The Opposite of Fate

by Alison McGhee

  “Was there anything good that happened tonight? Even one thing?” Zach said. “Because if there wasn’t, then there’s no hope.”

  It was late. Charlie was asleep in the loft. Mallie had pulled her knees up to her chest on the couch and wrapped her arms around them. She was a small ball of curled girl, sadness and pain ricocheting around inside her, brought all the way home to Forestport from the shelter in Utica. Three women tonight, each of them silent until the end of the massage, when their faces shone with tears and the stories came out of years of fear, years of trying to keep their children safe, years of being worn away until they barely knew who they were anymore.

  She shook her head. No, there was no good thing.

  “Something hard, then,” Zach said.

  “Everything’s hard.”

  “One hard thing. Just one. Say it.”

  “The cigarette burn on the last woman’s arm.” She didn’t want to see it in her mind, or how the woman had flinched when her fingers got close to it, but there it was. Deep and round and angry-looking.

  “Okay.” Zach nodded. “Now one impossible thing.”

  “Everything there is impossible, Zack.”

  “Just one, Mal. One impossible thing.”

  She clenched her arms tighter around her knees. Her stomach hurt. She tried to breathe into it and exhale it out, but her muscles were too tight and rigid.

  “That the second woman I worked on is sixty years old and only just got the hell away from the husband who’s been beating her up for the last forty years. Forty fucking years, Zach.”

  When Mallie had asked the woman — Jodie, it was a fake name, like most at the shelter — if there were places on her body where she should be very gentle, or avoid entirely, the woman had looked up at her. Everywhere, she had whispered. Everywhere. Next to her, Zach put his arms around her and she closed her eyes. She had barely touched this woman Jodie, and everywhere she touched, Jodie flinched.

  “It’s too much,” she whispered into Zach’s hands, which were covering hers. “There’s too much awfulness. I don’t think I can bear it.”

  “Think of one good thing, Mal. Just one. One hard thing, one impossible thing and now one good thing.”

  He laced his fingers through hers and waited. Zach was good at waiting. He was good at silence. He would wait as long as it took.

  “That she left?” Mallie said, finally. “Forty years in, but she left?”

  Zach’s fingers pressed into hers. Good job, was what that pressure meant. She had done it. She had thought of one good thing. His fingers moved on to her shoulders, kneading and releasing, then moved over her head, pressing and holding. She let her head droop onto her knees, still drawn up to her chest, and concentrated on breathing. She left. She left. She left. The breaths grew slower and longer and deeper. Finally, her legs and arms unclenched and she lay back against

  Zach.

  One hard thing, one impossible thing, one good thing. She pulled out her phone and texted her brother —

  once upon a time there was a sister

  and then stared at the screen, willing him to start typing, willing the little moving dots to appear. She waited and waited, but nothing. Come on, Charlie. Please. Make up a story with me, a story to get us through.

  Left hand on the steering wheel, right foot on the gas, left foot on the clutch, right hand on the gear stick, heading west at seventy-seven miles an hour in a part of the country that stretched ahead like the sea. Enormous swells of ranchland, like waves rolling in, over and over and over. The way they did on the Jersey shore the time that Lucia took her and Charlie there when they were little, the week that the huge seagull swooped down and stole the block of cheese.

  No people on this highway. No houses, no cars. Nothing but a four-lane ribbon of road leading straight ahead until it blurred and dissolved into the sky. She had not seen a single cop car since she passed through the western edge of Minnesota into the eastern edge of North Dakota. She pushed her right foot down.

  Seventy-eight. Seventy-nine. Eighty-one. Eighty-seven.

  The engine hummed and whined.

  Ninety-two. Ninety-five. Ninety-nine.

  The steering wheel shook. She gripped it tightly with both hands and dug her fingernails into the ripped vinyl. Wind roared outside the closed window. How much could the engine take?

  A hundred and one. A hundred and three.

  The Datsun shuddered around her but the engine throbbed and held its own. No sirens behind or ahead. No twirling kaleidoscope of red and blue in the rearview mirror. Nothing. She eased off the gas.

  A hundred and one. Ninety-six. Eighty-eight. Seventy-six. Sixty-eight. Fifty-five.

  The sound of the engine turned into a muted groan. The roaring wind quieted to a murmur. She and the truck trundled along at fifty-seven miles an hour. The road rolled and dipped and shimmered in the distance like a mirage, as if it ran out of itself up at the horizon and turned into water.

  Another seventy miles gone. See, Mallie, you’re getting there. The river of “there” was a far-ahead promise. The river of there held Zach Miller. If she could just keep her foot on the gas, keep the tank full, not give in to the tiredness, she would get there. And once you’re there, he’ll help you figure it out. Those were the words she used to muffle the dark birds hovering around her, keeping pace with the truck, invisible birds straining to open their beaks and call out Baby, and Darkness, and Pain, and Zach.

  The sun was the yolk of an egg simmering in a pot of water. The truck was the pot of water and she was the swimmer at the wheel. Sweat stung her eyes. Then the golden yolk slid off the top of the truck and began its slow arc through the sky to her left. Long rays slanted through the open window, fingering their way into the wind-rushing cab.

  no services for the next 158 miles, said a highway sign.

  The gas stations in the Dakotas weren’t gas stations the way she thought of gas stations. These were more like little general stores in the middle of nowhere. She pulled off on a ranch access road and clattered over a cattle guard.

  “Gas on pump two please.”

  Forty-two dollars and fifty-eight cents. She handed the woman three twenties.

  “Got anything smaller, miss? We’re short on ones. And fives. We’re short on everything, actually.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t.”

  The woman smiled, a big white-toothed smile. Little stud earrings marched up and down both earlobes. It was a tiny store and every shelf was packed. Groceries and candy and miniature cans of drinks that promised five hours of this and ten hours of that. Diapers and tampons and paper plates and napkins. Condoms and aspirin and cough syrup. Mosquito repellent and fishing poles and bobbers and lures. Tire pressure gauges and atlases and keychains and flashlights.

  “Where you off to on this fine day?” the woman said.

  “Montana.”

  “Nice. Big Sky country. Where are you on your way from?”

  “Upstate New York. The Adirondack mountains.”

  “Adriondack Mountains,” the woman said, pronouncing it the way many people did, A-dri-on-dack. “What brings you out west?”

  “I’m running away.”

  The woman nodded, as if running away out west was nothing new to her. “From what?”

  “The last year and a half. A lot of bad things.”

  “Well, good luck to you, then,” the woman said approvingly. “Go westward, young woman. You want some gum?” She held out an open pack.

  “No, thanks,” and then something leapt in the woman’s eyes, a flicker of recognition, and Mallie thought of the wig that wasn’t on her head.

  “Wait a minute,” she said. “Upstate New York. You’re not her, are you?”

  It was the way she said “her.” Her eyes were bright with discovery, with the kind of intuitive leap that defied rationality. Mallie shook her hea
d, but that was a mistake, because how would she know who ‘her’ was if she wasn’t her? The woman tilted her head.

  “You’re not the girl who” — now she was faltering — “was, that story that was all over the headlines, you know, that girl, that photo of that girl, that cute boyfriend, the baby, it happened in upstate New York . . .”

  Mallie said nothing. There wasn’t much anyone could do, if you just stayed silent and kept shaking your head in a No, not her, no, that girl is not me sort of way. The other person would start to think they were crazy to have leapt to that conclusion.

  She got back in the truck and drove and drove, and when she could drive no farther, she pulled over and stilled the engine. She stretched out as far as she could on the front seat and lay on her back, looking through the window up at the stars. It was a clear night, moonless, and they filled the sky. Diamonds. Lucy in the sky with diamonds. She sang the old song in her head.

  Her phone beeped and she pulled it out of its home at the bottom of the box of fortune cookies.

  once upon a time there was a sister

  whose brother wished he could turn back time

  The screen went dark after that. Charlie. She hugged the phone to her heart as if it were him.

  Darkness

  His little sister was happy he still lived at home. She was nine years younger, a mistake — that’s what his mother had said when they told him he was going to have a baby brother or sister, but mistake wasn’t a good word for a baby, especially when there was no dad in the picture, so he called her a happy accident. She called him Big D. Which was funny, because he wasn’t all that big. Big to a little kid, though.

  She was almost thirteen now. But to him she was still a little kid. He used to push her on the baby swings over at the playground. He used to take her there every day when he got home from school, give his mother a break so she could put her feet up or start supper or just be alone for a while. His mother’s life hadn’t been a piece of cake. She worked the night shift and then she came home and made breakfast for all of them. He had offered to do that, so she could go straight to bed, but she said she liked making their breakfast.

  Even for him.

  He said “Mom, I’m twenty-two,” and she said, “Once a mother, always a mother.”

  He still saw Mack and the others sometimes. Mostly by accident. Coming in and out of the grocery store, at the gas station, Friendly’s ice cream. The last time he’d seen Mack was at the DMV. They were both getting our licenses renewed. Both born in July, within a week.

  “Hey, man,” he said.

  “Mack. How are you?”

  He hoped he would say Good or Fine or Can’t complain, so he could just take his number and fill out the form by himself, without talking, but Mack shook his head.

  “The question is how you’re doing,” he said.

  He looked down at the little tab of paper in the red machine, waiting for him to take it: 078. Why did numbers from machines like that always begin with a zero? Made no sense.

  “What happened to you?” he said. “I mean it, D. Why’d you quit us all?”

  He shook his head, as if nothing had happened to him.

  “Look, D. We all know it was bad for a while. I’m sorry you got into that shit and I’m sorry it was my brother who got you into it and I’m sorry it messed you up so bad. But it’s done now, right? You’re through it, right? You’re clean?”

  Yes, it was done. It was all done, the desperation and craving, the need for money to stop the desperation, the things he had done to get the money. It hadn’t lasted more than a few months anyway. It was done with him and he was done with it and he wanted Mack just to go away because he, Big D, was not clean. There was nothing clean about him. But Mack kept standing there, until a lady came up and reached around him and said, “Excuse me, gentlemen,” in that stupid-loud way that really meant Get the hell out of my way.

  The place where it happened wasn’t far from his house. He hadn’t walked down the block since it happened but plenty of others had. It was so close, you know? It was like no one could believe such a horrible thing had happened right there in their own neighborhood. His mother had been on the phone the next morning, talking to her best friend, Cindy, who used to live two blocks away but moved to South Carolina last year.

  “That poor girl,” his mother was saying. “That poor, poor girl.”

  He stood in the kitchen while she talked, trying to make another pot of coffee. He didn’t know how much coffee to put in the filter thing. Making coffee was something his mother did, when she got home from work, before the rest of them woke up. He was shaky and trembling. It had been a bad night. Bad. He was blocking it out of his mind. He dumped in some grounds and filled the pot halfway with water and pressed the on button.

  “I guess she was waiting for her brother to leave a party,” his mother said. “In one of those big brick apartment buildings, you know the ones I mean over on Hawthorne? She was waiting to give him a ride home.”

  His head hurt. The coffeemaker started to make those burping sounds, and the first dark-brown drops appeared on the bottom of the glass coffeepot.

  “No, Cindy, don’t say that,” his mother said. “That’s not fair. It wasn’t late but it wouldn’t matter if it was.”

  She was drumming her fingers on the dining table. She was on the home phone, the old one with the twirly cord. No one had a landline anymore except them. Cindy was Ma’s best friend but that didn’t mean they agreed on everything.

  “You’re only saying those things because the idea of it terrifies you,” his mother was saying now. “The police think he raped her on the lawn of the church and that she came after him down the sidewalk and that’s when he bashed her head in. I mean, just imagine if it were one of our girls.”

  There was a knock on the back door just then. His little sister, wanting in. She saw him through the glass windowpane and smiled. Then she pressed her face into the glass so that her nose and mouth and cheeks were all smushed together. She looked horrible. She looked like she was suffering. The sight of her face like that made his stomach turn. It was all he could do to walk over to the door and let her in.

  The story was on the front page next day. He came downstairs late; it was Sunday, and even though other crews worked on Sunday, Billy’s Roofing didn’t. Which was something he used to be grateful for, because it gave him one guaranteed day off a week. Now he wished they did work on Sundays.

  “Would you look at this,” his mother said. She was sitting at the table with a cup of coffee, reading the paper. “What a nightmare. That poor girl.”

  She pointed at the headline and shook her head. She was good with dramatics. She was that woman who, if one of their neighbors stalked into a school with an assault weapon and started spraying bullets, she’d talk to the reporters and say she never suspected a thing, he was always a quiet boy, she’d lived next to him his whole life, his parents were nice people. His mother liked to sit in the morning with the paper after she got home from work and shake her head at all the horrible things in the paper, all the horrible things that people did to one another. So he took it with a grain of salt, the daily newspaper drama, but she liked backup for her opinions, so he leaned over her and read the headline.

  area woman assaulted, left for dead

  He looked at it and knew it was her. There was no name, no photo, but sometimes you instantly knew something, and there was no shaking it. His gut turned to ice.

  “So terrible,” his mother said. “Can you imagine?”

  “What happened?”

  He managed to keep his voice normal.

  “This poor girl on Hawthorne,” his mother said. “Raped and beaten.”

  “When?”

  “Friday night.”

  Look at her, shaking her head like that. There was something about his mother that made him angry, as if she thought she could
somehow keep them safe if she kept shaking her head and making sympathetic noises. Then she looked up at him and the anger instantly went away. Because it was real, that look in her eyes.

  “What if it was Beth?” she said. She was whispering, as if Beth were in the next room, even though she was sound asleep upstairs. “Can you imagine, if that was your sister?”

  “Is she going to be okay?”

  “She’s in the ICU. Her head was bashed in. They think whoever did it called 911 from the girl’s own cell phone. I mean, what kind of a monster . . .”

  “Maybe he felt bad and called 911?” he said. “Maybe it was drugs and he didn’t mean to do something so awful? He must’ve been out of his mind. That’s the only possible reason. Meth, maybe. Maybe he didn’t even remember it when he woke up the next morning.”

  The words tumbled out and she looked up at him oddly but then there was a sound at the kitchen doorway. Beth, standing there in her pajamas. “What are you talking about?” she said. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” his mother said. She turned the paper over and then rolled it up and reached out and tapped Beth on the shoulder with it. “Nothing.”

  “Something,” Beth persisted. Her eyes went from their mother to him and back again. “Just tell me. Tell me what you guys are talking about.”

  “Something that happened a couple nights ago,” their mother said. “Nothing to worry about.”

  “Mom’s right,” he said. “Some strung-out asshole. Out of his mind.”

  That night, when his mother and Beth were at church, he unrolled the paper and read the whole article. The ice came back and filled him. He couldn’t breathe right and his head filled up with fuzz and blur. Dizzy. Like he was going to fall down, even though he was sitting in a kitchen chair at the kitchen table. Christ, could he possibly have done that?

  William T.

  At the sound of William T.’s cell phone ringing, Burl and Crystal looked up from their game. The three of them were sitting in Burl’s garden, at the table he had made from two stumps and a long, curving flat rock he had prised out of Nine Mile Creek. Burl and Crystal were playing Bananagrams, the speedy Scrabble-like word game that William T. had no patience with but they loved. The game that had helped get them through the early weeks and months of the siege. The phone was a hot wafer in his hand. It was Mallie.