The Opposite of Fate

by Alison McGhee

  “Please sit down,” Aaron said, and Melissa smiled encouragingly and said, “Yes, please sit down. Sorry about the mess. Would you like something to drink?”

  These people were so calm. William T. sat down at the table with the little girl and her book. He again put his hand over his heart, stampeding in his chest, and the gesture reminded him of pledging allegiance to the flag when he was in elementary school. Did they still do that sort of thing? Maybe he should ask this child next to him. He made an effort to collect his thoughts. Focus, William T. He cleared his throat.

  “I’m trying to find something good,” he said.

  The child at the top of the stairs was now bumping his way down on his behind. He was too old to be the baby, and so was the toddler hanging on Melissa.

  “Zach and Mallie used to play a kind of game,” he said, by way of explanation. “When something felt impossible. One hard thing, one impossible thing, one good thing. I’m trying to play the game now.”

  Aaron and Melissa regarded him quizzically. They were patient people; that much was clear.

  “I’m tormented,” William T. said. “I keep thinking about that

  baby.”

  “Understandably,” Aaron said. “Why wouldn’t you think about him?”

  “It feels unbearable to me. The fact of its existence, I mean, like a living reminder of everything awful that Mallie went through.”

  Aaron cleared his throat and nodded. “That’s understandable too,” he said. “I choose to believe that the child is innocent. That he should not bear the sins of his father.”

  “Where is it?” William T. said. “I know you know. Tell me.”

  Melissa regarded him strangely. She patted the clingy toddler on the head mechanically, without taking her eyes off him.

  “The custody hearing was closed and confidential,” Aaron said,

  after a minute. “As you know. And I am the attorney for the child who was born to Mallie, as you also know.”

  What a strange way to put it. “The child who was born to Mallie.” It sounded like a term from a futuristic movie, in which the world had gone to hell and weird cults had taken over. Maybe that was how the Stampernicks kept their lives semi-sane. A social worker, an attorney for children, and also foster parents. It was too much.

  “We are legally bound to confidentiality,” Melissa added. “You must know that.”

  “Mallie may want to see it,” he lied. Or maybe it wasn’t a lie. How the hell would he know? “That’s why I’m asking.”

  The Stampernicks both nodded. That Mallie wanted to see the baby seemed to make sense to them. But what if she wanted the baby back? Ever thought of that, Stampernicks?

  “That makes sense, Mr. Jones,” Aaron said, as if he were trying to choose the right words. “I mean, why wouldn’t she? The fact that she has recovered and is now in possession of her faculties raises questions for her with regard to the child.”

  They were so cool and calm and collected and formal. Maybe their professions had trained them to be this way.

  “So will you tell me?” William T. said. “Where it is?”

  Aaron and Melissa looked at each other, communicating without words. William T. wanted to shout at them to stop it, but he didn’t. Melissa lifted both shoulders and then dropped them, and Aaron turned back to William T. She must have given him some kind of go-ahead.

  “We cannot, Mr. Jones,” Aaron said. “With the best interests of the child in mind, the judge ordered the hearing closed and the records sealed. The child is safe and healthy. Beyond that, we can tell you nothing. Mallie’s situation is, of course, different from yours. But this is an issue of personal and legal boundaries.”

  They both nodded, as if they’d cleared things up. Stampernick was so formal. His diction. His presence. William T. didn’t trust overly formal people.

  “We prayed about it,” Melissa added. “We felt Lucia would have wanted that.”

  “Please,” William T. said. “I’m trying to find one good thing. One small, good thing.”

  “The baby is safe and healthy,” Melissa repeated. “That’s a very good thing.”

  Her voice had turned smooth and professional. This must be her social-worker voice. Aaron stood behind his wife, his hands on her shoulders, and William T. could tell that no more information about the baby and his whereabouts would be forthcoming.

  Mallie

  By the end of a session, if it went the way it was supposed to, an exchange of energy had taken place between her and the client. Questions had been asked and answered. A story had been told, and all of it without words. This was happening between her and Charlie, now that they were talking and texting again. The gap between them was narrowing. When she thought of her brother now, a picture formed itself in her head.

  Charles, not Charlie. Tall and lean, wearing their father’s old army jacket and walking across a campus lined with birch and maple trees. An orange backpack. The Converse sneakers she had noticed on his feet that one time he had come to the hospital. Not the one time he had been there, but the one time she had been awake for him. Mal and Charlie, Charlie and Mal. They were filling in the empty spaces.

  Zach was still a blank.

  She stood on the rocks by a river in the wide-street town he lived in, here in the wide-open state of Montana. William T.’s slip of paper, with the name of the restaurant where Zach worked, was in her back pocket. The yellow-brown waters of the Yellowstone River churned at her feet. Gravity had tugged that water down from the mountains, and gravity was pulling it south. She held her hands up in front of her face and watched the veins smooth themselves out and hide behind her skin. The center of the earth pulled water toward itself and blood pulled itself earthward. The human body was mostly water, she remembered from biology.

  The West was the same as Sterns — no need for parallel parking. Parallel parking was a city thing, a thing done all the time in Manhattan, or Boston, even Utica, sometimes, places where people and cars were jammed up together. But not here. Here, you could pull right up to where you wanted to be.

  Outside the restaurant where Zach worked, a long bench with wooden slats painted alternately green and yellow sat in front of a big picture window. Pots of geraniums stood at either end. A little girl sat on one end and Mallie sat on the other. The front door swung open and a girl with a clipboard stepped into the sunshine.

  “Chang? Party of three?”

  The little girl leapt off the bench. “That’s us!” she yelled to a man and woman a few yards away. “That’s us!”

  The hostess glanced at Mallie, sitting on the bench. “Do you want to add your name to the list? It’s about a half hour at this point.”

  She shook her head. The hostess looked at her curiously and smiled. White, white teeth, even and straight. She wore tight jeans, rolled at the cuff. Flip-flops. A white tank top. A shark tooth suspended on a brown leather string around her neck and clanking silver bracelets on her wrist. Her black hair was pulled back in a loose knot held in place with a single chopstick.

  “Okay. Let me know if you change your mind.”

  The door swung shut behind her. Behind that door, somewhere in that restaurant, unless it was his day off, was Zach. This girl knew him. She worked with him. Were they friends? Did they work late together, close the place down, drink beer as one scraped down the grill and the other turned chairs up on tables and swept the floor? Did they blast music and sing along? Did they dance? Her mind pushed itself up against the edge of an imaginary cliff by an imaginary canyon, where Zach Miller stood on the other side, the bottom of the canyon yawning a thousand feet below.

  One hard thing, one impossible thing, one good thing.

  She was too nervous to sit. She stood up and walked down the sidewalk to the alley. The streets of this western town were wide the way the whole West was wide, and the alley was narrow and cool and out of the sun. She
leaned against the brick wall at the entrance and breathed. Breathe. Breathe. Breathe. Go back there, and this time walk in, Mallie.

  Then the scrape of a heavy door echoed toward her from down the alley and she peered down to see two figures walking in her direction. Too shadowy to make out their faces, but they were laughing, meandering along. Their words were indistinguishable but the sound of their talk was like music, low notes chasing higher notes, weaving together.

  They were coming toward her, where she leaned against the rough brick of the building. Except that she wasn’t leaning anymore. She was walking, backing away. Back toward the restaurant and the painted bench. Turning her head so that when they emerged into the sun from the alley they wouldn’t see her. Because no matter how shadowy an alley, no matter how indistinct the outline of a man, if that man was someone you knew in your bones, you would know him. You would know him by the sound of his voice and by the way he walked. You would know the woman with him because you had just spoken with her, just seen her. You would know that Zach Miller and the girl with the flip-flops and the chopsticked hair were walking together down the alley, and you would also know, from the sound of their voices and their laughter, that there was ease between them, a longstanding kind of ease. They were talking.

  “Want me to take Sir and Mister out after work?” the girl said. “Give you a break?”

  “Nah. Let’s both go. Let them play for a while and wear them out.”

  Sir! The image of her dog floated before her, her dog Sir, their dog Sir, Sir, who had slept at the foot of their bed, ridden behind the front seat of the truck, Sir, who had once chased down and killed a squirrel and then stood there looking at it as if he didn’t know what he had done, or why. And now there was a Mister. Sir and Mister. What kind of dog was Mister? Her mind scrabbled. Mister and Sir both had a lot of energy to burn. Did Mister and Sir sleep at the foot of the bed?

  Zach and the girl, Sir and Mister, a bed they all slept on.

  You could hold your breath for a long, long time — days, weeks — without knowing that you were holding it. You only realized you’d been holding it when it was punched out of you.

  “She blacked out, I think.”

  “Get her some water.”

  “It’s hot. Maybe she’s dehydrated.”

  She opened her eyes to a forest of legs. One pair was tanned and hairy, with big calf muscles and strong feet. Splayed toes in the kind of sandals you could climb mountains in, the expensive kind with multiple straps and cinches. Another pair was thin and white, black ballet flats on narrow feet. Another pair she couldn’t see, because the ruffles and folds of a long yellow and blue granny dress covered them. She closed her eyes again.

  “Hey. Are you okay?”

  This was a deep, quiet voice coming from directly in front of her face. Someone attached to the one of the pairs of legs had crouched down. She opened her eyes. Calm brown eyes under a thatch of sun-bleached hair. She nodded, because in order to make them go away, a nod was necessary. Brown-Eyes looked up at the heads attached to the legs.

  “She’s okay,” he said. “Too much sun, not enough water. Maybe a little altitude thrown into the mix.”

  He looked down for confirmation and she nodded again. Just keep nodding. That was the way to make them all go away. One after another, the legs slipped quietly out of vision. Brown-Eyes helped her up onto the bench. He held out a paper cup filled with water.

  “Drink.”

  She drank.

  “I figured you probably didn’t want a crowd staring at you. But are you okay?”

  Nod.

  “You from around here?”

  “No.”

  “So it actually might be the altitude, then.”

  When the water was gone he held his hand out for the cup and disappeared into the restaurant — wait, she was still at the restaurant! — but he returned just as she lurched up in panic. The cup, filled.

  “Sit back down and drink this, okay? Just sit for a bit until you’re sure you’re okay.”

  The end of the sidewalk was so far. The sun was so hot. She closed her eyes and saw Zach Miller and the girl coming down an alley over and over, a looping three seconds of video. They were about to see her so she turned and ran. Then they were there again, coming down the alley toward her, and again she ran. She sat back down and drank the water. Dizzy.

  “Better?”

  “Yes, thanks.”

  The door of the restaurant opened and she was there again: the girl. Chopstick-hair girl. Flip-flops girl. Clipboard-in-one-hand girl. “Brian” — she nodded at Brown-Eyes — “said you fainted. You okay?”

  Mallie nodded. Then she pushed herself up from the bench and started down the sidewalk.

  The wig was under the driver’s seat in the Datsun. If she had worn the wig when she walked up to the café, when she sat on the bench next to the flowers, when the girl with the chopstick hair and the clipboard came out and asked did she want her name on the list, then maybe none of this would have happened. She would not have walked down the street to the alley. She would not have heard the employee door down the alley open and then clang shut, and she would not have seen Zach and the girl. She would not have overheard them talking about Sir and Mister.

  She went back to the truck, scrunched up her hair with one hand and pulled the wig on with the other. It was probably crooked. Her own hair was probably sticking out a little. She leaned forward and looked at her unclear reflection in the window. It was too late anyway. She had messed up. She should have worn the wig.

  “You sound crazy,” she said out loud. “Start walking.” She started walking. She focused on her feet and her arms, the way she had when they helped her learn how to walk right again, during the long weeks of recovery. Wasn’t walking how she had always managed to calm herself? Wasn’t walking what had brought her to William T.’s house, that very first time she had gone without an adult to his house? She had loaded up her wagon with a blanket and her little brother and off to William T.’s house they had gone.

  “Keep walking, Mallie,” she said, and down the sidewalk she went. “There you go. There you are.”

  There she was. There was Mallie, reflected in every shop window, every plate-glass picture window of every restaurant she passed. Keep walking, Mallie. Her feet knew what to do. It had been a long time since she had walked her way out of something. She had lived with Zach Miller for three years before that dark night in Utica, and in those years, she had walked her way out of the pain of her clients’ lives. When the sorrow ebbed, there had been Zach to put his arm around her, Zach to dance with her, Zach to laugh with and make plans with, Zach who would wake from a deep sleep if he sensed she was awake and thinking.

  Was all that gone now? That’s the hardest thing about this, to me, Charlie had said. That we had no choice in anything that happened. It was like being on a train and knowing you wanted to get off, but the train just kept going.

  “Keep walking, Mallie. Keep walking.”

  She kept walking. Ten blocks this way, take a left. Ten blocks that way, take a left. Ten blocks that way, take a left. Ten blocks, back to the beginning. Ten + ten + ten + ten for how long? The sun was going down, going down, going down, and then the sun was down. Where was the Datsun? Three blocks out of the ten-by-ten square. What would she do now? It was almost dark and her body hurt from the walking.

  Then she saw them. They were across the street. Sitting at a table, eating. Talking. Lamplight pooled on their faces. The girl was on one side of the table, Zach on the other, a baby in a wooden high chair at the head of the table. Without thinking, she crossed the street in the middle of the block. A car blared its horn at her, the ugly loudness of the sound. Night had descended, and if she stood to the side of the window, she could look in at Zach Miller and the girl and their baby. Of course, she thought. This explains it. She heard herself say it out loud. “Of course, thi
s explains it,” as if she were a rational person who had just discovered a small thing that explained other, larger things. Of course, if Zach Miller had a new girlfriend, and they had a baby, then that would explain why he had abandoned her. Abandoned. Now she herself was using the word. She heard herself say that one out loud too: “Abandoned.” Of course, the abandonment made sense now. Of course, it made sense that Zach would keep this from William T. and Charlie. Of course, they would be even angrier once they found out.

  Zach’s hair was longer. Something was curling up out of the neck of his T-shirt. A tattoo. She peered and peered but she could not tell what the tattoo was. He was eating spaghetti with a fork. He lifted his head to look at the girl and his eyes — his eyes, his eyes —

  “Something hard, Mallie.” She said this out loud, even though this wasn’t hard, it was impossible. She was standing outside a restaurant looking in at Zach and the girl and their baby and it was impossible.

  She didn’t know much about babies and toddlers. She had never been a babysitting type. This one wore overalls, and a yellow bib was tied under his chin. He was stirring spaghetti noodles around on the high-chair tray. He held a clump of them up to his mouth and sucked at it. He might not be a boy, come to think of it. He might be a girl. Or gender-nonconforming. No need to box the baby in. Right? She watched her thoughts scrabble around, tumbling and contradicting themselves, inside her head.

  The girl talked and talked and laughed and laughed. Zach and the child were quiet as the girl spread her arms out and brought her hands together in a praying motion as she leaned back and laughed. What was she saying? What was she talking about? Suddenly, Zach put his fork down and leaned back and laughed too.

  A family, a happy young family, eating together and laughing together.

  The server brought the bill, folded and propped up in an empty glass. Zach reached in his back pocket for a wallet — the back pocket of Zach’s jeans had always had a faint outline of a wallet — and that was when she started to cry. It was the wallet that did it. The faint outline of a wallet on old worn jeans and the memory of Zach walking away from her and her watching him, the way his T-shirt rode his hips, his angular, swift walk.