The Opposite of Fate

by Alison McGhee

  Zach.

  Now Zach was scooping up the child while the girl dipped a napkin in her water glass and scrubbed at the child’s cheeks. The child kicked and flailed and opened his mouth in a sound that she could tell from here was a No no no no. She felt that way too. No. No no no no no.

  She huddled back in the darkness at the edge of the building, her face turned in the opposite direction, as they walked right by her. Zach held the child in his arms and the girl chattered on, something about did Daddy know that Mister had tried mango this morning and what had he thought of it, Mister? Did you like it? Tell us what you thought of that mango. Tell. Come on, tell us. Can you say yummy? Say yummy. Shut up. Shut up shut up shut up. The baby burrowed into Zach’s arms and hooted. He was like a prairie dog, burrowing into the tunnel of Zach’s arms. Zach laughed, and the girl laughed, and the three of them kept walking on down the sidewalk.

  William T.

  William T. had made it through most of the Waltz Boss’s instructional videos. One thing he liked about the man was that he kept his videos short, no longer than three minutes. And he got straight to the point. The music was already playing when the video opened; the Waltz Boss was already standing on the little stage with the floor clearly marked with tape.

  “Let’s fire her up, Jonathan,” William T. said.

  It had become their weekend routine. Crystal at the diner, Johnny in his red pajamas, sitting at the table eating breakfast, and William T. practicing his dance moves with the couch cushion as his partner. The Waltz Boss’s dance partner never said a word. She appeared just as he was finishing his Waltz Fact of the Day, took her place, with one hand on his shoulder and the other aloft in his hand, and moved smoothly and silently in rhythm with his steps. She smiled throughout, the sort of professional smile that Olympic figure skaters always produced the minute their own music began.

  “Today’s music is Waltz Number 2, by Dmitri Shostakovich,” the Waltz Boss said. “I chose it because Shostakovich is someone I admire greatly. He composed his Fifth Symphony under conditions of great deprivation, fear and ongoing threats to his life during the siege of Leningrad.”

  “And what does this have to do with the waltz, Jonathan?” William T. said, which made Johnny laugh. “Let’s get to the point, Boss.”

  “This historical fact doesn’t have anything to do with the waltz,” the Waltz Boss said, as if he had heard William T., “but it’s important to me. It might have been easier for Shostakovich to go into hiding and stop composing at that time, but he didn’t. He forged on and left the world with one of its greatest symphonies.”

  The Boss’s dance partner emerged from behind the curtain and walked to her place. But the Boss was not quite done.

  “Shostakovich is one of my heroes,” he said, and nodded.

  A lump rose in William T.’s throat, and he did not know why. Maybe because the pudgy Waltz Boss, whose YouTube channel had only three subscribers, had a hero and was unashamed to say so? Maybe because he himself, who had barely heard anyone utter the name Dmitri Shostakovich before the Waltz Boss did this morning, had just been shown again that there were worlds within worlds about which he knew nothing? Maybe because in the face of Stalin and his henchmen, and their ongoing campaign of terror, Shosta­kovich had kept going?

  That was what it boiled down to, didn’t it. You just kept going. Whatever slings and arrows came your way in life, you had to keep going. Crystal had once told him, late at night when they were sitting on the porch, about the early months of Johnny’s life, after her sister had abandoned him to her. How he cried and cried, shook with his crying, and she had not known what to do or how to soothe him. How she had narrowed life down to fifteen-minute segments of time in which she told herself that was all she had to get through. Fifteen minutes at a time. And when those fifteen minutes were up, all she had to get through was another fifteen minutes. She would sit with him all night long, in the trailer where she used to live, where the closest neighbors were too far away to hear Johnny’s screams.

  “Which was a good thing,” she had told him. “Because it probably sounded as if I were trying to kill him.”

  “Did you ever think of leaving?” he said. “Giving him to the state, maybe?”

  She had looked up at him, eyes unfathomable in the moonlight. “I didn’t let myself,” she said. “It felt like a door I could never open.”

  Now he looked across the table at Johnny, still finishing his cereal. The red spoon dipped in and out of the bowl, carefully conveyed to his mouth. Johnny concentrated on the job of feeding himself the way he concentrated on everything. He looked up and flashed a grin at William T. and held up the red spoon. A small, triumphant gesture.

  Johnny was a pivot point, the steady center around which Crystal and William T. moved when he was home with them. Johnny was the only one of all of them who could not have said what had happened to Mallie, or where she had been during the long passage of time he hadn’t seen her. Maybe it hadn’t seemed long to Johnny. Maybe it felt to him as if Mallie had been there one day and then the next had walked into the diner, seen him coming out of the restroom, given him a hug and told him she liked his red owl T-shirt. William T. did not know and he would never know what it was like to be inside Johnny’s mind.

  “I guess this is how we do it, Johnny,” he said. “Fifteen minutes at a time, over and over.”

  Johnny was refolding his napkin. Soon he would rise from the table and carry his bowl and spoon to the sink.

  “You ever heard of AA, Jonathan?”

  Johnny looked up at William T. and laughed the way he always did at the sound of “Jonathan” instead of “Johnny.”

  “It’s a twelve-step program for people who are addicted to alcohol,” he said. “You work your way through the steps, one at a time.”

  William T. barely drank. A beer a few times a year, maybe. But he had friends who drank, and some of those friends were devoted to AA the way Lucia and her friends had been devoted to the Faith Love Congregation.

  “Step Nine is the one where you make amends,” he said. “It doesn’t apply to you, of course, Jonathan. You’ve never done anything you need to make amends for.”

  Years ago, William T.’s friend and coworker at the farmer’s cooperative, Harwin, had made amends to him. William T. had come to work one morning and, on his desk — on top of the spread-out trucking charts and weather reports that he never put away at the end of each day — was a note.

  Dear William T.,

  My addiction has meant that I have not worked to full capacity most days of the week for years now. You have done more than your share of our work as a result. This unfairness was my fault entirely, and while I don’t have money to pay you back, I vow to work to full capacity from now on.

  Sincerly,

  Harwin Jacobs

  It’s “sincerely,” had been William T.’s first thought, not “sincerly.” Then he read through the note again. It was puzzling. What addiction? Harwin was an ordinary man in an ordinary job, even if he did have the best desk in the best location on the entire floor. He picked up the note and went straight to Harwin’s large desk, in the corner, by the large window where light streamed through. Harwin’s head had been bent over his own mess of spreadsheets and trucker schedules — he and William T. were in charge of getting the milk from the farms to the processing facilities within the required number of hours, and routes and drivers could change any day, depending on the weather — and he was fumbling with a pen, flipping it end over end on the desk. Avoiding William T.’s presence.

  “What the hell’s this, Harwin?”

  “Step Nine,” Harwin had mumbled, then cleared his throat and looked up from the pen. His face was pale but resolute. “I’m an alcoholic, William T. I’ve been an alcoholic since I was twenty-three, and I’ve been sober for nine months and three days.”

  “How old are you now?”

 
“Forty-nine.”

  “Jesus, Harwin. That’s a long time. What a hard thing. I had no idea.”

  “I’m on Step Nine,” Harwin said. “Making amends. Which is different from apologizing, because an apology is not action. Although I feel terrible about taking advantage of your generosity all these years.”

  Harwin was not a man who spoke like this: stilted and formal. He had picked up the pen again and was now tossing it from hand to hand. If the man had been hiding the booze all these years, William T. thought, wasn’t that suffering enough? But now here he was, clearly miserable but determined to do what he could.

  “I tell you what, Harwin. You want to make it up to me, why don’t we switch desks? You can sit in my dark corner and I’ll bask in the sunlight.”

  Harwin had jerked his head up, surprise and confusion on his face. William T. laughed and shook his head to make it clear he was joking, just trying to lighten the amends-making mood. But next day, when William T. came to work, Harwin had swapped their desks. No matter how William T. protested, insisted that he had not meant it, please go back to the way it was, Harwin refused. For the last three years he worked at the cooperative, William T. had sat in the sun. It had turned out to be an unenviable location. Too hot too much of the time, and the glare reflected off the papers and hurt his eyes.

  Click. Click. Slide. Click slide slide.

  “Peel.”

  “Peel.”

  “Peel.”

  Crystal and Burl were playing Bananagrams, and from the sound of it, they were both closing in on a win. William T. could feel it. They were cool customers, Crystal more so than Burl, but they gave off an invisible, silent thrill of excitement and competition when they had only one or two letter tiles left. Burl’s fingers hovered over his letter grid as if he were playing Ouija, the way they had back in high school. Crystal’s head was bent and her hands were placed carefully on either side of her own grid. Only her eyes moved, but she, like Burl, was taking in the entirety of the words she had formed.

  These nights, these dozens of nights spent playing this game at this table in this kitchen in this old house north of Sterns, were part of what had gotten Crystal and Burl through. They were all of them changed people from that first night, only days after the assault, when Burl had burst through the kitchen door, the little yellow Bananagrams bag in his hands. There had been a kind of suppressed desperation in his eyes, a panicky determination for something to hold on to, something to occupy them, something to get them through the crisis. William T. could see that now.

  “Bananas!” Burl and Crystal said simultaneously.

  “Jinx,” William T. said.

  Look at their grids, the two of them. Burl had built his vertically. It climbed the table like a small, starved skyscraper. Crystal’s was compact and dense, a warren of two- and three-letter words that crawled into and around one another. Burl’s was the tower that the migrating birds soared up and over, and Crystal’s was the nest they built in their new land. The next time they played, their grids would be entirely different. They would always be making and remaking themselves, the same way that Mallie, back in the world, must now remake herself. The same way he was trying to remake himself.

  Maybe that was why Zach and Mallie had kept all those unopened fortune cookies over all these years. It had been a joke between them — their box of possible futures — but when he thought about it now, maybe it wasn’t a joke. Maybe it was a way of keeping possibility alive.

  When you came back from the world between, the way they all had, you didn’t come back all the way. Part of you was still there, living in a world before and also beyond this one. The Mallie who had come trundling up the long road with Charlie in her wagon, when she was a little girl who had just lost her father, was still on that road, walking in that same determined way. The Mallie who had lived with Zach Miller in the cabin in Forestport was still there. Someone walking by the cabin now might feel a shadow pass over, or a breath of wind that felt like a whisper, and that would be Mallie. She had left behind the air she had breathed there, the things that had changed because of her when she was alive in that place.

  Maybe it was like that for everyone. The pebble that you stepped on shifted position, the apple tree altered when you picked its fruit. Every minute, everyone was changing, and because of that, so was the world.

  If Mallie was still in all the places she’d ever lived, then everyone else was too: Zach and Charlie and Crystal and Johnny and Burl and William T. himself. And Darkness, her word for the anonymous man he had nightmares of finding and killing. If Mallie’s unsolvable proof was to be solved — and solve it, they all must, if they were all to keep on living — then there was no way out of the fact that Darkness was also in the world. He would always be there, waiting.

  Burl swept the letter tiles into a big pile in the middle of the table. “Another?” he said.

  “Another,” Crystal agreed.

  Click. Click. Click. The quiet clicking of the tiles and Crystal’s and Burl’s hushed tones as they murmured, Peel, peel, peel, calmed him as William T. thought about making amends.

  Across the room, Johnny stood up from his big cushiony recliner across the room. He looked directly at William T. and smiled. Crystal, always alert to Johnny’s movements, looked up from the Bananagrams game.

  “What is it, Johnny?” Crystal said.

  But he was bent over the couch, working at something. Trying to pry up one of the couch cushions, William T. saw, but it was too big and cumbersome.

  “You need some help?” Crystal said, and started to get up, but William T. held out his hand and she sat back down. Johnny looked back up at William T., that same grin on his face.

  “Jonathan, you want to dance?” William T. said. “Is that what you’re trying to do?”

  At the “Jonathan,” Johnny, as always, began to laugh. He bent down to the couch again, tugging, but William T. reached him and held out his hands.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s the two of us give it a try.”

  He placed Johnny’s crabbed left hand on his own right shoulder and then closed his big paw around Johnny’s right hand. He started to sing. Moon river, wider than a mile, I’m crossing you in style . . . He tried to ease Johnny backward, inch by inch, but Johnny was not used to moving backward, and his body tensed. All right, then, he would try it a different way. He wrapped his arms around Johnny in a hug, and then he himself began to move backward, singing all the while. You don’t know how to follow, he told himself. You only know how to lead. But he was following, wasn’t he? He was leading and he was following, all in the same motion. Johnny was like an extension of his own body. They swayed and box-stepped and moon-rivered their way around the living room.

  When they had made it around the couch once, then twice, he looked over at Burl and Crystal. The look on Crystal’s face, caught in surprise and fascination, the same way he had probably looked when he’d glimpsed her through the window of the diner’s back door, dancing alone in the kitchen. He raised his eyebrows at her and tried to shrug — I learned to waltz for you; this is for you, Crystal — but she got up and came around the table to the two of them in their awkward box-step shuffle and put her arms around them both. She was crying, he realized.

  But Johnny, Johnny was smiling.

  Darkness

  When she started to get better, the first and only thing he felt was scared. His mother was watching the news and suddenly she screamed. He went running out and there she was on the couch, with Beth next to her, and they were both screaming and hugging. He looked at the TV and there was the girl, that same photo, the one of her in some driveway with her arms up like she was dancing.

  “She’s alive!” his mother said. “She’s going to be okay!”

  And all he felt was scared. He still felt scared.

  More than that, though. Sick. That was how he felt most of the time. All the time.
Like the outside skin of him was moving and talking and eating and sleeping, smiling at Beth and his mother. But inside, he was nothing. Worse than nothing.

  The only time he could get out of himself was when he was on the roof. When the nail gun was in his hand and the air was thin and invisible over his head. The nail gun was heavy and solid. It had to be, to put those nail guns through the shingles. He would take a nail gun over a staple gun any day. Staple guns were easier — light, and the staples were light too — but it was easy to mess up. The staples had to be put in straight, not at a slant. Slanted staples were the problem. Better do the job right with a nail gun, even though it was harder.

  He hated finishing for the day. Hated climbing back down. Because on the ground was when he couldn’t get away from himself. It all came back to him and it went around and around in his head. He imagined her there in the dark, like an animal that was so scared it couldn’t move. Like the rabbit in the garage, when he was a kid. They had come home at night and there it was, a rabbit in the corner next to the lawn mower. How it got in there, he didn’t know. But the lights of the car shone on it and it was like a cement rabbit. Frozen

  with fear.

  If you could go back in time and do one thing over again, what would it be? That was a question he’d heard his mother ask Cindy once on the phone. He was a kid then, so he didn’t think about it. There wasn’t that much further back in time he could go. It was different now. Now it felt like time stretched back forever, to thousands of years before he was born. Before he was thought of. Now there was only one thing he would do over again if he could.

  They’d found tiny bits of that flowerpot embedded in her scalp. Pieces so tiny they were like sand. He thought about that sometimes, up on the roof. He thought about telling, sometimes. If he told, if he went to the cops, they would know.