Them. Who was them?
“I mean the others,” he said. “Not Mr. Jones. Or your brother. Or Zach. Zach more than anyone.”
Zach.
William T.
Beanie was leaving Mallie’s room as William T. turned the corner from the nurses’ station. The orderly pushed the mop before him, making a swirly pattern on the shining floor. William T. quickened his pace and pushed open the door. Mallie lifted half off the bed at the sight of him, her eyes burning.
“Where’s Zach?”
Goddammit.
The air in the room vibrated with aliveness. He forced himself to meet her eyes. There must have been something awful in them because she went rigid. His mind whisked through possibilities. What could he tell her to make it easier? Jesus H. Christ, Zach Miller was just the beginning.
“William T., you tell me that Zach Miller is alive and in the world.”
“Zach’s alive.”
“Then where is he?”
Her voice was quiet now, as if she knew something bad was coming.
“Montana. He works in a restaurant there.”
“But” — her fingers fumbled the blanket again — “where in Montana? Which town? What restaurant?”
Wonder. Confusion. Bewilderment. Which town, which restaurant: the answers didn’t matter because the real question wasn’t a question but a want, a longing. A girl come back to life, wanting the boy she loved.
“He’s Zach, William T.,” she said patiently, as if there were an answer in there that he had missed. “He’s Zach.”
“He is,” William T. agreed, because he knew what she meant. Zach Miller had been there every day. Day after day. Until they had all — Zach Miller and Crystal and Charlie and himself — been barred from the room because he, William T. Jones, had raised a ruckus one too many times. And then came the day when Zach took off.
“He’s in Montana,” he said again. “In a town called Coburn.”
A shadow passed over her face as she absorbed the information. Another piece of the much bigger puzzle she didn’t yet know or understand. Her eyes went flat for a minute. Maybe she was relegating this knowledge to the same place she seemed to have relegated Charlie and Lucia.
“Charlie was here,” she said.
He didn’t know that. He tried to hide his surprise, but she was watching him. Little escaped her.
“He was here, and then he left. He wouldn’t talk to me. He wouldn’t play the, you know, the . . .”
Words sometimes failed her still. “The Once Upon a Time game?” he said, and she brightened.
“Yeah. He wouldn’t play it. And he left before I could ask him about Lucia. Where is she? Will the cult not let her out to visit me?”
Mallie had begun calling their mother by her first name when she and Charlie moved in with Zach Miller during her senior year of high school, when Lucia had disappeared into the arms of the church, down in Utica.
“Does she even know I woke up?” Mallie said. “I mean, did you even tell her about what happened to me?”
William T. cleared his throat.
“She’s gone, Mallie.”
“Gone where?”
“She died. Seven months ago now.”
“What do you mean died?” She pronounced the word as if it were foreign. “Died how?”
“She had pancreatic” — he sounded it out carefully; it was a difficult word — “cancer, and there wasn’t anything that could be done. It happened very fast.”
There was a long silence while she absorbed this information as well. The look on her face was guarded and calm, and William T. could feel her decide to put it behind the same invisible wall that barred off the knowledge that Zach Miller was living in Montana. She would leave them both there until she could turn to them again. In his view, Lucia had slipped away by increments, first years ago to the church, then forever.
“So you’re saying that my mother is no longer alive and in the world,” she said, finally, and he nodded. “But Charlie and Crystal and you are. And so is” — she shook her head once, abruptly, and he guessed that Zach had been next on the list. “And Johnny?”
“Johnny’s still here. Still in his group home, still coming home most weekends.”
“What about his red crayons?”
“Of course. Where would Johnny be without his red crayons?”
He watched as her face softened. She had always loved Crystal’s nephew Johnny, born with the cord twisted too tight around his neck. Who didn’t love Johnny, though? Thirty-two years old now — hard to believe. Zach Miller and William T. and Charlie and Crystal and Johnny, alive and in this world. All the people closest to Mallie, all returning to her mind and heart. Let her lead the way, the team had told him over and over. Take your cues from her. Offer no information unless she asks for it. Trauma, no matter the source of it, lingers in the body and in the psyche. It manifests in unpredictable ways. And she has experienced overwhelming trauma.
After he left her, after he nodded to the nurses and Beanie, who was cleaning and mopping and smiling his silent smile, William T. drove to Foothills Park, the city park with the playground, and backed the truck into his usual spot under the sugar maple. Clank. He needed to do something about the rusted door.
The ball field at the far end was empty save for a man raking it clear of the last of winter’s debris. The outfield grass was greening. At the playground, a few toddlers careened around the gravelly sand while their parents stood chatting. William T. looked at each one in turn, studying their faces, their hair. Beyond the obvious of skin and hair color, it was hard to tell most of them apart still, at this age. Too young. Too unformed. The child he was looking for would be ten months old now. Every step of the way, he had mentally charted the child’s progress, from infancy to now. At ten months he would probably be a little small — he had been born at thirty-six weeks, after all — but certainly crawling. Maybe even beginning to walk?
A couple and their baby approached from the ball field, closing in on the playground. They were young, both of them, and the child stumbled along between them, holding one hand of each. The hood of his red sweatshirt was tied in a bow underneath his chin. William T. studied his face: pale, red-cheeked, strands of brown hair plastered to his forehead and visible under the hood, the way Mallie’s had been as a child. This child looked too old, though. Didn’t he?
“Sarah, do you want to swing?” the father said.
Girl, not boy. William T. pushed himself up off the bench, mission unaccomplished. On the way back north, he stopped at Hassan’s Superette a couple of blocks from the park. Hassan’s had not changed since Mallie and Charlie were little. He used to bring them here sometimes in the summer, when they were out of school and Lucia had to work and whatever babysitting arrangement she’d pieced together had fallen through. The mural on the side of the red-brick building was faded but still visible: the flying toaster, the slice of bread running away on its little legs, the winged candy bar.
Inside, the wooden floorboards creaked. They were swept bare but dull and streaked, the look of wood that had never been sealed or polished, that had borne the weight of snow and rain and mops over a lifetime. William T. scanned the candy aisle. Hassan’s was the only place he knew of that still carried the candies he loved: Mallo Cups and Sky Bars, a glass jar full of Mary Janes and Bit-O-Honeys and Atomic FireBalls. He fished out a handful of Mary Janes and a single Atomic FireBall.
“You love those things, don’t you?” the girl at the cash register said, poking at the cellophane-wrapped FireBall. “Every time you’re in here, you buy one.”
He smiled and handed her a five.
“Hey, remember that girl who was attacked over on Hawthorne?” she said. “You know, a while back? It was big news?”
William T.’s stomach turned to ice and he felt the color drain from his face. She didn’t notice, too
busy clanging open the register and stepping out of the way as the drawer shot out. “So my cousin works at the rehab unit,” she said. “And she told me they thought she was just going to be kind of a zombie forever, but” — she spread her fingers wide, as if she were mimicking a firework explosion — “she woke up. She can, like, walk and talk and everything now.”
She counted out his change into the palm of his hand.
“That’s confidential, though,” she said. “No one knows yet.”
“Thank you,” William T. heard himself say.
Then he was back on the sidewalk, yanking open the rusty truck door, heading north to the foothills and Crystal’s Diner. The closed sign was turned outward and the front door locked when he got there. He went around back to the kitchen door and peeked through the little window. Crystal would be finishing cleanup, and that was something he could help her with — wipe down the grill, scrub the bigger pots and pans. But he stopped short before turning the door handle, because had he ever seen Crystal dance before?
Look at her. There in a corner of the kitchen by the grill, late-afternoon sun filtering in through the grease-spattered window, her face half in shadow and her eyes closed. He held his breath for fear she’d turn around and see him. She swayed, her head dipping and turning, into the sun, into the shadow. Now her body curved and tilted as if an invisible someone was turning her. Now she twirled in a slow circle. She was humming — he could hear through the cranked-open window — and the words Vienna waltz came into his mind. Crystal was waltzing, and from the smile on her face and the grace in her movement, it was clear that she loved to waltz.
How did he not know that Crystal was a dancer? How many times had she danced like this, alone, when she thought no one could see her? He and Crystal had come together in middle age. What else did he not know about her?
William T. eased himself away from the window and walked around to the front of the diner. He waited until she appeared through the big front picture window, scrubbing the length of the counter with a red sponge, then tapped on the glass. She opened the door for him, the sponge dripping suds down her arm. The fund-raiser jar still sat on the counter next to the cash register.
help bring mallie back!
every little bit counts!
A washed plastic container that had begun life as a takeout soup container from the Golden Dragon in Utica, with Mallie’s high school yearbook photo, blown up so that the outlines of her face and hair were fuzzy, glued to its side. Surrounded by smiley faces and bunches of hearts. The first time he saw it, only weeks after Mallie had been attacked, William T. had stood staring at the thing — Jesus H. Christ, who the hell had come up with this monstrosity — but Crystal had given him a warning look: Don’t say a word. Burl had come up next to him then.
“I wanted to do something,” Burl said.
Crystal’s eyes had beamed a message at him: He’s your oldest friend, William T, — don’t yell at him.
“It’s probably stupid,” Burl had said, reaching for the jar, his fingers covered in Band-Aids, like always. Curse of the postman. “But it’s something, you know? A tiny little thing.”
A couple of tens in the jar, some fives, many ones, and, visible near the bottom, a lone fifty.
“That was me,” Burl had said, stubbing his finger at the fifty.
“What do you plan to do with the money from this jar, Burl?”
“Every little bit helps, William T.”
Burl was mild-mannered but stubborn to the core. It was people like him who would eventually rule the earth someday, millennia from now, when everyone else less obstinate had just given up.
At that time Mallie was in a coma and they were starting to think it was permanent. The battle over her future had begun. The hospital staff, with the exception of Beanie and that one nurse, had taken to averting their eyes when William T. and Crystal walked in the door. This was the beginning of the siege, the time that, when William T. looked back on it, would appear in his mind as a combination of television reporters, telephone calls, and trips to the lawyer and judge.
They had paraded her across the news as if she were a freak at the freak show. Night after night, the photos. The high school graduation photo, the blue sundress photo. And the other one. That other one, the one the onlooker had put on his Facebook page, the one William T. couldn’t stand to think about. Where in the world could you go to get away? In the beginning the thick black headlines repeated themselves ad infinitum. On the a.m. talk-radio shows the callers were as sure of themselves as the host. Turn the TV on, turn it off. Open the computer and shut it down. News, news, it was everywhere in this world, and so was Mallie’s face. William T. was convinced that it was the sight of his big sister everywhere and nowhere, argued over by strangers, along with the loss of his mother, that had driven Charlie to apply to Braxton Preparatory Academy in Pennsylvania.
Now, all this time later, the plastic container was still there. St. John’s, both hospital and rehab unit, along with all the medical professionals, had at some point decided to donate their services, maybe to look good in the public eye, maybe to offset accusations on the part of protesters on either side, so there was no real point to the money in the container, was there? But by now it was part of the scenery of the diner. People dropped their change in sometimes, occasionally a bill or two, but only as a reflex. The girl in the photo was long gone. A hole had opened up around her and sucked her in. She was still living in the land of the lost, or so everyone thought. They had managed to keep the fact of her long, slow recovery under wraps. Let her get her life back in peace, had been the thinking, and everyone at St. John’s had been a willing participant in the secrecy. At least
until now.
Crystal ducked through the gate and came around to the front of the counter. He put his arms around her and kissed the top of her head. Crystal, the secret dancer.
“The news is out,” he said. “Tomorrow morning I’ll get her out of there.”
Mallie
The knock-knock conversation with Beanie was the first time she had talked with someone new, and when she pictured him in her mind, she smiled. Smiling felt like a strange new thing. So did laughing. But she had smiled and laughed with Beanie and it felt easy. Because he was someone who didn’t know her? Who wasn’t hiding something from her? Who wasn’t walking around with invisible dark birds on his shoulders?
“You will need to figure out how to let go of the emotions that come at you during a session,” her teacher had told them in massage therapy school, “because otherwise you will absorb them and become burdened with the pain of others.”
The specific means by which a massage therapist kept herself whole and contained varied for each person, the teacher said, and it might require time and experimentation to figure out what worked for you. It had taken Mallie a long time to figure out how to disperse pain from her clients. What had eventually worked was to envision sorrow and grief as silent, heavy birds, hovering in the room. Most of the time she could mentally shake them off. But sometimes she had to physically windmill her arms, shout at them to go away, dislodge themselves from inside a human being. To go back where they belonged, riding the wind, high in the sky.
It was always hardest when working with women at the shelter. All that sadness and pain and fear stored up inside them. To release it from their tense and guarded bodies was work of skill and intuition. She had once been able to do it, and without risk to herself. But that was in the before world, the world before this one. During the months she had lain unconscious, dark birds had settled inside both William T. and Charlie. She could sense them.
No dark birds were trapped inside Beanie, though. He was lightness. He had come by again this morning, poked his head around the door, which was ajar. Both hands behind his back, his eyes bright.
“Pick a hand,” he said.
“What is this, kindergarten?”
�
�Pick a hand. And quick, before it melts any more. Aw, crap, now I gave it away.”
She pointed at his right hand and he brought it forth, an ice cream cone dripping down his fingers, and she clapped her hands like a child and laughed.
“When’s the last time you had a cone?” he said. “I mean a real cone with real ice cream, not that cheap shit they bring by on the cart.”
She shook her head. A long time. Probably since the last time she and Zach had driven down from Forestport to the Kayuta drive-in on Route 28. She turned the cone, licking the drips. Vanilla with mashed-up chunks of strawberries. It was delicious.
“Good, isn’t it?” he said. “Homemade.”
“By who?”
“Me myself and I. And my daughter. She decides on the flavor, and we take turns turning the crank.”
“Tell her she did a good job, will you?”
He nodded, watching her turn and turn the cone in her hand. Cold, creamy sweetness slid down her throat and the Kayuta appeared in her mind, sun glinting off its tin roof. She and Zach sitting on one of the picnic tables, laughing and eating ice cream on a summer night. Mosquitoes. Cars swishing by. Tires crunching on the gravel parking lot. Tears filled her eyes.
“Aw, M.W.,” he said. “It’s just ice cream. Don’t cry.”
She shook her head. “It’s not the ice cream,” she said. “It’s . . . everything.”
He came over to the bed then and sat beside her and put his arm around her. He smelled like the mop and laundry detergent and sweat. She tried to picture his little girl, turning the crank of the old-fashioned ice cream maker, but no little girl swam into her mind.
“I know it is,” he said. “I know.”
Later, when the door opened softly, she looked up, hoping it would be Beanie again, but it was William T., with his familiar worried face. She was tired of his worry. Of the hushed tone of his voice.
The Opposite of Fate Page 3
