“Mallo Cup! Finally. Where are you?”
“I’m here.”
“Where’s here?”
She ignored him. “I’m trying to figure things out, William T.”
Burl and Crystal were leaning forward now, trying to overhear. Mallie’s voice was tinny and far away. William T. closed his eyes so he could concentrate. Let her lead the way, he reminded himself, and he forced himself to stay quiet and let her talk.
“Remember proofs, William T.? Like in geometry?”
Strange question. Geometrical proofs, yes, he remembered them. Barely. Math had never been his strong suit. Why was she talking about geometry?
“Sure, I remember proofs,” he said. “A and B and C and D, that kind of thing?”
“Yeah. I made one up. D is the guy. Darkness. Him.”
Him, as in the evil bastard who started all this? The one that he, William T., sometimes dreamed about killing? She was talking again. Switzerland, he told himself.
“I turned the whole thing into an equation,” she said, “all of it. Me and Time and Pain and Darkness. D was the only variable I could change so I made him a meth-head and I named him Darkness and that’s how I picture him now. I picture him as a roofer up high on a roof, looking around the city. But inside he thinks about what he did and he hates himself.”
What kind of strange story this was he did not know. It sounded like a perverted version of the Once Upon a Time game she used to play with Charlie, and now the image was stuck in his own mind, a man on a roof, hunched over, nailing shingles into wood, eyes looking down over a dark city. Burl and Crystal were making faces, gesturing at him — put her on speakerphone? Is that what they wanted? He shook his head, the phone pressed to his ear.
“I’m trying to make it bearable,” she said. “So I can figure out how to live with what happened.”
“But it’s not bearable. What happened isn’t bearable.”
“Stop, William T. It’s my life, not yours. Remember?”
“I remember,” he forced himself to say.
“You have to beat off the dark birds, William T. You can’t let them live inside you. They will take you over, William T.”
Dark birds. The words she had said on the first day she came back to the world. Her name for evil, maybe. For the terrible things that people did to one another.
“I don’t want the things that happened to me to turn into dark birds. That’s why I made him into a man with a mother and a sister. A man who did something horrible that he regrets.”
“But you have no idea if that’s true or even close to true, Mallie,” he said, in a tone that he hoped was reasonable.
“That doesn’t matter. The only thing I can change is the idea of him, so I made him into someone who hates himself for what he did. It’s a way to solve an unsolvable proof.”
“I’ll tell you something, Mallie. If I knew the bastard who did it was a strung-out roofer I’d find him and throw him right off the goddamn roof myself.”
At that, Burl and Crystal shook their heads at him, their faces as grim as the sound of his own voice in the phone. So much for being Switzerland. But Mallie’s voice on the other end was calm.
“Then that means the dark birds have you,” Mallie said. “You have to fight them off, William T.”
“Not possible.”
“You have to make it possible. Try something, William T. Tell me one hard thing about this situation. Just one.”
At that, the anger left him and a lump rose in his throat. She was playing the One Hard Thing game again, the game he had heard Zach play with her when something troubled her. He swallowed hard. He pictured her there, wherever “there” was, holding the phone to her ear and being patient with him.
“Everything about this is hard.”
“Narrow it down. One hard thing.”
“That someone hurt you.”
“Now one impossible thing.”
It was on the tip of his tongue to say Everything again, because it was the truth and because the everything-ness of it crowded his mind and wouldn’t let him go. But he held back. She was leading the way and he had to let her.
“That baby. The fact of its existence.”
She was quiet for a little while and he worried that maybe she’d blocked the baby out of her mind and now he’d brought it back by mentioning it. He shouldn’t have mentioned it. He should have kept the thoughts of the baby in his own dark mind. Maybe he was filled with dark birds.
“And now one good thing.”
“Jesus, Mallie. You’re asking the impossible.”
“Decide there’s something good and tell me what it is, William T. That’s how this works.”
But he couldn’t. Nothing came to him. Patient girl, she waited on the other end of the line. Mallie was being Switzerland. One hard thing, one impossible thing, one —
“That you’re alive,” he said, and slumped with relief, because it was true.
“See? It works,” she said, and he could hear the smile in her voice.
Then the phone went silent and still in his hand. He looked up at Burl and Crystal and pushed the phone down into his pocket.
“She brought up the baby?” Burl said.
“No. That was me.”
“So she didn’t talk about it at all?”
“No,” William T. said. “All she said was —” but he stopped, because Burl’s shoulders had slumped. Why did he look so downcast? Then it came to him in a sudden wave of knowledge. Burl wanted that baby in his life, that was why. He opened his mouth but Crystal was
faster.
“Burl,” she said. “Oh, Burl,” and in her voice was the half of the equation that William T. would have missed, the part that had nothing to do with the baby and how he came to be in this world. The half that was about Burl, who had never had children. Burl, who would welcome that child, any child, maybe, no matter how that child had come into the world, into his life and show him how to make a table out of a stump and a flat rock. How to plant a garden, how to open a letter with a letter opener instead of ripping it, how to eat a stack of pancakes at Keye’s Pancake House up in Old Forge. Jesus. Burl.
There was too much loneliness in this world, there was too much hurt, and his oldest friend should not have lived his life alone. He has you, he could hear Crystal saying in his head, and he has me, and he has Charlie and Johnny. He has his garden and his mail route and his church choir. Now he has Mallie back. He has us all. And yes, it was true, and no, it wasn’t true, because Burl had missed out on something that all his life he had wanted. He had to turn away from the sight of Burl’s face.
“I talked to Zach,” Burl said. “The other day.”
Both Crystal and William T. turned to him in surprise.
“He picked up the phone for you?” William T. said.
“I didn’t call him. He called me.”
“Why the hell would he call you?” William T. said, before he realized how rude it sounded.
“He wanted to know if I’d heard from Mallie. He’s worried.”
“He should be. She’s making up stories now about the rapist being some kind of roofer, a meth-head or something. Why’d he call?”
“I think he’s lonely, William T. I think he misses home. The way things used to be.”
“Well, welcome to the world, Zach Miller.”
Burl flicked his hand at William T. as if to shoo him away.
“Look, William T. You can be angry all you want, but it’s not your business to judge Zach, or Mallie, for that matter. If she wants to make up a story about a strung-out roofer, if that’s her way of getting through this and out the other side, then good for her.”
“You can’t just make up stories, Burl. You can’t just decide something’s good when it isn’t. You can’t just pretend your way into a whole new life.”
&nbs
p; “Sure you can. We all do.”
“Yeah? What’s my story, then?”
“Anger and bitterness. Too much of the time.”
Burl sat there looking at him, eyes resolute. Quiet Burl. Hold-himself-in-the-background Burl. But not all the time, and especially not recently. Look at the way he’d collected all that money for Mallie and then urged her to go. William T. clenched his fist around the phone in his pocket. He had not done a good job. He had not stayed calm and steady. He was not Switzerland.
“Burl’s right,” Crystal said. “Mallie and only Mallie gets to choose how to frame what happened to her.”
“And if she frames the rapist as a roofer who hates himself?
Just makes it up out of thin air? That’s crazy. That’s called magical thinking.”
“No. What it is, is her decision. If she wants to see the baby, then that’s her decision. If she wants to see Zach, that’s her decision. Nothing is cut and dried the way you want to believe it is, William T. Can’t you see that?”
“No, I can’t,” William T. said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
Crystal was silent, her eyes on him, unblinking. The image of Johnny rose up in his mind. Johnny, born with the cord wrapped around his neck. Johnny, who would not ever live independent of them or the caretakers at the group home. Johnny, whose life had been blunted in so many ways from the moment he was born. Johnny, whose existence had brought so much love and happiness to them all, his whole life long.
Mallie
Fly away, dark bird.
She used to send the command silently into the hurt bodies of the women at the shelter. She sent it via her own body, through her hands and fingers and sometimes her whole arms, and into the bound-up ball of twisted pain lodged within the women. Go away. Rise into the sky. Do not come back. Sometimes it was magical, like the time she saw — literally saw — a huge black bird rise into the air of the tiny dim room. Go! she told it, with the client silent and still and closed-eyed on the table beneath her. The dark bird had vanished through the ceiling, into the cold night sky above the shelter. And in that moment, the client drew in a sharp breath and opened her eyes in surprise.
You don’t want to get bound up in another’s history, her teacher had cautioned them. You have to remain your own self. You have to be clear.
And she had learned how to be. But what about now? How could you be clear when you had no memory of what your body had endured, no memory of the people who had touched you without your knowing? When, at the thought of that baby, alive and in the world and living in Utica, you felt no connection?
She and the Datsun had made it all the way to the eastern edge of Montana. Zach lived in this state now. Nothing about his days was familiar to her. Charlie hated him for leaving, and William T. tensed up at the mention of his name, and Crystal went silent. But none of them knew Zach the way she did. None of them had been there those late nights on the couch after work, when she couldn’t shake the dark birds from her own body. One hard thing, one impossible thing, one good thing. Each night, Zach had waited until she found one good thing. Even on the hardest and most impossible nights, she had been able to find one good thing.
“I don’t know what I would do without you,” she had said on one of those nights. “I wouldn’t know how to be alive without you.”
A cheesy-movie thing to say, but she had meant it. The thought of Zach disappearing had been her biggest fear. She wouldn’t let herself think the word died. Disappeared was as close as she would let herself come to that. He knew what she was thinking, though. She was twenty years old, he was twenty-two, and they had been together four years already.
“You’d figure it out.” His hands were on her shoulders, pressing and releasing. “One hard thing, one impossible thing, one good thing.”
“There wouldn’t be any good things if you were gone.”
“There would have to be,” he said.
Three years had passed since that night. A year and a half of them she had no memory of, but Zach did. How had he gotten through all the months after the night they found her lying on the street? Who had been there for Zach? Had he asked himself the series of questions? Had he been able to find one good thing?
Questions were all she had. She was driving west by instinct, into the sunset, like a migrating bird pulled toward an unknown home. A dozen miles west of Miles City, Montana, she parked the truck on the shoulder and laced her hands over her belly, over the place where a whole other life had begun. The sky outside the windows was crazy with stars, a fury of stars, dark canopy pricked everywhere with light. Stars that shimmered and glittered and shook with everything that was unknown. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? Panic clawed its way up inside her and she sat up and cried his name over and over — Zach, Zach, Zach — picturing an invisible cloud of birds that rose into the sky and bore his name westward.
Next to her the box of possible futures rode shotgun. She had shoved William T.’s box of pain behind the seat so she wouldn’t have to see it, but the fortune cookies had kept her company these thousands of miles. They rustled when the truck went over a bump. Their cellophane wrappers twinkled when the sun shone on them. Her little black phone lay hidden at the bottom of the box.
It used to bother William T. that she and Zach saved their fortune cookies.
“You’re playing with fate,” he used to tell them when he was at the cabin and caught sight of the white liquor store box. “Tear them open, toss the fortunes, and just eat the goddamn things.”
It was the unopened-ness of the fortunes that made him uneasy, he said, like a curse they were inviting into their lives.
“I don’t like fortune cookies to begin with,” he had said. “Number one, they taste like crap. Number two, you can’t let your destiny be ruled by superstition. Are you going to trust a crunchy cardboard cookie over your own heart and mind?”
Back then, she had laughed at him. But now she thought about it again. Wasn’t William T. actually doing the opposite of what he claimed? Giving weight and substance to the idea of a fortune influencing one’s fate seemed like the very definition of superstition. And whether or not he thought it was the right thing to do, of all the things William T. could have saved for her from their home, he had chosen to keep the box of fortunes.
And she had chosen to bring them with her. She had brought them both — documents detailing the past and cookies full of possible futures — with her on this migration to Montana. What if she opened all the cookies right now, read the fortunes, picked the ones she liked and tossed the rest out the window? And don’t you want to be the master of your own fate? Zach had asked, way back at the Golden Dragon the night of their first date. But he was the one who had saved those first two cookies and then kept adding to the pile over the years. Wasn’t choosing not to read the fortunes a way of saying that he too believed in their power?
If she had to figure out life without Zach, what would she do with their box of possible futures?
As if in response, the box buzzed. She plunged her hand down through the cookies and felt around for her phone. Charlie! Eight words glowed on the screen.
once upon a time there was a brother
She thought and counted and tapped out the words.
whose sister drove a thousand miles to montana
The response was immediate.
to talk to the asshole who abandoned her?
Back when she and Charlie and Zach all lived together in the cabin in Forestport, Charlie had watched Zach play the One Hard Thing game with her. He had watched her walk in the door after a late night at the shelter and go straight to Zach. No words. No explanation. Just the three of them together in the small house surrounded by deep woods, three people who knew one another so well that when one was upset, the others sensed it and knew why. Charlie had known Zach a long time. He should know that no matter the reason Zach had left, Mallie would
need to hear it from him.
stop it, she tapped back, breaking the eight-words-per-line rule of the game. i mean it, charlie. She shut down the call and tossed the phone back into the box of cookies. She was about to start the engine again when Charlie called, the jazzy ring tone she’d assigned to his number years ago shimmering up from the bottom of the box.
“Mal.”
“Don’t talk about him that way, Charlie.”
“What if he deserves it? What if it’s all hard when you see him? What if it’s all impossible? What if there’s nothing good?”
“I won’t know that until I see him.”
“Listen. You want me to come with you? I can look for a flight and you can pick me up somewhere out there.”
“No. Thank you, but no.”
“Jesus, Mallie, I hate the thought of you driving all that way by yourself.”
“Now you sound like William T. I’m not defenseless. And I’m not by myself. I brought the fortune cookies.”
“Toss the goddamn cookies. They’re stale.”
“You can’t just throw out all your possible futures, Charlie.”
“How can you sound so normal? I mean, you actually sound like yourself.”
“I am myself,” she said, and that seemed to shut him up.
“Mal, can I ask you something?” he said, after a while. “Am I, like, an uncle now? Are you a mother?”
“No. Yes. Maybe? Whatever we are, we didn’t choose to be.”
“I know we didn’t. But are we, anyway? Even if we don’t want to be? That’s the hardest thing about this, to me. 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.”
The Opposite of Fate Page 19
