If the Fates Allow

by Zoe Kane

  She was telling Uncle Marcus all about The Thing That Happened, shouting things at him that Lucy didn't ever ever want to know, and her words made a picture in Lucy’s mind, a picture of Mommy and Daddy and the car, a picture with smoke and fire and snow and shouting people and blood, and she couldn’t get the picture out of her head, no matter how tightly she held onto Princess, but she couldn’t make words either, she couldn’t say, “Stop talking, just stop talking, both of you, I'm right here, I can hear you, just stop.”

  So instead she did what small children do better than anyone else in the world.

  She opened her mouth and began to scream.

  It only took a heartbeat for Isaac and Sophia to come sprinting down the hall to fling their arms around her, but even that didn’t help, it didn’t make the bad things in her head go away, it didn’t make anything better. Lucy screamed and screamed and screamed, her whole body growing pink and tense from exertion, every muscle strained to breaking point, emitting full-body howls of anguish that seemed to echo from the soles of her feet to the top of her head, and which eventually – when she could not be consoled, no matter what Annie and Marcus did – set off equal hysteria in her siblings.

  In the end, out of better ideas, Annie called her brother, who broke the speed limit to get there, raced up the stairs and simply picked them all up as one, awkwardly lugging the shrieking, three-headed creature out to the car to drive them to Doctor Megan’s office.

  Which left Aunt Vera to deal with Marcus and Annie.

  “I hardly even know where to begin,” she said to them, pacing back and forth on the living room carpet as they sat side by side on the sofa like schoolchildren in the principal’s office, too miserable, guilty and ashamed to make even the slightest protest to anything Vera said.

  Lord knew they deserved it.

  “I find it almost impossible to believe that the two of you, who are mature, responsible adults with three very young and vulnerable children in your care, would engage in a shouting match twenty feet from their bedroom doorways about the most horrific thing that has ever happened in this family. How could you be so careless? What on earth can have possessed you?”

  There was, of course, no possible answer to this.

  “These children,” she continued sternly, “are traumatized. Do you have any idea what that means? Their grief is different from yours. You are adults, with a far higher level of cognitive function – though you have, apparently, decided not to use any of it today – and are capable of processing the things that have happened to you in a clearer manner. But Lucy is four. This entire family has worked very, very hard to protect these children from as much of the horror of this situation as we possibly can, and now you have implanted into her head an image she will be replaying over and over again at night before she falls asleep for the rest of her life. You have taken whatever small degree of progress Dr. Sharma has made and you have set her back so far that the children are worse than when they started. It is hard enough to explain to a four-year-old the reality that her parents are not coming back. It is just barely possible to do even that much. To ask her – any of them – at this age, with their limited emotional intelligence, to process the understanding of the horrific nature of a car accident, is unspeakably cruel. I have no idea what happened between the two of you this morning that caused you both to forget yourselves and your responsibility to so shattering a degree, and quite frankly I do not care. You are adults. You were supposed to protect her. And instead you have thrown her into emotional trauma so deep that for the life of me I don’t know how we can turn back the clock. And you have damaged both your own relationships with her permanently. She was afraid of many things before this, but now she will also be afraid of you.”

  Marcus’ eyes were squeezed tightly closed, trying and failing to hold back the sting of hot, mortified tears. Annie stared blankly and expressionlessly at the carpet in front of her. Neither of them said anything at all.

  Aunt Vera gathered up her coat and her purse and made her way to the door.

  “I’m going to Doctor Megan’s office to meet Michael and the children,” she said, “and after that I am taking them home with me for the next two days. By the time I bring them back here, I expect you both to have sorted this out. I don’t care if you resent each other. I don’t care what your grudges are. I don’t care if right now you can hardly stand to be in the same room with each other. You will learn to. There are children’s lives at stake here.” She buttoned her coat and strode briskly towards the door, before turning back to deliver one devastating parting shot:

  “I am very disappointed in you.”

  She closed the door, and Annie felt the whole world collapse in on her.

  * * *

  They sat side by side on the couch, silent and motionless, staring out into the now-empty living room, for a long time. The bright light of early afternoon sharpened into gold, then dimmed from copper to rose to violet as day faded into night. For hours and hours, they sat there. They said nothing. They did not acknowledge each other. They could not even form conscious thoughts. They just sat, as the shadows deepened and the darkness swelled up around them.

  Suddenly a soft sound of footsteps triggered both their parental instincts, and both heads snapped up, to see only the cat padding quietly downstairs (after missing all the drama earlier while he napped under Isaac’s bed). But the noise broke the spell somehow, drawing them both out of the gray silent fog and back into the real world. Annie switched on the lamp that sat at her elbow, and a warm golden light bathed their corner of the room.

  “I don’t know what’s the matter with us,” said Marcus heavily, and she turned to look at him for the first time since they had watched Michael carry the children downstairs what felt like a lifetime ago. There was no reproach on his face, no blame. He just seemed tired, and puzzled, and sad. “I don’t know why we always end up wanting to hurt each other.”

  “I don’t know either.”

  "Every time it seems like things might be getting better -"

  "I know. But we can’t keep going like this.”

  “Is Lucy going to be okay?”

  “I have no idea,” said Annie helplessly. “Would you be, if you were four and you heard the things I said?”

  “We both said things."

  "But I'm the one she's going to hate. I'm the one she's going to connect with her parents' death. Forever."

  "Don’t take this all on yourself. I was awful. I was unforgivable to you. None of this would have happened if I hadn't said the things I said."

  She shrugged, dismissing it. She was too tired to argue, too tired to remember why she had been so angry. She replayed the words of their argument over and over in her head, but she felt no rage, no desperate fury. In fact, she felt nothing at all.

  Hard to believe she had been so angry about Linnet. Hard to believe that only a few hours ago she had been coiled so tightly with rage that the only right thing to do had been to hurt Marcus as badly as she possibly could. It felt distant, alien, like the Annie upstairs in that bedroom hurling venomous words at him was a different person altogether. Every emotion had dried up. Even the Dark Thing had gone underground, leaving nothing behind it but a vast, echoing hollow where Annie’s heart used to be.

  “I didn’t sleep with Linnet,” he told her. “I know that’s the last thing that matters now. But I didn’t. I would never have done that to you. Never. I don’t know why it’s so important to me that you believe that, but it is.”

  “I believe you,” she said tonelessly. “But it doesn’t change anything.”

  He leaned his head against the back of the couch. “I know it doesn’t,” he sighed. “I know.”

  The next morning, he was gone.

  Chapter Twenty: Danny

  For weeks, after the children returned from Aunt Vera’s house to find the guest room stripped bare, its contents boxed up, and Uncle Marcus gone without a trace, they could hardly bear to be in the same room with Annie.
<
br />   She didn’t blame them. She could hardly bear to be in the same room with herself.

  Nobody – not the children, not Michael, not even Vera – managed to get a satisfactory answer out of her for why Marcus had gone, beyond “It wasn’t working out. It’s better this way.”

  Isaac was furious, but not at Aunt Annie. Or at any rate, not as much. Uncle Marcus had made a promise and he didn’t keep it, and now Isaac was the only boy in a house full of girls, and there was nobody he could talk to about how much he missed his dad. (He tried, once or twice, to bring it up with Aunt Annie, but it didn’t go well.)

  Sophia, however, was mad at Aunt Annie. There had been a lengthy stuffed animal conference at Aunt Vera’s house that night after they left Doctor Megan’s office to discuss the terrible things Aunt Annie had said about Mommy and Daddy and the car, things that woke Lucy up in the bed she shared with Sophia and made her squeeze her big sister tight out of anxiety and fear.

  Dolphin and Sophia, in their first real disagreement, were split on who was to blame; Sophia’s personal opinion was that the big mean fight – which Isaac blamed on Uncle Marcus – had really been Aunt Annie’s fault. When Aunt Annie was mad, she was scary. Whereas Uncle Marcus had been kind and funny and had given them a cat.

  (Dolphin, advocating for compassion all around, was for the first time scarcely heeded.)

  Lucy was not angry at anyone. Lucy simply withdrew. She did not like to ride in the car anymore; she screamed and cried and clung to the door, and only Isaac could calm her down. She did not like to be touched by Aunt Annie, even by accident. She clung with obsessive desperation to Bug, and grew panicky when she didn’t know where he was. Mostly, the thing you couldn’t help noticing was how all the sparkle had gone out of her.

  January passed into February, then March. Annie and the children tiptoed around each other, as though the whole house was full of emotional landmines they might inadvertently set off at any second. And then, one gray Tuesday morning at breakfast, two very important things – which didn’t seem, at first, to be connected to each other at all – happened at the same time.

  The first thing that happened was Isaac opening the glass doors from the kitchen to the backyard to retrieve his soccer ball from the deck. He was pretty quick, but Bug was quicker, streaking like a bolt of lightning between Isaac’s legs and zipping across the lawn to his hidey-hole under the rhododendron bushes.

  Lucy began to panic slightly, but Aunt Annie told her – in the same distant, faraway voice she used all the time now since Uncle Marcus had gone away, a voice that sounded like she was only halfway hearing or seeing them – not to worry about Bug. The yard was fenced, after all, and it was about to rain, which meant he’d be back up on the porch yowling to be let back in soon. And anyway, they had no time to run around the yard and chase him down, because they would be late for school.

  The second thing that happened, as Annie martialed the children outside with their backpacks to go meet Helen for their morning carpool, was that the mail came early that day, bringing with it a serious-looking envelope on Miller & Miller letterhead. Inside the larger envelope was a smaller one, folded inside a typed sheet of letterhead and signed by Charles Miller.

  Dear Dr. Walter,

  I hope this note finds you well. Enclosed please find a letter which was delivered into my care when Mr. Walter visited me last year to complete his revised will. He stated that in the event of his death – if and only if he was not survived by his wife – you were to be given this letter three months following his decease. Please forgive me not making the contents of this envelope known to you beforehand, but his instructions for discretion were very clear. I am not, of course, privy to the contents of this letter, as the envelope remains sealed, but please do not hesitate to contact me directly should any further assistance be required.

  Warm Regards,

  Charles Miller Sr.

  Attorney-at-Law

  The inner envelope was not on legal letterhead. It was small, and white, and it said “BEL” on the front in black Sharpie marker, in a sloping, angular left-handed scrawl she thought she would never see again.

  Five years ago, Danny Walter had written a letter to his sister-in-law that she would only ever see if he and Grace were both dead.

  This is what it said.

  * * *

  I’m sitting at the kitchen table right now.

  Grace’s upstairs, resting. She’s a motherfucking warrior, that one, but still, she gave birth like three days ago; why is it this hard for me to force her to stay in bed and rest? Nobody ever taught you Walter women how to slow down, did they?

  Lucy’s upstairs in the crib, where Grace can hear her, and Isaac and Sophia fell asleep next to Grace.

  Everyone’s asleep but you and me.

  You’re on the couch, grading a stack of papers. I still don’t know why. None of us know why. None of us know what happened six months ago. None of us know how the best damned neurosurgeon in the state ended up as an adjunct professor of biomedical ethics at Portland University, and I know you’ll never tell us because if it was something you wanted us to know, we’d know.

  Just another one of the mysteries Annabel Walter holds inside her. Just another thing about you I’ll never be able to ask.

  Like why that doctor looked at me the way he looked at me when we sat across from each other at dinner. Like why he looked at me the way he looked at me when I came by the next night for your things.

  Like what in God’s name he did to make you break his nose.

  There are so many things I don’t know about you, Bel. So many things I’ll never understand.

  But there are other things.

  Things you think I don’t know, but I do.

  I’m not sure why I’m writing this down. Is it tempting fate for a healthy thirty-three-year-old man in the middle of revising his will – oh, don’t worry, we’ll get to that in a second, I’d imagine you’re still pretty pissed at me – to write a letter that will probably go nowhere? Or is it good? Maybe it’s good. Maybe it will exorcise the ghosts, at least a little, if I say this just once – here, on paper, in an envelope that will be sealed and sent to my lawyer and locked in a metal box and only taken out if, and only if, you outlive first Grace, and then me. Maybe if I say it here, where it can’t hurt anybody, it will make things easier.

  My father was not a good man. That’s the first, most important thing to say. He was a very bad husband, and he was a very bad father. And he had two sons. And those sons watched him, and they learned, and they said to themselves – and to each other – “I will never become that man.” Marcus took a different road, Marcus decided the best way to avoid the risk of letting anyone down was never to get close enough for anyone to depend on you. (Which, frankly, is stupid. But we’re not quite up to the Marcus part of this letter yet – please hold all questions until the end of class, thank you.)

  But I always knew. I knew I wanted to be a dad. I knew I wanted to be a husband. I knew that I could take all the lessons I learned from watching my mother survive and watching who my father became and I could run so fast and so far in the opposite direction that I could build a family out of all the love my dad never gave to us. And when I met Grace, I knew. I knew that very second. It was just there. Right away. She was it. She was always it. There it is, I thought. I did it. I broke the cycle. I fell in love with an amazing woman with this amazing family and we had amazing children and I loved all of you so much it was like that love went back in time to the scared little kid I used to be and it healed all those broken things inside him. I thought I’d won, you know? I thought I’d done everything right.

  That’s why I never saw you coming.

  When I told Grace I wanted to revise the will to include Marcus, she tried to talk me out of it. “That’s ridiculous,” she said. “You can’t saddle Annie with a man she hardly knows for the rest of her life. What if she gets married?”

  And maybe you’ll think I’m an idiot – hell, maybe
I am – but I think that’s the first moment I knew. I mean really, really knew. Because it did something to me, it felt like a punch in the stomach.

  What if she gets married?

  What if one day, a guy comes along, a really great guy, and he gets to be the one that you let inside all those locked rooms full of all your mysteries and secrets? What if this precarious little balance we have right now is thrown off-kilter because there’s a man in your life who isn’t me? A man you love, a man who loves you back, a man who might even come close to deserving you?

  I’ve never hated a hypothetical person so much in all of my life.

  Jesus fucking Christ, I thought. What if she gets married? And I’m so stupid, I’m the stupidest person who’s ever lived, because really and truly, Bel, until I saw you in my mind in your white dress walking down the aisle with your eyes full of happy tears for some other man – I didn’t know. I didn’t know what this was.

  Because I didn’t have to know. It was so easy not to, when it was always just us. The three of us. You didn’t belong to anybody, which meant I was free, just a little bit, to think of you as mine. Or at least, there wasn’t another man with a better claim on you. That’s a horrible way of putting it, but it’s the truth. I was the man in your life. I liked that. I needed it. I didn’t know how afraid I was of losing it - of some other man being the one who broke through your walls and into your heart.

  You’re tapping the edge of your pen against your bottom lip right now as you turn pages. Do you know that you do that when you’re concentrating? Do you know how hard it is for me right now to stop staring at your mouth and thinking the things about it that I'm thinking?