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  Contents

  Advance Uncorrected Proofi

  Part One1

  Mallie Williams7

  William T.11

  Mallie16

  William T.21

  Mallie29

  William T.39

  Mallie44

  William T.52

  From the Box63

  Part Two83

  William T.85

  Mallie94

  William T.103

  Mallie109

  William T.114

  Mallie121

  William T.131

  Mallie137

  William T.146

  Mallie152

  Part Three159

  Darkness161

  William T.164

  Mallie169

  Darkness177

  William T.182

  Mallie188

  Darkness193

  William T.198

  Mallie205

  William T.213

  Darkness221

  Mallie224

  William T.231

  Darkness236

  Mallie238

  Mister248

  William T.249

  Mallie254

  Acknowledgments261

  Reading Group Guide263

  About the Author266

  The

  Opposite

  of Fate

  Alison McGhee

  Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  Boston New York

  2020

  Copyright © 2020 by Alison McGhee

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  hmhco.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: McGhee, Alison, 1960– author.

  Title: The opposite of fate / Alison McGhee.

  Description: Boston ; New York : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. |

  Identifiers: lccn 2018051343 (print) | lccn 2018057190 (ebook) |

  isbn 9781328518316 (ebook) | isbn 9781328518439 (hardcover)

  Classification: lcc ps3563.c36378 (ebook) | lcc ps3563.c36378 o66 2020 (print) | ddc 813/.54 — dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018051343

  For Julie Schumacher

  Part One

  In the beginning, a girl lay in a hospital bed in a room with white walls and a single window. Her name was Mallie Williams. She was twenty-one years old. She lay there for many months, months in which people came and went from the white room. Had she been conscious, she would have recognized some of them, the ones she had known most of her life. William T. Jones, her neighbor up the road. Crystal Zielinski, his girlfriend and the owner of Crystal’s Diner. Charlie, her younger brother. Lucia, her mother. And Zach, her boyfriend.

  Others, Mallie would not have known. The doctors and nurses in their scrubs and white coats, stethoscopes slung around their necks, noiseless shoes on their feet. The lawyers. The guardian ad litem. The members of Lucia’s church, who gathered around her bedside to pray. The young orderly with the yellow cap, gold earring dangling from his ear, who once a day entered the white room and pushed his mop around the tile floor until it gleamed.

  Months went by. Most things remained the same in the white room. The doctors and nurses settled into routine and resignation and finally into the kind of watchful resentment that sometimes happens in the face of hope turned hopeless. Until they were banned from the room, William T. and Crystal and Charlie gathered daily around Mallie’s bed. So did her boyfriend, Zach. They tried hard, but in the end even Zach’s face changed from worry to anger and finally to resignation.

  Outside the hospital, others also kept watch, protesters carrying signs, trying to sway the decisions of the people within the hospital’s doors.

  In the quiet white room with the double-glazed window, Mallie lay silent and asleep and unaware of the debate and protests and media coverage swirling around her. By all appearances, she was also unaware of the complicated emotions that anguished the people who loved her, the ones who came and went from her bedside. Her dark hair grew long and silky. Her skin softened, its freckles and few lines smoothing and disappearing over time. These changes were small and subtle, noticeable only to the people close to her.

  It was Mallie’s stomach that everyone noticed. Flat and muscled on the night she was admitted, her belly over time mounded itself and became the first thing anyone looked at when they walked into the white room. Such a small thing in the great scheme of the world: new life. But this particular new life was complicated. For a while, it was all anyone who knew her talked about.

  Sixteen Months Later

  William T. Jones

  Dark birds.

  That was the second thing Mallie said, when she began to talk again. Her eyes were open and looking toward the window of her room at St. John’s.

  “Dark birds,” she whispered, and he quickly followed her gaze. Did her words mean her vision was unharmed, along with her ability to talk? Crows? Grackles? Starlings, maybe. But he saw nothing. Nothing but sky.

  “I don’t see any birds, Mallie.”

  Back and forth she turned her head on the pillow, trying to shake it, maybe. He was holding her hand. Her fingers were so smooth. She was young, only twenty-three, but still. This was what happened when you didn’t use your hands; all the roughness went away. Her hands were the hands of a baby, and he remembered her as a baby. He had been in his forties then, a neighbor helping out her widowed mother, Lucia. Over time, he had grown to be a father of sorts to Mallie and her younger brother, Charlie.

  “Dark birds,” she whispered again.

  Her soft fingers twitched in his. She was trying to tell him something, but what, he didn’t know. That was all right. She would find a way. All the long months of waiting, of watching, of hoping that her body would finally recover, had taught him something about time and the nature thereof.

  What had she said first?

  “William T.”

  All his life he’d heard his name spoken, yelled, called out by familiar and unfamiliar voices, people who loved him and people who didn’t. But had he ever thought about his name until now? Had he ever felt his name as a physical thing, whispering into his body in the voice of someone he’d known since she was a child, someone he’d helped raise, someone he thought of as almost a daughter?

  “William T.”

  She knew who he was. She was saying his name. Welcome back to the world, Mallie.

  When he got home that afternoon he waited on the porch for Crystal. It took her an hour after the diner closed to put it in order for the next day. When her headlights swept across the driveway he stood up. The look on his face must have told her what she wanted to hear, because she flung open the car door, broke into a run and threw her arms around him.

  They stood there on the porch, swaying from side to side, while he told her how Mallie had looked at him, right in the eye, and said his nam
e. How she had gone back to sleep within a few minutes but still, she had spoken. William T. She had recognized him.

  “What should we tell her at this point? That she was just unlucky?” he said later. “That she was unconscious for a long time with an undiagnosed brain infection?”

  The initial excitement had passed and the reality of the situation — everything that Mallie didn’t know — was already weighing on them. Crystal stood at the kitchen counter, measuring coffee into the coffeemaker for the next morning.

  “I mean, there was the initial brain injury,” he said. “But still, it’s the truth.”

  “It’s part of the truth,” she said. “It leaves out the most important truth.”

  “I just want to buy her some time.”

  “Would you rather she found out the whole story from us, or from the rest of the world?” She clicked down the lid on the coffeemaker and turned to face him. “Because as of today we’re out of time, William T. If we, or maybe Charlie, don’t tell her, then someone else will. Better the news comes from us. We’re the ones who love her.”

  He punched in Charlie’s name on his phone. The 315 area code gave him an obscure sense of relief every time he saw it, as if the boy were still an upstate New Yorker, still physically in upstate New York, even though it had been nearly half a year since he moved himself into that fancy prep school in Pennsylvania.

  “What’s up, William T.?” Charlie’s voice was deeper every time William T. heard it, a young man’s voice. He was seventeen now.

  “It’s your sister. She’s awake. She spoke.”

  “Mallie? What? Wait. How awake? Does she know what happened? Is she, is she . . .” and the young man was gone, replaced by a boy, his words tumbling over themselves.

  “She’s okay,” William T. said, and then backtracked, because was she? It was too early to know. “I mean, she spoke.”

  “What did she say?”

  “My name. And something about birds.”

  “Your name? Why?”

  “Because I was the one in the room.”

  “Does she know what went down? Does she know . . . any of it?”

  “I don’t think so. I’m not sure where to start.”

  “She needs to know the whole story, William T. We can’t keep anything from her.”

  “Agreed. But let’s let her lead the way, Charlie. Okay?”

  He closed his eyes and waited for the boy to speak.

  “Okay,” Charlie said, finally.

  “You want to come home and see her?”

  “I don’t know if I can face her, William T. The whole thing was my fault in the first place. And I should’ve done more.”

  “You couldn’t have kept your mother and the church people away from her. None of us could.”

  “There must have been something I could have done,” Charlie railed, and William T. held the phone away from his ear. It was useless to try to convince Charlie he had done everything he could. The last sixteen months of hell had turned him fierce, which made sense, given everything that he had gone through with the sister he adored, but what a way to grow up. Trial by fire.

  “And what are you talking about, Charlie? Of course she’ll want to see you. You’re her brother. Get on up here. Please.”

  There was a touch on his arm and he turned to see Crystal looking at him, warning in her eyes. She raised both hands in the air and brought them down slowly, a gesture that meant, Slow down, calm down, back off. She was right. Everything from now on was new. They would have to figure it out together, with Mallie leading the way. Badgering her little brother wouldn’t help anything.

  Mallie Williams

  William T. was saying something about birds, how he didn’t see any and where were they, but she hadn’t said anything about birds. She closed her eyes and her fingers pressed against his — Please be quiet, they were trying to tell him — and he must have gotten the message, because he shut up. The blanket on her was soft and William T.’s hand was big and warm, and maybe this was a dream, the kind that felt real. She opened her eyes again and looked toward the window, toward the blue-green foothills of the Adirondacks. But the window was a blurry gray rectangle. She tried to focus her eyes but it was too much effort.

  If she was home, though, then why was William T. there, sitting next to her bed?

  There was something in his eyes, something he must not have wanted her to see because he blinked, but too late, she saw it anyway. He began to nod. Nod and smile and cry, all at the same time.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Mallie, with the birds. But we’ll figure it out.”

  Tired. Sleep.

  When she opened her eyes again she turned her head and saw a sink with a mirror above it. Look in the mirror, was the thought that came into her head. But when she tried to sit up, swing her legs over the side of the bed, they hardly moved. It felt as if they were buried in sand.

  “Legs,” she tried to say.

  “What is it, Mallie?”

  Again she tried to move her legs — kick off the invisible sand — but it took enormous effort. Tried to talk, but nothing. Tried to move her arms, but they too were leaden. Move, she commanded her body, MOVE. William T. was looking at her, and he knew, she could tell that somehow, he knew what was going on inside her.

  “Don’t be scared,” he said. “It’s your muscles. They have to build back up. But now that you’re back, now that you’re on the mend, it won’t take long. A few months.”

  For the first time, he sounded like the real William T., even though his voice was ten times quieter than usual. He smiled at her. His eyes and his smile and his whole big body were so full of hope and so full of something else, something she didn’t understand. She looked at the sink again, the mirror. The linoleum floor and the few steps it would take to cross it, steps she couldn’t take. Now that you’re on the mend. Now that you’re back.

  Back from where?

  “What happened to me?” she said.

  She was awake again. It was the next day. Or the next week. Time had passed, that was all she knew, and William T. was back. She was tired.

  “Do you remember anything?” he said.

  “No.”

  As soon as she said that, something did come to her, though: Rain. Less rain and more mist, mist that felt like petals of water. William T. picked up her hand and closed both his hands around it. Those big paws.

  “Rain, maybe,” she said. “Maybe it was raining that night.”

  “That night?”

  “Yeah, that night.”

  She didn’t know what she meant by that night but yes, that night. That night was dark, and she was walking. The sidewalk — or was it the street — shone under the street lamp. The street lamp was at the end of the block, a shining block with an old stone church set back on a lawn. William T. held her hand and waited.

  “Dark,” she said. “I was walking. It was pretty.”

  Pretty because the street, or was it the sidewalk, or both, glimmered under the light from the street lamp. The sensation of falling came to her.

  “Pretty?”

  There was something in his voice. He didn’t like that word. He hated that she had said the word pretty. She could feel his tension.

  “Yeah. The sidewalk was pretty. It was shining.”

  “Shining.”

  She pulled her hand out of his and laced her fingers together. “Am I right? About the rain? And that it was dark and it was pretty and I was walking down a street?”

  “I don’t know for sure. I wasn’t with you.”

  “Where were you?”

  She was a robot who could talk only in sentences that ended with question marks. A dark night? Rain? Pretty? She tried to follow her memory to the end of the street, past the church. A church? Where had she been, and where had she been going? But that was where memo
ry stopped.

  “Did a car hit me? It was wet — did I slip? Was I drunk? Did I wobble into the street?”

  The sensation of falling was a clear, soft memory. So she couldn’t have been too drunk. She didn’t even like being drunk. Buzzed, yes, but not drunk. William T. was shaking his head.

  “It’s been a long time, Mallie.”

  He kept saying that. Like it would explain everything. It’s been a long time. Which would explain why her hair was so long. And she had bangs now, tickling her forehead. Bangs? She had always hated bangs.

  “How long?”

  He looked past her, at the door that led to the hallway and its smooth cinderblock walls and Beanie, the orderly with the yellow cap. The murmurings behind the ajar doors of other rooms. It was the rehab wing of St. John’s — that much she had learned. Hospital-like, fluorescent-lit. Not like the places where she worked as a massage therapist. Those places — the Massage Center and the massage room at the women’s shelter — were quiet and serene, lit with soft lamps.

  “More than a year, Mallo Cup. You were unconscious for sixteen months.”

  Not “Mallie,” but “Mallo Cup,” the nickname he alone called her. His favorite candy bar. It brought her childhood rushing back over her, but the way he was saying it — in that hushed voice — was new. Where was the William T. she had known all her life, the William T. who used to sit on his old green tractor and roar her name across the cornfield?

  “What?”

  He said it again: “Sixteen months.”

  She couldn’t take it in. What was sixteen months? Not possible, that’s what. Fog clouded her head. Was this a dream, one of the weird, wandering kind? More than a year, Mallo Cup.

  She backtracked to a memory that she knew was real: First there was touch. Then someone saying her name. Then she woke into the world, and William T. was holding her hand. But what world? She waited for William T. to start talking again, to make sense of the whole thing. But his eyes had that same look in them and they kept sliding away from her.