The Opposite of Fate Read online

  “Where am I, William T., and what day is it?”

  “Utica. Tuesday.”

  “Winter? Fall? Summer?”

  Robot Mallie, with her robot questions.

  “March,” he said, and his voice meant Slow down. Stop shooting out questions. “A Tuesday in early spring. Two weeks now since you talked about the dark birds.”

  She looked around the room. Bed. Sink. Mirror. White walls. Blue blanket. Dark birds. On a Tuesday in early spring.

  “How old am I?”

  “You are” — he stopped to figure it out; William T. had always been bad with ages and birthdays — “twenty-three years old, Mallie.”

  She shut her eyes.

  William T.

  The three of them — Crystal and William T. and Charlie, on the phone — agreed to keep quiet and volunteer nothing unless Mallie specifically asked. The hospital and all the employees who worked with Mallie had been told to keep her recovery confidential, to tell no one. They all wanted to avoid another media circus. It would be a long recovery, the doctors had warned them, and it was best to let her lead the way. She slept most of the time, at first. Her brain was fogged and there was no treatment for it but time, according to the specialists. If and when she begins to talk and make sense, when she begins to move on her own volition, that’ll be the turning point, the doctors had said.

  It might take many months, they had said.

  But it didn’t. Full range of motion was back within a few weeks, and she was walking without assistance two months after that. The doctors and the physical therapists and the occupational therapists were surprised. She was young and healthy, and her immune system hadn’t been compromised by the coma and subsequent brain infection, so her body rebounded. Damage to the lymphatic system, edema, loss of bone density from so much time not moving, drifting in and out of consciousness: none of those were issues the way they’d be in someone older, someone with less mobility.

  Memory, though. What about memory?

  Be prepared, they had warned them. Be watchful. She might always have memory issues surrounding this particular period of her life. The initial trauma could cause it, the long period of unconsciousness could cause it, and any and all potential recovery was unpredictable. She might sleep and sleep and sleep, they had said.

  She did, at first. But not for long.

  The human body wanted to live. That was the thought that came to William T. throughout the weeks he watched Mallie shuffle a few feet out from the bed, and then back, with assistance. He was the one who watched over her all that time from his chair by her bed. Crystal had to keep the diner running. Charlie had still not made the trek from Pennsylvania, had still not spoken with his sister directly. It was all William T. could do to stay calm when Charlie called him, instead of her, to check on her progress. Yes, the boy’s guilt and sorrow were overwhelming. But he was her brother. She was his sister. Mallie had asked no questions about Charlie. And consequently, William T. volunteered no information.

  Resist the urge to do things for her, they had cautioned. Let her figure it out. He was watching the first time she made her way to the mirror. She had avoided it thus far. He didn’t know why and didn’t ask. William T. watched as she leaned on the sink and studied herself. She didn’t smile. She bent her forehead to the metal and stared into her own eyes. One second, two, three, maybe fifteen, ticked by without sound or movement.

  Then she turned sideways, inclining her neck and head, taking in her body’s profile. He had once watched Crystal look at herself that way, smile-less and appraising, when she thought she was alone. Crystal, in her T-shirt and jeans. He had wanted to tell her she was beautiful, that the thought she might not think so hurt his heart. But he had said nothing. Then, as now, it had seemed a private communion between a woman and her reflection. Mallie turned from the mirror.

  “Okay, William T. What happened to me?”

  She had not asked since that first time. But he was ready. He had practiced. Let her lead the way.

  “You had a brain injury which was followed by a brain infection,” he said. “You were unconscious for a long time.”

  She looked at him and waited for more. She had always been good at silence. It was one of the things that made her so good at her work as a massage therapist. She was intuitive to an unnerving degree. Her brother called it her “witchy stuff.” Tell her only the truth, the therapists had instructed him, and only when she specifically asks. Eventually she spoke.

  “A brain injury? How did I get it?”

  “Do you remember anything else, besides the rain and the street?”

  “No. There’s a gap. A big gap. I don’t know where I left off and then . . . picked up again.” She shook her head, as if she were looking for the right words. Which was something that she’d had to do throughout the recovery — look for the right words. “I keep trying to go back and fill things in, but everything’s cloudy. Blurry.”

  He stood there by the window, his mind sifting and turning.

  “Why hasn’t my mother called?” she said then. “Is Lucia still in the cult?”

  The “cult” was her and Charlie’s term for the church that their mother had joined while Mallie was still in high school. She had gone deep into it and not returned. And now she would never return, William T. thought, because pancreatic cancer had claimed her, seven months ago now — but was Mallie ready for that news?

  “We’ve all been focused on your health,” he said. “Getting the use of your muscles back. Mobility. Standing. Walking.”

  He was stalling and she knew it. Her eyes darkened.

  “You’re hiding something,” she said. “I can feel it.”

  She had always been able to feel invisible things, sense when secrets were being held in the mind or body. She was born for this kind of work, the director of the massage therapy program had told him after Mallie had completed her advanced certification. She’s a magician. Now her hands were moving in front of him, as if she were pulling in invisible information from his body, his thoughts. It was hard to hide from Mallie Williams.

  She had been the one to nickname him “William T.” when she was a child. Until then he had been William Jones. Your first name is my last name, he remembered her saying. We don’t want to confuse people. So you’re going to be William T. now. T for Thaddeus, because that’s your middle name. As if anyone could confuse a skinny little girl with big, loud William T. Jones.

  His strongest memory of her from that time was the memorial service for her father, struck by a truck when she was nine and Charlie barely three. The two of them had hidden beneath the long table while mourners gathered with their plates of food. William T. had watched as she silently fed bites of cake to her little brother.

  Should he tell her everything that had happened? She was asking, wasn’t she?

  He was not a man who had ever lied to her. His head filled with the photo that had been used and reused in the newspapers and on the television and online: Mallie Williams in a blue sundress. The photo that had turned him, a computer-less man, into a demon, who, for over a year until Crystal told him he had to stop, had typed mallie williams into search bars and then sat scrolling. Scrolling. Scrolling. It sickened him to realize that even though his Mallie was two yards away from him in the living and breathing and standing flesh, that photo of her felt more real than the real her.

  A girl in a blue sundress, hair floating over her shoulders, arms held out to her sides, a girl captured halfway through a turn to music that no one could hear.

  The photo had been taken at her high school graduation party. All the details were there in his memory: friends milling about the cooler of soda and beer on the porch, the grill smoking to one side of the rhubarb patch, the long, spindly folding table that William T.’s friend Burl had lent them, covered with hamburgers and grilled chicken, salads and chips and the big sheet cake that Burl himself
had made and iced and decorated with lilies from his garden. Burl, no family of his own. Burl, man on the sidelines. William T. must have been inside — fetching more ice? more beer? more hamburger patties? — when the photo was taken. Her eyes almost closed and one slender strap of the blue sundress fallen off her shoulder. She was smiling, a slow kind of smile.

  Pretty girl. Dancing, pretty girl. That photo held something secret, something that should have stayed hidden and private but had been thrown open for the world to tear into.

  “Wait a minute,” came her voice. “It’s not Charlie, is it? Nothing’s happened to him, has it?”

  This was the first time she’d asked about him. Had she just now remembered she had a brother? Or had she not asked before out of some kind of self-protection? Because any other time Charlie would’ve been right beside her. They had always been close, even with the six-year age difference. Playing their endless Once Upon a Time game with their thumbs on their phones, sometimes while they were right in the same room. What the hell is that game you’re always playing? he had asked them once, and without looking up, Charlie had answered. You start out with “Once upon a time” and then you go back and forth until the story’s finished. Their preferred method of communication, which had always struck William T. as strange. But he tried not to judge. Remain neutral, he told himself. Be Switzerland.

  “Charlie’s fine,” he said now. “He’s fine.”

  “Then just tell me what you’re not telling me. Please, William T.”

  But he couldn’t. Not yet.

  Mallie

  She opened her eyes to see Charlie there in the room, sitting in the chair that William T. usually sat in. He wasn’t looking at her. It was him, wasn’t it? Charlie. Her brother.

  “Charlie,” she said, but he didn’t move.

  Was she not speaking out loud? That happened sometimes. Her brother’s head was bent, as if he were listening to a song with a sharp beat through earbuds, or as if he were praying. Then he raised his head and looked at her. No song, no earbuds, no prayer.

  “Mal.”

  He was different. She saw this immediately. He wasn’t the brother she had last seen a year and a half ago. He had been through something terrible and it had re-cast him. She could feel it. She reached out to touch him, to put her hand on his shoulder and feel what he was feeling and how he had changed, but he flinched away.

  “No. Don’t do your witchy stuff on me.”

  Witchy stuff was his name for her knowing what his mood was like and why, just by his walking into a room where she was. For when she woke in the night, knowing he couldn’t sleep, and she would get up and walk down the dark hall and stand by his bed and send calm into him until his breathing slowed and softened and he relaxed into sleep. Your witchy stuff. Her witchy stuff was why she was so good at her work. She could feel the stories behind the tightness in muscles, behind the knots in shoulders and backs. She could pull the stress out through her hands.

  “What’s going on, Charlie?”

  He got up from the chair and began pacing. She waited. Charlie had never been someone who caved when pushed. Push him too hard and off he’d stomp.

  “I know there’s more than anyone’s told me,” she said.

  “So much more,” he said, his voice low and rapid. “There’s so much more. But I’m not the one to tell you, Mal.”

  “You’re my brother, Charlie.”

  “Charles. It’s Charles now. I was there the night it happened. I saw you, Mallie. In a way the whole thing is my fault.”

  His fault? He paced to the door and back to the window, to the door and back to the window. She watched his body — bigger than she remembered, heavy with muscle — and then he wheeled about to stand at the foot of the bed. Those eyes, dark and shadowed. He looked so much older.

  “If I start talking, I’ll say too much,” he said. “I won’t be able to stop.”

  “Don’t stop, then.”

  He shook his head.

  “Charlie, talk to me.”

  “I go to school in Pennsylvania now, Mal. I drove up this morning. William T. called me and told me you were awake. I wanted to talk to you but —”

  “Talk, then. Just talk.”

  “I can’t.”

  Desperation rose in her. He was her brother. Her little brother. They had always been closer than close, the two of them against the storms of their father’s death and their mother’s loneliness. He was pacing again, nearing the door. She could tell he was on the verge of disappearing, of yanking the door open and leaving. How could she stop him from going? His hand was on the door. Her mind seized on something.

  “Charlie! Once upon a time there was a sister.”

  “No, Mal. I outgrew that game a long time ago.”

  “You couldn’t have. We’ve played it all our lives.”

  “I outgrew it exactly eighteen months ago,” he said. “When I realized that no story could ever make this easier.”

  “Since when did we play Once Upon a Time to make something easier?”

  “Since forever. Which you know. And what happened can’t be spun. Nothing can make it easier. I’m sorry. I don’t know how to talk about this.”

  Then he was gone, had disappeared through the door. She folded her hands together and cradled them against her stomach. It’ll be okay, she chanted silently, it’ll be okay, it’ll be okay, it’ll be okay. She waited for him to come back through the door. She waited a long time, but there was no Charlie. All right. She would play the game herself. Eight words per sentence.

  Once upon a time there was a sister.

  And the sister had a brother named Charlie.

  And Charlie was alive and in the world.

  This was her mantra now. William T. was alive and in the world, and Crystal was alive and in the world, and Charlie was alive and in the world. One by one, the people she loved were appearing, were walking through the door. Each time another appeared, she added them to the Alive and in the World list. Charlie was alive and in the world. He would come back. Wouldn’t he? It would be okay.

  Wouldn’t it?

  The door pushed open again, slowly this time. Charlie? No. It was Beanie, the young orderly with the tiny yellow pom-pom cap. He stood in the doorway, a mop and bucket in his hands and a question on his face, as if he needed permission to start mopping.

  “Did someone knit that hat for you?”

  Beanie shivered when she spoke, as if she had sparked a kind of electric current in him. A tiny stud in his ear glinted gold in the overhead fluorescence. He leaned on the mop, an old-fashioned one with hundreds of whitish cotton worms swirling along the tile floor, and studied her. A ray of late-afternoon sun slanted through the far window and he stood in an oblong of golden light, a thousand dust motes floating around him. He said nothing.

  “It’s cute,” she said. “I like the color.”

  Hearing herself talk was like listening to someone she used to know. Someone she used to be, someone who knew how to talk to people. Her voice was slower than she intended it. But it was her voice, and she didn’t have to think each sentence through anymore. Her words were back. Charlie and Crystal and William T. are alive and in this world. The lullaby sang inside her, like background music. The orderly was looking at her as if she were an alien being.

  “Is that why everyone calls you Beanie? Because of your cap?”

  He laughed. White teeth and a soft but big laugh that reminded her for a second of William T.’s until it broke into a gravelly cough full of phlegm.

  “You sound like an old man who’s been smoking a pack a day since he was twelve.”

  “I have been smoking a pack a day since I was twelve. Not anymore, though.”

  “When’d you quit?”

  “Three days ago. On my twenty-fifth birthday.”

  He laugh-coughed again. She started laughing too. It felt
good. It felt like something she used to do a lot of.

  “Congratulations. I’m proud of you.”

  “You don’t know me enough to be proud of me.”

  “Well, I know that nicotine is supposed to be harder to quit than opioids. Did you ever hear that?”

  “Did not, nope.”

  “So what are you doing with all your free time, now that you quit smoking?”

  “Stand-up comedy.”

  “For real?”

  “For real in front of my daughter, yeah.”

  He laughed again, that smoker’s chuckle, and the tiny yellow pom-pom wiggled.

  “So tell me a joke,” she said.

  “Knock, knock.”

  “Who’s there?”

  “Orange.”

  “Orange who?”

  “Orange you glad to see me?”

  “You got to work on your material, Beanie. Everybody knows that one.”

  “My daughter didn’t.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Four.”

  “Well, no wonder. That’s how old I was when William T. started telling me knock-knock jokes. Including that one.”

  He touched the pom-pom on his yellow hat, as if making sure it was still there.

  “It’s something, watching you walk down the hall,” he said suddenly. “And hearing you talk.”

  And with that, she was back to being the strangeness in the room, the girl who had lost time. Beanie pushed the mop back and forth without moving his feet. He studied her, guarded fascination on his face.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “Stare at me.”

  How many people besides the ones who loved her had seen her, debilitated and out of it, all the months she’d been there? The way he looked down and started moving the mop in little ovals made her feel bad.

  “I guess I can’t blame you. It must be weird to see me talking.”

  His mouth opened as if he were going to say something, then he shut it.

  “Not weird,” he said finally. “Good. It’s good to see you talking for yourself instead of the way it was, with them all thinking they could talk for you.”