The Opposite of Fate (ARC) by Alison McGhee

Author:Alison McGhee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2019-10-30T16:00:23+00:00

William T.

The little phone buzzed deep in his pocket and he dropped the armful of birch he was holding. The chunks scattered, one narrowly missing his foot.

“Mallie?”

A man on the other end cleared his throat and said, “It’s Zach.”

Dust motes danced and twirled in the golden air of the last rays of the sun, slanting through the door of the storage barn. A large spider skittered away from the orderly row of wood he had stacked in the last hour. The boy’s voice sounded lower than it should. He’s not a boy, William T. reminded himself. It had been more than a year since he had last seen Zach Miller. All this flew through his mind in an instant, as a dark arrow of fear rose inside him. Why was Zach calling? Beyond the faint static of the connection he heard a bark, a loud woof that ended in an upward yip.

“That dog has a bark like Sir’s,” he said.

A pause, and then: “It is Sir.”

“It can’t be. Sir disappeared from Trish’s.”

“I took him. Which is something I should have told you a long time ago.”

“You couldn’t have taken him, Zach. You were in Montana when he disappeared from Trish’s.”

William T. sounded teacherlike to himself, as if he were explaining a geography problem to a not-bright student. Here’s Montana, see, and here’s Sterns, and there’s a very long distance between the two places. But Zach was talking again.

“I took him when I went back,” he said. “When Mallie had the, that . . . operation.”

Zach must be talking about the C-section. William T. saw the day clearly in his head: A cool day in June. The hospital employee parking lot with him and Crystal, Beanie watching from the back door. No Zach. Unless he had hidden himself away. Stay calm, he told himself. Be Switzerland.

“You were there? Why?”

“Because. Someone needed to be there. Someone who knew her, who knew who she was.” The boy’s voice turned hard on itself at the end of the sentence, angry, but he kept going. “I was in the woods behind the hospital.”

“Just standing there?”

“Yes. Until I knew it was over.”

“But Crystal and I were there.”

“I know.” Zach’s voice was quiet, laced with apology. So Zach Miller had been there at the same time, he had seen William T. and Crystal, but he had not come forward. Switzerland, he told himself. Zach was talking again, as if he could hear William T.’s thoughts.

“And when I knew it was done, I drove up to Trish’s and I waited until it was late and all the lights were out and then I went through their back door into the dog yard and I took Sir.”

“What do you mean you went through their back door? How?”

“Broke in. Kind of, anyway. Trish keeps the key under the welcome mat.”

William T. felt the ghost of a smile flit across his face. The whole valley knew that Trish kept a key under the welcome mat. His free hand began to peel the parchment bark off a piece of white birch.

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