And what about the girl? Would you think about her? If you did, would you look at everything she already lost — her mother, her boyfriend, a whole huge stretch of her life, her privacy, the right to make up her own mind, the right to abort the baby or keep the baby or adopt the baby out – and would you think, That girl would get to do whatever she wants now? Whatever feels right to her at this point?” — From “The Opposite of Fate”
Mallie Williams wakes from a coma after a year and a half, muttering about “dark birds.” She remembers nothing about how she was attacked in the dark on a rainy night. She doesn’t know she was impregnated by her attacker and that there was a huge public fight over whether she should have the baby.
All of that happened off-stage in Alison McGhee’s heartfelt new novel “The Opposite of Fate” (Mariner; $26, $14.99), in which Mallie fights to figure out who she is after being in a coma for so long. Her staunchest ally is William T., the neighbor who has been her father figure since she was a little girl. He was ferocious in his unwavering devotion as her mother, Lucia, and her fundamentalist church members won the court case allowing the C-section that brought the unconscious Mallie’s son into the world.
William T. and his partner, Crystal, were sure Mallie would have wanted an abortion, so was her boyfriend, Zach, and her brother, Charlie. The men couldn’t stand the months of drama and left their home in upstate New York. As the story begins, Zach has moved to Montana and Charlie is at an East Coast boarding school. The baby was awarded to Lucia, and after her death he was sent to foster care.
“The Opposite of Fate” is told in alternating chapters by Mallie, who’s waking to a whole new world, and William T., nearly obsessive in his need to help this young woman who is like a daughter to him. When she was in the hospital he was so protective he was banned from her room: “They had paraded her across the news as if she were a freak at the freak show.”
William T. thinks he knows where the baby’s foster parents live, and although he’s banned from going near them, he can’t help driving by their home every day.
Charlie admonishes this tortured man: “Maybe you think you’re helping Mallie by spending every minute of every day worrying about her, but you’re not. All this worry and panic and darkness, it’s like a disease. It does her no good.”
Mallie needs to heal but she isn’t sure how. She knows trauma can stay in the body because of her work as a massage therapist:
“When she had worked with women at the shelter, she sometimes closed her eyes. It was easier to channel energy through her hands that way, easier to find the knots, the crunch places, as her teacher used to call them. When her fingers found those places, a story came with them. Vigilance, fear, trauma, all held in the silent body of the woman on the massage table.”
To fend off what Mallie calls “dark birds,” she imagines her rapist as a meth-head roofer she names Darkness: “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.”
As Mallie drives cross-country to Montana to be with Zach, she encounters boxes soliciting funds with her picture on them and people recognize her. She realizes how much of her privacy was invaded while she had no say over her life. As she drives she tries to understand what she wants in relation to her baby. Does she want to see him? Be in his life?
In an interview sent by McGhee’s publisher, she said the novel was inspired by a nightmare in which she would fall into a coma-like state for years and woke into a world in which her children were grown, her partner remarried, parents dead and siblings older than in her lifetime.
McGhee acknowledges one of the challenges in writing this book was that: “As a writer and as a woman, it was excruciating to have a girl I love be unconscious for a long time, unable to make her own decision. The sense of panic inside me as I wrote these scenes was visceral. My worst nightmare is to have agency ripped away from me, and Mallie is living that nightmare. The only way to deal with the massive constraint of an initially unconscious main character is to work around it, primarily by having William T. fill in the gaps for the reader. Once Mallie is back in the world, her memories, body knowledge, and (crucially) her imagination gradually fill in the rest.”
That explanation answers some readers posting on social media who complain that the most interesting parts of this story happened before it begins. But this is not a thriller or a mystery. McGhee is interested in these characters regaining themselves, not the violence but the consequences. And she does it with her usual graceful writing and empathy for her characters that makes the reader ache for all of them.
McGhee, who divides her time between Minnesota, Vermont and California, is the author of the bestseller “Shadow Baby” and six other novels, as well as “Someday,” her award-winning picture book for adults.
