Hannah Pittard - The Fates Will Find Their Way

H ANNAH P ITTARD s fiction has appeared in McSweeneys , the Oxford American , the Mississippi Review , BOMB , Nimrod , and StoryQuarterly , and was included in 2008 Best American Short Stories 100 Distinguished Stories . She is the recipient of the 2006 Amanda Davis Highwire Fiction Award and a graduate of the University of Virginias MFA program. She divides her time between Charlottesville and Chicago, where she currently teaches fiction at DePaul University.

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T hanks to everyone at Sterling Lord, especially Jim Rutman and Addie Wainwright. Thanks also to everyone at Ecco (Dan Halpern, Abigail Holstein, Allison Saltzman, etc.) but most especially to Lee Boudreaux, the worlds gentlest and most acute editor.

I owe my family everything, but there are some specifics: I have to thank my mother, Stacy Stinchfield, who gave me her farm for the summer (and, yes, a little longer) in order to write more freely. If I hadnt had Lone Duck, I probably wouldnt have The Fates . I also have to thank my siblings, Noah and Greta, for their loyalty and support. Thanks also to the rest of my familyJack Pittard, Lee Stinchfield, Brooke Galardi, Olivia and Georgia Pittardfor existing in the first place. This world would be unmanageable without you.

There are others to thank: Ann Beattie, for one. I could make a career of thanking Ann Beattiefor creating opportunities, for providing me encouragement, but mostly for not being afraid to expect more, to demand better. I also have to thank the University of Virginia and its other amazing faculty: Deborah Eisenberg, Chris Tilghman, John Casey. These people are such careful and caring teachers, and I am ever grateful for their attention and advice.

There are still others: Mundo Otal for lending me his perfect name, Emma Rathbone, Tom Bouman, Eve-Lyn Hinckley, Hugh Merwin, Zoe Pagnamenta, Benjamin Warner, Jim Shepard, Peter Fallon, everyone at McSweeneys , everyone at The Downtown Grille in Charlottesville, especially Robert Sawrey.

And Andrew, I of course have to thank Andrew Ewell, for sitting across from me while I wrote it all down, for distracting me when I needed to beFrisbee, Pimms Cups, Scrabbleand even when I didnt need to beFrisbee, Pimms Cups, Scrabble.

And, finally, to end where it begins, a quietif difficultthanks to Malcolm Hugh Ringel, a.k.a. Pops, who wasand isresponsible for so much of who and how I am. My family only might recognize the similarities between the fictional obituary for Herbert Lindell and the very real obituary we wrote in 2006 for Malcolm Ringel. Still, it merits explanation: it would have been easy enough to create a wholly original obituary, but there was the strong desire to pay tribute, to keep the obituary somehow permanent, not ephemeral, and therefore preserve the memory, the man. And so, though there is no connection between the real Malcolm Ringel and the fictitious Herbert Lindellexcept, perhaps, that they are both loved fiercely by their daughtersI could not help but indulge in the obituarys inclusion. And so, to my family, I say thank you for understanding. And to Malcolm, I say again (and again and again and again) you are missed, ever, ever missed.

S ome things were certain; they were undeniable, inarguable. Nora Lindell was gone, for one thing. There was no doubt about that. For another, it was Halloween when she went missing, which only served to compound the eeriness, the mysteriousness of her disappearance. Of course, it wasnt until the first day of November that most of us found out she was gone, because it wasnt until the day after Halloween that her father realized she hadnt come home the night before and so started calling our parents.

From what we could tell, and from how the phone tree was ordered that year, Jack Boyds parents got the first phone call. Mrs. Boyd, as prescribed by the tree, called Mrs. Epstein, who called Mrs. Zblowski, who called Mrs. Jeffreys. By the time the tree had been completed, many mothers had already gotten word of Noras disappearance either from usrunning from house to houseor from Mr. Lindell himself, whod broken phone-tree etiquette and continued making calls even after getting off the phone with Mrs. Boyd. It was a breach in etiquette that our mothers forgave, obviously, but one that they agreed tacitly, behind the back of Mr. Lindell, added unnecessarily to the general confusion of the day.

The phone tree produced no new information. But it did, accidentally, serve to remind our mothers that the time change had come late that year and that all the clocks should be set back an hour. How wed forgotten, none of us knew. But somewhere in the branches and twigs of the phone tree, a mother remembered that in addition to having lost Nora, wed gained an hour. All our mothers could do was promise Mr. Lindell to ask us about his daughter when we returned home that night, an hour later than they expected.

With our curfew the same but with the day that much longer, while our mothers waited at home for our return, while the leaves changed and fell seemingly in a single afternoon, turned from green to orange to pewter to nothing, we stayed outdoors and away from our parents. We stayed away from the girls as best we couldall but Sarah Jeffreys who, for various reasons, was nearly impossible to want to stay away fromas though allegiance to our own sex would somehow solve the mystery, once wed learned of it, all the faster. We interrogated each other for information, eager to be the one to discover the truth. As it turned out, wed all seen Nora the day before, but seen her in different places doing different thingswed seen her at the swing sets, at the riverbank, in the shopping mall. Wed seen her making phone calls in the telephone booth outside the liquor store, inside the train station, behind the dollar store. Wed seen her in her field hockey sweats, in her jean jacket, in her uniform. We saw her smoking a cigarette, sucking a lollipop, eating a hot dog. Surely shed gone to the midnight thriller trilogy with us all (we called it the midnight show, though it was over by ten, just in time for curfew), and yet when we questioned each otherasked who had gotten to sit next to her, to share popcorn with her, to scare her when she was least expecting itnone of us could take credit.

Trey Stephens, the only public schooler among us, was the last to find out since his parents werent on the tree. He lived in the neighborhood and wed known him forever. His was the largest basement, with neon beer signs and stolen street signs, a giant fish tank and two dartboards, a full-size pool table and a drum kit. And it was there that we congregated the evening after Halloween as the sun began to fall, determined to wait out the extended curfew, to tell him and each other the story of Nora Lindell gone missing.

Trey, feeling excluded and irritated at being the last to find out, confessed to having had sex with Nora the month before. He wondered aloud about whether this might have had something to do with her disappearance. We doubted it strongly, as well as the fact that hed had sex with her at all, and we said so, but he told us about her uniform and the way she lifted her skirt but didnt take it off. He told us about her knee socks and how one stayed up while the other got pushed down. He told us about the skin on her legs, which was white and pink and stubbly. There were crumbs on her knees, he said. Crumbs from the carpet in his basement.