The Best American Short Stories 2020

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  So they had to do it.

  Yes, they all said at once.

  That firm swipe of rectitude that passed through her when they all confirmed themselves like this—​it was how she knew they were doing something good.

  So, hand over hand, using her long muscles, she began to climb. From halfway up, she looked out over the swirling playground.

  She could tell the difference—​who was real and who wasn’t.

  Above her, the piton glinted.

  EMMA CLINE

  The Nanny

  FROM The Paris Review

  “There isn’t much in the house,” Mary said. “I’m sorry.”

  Kayla looked around, shrugged. “I’m not even that hungry.”

  Mary set the table, bright Fiestaware on placemats alongside fringed cloth napkins. They ate microwave pizzas.

  “Gotta have something a little fresh,” Mary’s boyfriend, Dennis, said cheerily, heaping spinach leaves from a plastic bin onto his pizza. He seemed pleased by his ingenuity. Kayla ate the spinach, took a few bites of crust. Mary poured her more water.

  When Kayla asked for a beer, she saw Mary and Dennis glance at each other.

  “Sure, sweetie,” Mary said. “Dennis, do we have any beer? Maybe check the garage refrigerator?”

  Kayla drank two over dinner, then a third out on the porch, her legs tucked up into the oversize hoodie she had taken from Mary’s son’s room. The wildness of the backyard made everything beyond it look fake: the city skyline, the stars. Reception was awful this high in the canyon. She could try to walk closer to the road again, out by the neighbor’s fence, but Mary would notice and say something. Kayla could feel Dennis and Mary watching her from inside the kitchen, tracking the glow of her screen. What would they do, take her phone away? She searched Rafe’s name, searched her own. The numbers had grown. Such nightmarish math, the frenzied tripling of results, and how strange to see her name like this, stuffing page after page, appearing in the midst of even foreign languages, hovering above photos of Rafe’s familiar face.

  * * *

  Before Tuesday there had been hardly any record of Kayla: an old fund-raising page from Students for a Free Tibet; a blog run by a second cousin with photos from a long-ago family reunion, teenage Kayla, mouth full of braces, holding a paper plate bent with barbecue. Her mother had called the cousin and asked her to take the photo down, but by then it had passed into the amber of the Internet.

  Were there any new ones? She looked through the image results again, in case. They had dug up photos of Kayla lagging behind Rafe and Jessica, holding Henry’s hand. Rafe in his button-down and jeans, surrounded by women and children. Kayla had no photos of her and Rafe together. That was strange, wasn’t it? She came across a new photo—​she looked only okay. A certain pair of jeans she loved was not, she saw, as flattering as she’d imagined it to be. She saved the photo to her phone so she could zoom in on it later.

  Kayla made herself close the search results, then let her text messages refresh. A split-second reprieve where she could believe that perhaps the forces in the universe were aligning and aiming something from Rafe in her direction. She knew before they finished loading that there would be nothing.

  “You need anything, sweetie?”

  Mary stood in the porch doorway, just a black shadow.

  “I’d turn the light on for you,” Mary said, “but there’s no bulb out here, actually.”

  Mary had been her mother’s college roommate, now a drug and alcohol counselor. Kayla’s mother had wanted her to fly home—​I’ll buy the ticket, she said, please—​but then the photographers had descended on her ranch house in Colorado Springs. Waiting for Kayla. So her mother called Mary, the witness at her small courthouse wedding, though the wedding had been followed quickly by divorce. It was easy to imagine what Mary thought of Kayla. A waste, she probably believed, Kayla just twenty-four years old and now this. Probably, Mary thought, this was just the result of an absent father, an overworked mother.

  But how could Kayla explain? This felt correct, the correct scale of things. Kayla had always expected something like this to happen to her.

  “I’m fine.” Kayla made her voice excessively polite.

  “We’re about to start watching this documentary,” Mary said. “About a girl who was the first female falconer in Mongolia.” She paused. When Kayla didn’t respond, she kept on. “It’s supposed to be very good.”

  Mary, with her loose linen shirts, her silver oxfords, was the kind of older woman that younger girls were always saying they wanted to be like. Mary, with her great house up in the canyons, all the seventies wood left untouched. She probably let her teenage son call her by her first name. Kayla understood that Mary was a nice person without really believing it; Mary irritated her.

  “Actually,” Kayla said, “I’m pretty tired. I’m just gonna go to bed.”

  Did Mary want to say something else? Almost certainly.

  “Thanks again for letting me stay,” Kayla said. “I’m gonna try to sleep.”

  “Of course,” Mary said, and hesitated, probably gathering herself to dispense some sober wisdom, some ex-junkie psalm. Before she could speak, Kayla smiled at her, a professional smile. Mary seemed taken aback, and Kayla took the opportunity to pick up her beer, her phone, to walk past Mary and make her way to the bedroom. Mary’s son had wrapped his door in caution tape, pinned up a DANGER: KEEP OUT sign, a sticker of a nuclear symbol. Yeah, yeah, we get it, Kayla thought, you’re a toxic little shit.

  * * *

  Mary’s son was with his dad for the school break, and Mary had obviously tried to make the room nice: she left Kayla a stack of fresh towels, a little wrapped hotel soap, The Best American Essays 1993 on the nightstand. Still, it smelled like a teenager, fumes of Old Spice and cheap jerk-off lotion, unwashed sports equipment lingering in the closet. Kayla lay on the neatly made bed. The surfing posters on every wall showed men, pink-nippled and tan, on boards in the middle of huge, almost translucent waves. The posters were like porn about the color blue.

  Still nothing from Rafe. What to do but continue to exist? A sense of unreality thrummed under each second, a panic not altogether unpleasant. She found herself testing out the wording, imagining how she would characterize the feeling to Rafe if he called. She felt proud of the phrase It’s like I’ve been plucked out of my own life. She said it silently to herself and her heart pounded faster. Dramatic. As long as she was sleeping, she felt fine, as long as there was the option to blot things out—​she still had a few of Rafe’s sleeping pills, prescribed to him under a different name. She pulled a Ziploc from her backpack and shook out a Sonata, nibbling off a bitter shard. Best to parcel them out, save some for later. She pressed a wet finger to the bag to pick up any residue, then gave up, swallowing the second half of the pill with the last sip of her beer.

  There was nothing interesting to look at in Mary’s son’s drawers: boxers folded tightly, T-shirts from various summer camps, their specialties increasingly psychotic—​rock star camp, fashion design camp. A cigar box of coins and a pair of cufflinks made from typewriter keys, a yearbook in which only girls had written. She flipped through it: the kid appeared to go to the kind of school where everyone learned to knit in lieu of taking prescription amphetamines. A well-meaning missive from a teacher took up a whole page in the back. Maybe the boy had never even read it. Kayla did, though, sitting on the edge of the twin bed—​it was moving, strangely, though maybe that was just the Sonata kicking in, the way her thoughts took on a slurred quality, the shutter speed starting to slow. “Max: I’m so proud of you and all you have accomplished this year. Can’t wait to see what you’ll do in this world! You are a very special person—​never forget it!”

  She could hear, from the living room, the sounds of the documentary, the swell of Mongolian music gaining in urgency. She would bet anything that Mary was tearing up right now, overcome by the sight of a soaring falcon or a close-up of an old man’s hands, wind whipping acro
ss a Mongolian plain. Kayla had known a girl in college who’d been adopted from Mongolia. Her name was Dee Dee and all Kayla remembered was that she had a tendency to shower with the curtain open, that she picked at her face at the sink, leaving behind tiny shrapnel of pus on the mirror. Where was Dee Dee now?

  Kayla was getting tired. She knew she should get up and turn off the light, take her contacts out, take off her bra. She didn’t move.

  Did Dee Dee remember her? Had she heard the news?

  You are a very special person, Kayla thought to herself. A very. Special. Person.

  * * *

  Dennis had been the one to pick her up. Kayla didn’t have her own car, had used one of Rafe and Jessica’s. It had been one of the appealing things about the job, the car, though now it seemed very stupid, another way her life was tethered to those people. Kayla watched Dennis approach in the Volvo—​he would have had to inch through the photographers at the main entrance. He stopped at the gate and waited to be buzzed in. He was wearing a visor whose brim was gnawed with age, a fleece vest embroidered with the logo of a vitamin company. He looked like a sad and tired animal, pulling through the security gates, and Kayla felt, briefly, that she had done something terrible. To summon someone like Dennis to a place like this. For reasons like this. But it wasn’t really true, was it, that she was terrible? Life is long, she told herself, opening the car door. People always said things like that, Life is long.

  “Is this all your stuff?” Dennis said.

  Just two suitcases, her backpack. She had taken all of it, even the earrings Jessica had given her, the dress with the tags still on. The contents of the endless gift bags, perfume and makeup, so many lotions, a microcurrent wand, items Kayla would search out online, finding the exact retail prices, adding up the numbers until she got a little drunk. Kayla didn’t feel guilty, not yet. Would she ever? The security cameras were recording her getting into Dennis’s car. Would Jessica watch this footage? Would Rafe? She tried to keep a mild smile on her face, in case.

  * * *

  The first time she met Jessica was at the interview, after the agency had already approved her. Jessica came in late, sitting down at the table. She was distracted: her necklace had caught on her sweater.

  “Can you just—” Jessica gestured, and Kayla took over, gentling the latch, trying not to tug so the sweater wouldn’t stretch. She was bent close to Jessica’s face: her skin lightly tanned, her hair almost the same color, all her features so tiny and symmetrical that Kayla could hardly look away, absorbed in the seamlessness of Jessica’s beauty. Kayla felt a curious elation, a giddy feeling—​how much time she had wasted trying to be beautiful, when it was obvious, now, how impossible that was. The knowledge was almost a relief.

  “There.” Kayla dropped the necklace back in place, smoothing the sweater. It was cashmere, the color of root beer.

  Jessica touched the chain absently, smiled at her. “You’re sweet.”

  * * *

  The latest news was that Rafe’s text messages were connected to the kid’s iPad, that’s how Jessica had found out, and it was amazing to imagine where this information came from, how these facts made their way to light. Because that part was true, anyway, she had gotten careless about texting Rafe, toward the end, and even if he rarely texted her back, Jessica would have seen right away what was happening.

  Henry’s favorite game on the iPad had been set in some virtual diner where you made hot dogs and hamburgers, a clock ticking down to zero. Kayla tried playing it once and sweated through her shirt, it made her so agitated. The burgers kept burning, the soda machine kept breaking. Customers fumed and departed.

  Henry took the iPad from her with exaggerated patience.

  “It’s easy,” he said. “Just don’t pick up the coins right away. Then you have more time.”

  “But,” she asked, “isn’t the point to get a lot of money?”

  “Then it goes too fast,” Henry said. He seemed to feel sorry for her. “It’s tricking you.”

  * * *

  For Henry’s eighth birthday, Kayla got him a machine that carbonated water and a book she had loved as a child. She read it aloud while Henry stared at the ceiling. He seemed to like the book, though the ending surprised her; she had not remembered that the old man died so violently, that the orphan grew up and was not very happy. In the afternoons, when the housekeeper was gone and Henry was at school, the air seemed to go slack. In the empty house, sometimes she felt as though she were a ghost floating through the world of the living. It was strange to walk through the rooms, open the closets, touch the hanging dresses, Rafe’s pants, sweaters folded with tissue paper.

  The thing was, she was a smart girl. She’d studied art history. Her first class, when Professor Hunnison turned out the lights and they all sat in the dark—​they were eighteen, most of them, still children, still kids who had slept at home all their lives. Then the whir of the projector, and on the screen appeared hovering portals of light and color, squares of beauty. It was like a kind of magic, she had thought back then, when thoughts like that didn’t feel embarrassing.

  How mysterious it seemed sometimes—​that she had once been interested or capable enough to finish papers. Giotto and his re-imaginings of De Voragine’s text in his frescoes. Rodin’s challenge to classical notions of fixed iconographic goals, Michelangelo’s bodies as vessels for God’s will. It was as if she’d once been fluent in another language, now forgotten.

  Before he ate lunch, Henry got fish oil gummies in the shape of stars. Kayla liked them too—​one for him, two for her. They were covered in sugar, but you were supposed to ignore that, focus instead on the fishy fat plumping your brain and making it pinker and brighter. A nice thought. For lunch Kayla made grilled cheese sandwiches on brown bread and cut apple slices. They ate outside, off paper towels. After eating, they lay in the sun in silence, Henry still in his swim trunks, Kayla in her carefully sexless one-piece.

  Rafe had once pulled the crotch of that one-piece to the side to stick a blunt finger inside her. Was that the second or the third time? Kayla imagined being the kind of person who recorded details like that in a journal. She had lots of them: Rafe liked to nap with one arm flung over his head. Rafe had scars on his back from teenage acne but told her they were from a rock climbing accident. Strange how these were facts that would mean something to other people too, strangers who didn’t even know him. If you searched him, everything was there—​his allergies, his approximate height, photos of him as a young man. She pretended to have never seen any of it. That was between them always, the pretended unknowing.

  It must have been the third time, the time with the swimsuit. The sheets in the pool house bed smelled like sunscreen. Rafe had his hand on her under the sheet, his eyes closed. Kayla looked at his bland, handsome face—​it was always strange to touch it, like touching the memory of someone.

  “How’d you start acting?” she asked. Her voice was druggy and low, neither of them fully awake.

  “I was actually pretty young,” Rafe said. There had been a visiting actor from Arts in Schools who came to perform for his class, he told her.

  “You have to remember,” he said, “this was Iowa, in January.” It was before she had read all the articles—​and Rafe told the story so haltingly, she’d assumed it was some kind of secret, something precious mined up from his psychic depths.

  Apparently the visiting actor had opened all the windows of the classroom, maybe to call forth some appropriate level of drama, the freezing air gusting around while he paced in front of the desks, reciting Hamlet.

  “It blew my mind,” Rafe said. “Truly.”

  “Cute,” she said, imagining Rafe as a child, moved by adult things.

  He’d had a piece of food in his teeth at dinner once—​the sight had given her an almost erotic discomfort until Jessica finally reached over and flicked it away. This was what she couldn’t explain; Kayla hated him and loved him at the same time, and part of it was maybe that he
was stupid.

  Later she read the story about Hamlet almost word for word in many different interviews.

  * * *

  Rafe was away for almost a month, filming eight time zones away, but as soon as Henry was on winter break, he and Jessica flew to meet him, Kayla coming too, her pay doubled. She had her own hotel room close to the set. Outside the window, beyond the hotel’s white walls, gasoline trucks made the rounds of the dirt streets.

  After they’d arrived, Rafe had barely looked at her. But, she told herself, it made sense. Jessica was always around, or some PA with a walkie-talkie appearing to “invite” Rafe to set. People only ever “invited” Rafe to do the things he was supposed to do. At a dinner for the cast, he’d pinched her nipples, hard, in the back hallway of the restaurant, his breath fumy with the local beer, flavored with kola nuts and wormwood. She laughed at the time, though waiters seemed to have noticed, along with at least one of the producers, judging by his smirk. They were actually alone only once. Jessica had sent Kayla up to their room to grab sunscreen for Henry. She opened their door, using Jessica’s key card, and there was Rafe, watching a boxing match on television, the curtains drawn.

  “Hi, you,” she’d said, going to kiss him, and he fumbled, kissing her back with tight lips. Was he blushing? It was strange. Still, they had sex, quickly, her dress pushed up, the bedcovers only slightly disturbed. She went to the bathroom to wipe herself, careful to flush the toilet paper. She was still being careful then. There was the sunscreen on the counter. When she returned to the bedroom, sunscreen in hand, Rafe was absorbed by the television, his face blank, the bedcovers smooth, as if nothing had happened at all.