The Best American Short Stories 2015

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  One day my father did what anyone might have predicted. He hoisted his pack onto his back, waved through the gap in the trees, boarded the train that wound through the Selkirk Mountains, got off in Seattle, and was never heard from again. My mother waited years, but the body was never found. For that reason she went on for a long time believing he might come back. When I was younger, and thought love was something the world owed you, I had to hide in my room when I wanted to cry over it, this great unfairness.

  The sea captain who found my father’s notebook frozen into the side of Little Iceland came all the way to northern Idaho to hand-deliver it to my mother.

  We all thought very highly of your husband, he said. The world could use more men like him.

  My mother nodded. She said the notebook had clearly been left there intentionally. It was stuffed inside a specimen jar, stoppered, carefully sealed with wax. The pages were in perfect condition, she pointed out, the words only a little smudged here and there.

  The sea captain nodded. The balloon could have landed anywhere, he said, sunk anywhere. The water would have carried the party’s belongings miles from where they died. With time, their bodies would have been dispersed in this way as well.

  Or, my mother said, he could have deliberately thrown it overboard. A clue, she called it, as though the whole thing—my father, the balloon, the years of waiting, all of it—was no more than a puzzle waiting to be solved.

  Every love story begins with a discovery: amidst the ordinary, the sublime.

  This is how it begins.

  My mother and her sisters were crossing the road in the town of Sumpter, North Dakota, when a buggy stopped in front of her and a man leaped out. He wore a tall hat, wide red suspenders. His boots were covered in mud, his coat filthy and ragged along the hem, but he walked up to my mother as though they’d known each other all their lives.

  “Good afternoon.” He stood there, smiling at her.

  My mother had never seen a smile like his. It was a smile like a magician’s, full of hidden wonders.

  “Allow me to introduce myself,” he said, tipping his hat, and her sisters giggled into their handkerchiefs.

  My mother had never set foot outside of Sumpter. Her family was close-knit, clannish, five girls born to a Virginia preacher who’d ended up in a dusty town in the middle of nowhere because the Lord commanded him so. His wife liked to remind anyone who would listen that the Lord hadn’t commanded her to go anywhere. She would have stayed in Virginia forever, if anyone cared. She would have stayed there till the end of time.

  There wasn’t much for my mother and her sisters to do in Sumpter. They spent long afternoons sewing on the porch, watching the dusty streets turn copper-colored in the sun.

  But my mother was not quite like her sisters. She’d been taken to the town physician frequently as a child, because she did strange things to her body even God couldn’t seem to explain. She ripped the nail clean off her thumb once because, she said, she wanted to see her hand plainly. She took a pair of scissors to her braid and chopped the whole thing off, the curls that remained so short her ears showed through like little shells. She slipped out to where the prairie grasses grew high as her shoulders, pulled her dress over her head, and ran through those arid, sweet-smelling fields until her legs buckled under her; she lay there a long time, breathing hard into the hot alluvial soil, letting the bloody taste of it settle across her tongue. She didn’t know how to read, but she spent long hours bent over the Bible, moving her lips in a way that might have suggested to anyone who didn’t know her that she was praying. She had desires she didn’t have words for.

  No man will want a wild woman for a wife, her mother told her, not unkindly.

  A wild man will, my mother said, and her sisters laughed, because the way she said it made it sound true.

  At night, my mother sneaked out to sit on the porch. She needed to breathe, she told her sisters. She couldn’t for the life of her understand how anyone slept cooped up like that. She curled herself into the rocking chair, still as a cat. Counted the stars in the sky, memorized the pinprick pattern they punched into the blue. With a little concentration, she found, she could float up among them. Vanish from the porch, the still, too-close air. In the wink of an eye, escape.

  This was one of the first things she told my father when he came to call on her the next day.

  I should warn you, she said, eyeing him as she used her pinky to coax a sugar tornado up from the bottom of her glass of lemonade. I have a habit of disappearing.

  But he just tapped his chest and smiled his magician’s smile. Ask me what I do for a living.

  This is how it begins.

  My father, Thomas Hamblen, stands on the narrow strip of shoreline. Overhead, the sky burns a brilliant blue. It is late August, and a breeze ripples the surface of the lake. The air at this early evening hour is already cool, but comfortably so. Even a man unaccustomed to the cold could spend the night outdoors without complaint.

  My father eases himself down in front of the water, stretching his back against the gravelly sand. He wears a long-sleeved shirt and cotton pants. Slowly, deliberately, he removes his socks.

  He has been home for five days. He is afraid he might be losing his mind.

  Over the course of the past fifteen years, my father has traveled to the Arctic and back a total of three times. He came within an estimated sixty-odd miles of the North Pole—so close, he tells my mother, he could taste it. He went first as a boy, chosen for his speed and agility. Later, because he retained a boy’s hunger for the unknown. He goes where few other men dare. He does so willingly, eagerly. For this reason, he is respected by other explorers. Admired, even. This does not protect him from anything.

  For example, loss. He has lost so much by this point it hardly registers when he loses it all over again, his memory stretched over time to a dangerous thinness. What did he lose? A fellow expedition member. A photograph. Ammunition. Mementos—lockets, pocketknives, letters. They slid into the water when an ice floe cracked, or they fell out of his jacket, or he traded them for something necessary, something that in the moment drew the line between life and death. There are nights he lies, sleepless, beside my mother and tries to add it all up: five men, sixteen dogs, five pounds of dried meat plus ten pounds of beans, two notebooks . . . but it is a futile exercise. He gives up and goes back to counting sheep. Easier arithmetic. Or he gets out of the warm bed and goes into the kitchen, where he pours himself whiskey after whiskey, drinking until the numbers disappear.

  There are moments on his expeditions, trekking across snow so brilliant its light seems thrown from some alien sun, when my father stops abruptly, drops his head in his hands. He pretends to cough, to sneeze, to wipe at the tiny icicles forming at the corners of his eyes. He has to, to hide what his companions on these long journeys cannot see: he is in love. His face, like a schoolboy’s, would give him away.

  Now he lies back against the damp stones and watches the setting sun bleed into the blue. Clouds shuttle back and forth, pinking up around their edges until they glow like flesh in candlelight. High above the pine trees, a pair of sharp-shinned hawks turn lazy circles, scouting out mice and voles.

  My father shuts his eyes, squeezing until red stars explode against the black.

  He blinks, and the sky opens above him like an invitation.

  What did the Pole taste like?

  Like dirty metal. Like salt. Like this, he tells my mother, and she waits, eyes closed, lips parted for a kiss.

  The months between expeditions are never easy. In the absence of imminent disaster, my father finds himself listless, irritable. His appetite vanishes; his body softens like fruit. Days pass and he loses himself in their passing, the predictable sameness of one morning to the next. He loses hours to sleep, or to some strange fugue state between sleeping and waking from which he starts as though from a nightmare, finding himself in the middle of some small task he has no recollection of having begun. He walks outside to fetc
h water from the creek and wakes with an ax in his hand, his head leaning against the rough, sweet-smelling trunk of a white pine. He opens his battered copy of Origin of Species and finds himself on the shore an hour later, left hand aching, as though feeling the loss of those fingers anew. He finds a pencil and sits on a log, copying lines into his notebook until the pain ebbs from his palm. Great as are the differences between the breeds of the pigeon . . . he switches the pencil to his right hand, forcing his wrist to curve in a way still unnatural. Over the years, the muscles in those fingers have gained only a little more fluidity, but he keeps at it. Anticipate the worst, a fellow explorer once told him—this one of the men now gone, succumbed to something or other in lands unknown. The only surprise should be finding yourself alive.

  One afternoon a few weeks after he arrives home, my father goes into the kitchen and puts his arms around my mother. He is not a man given to regret, but on this afternoon, the world honeyed by the warm September light, he feels suddenly heavy with it, a sadness that sits on his chest like a stone. He tells my mother he has been a fool to leave her all these years. He says she is what he thinks of every night he is gone. That she is what saves him. When he is with her, he tells her, the cold that has a hold on his body retreats a little. Retracts its claws. He is nothing without her, he tells her. A no one. He is hardly a man at all.

  Please, he says.

  Forgive me, he says.

  For a moment, she stands perfectly still. Through the window, the pine trees are moving their feathered branches in the breeze, the cool, clean smell of them so strong she can feel the rutted surface of their bark beneath her hands, feel the sap lacing itself stickily across her palms.

  Then all at once—chattering, her voice too loud—she ducks out from under his arm. Look! she says, pushing up her sleeve. Look how strong she’s gotten! She makes him feel the sinewy muscles along her shoulder. She has been chopping wood all spring and summer. She put up ten jars of huckleberry jam and ate enough fresh berries she worried her skin might turn blue. There were bears up along the mountainside where the huckleberries grow. She counts off on her fingers: a family of four, two young ones, a mother and three cubs, a solitary giant—male, she thinks. She crept away—so, so quietly—and made it home with her store intact. She caught trout in the stream and dried and smoked it for winter. She made friends with their neighbors in the next cove and has been taking the coach with the wife, Bernice, into town for supplies every few weeks. She stitched a new quilt for their bed. She taught herself how to crochet. She embroidered three separate pillows, one for each chair. She went swimming every afternoon, for hours and hours—See how strong she is? How brown? She thrusts her arm out again. Only two bad storms, and what little damage there was she cleaned up easily. The sun after this long winter a blessing, she says. The sun its own God, she says, making heaven out of—she shakes her head, brushing something off the front of her dress. Heaven, she says. End of story, she says.

  He looks at her and sees she is desperately unhappy.

  The sun sails from one side of the lake to the other. As it mounts, the air grows heavy with heat. The birds thin out. They retreat into the woods, though the pair of hawks remains, riding air currents carelessly back and forth. When they sight something—a fish sliding under the surface of the lake, a mouse scrabbling through the tangle of huckleberries—they release a thin, high whistle. As the afternoon stretches on, the air cools, and other birds begin to reappear—loons and grebes, the tiny gray-tailed Grunter finch. My father watches the birds coast back and forth, retreating and advancing toward land. By the time the sun begins to slip toward the lake, the bats have joined in, dim shapes flicking back and forth across the water, sailing low to scoop up the bugs congregating just above the surface.

  The air is full of flying things.

  My father watches. A dull pain uncoils itself along the base of his skull. He has not eaten anything all day, and his brain, despite the pain, feels sharper for it. He slides his notebook from his pocket and starts a few simple sketches—a duck, a finch, a filigree of alder leaves against the sky—before dropping the pencil, his right hand spasming in a way that makes him want to weep. Glancing at the horizon, he catches a ribbon of ice glinting out from behind the distant mountain ridge: it is bluish, glittering, a faint iridescence like a butterfly’s wing. When he looks again, it is gone.

  The sky is an angry bruise-colored violet by the time my mother makes her way down to the lake’s edge. Clouds hang low along the horizon. My father has lain here for hours now, half-shaded by a row of tall cedars. A patch of skin across his left foot stings: sunburn, probably, though most of the feeling in both feet he lost to frostbite years ago, the skin there smooth and white as a cadaver’s.

  My mother stands over him, smiling. “Resting?”

  “Thinking,” he says, and she turns away too quickly.

  An eagle emerges from a nearby cove, gliding in before flapping its enormous wings—once, twice, spiraling down across the open expanse of lake, sending the house sparrows into a frenzy. The eagle, my father has read, is nearly seven feet across the wingspan, though to see it glide across the cove is to believe it larger still. It is a bird of such grace and power it seems to come from another world. According to the great Darwin, the eagle is the result of centuries of careful genetic winnowing. He is the outcome of a thousand intricate survival games: Does this wingspan help the eagle fly higher or longer? Does this particular curvature of the beak aid or hinder the tearing of flesh? Does the chick with the slightly larger cranial socket hunt more efficiently, or does it die when its head gets stuck in the burrow of some woodland animal it has chased into the underbrush?

  The sky is darkening in earnest now, turning indigo and velvety, dense as cream. A cloud drifts out from behind the ridge of trees to his right and my father tries to watch them simultaneously, eagle and cloud, but in the last faint wash of daylight, his eyes refuse to focus. He squints, raises himself on one elbow. Suddenly, the eagle plunges. It drops from the sky like a cannonball, so fast my father barely has time to sit up before the bird is flapping its enormous wings, skidding to an awkward suspension as it scoops one talon into the water and takes off again. Its victory scream is high and loud. Against the rising moon, the outline of a small pike wriggling in the bird’s talons is neat and black as a stamp. Up the eagle rises, up, up.

  The sky snuffs itself out like a candle.

  My father grabs the nearest bit of driftwood and drives it into the pebbles, lights the end on fire. He snatches up his notebook, turns to a fresh page, and draws the eagle coasting, then dropping, then braking against the air—then, as his makeshift lantern sputters and spits, draws the eagle lifting again, the sudden parasol of those wings.

  When my mother calls him in for dinner, she has to say his name three times before he stands. His body is stiff from hours of inertia. His foot burns. His mouth is so dry his lips have cracked, the bottom one—when he runs his tongue along it experimentally—weeping a few drops of blood.

  But: his mind. His mind vibrates like a plucked string.

  My mother sits across the table from him, smoothing the napkin across her knees. She pretends not to notice how quickly he eats, moving his fork mechanically back and forth until his plate is clean. When dinner is done, he gets up immediately and goes to the little desk by the window and sits down. Opens his notebook to a new page.

  Supplies needed for the construction of a balloon, he writes.

  When my mother goes to bed, she leaves the candles burning. My father does not raise his head as she steps past him, putting her feet down deliberately, rattling the door in its casing. In bed, she tosses and turns; it is after one by the time she finally blows the candles out. She lies there in the dark, listening to the scratch of the pen against paper. She counts the minutes as they pass.

  When she wakes, she is still alone. Light leaks in around the half-closed door; she gets up and crosses the room, pulling a sweater on over her nightgown to fend off
the early morning chill.

  My father sits at the desk, scribbling furiously. He does not turn, and my mother stands there only briefly before slipping out the back door. Here, in her own home on the edge of a lake so wide she can’t see to the other side, she no longer has to sit outside in order to breathe. On the nights she finds herself unable to sleep, she simply leaves. Walks along the trail until she comes to the main road, then up the hill to where it crests against the sky. When she reaches the top of the hill, she turns around and looks back at the cabin, the glint of moonlight off its windows giving it away, like a telltale heart.

  She would like to know how it feels, is all.

  The next few months are a slow grind of activity. Each day my father cycles through exhilaration, exhaustion, frustration. Each day he arrives at the conclusion that he has embarked upon the most significant journey of his life, one that will write his name beside Darwin’s in the history books. Each day he decides he has finally gone mad. He sits on the stony beach with a stack of notepaper, writing letter after letter. He is gathering what he will need to coax his expedition into the realm of possibility: information, interest, hazy promises of involvement, financial and otherwise. Without the necessary funds, the idea will never leave the page. He writes everyone from every expedition he has been a part of since he became a member of this strange club, the club of explorers. He writes John Manley, who once shot and killed the largest polar bear any member of their party had ever seen. Nanook, he called it, after the native people’s word for the bear. He said he had been waiting his whole life to kill a bear that big.