The Best American Short Stories 2013

by Elizabeth Strout

  Fifteen minutes later, standing inside one of the chapels, Susan felt herself soften from all the procreative excess on display. Elijah had been right: carved babies took up every available space. Surrounding them on all sides—in the front, at the altar; in the back, near the choir loft, where the carved cherubs played various musical instruments; and on both walls—were plump winged infants in various postures of angelic gladness. She’d never seen so many sculpted babies in one place: cherubs not doing much of anything except engaging in a kind of abstract giggling frolic, freed from both gravity and the earth, the great play of Being inviting worship. What bliss! God was in the babies. But you had to look up, or you wouldn’t see them. The angelic orders were always above you. At the front, the small cross on the altar rested at eye level, apparently trivial, unimportant, outnumbered, in this nursery of angels. For once, the famous agony had been trumped by babies, who didn’t care about the Crucifixion or hadn’t figured it out.

  “They loved their children,” Susan whispered to Elijah. “They worshiped infants.”

  “Yeah,” Elijah said. She glanced up at him. On his face rested an expression of great calm, as if he were in a kingdom of sorts where he knew the location of everything. He was a pediatrician, after all. “Little kids were little ambassadors from God in those days. Look at that one.” He pointed. “Kind of a lascivious smile. Kind of knowing.”

  She wiped a smudge off his cheek with her finger. “Are you hungry? Do you want lunch yet?”

  He dug into his pocket and pulled out a nickel, holding it out as if he were about to drop it into her hand. Then he took it back. “We just got here. It’s not lunchtime. We got out of bed less than two hours ago. I love you,” he said matter-of-factly, apropos of nothing. “Did I already tell you this morning? I love you like crazy.” His voice rose with an odd conviction. The other tourists in the chapel glanced at them. Was their love that obvious? Outside, the previous day, sitting near a fountain, Susan had seen a young man and a young woman, lovers, steadfastly facing each other and stroking each other’s thighs, both of them crazed with desire and, somehow, calm about it.

  “Yes,” she said, and a cool wind passed through her at that moment, right in through her abdomen and then out the back near her spine. “Yes, you do, and thanks for bringing me here, honey, and I agree that we should go to the Kafka Museum too, but you know what? We need to see if we can get tickets to The Marriage of Figaro tonight, and anyway I want to walk around for a while before we go back to that hotel.”

  He looked down at her. “That’s interesting. You didn’t say you loved me now.” His smile faded. “I said I love you, and you mentioned opera tickets. I hope I’m not being petty, but my love went out to you and was not returned. How come? Did I do something wrong?”

  “It was an oversight. No, wait a minute. You’re wrong. I did say that. I did say I love you. I say it a lot. You just didn’t hear me say it this time.”

  “No, I don’t think that’s right,” he said, shaking his head like a sad horse, back and forth. “You didn’t say it.”

  “Well, I love you now,” she said, as a group of German tourists waddled in through the entranceway. “I love you this very minute.” She waited. “This is a poor excuse for a quarrel. Let’s talk about something else.”

  “There,” he said, pointing to a baby angel. “How about that one? That one will be ours. The doctor says so.” The angel he had pointed to had wings, as they all did, but this one’s arms were outstretched as if in welcome, and the wings were extended as if the angel were about to take flight.

  After leaving the chapel, walking down a side street to the old city, they encountered a madwoman with gray snarled hair and only two visible teeth who was carrying a shopping bag full of scrap cloth. She had caught up to them on the sidewalk, emerging from an alleyway, and she began speaking to them in rapid vehement Czech, poking them both on their shoulders to make her unintelligible points. Everything about her was untranslatable, but given the way she was glaring at them, she seemed to be engaged in prophecy of some kind, and Susan intuited that the old woman was telling them both what their future life together would be like. “You will eventually go back to your bad hotel, you two,” she imagined the old woman saying in Czech, “and you will have your wish, and with that good-hearted husband of yours, you will conceive a child, your firstborn, a son, and you will realize that you’re pregnant because when you fall asleep on the night of your son’s conception, you will dream of a giant raspberry. How do I know all this? Look at me! It’s my business to know. I’m out of my mind.” Elijah gently nudged the woman away from Susan, taking his wife’s hand and crossing the street. When Susan broke free of her husband’s grip and looked back, she saw the crone shouting. “You’re going to be so terribly jealous of your husband because of the woman in him!” the old woman screamed in Czech, or so Susan imagined, but somehow that made no sense, and she was still trying to puzzle it out when she turned around and was gently knocked over by a tram that had slowed for the Malostranské stop.

  The following commotion—people surrounding her, Elijah asking her nonsensical diagnostic questions—was all a bit of a blur, but only because everyone except for her husband was speaking Czech or heavily accented English, and before she knew it, she was standing up. She looked at the small crowd assembled around her, tourists and citizens, and in an effort to display good health she saluted them. Only after she had done it, and people were staring, did she think that gestures like that might be inappropriate.

  “Good God,” Elijah said. “Why’d you do that?”

  “I felt like it,” she told him.

  “Are you okay? Where does it hurt?” he asked, touching her professionally. “Here? Or here?”

  “It doesn’t hurt anywhere,” she said. “I just got jostled. I lost my balance. Can’t we go have lunch?” The tram driver was speaking to her in Czech, but she was ignoring him. She glanced down at her jeans. “See? I’m not even scuffed up.”

  “You almost fell under the wheels,” he half groaned.

  “Really, Elijah. Please. I’m fine. I’ve never been finer. Can’t we go now?” Strangers were still muttering to her, and someone was translating. When they calmed down and went back to their business after a few minutes, she felt a great sense of relief. She didn’t want anyone to think of her as a victim. She was no one’s and nothing’s victim ever. Or: maybe she was in shock.

  “So here we are,” Elijah said. “We’ve already been to a chapel, seen a baby, talked to a crazy person, had an accident, and it’s only eleven.”

  “Well, all right, let’s have coffee, if we can’t have lunch.”

  He held her arm as they crossed the street and made their way to a sidewalk café with a green awning and a signboard that seemed to indicate that the café’s name had something to do with a sheep. The sun was still shining madly in its touristy way. Ashtrays (theirs was cracked) were placed on all the tables, and a man with a thin wiry white beard and a beret was smoking cigarette after cigarette nearby. He gazed at Susan and Elijah with intense indifference. Susan wanted to say: Yes, all right, we’re stupid American tourists, like the rest of them, but I was just hit by a tram! The waiter came out and took their order: two espressos.

  “You didn’t see that thing coming?” Elijah asked, sitting up and looking around. “My God. It missed me by inches.”

  “I wasn’t hit,” she said. “I’ve explained this to you. I was nudged. I was nudged and lost my balance and fell over. The tram was going about two miles an hour. It happens.”

  “No,” he said. “It doesn’t happen. When has it ever happened?”

  “Elijah, it just did. I wasn’t thinking. That woman, the one we saw, that woman who was shouting at us . . .”

  “She was just a crazy old lady. That’s all she was. There are crazy old people everywhere. Even here in Europe. Especially here. They go crazy, history encourages it, and they start shouting, but no one listens.”

  “No. No. She was sh
outing at me. She had singled me out. That’s why I wasn’t looking or paying attention. And what’s really weird is that I could understand her. I mean, she was speaking in Czech or whatever, but I could understand her.”

  “Susan,” he said. The waiter came with their espressos, daintily placing them on either side of the cracked ashtray. “Please. That’s delusional. Don’t get me wrong—that’s not a criticism. I still love you. You’re still beautiful. Man, are you beautiful. It just kills me, how beautiful you are. I can hardly look at you.”

  “I know.” She leaned back. “But listen. Okay, sure, I know it’s delusional, I get that, but she said I was going to be jealous of you. That part I didn’t get.” She thought it was better not to mention that they would have a son.

  “Jealous? Jealous of me? For what?”

  “She didn’t . . . say.”

  “Well, then.”

  “She said I’d get pregnant.”

  “Susan, honey.”

  “And that I’d dream of a giant raspberry on the night of conception.”

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake. A raspberry. Please stop.”

  “You’re being dismissive. I’m serious. When have I ever said or done anything like this before? Well, all right, maybe a few times. But I can’t stop.”

  The man sitting next to them lifted his beret and held it aloft for a moment before putting it back on his head.

  “Yeah, that’s right. Thank you,” Elijah said to the man. He pulled out a bill, one hundred crowns, from his wallet and dropped it on the table. “Susan, we need to get back to the hotel. Okay? Right now. Please?”

  “Why? I’m fine. I’ve never been better.”

  He gazed at her. He would take her back to the hotel, pretending to want to make love to her, and he would make love to her, but the lovemaking would just be a pretext so that he could do a full hands-on medical examination of her, top to bottom. She had seen him pull such stunts before, particularly in moments when the doctor in him, the force of his caretaking, had overpowered his love.

  What she saw in her dream wasn’t a raspberry. The crone had gotten that part wrong. What she saw was a tree, a white pine, growing in a forest alongside a river, and the tree swayed as the wind pushed at it, setting up a breathy whistling sound.

  They named their son Raphael, which, like Michael, was an angel’s name. Elijah claimed that he had always liked being an Elijah, so they had looked up angel names and prophet names on Google and quickly discarded the ones like Zadkiel and Jerahmeel that were just too strange: exile-on-the-playground names. Susan’s mother thought that naming a child after an angel was extreme bad luck, given the name’s high visibility, but once the baby took after Susan’s side of the family—he kept a stern gaze on objects of his attention, though he laughed easily, as Susan’s father did—the in-laws eventually softened and stopped complaining about his being a Raphael. Anyway, Old Testament names were coming back. You didn’t have to be the child of a Midwestern farmer to have one. On their block in San Francisco, an Amos was the child of a mixed-race couple; a Sariel belonged to a gay couple; and Gabriel, a bubbly toddler, as curious as a cat, lived next door.

  After they brought Raphael home from the hospital, they set up a routine so that if Elijah was home and not at the hospital, he would give Raphael his evening feeding. On a Tuesday night, Susan went upstairs and found Elijah holding the bottle of breast milk in his left hand while their son lay cradled in his right arm. They had painted the room a boy’s blue, and sometimes she could still smell the paint. Adhesive stars were affixed to the ceiling.

  A small twig snapped inside her. Then another twig snapped. She felt them physically. Looking at her husband and son, she couldn’t breathe.

  “You’re holding him wrong,” she said.

  “I’m holding him the way I always hold him,” Elijah said. Raphael continued to suck milk from the bottle. “It’s not a big mystery. I know how to hold babies. It’s what I do.”

  She heard the sound of a bicycle bell outside. The thick bass line on an over-amped car radio approached and then receded down the block. She inhaled with great effort.

  “He’s uncomfortable. You can tell. Look at the way he’s curled up.”

  “Actually, no,” Elijah said, moving the baby to his shoulder to burp him. “You can’t tell. He’s nursing just fine.” From his sitting position, he looked up at her. “This is my job.”

  “There’s something I can’t stand about this,” Susan told him. “Give me a minute. I’m trying to figure it out.” She walked into the room and leaned against the changing table. She glanced at the floor, trying to think of how to say to Elijah the strange thought that had an imminent, crushing weight, that she had to say aloud or she would die. “I told you you’re not holding him right.”

  “And I told you that I am.”

  “Elijah, I don’t want you feeding him.” There. She had said it. “I don’t want you nursing him. I’m the mother here. You’re not.”

  “What? You’re kidding. You don’t want me nursing him? Now? Or ever?”

  “I don’t want you feeding Raphael. Period.”

  “That’s ridiculous. What are you talking about?”

  “I can’t stand it. I’m not sure why. But I can’t.”

  “Susan, listen to yourself, listen to what you’re saying. You don’t get to decide something like this—we both do. I’m as much a parent here as you are. All I’m doing is holding a baby bottle with your breast milk in it while Raphael sucks on it, and then—well, now—I’m holding him on my shoulder while he burps.” He had a slightly clinical, almost diagnostic expression on his face, checking her out.

  “Actually, no, I don’t think you’re paying attention to what I’m saying.” She fixed him with a sad look, even though what she felt was positive rage. Inwardly, she was resisting the impulse to snatch their baby out of his arms. With one part of her mind, she saw this impulse as animal truth, if not actually unique to her; but with another part, she thought: Every mother feels this way, every mother has felt this, it’s time to stand up. She was not going to chalk this one up to postpartum depression or hormonal imbalances or feminine moodiness. She had come upon this truth, and she would not let it go. She felt herself lifting off. “You can’t be his mother. You can’t do this. I won’t let you.”

  “You’re in a moment, Susan,” he said. “You’ll get over it.”

  “No, I won’t get over it.” Raphael burped onto Elijah. “I’ll never get over it, and you will not fucking tell me that I will.”

  “Please stop shouting,” he said, ostentatiously calm.

  “This is not your territory. This is my territory, and you can’t have it.”

  “Are we going to argue about metaphors? Because that’s the wrong metaphor.”

  “We aren’t going to argue about anything. Put him down. Put him into the crib.”

  Elijah stood for a few seconds, and then with painfully executed elaboration he lowered Raphael into the crib and pulled over him the blue blanket that Elijah’s mother had made for the baby. He started up the music box and turned around. Both his hands were tightened into fists.

  “I’m going out,” he said. “I’ve got to go out right now.”

  She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, he was gone.

  She went downstairs and turned on the TV. On the screen—she kept the sound muted because she didn’t really want to get attached to the story—a man with an eagle tattoo on his forearm aimed a gun at a distant figure of indistinct gender. The man fired, whereupon the distant figure fell. The screen cut to a brightly lit room where male authority figures of some kind were jotting down notes and answering landline telephones while they held cups of coffee. Perhaps, she thought, this was an old movie. One woman, probably a cop, heard something on the phone and reacted with alarm. Then she shouted at the others in the room, and their shocked faces were instantly replaced by a soap commercial showing a cartoon rhinoceros in a bubble bath set upon by a trickster monkey, and thi
s commercial was then replaced by another one, with grinning skydivers falling together in a geometrical pattern advertising an insurance company, and then the local newscaster came on with a tease for the ten o’clock news, followed by a commercial for a multinational petroleum operation apparently dedicated to cleaning up the environment and saving baby seals, and Susan scratched her foot, and she was looking at the no-longer-distant figure (a young woman, as it turned out) on an autopsy table as a medical examiner pointed at a bullet hole in the victim’s rib-cage area—tantalizingly close to her breasts, which were demurely covered, though the handheld camera seemed eager to see them—and Susan felt her eyes getting heavy, and then another, older woman was hit by a tram in Prague, which was how Susan knew she was dreaming. Sleeping, she wondered when Elijah would return. She wondered, for a moment, where her husband had gone.

  When she woke up, Elijah stood before her, bleeding from the side of his mouth, a bruise starting to form just under his left eye. His knuckles were caked and bloody. On his face was an expression of joyful defiance. He was blocking the TV set. It was as if he had come out of it somehow.

  She stood up and reached toward him. “You’re bleeding.”

  He brushed her hand away. “Let me bleed.”

  “What did you say?”

  “You heard me. Let me bleed.” He was smilingly jubilant. The smile looked like one of the smiles on the faces of the angels in the Loreto chapel.

  “What happened to you?” she asked. “You got into a fight. My God. We need to put some ice or something on that.” She tried to reach for him again, and again he moved away from her.

  “Leave me alone. Listen,” he said, straightening up, “you want to know what happened? This is what happened. I was angry at you, and I started walking, and I ended up in Alta Plaza Park. I walked in there, you know, where it was dark? Off those steep stairs on Clay Street? And this is the thing. I wanted to kill somebody. That’s kind of a new emotion for me, wanting to kill somebody. I mean, I wasn’t looking for someone to kill, but that’s what I was thinking. I’m just trying to be honest here. So I went up the stairs and found myself at the top, with the view, with the famous view of the city.