The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015

by Laura Furman

  It’s like what that woman in the store said to me the other day. We were talking about the little expressions our mothers liked to use over and over again—“To each his own,” or “They meant well.” She said her mother was Christian, and devout, and that she believed in an afterlife of the soul. But this woman herself did not believe, and would gently make fun of her mother. And whenever that happened, her mother would say to her, with a good-humored smile, When we die, one of us is going to be very surprised!

  Our father himself believed that it was all in the body, and specifically in the brain, that it was all physical—the mind, the soul, our feelings. He had once seen a man’s brains spread over the asphalt of a driveway after an accident. He had stopped his car on the street and got out to look. My sister was a little girl then. He told her to wait for him in the car. When the body was finished, he said, it was all over. But I wasn’t so sure.

  There was the terror I felt one night as I was going to sleep—the sudden question that woke me up. Where was she going now? I sensed very strongly that she was going somewhere or had gone somewhere, not that she had simply stopped existing. That she, like him, had stayed nearby for a while, and then she was going—down, maybe, but also out somewhere, as though out to sea.

  First, while she was still alive, but dying, I kept wondering what was happening to her. I did not hear much about it. One thing they said was that when her reflexes were worse, according to the doctors, she would move toward the pinch or the prick instead of away from it. I thought that meant that her body wanted the pain, that she wanted to feel something. I thought it meant she wanted to stay alive.

  There was also that slow, dark dream I had about five days after her death. I may have had the dream just as her funeral was taking place, or just after. In the dream, I was making my way down from one level to the next in a kind of arena, the levels were wider and deeper than steps, down into a large, deep, high-ceilinged, ornately furnished and decorated room, or hall—I had an impression of dark furniture, sumptuous ornamentation, it was a hall intended for ceremony, not for any daily use. I was holding a small lantern that fit tightly over my thumb and extended outward, with a tiny flame burning in it. This was the only illumination in the vast place, a flame that wavered and flickered and had already gone out or nearly gone out once or twice. I was afraid that as I went down, as I climbed down with such difficulty, over levels that were too wide and deep to be easily straddled, the light would go out and I would be left in that deep well of darkness, that dark hall. The door I had come in by was far above me, and if I called out, no one would hear me. Without a light, I would not be able to climb back up those difficult levels.

  I later realized that, given the day and the hour when I woke up from the dream, it was quite possible that I dreamt it just at the time she was being cremated. The cremation was to begin right after the funeral, my brother told me, and he told me when the funeral had ended. I thought the flickering light was her life, as she held on to it those last few days. The difficult levels descending into the hall must have been the stages of her decline, day by day. The vast and ornate hall might have been death itself, in all its ceremony, as it lay ahead, or below.

  The odd problem we had afterward was whether or not to tell our father. Our father was vague in his mind, by then, and puzzled by many things. We would wheel him up and down the hallway of his nursing home. He liked to greet the other residents with a smile and a nod. We would stop in front of the door to his room. In June, the last year he was alive, he looked at the HAPPY BIRTHDAY sign on the door and waved at it with his long, pale, freckled hand and asked me a question about it. He couldn’t articulate his words very well anymore. Unless you had heard him all your life, you wouldn’t know what he was saying. He was marveling over the sign, and smiling. He was probably wondering how they knew when his birthday was.

  He still recognized us, but there was a lot he didn’t understand. He was not going to live much longer, though we didn’t know then how little time was left. It seemed to us important for him to know that she had died—his daughter, though she was really his stepdaughter. And yet, would he understand, if we told him? And wouldn’t it only distress him terribly, if he did understand? Or maybe he would have both reactions at once—he might understand some part of what we were saying, and then feel terrible distress at both what we had told him and his inability to understand it completely. Should his last days be filled with this distress and grief?

  But the alternative seemed wrong, too—that he should end his life not knowing this important thing, that his daughter had died. Wrong that he, who had once been the head of our small family, the one who, with our mother, made the most important family decisions, the one who drove the car when we went out on a little excursion, who helped our sister with her homework when she was a teenager, who walked her to school every morning when she was in her first year of school, while our mother rested or worked, who refused or gave permission, who played jokes at the dinner table that made her and her little friends laugh, who was busy out in the backyard for a few weeks building a playhouse—that he should not be shown the respect of being told that such an important thing had happened in his own family.

  He had so little time left, and we were the ones deciding something about the end of his life—that he would die knowing or not knowing. And now I’m not sure what we did, it was so many years ago. Which probably means that nothing very dramatic happened. Maybe we did tell him, out of a sense of duty, but hastily, and nervously, not wanting him to understand, and maybe there was a look of incomprehension on his face, because something was going by too quickly. But I don’t know if I’m remembering that or making it up.

  On one of her visits to me, she gave me a red sweater, a red skirt, and a round clay tile for baking bread. She took a picture of me wearing the red sweater and the skirt. I think the last thing she gave me was those little white seals with perforated backs. They’re filled with charcoal, which is supposed to absorb odors. You put them in your refrigerator. I guess she thought that because I live alone, my refrigerator would be neglected and smell bad, or maybe she just thought that anyone might need this.

  When did she leave the tartar sauce? You wouldn’t think a person could become attached to something like a jar of tartar sauce. But I guess you can—I didn’t want to throw it out, because she had left it. Throwing it out would mean that the days had passed, time had moved on and left her behind. Just as it was hard for me to see the new month begin, the month of July, because she would never experience that new month. Then the month of August came, and he was gone by then, too.

  Well, the little seals are useful to me, at least they were seven years ago. I did put them in my refrigerator, though at the back of a shelf, where I wouldn’t have to look at their cheerful little faces and black eyes every time I opened the door. I even took them with me when I moved.

  I doubt if they absorb anything anymore, after all this time. But they don’t take up much room, and there isn’t much in there anyway. I like having them, because they remind me of her. If I bend down and move things around, I can see them lying back there under the light that shines through some dried spilled things on the shelf above. There are two of them. They have black smiles painted on their faces. Or at least a line painted on their faces that looks like a smile.

  Really, the only present I ever wanted, after I grew up, was something for work, like a reference book. Or something old.

  Now there’s a lot of noise coming from the café car—people laughing. They sell alcohol there. I’ve never bought a drink on a train—I like to drink, but not here. Our brother used to have a drink on the train sometimes, on his way home from seeing our mother. He told me that once. This year he’s in Acapulco—he likes Mexico.

  We have a couple of hours to go, still. It’s dark out. I’m glad it was light when we passed the farms. Maybe there’s a big family in the café car, or a group traveling to a conference. I see that all the time. Or to a sporting ev
ent. Well, that doesn’t actually make much sense, not today. Now someone’s coming this way, staring at me. She’s smiling a little—but she looks embarrassed. Now what? She’s lurching. Oh, a party. It’s a party—in the café car, she tells me. Everyone’s invited.

  Lionel Shriver

  Kilifi Creek

  IT WAS A BRAND of imposition of which young people like Liana thought nothing: showing up on an older couple’s doorstep, the home of friends of friends of friends, playing on a tentative enough connection that she’d have had difficulty constructing the sequence of referrals. If there was anything to that six-degrees-of-separation folderol, she must have been equally related to the entire population of the continent.

  Typically, she’d given short notice, first announcing her intention to visit in a voice mail only a few days before bumming a ride with another party she hardly knew. (Well, the group had spent a long, hard-drinking night in Nairobi at a sprawling house with mangy dead animals on the walls that the guy with the ponytail was caretaking. In this footloose crowd of journalists and foreign-aid workers between famines, trust-fund layabouts, and tourists who didn’t think of themselves as tourists, if only because they never did anything, the evening qualified them all as fast friends.) Ponytail Guy was driving to Malindi, on the Kenyan coast, for an expat bash that sounded a little druggy for Liana’s Midwestern tastes. But the last available seat in his Land Rover would take her a stone’s throw from this purportedly more-the-merrier couple and their gorgeously situated crash pad. It was nice of the guy to divert to Kilifi to drop her off, but then Liana was attractive, and knew it.

  Mature adulthood—and the experience of being imposed upon herself—might have encouraged her to consider what showing up as an uninvited, impecunious houseguest would require of her hosts. Though Liana imagined herself undemanding, even the easy to please required fresh sheets, which would have to be laundered after her departure, then dried and folded. She would require a towel for swimming, a second for her shower. She would expect dinner, replete with discreet refreshments of her wineglass, strong filtered coffee every morning, and—what cost older people more than a sponger in her early twenties realized—steady conversational energy channeled in her direction for the duration of her stay.

  For her part, Liana always repaid such hospitality with brightness and enthusiasm. On arrival at the Henleys’ airy, weathered wooden house nestled in the coastal woods, she made a point of admiring soapstone knickknacks, cooing over framed black-and-whites of Masai initiation ceremonies, and telling comical tales about the European riffraff she’d met in Nairobi. Her effervescence came naturally. She would never have characterized it as an effort, until—and unless—she grew older herself.

  While she’d have been reluctant to form the vain conceit outright, it was perhaps tempting to regard the sheer insertion of her physical presence as a gift, one akin to showing up at the door with roses. Supposedly a world-famous photographer, Regent Henley carried herself as if she used to be a looker, but she’d let her long dry hair go gray. Her crusty husband, Beano (the handle may have worked when he was a boy, but now that he was over sixty it sounded absurd), could probably use a little eye candy twitching onto their screened-in porch for sundowners: some narrow hips wrapped tightly in a fresh kikoi, long wet hair slicked back from a tanned, exertion-flushed face after a shower. Had Liana needed further rationalization of her amiable freeloading, she might also have reasoned that in Kenya every white household was overrun with underemployed servants. Not Regent and Beano but their African help would knot the mosquito netting over the guest bed. So Liana’s impromptu visit would provide the domestics with something to do, helping to justify the fact that bwana paid their children’s school fees.

  But Liana thought none of these things. She thought only that this was another opportunity for adventure on the cheap, and at that time economy trumped all other considerations. Not because she was rude, or prone to take advantage by nature. She was merely young. A perfectly pleasant girl on her first big excursion abroad, she would doubtless grow into a better-socialized woman who would make exorbitant hotel reservations rather than dream of dumping herself on total strangers.

  Yet midway through this casual mooching off the teeny-tiny-bit-pretentious photographer and her retired safari-guide husband (who likewise seemed rather self-impressed, considering that Liana had already run into a dozen masters of the savanna just like him), Liana entered one eerily elongated window during which her eventual capacity to make sterner judgments of her youthful impositions from the perspective of a more worldly adulthood became imperiled. A window after which there might be no woman. There might only, ever, have been a girl—remembered, guiltily, uneasily, resentfully, by her aging, unwilling hosts more often than they would have preferred.

  —

  Day Four. She was staying only six nights—an eyeblink for a twenty-three-year-old, a “bloody long time” for the Brit who had groused to his wife under-breath about putting up “another dewy-eyed Yank who confuses a flight to Africa with a trip to the zoo.” Innocent of Beano’s less-than-charmed characterizations, Liana had already established a routine. Mornings were consumed with texting friends back in Milwaukee about her exotic situation, with regular refills of passion-fruit juice. After lunch, she’d pile into the jeep with Regent to head to town for supplies, after tolerating the photographer’s ritual admonishment that Kilifi was heavily Muslim and it would be prudent to “cover up.” (Afternoons were hot. Even her muscle T clung uncomfortably, and Liana considered it a concession not to strip down to her running bra. She wasn’t about to drag on long pants to pander to a bunch of uptight foreigners she’d never see again; career expats like Regent were forever showing off how they’re hip to local customs and you’re not.) She never proffered a few hundred shillings to contribute to the grocery bill, not because she was cheap—though she was; at her age, that went without saying—but because the gesture never occurred to her. Back “home,” she would mobilize for a long, vigorous swim in Kilifi Creek, where she would work up an appetite for dinner.

  As she sidled around the house in her bikini—gulping more passion-fruit juice at the counter, grabbing a fresh towel—her exhibitionism was unconscious; call it instinctive, suggesting an inborn feel for barter. She lingered with Beano, inquiring about the biggest animal he’d ever shot, then commiserating about ivory poaching (always a crowd-pleaser) as she bound back her long blond hair, now bleached almost white. Raised arms made her stomach look flatter. Turning with a “cheerio!” that she’d picked up in Nairobi, Liana sashayed out the back porch and down the splintered wooden steps before cursing herself, because she should have worn flip-flops. Returning for shoes would ruin her exit, so she picked her way carefully down the overgrown dirt track to the beach in bare feet.

  In Wisconsin, a “creek” was a shallow, burbling dribble with tadpoles that purled over rocks. Where Liana was from, you wouldn’t go for a serious swim in a “creek.” You’d splash up to your ankles while cupping your arches over mossy stones, arms extended for balance, though you almost always fell in. But everything in Africa was bigger. Emptying into the Indian Ocean, Kilifi Creek was a river—an impressively wide river at that—which opened into a giant lake sort of thing when she swam to the left and under the bridge. This time, in the interest of variety, she would strike out to the right.

  The water was cold. Yipping at every advance, Liana struggled out to the depth of her upper thighs, gingerly avoiding sharp rocks. Regent and Beano may have referred to the shoreline as a “beach,” but there wasn’t a grain of sand in sight, and with all the green gunk along the bank the obstacles were hard to spot. Chiding herself not to be a wimp, she plunged forward. This was a familiar ritual of her childhood trips to Lake Winnebago: the shriek of inhalation, the hyperventilation, the panicked splashing to get the blood running, the soft surprise of how quickly the water feels warm.

  Liana considered herself a strong swimmer, of a kind. That is, she’d never been comfortabl
e with the gasping and thrashing of the crawl, which felt frenetic. But she was a virtuoso of the sidestroke, with a powerful scissor kick whose thrust carried her faster than many swimmers with inefficient crawls (much to their annoyance, as she’d verified in her college pool). The sidestroke was contemplative. Its rhythm was ideally calibrated for a breath on every other kick, and resting only one cheek in the water allowed her to look around. It was less rigorous than the butterfly but not as geriatric as the breaststroke, and after long enough you still got tired—marvelously so.

  Pulling out far enough from the riverbank so that she shouldn’t have to worry about hitting rocks with that scissor kick, Liana rounded to the right and rapidly hit her stride. The late-afternoon light had just begun to mellow. The shores were forested, with richly shaded inlets and copses. She didn’t know the names of the trees, but now that she was alone, with no one trying to make her feel ignorant about a continent of which white people tended to be curiously possessive, she didn’t care if those were acacias or junipers. They were green: good enough. Though Kilifi was renowned as a resort area for high-end tourists, and secreted any number of capacious houses like her hosts’, the canopy hid them well. It looked like wilderness: good enough. Gloriously, Liana didn’t have to watch out for the powerboats and Jet Skis that terrorized Lake Winnebago, and she was the only swimmer in sight. Africans, she’d been told (lord, how much she’d been told; every backpacker three days out of Jomo Kenyatta Airport was an expert), didn’t swim. Not only was the affluent safari set too lazy to get in the water; by this late in the afternoon they were already drunk.

  This was the best part of the day. No more enthusiastic chatter about Regent’s latest work. For heaven’s sake, you’d think she might have finally discovered color photography at this late date. Blazing with yellow flora, red earth, and, at least outside Nairobi, unsullied azure sky, Africa was wasted on the woman. All she photographed was dust and poor people. It was a relief, too, not to have to seem fascinated as Beano lamented the unsustainable growth of the human population and the demise of Kenyan game, all the while having to pretend that she hadn’t heard variations on this same dirge dozens of times in a mere three weeks. Though she did hope that, before she hopped a ride back to Nairobi with Ponytail Guy, the couple would opt for a repeat of that antelope steak from the first night. The meat had been lean; rare in both senses of the word, it gave good text the next morning. There wasn’t much point in going all the way to Africa and then sitting around eating another hamburger.