The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015

by Laura Furman

  Oh, what drama, my Persian girl. “Whatever you want,” says Shirin, thinking of all the imagined conversations with her daughter, over the ten days they were supposed to have together. So far they’ve only conversed once, and even that about somebody’s strange boy. “I’ll find you a ride to Chiang Mai.” The weekly van isn’t due for four days.

  “You come too,” says Leila. “We can travel around together. Stay in hotels.”

  Shirin has already thought of this. It’s impossible, and why should she give in to Leila’s whims? “I’m needed here,” she says. “I won’t follow you around Thailand.”

  “Don’t be stubborn,” says Leila. “Isn’t there a teacher that can cover for you?”

  “That’s not the point,” Shirin snaps. “I work at the clinic too. You go. It’s fine.”

  “They have midwives,” mutters Leila, because she is trying to be cruel.

  Her daughter believes that Shirin has lied about being a doctor in Tehran. She believes that Shirin was actually a midwife. Shirin has tried to have her credentials sent to America, but has failed to locate them. They were left behind in a hurry when she escaped the Islamic Republic. Likely they were lost or destroyed in the ensuing government lootings of her office. It is the only true thing that Shirin wishes known about herself: that she was a top doctor in Tehran. This is the truth: She once attended the best college in a big city, as Leila is now doing. She was a doctor, a very good one. But what’s the point? Her daughter believes she is a liar, and is desperate to get away. In Iran and in Thailand, children never leave their parents, not even bad ones like Khunpol.

  They spend the early evening walking in silence through the tiny village—three unpaved roads snaking out of a central fish market—knocking on every door. Shirin cringes each time she has to explain to a neighbor that her daughter is sick and that they need a ride into Chiang Mai tonight. No, it can’t wait, she says. Yes, she is a doctor herself but she is ill-equipped here. No, she doesn’t have a better explanation.

  “Tonight?” the first neighbor, a young seamstress with a browning half tooth, asks. “Really so urgent?” She doesn’t have a car, but she offers to call a friend who does.

  As she goes inside her hut to find her mobile, Shirin catches the eye of the girl’s mother, sitting cross-legged on the floor just inside the screen door, facing outside. It is a strange place to sit, and the old woman smiles perpetually, never closing her mouth. Shirin smiles back. Leila looks baffled. She swats flies from her legs and leans against a tree stump a few feet away from the grinning mother, whose mouth just opens wider. The two stare at each other wordlessly. It’s exhausting for Shirin to watch them. Finally, the woman asks in Thai, “How old is she?”

  Shirin responds, also in Thai, “Twenty.”

  “Ohhhh,” says the old woman. “She looks much younger.”

  “She says you look young,” Shirin mutters to her daughter. “It’s a compliment.”

  Leila thanks the old woman, in Thai, pressing her palms together in an elegant wai. Shirin stares at her daughter, unable to keep her eyebrows from creeping upward. “What?” says Leila, crossing her arms. “I read the guidebook on the plane.”

  The young seamstress returns, carrying a bunch of bananas. She offers them to Leila, who, though confused, accepts with both hands, bowing a little. Shirin feels a tingle of pride at her worldly daughter, but she fights it back. Because isn’t the girl forcing Shirin to go door to door, to give up all the respect she’s gained, just because she’s hot and needs a farang toilet? The seamstress motions for them to follow her to the next house, where a man in traditional Thai clothes and an old American-style cap answers. After a short exchange, Shirin thinks maybe they’ve found a ride. The man is coming outside. Maybe he has a truck behind the house. But soon it becomes clear that his only intention is to follow and observe as the seamstress leads them to a third house.

  Half an hour later, they stand sweaty and furious, in front of the eighth house, with the occupants of all seven previous houses in a whispering cluster behind them. Their errand has become an event. “This isn’t happening,” says Leila. “Fucking unreal.”

  “Please don’t speak,” says Shirin.

  For the eighth time, someone asks, “You need to go to Chiang Mai tonight? Why tonight? Is everything okay?” then shakes their head and says, “Impossible!”

  Maybe this won’t work, thinks Shirin. Maybe Leila will have to stay another night, and then her jet lag will be fully gone and she can see that things aren’t so bad here, that her house is quaint and charming, a window into a new world. Maybe they can bike far past the rice fields and she can tell Leila about the time she was chased by a water monitor, a lizard so big and fast, it outran her even though she was cycling. But then, how can she take Leila around the village again, after tonight? How can she present her, knowing that everyone will whisper? Dr. Rin’s spoiled daughter. The girl who yelled at her own mother in the front yard. The daughter who needs air-conditioning to survive.

  Each time they go from one house to the next, an act that feels very much like begging, the crowd behind them grows by the inhabitants of the last house. People ask her daughter’s name, her age and occupation. They ask if she’s had rice today. After a while, Leila seems to recognize these questions and answers on her own behalf. She loves the one about rice. They marvel at her answers.

  Shirin focuses on a point on her fisherman pants. There’s a tear there, on the knee. Has it been there all day? She tries to push away that sickening humiliation that worsens with each door and every knock—her frayed seams showing clearer and clearer. Someone touches her arm. She has been so exhausted that she has stopped noticing the individual people joining the expedition, which they are now calling “Dr. Rin’s Mission.” Sawat, the schoolteacher, is smiling beside her. “You need a ride, Dr. Rin?” she asks.

  “Sawat,” she whispers, because what’s the use of holding back this one last favor she needs? They already know all her business. “How do I get them all to go home?”

  “Why go home?” says Sawat, surprised. “They want to see what happen!”

  Shirin stares dumbfounded. “I think it’s a lost cause,” she mutters.

  Sawat’s thin eyebrows gather. She doesn’t seem to know the expression, so Shirin elaborates: “I think we failed at the mission.”

  Sawat laughs. “This Dr. Rin’s mission…it is Phrao that succeed or fail.”

  Absurd, thinks Shirin, then chastises herself, her bitter heart, for scoffing at such a lovely sentiment. These people love her. In an hour and a half of knocking on doors, she and Leila have no ride but they are weighed down with fruits. Leila, whose fatigue seems to go in and out, is peeling lychee in a happy cluster of women her age. This too angers Shirin and she thinks maybe she’s growing old and cynical. She looks back at the swelling crowd and wishes she were in her bed beside the lizards.

  “I know who we ask,” says Sawat suddenly. She gives a quick bow good-bye and rushes off down the road, the only direction from here.

  “Let’s just go home,” whispers Leila in accented Farsi.

  “I have to wait for Sawat,” Shirin says coldly. “You can’t just treat people like they’re your servants, then dismiss them when you’re done.”

  “Fine,” says Leila in English, as if her Farsi has been rejected. “Just saying…”

  Ten minutes later Sawat returns, a male figure lumbering behind her. Khunpol is strutting quickly, his head down as if he is counting his own steps. His walk conjures in Shirin’s mind the memory of Boonmee in the school courtyard, his head hanging, and her anger flares. How could Sawat bring this man here? When the crowd sees the keys dangling from his hand, they whisper and cheer. A ride has been found, they say, Khunpol is a good man, a reliable man—lies for which Shirin blames Leila.

  She tries to calculate how much this day has cost her and, unable to do so, she decides she is finished. Her peace is gone. When Khunpol motions to the next street, where his truck is parked, and i
ndicates that he will do the job for 1,300 baht, Shirin accepts. She wonders who will watch Boonmee while his father is out.

  They load Leila’s suitcase into the back of the truck, but it has only two seats, so Shirin says good-bye at the door. She feels sick to her stomach, every now and then thinking that she should stop Leila. But the entire town has gone to so much trouble to find a ride. They have let it escalate too far to turn back. What a marvel, she thinks, the distance that can grow between a mother and daughter, two creatures who once shared a body. Did she give birth to this American stranger who needs to get far away from her for a peaceful breath? For a second she considers Khunpol’s temper, the demon Sawat mentioned. But there is no reason to worry. This is a small community, and she a well-respected member of it. Leila is as safe with this man as with any of them.

  She pays Khunpol, says good-bye to her daughter. There is no question of her visiting again. “Maman joon,” says Leila in Farsi, as she settles in the front seat. “I’m sorry about that midwife crack earlier. I know how it was in Iran.”

  “No mention,” says Shirin, reverting to Iranian pleasantries but using English words, maybe to show that she’s still angry. “It was a really nice time having you here.”

  She almost apologizes for having lied about Chiang Mai, but she doesn’t—though she plans to later. She promises herself that she will, as soon as she has found elegant enough words, about Iran and homesickness and children and her own sinful heart. There are secrets she has yet to confess, painful half-truths about Leila’s father and her days in Tehran. Maybe she will, slowly, not now. The next day Leila calls to say she plans to spend the rest of her vacation in Bangkok, and this seems reasonable to Shirin.

  After the truck has pulled away, Shirin passes by Khunpol’s house. She peeks into the window. Boonmee is in the front garden, picking leaves off a tree, trying to blow bubbles from the sap. His rosebud mouth and sleepy eyes cheer her. And she thinks, What a thing I thought of the poor boy who, after all, just wanted a mother’s love. It was my own wickedness. She goes to say hello and the boy bursts into unexpected laughter, his strange habit, conversing with himself. Maybe he does have a demon, and maybe that’s not such a bad affliction. A demon is just another foreign thing that needs its space. When he lifts his arms toward her, a thing he would never have done at school, she wraps him up in a warm hug. Again his hand creeps toward her breast. She pulls back, searches his face for malice. She says in broken Thai, “This is how we touch mothers.” She puts a hand on each of his cheeks. His small eyes widen and eagerly he mirrors the gesture, his warm palms on her face reminding her of childhood and isolation and the thin line of nature, like the skin inside a spiny fruit, that separates the sweet from the foul.

  Emily Ruskovich

  Owl

  WHEN THE DOCTOR LEFT, I fed the cats their cornmeal. For Jane’s sake. My wife. Two bullets taken from her body and still she remembered the hunger of our sickly, mewing clowder; still she had the strength to recite her whole tiresome routine to me. Let it cool first, she whispered, holding out her hand, and when I took her hand, Let it cool first, she said again. Well, twelve years prior, I had not let it cool first. I had thought the bastards would have the sense to wait till the cornmeal wasn’t boiling. But they stuck their faces in and ate. One or two got badly splattered, and after that the white scalds on their eyeballs kept them in the dark. Twelve years ago. Those cats long dead, the offspring of their offspring prowl our land. It happened once. How many times had I seen her feed the cats since then? How many thousands of times had the cornmeal cooled? And yet, recovering from her wounds, she called out to me through all those layers of ether, wrapped up in all those layers of gauze, called out to me in an urgent whisper to let it cool first, as if I would not hear it, as if I could forget the blind cats pawing around in their idiot darkness, as if what she sensed at my very core, when her delirium peeled off all the rest, was a thick and hot and yellow-colored cruelty.

  Well, I forgave her that. I went outside. The dust hung in the air from the retreat of the doctor’s wagon. I pumped the water ’til the bucket was half full. Then I went on into the house to boil it.

  I was thirty then, Jane twenty-seven, and we had lived on the land by Bonner’s Ferry for twelve years. I arrived in spring of 1890, the year I married Jane, the year my father died. It had been his land before that. The undiluted offspring of his cats were all that was left of him. Skeletal, startled, brainless, they purred when they were scared. Each generation had larger heads than the one before. “Skulls,” I called them, never cats.

  But in spite of my daily protests against feeding the inbred beasts at all, in spite of all the work there was to do, and of this being my first moment alone in three long days, and in spite of my preoccupation with the question in my mind concerning the face of my young wife’s shooter—I let the cornmeal cool first. And while it cooled, I went back upstairs. Julie Bennett, the minister’s daughter, had nursed Jane for three days. Before she left for good that afternoon, assuring me that time was all we needed, she had washed the hair of my crippled wife in vinegar, sitting on the bed with a bowl in her lap and Jane’s head tilted over the lip of it. She pulled twigs from the knots. Why so many twigs so badly tangled up? Because my wife lay on the ground after they shot her. She moved her head from side to side in the broken weeds as if to say, This isn’t so.

  Her hair, damp and dark and spread out on her pillow in the light, dried as she slept and I could smell it drying. The smell mingled in my body with the onset of something like sickness, which it took me a moment to realize was relief. Relief soon had me shaking, had me down weak-kneed on the chair beside her bed, clasping hard, in spite of my desire to let her sleep, her still and lovely hand. She woke, briefly, and was gone again.

  All this while the cornmeal cooled, the cats still hungry outside.

  After a moment, I recovered from my state. The shaking ceased. I calmed my mind enough to consider.

  There were four of them, the boys that shot her, all boys I knew by sight and by their fathers’ names, except for one. The one who held the gun—his name I knew. Peter. Three years before, when I made the journey north to Sandpoint to see to the arrangements of my only cousin’s burial, I hired the boy without having met him, on the recommendation of a fellow trapper who assured me that the child, then fourteen years old, would be able to check my traps and look after the chores that Jane could not. I was gone five days. The boy, Peter, slept in the barn, where my young wife, now crippled by his gun, brought him plates of eggs and hot venison sausage at sunrise. She stood over him, in the barn, and watched him eat.

  I know because she told me. She told me as soon as I arrived home, before I could even unsaddle my horse. First she asked in a hurried, distracted way about my journey, and after a vague answer that should not have satisfied her, she began to tell me about the boy in the barn eating his sausage, as if there was anything at all unusual about this. I could not see—I still cannot—why she was compelled to narrate to me so mundane a detail of their predictable routine, and this so soon after my return, when there was a great deal else to say.

  “He was like a little starved dog,” she said. “He cupped his hand over the sausage as if I was going to steal it.” She laughed and there was pity mixed up in that laughter, but also something else, something private and unseemly, and even as I dismissed it as female sentimentality over having played mother to a little boy for five days, even then it struck me.

  And sitting in my chair, as the cornmeal cooled, it struck me again. I closed my eyes and tried to picture the boy—at fourteen when he ate the sausage, at seventeen when he shot my wife—but all I could see was the bleary darkness beneath his distinct cap of windy hair.

  Shouts coming from that darkness. Scared, excited shouts.

  It bothered me. Why could I not see his face, when I had seen it so clearly the night he shot my Jane? She stood at the edge of the woods and they, the four boys, waited just inside the shadows of the trees.
The house, where I was, was behind her.

  An accident. Well, of course.

  Then there was the smell of ether in the sunny room, stirred up in the sheets from her movement. She turned onto her good side so that the light that had just been in her hair now fell on the bandage on her shoulder. Her hand twitched in mine, then left it.

  “Jane,” I said, because it occurred to me in this newfound calm that there was something I had not asked, what with the doctor there and the minister’s daughter fumbling with the gauze and my own mind staggering around with the basic fact of so very little blood. To my surprise, the boys had stayed to help. They obeyed my every order; while I carried her up into bed, two rode into town, on my horse, to get the doctor and the sheriff. There seemed to be no fear of punishment, only the shock—and was it joy?—of having been a part of so supreme an accident.

  But why was she out there in the first place in the middle of the night? What was she looking for that she wouldn’t ask me first to go and see? This was the question that occurred to me in those quiet moments by her bed, and I said her name again, to ask it.

  But she didn’t wake. I ran my fingers over the bandage on her shoulder. I touched the tiny circle of blood that had traveled so far up through the gauze that it was not like blood any longer but like the faded pink of a wild rose.

  There was another bandage on the lower part of her leg, but it was hidden by the sheet.

  “Jane,” I said.

  But several loud knocks on the door downstairs startled me out of the chair. As I got up, my foot bumped the washbowl beneath the bed. It splashed dirty vinegar and twigs onto the floor. I went to the top of the stairs and I looked down.

  There, on the porch, behind the screen door, three boys. They were knocking, all of them—on the door frame and on the side of the house. They stopped when they saw me there, except the red-haired boy, the youngest one, who was looking off to the side. His knock came quietly and then, when he realized he was the only one, not at all.