The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015

by Laura Furman

  —

  We don’t know where Mariam was when her boys got taken away, if she was hiding in her apartment, or hiding from herself, but we saw her the next day, sitting on the low stoop in front of her place. Her head was wrapped in a towel, and a tattered robe revealed her purple-veined legs. She was smoking, head tilted back, breathing in the same smoke she breathed out. There was a plate of chocolate cake next to her, a gold-plated fork stabbed into its center. But the cake appeared untouched. When she saw us notice it, she picked it up with her free hand and waved it in our faces.

  “You want it? Take it.”

  We shook our heads.

  “Take it. I’m not going to eat it. I thought I might, but I’m not hungry.”

  “Mariam,” we said.

  “Fuck you. I said take it. You want my fucking cake? Take it and don’t feel bad about it. Take it home and share it.”

  “Mariam,” we pleaded. But she blew smoke in our faces and we turned away as if slapped. When we caught her eyes once more, she was chewing wildly, her whole face contorted, cheeks puffed out and nose flaring, brown smearing her upper lip.

  A month later, Carmen and Mariam had a talk. We tried not to listen in, not to open our windows just a crack, because we understood how easy it was to destroy the illusion of dignity between broken women. We did it anyway because we were hurting, too. We had rooted for Carmen, for her boy, for ourselves. Even when we stopped—we like to tell ourselves now—we didn’t. Mariam had just taken out the trash when Carmen turned the corner with her basket. The women stopped short of running into each other, but the space between them was like no space at all. They stood there for a second before Carmen moved the basket from her hip to her stomach and Mariam took a step back.

  “Yes, yes, that’s right. You do that. You keep going, Mariam. And don’t stop until you’re miles away from here.”

  Mariam laughed and we cringed. Her laugh could be a bitter thing, as if it scraped her throat as it rose from her belly.

  “Don’t be silly, Carmen. It’s not very becoming. What would your husband say if he saw that ugly expression on your face?”

  Carmen put down her basket, bending slowly in front of Mariam, and for a moment we worried that Mariam would push her down, shove Carmen into that plastic container that seemed to be forever attached these days to her thinning shape. But it was Carmen who made us gasp as she took a wet blouse from the basket and flung it at Mariam’s face. Mariam whipped her head back, but the shirt seemed to fix itself around her, wrapping its sleeves around her ears. Mariam pulled it off with the tips of her fingers, dropping it to her side like it was a dirty diaper.

  “You’re pathetic.” Mariam said it so softly we thought we misheard, and we pushed our heads closer against our windows. Carmen pulled her arm back but she didn’t strike. Mariam only tilted her head to the side and looked at her.

  “Can’t you see what you’ve done?”

  Mariam looked behind herself, then turned back. She placed a hand over her chest. “Me?”

  Upstairs we wanted to nod along. We wanted to point. Now the whole world knew what we knew, what we learned here. That we loved our sons not because of who they were, but because of what they were to us.

  Carmen lowered her arm, both hands now rigid at her sides. She looked like a soldier. “How can you just stand there? How can you pretend none of this has happened? How can—”

  “All you do is ask questions, Carmen. Questions, questions, questions. ‘Why me?’ Well, why the hell not?”

  “Why were you never at the court for the hearings?”

  Mariam put her hands over her face and groaned. But then her groan turned into strained, muffled laughter, as if she were convulsing. Carmen frowned, took a step forward.

  When Mariam removed her hands, her teeth showed. “Because I know what my boys are. I don’t need the court to tell me.”

  “And what are they, Mariam?”

  “They’re worthless.”

  The slap stunned us. The suddenness of Carmen’s movement, the loudness of the flat thud. We jerked away from the windows, out of breath, and just as quickly, returned to look. Mariam very slowly righted her neck. She licked her lips and we shook our heads. From above, we mouthed a plea: Stay silent.

  “They’re criminals.”

  Carmen slapped her again, her palm hitting the same side of Mariam’s face. An audible sigh escaped Mariam’s mouth. We began to pound on the glass. Carmen kept her hand in the air. Neither woman looked up.

  “I wish they weren’t mine.”

  There are a few things we remember of that moment. The sound Carmen’s knees made as she hit the ground, like the logs our fathers would axe in the mornings during the summer months, when they were split open and fell on opposite sides. The way Mariam looked down at Carmen, the gentle shake of the head, and the way, leaning back, she finally saw us, her hands brushing the hair from her face, eyes unblinking. How she stepped over Carmen’s outstretched arms. Carmen, there on the ground, bent forward like a Turk, wailing. And when we averted our eyes, resting them on our empty couches, we had the feeling we used to get when we were young girls, our backs opening once a month, that gnawing sensation all over, like little kernels pushing against the skin, ready to puff up, ready to burst, but never gathering enough heat, enough steam, always missing the opportunity to become something beautiful.

  —

  In the following weeks, Carmen seemed to return to her former self. She smiled when we saw her outside, checking the mail; she winked when we caught her cutting the basil that grew by her stoop—our landlord forbade it, said the smell hid other smells—pocketing it swiftly in the money pouch she wore around her waist when she was gardening. She came over for coffee, for stories. We tried not to pry but Carmen appeared comfortable sharing with us the details of what she was feeling. We weren’t too surprised; we were like that, too, finding comfort in the telling. It saddened us, disappointed us, but her acceptance of the situation was of great solace, too. She was not any better than us.

  Of course, some things we knew we could never ask. What Ruben thought about all this. What Zaven had to say, how he was doing. Some questions are not so much questions as they are accusations. When Zaven was convicted in November, we learned about it through the Armenian Daily. We were careful. We couldn’t help it. We had our friend Carmen back and we tried to forget about Mariam, the way she looked up at us that day, all-knowing and unapologetic. Carmen never mentioned her name.

  The holidays were approaching and we went to work. We buttered our filo doughs and ground our walnuts. We chopped up our carrots, pickles, and potatoes and put them in the back of the refrigerators. We took out the beef to thaw and rinsed out the bulgur. We unearthed our fine china and the Italian-made tablecloths left over from our dowries.

  When we first came to America, our children tried to force us to celebrate Christmas on the twenty-fifth, like their classmates did. But ever since we could remember, we had exchanged presents and drunken kisses and plates of kyofta on New Year’s Eve. It was a Soviet leftover, one that we tried very hard to get our kids to understand. Celebrating a fresh beginning, where the past didn’t matter, where the past was just that, past: That still had great meaning for us, especially as immigrants. So the twenty-fifth came and went, and we hurried to the department stores to do our “Christmas” shopping, taking advantage of all the sales on clothing and ornaments, shirts and shoes, and dancing Santas.

  Carmen cut down the laundry line on the morning of the thirtieth. She just took a scissor close to the two poles and snapped it right off. The thin rope fell to the ground and Carmen bent down and began rolling it loosely around her wrist, like it was merely yarn for the knitting. When she was finished, she looked up at us and we waved from our windows. She smiled and waved back. It was her normal smile, wide, no teeth showing—she was always embarrassed about her teeth. But did the smile reach her eyes? We women always wash our windows on the thirty-first, so we can welcome the New Year with li
ght unobstructed, our glass spotless and vision the most clear. On the thirtieth, we couldn’t see as closely.

  It was Mariam who found her. Mariam who stood up on the stool that Carmen had used to loop a noose from the drainage pipe in our laundry room. Mariam who wrapped one arm around Carmen’s waist as she cut down the rope ripping into our friend’s skin. Mariam who fell under Carmen’s body on the dirty concrete floor next to the washing machines. Skinny old Mariam. It was then that she cried out, when Carmen’s body fell on her chest, Carmen’s head gently sloping over her pounding heart, then that Mariam let out a howl so terrible, so strange, so loud, that we stopped in our kitchens, in our living rooms, and ran downstairs. When we reached the laundry room, Mariam was sitting with her legs spread open, Carmen between them, Carmen with her head falling back over Mariam’s shoulder, Mariam rocking back and forth, Mariam shh shh shh–ing, as if it was a child in her lap, as if Carmen was still alive and only hurting.

  —

  Ruben didn’t tell Zaven that his mother was dead until after the funeral. Zaven served six years; he was out early on good behavior. He married quickly, began driving a truck, bought a small one-bedroom condo a few miles from here. As for Robert and Vardan, we don’t know much. Mariam tells us that they are free to live their own lives and that her main concern has always been to do the same. Now she says Los Angeles is not such a bad place to grow old in. She waters the fig tree in the backyard and plants a new batch of basil every spring. She takes cooking classes at the community college and invites us over for dessert. Before she takes the first sip of her surj, Mariam raises the cup in a toast. To all those we have lost, she says.

  And knowing what we know now and seeing what we have seen, we can’t help but nod. We bring the demitasse cups to our lips and sip soundlessly. But the taste of Mariam’s coffee is always bitter. At night, when we return to our apartments, when we put our heads to the pillow, when we lie beside our husbands, we still can’t help but wonder: If all it took was for them to see us dead, we too would’ve done it ourselves.

  Emma Törzs

  Word of Mouth

  I HAD A JOB, FINALLY, at a new restaurant called the Whole Hog, though no one ever came because the owner didn’t believe in advertising. “Word of mouth,” he kept saying, but didn’t seem to understand that there had to be a first mouth to speak the first word. The Hog was off Highway 200, thirty minutes out of town—twenty if you drove the speed limit, which I never did, because this was Montana and the limit was astronomical. The roads were mountain-cut and followed high above the seething river, and there were white wooden crosses planted alongside the sharpest curves, as tribute to the ones who’d zoomed beyond the sound barrier forever.

  I’d been out west and unemployed for six months, ever since my grandmother had passed away and left me all her money, though in a sense she’d been supporting me for over a year; throughout my junior year of college I’d been living with her as her caretaker, paid from her social security pension. Her money in my bank account felt greasy, fingerprinted with guilt, and I was glad to begin receiving paychecks from the restaurant, paychecks that had nothing to do with her. I’d dropped out of college soon after her death (“a hiatus,” hoped my mother), and I was glad, too, to feel responsible for something again, even a barbecue joint with no patrons.

  As for employees, so far it was just me and the cook, so I tried my best to get friendly with him even though I didn’t smoke weed anymore and that seemed to be his only passion. His name was Holt, and he was older than I was, maybe thirty, with well-set eyes but the mouth of an idiot, his clumsy lips always wet like earthworms. Afternoons we went out onto the porch to sit at one of the picnic tables and I watched him pack a bowl, tamping it down with the butt of his lighter—not how I’d done it, back in my high-school smoking days. I’d preferred it loose.

  “That’s what she said,” said Holt.

  It was four o’clock and the sun was still golden in the sky, skimming the sharp points of the mountains and playing angel with the smoke, and I could hear the river through the trees although I couldn’t see it. The restaurant was set back from the highway, camouflaged by branches and its own tree-colored walls, and I said, “If we don’t get some kind of sign out there, this place is doomed.”

  Just then a Subaru turned sharply off the road and came jouncing up the drive, dust rising in a cloud.

  “Finally,” I said, and stood, but Holt waved me back down. His dog was barking from where she was tied up around back, her voice high and strained from the rope around her neck.

  “It’s not a customer,” Holt said. “It’s this poor fuck keeps coming around asking about his wife.”

  The car stopped on the gravel lot in front of our patio and a man got out, pushed his sunglasses up to the receding line of his hair. He was sunburned and clean-shaven, with a pad of softness around his cleft chin like a cartoon dad.

  “Hi,” he said, and climbed the first stair. The dog was still barking.

  “Hi again,” Holt said over the noise. “Still no word.”

  “Can I give you a couple flyers to pass out to your customers?”

  “No one comes in here, man,” Holt said.

  “Just two or three.”

  He didn’t seem like he was going to come any further up the stairs, and Holt didn’t move, so I stood and went over to him and took a flyer. Front-and-center was a photo of a woman, and she wasn’t young, wasn’t lovely the way I expected missing girls to be; she was what the old books would call handsome. A striking, bottom-heavy face, take-no-bullshit lines around her mouth, lots of coarsely dyed blonde hair.

  “We came out from New Hampshire,” said her husband, a fixed mindlessness to his tone. “I wanted to learn how to fly-fish. We were on the Blackfoot together just two nights, and when I woke a week ago, she was gone from our camper. Her shoes, too. Her favorite sweater. She must have left for a walk and got lost? I’m out of my mind thinking of her alone in these mountains.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said. “We’ll keep our eyes out.” Though I didn’t want to be the one who came across her. This was bear country. This was whitewater, crumbling-bluff, stray-bullet country; there were many different ways a woman could expire, and I’d had my fill of finding people dead.

  “Haven’t seen you here before,” the husband said, like an accusation or a come-on.

  “This is my third day,” I said.

  “Where are you from?”

  I got this question no matter where I was, though it proved more common in the great white West. My father was half black and on me this registered as something vaguely foreign, a suspicious curl to my dark hair, a permanence about my tan. He died when I was ten and I’d always wished I looked more like him. “Also from out east,” I said. “New Jersey.”

  “I’m Brian,” he said.

  “Jenny,” I said. “And Holt.”

  “Well, if you see my wife,” Brian said, a hand on his heart, “she answers to Peggy.”

  He got back in his car and Holt said, “Answers to Peggy?”

  “It says Patricia on the flyer,” I said. “He was telling us her nickname.”

  “Dogs answer to,” Holt said. “Women are just named. I think he killed her himself.”

  I’d been thinking along the same lines—spooked by his monochromatic voice, the spinning blankness of his eyes, how very on-vacation he appeared—but felt the need to offer Brian at least a token defense.

  “It’s true he seems a little sketchy,” I said. “But people get strange when bad things are happening to them.”

  —

  Case in point: my landlady. I was renting a house with a German girl named Emily, a quiet grad student in wildlife biology, and we’d signed a sublease that was supposed to take us through December while the owner was in Thailand for a year with her girlfriend. But in June she’d called to say they were coming home early because she had ovarian cancer and needed treatment. We could stay in the house, she’d promised, which was generous consideri
ng the circumstances, but meanwhile they were living two blocks away at her girlfriend’s house and had taken to showing up unexpectedly. “Don’t mind us,” they’d chirp, letting themselves in, and my roommate and I would listen to them bicker in the kitchen.

  “Is this our mug or theirs?”

  “It says 89.1. Did you donate to Public Radio last year?”

  “Don’t remember—we may as well just take it.”

  When I got home from work that night, the landlady, Miranda, was sitting in our living room with Emily, eating pizza barefoot and in a too-tight wifebeater. She hadn’t started chemo yet and still looked healthy and overweight, though she’d buzzed her gray head as soon as she was diagnosed and now liked to refer to herself as “GI Jane.” This evening she was on the couch talking loudly about her new iPhone.