The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015

by Laura Furman

  —

  Mary opens the pantry doors. She doesn’t see the dogs. If only she had poison. She imagines Wynn coming home and finding both dogs dead. She imagines him cradling their bodies and weeping. No, Wynn wouldn’t weep. He’d probably just buy two more dogs, recycle the names, and move on with his life. Mary has never killed an animal as big as a dog. She veered her car in order to hit a squirrel once and regretted it for two days.

  She makes it a few steps into the kitchen before realizing that Brooks has fallen behind. He has stopped at the fridge. Photos and appointment cards are stuck to the front of it with magnets. He’s looking at a Polaroid, one she can see—of two children, a tiny girl and an older boy, on a seesaw. Across the bottom someone has written “What goes up…”

  She waves at him to get his attention. At least forty feet of tiled floor separate them from the back door. She considers sprinting for it, but they haven’t discussed that as the plan, and she doesn’t want to surprise Brooks. She takes two steps, then two more. It’s when she reaches the entrance to the living room that she sees them in there, twenty feet away, the dogs, heads low, tails stiff, coarse black fur Mohawked up along their backs. Is it possible that the dogs have set an elaborate trap for them?

  “What’s wrong?” he asks, far too loud.

  The dogs growl. Their heads drop even lower.

  “Baa baa black sheep,” Mary whispers. “Bibi Netanyahu.” Maybe Wynn has changed the password. She hates him now more than ever. Her friends warned her about him. They’d heard strange things about him. Perverted things. According to a guy who used to work with him, he cheated on his wife constantly. He’d been with a hundred women. Probably his dick was contaminated, they said. At least make him wear a condom, they said.

  —

  Brooks can’t see the dogs, but he hears them now. His sister inches backward. He could probably make it to the pantry in time. But not Mary. He looks around the room for something that might help them. He sees the cordless phone on the wall behind him. Mary could call her friend for the safe command, and all this would be over.

  “Top of the fridge,” he whispers.

  “What?” She sneaks a look over her right shoulder.

  Brooks leans back for the phone as Mary lunges for the fridge. When he turns, she’s trying to use the ice dispenser as a foothold. The freezer door swings open. She slams it shut and scrambles up onto the soapstone counter. From there she pulls herself up onto the fridge. Brooks is not far behind her. Phone in hand, he flings himself onto the counter, belly first. He feels like a spider with all its legs ripped out. He’s having trouble getting up onto his knees. He reaches for a cabinet knob. One of the dogs locks onto his ankle, and he screams. He writhes, swinging the phone back and forth. When the phone connects with the dog’s head, he loses his grip on it and it goes clattering to the floor. But he’s free now. He’s able to clamber up beside his sister.

  The top of the fridge is covered in dust. They have to crouch to avoid hitting their heads on the ceiling.

  “You’re bleeding,” Mary says, bending down to his ankle.

  “Don’t bother with it now.” He looks down at the dogs, at their giant stinking faces. One dog is on the floor whimpering, and the other is pogoing up and down the front of the fridge, knocking loose all the photos and appointment cards. Its back paws come down on the phone and launch it sideways.

  “I dropped it,” Brooks says. “The phone. Sorry. We could have called your friend.”

  Mary is prodding at his ankle unscientifically. “Don’t worry about it. That wouldn’t have worked anyway.”

  “Why, he’s out of the country or something?”

  “Well—”

  “He doesn’t know we’re here,” Brooks says.

  His sister looks at him as if she were the one with the dog bite.

  —

  The night Wynn first brought out his video camera they were in Myrtle Beach, at his family’s vacation home. Mary listened to the waves through the open window as Wynn fiddled with a tape. Wynn with his blue eyes, the perfect gray streak in his long, windswept hair, the difficult marriage to his crazy pediatrician wife, who was hardly ever around. Then he told her to start playing with herself. Already she could anticipate the regret. Maybe that was part of the fun.

  Did she enjoy making the video? A little bit, sure. For the newness of it. But not for the sex itself. It didn’t even feel much like sex to her. It was like something else. She was a planet, way out in space, out of its orbit, and he was an unmanned spaceship, taking measurements of the atmosphere. She was not suitable for habitation. The pillowcases smelled like potato chips and sweat. She wondered if he’d even washed the sheets, if maybe this was one of the kids’ bedrooms. He smacked her bottom, and she almost laughed. It wasn’t risqué, it was silly.

  She broke off the affair a few weeks later, when he proposed a new video, this one in his bathroom at home. His wife was at work and the kids were at school. He already had the camera out.

  “Do you ever watch these later?” she asked.

  “Not really,” he said. “It’s not about that. Making them is what’s fun. It is fun, isn’t it?”

  She was in a white towel, examining the shower. There was blond hair trapped in the drain. His wife’s, no doubt. One of the drawers under the sink was halfway open, and she could see cotton swabs and a box of tampons. She opened the medicine cabinet and found three different kinds of antidepressants.

  “Not mine,” he said. “Let’s start with you in the shower. You ready?”

  She slipped back into her underwear and told him it was over.

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “I want the tape,” she said. “From the beach.”

  “I erased it. I always tape over them.”

  She left him half naked in the bathroom. Later, she wondered if she might have got the tape from him then if she’d only been a little more persistent. She thought about it constantly. At work, ringing people up, she lost track of the numbers. She spilled a box of rainbow sprinkles, and what should have been a ten-minute cleanup took her almost thirty.

  “You’ve got to get that tape,” her friends said. “What if he puts it online?”

  Online! She started visiting pornography sites, just in case. There were so many categories of sex. She couldn’t believe all the categories: Mature, POV, MILF, Amateur, Ex-Girlfriend. How might Wynn have categorized her?

  She called him and demanded the tape.

  “I already told you,” he said. “It doesn’t exist anymore.”

  “I’ll call the cops.”

  “Listen, if I had it I’d give it to you, but I don’t. You can’t just call me like this. I’m at work.”

  She imagined a locked desk drawer in his home study, a hundred tapes, each with a label, her name on one of them, the date, the location, the positions, the noises made, all of it charted out and diagrammed.

  This was her situation to fix. Wynn kept a key hidden under a rock on the back porch. She remembered that. All she had to do was wait for the right day, the right moment.

  —

  “And so you think he has the tape here,” Brooks says. “Somewhere in this house? And that’s why we broke in?”

  She nods.

  “You could have just told me,” he says.

  “You would have judged me.”

  “Sure, but only a little.”

  “Would you have gone along with it? If you’d known we were breaking into someone’s house?”

  “No, of course not,” he says. “I would have waited in the car.”

  She smiles at him, and he is relieved to see that it’s a real smile, without a trace of pity. “So where is Wynn now?” he asks. “How much time do we have?”

  “A few hours, maybe. They drove up to Chapel Hill for the day. His son’s looking at colleges.” She knows this because Wynn shares so much of his life online. When she was with him he was hardly ever without his phone.

  “If I had a sex ta
pe, I don’t think I’d keep it in the house for my wife to find.”

  “You don’t know Wynn.”

  The dogs have stopped barking. They sit patiently at the foot of the fridge. Brooks’s ankle throbs. He doesn’t know what to do next. If only he could curl up here and take a nap. But the dogs will never give up. They are trained to attack intruders, and that’s exactly what he and Mary are. They’re the intruders. He has broken into someone’s home. He needs a brick. Where’s his brick? Give him a brick.

  Brooks jumps, not over the dogs and toward the door but to their left. He lands on both feet and sprints back down the hall. The dogs follow. He’s the distraction, the bait. “Find it!” he yells back to Mary. He passes the pantry. Ahead of him is the grandfather clock. A blue Oriental rug shifts sideways as he turns left at the end of the hall. He runs up a wide staircase, hand on the rail, and at the top he sees that there are doors, three of them. They all look the same. It’s like a terrible game show. He grabs the knob of the middle door, but his fingers won’t grip right. “Some things will get better and others won’t,” Dr. Groom says, and Brooks will have to accept that.

  But it’s not his fingers, he realizes. The door is locked. He slings his shoulder into it with all his weight. Thankfully the lock is cheap and the door pops open.

  Closing it behind him, he finds himself in a room with hotpink walls decorated with gruesome movie posters. A stereo and a television barely fit on a small white desk beneath the window. In the dead, gray television screen, Brooks can see his warped reflection staring at him: his awful haircut, his skeletal face. Overhead, the ceiling fan spins. The bedspread moves.

  Moves? A tiny wiggle at the corner of his vision. An almost imperceptible change in the arrangement of wrinkles in the blanket. Like a scene from a horror movie.

  In the months after the accident, Brooks experienced what he now knows were mild hallucinations. At the hospital he became temporarily convinced that a family of goats had taken up residence under his bed. They had gray coats and black eyes, and at night they came out to lap water from the toilet. If Brooks called for help, the goats would scatter in all directions. Dr. Groom had explained that Brooks could no longer implicitly trust everything he saw and heard. What Brooks needed, he said, was a healthy dose of skepticism. If goats were ransacking his room, he was supposed to remember that it would be very tricky for a goat to get past the hospital’s front desk and take the elevator to the third floor. If the coatrack asked him for a grilled cheese, Brooks needed to remind himself that coatracks did not typically require human food, especially grilled cheese. If a bedspread sprang to life…

  He steps toward the bed. There are pillows piled at the head and foot. In the middle, under the bedspread, is a person-size lump. He watches it closely.

  “Who’s under there?” he asks.

  The lump is very still.

  “I’m trying to leave,” he says. “So don’t be afraid. All of this was a big mistake. Us being here, I mean. We know your dad. We got trapped. By your dogs.”

  The lump doesn’t move.

  “I’m Brooks. I’m not sure if you’re actually under there. Maybe I’m talking to nothing. I can get a little confused. I haven’t always been this way.” He steps toward the desk. “I’m moving your desk so I can go out the window. Your dogs want to eat me. So I’m going out the window. Sorry.” An apology to a ghost.

  He slides the desk toward the closet, everything on it rattling. A water glass topples over and the liquid rolls. He grabs a sock off the floor and sops it up before it reaches a closed laptop covered in pink monkey stickers. “I spilled some water,” he says, “and I had to use one of your socks. Sorry. Your laptop is fine, I think.” He gets the window open and pops out the screen, which lands below in some holly bushes. He sticks one leg out and straddles the sill. It’s a long way down, but not so far that he will necessarily break a bone. Still, this is probably going to hurt.

  “Ba baboon,” the lump says.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Say that to the dogs and they won’t attack you.”

  “So you’re really under there?”

  The lump doesn’t answer.

  “Thank you. That’s very kind. I’m Brooks.”

  “Yeah, you said that already.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be off with your family or something?”

  “I got out of it. Please go now.”

  “I hope you’re not just in my head,” he says, and goes to the door. “Because that would mean ba baboon is total nonsense, and I’m going to get bitten again.” The lump doesn’t answer. He’s about to turn the knob but stops. “By the way, just in case this ever happens again—”

  “God. Why haven’t you left yet?”

  “I will. I’m about to. But next time this happens you should really consider calling the police—or at least your parents.”

  The lump is quiet.

  “Just an idea,” Brooks adds.

  The lump sits up fast, the bedspread transformed into a mountain. “Look, my mom, like, stole my cell, all right?” the lump says. “And the only phone up here is all the way in my parents’ room, and it’s not like I had a ton of options, you know? I told you what to say, now go. Just get out of here.”

  Brooks isn’t sure what to say. He considers apologizing again.

  “Actually, I lied,” the lump says. “I did call the police. They’ll be here, like, any minute. You’re going to jail.”

  “Okay,” Brooks says, hand on the door. “I’m going.”

  —

  When Mary climbs down from the fridge, part of her just wants to leave and forget the tape. But she can’t do that. Brooks could be hurt upstairs. He could lose his way. He could trap himself in the linen closet and, in the dark, lose himself entirely.

  Until her brother’s accident, Mary never gave much thought to the idea that personalities may be not only malleable but also divisible from the self. There has to be more to us than memories and quirks that can get smashed away so easily. This raises questions of accountability. What part of her is accountable for her decisions if all that stands between Mary being Mary and not someone else is a simple bump on the head?

  Wandering down the hall in search of the tape, she finds a room with a computer on a mahogany desk and a leather chair on a clear plastic mat over the carpet. Wynn’s camera is on the chair, and in a metal tray beside the computer she finds a stack of small gray tapes. She can’t sort through them here. She’ll just have to take them all with her. She dumps out a bag of tangled cables, connectors, and startup disks and drops the tapes into the bag. Then she adds the camera, just in case.

  The hallway is quiet. Brooks is upstairs somewhere—and the dogs? At the bottom of the stairwell, she hears their nails. “Get out, Brooks!” she yells, and runs back the way she came, down the hall, past the grandfather clock and the pantry, into the kitchen, all of it so familiar now. She goes out the back door and into the yard, the sunlight on her face, a stultifying whiteness. One day she will forget everything, and there will be nothing left of her except…This. Whatever This is. Total erasure, maybe.

  She roams around the perimeter of the house, searching for any sign of Brooks up in the windows. She sees a popped-out screen in some bushes, but there’s no sign of Brooks up above in the window. On the front porch, she leans into a narrow window beside the door with her hands cupped around her eyes. Through the thin white curtain she can barely make out a table in the foyer, a painting on the wall above that, and the base of the wide staircase. She rings the doorbell three times, hears it echo in the house. She is about to abandon the porch when through the window she sees feet, then knees, then a torso. Brooks is striding down the stairs as if he owns the place.

  The dogs follow him, no longer vicious at all, their heavy dumb tongues lolling over sharp, crooked teeth. Her brother has tamed the beasts. The dead bolt clicks open, and there he is, framed in the doorway, her big brother.

  —

  The dog bite isn
’t deep enough to warrant a trip to the emergency room. “No more stitches,” he says. “Please.” Back at Mary’s, he takes a hot shower and lets the water trickle over his wound. Blood swirls around the drain. He towels off and wraps his ankle with gauze and then falls into a long nap on top of the covers. When he wakes up, it’s dark out. He does his exercises at the foot of the bed, then heads downstairs. In the den, the blinds are drawn and the television screen casts a blue light across the furniture. On the floor, stacks of gray tapes surround a video camera tethered to the television by a long cord.

  Brooks sits down cross-legged and brings the camera into his lap. He can hear Mary in the kitchen, rattling pots, preparing dinner. The tapes all look the same. He picks one off the top and pops it into the camera. When he pushes play, he keeps his finger on the button, just in case he’s presented with something no brother wants to see.

  Two lines squiggle across the screen, and then a patio appears, a concrete space bright with sunlight. The camera is bouncy in someone’s hand. Two kids are on the ground, dyeing Easter eggs in red Dixie cups. The boy, maybe twelve years old, gives an egg to his younger sister. Holding it between two fingers, she dips it in the cup.

  “Hey, I didn’t know you were awake,” Mary says, striding into the den in an apron. When she sees what he’s watching, she sighs and sits down beside him on the floor. They stare up at the television together.

  It’s been years, Brooks thinks, since he last saw this tape, but it’s all coming back to him now: their dye-stained fingertips, Easter eggs buried in the pine straw, the smell of the azalea bushes, his mother lounging in the yard with her Bible and People magazines.

  “Seems like yesterday that was us,” Mary says.

  The little girl on the screen knocks over the cup and colored water spills all over her dress, the blue dye splashed up across her chest. She faces the camera bewildered, looking for help or reassurance, maybe, and begins to cry.

  “We shouldn’t be watching this,” Mary says, and grabs the camera from Brooks’s lap. “It’s wrong. Do you think I should try to return this stuff? I feel awful about it. I guess I could leave it all on the doorstep.”