The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Nine

by Jonathan Strahan

Abba arrived before she could finish. He stood in the doorway with his shoulders hunched, his eyes averted from the Image of his dead wife. “Breakfast is ready,” he said. He lingered for a moment before turning away.

  AFTER BREAKFAST, ABBA went outside to scrape ice off of the truck.

  They drove into town once a week for supplies. Until last year, they’d always gone on Sundays, after Shabbat. Now they went on Fridays before Mara’s appointments and then hurried to get home before sunset.

  Outside, snowflakes whispered onto the hard-pack. Mara pulled her knitted hat over her ears, but her cheeks still smarted from the cold. She rubbed her gloved hands together for warmth before attaching Abel’s leash. The old dog seemed to understand what her crutches were. Since she’d started using them, he’d broken his lifelong habit of yanking on the strap and learned to walk daintily instead, placing each paw with care.

  Abba opened the passenger door so that Abel could clamber into the back of the cab. He fretted while Mara leaned her crutches on the side of the truck and pulled herself into the seat. He wanted to help, she knew, but he was stopping himself. He knew she hated being reminded of her helplessness.

  He collected her crutches when she was done and slung them into the back with Abel before taking his place in the driver’s seat. Mara stared silently forward as he turned the truck around and started down the narrow driveway. The four-wheel-drive jolted over uneven snow, shooting pain through Mara’s bad leg.

  “Need to fix the suspension,” Abba grumbled.

  Because Abba was a tinkerer, everything was always broken. Before Mara was born, he’d worked for the government. These days, he consulted on refining manufacturing processes. He felt that commercial products were shoddily designed and so he was constantly trying to improve their household electronics, leaving his dozens of half-finished home projects disassembled for months while all the time swearing to take on new ones.

  The pavement smoothed out as they turned onto a county-maintained road. Piles of dirty snow lined its sides. Bony trees dotted the landscape, interspersed with pines still wearing red bows from Christmas.

  Mara felt as though the world were caught in a frozen moment, preserved beneath the snow. Nothing would ever change. No ice would melt. No birds would return to the branches. There would be nothing but blizzards and long, dark nights and snow-covered pines.

  Mara wasn’t sure she believed in G-d, but on her better days, she felt at peace with the idea of pausing, as if she were one of the dancers on Ima’s DVDs, halted mid-leap.

  Except she wouldn’t pause. She’d be replaced by that thing. That doll. She glanced at her father. He stared fixedly at the road, grumbling under his breath in a blend of languages. He hadn’t bought new clothes since losing so much weight, and the fabric of his coat fell in voluminous folds across the seat.

  He glanced sideways at Mara watching him. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” Mara muttered, looking away.

  Abel pushed his nose into her shoulder. She turned in her seat to scratch between his ears. His tail thumped, tick, tock, like a metronome.

  THEY PARKED BESIDE the grocery. The small building’s densely packed shelves were reassuringly the same year in and year out except for the special display mounted at the front of the store. This week it showcased red-wrapped sausages, marked with a cheerful, handwritten sign.

  Gerry stood on a ladder in the center aisle, restocking cereals. He beamed as they walked in.

  “Ten-thirty to the minute!” he called. “Good morning, my punctual Jewish friends!”

  Gerry had been slipping down the slope called being hard of hearing for years now. He pitched his voice as if he were shouting across a football field.

  “How is my little adult?” he asked Mara. “Are you forty today, or is it fifty?”

  “Sixty-five,” Mara said. “Seventy tomorrow.”

  “Such an old child,” Gerry said, shaking his head. “Are you sure you didn’t steal that body?”

  Abba didn’t like those kinds of jokes. He used to worry that they would make her self-conscious; now he hated them for bringing up the subject of aging. Flatly, he replied, “Children in our family are like that. There is nothing wrong with her.”

  Mara shared an eye roll with the grocer.

  “Never said there was,” Gerry said. Changing the subject, he gestured at Mara’s crutches with a box of cornflakes. “You’re an athlete on those. I bet there’s nothing you can’t do with them.”

  Mara forced a smile. “They’re no good for dancing.”

  He shrugged. “I used to know a guy in a wheelchair. Out-danced everyone.”

  “Not ballet, though.”

  “True,” Gerry admitted, descending the ladder. “Come to the counter. I’ve got something for you.”

  Gerry had hardly finished speaking before Abel forgot about being gentle with Mara’s crutches. He knew what Gerry’s gifts meant. The lead wrenched out of Mara’s hand. She chased after him, crutches clicking, but even with his aging joints, the dog reached the front counter before Mara was halfway across the store.

  “Wicked dog,” Gerry said in a teasing tone as he caught Abel’s leash. He scratched the dog between the ears and then bent to grab a package from under the counter. “Sit,” he said. “Beg.” The old dog rushed to do both. Gerry unwrapped a sausage and tossed it. Abel snapped and swallowed.

  Mara finished crossing the aisle. She leaned against the front counter. She tried to conceal her heavy breathing, but she knew that her face must be flushed. Abba waited at the edges of her peripheral vision, his arms stretched in Mara’s direction as if he expected her to collapse.

  Gerry glanced between Mara and her father, assessing the situation. Settling on Mara, he tapped a stool behind the counter. “You look wiped. Take a load off. Your dad and I can handle ourselves.”

  “Yes, Mara,” Abba said quickly. “Perhaps you should sit.”

  Mara glared. “Abba.”

  “I’m sorry,” Abba said, looking away. He added to Gerry, “She doesn’t like help.”

  “No help being offered. I just want some free work. You up for manning the register?” Gerry tapped the stool again. “I put aside one of those strawberry things you like. It’s under the counter. Wrapped in pink paper.”

  “Thanks,” Mara said, not wanting to hurt Gerry’s feelings by mentioning that she couldn’t eat before appointments. She went behind the counter and let Gerry hold her crutches while she pulled herself onto the stool. She hated how good it felt to sit.

  Gerry nodded decisively. “Come on,” he said, leading Abba toward the fresh fruit.

  Abba and Gerry made unlikely friends. Gerry made no bones about being a charismatic evangelical. During the last election, he’d put up posters saying that Democratic voters were headed to hell. In return, Abba had suggested that Republican voters might need a punch in the jaw, especially any Republican voters who happened to be standing in front of him. Gerry responded that he supported free speech as much as any other patriotic American, but speech like that could get the H-E-double-hockey-sticks out of his store. They shouted. Gerry told Abba not to come back. Abba said he wouldn’t even buy dog food from fascists.

  The next week, Gerry was waiting on the sidewalk with news about a kosher supplier, and Mara and Abba went in as if nothing had ever happened.

  Before getting sick, Mara had always followed the men through the aisles, joining in their arguments about pesticides and free-range chickens. Gerry liked to joke that he wished his children were as interested in the business as Mara was. Maybe I’ll leave the store to you instead of them, he’d say, jostling her shoulder. He had stopped saying that.

  Mara slipped the wrapped pastry out from under the counter. She broke it into halves and hid one in each pocket, hoping Gerry wouldn’t see the lumps when they left. She left the empty paper on the counter, dusted with the crumbs.

  An activity book lay next to where the pastry had been. It was for little kids, but Mara pulled it out anyway
. Gerry’s children were too old to play with things like that now, but he still kept an array of diversions under the counter for when customers’ kids needed to be kept busy. It was better to do something than nothing. Armed with the felt-tip pen that was clipped to the cover, she began to flip through pages of half-colored drawings and connect-the-dots.

  A few aisles over, near the butcher counter, she heard her father grumbling. She looked up and saw Gerry grab Abba’s shoulder. As always, he was speaking too loudly. His voice boomed over the hum of the freezers. “I got in the best sausages on Wednesday,” he said. “They’re kosher. Try them. Make them for your, what do you call it, sadbath.”

  By then, Gerry knew the word, but it was part of their banter.

  “Shabbat,” Abba corrected.

  Gerry’s tone grew more serious. “You’re losing too much weight. A man needs meat.”

  Abba’s voice went flat. “I eat when I am hungry. I am not hungry so much lately.”

  Gerry’s grip tightened on Abba’s shoulder. His voice dropped. “Jakub, you need to take care of yourself.”

  He looked back furtively at Mara. Flushing with shame, she dropped her gaze to the activity book. She clutched the pen tightly, pretending to draw circles in a word search.

  “You have to think about the future,” said Gerry. His voice lowered even further. Though he was finally speaking at a normal volume, she still heard every word. “You aren’t the one who’s dying.”

  Mara’s flush went crimson. She couldn’t tell if it was shame or anger – all she felt was cold, rigid shock. She couldn’t stop herself from sneaking a glance at Abba. He, too, stood frozen. Neither of them ever said it. It was a game of avoidance they played together.

  Abba pulled away from Gerry and started down the aisle. His face looked numb rather than angry. He stopped at the counter, looking at everything but Mara. He took Abel’s leash and gestured for Mara to get off of the stool. “We’ll be late for your appointment,” he said, even though it wasn’t even eleven o’clock. In a louder voice, he added, “Ring up our cart, would you, Gerry? We’ll pick up our bags on our way out of town.”

  MARA DIDN’T LIKE Doctor Pinsky. Abba liked him because he was Jewish even though he was American-born reform with a degree from Queens. He wore his hair close-cut but it looked like it would Jew ’fro if he grew it out.

  He kept his nails manicured. His teeth shone perfectly white. He never looked directly at Mara when he spoke. Mara suspected he didn’t like children much. Maybe you needed to be that way if you were going to watch the sick ones get worse.

  The nurses were all right. Grace and Nicole, both blonde and a bit fat. They didn’t understand Mara since she didn’t fit their idea of what kids were supposed to be like. She didn’t talk about pop or interactives. When there were other child patients in the waiting room, she ignored them.

  When the nurses tried to introduce her to the other children anyway, Mara said she preferred to talk to adults, which made them hmm and flutter. Don’t you have any friends, honey? Nicole had asked her once, and Mara answered that she had some, but they were all on attic space. A year ago, if Mara had been upset, she’d have gone into a-space to talk to her best friend, Collin, but more and more as she got sick, she’d hated seeing him react to her withering body, hated seeing the fright and pity in his eyes. The thought of going back into attic space made her nauseous.

  Grace and Nicole gave Mara extra attention because they felt sorry for her. Modern cancer treatments had failed to help and now Mara was the only child patient in the clinic taking chemotherapy. It’s hard on little bodies, said Grace. Heck, it’s hard on big bodies, too.

  Today it was Grace who came to meet Mara in the waiting room, pushing a wheelchair. Assuming it was for another patient, Mara started to gather her crutches, but Grace motioned for her to stay put. “Let me treat you like a princess.”

  “I’m not much of a princess,” Mara answered, immediately realizing from the pitying look on Grace’s face that it was the wrong thing to say. To Grace, that would mean she didn’t feel like a princess because she was sick, rather than that she wasn’t interested in princesses.

  “I can walk,” Mara protested, but Grace insisted on helping her into the wheelchair anyway. She hadn’t realized how tightly Abba was holding her hand until she pulled it free.

  Abba stood to follow them. Grace turned back. “Would you mind staying? Doctor Pinsky wants to talk to you.”

  “I like to go with Mara,” Abba said.

  “We’ll take good care of her.” Grace patted Mara’s shoulder. “You don’t mind, do you, princess?”

  Mara shrugged. Her father shifted uncertainly. “What does Doctor Pinsky want?”

  “He’ll be out in a few minutes,” said Grace, deflecting. “I’m sorry, Mr. Morawski. You won’t have to wait long.”

  Frowning, Abba sat again, fingers worrying the collar of his shirt. Mara saw his conflicting optimism and fear, all inscribed plainly in his eyes, his face, the way he sat. She didn’t understand why he kept hoping. Even before they’d tried the targeted immersion therapy and the QTRC regression, she’d known that they wouldn’t work. She’d known from the moment when she saw the almost imperceptible frown cross the diagnostician’s face when he asked about the pain she’d been experiencing in her knee for months before the break. Yes, she’d said, it had been worse at night, and his brow had darkened, just for an instant. Maybe she’d known even earlier than that, in the moment just after she fell in Ima’s studio, when she realized with strange, cold clarity that something was very wrong.

  Bad news didn’t come all at once. It came in successions. Cancer is present. Metastasis has occurred. The tumors are unresponsive. The patient’s vitals have taken a turn for the worse. We’re sorry to say, we’re sorry to say, we’re sorry to say.

  Grace wheeled Mara toward the back, maintaining a stream of banal, cheerful chatter, remarks about the weather and questions about the holidays and jokes about boys. Mara deflected. She wasn’t ever going to have a boyfriend, not the way Grace was teasing her about. Adolescence was like spring, one more thing buried in endless snow.

  MARA FELT EXHAUSTED as they pulled into the driveway. She didn’t have the energy to push Abba away when he came around the truck to help her down. Mara leaned heavily on her father’s arm as they crunched their way to the front door.

  She vomited in the entryway. Abel came to investigate. She pushed his nose away while Abba went to get the mop. The smell made her even more nauseated and so when Abba returned, she left him to clean up. It made her feel guilty, but she was too tired to care.

  She went to the bathroom to wash out her mouth. She tried not to catch her eye in the mirror, but she saw her reflection anyway. She felt a shock of alienation from the thin, sallow face. It couldn’t be hers.

  She heard Abba in the hallway, grumbling at Abel in Yiddish. Wan, late afternoon light filtered through the windows, foreshadowing sunset. A few months ago, she and Abba would have been rushing to cook and clean before Shabbat. Now no one cleaned and Mara left Abba to cook alone as she went into Ima’s studio.

  She paused by the barre before sitting, already worried about how difficult it would be to get up again. “I want to watch Coppélia,” she said. The AI whirred.

  Coppélia began with a young woman reading on a balcony – except she wasn’t really a young woman, she was actually an automaton constructed by the mad scientist, Dr. Coppélius. The dancer playing Coppélia pretended to read from a red leather book. Mara told the AI to fast-forward to Ima’s entrance.

  Mara’s mother was dancing the part of the peasant girl, Swanhilde. She looked nothing like the dancer playing Coppélia. Ima was strong, but also short and compact, where Coppélia was tall with visible muscle definition in her arms and legs.

  Yet later in the ballet, none of the other characters would be able to tell them apart. Mara wanted to shake them into sense. Why couldn’t they tell the difference between a person and a doll?

 
ABBA LIT THE candles and began the prayer, waving his hands through the smoke. They didn’t have an adult woman to read the prayers and Abba wouldn’t let Mara do it while she was still a child. Soon, he used to say, after your bat mitzvah. Now he said nothing.

  They didn’t celebrate Shabbat properly. They followed some traditions – tonight they’d leave the lights on, and tomorrow they’d eat cold food instead of cooking – but they did not attend services. If they needed to work then they worked. As a family, they had always been observant in some ways and relaxed in others; they were not the kind who took well to following rules. Abba sometimes seemed to believe in Hashem and at other times not, though he believed in rituals and tradition. Still, before Mara had become ill, they’d taken more care with halakha.

  As Abba often reminded her, Judaism taught that survival was more important than dogma. Pikuach nefesh meant that a hospital could run electricity that powered a machine that kept a man alive. A family could work to keep a woman who had just given birth comfortable and healthy.

  Perhaps other people wouldn’t recognize the exceptions that Mara and her father made from Shabbat as being matters of survival, but they were. They were using all they had just by living. Not much remained for G-d.

  The long window over the kitchen counters let through the dimming light as violet and ultramarine seeped across the horizon. The tangerine sun lingered above the trees, preparing to descend into scratching, black branches. Mara’s attention drifted as he said Kiddush over the wine.

  They washed their hands. Abba tore the challah. He gave a portion to Mara. She let it sit.

  “The fish is made with ginger,” Abba said. “Would you like some string beans?”

  “My mouth hurts,” Mara said.

  Abba paused, the serving plate still in his hands.

  She knew that he wouldn’t eat unless she did. “I’ll have a little,” she added softly.

  She let him set the food on her plate. She speared a single green bean and stared at it for a moment before biting. Everything tasted like metal after the drugs.