Hugo Awards: The Short Stories (Volume 2)

by Anthology

"Mother — "

  The oven timer sounds. Her mother stands.

  "Mother." She jumps up and grabs her mother's arm. "Mother, I can't eat now." Her mother looks startled. "You understand. It's upsetting. Not knowing. I have to call the hospital, okay?"

  "He said it wasn't anything important, honey."

  He lied all the time. "Don't forget your purse. We'll do this again. Thank you for everything." She propels her mother to the apartment door, through the lobby, to the building door.

  "Don't forget the hospital number — "

  She grabs it and shoves it in her pocket. "Thank you. I'll call. Goodbye!" The door slams in her mother's concerned face. Laura retreats three steps and shoves the inner door shut, stepping around where the end table used to keep her from Donald. She miscalculates. His bags are packed and he glowers without looking at her. "Bastard!" she screams at him. She thrashes the empty air, makes herself stop.

  She stands trembling in the wreckage of her protection, tidy rational apartment with nowhere to hide. Every chair and table, bit and piece has used her mother as its agent to find its way back to sinister order. Closing in on her.

  She has survived everything else. She will survive.

  She will leave the slip of paper wadded in her pocket.

  The chicken slowly turns to carbon in the oven.

  ###

  Ghosts.

  Frank lifts weights in the back room, in the corner once marked out with brown chalk. "You're a self-involved jerk," she shouts at him. "I don't know what I ever saw in you!" He clamps another weight on the bar and grins at her. "You don't think I can lift this? Ah, but you forget how you inspire me, oh beauteous one. Watch!"

  "I don't care!" She throws her glass through him. It shatters against the wall. Frank doesn't stop grinning. The bar bends under the weights' mass as he lifts it over his head.

  "What do I get for a reward?" he says, grunting the bar back down, reaching out —

  On the floor against the coffee table, Donald hunches, knee-hugging, in rare tears, his only tears. His father's death. Weeping, bruise-eyed, he reaches up for comfort —

  Eric is setting the dining-room table: it's roast goose, a sort of asparagus soufflé, German wine. She can almost taste it. Smiling, pleased with himself, he reaches out to pull her in to him —

  The shower is horrible: her mother threw out the hose she rigged to the other side of the tub, shaking her head, telling Laura she really should call a plumber if she can't deal with shower pipes. Laura can't bathe without Donald Frank Eric swirling around her with the water. She sponges her armpits, washes her hair in the bathroom sink, not looking up to see who is shaving in the mirror —

  She tries sleeping in her bed where it's been moved back. (Her mother threw out the mildewy mattress in the back room.) Donald makes love beside her. His lean torso moves slowly, sensually; sweat gleams along his smooth jaw; his broad hand reaches to stroke her hair. He whispers things she could barely hear the first time, can barely hear now. Nonsense.

  She turns her back, squeezes her eyes shut. Still the indecipherable murmuring. Gets up and takes two sleeping pills, jams the pillow down hard over her ears. Can't shut out the murmurs. Even the bed seems to rock, slowly, sensually —

  Sobbing with anger she drags the massive bed across the floor. It takes five long minutes to move it, gouging four broad pale lines in the floor. Her shoulders ache. Shake.

  The bed away from where Donald touched a girl who used to be Laura, she still can't sleep. The house murmurs with the hundred ghosts of three living men.

  Slip of paper wadded in her pocket.

  The workday seems infinite when she's in the office. She thinks she hears gossip behind her back. Nobody says more than hello except her supervisor, Bob, who lingering too long at her desk. His smug flirting brings bile to the back of her throat; she clenches her jaw until he moves on to the next woman. She routes forms, stacks and stacks of forms, trying to lose herself in the mindlessness of it. The routine is abysmal, the whispering unbearable, and the day goes on forever; and then she has to go home.

  To each infinite, unbearable night.

  ###

  Finally she calls the number on the lined paper.

  Eric is putting a big box of Godiva chocolates on the end table next to the telephone, bidding for her attention with another present. The phone rings twice on the other end.

  "Yes, could you tell me about your patient Eric Kennelly?"

  "I can connect you."

  Eric pulls away the chocolate box and points coyly to his lips.

  "No, I don't want to talk to him. I just want to know how he's doing. Could you tell me what he's being treated for?" She knows it's not AIDS — Eric was too clever, too controlled to forget any precautions — but she tells herself she has to be sure. It's only sensible.

  "I'm afraid that's not hospital policy, ma'am. I can connect you, if you like."

  He unbuttons two buttons, pulls away the shirt from one shoulder and balances a chocolate on his pale skin.

  "Ma'am?"

  She hangs up.

  An hour later she walks eight blocks to the car rental place and lays down her credit card.

  He didn't even leave her for another woman. He'd just been killing time in Chicago until he could wangle an assistant professorship at UW. She was something to do in the meantime. Hindsight. "Do you know how many PhD's in history are working in personnel, or selling insurance, or sweeping high schools? And this isn't some podunk college, either. This is my big break!" But he never asked if she'd move north with him. And was packed and gone before she could ask him.

  It's only a couple of hours drive to Madison, far too short. She has to stop at a gas station to find out where the hospital is. She circles it a couple times before she pulls in and parks near the Visitors sign.

  "It's probably not visiting hours," she says to the woman at the desk. "I can leave if it's the wrong time."

  "No, there's half an hour left." The woman smiles. "Who are you here to see?"

  "That's okay, I have his room number." 258. She can almost feel the number, burning her hand from the wad of paper. Into the elevator, down the hall to the right nearly to the end; she faces the door. Hand on the knob. Opens it.

  A wasted pale figure lies half-curled on a hospital bed. Tubes all over. It looks like nobody she's ever seen, barely like a human. The figure turns and opens Eric's gray-green eyes. "Laura. Well. What brings you by?"

  The door gapes open behind her, air blowing through it, chilling her as if she's naked. She closes it carefully.

  "I'll bet it's two weeks since I had a visitor." The voice is a rasping whisper, not Eric's soft tenor at all. He manages a lopsided sort of grin. "People get bored of watching a guy die. Can't blame them. Liver cancer's not a showbiz way to go."

  She is silent.

  "I knew you'd come eventually. You cut it close, though, hon."

  She stares at him. She can't let herself feel sorry for the sweet and lying Eric who haunts her days and nights, so she mustn't make this miserable stick-figure look like any Eric at all.

  Except the eyes. Hard not to look at the eyes.

  "Laura? You going to say anything?" The stick-man swallows painfully. "I feel like I'm being visited by a ghost. You didn't go and beat me to the other side, did you?" He laughs briefly, coughs at greater length. "Sorry. Gallows humor. My psychiatrist tells me it's normal."

  Just a stick-man, she tells herself. Something too big moves, like broken wings, inside her. All right! she thinks. Eric! Sick. Pitifully sick. But don't let him fool you again, don't let him —

  "Laura?"

  "Why did you call my mother? What do you want?"

  The stick-man blinks Eric's eyes. "I don't know. Nothing. Whatever. It's so damn boring, dying. To see if you were still as uptight as you ever were. Amazing — you're even more uptight."

  If she moves even an inch she'll be lost, he'll have won; in grief and sympathy and love she will do anything for him. She strugg
les to stand still, firm. So he'd be using her. Is that bad? Was he really just using her before?

  He grins again, a parody of the smile that used to be his best feature. "It's something to do." Why did you move in with me if you just expected to leave in four months? she had asked him, desperate, as his car backed down the driveway. It was something to do, he said, and drove away.

  "You never needed much reason," Laura says. She wonders if anesthetics linger in hospital air. Her heart beats slow and her body feels dull. Antiseptics must be stinging her eyes to tears. But she pushes down the crippled part inside her. Things die in hospitals.

  The stick-man frowns. "Laura — "

  "You knew how Donald and Frank hurt me, and you made it your little project to get me to trust you. Then you walked out." Something almost chokes her voice; she doesn't let it. "Kept things from being boring, I expect. I don't know. I've never been so bored I'd do that."

  The stick-man coughs, starts to speak, coughs again. Lopsided grin. "Is that any way to talk to a dying man?"

  "I don't give a shit what you do. You were the worst of the lot. I don't have a thing to say to you." She turns to leave, before the leaden anesthetic feeling weights her feet in place, before the broken parts inside her weigh her heart down. While she can still move.

  The stick-man rasps a sigh, presses his head back into his pillow. "Then why did you come all this way to see me?"

  Laura stops without looking back. "No reason at all." Not good enough. She turns — his deep, gray-green eyes — and has to force her prepared words out: "Just a little friendly advice."

  Deep breath: "Drop dead."

  She closes the door behind her with perfect silence.

  ###

  After her brilliant, cutting exit, what a shock to see Eric flush and laughing on the front stoop.

  "You're dying," she tells him, and at the dining-room table, and in the red chair, and in the back bedroom, and at the kitchen sink. "Just die." Eric laughs and shows her how he can (sloppily) wash with one hand and dry with the other. All she can do is run again.

  A week slides by.

  Hard as she tries, she can't forget Eric dying in the hospital, too pitiful for lasting hate. To keep hate fresh she visits all the really bad ghosts. They don't hurt as much as the happy ones, the loving ones, but she's always spent less time with them.

  In the back room with Donald: "If you had any sense you wouldn't have encouraged me to risk all my assets!" Mine too, she thought, but she's helpless against his hurt fury. "Flat broke and you think the wedding's still on? Give me the damn ring back and I'll at least have a thousand bucks to start a new life with." It isn't fair, but the ring clatters at his feet where she threw it at him. He picks it up without a word and stalks away; though she will wait for months for him to come to his senses, call her, apologize, he never does. Leaving her in debt, lonely, alone.

  The bedroom with Frank: "I've thought about it," he says. "I'm going back to my wife." Wife? He never mentioned a wife. She would never have been stupid enough to get involved with a married man. It was his two jobs and his eternal exercise that kept his visits so erratic. "Of course I never told you I was married — we were going to get a divorce. You didn't need to know." He's pulling on his pants, not looking at her. His skin damp with sweat from their lovemaking. "But Sheila's pregnant now. I can't leave her." Too stunned to move, the hair on her thighs drying stiffly, she had stared at him leaving.

  And Eric. Over and over, Eric. "We've had fun, Laura, but this is a job. My future. Don't get emotional over this, okay? It was fun."

  Harder to make these ghosts hurt than the happy ones. She wants the beautiful ghosts, for all she knows about them. These betrayers are strangers, strangers. She stares and stares at them.

  The same feeling she's ever had on betrayal: numb. Just numb.

  She doesn't miss the men who left. She misses ones she loves, and hates: the lovers who once stayed. If only they would go away now. Go away, leave her in peace.

  The pain stays.

  She thinks about what Eric said about beating him to the other side. She goes out the next Saturday, buys a tiny gun from a local pawn shop and contemplates it for a long hour, Frank sleeping at her elbow where the bed used to be two years ago. Contemplates it until the plastic pearl handle sticks warmly to her fingers. But death is a land of ghosts, and how is someone who can't manage the ghosts of life to manage all the ghosts of death?

  Or maybe she's just a coward.

  Unable to point it at her own head, she turns it on sleeping Frank.

  "Bang," she says. Frank snores softly.

  She crosses the room to where Donald is destroying the Venetian blind, futilely trying to rehang it. Aims. "Bang." The blind crashes to the floor and Donald, laughing, scoops it up. She walks into the living room and aims at the red overchair.

  Eric isn't there.

  Laura drops the gun. Somehow, it doesn't go off.

  Somehow, Eric isn't there.

  She approaches the chair slowly, afraid of things she can't guess at.

  Just a chair. Empty.

  She runs into the dining room, too fast to follow the side-to-side pattern, flashing past two Donalds and a Frank. Reaches the dining-room table.

  Empty.

  The back bedroom. The guest bed only ever shared with one person.

  Empty.

  The sink, where Donald or Frank never did dishes.

  Empty.

  Panicking, she runs outside to the front stoop. No roses wait for her there.

  Back to the chair. She rips off the cushion, looking for she doesn't know what. Shakes the empty chair. Shakes it shakes it shakes it. Wrenches the chair back and forth with hysteric echoing clatters.

  The phone rings. Laura jumps as though the gun were firing. She grips one velvet chair arm with each hand, presses her forehead into the back of the chair, breathes deeply. The phone keeps ringing. Trembling, she picks up the receiver.

  "Ms. Hampton?" asks a strange voice. Not Eric. Not Eric.

  "Yes?" Her voice is a squeak. She tries again. "Yes."

  "I'm sorry to bother you. My name's Bill Chang. You don't know me. I was Eric Kennelly's roommate."

  "Yes?"

  "Um, well, your name is on this list he wanted me to call when — Ms. Hampton, I'm calling to tell you he passed away this afternoon."

  "Yes."

  "Um, I'm sorry to have to tell you this like this. I wish we could talk, but he's got all these cousins, and he really wanted me to make all these calls — "

  "Yes."

  "I know this is a terrible thing to hear from a stranger — "

  "When did it happen?"

  "What? Oh, I'm sorry. Less than an hour ago. I just talked to his parents. Do you want to know when the funeral is?"

  "No. Thank you, Mr. Chang. Goodbye."

  She hangs up the phone. The red chair is a little out of place. She replaces the cushion and pushes the chair gently to its proper bit of wall. Sits in it. So comfortable. So empty.

  The little pawnshop gun lies at her foot. She picks it up and wipes cold sweat from its handle. It really is a nice little gun; it fits sweetly in her hand.

  Sitting in the empty red chair with the sweet little gun feels better than she's felt in a year. Longer. She shuts her eyes and luxuriates in the wonder of having a third of her home back to herself. No more paper plates — she can use the sink. She can eat at the table. She can sleep on the guest bed. Reborn possibilities warm her, spread from her heart to tingle in every limb, flow through her hand to warm the sweet little gun.

  Later she picks up the phone and dials a memorized number she's never phoned before.

  "Mrs. Prescott?" she says pleasantly. "Hi. You don't know me. I'm an old friend of your husband Frank's. Could you tell him I've run into a few old things of his around my place I'd like him to come pick up? — Whenever's convenient. Thanks so much."

  She stretches back in the red overchair, listening to Mrs. Prescott telling her when Fra
nk can come over, right hand wrapped comfortably around warm plastic grip.

  "Yes, that'll be a big help." Laura smiles. "I'm just trying to clear out the house."

  EVEN THE QUEEN

  Connie Willis

  The phone sang as I was looking over the defense's motion to dismiss. "It's the universal ring," my law clerk Bysshe said, reaching for it. "It's probably the defendant. They don't let you use signatures from jail."

  "No, it's not," I said. "It's my mother."

  "Oh." Bysshe reached for the receiver. "Why isn't she using her signature?"

  "Because she knows I don't want to talk to her. She must have found out what Perdita's done."

  "Your daughter Perdita?" he asked, holding the receiver against his chest. "The one with the little girl?"

  "No, that's Viola. Perdita's my younger daughter. The one with no sense."

  "What's she done?"

  "She's joined the Cyclists."

  Bysshe looked enquiringly blank, but I was not in the mood to enlighten him. Or in the mood to talk to Mother. "I know exactly what Mother will say. She'll ask me why I didn't tell her, and then she'll demand to know what I'm going to do about it, and there is nothing I can do about it, or I obviously would have done it already."

  Bysshe looked bewildered. "Do you want me to tell her you're in court?"

  "No." I reached for the receiver. "I'll have to talk to her sooner or later." I took it from him. "Hello, Mother," I said.

  "Traci," Mother said dramatically, "Perdita has become a Cyclist."

  "I know."

  "Why didn't you tell me?"

  "I thought Perdita should tell you herself."

  "Perdita!" She snorted. "She wouldn't tell me. She knows what I'd have to say about it. I suppose you told Karen."

  "Karen's not here. She's in Iraq." The only good thing about this whole debacle was that thanks to Iraq's eagerness to show it was a responsible world community member and its previous penchant for self-destruction, my mother-in-law was in the one place on the planet where the phone service was bad enough that I could claim I'd tried to call her but couldn't get through, and she'd have to believe me.

  The Liberation has freed us from all sorts of indignities and scourges, including Iraq's Saddams, but mothers-in-law aren't one of them, and I was almost happy with Perdita for her excellent timing. When I didn't want to kill her.