The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

by Laura Furman

  When Ophelia came back at five, she had her hair in a ponytail and a flashlight and a thermos in her pocket, like she thought she was Nancy Drew.

  “It gets dark up here so early,” Ophelia said. “I feel like it’s Halloween or something. Like you’re taking me to the haunted house.”

  “They ain’t haints,” Fran said. “Nor demons or any such thing. They don’t do no harm unless you get on the wrong side of them. They’ll play a prank on you then, and count it good fun.”

  “Like what?” Ophelia said.

  “Once I did the warshing up and broke a teacup,” Fran said. “They’ll sneak up and pinch you.” She still had marks on her arms, though she hadn’t broken a plate in years. “Lately, they’ve been doing what all the people up here like to do, that reenacting. They set up their battlefield in the big room downstairs. It’s not the War Between the States. It’s one of theirs, I guess. They built themselves airships and submersibles and mechanical dragons and knights and all manner of wee toys to fight with. Sometimes, when they get bored, they get me up to be their audience, only they ain’t always careful where they go pointing their cannons.”

  She looked at Ophelia and saw she’d said too much. “Well, they’re used to me. They know I don’t have no choice but to put up with their ways.”

  That afternoon, she’d had to drive over to Chattanooga to visit a particular thrift store. They’d sent her for a used DVD player and all the bathing suits she could buy up. Between that and paying for gas, she’d gone through seventy dollars. And the service light had been on the whole way. At least it hadn’t been a school day. Hard to explain you were cutting out because voices in your head were telling you they needed a saddle.

  She’d gone on ahead and brought it all up to the house after. No need to bother Ophelia with any of it. The iPod had been a-laying right in front of the door.

  “Here,” she said. “I went ahead and brought this back down.”

  “My iPod!” Ophelia said. She turned it over. “They did this?”

  The iPod was heavier now. It had a little walnut case instead of pink silicone, and there was a figure inlaid in ebony and gilt.

  “A dragonfly,” Ophelia said.

  “A snake doctor,” Fran said. “That’s what my daddy calls them.”

  “They did this for me?”

  “They’d embellish a Bedazzled jean jacket if you left it there,” Fran said. “No lie. They can’t stand to leave a thing alone.”

  “Cool,” Ophelia said. “Although my mom is never going to believe me when I say I bought it at the mall.”

  “Just don’t take up anything metal,” Fran said. “No earrings, not even your car keys. Or you’ll wake up and they’ll have smelted them down and turned them into doll armor or who knows what all.”

  They took off their shoes when they got to where the road crossed the drain. The water was cold with the last of the snow-melt. Ophelia said, “I feel like I ought to have brought a hostess gift.”

  “You could pick them a bunch of wildflowers,” Fran said. “But they’d be just as happy with a bit of kyarn.”

  “Yarn?” Fran said.

  “Roadkill,” Fran said. “But yarn’s okay too.”

  Ophelia thumbed the wheel of her iPod. “There’s songs on here that weren’t here before.”

  “They like music, too,” Fran said. “They like it when I sing.”

  “What you were saying about going out to San Francisco to busk,” Ophelia said. “I can’t imagine doing that.”

  “Well,” Fran said. “I won’t ever do it, but I think I can imagine it okay.”

  When they got up to the house, there were deer grazing on the green lawn. The living tree and the dead were all touched with the last of the sunlight. Chinese lanterns hung in rows from the rafters of the porch.

  “You always have to come at the house from between the trees,” Fran said. “Right on the path. Otherwise, you don’t get nowhere near it. And I don’t ever use but the back door.”

  She knocked at the back door. BE BOLD, BE BOLD. “It’s me again,” she said. “And my friend Ophelia. The one who left the iPod.”

  She saw Ophelia open her mouth and went on, hastily, “Don’t say it, Ophelia. They don’t like it when you thank them. They’re allergic to that word. Come on in. Mi casa es su casa. I’ll give you the grand tour.”

  They stepped over the threshold, Fran first.

  “There’s the pump room out back, where I do the wash,” she said. “There’s a big ole stone oven for baking in, and a pig pit, although why I don’t know. They don’t eat meat. But you prob’ly don’t care about that.”

  “What’s in this room?” Ophelia said.

  “Hunh,” Fran said. “Well, first, it’s a lot of junk. They just like to accumulate junk. Way back in there, though, is what I think is a queen.”

  “A queen?”

  “Well, that’s what I call her. You know how, in a beehive, way down in the combs, you have the queen, and all the worker bees attend on her?

  “Far as I can tell, that’s what’s in there. She’s real big and not real pretty, and they are always running in and out of there with food for her. I don’t think she’s teetotally growed up yet. For a while now, I’ve been thinking on what my momma said, about how maybe these summer people got sent off. Bees do that too, right? Go off and make a new hive when there are too many queens?”

  “Honestly?” Ophelia said. “It sounds kind of creepy.”

  “The queen’s where my daddy gets his liquor, and she don’t bother him none. They have some kind of still set up in there, and every once in a while when he ain’t feeling too religious, he goes in and skims off a little bitty bit. It’s awful sweet stuff.”

  “Are they, uh, are they listening to us right now?”

  In response came a series of clicks from the War Room.

  Ophelia jumped. “What’s that?” she said.

  “Remember I told you ’bout the reenactor stuff?” Fran said. “Don’t get freaked out. It’s pretty cool.”

  She gave Ophelia a little push into the War Room.

  Of all the rooms in the house, this one was Fran’s favorite, even if they dive-bombed her sometimes with the airships, or fired off the cannons without much thought for where she was standing. The walls were beaten tin and copper, scrap metal held down with two-penny nails. Molded forms lay on the floor representing scaled-down mountains, forests, and plains where miniature armies fought desperate battles. There was a kiddie pool over by the big picture window with a machine in it that made waves. There were little ships and submersibles, and occasionally one of the ships sank, and bodies would go floating over to the edges. There was a sea serpent made of tubing and metal rings that swam endlessly in a circle. There was a sluggish river, too, closer to the door, that ran red and stank and stained the banks. The summer people were always setting up miniature bridges over it, then blowing the bridges up.

  Overhead were the fantastic shapes of the dirigibles, and the dragons that were hung on string and swam perpetually through the air above your head. There was a misty globe, too, suspended in some way that Fran could not figure, and lit by some unknown source. It stayed up near the painted ceiling for days at a time, and then sunk down behind the plastic sea according to some schedule of the summer people’s.

  “It’s amazing,” Ophelia said. “Once I went to the house of some friend of my father’s. An anesthesiologist? He had a train set down in his basement and it was crazy complicated. He would die if he saw this.”

  “Over there is a queen, I think,” Fran said. “All surrounded by her knights. And here’s another one, much smaller. I wonder who won, in the end.”

  “Maybe it’s not been fought yet,” Ophelia said. “Or maybe it’s being fought right now.”

  “Could be,” Fran said. “I wish there was a book told you everything that went on. Come on. I’ll show you the room you can sleep in.”

  They went up the stairs. BE BOLD, BE BOLD, BUT NOT TOO BOLD. The m
oss carpet on the second floor was already looking a little worse for wear. “Last week I spent a whole day scrubbing these boards on my hands and knees. So, of course, they need to go next thing and pile up a bunch of dirt and stuff. They won’t be the ones who have to pitch in and clean it up.”

  “I could help,” Ophelia said. “If you want.”

  “I wasn’t asking for help. But if you offer, I’ll accept. The first door is the washroom,” Fran said. “Nothing queer about the toilet. I don’t know about the bathtub, though. Never felt the need to sit in it.”

  She opened the second door.

  “Here’s where you sleep.”

  It was a gorgeous room, all done up in shades of orange and rust and gold and pink and tangerine. The walls were finished in leafy shapes and vines cut from all kinds of dresses and T-shirts and what have you. Fran’s momma had spent the better part of a year going through stores, choosing clothes for their patterns and textures and colors. Gold-leaf snakes and fishes swam through the leaf shapes. When the sun came up in the morning, Fran remembered, it was almost blinding.

  There was a crazy quilt on the bed, pink and gold. The bed itself was shaped like a swan. There was a willow chest at the foot of the bed to lay out your clothes on. The mattress was stuffed with the down of crow feathers. Fran had helped her mother shoot the crows and pluck their feathers. She thought they’d killed about a hundred.

  “I’d say wow,” Ophelia said, “but I keep saying that. Wow, wow, wow. This is a crazy room.”

  “I always thought it was like being stuck inside a bottle of orange Nehi,” Fran said. “But in a good way.”

  “Oh yeah,” Ophelia said. “I can see that.”

  There was a stack of books on the table beside the bed. Like everything else in the room, all the books had been picked out for the colors on their jackets. Fran’s momma had told her that once the room had been another set of colors. Greens and blues, maybe? Willow and peacock and midnight colors? And who had brought the bits up for the room that time? Fran’s great-grandfather or someone even farther along the family tree? Who had first begun to take care of the summer people? Her mother had doled out stories sparingly, and so Fran only had a piecemeal sort of history.

  Hard to figure out what it would please Ophelia to hear anyway, and what would trouble her. All of it seemed pleasing and troubling to Fran in equal measure after so many years.

  “The door you slipped my envelope under,” she said, finally. “You oughtn’t ever go in there.”

  Ophelia yawned. “Like Bluebeard,” she said.

  Fran said, “It’s how they come and go. Even they don’t open that door very often, I guess.” She’d peeped through the keyhole once and seen a bloody river. She’d bet if you passed through that door, you weren’t likely to return.

  “Can I ask you another stupid question?” Ophelia said. “Where are they right now?”

  “They’re here,” Fran said. “Or out in the woods chasing nightjars. I told you I don’t see them much.”

  “So how do they tell you what they need you to do?”

  “They get in my head,” Fran said. “I guess it’s kind of like being schizophrenic. Or like having a really bad itch or something that goes away when I do what they want me to.”

  “Not fun,” Ophelia said. “Maybe I don’t like your summer people as much as I thought I did.”

  Fran said, “It’s not always awful. I guess what it is, is complicated.”

  “I guess I won’t complain the next time my mom tells me I have to help her polish the silver, or do useless crap like that. Should we eat our sandwiches now, or should we save them for when we wake up in the middle of the night?” Ophelia asked. “I have this idea that seeing your heart’s desire probably makes you hungry.”

  “I can’t stay,” Fran said, surprised. She saw Ophelia’s expression and said, “Well, hell. I thought you understood. This is just for you.”

  Ophelia continued to look at her dubiously. “Is it because there’s just the one bed? I could sleep on the floor. You know, if you’re worried I might be planning to lez out on you.”

  “It isn’t that,” Fran said. “They only let a body sleep here once. Once and no more.”

  “You’re really going to leave me up here alone?” Ophelia said.

  “Yes,” Fran said. “Unless you decide you want to come back down with me. I guess I’d understand if you did.”

  “Could I come back again?” Ophelia said.

  “No.”

  Ophelia sat down on the golden quilt and smoothed it with her fingers. She chewed her lip, not meeting Fran’s eye.

  “Okay. I’ll do it.” She laughed. “How could I not do it? Right?”

  “If you’re sure,” Fran said.

  “I’m not sure, but I couldn’t stand it if you sent me away now,” Ophelia said. “When you slept here, were you afraid?”

  “A little,” Fran said. “But the bed was comfortable, and I kept the light on. I read for a while, and then I fell asleep.”

  “Did you see your heart’s desire?” Ophelia said.

  “I guess I did,” Fran offered, and then said no more.

  “Okay, then,” Ophelia said. “I guess you should go. You should go, right?”

  “I’ll come back in the morning,” Fran said. “I’ll be here afore you even wake.”

  “Thanks,” Ophelia said.

  But Fran didn’t go. She said, “Did you mean it when you said you wanted to help?”

  “Look after the house?” Ophelia said. “Yeah, absolutely. You really ought to go out to San Francisco someday. You shouldn’t have to stay here your whole life without ever having a vacation or anything. I mean, you’re not a slave, right?”

  “I don’t know what I am,” Fran said. “I guess one day I’ll have to figure that out.”

  Ophelia said, “Anyway, we can talk about it tomorrow. Over breakfast. You can tell me about the suckiest parts of the job and I’ll tell you what my heart’s desire turns out to be.”

  “Oh,” Fran said. “I almost forgot. When you wake up tomorrow, don’t be surprised if they’ve left you a gift. The summer people. It’ll be something that they think you need or want. But you don’t have to accept it. You don’t have to worry about being rude that way.”

  “Okay,” Ophelia said. “I will consider whether I really need or want my present. I won’t let false glamour deceive me.”

  “Good,” Fran said. Then she bent over Ophelia where she was sitting on the bed and kissed her on the forehead. “Sleep well, Ophelia. Good dreams.”

  Fran left the house without any interference from the summer people. She couldn’t tell if she’d expected to find any. As she came down the stairs, she said rather more fiercely than she’d meant to: “Be nice to her. Don’t play no tricks.” She looked in on the queen, who was molting again.

  She went out the front door instead of the back, which was something that she’d always wanted to do. Nothing bad happened, and she walked down the hall feeling strangely put out. She went over everything in her head, wondering what still needed doing that she hadn’t done. Nothing, she decided. Everything was taken care of.

  Except, of course, it wasn’t. The first thing was the guitar, leaned up against the door of her house. It was a beautiful instrument. The strings, she thought, were pure silver. When she struck them, the tone was pure and sweet and reminded her uncomfortably of Ophelia’s singing voice. The keys were made of gold and shaped like owl heads, and there was mother-of-pearl inlay across the boards like a spray of roses. It was the gaudiest gewgaw they’d yet made her a gift of.

  “Well, all right,” she said. “I guess you didn’t mind what I told her.” She laughed out loud with relief.

  “Why, everwho did you tell what?” someone said.

  She picked up the guitar and held it like a weapon in front of her. “Daddy?”

  “Put that down,” the voice said. A man stepped forward out of the shadow of the rosebushes. “I’m not your damn daddy. Although,
come to think of it, I would like to know where he is.”

  “Ryan Shoemaker,” Fran said. She put the guitar down on the ground. Another man stepped forward. “And Kyle Rainey.”

  “Howdy, Fran,” said Kyle. He spat. “We were lookin’ for your pappy, like Ryan says.”

  “If he calls I’ll let him know you were up here looking for him,” Fran said. “Is that all you wanted to ask me?”

  Ryan lit up a cigarette, looked at her over the flame. “It was your daddy we wanted to ask, but I guess you could help us out instead.”

  “It don’t seem likely somehow,” Fran said. “But go on.”

  “Your daddy was meaning to drop off some of the sweet stuff the other night,” Kyle said. “Only, he started thinking about it on the drive down, and that’s never been a good idea where your daddy is concerned. He decided Jesus wanted him to pour out every last drop, and that’s what he did all the way down the mountain. If he weren’t a lucky man, some spark might have cotched while he were pouring, but I guess Jesus doesn’t want to meet him face to face just yet.”

  “And if that weren’t bad enough,” Ryan said, “when he got to the convenience, he decided that Jesus wanted him to get into the van and smash up all Andy’s liquor, too. By the time we realized what was going on, there weren’t much left besides two bottles of Kahlua and a six-pack of wine coolers.”

  “One of them smashed, too,” Kyle said. “And then he took off afore we could have a word with him.”

  “Well, I’m sorry for your troubles, but I don’t see what it has to do with me,” Fran said.

  “What it has to do is that we’ve come up with an easy payment plan. We talked about it, and the way it seems to us is that your pappy could provide us with entrée to some of the finest homes in the area.”

  “Like I said,” Fran said. “I’ll pass on the message. You’re hoping my daddy will make his restitution by becoming your accessory in breaking and entering. I’ll let him know if he calls.”

  “Or he could pay poor Andy back in kind,” Ryan said. “With some of that good stuff.”

  “He’ll have to run that by Jesus,” Fran said. “Frankly, I think it’s a better bet than the other, but you might have to wait until he and Jesus have had enough of each other.”