The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2018 (retail) (epub)

  My breasts were so engorged it felt as though they were full of rocks. Lou was stirring in Lonnie’s arms, and I knew she would wake up hungry and start crying.

  “Did he leave a will or not?” said Barry. He stepped toward his sister, and they looked at each other like two schoolyard bullies about to brawl.

  “I’m just going to say it,” said Lonnie. “He wrote you out of it last year.”

  “He did?” Barry had his hands on his hips. He craned his neck toward Lonnie. “I don’t think he did that.”

  “Well, that’s what he did.” Lonnie pulled Lou off her shoulder and handed her to me. “She’s waking up,” she said.

  Seconds later, Lou was wailing. She reached for the front of my dress, yanked it open, and started slapping my breast with her little hand. “Okay, okay,” I said. I wrestled my breast back into the dress and tried to get her pacifier into her mouth, but she grabbed it and flung it into the grass. I could hear Lonnie telling Barry that he should have expected this. He had not been there for his dad. Lonnie had been the one to keep him company all these years, the one inviting him over for Sunday dinners, the one driving to the Kentucky cabin and rolling him over so he wouldn’t choke on his vomit in his sleep.

  “It wasn’t my job to look after Dad,” Barry was saying, yelling now over Lou’s cries. A couple of people hurried past us and I tried not to think about what we must have looked like to them.

  “Maybe if you’d visited more, helped out a little, Barry,” Lonnie said. “What did you think would be in the will anyway? Millions of dollars? Some property we didn’t know about? He left me the cabin. That’s it. It’s probably worth about forty grand. He told me he’d given you about that much over the years.”

  My dear, handsome husband. It was the first time I’d ever seen him not get what he wanted.

  Lou’s cries were intensifying into a high-pitched wail that made me feel as though my bones were going to shatter. She reached into my dress again, her body rigid and angry. She threw her head back and screamed.

  “He never met Lou,” Lonnie yelled. “You never brought her here. He never got to meet his granddaughter.” I couldn’t tell if she was talking to me or to Barry.

  I could feel Barry’s eyes on me. I had been the one who hadn’t wanted to visit. I couldn’t handle the thought of being around Barry’s family with a baby. I was so anxious in the months after she was born that it felt like a kind of psychosis. I had told Barry that it would kill me to travel with Lou, to break up our fragile routine of napping and nursing. I had manufactured a panic attack, my arms out in front of me, shaking and crying.

  “Just nurse her,” Barry shouted at me then, red faced. “Nurse her, Edie.”

  “We only nurse sometimes,” I said to Lonnie. “She’s more or less weaned.”

  “Christ,” said Barry. He walked back toward Barry Sr.’s grave. He was gone for what felt like a very long time. Lonnie and I sat in the car with the air-conditioning on high while I nursed Lou. We listened to the radio. She did not say a thing.

  “What’s he doing?” I asked.

  “Apologizing to his father,” Lonnie said. “Who knows. They never got along.”

  I thought of Lonnie and Barry Sr. in the Kentucky cabin, sitting around the kitchen table, talking about me and Barry. I had to admit, I was disappointed about the will.

  “What are you going to do with the cabin?” I asked her.

  “Keep it for the kids, I think,” she said. “I don’t know.”

  By the time we got home, the front of my dress was stiff with dried milk and sweat. Lou and I went into the guest bedroom and we lay together, her in her diaper, me in my tights. She needled me in the stomach with her chubby foot, then kicked out her leg and flailed it around, slammed it down on the mattress. I held her hand and kissed her forehead. I closed my eyes. I promised myself I would put her in the little white boot when we got home. She was supposed to wear it for six weeks. The doctor said the pigeon-toeing was mild and would be easy to correct. It was because of her position in the womb. I had carried her wrong, unwittingly.

  Barry came into the bedroom and I felt myself tense. He lay behind me and put his hand on my waist. Lou was playing with the curls in my hair.

  “It’s like you guys are having an affair,” Barry said.

  “We are,” I said.

  I am sorry for the way I am, I wanted to tell my husband. I am sorry for my narcissism and the peculiar way I navigate the world. I am sorry that I haven’t said one kind thing about the fact that you lost your father. I am sorry that I need things to be just so, that I cannot relax and do things any other way but the way in which I do them. I am sorry that I need so much time with Lou. I am sorry that I try to control my environment and everyone around me. I am sorry that I feel things so intensely and that the intensity of my love for Lou creates a kind of counterblast of rage for all other things. I am too full of love and thus I am too full of sorrow. In the quiet of the morning, when Lou is nursing and the blue of dawn begins to appear, I am grateful that you, Barry, are in my life. I whisper to Lou that she will grow up with a good father, with a father who loves her, that she will not roam the earth looking for a man to love her as much as she needs to be loved. The terrible things that happen in the world will not happen to Lou. I will not let them happen.

  I could hear Lonnie on the phone with her husband in the other room. She was telling him that the church had a new stained-glass window. She said it had been a nice day, not too hot. She said the neighbors still hadn’t finished their deck.

  I wondered why she didn’t tell her husband that she needed him. That she had needed him and her children to come home for her father’s funeral, that she needed him now. I wondered when it got to be too much for a person like her, if she had ever thrown a plate against a wall and demanded anything, or if not moving to Canada was the best she could do, the only way she could assert herself. Jerry had met someone else, she would find out a few weeks later. When we heard the news, Barry and I lay in the dark of our bedroom and talked about how we were the only people left in the world who still loved each other. Our house then was funny. One story, just two small bedrooms for the three of us, a little stone patio out back with a portable Weber grill. I say “funny” because Lou can hardly believe that we ever lived in a place so small. Before she left for New York City, she and I shared a five-bedroom house with an outdoor pool and a hot tub on the wraparound deck. I have done well for myself as the dean of arts and humanities at the college here. I’ll retire next year. I sit in the hot tub at night under the stars and wonder how Barry is doing. He never did find work, though he did finally publish the book of essays. He married this woman, June, who owns some kind of successful business, and they have a nice condominium downtown. They had their honeymoon in Paris. I found this out online, of course, though Lou would have told me if I asked. She refers to June as her stepmother, and I feel a little shock every time she says it.

  After Lou was born, the agreement was that Barry and I would have a second child when Lou turned three. He did not know that the thought filled me with such anxiety that I lay awake at night, imagining nursing a newborn while Lou called out to me from the other room. The idea that I could not be fully present for Lou—I knew I was only capable of being a good parent to one child—Barry could not understand it. He couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t want to have another baby with the man I loved. He couldn’t see how tired I was already, how a person like me probably shouldn’t have had a baby in the first place. Lou turned three, then four, then five. When I divorced Barry, more than his absence, I felt the absence of all that anxiety. When I told him this, he did not speak to me for a very long time.

  The only time I feel like talking to anyone is late at night, after I’ve showered off the chemicals of the hot tub water and am sitting at the end of the bed in my bathrobe, my hair in a towel. I’d like to tell someone a
bout my day, the funny things that happened, the things that were remarkable. This person was Lou for many years. I do remember Barry Sr. talking to me about the loneliness of the elderly shortly before he died. He said he was alone because he deserved to be. I imagine I’ll die here, in my bed, and that Lou will notice after a day or two that I haven’t called. I have my and Barry’s wedding rings in a velvet box in a safe-deposit box downtown, bequeathed to her. I’ve told her they might be worth something one day.

  After Lonnie divorced Jerry, she came to stay with Barry and me for a few days. She hardly said a word. She seemed to hold herself very still. I remember her sitting across from me in the kitchen of our little two-bedroom house, drinking a tall glass of Baileys with ice. Lou was opening and shutting one of the cabinet doors—her new favorite game—while Barry watched TV in the other room.

  “My youngest had to wear one of those,” Lonnie said, eyeing the counter, where Lou’s special boot sat, still untouched. “I’d forgotten about it until now.”

  “Was it hard on her?”

  “I don’t remember,” Lonnie said. “She was so little. I think it took some getting used to. These things feel like a huge deal at the time, but they’re not. Not in the grand scheme of things. Just put it on and carry on with your life.”

  She looked at me from behind her rimless glasses. I took her hand then and asked her if she would take care of Lou if Barry and I died. “Yes, Edie,” she said. It was not the emotional moment for her that it was for me. Barry must have heard us because he was suddenly in the doorway, the remote in his hand.

  “You know I will,” she said to both of us.

  “What’s going on in here?” Barry asked.

  “We’re putting the boot on Lou,” I said. I picked her up, then motioned for Barry to pass it to me. It was white with green Velcro straps that fastened around her ankle and just below her toes. I slipped her foot into it, adjusted the straps, and I waited.

  “Well?” I said to Lou. She was examining it.

  “She’ll live,” said Lonnie.

  The trouble was, I wanted more than that. I wanted more from the world than survival.

  Youmna Chlala

  Nayla

  THERE WAS SUN and then there was more sun and more sun. You can’t imagine loss when it’s sunny. Everything reflects, the sides of buildings, dirty, dusty windows offer half a version of a sad tired face. You squint and rooms appear tilted, the sky unbearable, and then when—like a turtle, worm, or whatever it is that burrows—you wrap thick heavy blankets around the curtain bar, dust flies everywhere. So you sneeze and secure the blankets with giant paper clips, metallic tape, anything that feels like it will protect you from the brightness for a long time.

  This is how I felt for the first few days of my twenty-first year. I was still in this camp in the desert, worming my way into acceptance while years—let’s count them…something like 365 × 6 + however many days—had gone by. By the end of the week, Mama pulled down the blankets and dragged me to my cousin Marwan’s birthday party. He relished his legal ability to drink, although as I told him many times, legality did not matter here.

  Mama spent most of the night in the living room with my aunts while Marwan and his friends entertained them by trying to dance the dabke with a group of terribly synchronized tabla drummers. Already tipsy by the time we got there, Marwan introduced us to his new girlfriend, Nayla. I noticed that everyone else seemed to approach her cautiously or envelop her in an airy swoop that simulated the grandeur of a hug without bodily contact. She didn’t smell bad or look disheveled or unkempt. There were no obvious signs of repulsion. I asked my mom what was going on and she said: She’s a young widow, in the hushed tone of a terrible fate or a shameful secret. I immediately thought of a spider and recoiled. So when Nayla sat next to me on the sticky linoleum kitchen floor and offered me the wobbly part of her spinach quiche, I hesitated. She insisted. I took a small chunk with my hands as if like sisters we had always shared food.

  The music was loud in the kitchen, a mix of bootleg DJ Khaled and De La Soul. Nayla and I stayed on the floor, legs extended, bare feet against the cabinet, eating. I picked out the almonds from the rice and gave them to her. She whispered that they were a cheap substitute for pine nuts. We agreed that bread is the best utensil and that olives without pits are disgusting, as if manhandled by a machine. By the end of the night we were friends.

  Nayla worked part-time as an engineer. She fixed boilers, heaters, and pipes. She made sure all the internal parts worked: the heart, the liver, the organs of a building. She spoke of codes like a spy. She had a clipboard with stacks of paper that she flipped through and wrote on only in pencil. I never saw her erasing. There were numbers and barely legible words along the margins. Her soundtrack was the scribbling scratch of the pencil. When she was surrounded by the rest of her crew, mostly men who liked to yell into the air rather than speak directly with one another, she seemed feminine, like a feline cartoon character who bats her eyelashes when she wants something. She wore short skirts or belted long shirts along with the white hard hat she carried looped around her gaudy large gold purse. She didn’t wear heels but her shoes seemed demure, dignified, and actually, as I often told her, totally old-lady-like. The leather was never scuffed or dirty.

  That summer, I practically lived in her apartment, a tiny place right above her late husband’s family’s house. I’d come over and we’d drink prosecco (pretending we were in Italy) and invent recipes together. We traded food for the bubbly wine with Ahmad, the liquor store manager. We made him fish fattoush; lamb-stuffed eggplant; pistachio, orange, and cardamom cookies; and vegetarian kibbeh with extra pine nuts. Ahmad had a huge family who liked to be fed by anyone other than the aunt in charge of cooking, who vacillated between old-school kushari and a weird version of rice pilaf.

  We’d go out dancing until late, and it just seemed easier to sleep over. We shared the crickety pullout bed in the living room, and I’d help her fold its giant metal legs in the morning as our Turkish coffee gurgled on the stove. We ate breakfast together, dipping stale and barely thawed bread into bowls of homemade labne drowning in olive oil. Then we gulped down one more coffee before we each went our own way.

  Nayla never talked to me about her husband. I didn’t know how long they were married, if it was arranged, if they had been super in love, or how and why he died. This was a time when so many of us had lost someone close. There was an unspoken rule not to talk about them, as if it would put you at risk. Like you only existed because of their absence. I only knew what he looked like because the first time I came over she pointed to a single photograph hanging on the refrigerator door and said, That’s him. I keep it up here for them, pointing down at the floor that separated her from his parents and siblings. The magnet was weak and each time she opened and closed the door, the photo swayed a little. His cheeks were reddened by the sun or wind. He had on sunglasses so I couldn’t tell much about his eyes, his aura. He wore a collared striped blue and white T-shirt. He seemed preppy, healthy, what youth was supposed to look like.

  * * *

  —

  Marwan, on the other hand, had a face only a mother could love, as my mama often said, teasing her own sister. When I saw him at family gatherings, I tried to get him to reveal something about how he felt about Nayla so that we could dissect his words as we chopped onions and pulled parsley leaves. She seemed to really like him, though I couldn’t understand how he compared to the beautiful man who haunted the kitchen.

  I enjoyed my role as a spy until Marwan told me that he liked dating her because he’d never have to commit. Clearly, you can’t marry a widow. I told him that was insane and archaic and backward and stupid. In an instant everything changed. He stood up, got really close to me, and yelled: Why don’t you leave my girlfriend alone! Are you a lesbian or something? And I said, Yeah, so what? Then he told me I was going to hell and a whore and anyt
hing he could think of that would make me feel shame, and when I didn’t blink he pushed me hard, both his hands flat against the center of my chest. I didn’t fall or fight back, instead that night I told his sister, who really was a lesbian: Don’t ever tell him the truth. It’s not worth it.

  The next day, Nayla and I were supposed to make a flourless chocolate cake for Ahmad’s daughter’s birthday. We were promised a bottle of champagne in return. I kept trying to find the right time to tell her what had happened with Marwan. We stood in the kitchen grating dark and heavy bars of chocolate. Facing each other across the wood counter, we each had a cheese grater set up like a monument in the center of the plate. We leaned with all our might into them to shred the cocoa.

  I was restless and set everything down and began to fumble with the record player on the side table. There were no records in sight. The lid was always closed. I opened it and found a layer of dust.

  Why don’t you ever use this thing? I asked, and Nayla just stared at me silently. I suddenly remembered the small graveyard next to the east fence and the line of vinyl records shoved into the ground next to a headstone as if they were guards. And without thinking, maybe as a way to fill my mouth with words of forgiveness or to be a distraction or maybe just to undo this unintended opening, I began to talk about my sister.

  I never told you that I have an older sister, I said, entering a strange world where I uttered what I thought. My life up until that moment had been suspended, like when it’s really hot outside and muggy and you know it’s going to rain, that all of this humidity will break and burst water from the clouds, but you wait and you wait under the graying sky and it doesn’t happen. Until it does, much later, at night when you no longer mind because you’re safe at home.

  Nayla didn’t respond and looked down at the chocolate shreds. I opened the refrigerator and grabbed the fig cookies (that she kept cold so that they crunched when she bit into them) and continued to talk.