The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018

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

  Dad was standing in the hallway, jacket on, studying a map. He said to get ready and get in the car: we were going to walk around on a flat volcano! “Bring water,” he shouted. Mom put on a floppy straw hat, got her bag, and we walked down. Something kept making her smile.

  On the way, Alicia told us about the old brick sauna that looked like an oven, and the place where you could camp (really? I could already smell the sulfur). We parked and went up.

  PERICOLO • DANGER

  said a warped yellow sign. Alicia and I laughed: the sign itself was smoldering. Steam drifted by or rushed up from under the dirt. Hot spots kept shifting, leaving safety barriers tilted and twisting, about to be swallowed up, or neatly fencing off some harmless stretch. I stared at a distant pit of bubbling muck and tried to get used to the smell. “It’s literally on fire.”

  “What do you expect?” Marcia said. “It’s a volcano.”

  Sky was so blue. Alicia stretched out her arms and whirled around. I squinted and smiled. Mom put on her movie-star sunglasses.

  “So…this is a caldera.” Dad studied my guidebook. “And these are…fumaroles?”

  “Sounds like a fancy dessert,” Mom said. “Forget the guidebook, Peter, look around!”

  He blinked and smiled, but he did look: I could see he liked it, too.

  I picked up a rock and wandered toward the lake of boiling mud. Alicia stood by a repositioned fence, nose in the air, wrists against her hips, hands turned out, neck elongated, like she was posing for a fashion shoot. She wore black jeans and a dark red sleeveless shirt that was actually perfect. On her bicep was a neat, needle-thin tattoo, plain punctuation:

  ? > !

  —whatever that meant. Still, her posture was a little odd: like she was a model, but a really clumsy one. I couldn’t decide whether she posed like that on purpose or couldn’t help it.

  Must have been unconscious: I saw her do the exact same thing an hour later in the Pozzuoli town square. A soccer ball rolled by—followed by a curly-haired boy (dark blond, tan, blue shirt) who looked my way for a second with bright-dark eyes. Amazing, though, to see the palm trees near the ancient columns: pretty obvious where the whole idea for columns had come from, right down to the leafy decorations on top.

  The restaurant was big and empty and had a wood-burning forno. The people who ran it were crazily busy but nice. Dad joked about ordering a dormouse glazed with honey, stuck with poppy petals; Alicia slitted her eyes and murmured, “Petronius.” Since the menu was a choice between noodles with a gamy sauce and some kind of local mushroom, I asked for a sandwich. While everyone ate flat pasta with wild-boar sauce, a.k.a. pappardelle al sugo di cinghiale, and went on about how it was the best meal of their lives, I picked at a huge piece of crusty bread and a hunk of cheese. Dad offered me wine, but I said “No, thanks” before Mom could object.

  Marcia sucked a long noodle into her mouth and looked up to see if anyone had seen. It was sad: we used to notice things together—find the meow in homeowner—and laugh till we couldn’t breathe. We’d be having fun together now, but apparently we’d been to the beach with Alicia’s family when we were little and had both “adored her.” We hadn’t even seen her in six years, but it made sense to them: Alicia could “help out” in exchange for a free trip to Italy.

  We all got tired at once. Sulfur clung to the weave of our clothes, a disgusting smell that might never wash out. There was no escaping it—as if it were somehow inside you.

  No one spoke on the drive back. Marcia fell asleep. We passed an unlit villa—old, crumbly, streaky, and gorgeous, like lots of things in Italy. Even the darkness seemed ancient. This road had older roads underneath; people had lived here, lied to each other here, cried, prayed, fought, spoken languages no one living even knew, and died, and now we were here: just for a second, it was our turn.

  Headlights swept over trees. I caught Alicia staring at me, her head a little to one side: she didn’t look away. Instead, she got this irritating look of satisfaction, as if she’d let me in on a big secret in perfect safety, because it was something I would never understand.

  “Didn’t you take the left fork last time?” Mom asked.

  Tall, shadowy, with weeds and bushes growing out of it, the ancient arch passed over us.

  Dad didn’t reply, which meant he was either angry or super frustrated. I’d been chewing so quietly that the last thing Alicia expected to emerge from my lips was a pink bubble the size of a grapefruit. I let it deflate and wrinkle back into my mouth. Even the gum tasted sulfury.

  Then there we were, back on the ancient pavement, gliding through the arch again, wondering how many more times we’d see it tonight before we could collapse into our beds. (Or whichever bed we planned to sleep in, anyway.)

  * * *

  —

  No note. I checked the rooms: everyone was gone. Alicia had left a neat little pile on her pillow. The name on her International Driving Permit was Mary Alicia Minnen—we had the same first name? I sat on the edge of her bed and untangled a wonderful charm bracelet: silver telescope, bronze acorn, enameled ham, tiny hourglass with real sand in it—nice. The velvet pouch I guessed was her makeup bag was jammed instead with prescription medicines. Wow. Why so many? Their names made me think of those late Roman emperors who issued coins, marched around the frontier for a month, and died without visiting Rome: Verropax, Mortorian, Afflexitor, Numerian, Cerulazapam. I picked up her music player and touched the button:

  If you work hard and get counseling

  You can turn your life around, but…

  I don’t fucking WANT TO!

  I don’t fucking WANT TO!

  * * *

  —

  Sleep in and everyone abandons you. I showered and put on jeans, a dark red shirt, and a thin charcoal cardigan with one tiny hole in it. Touched my lips with the Lipdust Matte Stick I’d brought, so my shirt and lips were almost the same red; and that was it. I couldn’t go anywhere, but at least I was dressed. I couldn’t drive, there was no place I could walk to, I didn’t speak Italian; but that was just a situation. I felt like I knew this place. You don’t have to kiss someone to know exactly how the kiss would be. When that boy in the soccer shirt walked past, guiding the ball without ever seeming to touch it, I didn’t know him at all, but I knew what it would be like: his breath hot, his lips a little chapped, his mind on something he couldn’t describe. (It’s amazing how defenseless people are.)

  I slipped through my secret passageway, a cloakroom that joined the LOUNGE to the LIBRARY: narrow hall, long shelves, row of hooks. I liked the stillness, the way the old books smelled. I sank into a chair and tried to follow the mental adventures of Diodorus Cronus.

  Alicia and Marcia bubbled into the lounge next door, laughing and talking. I turned the page but didn’t read. “No, but his villa was walking distance from here. When they put him under house arrest, he threw a suicide party. Just a normal night with friends—except he let himself bleed to death.” Alicia, talking about some guy she knew—or some musician or director she only knew about. I couldn’t hear Marcia’s voice. “Anyway, he liked you. Did you catch what he said? In English it’d be something like: ‘I want pictures of you to decorate my dreams.’ ”

  I read on over their laughter: I didn’t really get the Master Argument.

  “I’m not a good example,” Alicia said. “I was having sex before I knew what sex was. Mostly older men who ‘thought’ I was twenty—and I was your sister’s age. She’s pretty, your sister.”

  “She’s afraid someone’ll think she’s pretty,” Marcia said clearly.

  My chin touched my chest. I blew air across the pages of my book.

  “Oh, come on…you two look alike! Big brown eyes, olive skin, brown hair…long-waisted—”

  “My eyes aren’t ‘brown’ at all. They’re hazel, actually. See?”

  I was sorry I�
��d looked in Alicia’s pill bag. At Solfatara she’d dragged me over to the old brick sauna and shown me where to stick my hand, into a gap in the brickwork: hot. Quite hot, but I could stand it. Okay, now move your hand a tiny fraction higher, and keep it there. What? It was so hot my hand just jumped away on its own.

  My sister squealed in the next room. “You’re playing with something dangerous.” She was out of breath.

  “What am I playing with?”

  “Me.”

  They went quiet. After a minute I got up but didn’t leave. I felt ticklish all over, like when someone tells a ghost story late at night and stops at a scary moment and everyone listens.

  “You lose,” Alicia said. “Now you have to do what I say.”

  A muffled laugh. “All right—this one. Wait: does it actually work?”

  “Oh, it works. It’s a kiss timer. We’ll have until the sand runs out: no more, no less.”

  “That’s not much sand.” Silence. “Barely a pinch. Anyway, no. You’ll mess up my lipstick.”

  “I’ll mess up your life. Did I say you could stop? You lost: pay the price. Andiamo, amante.”

  Leaves rustled overhead; wind flung my hair around. I hiked past the excavation, sat down on some crumbly steps, and spoke mock Italian to Luca, one of the dogs. Trees creaked. It was already getting dark. What a waste of a day! Where were Mom and Dad? Why bring us to Italy and disappear? One star out. No, that was Venus: slightly blue and very, very bright.

  I went in. Whatever had happened was over and they’d slid the wooden doors open. Marcia was telling Alicia that Mom and Dad had lost a lot of money, taken out a loan, and were trying to start a new business. Huh? What money? What business? Was she making it up?

  I went down to the kitchen and turned on the tiny TV. Weird ads, then girls in miniskirts and lots of makeup singing jingly love songs and smirking. I trudged back up: now the lounge was empty. I sat and wrote postcards to Kristen Wilbeck and Anita Alvarez, and thought about writing one to Anita’s brother, which made me so nervous that I had to stretch out on the rug and close my eyes for a minute. Even so, I was smiling.

  Alimar and Malicia dropped onto the couch and started leafing through magazines. I ignored them. Whaaaat? Now Marcia was wearing Alicia’s socks, the ones with the helmeted cartoon Martian. I wrote another postcard, got some tiny thing wrong, and had to tear it up.

  “Ooh. I want that,” Marcia said.

  “The handbag? The skirt?…Or just the model?”

  “Very funny, Lee.” Every time they laughed, I ruined another card—and they laughed at everything, as if they were high. Wait; they were definitely high. I could smell it. Fine…Whatever Alicia did, my sister was right behind, like a towed boat.

  “Wow…the Tetrarchs live on in the old ‘marching Ks’ Krispy Kreme logo. That’s the Nicomedian Augustus on the left.” Alicia sat up. “Hey, Britta Choatelle! I used to work for her.”

  Marcia leaned over the page. “You know her?”

  “I don’t know anyone. Britt knows a lot of people. I was her assistant for three weeks once, while her real assistant was sick. It was pretty crazy: she has this huge space in Chelsea—”

  I felt like asking them whether celebrities and scenesters were the only people worth knowing, but they’d be all “Of course not,” whatever they really thought. I copied my words onto a fresh card, and wrote two more before they distracted me again, reading a love letter out loud and laughing. It was apparently from some man Alicia barely knew. Marcia laughed so much I had to leave: it was not her normal laugh.

  I moved my postcard operation to the MAP ROOM, which no one else had discovered—or so I’d thought. An actual letter lay on the table half-written, next to Alicia’s little notebook.

  Dear E, hope you just dumped me and aren’t ill. Either way, I miss you. I miss the way you used to bring me toast and juice (with a lemon slice) on your old Bakelite tray, the one with the rooster on it. I miss your black kimono and how you never smiled (not before coffee, anyway). I miss the hand-lettered newspaper you wrote out on rice paper that morning, just for me. I miss the complicated board game with the dozen dice and the awful penalties we dreamed up, and I miss your laugh, all soft and papery like a hornet’s nest falling in the woods. I miss fucking you. I miss kissing your throat, I miss nuzzling around to find the source of your smell, I miss that old shirt you used to wear, I miss seeing you without your glasses. By the way—

  By the way, in the morning, once we got outside, it was almost warm. It had rained, a dirty wash that left a spatter of silt on everything. Dad tested the fine grit between finger and thumb and told us it came straight from the Sahara—picked up in a storm and blown across the sea to coat the hood of our rented Zeus. “A sirocco.” And, for a moment, everything seemed fine.

  At the museum in Naples, we all stared at Hercules, at the hard curves of his muscles, at his tremendous marble buttocks, and were impressed. “Why does he carry that enormous pickle?” Marcia said, and giggled at her own dumb joke, one I guarantee every child makes. (His club was exactly like a pickle, but so what?) She had too much mascara on, but looked good—really good. Alicia ignored her for once, absorbed in some lustery glassware from Pompeii.

  “What are you thinking?” Mom took my hand. “You’re like your father—he could lie on the floor for hours and stare down at the dust. What do you see? Are you having a good time?”

  “Yes,” I said, and squeezed her hand and let go.

  We feasted on filetti di baccalà and marinated zucchini and gnocchi alla Sorrentina at an amazing restaurant near the water. My father raised a glass to the stuffed boar’s head on the wall, its neck still draped with last year’s Christmas tinsel. On the drive back, Alicia held her philosophy as steady as she could under the trembling clip light. As a reader she seemed completely different—serious and at ease. She read as if she slowly took things in without rejecting or accepting anything right away. If she could really do that, she was wonderful.

  The arch loomed up and passed over. We made the loop ten times, following the same exact route; the eleventh time, the villa was just there. We crunched to a stop. A dog barked off in the dark, near the olive grove. This place was nothing like Connecticut.

  Mom headed for the villa, walking fast, holding Dad’s phone, which was all lit up.

  Dad got out and stood petting the dogs. Bracelets jingled as Alicia bent over to adjust the ribbons on her shoes. Her breasts almost came out of her top; I heard the juicy little click of metal as her tongue arched and the steel bead in her piercing touched her teeth, but Dad just went on patting Luca. He hardly noticed her, and I loved him for it: no matter how she dressed or what she did, he ignored her completely, without trying to at all.

  Marcia went right to our room, so Alicia and I ended up in the kitchen, drinking supercold mineral water. She swung her feet up onto a chair and cursed. “Left my philosophy in the car.”

  “Lots more in the library. Try Philo of…someplace? Not Parmenides, there are a bunch of loose pages. And, I only read a little bit, but Lucretius is awesome. One of the red books.”

  Alicia slumped down, tilted her head to the side, and gave me a look like: I wish you were prettier. The way you look really depresses me. But all she said was, “You seem older than your sister sometimes.” (Thanks?) “Anyway…you can have my book if you find it, Mary. In a way it’s the only thing I really own; but I’m pretty much done with it.” She kept looking at me, and for a second I could see how tired she was. “I’m only evil part-time,” she said. “Aaand, like most people, it’s when I’m thinking fairly highly of myself.” She went up to her room.

  I got out my flat little zip bag and wrote a Vesuvius postcard to Bethany Taylor and one to Maya James, and spent a long time drawing Hercules and his club to send to Todd Chan. It got messy and the club looked too weird and I threw it away. I made another drawing that was sor
t of worse, but decided to send it anyway, mistakes and all, because why obsess? Also, the ribbons on Alicia’s shoes were actually beautiful. You had to give her that.

  Marcia wasn’t in our room. The clothes she’d had on were strewn on her bed. The floor was solid—no one could hear a thing—so I popped my earbuds in, put on crazy music, and danced.

  * * *

  —

  I said, “Morning!” but Mom didn’t seem to hear. I went back in after my shower: she sat brushing her hair. She stopped with the brush still in; leaned forward little by little; the brush dropped. All I could think of to do was leave: I closed the door as quietly as I could.

  It had rained again and was cool. In the kitchen we ate pizza bianca and delicious little yogurts in glass jars, and peeled the fat, round oranges a landscaper at one of the villas had given Alicia and Marcia, who’d risked their lives to take a walk along the road. Handsome, Marcia said, but married, with a newborn baby named Eleonora Orfanelli.

  Mom came down and sat with a cup of tea. She smiled, like she was trying very hard to be herself. “Mmm,” I told her. “Frutti di bosco is the best flavor in the world.”

  “I miss bacon,” Marcia said.

  “Seriously? Since when do you even eat bacon?”

  “I don’t. I miss its being available.” New earrings: rubies like tiny drops of blood.

  “They do have bacon here, honey,” Mom said. “Pancetta. It’s better than our kind, in some ways.” Marcia looked at me: We have pancetta in Connecticut.

  Dad showed us a photo of an octopus relaxing in a bed of seaweed, taken just a five-minute swim from where we sat. Alicia reappeared in an olive-green raw-silk sheath and wooden jewelry. Where was she getting her clothes? Midnight shoplifting expeditions? Waking up to find the outfit she’d dreamed about in a neat pile at the foot of her bed? Anyway, she looked sophisticated, completely comfortable. She smiled at me.