The Best American Short Stories 2016

by Junot Díaz

  “You don’t know anything about it,” Thea cried. “Are you God?”

  “You’re right, I don’t know, I only heard—” Gaby clapped a hand to her mouth. “Shut me up. I won’t say anything else, I promise.”

  She couldn’t let up. “It’s like you want him to die or something.”

  Gaby moaned. “You don’t really believe that?”

  Thea was crying. “I can bear this as long as I think he’ll be okay in the end.” Sobs heaved up her throat, one at a time, like large abrading stones.

  “Please. Of course he’ll be okay!”

  Gaby apologized over and over again. She took back everything, called herself a stupid moron, refused to leave the parking lot till Thea forgot the blather she’d spoken. Which came from her being ignorant and neurotic, talking to fill nervous space, that’s all. “I swear to God!” she cried. They hugged goodbye. Thea rode the elevator back to Nate’s floor, counting breaths to subvert all thought-horrors. And managed to do so in a faint, partial way by construing Gaby as unconsciously jealous of her. Thea had boys, Gaby girls. I’m afraid we’re going to lose him. The words seethed with clairvoyance, or worse, like the report to the family after emergency surgery. Did Gaby feel the same blood rivalry that she had felt toward Gaby all her life? She fervently hoped so.

  For a month Nate remained in the hospital while they tried to resolve his pleural effusion. Thea was given leave from work, and she and Allan took turns, one of them sleeping in a pull-out chair in Nate’s room while the other was home with Dylan. Nate would be discharged only to return to the hospital the following day. He was nauseated, weak, sometimes feverish. “The Side-Effect King!” said the Fellow, whom they had come to term the Good Doctor (Elkin, brusque and pessimistic, was the Bad Doctor). Gradually, though, Nate’s lungs cleared, and the tumor, as aggressive as it was, began to shrink. In December it was decided that for the duration of his protocol, unless he spiked a fever, he would spend only five days a month in the hospital, for his nastiest rounds of infusions. Thea returned to London.

  In Chicago when she’d thought about Edward, it was mainly to figure out how to disengage without hurting his feelings, not that she knew whether he was attached to her in such a way as to be wounded. A single night together, a few hours two long months ago: it would be arrogant—no?—for her to worry unduly about him. Either way, she would be cordial and faintly regretful. They would have lunch, during which she would touch briefly on her family troubles. She would be sad and brave, he, respectful.

  Over their actual lunch, though, her legs trembled and she couldn’t stop talking. Gaby was no doctor but Thea feared her as prophetess. I’m afraid we’re going to lose him. She gave him Gaby’s words in Gaby’s tone, as close as she could come to it, along with the tale of their ancient rivalry. He described problems with his hyper-assured, wealthy brother, then pointed out an ambiguity in Gaby’s “I’m afraid.” In the mouth of an authority figure the words might preface a decree, a declaration of something slated to happen (I’m afraid we’re going to have to let you go), but colloquially all they expressed was personal feeling. Unless Gaby was a witch or a doctor, she was simply, genuinely, afraid! Thea closed her eyes, waiting for something to wash over her—irritation with Edward’s attempt at solace, or relief. She felt relief.

  After that, as long as she was in England, Thea didn’t want to let Edward out of her sight and he seemed to need her too. In private they started holding hands.

  One of the problems with cancer treatment—not the big thing, the fear of pain and death, but the immediate, tangible thing—was the itinerary, the journey, its relentless sameness. There was no peak, no rise and fall. No fever that broke or didn’t, no surgery that stemmed or failed to stem the bleeding. In moments of relative lightheartedness Thea would describe it architecturally. If cancer treatment were a house, it was ranch style, if a guesthouse, a motel; graphed, it was a sine curve. There was no focal point, no place for eye or mind to rest. No goal, only bouts of infusions, after which Nate would get sick and then recover enough for the next one.

  Of all Nate’s therapeutic poisons the worst was the one he received in the hospital. Adriamycin sounded like an antibiotic, familiar and benign, but it was blood-red in the bag over the bed, and draped with a pillowcase so that Nate wouldn’t see it and gag. It was evil in other ways too, gave him sores in the back of his throat, a track of shingles across his chest, a constant fever of 101, and lowered his red count to where he sometimes needed a transfusion. “Mom,” he said once, holding a paper cup of orange juice that he couldn’t swallow, “I don’t think I’m getting better.”

  Allan was in the room too and he cried, “You are!” as if insistence would change things. As if simple utterance had power. Thea’s mouth was trembling. She couldn’t walk out and leave her son with the message her departure would give, but she couldn’t let him see her face. Face averted, she kept her voice steady. “Remember what the doctors said, honey? Ups and downs? Tomorrow will be an up.”

  But even when Nate seemed, or perhaps actually was, better, she was walking around on the constant verge of tears that she couldn’t emit, even when she was alone, for fear of losing control of herself. Sometimes, she thought, it was better for Nate when she wasn’t there. The parents’ job was to amuse the sick one without showing how worried they were. On Adriamycin nights when she and Allan alternated sleeping at the hospital, she took on her tours of duty like a soldier, bearing the pain of Nate’s pain, but Allan seemed almost to enjoy his. Drowsing in the hospital’s all-night fluorescent twilight to the tune of beeping, humming, or a roommate’s television, Allan said he felt at peace. Nate would be feverish or nauseated or hurting, but when it let up, for Nate it was gone, and for him too. They would play chess or gin rummy. He would read to Nate and help with the schoolwork he was trying to keep up with. Nothing mattered, said Allan, beyond the blue-and-yellow curtains (a sailboat pattern) of the hospital room. He and Nate were two shipwrecked sailors on an island. They lived moment to moment. There was a sweetness.

  Thea thought but didn’t say that the island was gradually sinking. And if Allan didn’t say it, he seemed to know it. Her worst moments weren’t at the hospital but at home with Allan. It was hard to make love with him, though they still accomplished it from time to time. Harder was the moment they pulled away from each other, when she caught his eye and saw his fear, which mirrored and multiplied hers.

  Her refuge was London, where she spent—was required to spend—five days each month. There was her work and there were her nights with Edward, who declared he was falling in love with her. She wasn’t in love with him and she didn’t believe he loved her (he possibly romanticized her, an older woman, woman of tragedy), but she could get lost in the sound of his unfamiliar voice, the touch of his unauthorized hands, the eternal novelty of the foreign city, the way as a child she had lost herself in books of fantasy.

  All winter and spring Nate did well, even according to Elkin. His bar mitzvah was rescheduled for July. The cantor came to the house or the hospital, wherever Nate was ready for practice, and Nate practiced seriously. He sometimes spiked a fever but he was less fatigued than most kids in his situation, hospitalized only for the Adriamycin. To keep his white count high enough to ward off infection, Thea and Allan had learned to infuse him at home with immature white cells called G-CSF. They would set up the apparatus in the living room while he read a book or watched TV, and they admitted to enjoying it, injecting new cells into Nate’s bloodstream that would grow into the adult cells that the chemo had zapped. Having overcome her fear of hurting her son, Thea could push the needle straight down through his skin into the port with the steady hand of a good nurse. Most of the time he went to school, and when school let out, if he was well enough he’d spend two weeks at a sleep-away camp for kids with cancer. Then the bar mitzvah. In the meantime, an altruistic Jewish organization had assigned him Avi, an eighteen-year-old Chabad-Lubavitcher. He didn’t preach, just visited him in the hospita
l and took him and Dylan out to play laser tag and video games when Nate was home. At home, friends came over like friends of anybody. When his count was low the friends had to wear surgical masks, and they did so with gravitas. No one cheated.

  Once when Nate was unusually lively, a problem arose, albeit a small one. Nate and Assad had started roughhousing, which looked like so much fun that Thea didn’t stop it. The port dislodged and required a trip to the ER, but the next day his temperature was normal. Thea described the event to Gaby, who visited frequently and kept all dire predictions to herself. “It was nice going to Children’s for something they could fix,” Thea said. “I felt like an ordinary mother.”

  “I know exactly what you mean.”

  It was Saturday morning. Allan was playing racquetball. The sisters sat together at the kitchen table, Thea pretending, as usual, to be more upbeat than she really was. Assad was over again, and Nate and Assad were such good friends, and Nate and Dylan were getting along too, the younger boy welcome in his brother’s group. From time to time three-way laughter came in from the TV room. Then Gaby said, so casually it seemed rehearsed, that she was thinking of going back to school. Nursing school.

  “Nursing?”

  The question was automatic, a placeholder. Gaby’s face was pink. She had been feeling lately that she was wasting her life. Since she had her BA, she could be an RN in two years. She took Thea’s hand in her surprisingly moist one. “I don’t know why I feel so guilty. Or nervous about this. I already applied, Thea, and I was accepted.”

  Thea congratulated her but had to amplify her enthusiasm. It seemed, oddly, that their shaky balance was tilting again. As if she couldn’t thrive or even live without Gaby fixed in place like the North Star. Sister-in-a-bag, sister lesser; less interesting. What was wrong with her?

  Until now, Thea hadn’t told anyone about her affair, not even her closest friends. She didn’t want to participate in hushed talk or field private looks of concern or complicity, which would make Allan nervous or suspicious. He was not insensitive. If she needed a confidante, she would not have chosen Gaby, whom she was habituated to outmaneuver. Still, perhaps to best her sister in the arena of surprise revelations, or simply in the throes of her age-old jealousy, Thea told her about Edward. How it began. What it was like. What he was like. To her relief, Gaby made no suggestions. There was no inkling of disapproval. Your English lover! she said, fascinated, and Thea went deeper and deeper into the experience, the disgust and thrill of touching another man’s skin, the exhilaration of law-breaking, the color of the sky at dusk through her hotel window, Edward’s smooth, youngish face. As she spoke, like fish rising to the surface of murky water, the image reassembled before her. As if a membrane between the two worlds were breaking down. She felt a ghostly frisson.

  “You could really screw me,” she said to Gaby.

  “I would never,” cried Gaby. “Do you really think I’d tell anyone?”

  No, that wasn’t it. She knew her sister would keep her secret. And there was more to say, what Thea was at this point only beginning to understand. Edward wasn’t glamorous; he wasn’t even that interesting. He was a comfort, a distraction. In some ways she felt as guilty about Edward as she did about Allan.

  But before she could follow the train of thought to where it might enlighten her, Nate ran into the room, not on his toes as he had walked with the tumor growing in his belly, but on his whole foot, heel-toe, heel-toe. He opened the freezer, took out a quart of chocolate ice cream, carried it back to the den. “Yo, hombres!” he called out. “I bring sustenance.”

  Gaby was looking at Nate with what seemed pure pleasure, and Thea regarded her sister, whom she used to envy and still did, though Thea was taller by an inch and thinner, even now, by three to ten pounds. Today Gaby looked neither pretty nor ugly. One day Gaby would be a nurse. Thea felt Nate’s presence in that realignment. Another link between the families. Thicker webbing.

  She closed her eyes, conscious of Gaby, the boys in the den, the May sun warming them through the window. Of her own face she could summon no mental image. She wasn’t fortune’s favorite. No special treatment would be given her. This ripple of peace with its curl of joy could come to an ordinary person just the same. But it would be stupid not to embrace it.

  HÉCTOR TOBAR

  Secret Stream

  FROM ZYZZYVA

  NATHAN WAS PEDALING along on Third Street at a robust twenty-five miles per hour when he spotted her, a feminine mirage in black that forced him to stop. Even before his brakes had finished squealing he began to laugh and shout. “Hey, what are you doing up there?” The woman was stuck to the top of a chainlink fence, trying to reach the sidewalk on a stretch of Third Street where Nathan never saw anyone on foot. It’s a cliché about Los Angeles that no one walks, but on that shortcut to the Westside it’s actually true. There are no pedestrians on Third Street and thus no crosswalks. The resulting fast and free flow of traffic feels like a memory of the city’s unencumbered past, and Nathan biked that stretch like a guy driving a Porsche: he was in a hurry, he cut people off, and he didn’t stop to take in the sights, except in this special case when a lithe woman in need appeared before him, attached to the top of a fence.

  The barrier in question sealed off the street and the public from the undulating, artificial pastures of a private golf course. A broken strand of the fence had hooked into the woman’s jeans: like a steel finger, it seemed to be pulling her down as she tried to free herself.

  “You’re fleeing the golf course,” Nathan said.

  She was about thirty years old, with lips glossed burnt umber, and the flat soles of her ankle-high black boots were caked in mud. On the other side of the fence two men in shorts were standing on the seventh green with clubs in hand, studying the geometry of their putts and squinting up at the noon sky. A thin layer of high clouds had drifted over the city, weakening the sun into a yellow stain, and all the shadows had been erased from the world below, confusing the golfers as they tried to read the dips in the grass beneath their shoes. They were therefore oblivious to the fence climber nearby.

  “It’s actually a country club,” she said.

  “And you’re not a member.”

  “I’m trapped.”

  In the moment it took Nathan to get off his bike so that he could help her, she freed herself and leaped off. Her hair rose in a cloud of raven strands and fell with a splash as she bounded onto the sidewalk. With a few quick swipes of her hands, she brushed some blades of grass and dried mud splashes from her jeans.

  “Well, that was embarrassing,” she said.

  She took a small nylon bag from her back and removed a notebook and pencil from it, and Nathan suddenly ceased to exist for her as she sat on the sidewalk, her back against the fence. Nathan watched her begin to draw and wondered which of the city’s arty tribes she belonged to.

  “Hi,” Nathan said, insisting, because she was dark-skinned and pretty and he felt the need to know why she was trespassing on a golf course. “Excuse me, but . . . what are you doing?”

  “I’m following the water.”

  As soon as she said “water” Nathan heard it and felt it: the sound of liquid flowing, dripping, moving through the air, causing oxygen molecules to shift and cool. Looking behind her, on the other side of the fence, he saw a stream. About three feet wide and four inches deep, it curved around some bunkers near the seventh green, and then fell sharply, broadcasting a steady, metallic sound as it disappeared into a concrete orifice beneath Nathan’s feet.

  “Fucking country club,” Nathan said. “They shouldn’t be wasting water like that.” It was the middle of August, after all. In the middle of drought-parched LA.

  “No,” the woman said. She stopped drawing and looked at the water again. “It’s not theirs. So they can’t be wasting it.”

  “Well, who does it belong to, then?”

  The woman paused for a second and answered with an amused smile. “The underworld, I guess.”

&nbs
p; Sofia was her name and she described herself as a “river geek.” She said she was mapping the creek that ran through the golf course. And also its “tributaries.” It was an ancient stream, she told him, born from a spring at the base of the Hollywood Hills, “bubbling up from the underworld.” She showed Nathan her map, a series of blue pencil lines over a street grid she had pasted into her notebook. “It’s groundwater,” she said. Before reaching the golf course, the stream flowed into downtrodden Hollywood proper, around assorted industrial buildings and parking lots, and also through a junior-high campus and the television studios of KTLA. Sofia described all these things with a reverence that Nathan found disturbing: he sensed that she’d been doing this mapping expedition of hers alone, for weeks, and had never talked to anyone else about it until this moment.

  Nathan returned the map to Sofia. He saw that the water in the culvert moved quickly, and was crystalline, as if it were some sylvan stream. This can’t be, Nathan wanted to say. This supposedly natural body of water was trickling under his feet on Third Street, in a wealthy neighborhood called Hancock Park that was surrounded by low-slung, less-wealthy Korean, Filipino, and Salvadoran neighborhoods that were themselves near the geographic center of approximately five hundred square miles of asphalt and concrete.

  “The flow never stops. Not even in the summer,” Sofia said. “This creek was here before the country club. Before everything around you.”

  Sofia spoke these words and turned quiet, as if to allow the sound of the stream to make the truth of its presence clear to him. She was shy and a loner, like him, he thought. Nathan considered himself a loner, though none of his friends did, especially his women friends, all of whom were fervent cyclists: they thought he was charismatic and often very funny (when he was riding a bike), though clueless when it came to women. Clueless Nathan now concluded that Sofia’s lonesomeness was deeper and more interesting than his own, more attuned to the mysterious and the sublime. She wore a silver scarab clip in her hair, a jeweled stud in her nose, and looking at her made Nathan feel unkempt and underdressed, which is a ridiculous thing for a man on a bicycle to feel.