The PEN O. Henry Prize Stories 2012

by Laura Furman

  He stands there a long time. Into the gathering darkness he says, I’m still here, but where are you? His blood sloshes to and fro, and snow gathers in his eyelashes, and three ducks come spiraling out of the night and land silently on the water.

  The next morning he walks past the padlocked gate of International Salt with fourteen dollars in his pocket. He rides the trackless trolley downtown for a nickel and gets off on Washington Boulevard. Between the buildings the sun comes up the color of steel, and Tom raises his face to it but feels no warmth at all. He passes catatonic drunks squatting on upturned crates, motionless as statues, and storefront after storefront of empty windows. In a diner a goitrous waitress brings him a cup of coffee with little shining disks of fat floating on top.

  The streets are filled with faces, dull and wan, lean and hungry; none belongs to Ruby. He drinks a second cup of coffee and eats a plate of eggs and toast, and then another. A woman emerges from a doorway and flings a pan out onto the sidewalk, and the wash water flashes in the light a moment before falling. In an alley a mule lies on its side, asleep or dead. Eventually the waitress says, You moving in? and Tom goes out. He walks slowly toward the address he’s copied and recopied onto a sheet of Mother’s writing paper. Frozen furrows of plowed snow are shored up against the buildings, and the little golden windows high above seem miles away.

  It’s a boardinghouse. Mr. Weems is at a lopsided table playing dominoes by himself. He looks up, says, Holy shit sure as gravity, and spills his tea.

  By a miracle Mr. Weems has a grandniece who manages the owl shift in the maternity ward at City General. Maternity is on the fourth floor. In the elevator Tom cannot tell if he is ascending or descending. The niece looks him up and down and checks his eyes and chest for fever and hires him on the spot. World goes to Hades, but babies still get born, she says, and issues him white coveralls.

  Rainy nights are the busiest. Full moons and holidays are tied for second. God forbid a rainy holiday with a full moon. Ten hours a night, six nights a week, Tom roves the halls with carts of laundry, taking soiled blankets down to the cellar, bringing clean blankets up. He brings up meals, brings down trays.

  Doctors walk the rows of beds injecting expectant mothers with morphine and something called scopolamine that makes them forget. Sometimes there are screams. Sometimes Tom’s heart pounds for no reason he can identify. In the delivery rooms there’s always new blood on the tiles to replace the old blood Tom has just mopped away.

  The halls are bright at every hour, but out the windows the darkness presses very close, and in the leanest hours of those nights Tom gets a sensation like the hospital is deep underwater, the floor rocking gently, the lights of neighboring buildings like glimmering schools of fish, the pressure of the sea all around.

  He turns eighteen, nineteen. All the listless figures he sees: children humped around the hospital entrance, their eyes vacant with hunger; farmers pouring into the parks; families sleeping without cover—people for whom nothing left on earth could be surprising. There are so many of them, as if somewhere out in the countryside great factories pump out thousands of new men every minute, as if the ones shuffling down the sidewalks are but fractions of the immense multitudes behind them.

  And yet is there not goodness, too? Are people not helping one another in these ruined places? Tom splits his wages with Mr. Weems. He brings home discarded newspapers and wrestles his way through the words on the funny pages. He turns twenty, and Mr. Weems bakes a mushy pound cake full of eggshells and sets twenty matches in it, and Tom blows them all out.

  He faints at work: once in the elevator, twice in the big, pulsing laundry room in the basement. Mostly he’s able to hide it. But one night he faints in the hall outside the waiting room, and a nurse named Fran hauls him into a closet. Can’t let them see you like that, she says, and he washes back into himself.

  Fran’s face is brown, lived-in. She sits him on a chair in the corner and wipes his forehead. The air is warm, steamy; it smells like soap. For a moment he feels like throwing his arms around her neck and telling her everything.

  The closet is more than a closet. On one wall is a two-basin sink; heat lamps are bolted to the undersides of the cabinets. Set in the opposite wall are two little doors.

  Tom returns to the chair in the corner of this room whenever he starts to feel dizzy. Three, four, occasionally ten times a night, he watches a nurse carry an utterly newborn baby through the little door on the left and deposit it on the counter in front of Fran.

  She plucks off little knit caps and unwraps blankets. Their bodies are scarlet or imperial purple; they have tiny, bright red fingers, no eyebrows, no kneecaps, no expression except a constant, bewildered wince. Her voice is a whisper: Why here you are, there you go, okay now, baby, just lift you here. Their wrists are the circumference of Tom’s pinkie.

  Fran takes a new washcloth from a stack, dips it in warm water, and wipes every inch of the creature—ears, scrotum, armpits, eyelids—washing away bits of placenta, dried blood, all the milky fluids that accompanied it into this world. Meanwhile the child stares up at her with blank, memorizing eyes, peering into the newness of all things. Knowing what? Only light and dark, only mother, only fluid.

  Fran dries the baby and splays her fingers beneath its head and tugs its hat back on. She whispers, Here you are, see what a good girl you are, down you go, and with one free hand lays out two new, crisp blankets, and binds the baby—wrap, wrap, turn—and sets her in a rolling bassinet for Tom to wheel into the nursery, where she’ll wait with the others beneath the lights like loaves of bread.

  In a magazine Tom finds a color photograph of a three-hundred-year-old skeleton of a bowhead whale, stranded on a coastal plain in some place called Finland and covered with moss. He tears it out, studies it in the lamplight. See, he murmurs to Mr. Weems, how the flowers closest to it are brightest? See how the closest leaves are the darkest green?

  Tom is twenty-one and fainting three times a week when he sees, among the drugged, dazed mothers in their rows of beds, the unmistakable face of Ruby Hornaday. Flaming orange hair, freckles sprayed across her cheeks, hands folded in her lap, and a thin gold wedding ring on her finger. The material of the ward ripples. Tom leans on the handle of his cart to keep from falling.

  Blue, he thinks. Blue, blue, blue.

  He retreats to the chair in the corner of the washing room and tries to suppress his heart. Any minute, he thinks, her baby could come through the door.

  Two hours later, he pushes his cart into the postdelivery room, and Ruby is gone. Tom’s shift ends; he rides the elevator down. Outside, an icy January rain settles lightly on the city. The streetlights glow yellow. The early morning avenues are empty except for the occasional automobile, passing with a damp sigh. Tom steadies a hand against the bricks and closes his eyes.

  A police officer helps him home. Tom lies on his stomach in his rented bed all that day and recopies the letter until little suns burst behind his eyes. Deer Ruby, I saw you in the hospital and I saw your baby to. His eyes are viry prety. Fran sez later they will probly get blue. Mother is gone and I am lonely as the arctic see.

  That night at the hospital Fran finds the address. Tom includes the photo of the whale skeleton from the magazine and sticks on an extra stamp for luck. He thinks: See how the flowers closest to it are brightest. See how the closest leaves are the darkest green.

  He sleeps, pays his rent, walks the thirty-one blocks to work, and checks the mail each day. And each day winter pales and spring strengthens and Tom loses a little bit of hope.

  One morning over breakfast, Mr. Weems looks to him with concern and says, You ain’t even here, Tom. You got one foot across the river. You got to pull back to our side.

  But three weeks later, it comes. Dear Tom, I liked hearing from you. It hasn’t been ten years but it feels like a thousand. I’m married, you probably guessed that. The baby is Arthur. Maybe his eyes will turn blue. They just might.

  A bald president is on th
e stamp. The paper smells like paper, nothing more. Tom runs a finger beneath every word, sounding it out. Making sure he hasn’t missed anything.

  I know your married and I dont want anything but happyness for you but maybe I can see you one time? We could meet at the acquareyem. If you dont rite back thats okay I no why.

  Two more weeks. Dear Tom, I don’t want anything but happiness for you, too. How about next Tuesday? I’ll bring the baby, okay?

  The next Tuesday, the first one in May, Tom leaves the hospital after his shift. His vision wavers at the edges, and he hears Mother’s voice: Be careful, Tomcat. It’s not worth the risk. He walks slowly to the end of the block and catches the first trolley to Belle Isle, where he steps off into a golden dawn.

  There are few cars about, all parked, one a Ford with a huge present wrapped in yellow ribbon on the backseat. An old man with a crumpled face rakes the gravel paths. The sunlight hits the dew and sets the lawns aflame.

  The face of the aquarium is Gothic and wrapped in vines. Tom finds a bench outside and waits for his pulse to steady. The reticulated glass roofs of the flower conservatory reflect a passing cloud. Eventually a man in overalls opens the gate, and Tom buys two tickets, then thinks about the baby and buys a third. He returns to the bench with the three tickets in his trembling fingers.

  By eleven the sky is filled with a platinum haze and the island is busy. Men on bicycles crackle along the paths. A girl flies a yellow kite.

  Tom?

  Ruby Hornaday materializes before him—shoulders erect, hair newly short, pushing a chrome-and-canvas baby buggy. He stands quickly, and the park bleeds away and then restores itself.

  Sorry I’m late, she says.

  She’s dignified, slim. Two quick strokes for eyebrows, the same narrow nose. No makeup. No jewelry. Those pale blue eyes and that hair.

  She cocks her head slightly. Look at you. All grown up.

  I have tickets, he says.

  How’s Mr. Weems?

  Oh, he’s made of salt, he’ll live forever.

  They start down the path between the rows of benches and the shining trees. Occasionally she takes his arm to steady him, though her touch only disorients him more.

  I thought maybe you were far away, he says. I thought maybe you went to sea.

  Ruby doesn’t say anything. She parks the buggy and lifts the baby to her chest—he’s wrapped in a blue afghan—and then they’re through the turnstile.

  The aquarium is dim and damp and lined on both sides with glass-fronted tanks. Ferns hang from the ceiling, and little boys lean across the brass railings and press their noses to the glass. I think he likes it, Ruby says. Don’t you, baby? The boy’s eyes are wide open. Fish swim slow ellipses through the water.

  They see translucent squid with corkscrew tails, sparkling pink octopi like floating lanterns, cowfish in blue and violet and gold. Iridescent green tiles gleam on the domed ceiling and throw wavering patterns of light across the floor.

  In a circular pool at the very center of the building, dark shapes race back and forth in coordination. Jacks, Ruby murmurs. Aren’t they?

  Tom blinks.

  You’re pale, she says.

  Tom shakes his head.

  She helps him back out into the daylight, beneath the sky and the trees. The baby lies in the buggy sucking his lips, and Ruby guides Tom to a bench.

  Cars and trucks and even a limousine pass slowly along the white bridge, high over the river. The city glitters in the distance.

  Thank you, says Tom.

  For what?

  For this.

  How old are you now, Tom?

  Twenty-one. Same as you. A breeze stirs the trees, and the leaves vibrate with light. Everything is radiant.

  World goes to Hades, but babies still get born, whispers Tom.

  Ruby peers into the buggy and adjusts something, and for a moment the back of her neck shows between her hair and collar. The sight of those two knobs of vertebrae, sheathed in her delicate skin, fills Tom with a longing that cracks the lawns open. For a moment it seems Ruby is being slowly dragged away from him, as if he were a swimmer caught in a rip, and with every stroke the back of her neck recedes farther into the distance. Then she sits back, and the park heels over, and he can feel the bench become solid beneath him once more.

  I used to think, Tom says, that I had to be careful with how much I lived. As if life was a pocketful of coins. You only got so much and you didn’t want to spend it all in one place.

  Ruby looks at him. Her eyelashes whisk up and down.

  But now I know life is the one thing in the world that never runs out. I might run out of mine, and you might run out of yours, but the world will never run out of life. And we’re all very lucky to be part of something like that.

  She holds his gaze. Some deserve more luck than they’ve gotten.

  Tom shakes his head. He closes his eyes. I’ve been lucky, too. I’ve been absolutely lucky.

  The baby begins to fuss, a whine building to a cry, and Ruby says, Hungry.

  A trapdoor opens in the gravel between Tom’s feet, black as a keyhole, and he glances down.

  You’ll be okay?

  I’ll be okay.

  Good-bye, Tom. She touches his forearm once, and then she goes, pushing the buggy through the crowds. He watches her disappear in pieces, first her legs, then her hips, then her shoulders, and finally the back of her bright head.

  And then Tom sits, hands in his lap, alive for one more day.

  Salvatore Scibona

  The Woman Who Lived in the House

  HE LEARNED OF Sergei’s arrest and imprisonment when a waiter switched the television to CNN. Ásmundur and his wife watched the screen with horror in the Amsterdam café where they habitually took their Sunday coffee and pastries, reading two papers, his in English, hers in Dutch. The Soviets—rather the Russians, rather Putin—would seize all the money too, wouldn’t they? asked Ásmundur’s wife hopelessly.

  Ásmundur’s whole head boiled with blood. He mistook the bowl of sugar cubes for an ashtray and stabbed his cigarette in it. He said, “Perhaps.” They both knew he meant, Yes, everything.

  Sergei’s development of a Siberian natural gas field was such a sure thing, his kleptocratic credentials so spotless, that they had tied to him millions of their own guilders and even taken a second mortgage on their house to make the minimum investment.

  “This is what we get. This is what we get,” she cried on the walk home—otherwise their week’s most tender hour, when she would hook her arm in his and wrap her small hands in the tail of his scarf. Whatever the weather she felt a chill outdoors.

  Then a cyclist neglecting his bell careened into her on a footbridge, and Ásmundur made the mistake of asking after the health of the drug-addled young man, who’d just bloodied his head on the stone bridge rail. That she had only stumbled a little made no difference. Ásmundur should first have thought of her. And so the deep screw in the joint between them came out another turn.

  She had warned him off Sergei—his occasional squash partner, a Russian with the face of Saddam Hussein and fingers as soft as soup dumplings. Once, the man had come to Twelfth Night supper while Ásmundur’s sister, Íris, was visiting from Iceland with her infant daughter, Frigg. When the girl awoke howling during dessert, Sergei fetched her and dipped her pacifier in his rum pudding. She went to sleep again on his belly while he petted her like a cat. Nevertheless Ásmundur’s wife had been right about that man, and now she compulsively said so.

  Later on, Ásmundur saw that God had sent them the cyclist to foretell that, after twenty years of giving them the stamina and will that makes young Eros turn into the companionship of married love, he would now send bicycle accidents; a toilet seat that cracked under her behind at a friend’s dinner party; brackish water that pooled from untraceable faults in their basement just as they had to sell their house for debts; spoiled milk in fresh cartons; and contempt for all the differences between their characters that, before, th
ey had turned into more and more baroque demonstrations that their love gained strength with exercise.

  Ásmundur Gudmundsson had been born a hayseed and made himself a modern man. Twenty years of typing at a computer keyboard while pressing a telephone receiver or a mobile to his right ear with his shoulder had permanently twisted his neck. Throughout his career his clever intestines convulsed in sympathy with otherwise undetectable shifts in the mood of the currency markets in distant capitals. When he had begun to lose his hair he wondered which of his daring investments had caused it, and only concluded long after his ruin that he might just have been taking part in the common life of his species, as when a maturing frog loses its tail.

  He had married a woman he admired. She taught him the knack of talking with strangers, simply asking them questions about themselves. She worked for an NGO devoted to transparency in government but had usually held her tongue about his own dealings. Her slender neck bore a crown, like a seeding dandelion, of hair that had gone to shining white in her twenties.

  He had wanted two children, and she wanted none, and they made none. It was only once they went bankrupt that he saw his recitations that he was “okay” with having no children as the reading of a hostage from a script before a video camera, while his captor pointed a Kalashnikov at the place where the hostage’s spine met his skull.

  After the Sergei affair, Ásmundur revealed a distemper, a callowness he’d never shown from his Lutheran boyhood to his early middle age. He made lewd jokes at her friends’ expense while drinking with them. Then he began to take long drives in the countryside with a red-headed Danish university student, whose silly fixation on such a lopsided figure as him briefly inspired the delusion that he had been meant for rakishness. The girl’s muddy English, learned from text messaging, bewitched him. He did not understand a word of it, and for three months it seemed to hold out all the wrecked promise of continental Europe.