The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014

by Laura Furman

  I was afraid of Nemecia because I knew her greatest secret: when she was five, she put her mother in a coma and killed our grandfather.

  I knew this because she told me late one Sunday as we lay awake in our beds. The whole family had eaten together at our house, as we did every week, and I could hear the adults in the front room, still talking.

  “I killed them,” Nemecia said into the darkness. She spoke as if reciting, and I didn’t at first know if she was talking to me. “My mother was dead. Almost a month she was dead, killed by me. Then she came back, like Christ, except it was a bigger miracle because she was dead longer, not just three days.” Her voice was matter-of-fact.

  “Why did you kill our grandpa?” I whispered.

  “I don’t remember,” she said. “I must have been angry.”

  I stared hard at the darkness, then blinked. Eyes open or shut, the darkness was the same. Unsettling. I couldn’t hear Nemecia breathe, just the distant voices of the adults. I had the feeling I was alone in the room.

  Then Nemecia spoke. “I can’t remember how I did it, though.”

  “Did you kill your father too?” I asked. For the first time I became aware of a mantle of safety around me that I’d never noticed before, and it was dissolving.

  “Oh, no,” Nemecia told me. Her voice was decided again. “I didn’t need to, because he ran away on his own.”

  Her only mistake, she said, was that she didn’t kill the miracle child. The miracle child was her brother, my cousin Patrick, three years older than me. He was a miracle because even as my aunt Benigna slept, dead to the world for those weeks, his cells multiplied and his features emerged. I thought of him growing strong on sugar water and my aunt’s wasting body, his soul glowing steadily inside her. I thought of him turning flips in the liquid quiet.

  “I was so close,” Nemecia said, almost wistfully.

  A photograph of Patrick as a toddler stood in a frame on the piano. He was seated between my aunt Benigna, whom I had never met, and her new husband, all of them living in California. The Patrick in the photograph was fat cheeked and unsmiling. He seemed content there, between a mother and a father. He did not seem aware of the sister who lived with us in another house nine hundred miles away. Certainly he didn’t miss her.

  “You better not tell anyone,” my cousin said.

  “I won’t,” I said, fear and loyalty swelling in me. I reached my hand into the dark space between our beds.

  The next day, the world looked different; every adult I encountered was diminished now, made frail by Nemecia’s secret.

  That afternoon I went to the store and stood quietly at my mother’s side as she worked at the messy rolltop desk behind the counter. She was balancing the accounts, tapping her lower lip with the end of her pencil.

  My heart pounded and my throat was tight. “What happened to Aunt Benigna? What happened to your dad?”

  My mother turned to look at me. She put down the pencil, was still for a moment, and then shook her head and made a gesture like she was pushing it all away from her.

  “The important thing is we got our miracle. Miracles. Benigna lived, and that baby lived.” Her voice was hard. “God at least granted us that. I’ll always thank him for that.” She didn’t look thankful.

  “But what happened?” My question was less forceful now.

  My mother shook her head again. “It’s best forgotten, hijita. I don’t want to think about it.”

  I believed that what Nemecia told me was true. What confused me was that no one ever treated Nemecia like a murderer. If anything, they were especially nice to her. I wondered if they knew what she’d done. I wondered if they were afraid of what she might do to them. Perhaps the whole town was terrified of my cousin, watching her, and I watched Nemecia too as she talked with the teacher on the school steps, as she helped my mother before dinner. But she never slipped, and though sometimes I thought I caught glimmers of caution in the faces of the adults, I couldn’t be sure.

  The whole town seemed to have agreed to keep me in the dark, but I thought if anyone would be vocal about her disapproval—and surely she disapproved of murder—it would be my great-aunt Paulita. I asked her about it one afternoon at her house as we made tortillas, careful not to betray Nemecia’s secret. “What happened to my grandfather?” I pinched off a ball of dough and handed it to her.

  “It was beyond imagining,” Paulita said. She rolled the dough in fierce, sharp thrusts. I thought she’d go on, but she only said again, “Beyond imagining.”

  Except that I could imagine Nemecia killing someone. Hell, demons, flames—these were the horrors that I couldn’t picture. Nemecia’s fury, though—that was completely plausible.

  “But what happened?”

  Paulita flipped the disk of dough, rolled it again, slapped it on the hot iron top of the stove, where it blistered. She pointed at me with the rolling pin. “You’re lucky, Maria, to have been born after that day. You’re untouched. The rest of us will never forget it, but you, mi hijita, and the twins, are untouched.” She opened the front door of her stove with an iron hook and worried the fire inside.

  No one would talk about what had happened when Nemecia was five. And soon I stopped asking. Before bed I would wait for Nemecia to say something more about her crime, but she never mentioned it again.

  At night I stayed awake as long as I could, waiting for Nemecia to come after me in the dark.

  Any new thing I got, Nemecia ruined, not enough that it was unusable, or even very noticeable, but just a little: a scrape with her fingernail in the wood of a pencil, a tear on the inside hem of a dress, a crease in the page of a book. I complained once, when Nemecia knocked my new windup jumping frog against the stone step. I thrust the frog at my mother, demanding she look at the scratch in the tin. My mother folded the toy back into my palm and shook her head, disappointed. “Think of other children,” she said. She meant children I knew, children from Tajique. “So many children don’t have such beautiful new things.”

  I was often put in my cousin’s care. My mother was glad of Nemecia’s help; she was busy with the store and with my three-year-old brothers. I don’t think she ever imagined that my cousin wished me harm. My mother was hawkish about her children’s safety—later, when I was fifteen, she refused to serve a neighbor’s aging farmhand in the store for a year because he whistled at me—but she trusted Nemecia. Nemecia was my mother’s niece, almost an orphan, my mother’s first child.

  My cousin was fierce with her love and with her hate, and sometimes I couldn’t tell the difference. I seemed to provoke her anger without meaning to. At her angriest, she would lash out with slaps and pinches that turned my skin red and blue. Her anger would sometimes last weeks, aggression that would fade into long silences. I knew I was forgiven when she would begin to tell me stories, ghost stories about La Llorona, who haunted arroyos and wailed like the wind at approaching death, stories about bandits and the terrible things they would do to young girls, and, worse, stories about our family. Then she would hold and kiss me and tell me that though it was all true, every word, and though I was bad and didn’t deserve it, she loved me still.

  Not all her stories scared me. Some were wonderful—elaborate sagas that unfurled over weeks, adventures of girls like us who ran away. And all her stories belonged to us alone. She braided my hair at night, snapped back if a boy teased me, showed me how to walk so that I looked taller. “I’m here to take care of you,” she told me. “That’s why I’m here.”

  After her fourteenth birthday, Nemecia’s skin turned red and oily and swollen with pustules. It looked tender. She began to laugh at me for my thick eyebrows and crooked teeth, things I hadn’t noticed about myself until then.

  One night she came into our bedroom and looked at herself in the mirror for a long time. When she moved away, she crossed to where I sat on the bed and dug her nail into my right cheek. I yelped, jerked my head. “Shh,” she said kindly. With one hand she smoothed my hair, and I felt myself softe
n under her hands as she worked her nail through my skin. It hurt only a little bit, and what did I, at seven years old, care about beauty? As I sat snug between Nemecia’s knees, my face in her hands, her attention swept over me the way I imagined a wave would, warm and slow and salty.

  Night after night I sat between her knees while she opened and reopened the wound. One day she’d make a game of it, tell me that I looked like a pirate; another day she’d say it was her duty to mark me because I had sinned. Daily she and my mother worked against each other, my mother spreading salve on the scab each morning, Nemecia easing it open each night with her nails. “Why don’t you heal, hijita?” my mother wondered as she fed me cloves of raw garlic. Why didn’t I tell her? I don’t know exactly, but I suppose I needed to be drawn into Nemecia’s story.

  By the time Nemecia finally lost interest and let my cheek heal, the scar reached from the side of my nose to my lip. It made me look dissatisfied, and it turned purple in the winter.

  When Nemecia turned sixteen, she left me alone. It was normal, my mother said, for her to spend more time by herself or with older girls. At dinner my cousin was still funny with my parents, chatty with the aunts and uncles. But those strange secret fits of rage and adoration—all the attention she’d once focused on me—ended completely. She had turned away from me, but instead of relief I felt emptiness.

  I tried to force Nemecia back into our old closeness. I bought her caramels, nudged her in church as though we shared some secret joke. Once at school I ran up to where she stood with some older girls. “Nemecia!” I exclaimed, as though I’d been looking everywhere for her, and grabbed her hand. She didn’t push me away or snap at me, just smiled distantly and turned back to her friends.

  We still shared our room, but she went to bed late. She no longer told stories, no longer brushed my hair, no longer walked with me to school. Nemecia stopped seeing me, and, without her gaze, I became indistinct to myself. I’d lie in bed waiting for her, holding myself still until I could no longer feel the sheets on my skin, until I was bodiless in the dark. Eventually, Nemecia would come in, and when she did, I would be unable to speak.

  My skin lost its color, my body its mass, until one morning in May when, as I gazed out the classroom window, I saw old Mrs. Romero walking down the street, her shawl billowing around her like wings. My teacher called my name sharply, and I was surprised to find myself in my body, sitting solid at my desk. Suddenly I decided: I would lead the Corpus Christi procession. I would wear the wings and everyone would look at me.

  Corpus Christi had been my mother’s favorite feast day since she was a child, when each summer she walked with the other girls through the dirt streets, flinging rose petals. Every year my mother made Nemecia and me new white dresses and wound our braids with ribbons in coronets around our heads. I’d always loved the ceremony: the solemnity of the procession, the blessed sacrament in its gold box held high by the priest under the gold-tasseled canopy, the prayers at the altars along the way. Now I could think only of leading that procession.

  My mother’s altar was her pride. Each year she set up the card table on the street in front of the house. The Sacred Heart stood in the center of the crocheted lace cloth, flanked by candles and flowers in mason jars.

  Everyone took part in the procession, and the girls of the town led it all with baskets of petals to cast before the Body of Christ. On that day we were transformed from dusty, scraggle-haired children into angels. But it was the girl at the head of the procession who really was an angel, because she wore the wings that were stored between sheets of tissue paper in a box on top of my mother’s wardrobe. Those wings were beautiful, gauze and wire, and tied with white ribbon on the upper arms.

  A girl had to have been confirmed to lead the procession, and was chosen based on her recitation of a psalm. I was ten now, and this was the first year I qualified. In the days leading up to the recitation I surveyed the competition. Most of the girls were from ranches outside town. Even if they did have a sister or parent who could read well enough to help them with their memorization, I knew they wouldn’t pronounce the words right. Only my cousin Antonia was a real threat; she had led the procession the year before, and was always beautifully behaved, but she would recite an easy psalm. Nemecia was too old and had never shown interest anyway.

  I settled on Psalm 38, which I chose from my mother’s cardboard-covered Manna for its impressive length and difficult words.

  I practiced fervently, in the bathtub, walking to school, in bed at night. The way I imagined it, I would give my recitation in front of the entire town. Father Garcia would hold up his hand at the end of Mass, before people could shift and cough and gather their hats, and he would say, “Wait. There is one thing more you need to hear.” One or two girls would go before me, stumble through their psalms (short ones, unremarkable ones). Then I would stand, walk with grace to the front of the church, and there, before the altar, I’d speak with eloquence that people afterward would describe as unearthly. I’d offer my psalm as a gift to my mother. I’d watch her watch me from the pew, her eyes full of tears and pride.

  Instead, our recitations took place in Sunday school before Mass. One by one we stood before our classmates as our teacher, Mrs. Reyes, followed our words from her Bible. Antonia recited the same psalm she had recited the year before. When it was my turn, I stumbled over the phrase “For my iniquities are gone over my head: and as a heavy burden are become heavy upon me.” When I sat down with the other children, tears gathered behind my eyes and I told myself that none of it mattered.

  A week before the procession, my mother met me outside school. During the day she rarely left the store or my little brothers, so I knew it was important.

  “Mrs. Reyes came by the store today, Maria,” my mother said. I could not tell from her face if the news had been good or bad, or about me at all. She put her hand on my shoulder and led me home.

  I walked stiffly under her hand, waiting, eyes on the dusty toes of my shoes.

  Finally my mother turned to me and hugged me. “You did it, Maria.”

  That night we celebrated. My mother brought bottles of ginger ale from the store, and we shared them, passing them around the table. My father raised his and drank to me. Nemecia grabbed my hand and squeezed it.

  Before we had finished dinner, my mother stood and beckoned me to follow her down the hall. In her bedroom she took down the box from her wardrobe and lifted out the wings. “Here,” she said, “let’s try them on.” She tied the ribbons around my arms over my checked dress, and led me back to where my family sat waiting.

  The wings were light, and they scraped against the doorway. They moved ever so slightly as I walked, the way I imagined real angel wings might.

  “Turn around,” my father said. My brothers slid off their chairs and came at me. My mother caught them by the arms. “Don’t go get your greasy hands on those wings.” I twirled and spun for my family, and my brothers clapped. Nemecia smiled and served herself seconds.

  That night Nemecia went up to bed when I did. As we pulled on our nightgowns, she said, “They had to pick you, you know.”

  I turned to her, surprised. “That’s not true,” I said.

  “It is,” she said simply. “Think about it. Antonia was last year, Christina Garcia the year before. It’s always the daughters of the Altar Society.”

  It hadn’t occurred to me before, but of course she was right. I would have liked to argue, but instead I began to cry. I hated myself for crying in front of her, and I hated Nemecia. I got into bed, turned away, and fell asleep.

  Sometime later I woke up to darkness. Nemecia was beside me in bed, her breath hot on my face. She patted my head and whispered, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” Her strokes became harder. Her breath was hot and hissing. “I am the miracle child. They never knew. I am the miracle because I lived.”

  I lay still. Her arms were tight around my head, my face pressed against her hard sternum. I couldn’t hear some of the t
hings she said to me, and the air I breathed tasted like Nemecia. It was only from the shudders that passed through her thin chest into my skull that I finally realized she was crying. After a while she released me and set me back on my pillow like a doll. “There now,” she said, and arranged my arms over the covers. “Go to sleep.” I shut my eyes and tried to obey.

  I spent the afternoon before Corpus Christi watching my brothers play in the garden while my mother worked on her altar. They were digging a hole. Any other time I would have helped them, but tomorrow was Corpus Christi. It was hot and windy and my eyes were dry. I hoped the wind would settle overnight. I didn’t want dust on my wings.

  I saw Nemecia step out onto the porch. She shaded her eyes and stood still for a moment. When she caught sight of us crouched in the corner of the garden she came over, her strides long and adult.

  “Maria. I’m going to walk with you tomorrow in the procession. I’m going to help you.”

  “I don’t need any help,” I said.

  Nemecia smiled as though it was out of her hands. “Well.” She shrugged.

  “But I’m leading it,” I said. “Mrs. Reyes chose me.”

  “Your mother told me I had to help you, and that maybe I would get to wear the wings.”

  I stood. Even standing, I came only to her shoulder. I heard the screen door slam, and my mother was on the porch. She came over to us, steps quick, face worried.

  “Mama, I don’t need help. Tell her Mrs. Reyes chose me.”

  “I only thought that there will be other years for you.” My mother’s tone was imploring. “Nemecia will be too old next year.”