The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014

by Laura Furman

“That was amazing, just amazing.” Hugo looked yearningly in the direction the young men had gone. “I wish they’d just walk around the streets singing like that all the time. You know, I was in a chorus for two years in high school. Did I ever tell you this? We used to take a bus around the state to these small towns and sing in school auditoriums. Sometimes they put us up overnight in dorms. It was okay, I sort of liked doing it, but it never meant anything much.

  “Then I remember one night after a performance I was all het up and restless for some reason and I walked down a path to a little river or maybe it was just a creek and I stood there on the bank feeling really strange like I was full of something that was going to burst in my chest. And for the first time I listened, really listened, to what was out there in the dark.

  “First I’d hear the cicadas, then they’d stop, and the tree frogs would start in, and then lightning bugs would dance around as if they were trying to write the tune. And it struck me that when I was standing with the other guys on the bleachers singing—and ‘Shenandoah’ was one of our songs—that we were just doing the same thing as these bugs and frogs. These creatures were expressing my feelings for me, they were manifestations, you might call it, of my feelings. And me and the other guys onstage, we were expressing the feelings of the people sitting out there on the folding chairs. That’s why they always got these happy dreamy expressions on their faces when they listened to us. That’s what I felt just now.”

  Hugo sighed. He looked a little bewildered after his speech.

  “So why didn’t you pursue a career in music?”

  He looked at me oddly. “It has nothing to do with a career.”

  We heard a rumble of thunder just then.

  “Hey, Marie, why don’t you go back to the apartment? The store we’re looking for is up near the railroad station. That’s quite a ways.”

  “No, I’m coming with you,” I said. I knew if I went back I’d just pace around wondering what I should do—tell Hugo I didn’t want to get married and get it over with? Or just let things drift for a while, the way they were drifting now?

  “Well, let’s at least take the boat.”

  We stood in line at the ticket booth, and Hugo paid for two tickets. Then we got behind the crowd jostling against the chain as the noisy vaporetto bumped against the floating dock. People pressed forward. Hugo touched my shoulder. “Go ahead and get on, Marie,” he said. “I forgot the toilet seat. It’s over there leaning against that booth.”

  “Oh, forget it,” I said, but Hugo was gone, pushing backward through a group of Chinese tourists in bright rain jackets. I climbed on board, but although I was shoved this way and that way I managed to stay near the rail. I spotted Hugo. He had the newspaper-wrapped package under his arm and was running back toward the floating dock. But the boatman locked the chain, and then jumped on board. The boat slid away from the dock.

  “Wait, wait,” I screamed. “Let him on!”

  But the boatman could not possibly have heard me over the noise. I waved frantically at Hugo. “Where should I get off?” I screamed.

  He waved his free arm and pointed up the Grand Canal and shouted something but I couldn’t hear him. The boat was out in the middle of the canal now. There was another clap of thunder, and it began to rain. Everyone on board shrieked and pushed back from the edge. I glimpsed Hugo ducking away down a street and then he was gone from my sight. People who’d had their cameras out were wiping the lenses and stowing their gear.

  I got off at the railroad station. Hugo had said that the plumbing supply store was near there. I had the address in my notebook, but I lacked a map. Hugo probably remembered the address, and was on his way up here. But maybe he didn’t remember the address. Maybe he’d just gone back to the apartment and was waiting for me. Our cell phones didn’t work in Europe so we hadn’t brought them, and there was no way I could call him unless I bought a phone card and located a phone and called the apartment.

  Luckily I had my little red umbrella. But it was raining hard and my feet were soaked. Nevertheless, I did my best to get to where we’d been going. I showed the address of the plumbing supply store to a young woman in a clothing store, and she pointed to the right. But I couldn’t find the street. A waiter in a café pointed me to the left. Still no luck. Finally I decided to go back to the apartment. Hugo must have been waiting for me and I didn’t want him to worry.

  But when I got back, there were no wet shoes sitting outside the door on the landing, and the sisal mat was dry. There was no damp jacket hanging on the pegboard in the hall. I left my umbrella open on the landing, took off my own soaked shoes and left them on the mat, hung my socks on the bathroom radiator, and made a cup of tea in the kitchen. When I carried the tea to the living room, I saw that the window had blown open in the storm and my pot of basil was on the floor.

  I set my tea down and scooped up the dirt and repacked it around the basil roots. I closed the window and swept the floor. Then I sat down with my cup of tea to wait.

  Twenty minutes went by, then an hour. I looked at the phone. There were a lot of English books that other renters had left in the apartment over the years, and I picked up a novel and tried to read, but I kept jumping at every noise and couldn’t get interested. The outer door banged open downstairs several times, but the footsteps always continued up to other landings.

  I was getting worried. I paced into the bedroom and looked at the king-sized bed still unmade from the morning. Hugo’s pillow was wadded and dented and the sheets on his side were twisted. A few hard candies with cellophane wrappings glittered on his bedside table. I walked into the bathroom and held the sleeve of his bathrobe hanging on the back of the door.

  It was time for dinner, but I wasn’t hungry. At eight o’clock I made another cup of tea and ate a handful of chocolate biscotti. I couldn’t call the police and report a missing person because I didn’t speak Italian. I’d have to go to the police station in person, wherever that was. But surely nothing had happened to Hugo! This was Venice. It was a safe city. There weren’t any cars to worry about. And Hugo was a friendly guy. He’d probably just met somebody, maybe in a café, and had forgotten all about me.

  I started to feel resentful. Why didn’t he call and tell me where he was? Why was he doing this to me? Was this what our married life was going to be like?

  But we weren’t getting married, were we?

  I looked out the dark bedroom windows at the apartment straight across the street, where a woman was doing the dishes. I looked out the kitchen window above the canal, where a man was tinkering with his boat in the twilight. The rain had stopped and clouds were streaming across the sky, leaving dark blue patches. I looked out a corner window in the living room where I could see a little bridge farther down the canal. A man and a woman were standing there, looking up. I looked up, too. The moon was just rising through the clouds.

  I went back to the novel. I got up after ten minutes, having understood nothing. I walked into the kitchen and opened a bag of cheese puffs and stuffed some in my mouth. Then I went into the bathroom and sat on the cracked toilet seat. I could feel the crack—the seat wasn’t quite even now—but I didn’t care. Where was Hugo? In the morning I really would go to the police if he wasn’t back.

  I picked up an afghan and wrapped it around my shoulders and stretched out on the blue sofa. I remembered years ago when I was a babysitter and used to wait up for parents, trying not to fall asleep. My eyes felt dry and scratchy. Once or twice they fell shut but I always opened them again. Or I thought I did. It was an hour later when I looked at my watch the next time.

  I meant to get up, but I didn’t. Then I dreamed, or thought I was dreaming. I heard distant singing. Somewhere a bunch of people were singing “Shenandoah” and they were coming closer and closer.

  Oh Shenandoah

  I long to see you

  And hear your rolling river

  Oh Shenandoah

  I long to see you

  Away, we’re bound awayr />
  Across the wide Missouri

  I wasn’t dreaming, because I didn’t know the words to the song and couldn’t have dreamed them so clearly. I sat up. The singing was coming down my street, a street that dead-ended in the canal. Whoever was singing was coming straight in this direction, not just passing by.

  I got up and went to the window and pushed back one half of a green shutter that had blown back from the wall. I looked down. Right below me were eight or nine young men in white shirts and blue ties, all of them singing “Shenandoah” at the top of their lungs. All down the street, windows were flung open and sleepy heads were peering out. The singers saw me at the window, and some of them waved, but they all kept singing. And then I saw Hugo.

  Hugo was standing in the middle of the group. He was singing, too. And over his head he held up a shiny new toilet seat.

  They sang for me—first “Shenandoah” and then “Danny Boy” and then a Shaker hymn. And they caught all that was inside me so exactly that I felt I’d been opened up like a geode. I could feel my face shining as I looked down at Hugo. I didn’t know what was going to happen next. Was I really going to hand over the pure and rounded pearls of my lonely life for this? I leaned over the windowsill, confused by such happiness, if that was what it was.

  Laura van den Berg

  Opa-locka

  MY SISTER WAS THE photographer. From a rooftop deck, nestled between two enormous ferns in clay pots, she photographed our target, Mr. Defonte, entering the adjacent apartment building. He wore a white linen suit, boat shoes, and a straw sun hat with a chin strap that dangled beneath his jaw.

  “Only in Florida,” Julia said, snapping a photo. “Does he think he’s on a safari?”

  Mr. Defonte paused outside and stared at his feet. He was only a few steps away from the entrance of the glossy high-rise building. The doors were made of blue glass with silver handles in the shape of leaping fish. Julia took another picture. I was crouched beside my sister and peering through binoculars. I could see his face in profile, his long downward-sloping nose and soft chin. I knew his full legal name, his social, his date of birth, where he lived, where he worked, his favorite lunch spot, and his license plate number. His wife had hired me and Julia to investigate him. Together we made up Winslow & Co., the private detective firm we’d been running for the last year.

  “I don’t think he’s going inside.” I lowered the binoculars. It was Boca Raton in June. My throat was slick with sweat, my underarms damp. “I just have a feeling.”

  “If that motherfucker doesn’t walk through that door, I’m going to climb down from this roof and smack him in the face,” Julia said. The apples of her cheeks were flushed. Her chestnut hair glistened.

  I opened the red cooler we brought on stakeouts and fished out an ice cube. I ran it along the back of Julia’s neck and over her cheeks. She sighed in a way that sounded grateful. I kept moving the ice over her skin until it turned into a tiny translucent shard and melted into my fingertips, until it was just my hand on the nape of her neck.

  Mr. Defonte opened the door. He hesitated for a moment, then disappeared into the building. Julia snapped three pictures in a row. Now all he had to do was come out. And all we had to do was wait.

  What do you want? That was how the conversation with Mrs. Defonte began, how they always began. You don’t hire a private investigator unless you want something. In our early twenties, Julia and I hired a detective to track down our father, who vanished in the middle of the night when we were teenagers. I was fifteen, Julia thirteen. We just woke up one Saturday morning and found him gone and our mother in the backyard, staring at the sky. Our detective was expensive and didn’t have any luck. We knew what it was like to want something so badly, it burned a hole inside you.

  Mrs. Defonte had hired us for the same reason most women hired PIs: she suspected her husband was having an affair. In the last six months, she explained in her living room, his behavior had changed. He took phone calls in the middle of the night. He worked later. Something about his tone of voice was different, his smell, even. He seemed to have trouble looking her in the eye. She had followed him once, waited outside his office and trailed him to a café on Second Street, but then she lost her nerve.

  Mrs. Defonte had beautiful black hair that nested on her shoulders and nails painted the color of pink geraniums. She wore a snug black sleeveless dress and a white sweater draped over her shoulders, and sat with her ankles crossed. She was in her fifties, around the same age as my mother, who was several weeks into a six-month cruise around the world; it had started in Fort Lauderdale and would end in Monte Carlo. Julia liked to joke that our mother had been away at sea her whole life. She’d done her best to raise us, but once we were out in the world, the distance that had always been there shifted and hardened, like a building shedding its scaffolding and assuming its final shape. We reminded her of painful times, we understood.

  “I want to know what’s real,” Mrs. Defonte said.

  “That’s exactly what we do.” We had been served iced teas and Julia’s long fingers were wrapped around her glass. “We gather facts, evidence. We separate what’s true from what isn’t.”

  Mrs. Defonte nodded. “It’s all very peculiar,” she said, almost to herself.

  “It’s actually pretty common,” I said. Julia stepped on the toe of my sneaker. I had a habit of saying the wrong thing to clients. Each one was supposed to think their predicament was special, in need of our expertise. The Defonte case was a big opportunity for us. We’d been getting most of our work from insurance companies, who often hired private investigators to look into claims, but it was the domestic investigations that really paid.

  Mrs. Defonte looked at the ceiling for a moment and sighed. She told us that sometimes she wondered if she was making it up. Once she wrote out a list of all the warning signs, all the things he’d done, but on paper it didn’t look that damning. Still she couldn’t let go of the feeling that something was wrong. It plagued her day and night.

  “Maybe I just have too much time on my hands,” she said.

  “You leave it to us,” Julia said. “Give us a month and we’ll know what he’s been up to.”

  On our way out, I noticed a photo in a silver frame. It was Mrs. Defonte standing on a stage, a red velvet curtain hanging behind her. She wore a long bronze gown. Her hands were clasped in front her stomach, her lips parted in song.

  “I sing in our community opera,” Mrs. Defonte said when she saw me looking. “That was from The Mask of Orpheus. I went to Juilliard, you know.”

  “Really?” I glanced up at her. She was nearly smiling.

  “It was a long time ago.” She opened the front door and watched us walk to our car, a black Explorer with tinted windows and a portable GPS affixed to the dashboard. It was a rental.

  That night, back at our apartment, a minimal amount of digging turned up the name of the community opera and their rehearsal schedule. They staged their rehearsals and performances at an opera house in downtown Boca Raton. My sister and I lived in Opa-locka, ten miles north of Miami. Opa-locka came from the Indian name Opatishawokalocka, which meant “the high land north of the little river on which there is a camping place.” It was a rough neighborhood. Every night Julia locked all our equipment—GPS, walkie-talkies, tape recorders, cameras, binoculars, laptops—in a safe in her bedroom closet. She kept the Glock 22 I was licensed for on the bedside table. Just last week our neighbor Mirabella had been robbed at knifepoint. I had tried to talk my sister into moving, citing crime statistics and reasonable rents in other neighborhoods, but she loved the two-story blue stucco building with the concrete balcony and the drained swimming pool half-filled with bottles and empty cigarette packs. For Julia risk was like air. The good news was that we saved a bundle in rent and could afford to run ads in everything from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel to the Boca Beacon, which was how Mrs. Defonte had found us.

  One night, a week into the Defonte case, I told Julia I needed to go fo
r a drive. It took less than an hour to reach the opera house. It was on a brick street lined with palm trees, a circular building with a glass facade, so even from the parking lot, I could see the warm light inside. A crescent-shaped pool curved in front of the entrance; a trio of fountainheads shot white water into the air. After finding the rehearsal stage, I took a seat in the very back. The space was empty save for a handful of people in the front rows. They were in rehearsal for Don Giovanni. Mrs. Defonte stood on the right-hand side of the stage. She wore street clothes, black slacks and a crisp pink button-down. A long white veil was clipped to her hair. A man with a black mask over his eyes stood in the center of the stage, singing. I watched Mrs. Defonte watch the man and wondered what she was feeling. Another person came into the theater and walked down the aisle, carrying an armful of fake roses to the stage. I sank lower into my seat.

  The veil Mrs. Defonte wore in her hair was not unlike the one I’d worn when I got married. I had moved in with Julia six months ago, after my divorce was finalized, and not long after, I’d started getting strange postcards in the mail. They were part of a set. I’d seen a similar kind of thing in a party store once; if I had all the cards they would fit together like a puzzle. So far I’d received two swatches of sky, a cloud, a dried-out river, and a brown ledge. There was nothing on the back except my name and Julia’s address. Everything was typed, the letters large and a little smudged, as though it had been done on an old typewriter. The postmarks were from Arizona, Utah, Nevada. I had never seen my husband use a typewriter, but he had always wanted to travel west. He thought Florida was a miserable swamp. And he knew Julia’s would be the first place I’d turn. Once, I spread the cards out on the floor and tried to put them in order. I didn’t have enough pieces to make sense of what they were supposed to be.

  When Mrs. Defonte began singing, my hands dropped into my lap. My chin rose, as though pulled by a string. Each note was as perfect as the crystal goblets I’d noticed on her dining room table. The other actors onstage gazed at her with the same kind of wonder. When she finished, they all applauded. One person rose from her seat. Mrs. Defonte looked around, startled, like she’d just come out of a trance. A voice like that was a weapon.