The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

by Laura Furman

  With Esme gone, Victor began to talk about quitting the mill. The ceaseless roar was giving him tinnitus; his back hurt; there were nights he fell asleep without showering and woke already exhausted, doomed to another day just like the last, and how was he supposed to have any energy left for a four-year-old? Had Esme thought of that before she left, he wondered—that he might not be able to keep it together? No doubt his steadiness had misled her into thinking it was safe to leave, and when he remembered how reliable and fond and funny and tolerant he had been, anger slanted murderously through his body; and it was like anger practiced on him, got better and better at leaving him with shaking hands and a dilated sense of hatred with no nearby object; and he began to be very, very careful not to be alone with his little boy.

  Dylan understood this. After nightmares he did not try his dad’s room, right next to his, but padded his way through the dark house up the narrow flight of stairs to the bedroom, where he slid in between Sean and Daisy. More than once his cold bare feet made accidental contact with Sean’s genitals, and Sean had to capture the feet and guide them away. This left him irritably awake, needing to make the long trip to the bathroom downstairs, and when he returned the boy was still restless and Sean watched him wind a hand into Daisy’s long hair and rub it against his cheek until he could sleep. Worse than jealousy was the affront to Sean’s self-regard in feeling so contemptible an emotion. This was a scared little boy, this was his tight hold on safety, this was his grandfather standing by the side of the bed looking meanly down. Protectiveness toward his own flesh and blood had always been Sean’s ruling principle, and if that went wrong he didn’t know who he was anymore. He rose to dress for work one chilly 6:00 a.m. and noticed the amateur tattoos running cruelly down the boy’s arm. Had an older kid got hold of him somehow, was this some kind of weird abuse, why hadn’t he come running to his grandfather? Sean bent close to decipher the trail of descending letters. I LOVE YOU. Not another kid, then. Not abuse. But wasn’t that bad for him, wouldn’t the ink’s toxins be absorbed through his skin, didn’t she think that was going a little too far, inscribing her love on the boy while he did what—held his arm out bravely? Time, past time, for Sean to try to talk to Daisy, to suggest that day care would be a good idea, or a playgroup where the boy could meet other kids. When Daisy was tired or wanted time to herself she left the boy alone with the remote, and once Sean walked in on the boy sitting cross-legged while on the screen a serial killer wrapped body parts in plastic, and how could you talk to a child after that, what could you tell him that could explain that away? All right, they could do better. He supposed most people could do better by their kids. Maybe her judgment in taking a pen to the boy’s arm wasn’t perfect, but was it such a bad thing to have love inscribed on your skin, whoever you were? Half the world was dying for want of that. If Daisy adored this boy Sean could live with that. More than live with it: he admired it. He admired her for being willing to begin again when she knew how it could end.

  Maybe Victor’s mood would have benefited from confrontation—a kitchen-table sit-down where, with cups of reheated coffee to warm their hands, father and son could try to get at the root of the problem—but envisioning his own well-meaning heavy-heartedness and guessing that Victor would take offense, Sean was inclined to ignore his son’s depression. In most cases, within a family, there was wisdom in holding one’s tongue. Except for one thing: Victor could, if he concluded his chances were better elsewhere, take the boy with him when he left. This gave a precarious tilt to their household, an instability whose source was, really, Victor’s fondness for appearing wronged. He came home with elaborate tales of affronts he had suffered, but Sean knew the foreman and doubted any unfairness had been shown Victor. When Victor needed to vent, Sean steered clear and Daisy, rather than voicing her true opinion—that it was time he got over Esme—calmly heard him out. Victor could ruin his mother’s peace of mind by ranting at the unbelievable fucking hopelessness of this fucking dead-end town, voice so peeved and fanatical in its recounting of injustice that Sean, frowning across the dinner table, thought he must know how ridiculous he sounded, how almost crazy, but Victor kept on: he was only waiting for the day when the mill closed down for good and he could pack up his kid and his shit and get out. What were they, blind? Couldn’t they see he had no life? Did they think he could take this another fucking day? From his chair near his dad Dylan said, “Are we going away?”

  “No, baby boy, you’re not going anywhere,” said Sean, at which Victor did the unthinkable, pulling out the gun tucked into the back of his jeans and setting it with a chime on his dinner plate and saying, “Then maybe this is what I should eat.” Daisy said, “Sean,” wanting him to do something, but before he could Victor pushed the plate across the table to him and said, “No, no, no, all right, I’m sorry, that was in front of the kid, that’s taking it too far, I know I know I know, don’t ask me if I meant it because you know I don’t but I swear to god, Dad, some days it crosses my mind. But I won’t. I never will.” Gently he cupped his boy’s head. “I’m sorry to have scared you, Dyl. Daddy got carried away.”

  “I want that gun out of the house,” Daisy said. Sean had gone out into the starry night and folded the passenger seat of his truck forward and tucked the gun into the old parka he kept there. In bed that night Daisy turned to him, maybe needing to feel that something was still right in their life, and while he understood the impulse and even shared it, he found he was picturing Esme’s pointed chin, her head thrown back, her urchin hair fanned out across a filthy mattress in the woods, an image so wrong and good he couldn’t stop breathing life into it, the visitation no longer blissfully involuntary but nursed along, fed with details; the childish lift of her upper lip as she picked at the gift-box ribbon came to him, the imagined grace of her pale body against the filthy mattress, her arms stretched overhead, her profile clean against the ropy twists of dirty hair, no she wouldn’t look, she wouldn’t look and he came without warning, Daisy far enough gone that momentum rocked her farther, Sean relieved when she managed the trick that mostly eluded her while also, in some far-back, disownable part of his mind, judging her climax too naked, too needful, and at the same time impersonal, since she had no idea where he was in his head, and this, her greedy solitary capacity, bothered him. In the slowed-down aftermath when their habit was to roll apart and stretch frankly and begin to talk about whatever came to mind, a brief spell, an island whose sanctity they understood, where they were truly, idly, themselves, their true selves, the secret selves only they recognized in each other, she didn’t move or speak and he continued to lie on her worrying that he was growing heavier and heavier, her panting exaggerated as if to communicate the extremity of her pleasure, and for a sorry couple of minutes he hated her. There was something offensive in her unawareness of his faithlessness. If he was faithless even in his mind he wanted it to matter and it couldn’t matter unless she could intuit it and hold him accountable and by exerting herself against him, as she had a right to, make him want to come all the way back to her. That was up to her. If she couldn’t do it then he might continue to be bewilderingly alone and even slightly, weirdly in love with the lost girl Esme, indefensible as that was, and astounding. Daisy squirmed companionably out from under, turned on her side, a hand below her cheek, the crook of her other arm bracing her breasts, the light of her eyes, the creases at the corners of her smile confiding, genuine, her goodness obvious, the goodness at the heart of his world, the expression on his face god knows what, but by her considering stillness she was working up to a revelation. With Daisy sex sometimes turned the keys of the secretest locks and he could never guess what was coming, since years and decades of wrongs and sorrows awaited confession, and even now, having loved her for twenty years, he could be surprised by some small flatly told story of some terrible thing that had happened when she was a kid. Damage did that, went in so deep it took long years to surface. Tonight he had no inclination to be trusted, but could hardly stop her. �
��This thing’s sort of been happening. Maybe four or five times? This thing of the phone ringing and no one being there. ‘Hello.’ ” The hello was hers. “And no answer. And ‘Hello.’ And no answer. Somebody there, though. Somebody there.”

  Such a relief not to have to travel again through the charred landscape of her childhood that he almost yawned. “Kids. Messing around.”

  “No,” she said. “Her.” His frown must have been puzzled because she said, “Esme.”

  “Esme.”

  “Don’t believe me then but I’m right, it was her and the last time she called I said, ‘Listen to me. Are you listening?’ and there was no answer and I said, ‘Never come back.’ I didn’t know that was about to come out of my mouth, I was probably more surprised than she was. ‘Never come back.’ ”

  “And then what?”

  “And then she hung up.” She scratched one foot with the toes of the other. “And that’s not like me. And I didn’t have any right, did I?” Rueful smile. “If I’d said, ‘Honey, where are you? Are you in trouble?’ that would have been like me, right? And maybe she would have told me, maybe something is wrong and that girl has nowhere else to turn. She’s the kind of girl there’s not just one filthy mattress in the woods in her life, not just one fantastic fuckup, but last time she was lucky and found us, and we let her come live in our house, and we loved her, I think—did we love her?—and I think if things got bad enough for her she’d think of us and remember we were good to her, weren’t we good to her?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes and now it’s like I’m waiting for her to call again. Or turn up. I think that’s next. She’ll turn up. And I don’t want her to. I never want to see that girl’s face again.”

  He couldn’t summon the energy for I’m sure it wasn’t her, even if that was probably true. He could also have accepted Daisy’s irrational conviction and addressed it with his usual calm. Of course you’re angry. Irresponsible, not just to her little boy, but to us who took her in, who cared about her—she left without a word. It’s natural to be angry.

  He lay there withholding the consolation that was his part in this back-and-forth until she turned onto her back and stared at the ceiling.

  I made a serious mistake with Esme once. Gave her a bracelet. If he could have said that. If he could have found a way to begin.

  Dent Figueredo wasn’t someone Sean thought of as a friend, but this sweet May evening they were alone in the Tip-Top, door open to the street alive with sparrow song and redolent of asphalt cooling in newly patched potholes, Dent behind the bar, Sean on his barstool thinking about taxes, paying no attention until he heard “I want your take on this.”

  “My take.”

  “You’re smart about women.”

  Women? But Sean nodded, and when that didn’t seem to be enough, he said, “Hit me.”

  “See first of all despite her quote flawless English she utters barely a word in the airport, just looks at me like I saved her life, which you’d think I would be a sucker for but no, I’m praying get me out of this, ready to turn the truck around and put her on the next flight home, and like she knows what I’m on the verge of she unbuckles and slides over and you know Highway Twenty twists and turns like a snake on glass, I never felt that trapped before in my life, just because this itty-bitty girl has hold of my dick through my trousers and you know she’s never done that before and I should’ve known that at this late date I’m not good husband material, should have lived with that but no, I had to get melty when I seen her doe-eyed picture on the Internet. Shit.”

  “Husband material.”

  “What you got to promise if you want a nice Filipina girl,” Dent said. “She’s some kind of born-again. Dressed like a little nun, baggy skirt and these flat black worn-out shoes. No makeup. Won’t hold your eye.” When he catches Sean’s eye he looks down and away, smiling, this imitation of girly freshness at odds with Dent’s bald sunspotted pate and the patch of silvery whiskers he missed on his Adam’s apple, and Sean can’t help laughing.

  “What happens to her now?”

  “Stories she tells, shit, curl your hair.” Dent used his glass to print circles of wet on the bar. “America still looks good to a lot of the world, I tell you.” He crouched to the refrigerator with his crippled leg stuck out behind. “She’s staying in my house till I can figure out what comes next, and you should see the place, neat as a picture in a magazine. Hard little worker, I give her that. If any of my boys was unmarried I’d drag him to the altar by the scruff of his neck.” He levered open his beer, raising it politely. Sean shook his head. “Course before long,” Dent continued, “one of them boys will shake loose.”

  “Meanwhile where does she sleep, this paragon?”

  “Nah, Filipina.”

  “And you two, have you been—?”

  “Ming. Cute, huh?” Dent drank from the bottle before pouring into his glass.

  “Took the upstairs room for her own, cleared out years of boy shit. Jesus won’t let nobody near her till there’s a ring on her finger. Twenty-two and looks fifteen. That’s the undernourishment.”

  When, sitting down to dinner that night, Sean told Daisy about the girl, she said, “You’re kidding,” and made him tell the entire story again, then said, amused, “Poor thing. You know he lied to her. And do you think he ever sent his picture? He’s, what, a poorly preserved sixty, a drinker, a smoker, hobbling around on that leg and he talks this child into leaving her home and her family and now he won’t do the right thing?”

  “He’d never seen her till she got off the plane. I think his lack of any feeling for her came as a shock. And in his defense he is leaving her alone.”

  “Of course he’s terrified of any constraint on his drinking. Dylan Raymond, we are waiting for your father.”

  Dylan put down the green bean he was trailing through his gravy and said, “Why?”

  “Yeah, I think that’s maybe more to the point. Because she’s a born-again, and might start in on him.”

  “Is she pretty?”

  “He says she has drawbacks.” He bared his teeth. “Primitive dental care.”

  “Oh and he’s George Clooney.”

  “But she’s sweet, he says,” Sean said, prolonging his bared-teeth smile. “Good-natured.”

  Victor came to the table then in his signature ragged black T-shirt and jeans, his pale workingman’s feet—which never saw the sun—bare, dark hair still dripping wet, and he stood behind Dylan, kneading the boy’s shoulders. “Who’re we talking about?” he wanted to know.

  “My mom is pretty,” Dylan announced, then waited with an air of uncertainty and daring—the kid who’s said something provocative in the hope the adults will get into the forbidden subject. Victor could conceivably say, “What mom?” He could conceivably say, “You wouldn’t know your mom if you passed her in the street.” He could conceivably say, “That bitch.” Sean knew Victor to be capable of any or all of these remarks, and was relieved when Victor calmly continued to rub the boy’s shoulders. Not answering was fine, given the alternatives. When Dylan began drawing in his gravy with the green bean again, his head down, he inscribed circles like those his dad was rubbing into his shoulders, in the same rhythm. How does he understand his mother’s absence? Sean wondered. Surely it’s hard for him that his father never mentions his mother, worrisome that nobody can say where she’s gone. Daisy has not made up any tale justifying Esme’s desertion. Sean understood the attraction of lying consolation; he felt it himself. The boy’s relief would have been worth almost any falsehood, but Daisy had insisted that they stick with what they knew, which was virtually nothing. Daisy said, “Yes, your mother is pretty,” with a sidelong glance at Victor to make sure this didn’t prompt meanness from him.

  Victor changed the subject: “Who were you saying was sweet?”

  Ming had no demure, closed-mouth smile, as he’d expected from an Asian girl, but a wide, flashing laugh whose shamelessness disturbed Victor, for her small teeth were sep
arated by touching gaps, the teeth themselves incongruously short, like pegs driven hastily into the ground. The decided sweetness of her manner almost countered the daredevilish, imbecile impression made by those teeth. Seated on a slab of rock at the beach, he peeled off his socks. Flatteringly, Ming had dressed for their date—not only a dress, stockings, and high heels—while he had worn jeans and his favorite frayed black T-shirt, but he figured this was all right, she would know from movies that American men complained about ties and jackets. Ming’s poise as she stood one-legged, peeling the stocking from her sandy foot, was very pretty, and the wind wrapped her dress—navy blue printed with flying white petals—tightly around her thighs and little round butt. Her panty hose were rolled up and tucked into a shoe, her shoes wedged into a crevice of the rock. In the restaurant earlier Victor had observed her table manners and found them wanting. It wasn’t so much that she made overt mistakes as that she wasn’t allowing for the grace-note pauses and frequent diversions—a smile, a little conversation—with which food is properly addressed in public, but chewed steadily with her little fox teeth. Her style overall began to seem quick and unfastidious and he was curious about what that would translate to in bed. He had been trying not to think about that because he knew from what Dent had said—first to his dad and then, when Victor called, to Victor himself—that she was a virgin, and it seemed wrong to try to guess what she would be like, sexually, when the only right way of perceiving her was as a semi-sacred blank slate. Respect, protectiveness: he liked having these feelings as he slouched against the rock, the wind bothering his hair, the bare-legged woman turning to find him smiling, smiling in return. There: the unlucky teeth. Guess what, she’s human. He jumped from the rock and took her hand and they walked down the beach.