The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

by Laura Furman

  For nearly a year Victor was happier than his parents had ever known him to be, even after he was laid off from the mill for the winter. Not the time you’d want to get pregnant, but Ming did, and when she miscarried at five months, they both took it hard. “She won’t get out of bed, Dad,” Victor confided in a late-night call. “Won’t eat, either.” After work the next day Sean decided to swing by their place, a one-story clapboard cottage that suited the newlyweds fine except that it didn’t have much of a yard and lacked a second bedroom for Dylan; all agreed the boy should continue living at his grandparents’. Two birds with one stone, in Sean’s view. Not only was the continuity good for Dylan, but once she saw she wasn’t going to have to negotiate for control of the boy, Daisy was free to be a kind, unintrusive mother-in-law. Privately, Sean has all along believed he is better than the other two at relating to Ming. To Daisy, Ming was the odd small immigrant solution to the riddle of Victor, the girl who had supper waiting when he got home, who considered his paycheck a prince’s ransom, who tugged off his boots for him when he was tired. The miscarriage was a blow but such things happened. Ming was sturdy and would get over it. Basically Daisy was only so interested in anyone other than Dylan, and Victor—well, could you count on Victor to bring a person flowers to cheer her up? Or ice cream? Even if Ming won’t eat anything else she might try a little of the mint chocolate-chip she loves. Safeway is near their cottage, so Sean swings into the parking lot and strides in, wandering around in the slightly theatrical male confusion that says My wife usually does all this before finding what he wants, remembering Daisy had said they were out of greens, deciding on a six-pack of beer, too, craving a box of cigarettes when it was time to pay, that habit kicked decades ago, its urgency a symptom of his sadness about the lost baby, and bizarrely, ridiculously, he was standing in the checkout line with tears in his eyes, recognizing only then that the girl thrusting Ming’s roses into the bag was Esme.

  She seemed to have been trying not to catch his attention, and he wondered if she had been hoping against hope he would conclude his business and walk out without ever having noticed her. She could reasonably hope for that, he supposed: a job like hers could teach you that the vast majority of people walked through their lives unseeing. The checker was hastening the next lot of groceries down the conveyor belt, loaves of bread and boxes of cereal borne toward Esme as Sean hoisted his bags and said, “So you’re back.”

  “Not for long.”

  “Not staying long, or you haven’t been back long?”

  Over his shoulder, to the next person: “Paper or plastic.”

  “You’re staying with your sister?”

  None of his business, her look said.

  The woman behind squeezed past Sean to claim her bag, frowning at him for the inconvenience—no, he realized, she was frowning because she thought he was bothering Esme, who scratched at her wrist, then twisted a silver bracelet around, the bracelet, part of her repertoire of nervous gestures, because this was Esme, fidgeting, resentful, scared—smiling to cover it up but construing the mildest gestures or words as slights, taking offense with breathtaking swiftness and leaving you no way to remedy the situation. In the face of such fantastical touchiness, gracefulness became an implausible virtue—quaint, like chastity. Nonetheless he tried: “Come to see Dylan.”

  “Paper or plastic.”

  “He wonders about you, you know.”

  “Plastic.”

  To Sean, who had edged out of the aisle and stood holding his bags, she said wretchedly, “Does he?”

  Sean said, though it was far from the case, “No one holds anything against you. He needs you. He’s five years old.”

  “I know how old he is,” she said. “I do.”

  “Or I could bring him by if that’s easier.”

  Abruptly she stopped bagging groceries and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyelids. It was as if she’d temporarily broken with the world and was retreating to the deepest sanctuary possible in such a place. It was as if she despaired. He was sorry to have been a contributing factor, sorry to be among those she couldn’t make disappear; at the same time he felt formidably in the right, and as if he was about to prevail—to cut through her fears and evasiveness and self-loathing heedlessness to the brilliant revelation, from Esme to herself, of mother love, a recognition she would never be able to go back on, which would steady her and bring her to her senses and leave her grateful for the change that had begun right here and now in the checkout line at Safeway. Because lives had to change unglamorously and for the better. Because he had found her.

  “Would you really do that?” Esme said.

  “Yeah, I’d do that.”

  She tore a scrap from the edge of the bag she was filling, reached past the glaring cashier for a pen from the cup by the register, scribbled, and handed Sean the leaf of brown paper, which he had to hunt for, the next day, when it came time to call her, worrying that he’d lost it, finding it, finally, tucked far down into the pocket of the work pants he’d been wearing, but Esme wasn’t there and instead he got her sister, who told him Esme would be home from work at five. Sarah was this one’s name, he remembered. “You know, she said you were really nice. Kind. So I want to thank you. She might not tell you this herself but I know she can’t wait to see the little guy. Me, too.” Fine, they would come by around six. Sean hadn’t yet broken the news of Esme’s return to Daisy, much less Victor, partly for his own sake, because he wanted to conserve the energy needed to deal with Daisy’s inevitable fretting and Victor’s righteous anger, partly for Dylan, because he wanted the boy to meet his mother again in a relatively quiet, relatively sane atmosphere, without a lot of fireworks going off, without anyone’s suggesting maybe it wasn’t the best thing for the boy to spend time with a mother so irresponsible. Was there, in this secrecy, the flicker of another motive? Something like wanting to keep her to himself. Sean, driving, shook his head at this insight, and beside him Dylan asked, “Am I going to live with her now?”

  “Honey, no, this is just for a little while, for you guys to see each other. You know what a visit is, right? And how it’s different from live with? You live with us. You are going to visit your mom for a couple of hours. Meaning you go home after. With me. I come get you.”

  “What color is her hair?”

  “Don’t you remember? Her hair is black. Like—.” He felt foolish when all he could come up with was “—well, not like any of ours.”

  “Not like mine.”

  “No, yours is brown.” Sean tried to think what else Dylan wouldn’t remember. “Your mom has a sister, a twin, meaning they look just alike and that’ll be a little strange for you maybe, but you’ll get used to it, and this sister, see, is your aunt Sarah, and this’s your aunt’s house I’m taking you to. Because your mom is staying there. With her sister.”

  Too much news for sure, and for the rest of the brief drive Dylan sucked his thumb as he hadn’t for years, but Sean didn’t reprimand him, just parked the truck so the two of them could study the one-story white clapboard house with the scruffy yard where a bicycle had lain on its side long enough that spears of iris had grown up through its spokes. If this had been an ordinary outing, Sean would have explained, “They built all these little houses on the west side for workers in the mill, and they don’t look like much maybe but they’re nice inside and the men were allowed to take home seconds from the mill and they made some beautiful cabinets in their kitchens,” because he likes telling the boy bits of the history of his hometown, but he kept that lore to himself and when the boy seemed ready they climbed the front porch steps together and stood before the door. “You want to knock or should I?”

  “You.”

  Sean used his knuckles, three light raps, and then Esme was saying through the screen to Dylan, “Hey you,” smiling her pained childish smile, and Dylan couldn’t help himself, he was hers, Sean saw, instantly, gloriously hers because she’d smiled and said two words. She held the door ajar and Dylan went
past her into the house and he never did things like that—he was shy.

  “Coming in?”

  “I’ll leave you two alone. To get—” Reacquainted would strike her as a reproach, maybe. “So you can have some time to yourselves. Just tell me when to come for him and I’ll be back.” He paused. “His bedtime’s eight o’clock and it would be good if I got him home before that.” In case he needs some settling down. Sean doesn’t say that, or think about how he’s going to keep the boy from telling his grandmother where he’s been, but he’ll find a way, some small bribe that will soothe the boy’s need to tell all.

  “Not even two hours,” she said.

  “It’s not a great idea to feed him a lot of sugar or anything, ’cause then he gets kind of wired.”

  “I wasn’t going to,” she said. “I know how he is.”

  “It would only be natural if you wanted to give him a treat or something.”

  “To worm my way back into his affections.”

  “Not what I meant.”

  In her agitation she gave her wrist a punishing twist—no, she was fooling with the silver bracelet, and he suffered an emotion bruising but minor, too fleeting or odd, maybe, ever to have been named, nostalgia for a miserably wrongheaded sexual attraction. Not regret. He had repented for giving her the bracelet by bringing her kid to her. Had that really been his reason? He repeated, “Not what I meant.”

  “So maybe you won’t believe this, I can see why you wouldn’t, but I wanted to see him so bad. Only I thought you-all would for sure say no. Blame me. Not, you know, trust me. And instead you’ve made it easy for me and I never expected that and I don’t know how to thank you, Sean, I don’t, but this means everything to me, it’s kind of saving my life. It’s really basically saving my life.” Running the sentences together, so unaccustomed was she to honesty, afraid, maybe, of the feeling of honesty, scary if you weren’t used to it, and Sean reached out to lay a finger on her lips, ancient honorable gesture for hush now, no further explanation was necessary, he got it that to see your child again was like having your life saved, he would have felt the same way in her shoes but also chastened and rebellious confronting someone like him who was doing the real work, constantly and reliably there for the boy, and he wanted to convey the fact that none of this mattered if she was here and could give the boy a little of what he needed, a sense of his mother: but now it was Sean who was inarticulate, moved by the girl softness of her mouth, Sean whose finger rested against her lips until she jerked her head back and he was blistered by shame, the burden of impossible apology and regret shifting from her shoulders to his. He waited for her to say something direct and blaming, scathing, memorable, and when she did not he was relieved. But he wasn’t fooled, either. She knew exactly what had happened and where it left them. This girl believed she now had the upper hand, but must use her leverage tactfully, however unlike her that was, if he was not to instantly deny what had taken place. What he understood was that he was in trouble here, but that she was going to collude with him because, basically, he could give her more of what she wanted. The child. His agreement was necessary for her to continue secretly seeing the child. And Sean did not know how to set any of this right, only that he needed to keep his voice down and not do any further harm—not scowl in dismay or do anything else she could construe as a sign of problems to come. He told her, “Seven-thirty then, okay? See you at seven-thirty,” and she said in a voice in no way remarkable, “We’ll be here.”

  But they were not. “She has rights,” Sarah told Sean, who was in her kitchen, in a rickety chair she had pulled away from the table, saying, “She has rights,” saying now, “It’s wrong for him to be kept from his mother the way you-all have done.”

  For some reason, when she’d pulled the chair out for him, he’d taken it and turned it around and straddled it. Maybe he had needed to act, to take control of something, if only the chair. This is her sister—or closer than sister, twin—and he keeps his voice down. “Ask yourself why I brought him by. I’m her best friend in this mess, but what she’s done is damage her own cause. This isn’t gonna look good.”

  “To who?”

  “Do you know where she’s going?”

  “To who won’t it look good?”

  Trailer trash, Daisy called the sisters once. “The thing is to make this right without having anybody else get involved.”

  “You’re threatening me.”

  “I’m the opposite of threatening you. I’m saying let’s work this out ourselves. You tell me where she’s gone and I find her and we work it out like reasonable people and there’s no need for anybody else to know she abducted a five-year-old child.”

  “A five-year-old. You-all opened your door and what’s in this basket? A cute little baby! She wasn’t in labor eighteen hours. She never chipped a tooth from clenching or left claw marks on my hand. Tell me you ever even really knew she was in the house. Tell me you ever once really talked to her. Victor hit her upside the head so hard the ringing in her ear lasted a week. Do you know he said he’d kill her if she tried to leave? It was my four thousand dollars. So she ran, you know, she took the money and she ran and there was never any phone call and it kept me up a lot of nights. It wasn’t the money, it was not knowing she was all right—they say twins know that but I didn’t, not till I saw her again. And I never saw her look at anyone like she looks at that little boy when he says I want to stay with you and it’s not like she planned this but after that how was she going to let him go? I’m not saying she makes great choices but you were unrealistic thinking she could give him back.”

  The chair wobbled as he crossed his arms on its backrest. “Maybe so. She and I need to talk about that. Work out what’s best for all concerned.”

  “It sounds so reasonable when you say it.”

  “I am reasonable.” He smiles. “Families need to work these things out.”

  “Now you’re family.”

  “Like it or not.” Still smiling.

  Sarah gave in. Esme was driving north toward Arcata to go to college there. “None of you thought she was good enough for college.”

  An outright lie but he let it go. “How long ago did they take off?”

  “Not long. She had to get her stuff. She was just throwing things into the car. Dylan helped. Laughing like they were both little kids.” He continued to look at her. “Mmm. Twenty minutes ago maybe.”

  “What kind of car?”

  “I don’t know kinds of cars.” He won’t look away. “Smallish. A Toyota maybe. Green maybe.” Not smiling now: he needs her to get this right. “Yeah. Green. A bumper sticker. Stop fucking something up. That really narrows it down, hunh. Trees. ‘Stop Killing Ancient Trees.’ Trees are her thing.”

  “You’re sure about Arcata.”

  “See, she’s wanted that for years, an apartment and classes and her little boy with her. Botany. Redwoods, really. Did you know that about her? She loves redwoods and there’s this guy there who’s famous, like the guy if you want to study redwoods, and she met him, and she might be going to be his research assistant this summer. She said—” But she’d told him what he needed to know and he was out the door. Lucky that it was north, the two-lane highway looping through the woods without a single exit for sixty miles and few places to pull over, lucky that after dark nobody drives this road but locals and not many of those. As long as he checks every pull-off carefully and doesn’t overshoot her then it comes down to how fast he can drive, each curve with its silver-gray monoliths stepping forward while their sudden shadows revolve through the woods behind, the ellipse of shadow-swerve the mirror image of his curve, evergreen air through the window, no oncoming lights, which is just as well given his recklessness, the rage he can admit now he’s alone, the desire just to get his hands on her, the searing passage of his brights through the woods like the light of his mind gathered and concentrated into swift hunting intelligence that touches and assesses and passes on because its exclusive object is her. At this speed i
t’s inevitable he will overtake her—nobody drives this road like this—but now he’s bolted past a likely spot, a scruffy rutted crescent rimmed with trees tall enough to shade it from moonlight: there. He brakes and runs the truck backward onto the shoulder, passing an abandoned car whose color, in the darkness, can’t be discerned, and pulling in behind he reads STOP KILLING ANCIENT TREES. Such fury, such concentration, and he almost missed it. An empty car. Here is his fear: that she has arranged to meet someone. That Sarah was lied to, and Arcata was a fable, and there’s a guy in this somewhere, and she told him she would go away with him if she could get her kid. Nobody to be seen but when he gets out in the moonlight it was as if the air around Sean was sparkling, as if electricity flashed from his skin and glittered at the forest, as if he could convey menace even to a stone. When he checked in the backseat there was the boy curled up, sleeping in his little T-shirt and underpants with nothing over him, no blanket, not even an old sweater or jacket, and cracking the door open—its rusty hinges alarming the woods—Sean ducks into a cave of deepest oldest life-tenderness and takes the child in his arms and leans out loving the weight of him and the shampoo smell of his mussed hair. He sets him down barefoot and blinking, his underpants a triangular patch of whiteness in the moonlight, the boy as shy as if it was he who’d run away, keeping a fearful arm’s length from Sean, and when Sean says, “Where’s your mom?” blinking again, seeming not to trust Sean, confused and on the brink of tears and there’s no time for that. That was for later. “Get in the truck,” he tells the boy, “and I don’t want you coming out no matter what. Your job is to stay in the truck and I don’t want you getting out of that truck for any damn reason whatsoever, do you understand me?”