The Best American Short Stories 2013 (48 page)

Rebecca has always been competent whenever there’s a crisis—but it’s different now, more automatic, because she has Ben. When something happens with Harriet, she does what needs to be done, but it feels more like Honor Thy Mother than it does like running into a burning building to save someone you love who is trapped inside.

“And you’re sure you don’t want me to look for a place near Boston?” Rebecca asks.

No, Harriet always says, because of Ralph.

She talks to Cath occasionally, and Cath says, from the safe distance of Denver, “It’s time for her to live closer to one of us.”

(Rebecca is tempted sometimes to say, Okay, Cath, I’ve arranged to have Mom med-flighted out to you.)

Harriet gets a urinary tract infection, another leg infection, bronchitis.

She has been sick now for so long, this has all been going on forever. Rebecca wishes it would all just stop—but the only thing that will stop it is Harriet’s death, and she doesn’t want that.

She asks Harriet one afternoon—it’s when Harriet is in the hospital with bronchitis, and Rebecca has driven down to Connecticut to spend the afternoon with her (just the afternoon: she wants to be back in Cambridge again by bedtime)—“Aren’t you tired of all this?”

“Yes,” Harriet says. “But I don’t want it to be over, because I want to know the end of the story.”

“What story?” Rebecca asks.

“All the stories,” Harriet says.

“You’re so sad,” Ben says, rubbing the backs of his fingers against her cheek when she gets home from the bookstore one evening.

“My mother’s in the hospital again. Septic shock. Another urinary tract infection, which I guess they didn’t catch fast enough. I’m going to drive down there tomorrow.”

“I’ll make you a drink,” he says, and then he calls her one of the incredibly silly pet names, which for the first time fails to delight her. It seems irritating and ill-timed. “And then I’ll run you a bath,” he says.

“A bath sounds good.”

“And I’ll come watch you take it.”

“Come talk to me, you mean?”

“No. Watch you.”

That’s an aberration, not a revelation, she thinks. Being objectified, when she just wants to be accompanied.

“You’re so sad,” he keeps saying. It starts as sympathy. A week or two later it’s cool, a diagnosis. Then it becomes a criticism.

He starts wanting the underwear to be kinkier. And he wants her to wear it every time.

He used to talk a lot about divorcing Dorinda. But it’s been months now since he mentioned it.

Rebecca asks him about it one night, as they are lying in bed, happy, she thinks, naked, with scraps of underwear scattered all around them.

“I would love to marry you,” she says, with a boldness that is new and luxurious for her. She’s echoing something he has said to her many times by now. “I hate it that you’re still married to someone else.”

He is silent. Then he says: “You knew I was married when we started this.”

She tries to get out of it without too much self-abasement. She knows the uselessness of asking questions. She manages to sound less desperate than she is—but still, it’s more desperate than she would like to sound.

Women ask for explanations, over and over, when love goes. There is no explanation. The explanation is: It’s gone.

The whole thing, from the time they met at the little movie to the end, took sixteen months.

Back in her apartment, she’s cold. It’s a cold spring, wet, dark. She doesn’t cook, she doesn’t sleep well, she doesn’t read, she doesn’t see many friends. She gets her hair cut to just below her jawline, knowing it’s an angry, masochistic thing to do, but hoping that it will somehow make her feel better. (And also because she can’t bear now to attend to it: shampooing, brushing.) She talks to two people, her assistant from the bookstore who has had something of a front-row seat for all this—she used to raise her eyebrows at Rebecca all those months ago when Ben would come in, buy books, and leave without saying anything—and an old friend from the school where she used to teach. Both of them are kind, but both seem to be saying, without saying it, “What did you expect?” (In fact, they’re not saying this. They’ve been watching Rebecca all this time with some concern because she has seemed so engulfed in Ben and remote from everything else, but they have also been rooting for her, wanting it to work. The “What did you expect?” is coming straight from Rebecca herself, spoken in a voice not unlike Harriet’s.)

Summer comes, then fall. Rebecca still can’t walk by the store that sells the chocolate eggs.

“What’s wrong?” Harriet asks over the phone. Her voice is feebler these days, hoarse.

“Nothing,” Rebecca says. “I’m just tired.”

“You want to hear something shitty?” Harriet asks.

“What?”

“They’ve stopped giving me physical therapy. They say I’m not making any progress. I said, ‘Well, how the hell am I supposed to make progress if you stop giving me physical therapy?’ But you want to hear something wonderful?”

“What?”

“When Ralph comes over, he moves my legs for me. And he makes me do arm exercises. So I don’t atrophy.”

The nursing home calls.

“We’re calling to let you know your mother is in the hospital again—she had a fever, and so we sent her over to the ER.”

The hospital calls. Harriet once again has a urinary tract infection that has gone undiagnosed—she can’t feel any pain, because of the paralysis—and once again she’s in severe septic shock. They’re putting her on antibiotics.

Harriet calls. Her voice is weak and shivery, but animated, excited. “Oh, my God—did you hear about the tunnel?”

“What tunnel?”

“It collapsed. Turn on the TV. It just happened, at the height of the morning commute, they said.”

“Where was this? What city?”

“I don’t know. It was my roommate’s TV, so I couldn’t hear very well, and then the nurse or someone came in and shut it off. But it sounded awful. People were killed, they think some people may still be trapped in their cars. You need to turn it on.”

“Mom, we don’t even know where it’s happening.”

“It’s in a commuter tunnel. The main one that leads to the city, they said. Or maybe it was the bridge that collapsed, the bridge that leads to the tunnel. But
everybody
goes through the tunnel.”

That night the hospital calls. Harriet’s fever isn’t coming down. They’re going to try a different antibiotic.

Early the next morning, Rebecca is trying to decide what to do—call in the assistant, or close the store for the day, so she can go to Connecticut? Stay here and keep in touch with the hospital and Harriet by phone?—when the hospital calls again and someone tells her in a clear, soft voice that Harriet is dead.

She sits there.

She needs to call Cath. (Who will say, “Do you think we need to do a funeral?”)

She needs to call Ralph. (Who will cry. Who will be heartbroken. Who will now begin to decline very fast.)

She wants to call Harriet.

It has all gone on for so long without Harriet dying that Rebecca lost track of the fact that Harriet was going to die.

Guilt: if she hadn’t gotten tired and distracted—if she hadn’t let herself be so easily dazzled—if she had not relaxed her vigilance, this would not have happened.

Even in the moment, she recognizes this guilt as irrational, bogus; but it pierces anyway.

Harriet died when Rebecca wasn’t looking.

She sits there.

She wants to call Harriet, more passionately than she would have believed, an hour ago, that it was possible to want that, or to want anything.

The only other person she finds she wants to call—and of course she can’t—is Peter.

She will, though. Not now. Not until almost a year from now.

She will wrestle during that time with questions having to do with forgiveness. Can she forgive herself for what she did to him?

(For the most part, yes. The two of them made their polite, inhibited, explosive mess together, she believes; it ended the way it might have been expected to end, although the particular trigger could not have been predicted.)

(But oh, the folly of that particular trigger.)

Can he forgive her? No way to know. She puts off the phone call for so long partly because she is afraid to find out.

She keeps pitting his final “Don’t call me” against his penultimate, “Don’t call me unless you mean it,” trying to figure out which one carries more weight.

And she gets tangled in that “unless you mean it.” Which she didn’t even really hear when he said it; which she has discovered in her memory since then. Unless she means what? She can’t define it explicitly, the thing that Peter insisted she had better mean—but she does feel she understands what
he
meant by that insistence, and it gives her hope.

By the time she finally does call him, she will know that she means it, even though it will be a scary phone call to make, and even if she still won’t be capable of saying clearly what exactly it is she does mean.

Harriet would have been quick to tell her, accurately or inaccurately. To guess, to analyze, to explain, to make predictions. Harriet was always the one who wanted to talk about the news, from Spain, or from the Vatican, or from some uncertain city where something had collapsed—from any place, really, where anything of interest might be going on.

CALLAN WINK

FROM
The New Yorker

T
HERE WERE CATS
in the barn. Litters begetting litters begetting litters—some thin or misshapen with the afflictions of blood too many times remixed.

“Get rid of the damn things,” August’s father said. “The haymow smells like piss. Take a tire iron or a shovel or whatever tool suits you. You’ve been after me for school money? I’ll give you a dollar a tail. You have your jackknife sharp? You take their tails and pound them to a board, and then after a few days we’ll have a settling up. Small tails worth as much as large tails, it’s all the same.”

The cats—calicos, tabbies, dirty white, gray, jet black, and tawny—sat among the hay bales, scratching and yawning like indolent apes inhabiting the remains of a ruined temple. August had never actually killed a cat before, but, like most farm boys, he had engaged in plenty of casual acts of torture. Cats, as a species, retained a feral edge, and as a result were not subject to the rules of husbandry that governed man’s relation with horses or cows or dogs. August figured that somewhere along the line cats had struck a bargain—they knew they could expect to feel a man’s boot if they came too close; in return, they kept their freedom and nothing much was expected of them.

A dollar a tail. August thought of the severed appendages, pressed and dried, stacking up like currency in the teller drawer of some strange Martian bank. He could earn fifty dollars at least, maybe seventy-five, possibly even a hundred if he was able to track down the newborn litters.

He went to the equipment shed to look for weapons. It was a massive structure, large enough to fit a full-sized diesel combine, made of metal posts skinned with corrugated sheet metal. August often went there when it rained. He thought it was like being a small creature trapped inside a percussion instrument. The fat drops of rain would hit the thin metal skin in an infinite drumroll, punctuated by the clash of lightning cymbals and the hollow booming of space.

In the shed there was a long, low workbench covered in the tangled intestine of machinery: the looping coils of compressor hoses, hydraulic arms leaking viscous fluid, batteries squat and heavy, baling twine like ligaments stitching the whole crazy mess together, tongue-and-ball trailer knobs, Mason jars of rusting bolts and nuts and screws, a medieval-looking welder’s mask, and, interspersed among the other wreckage like crumpled birds, soiled leather gloves in varying stages of decomposition. August picked up a short length of rusted, heavy-linked logging chain and swung it a few times experimentally before discarding it. He put on a pair of too-large gloves and hefted a mower blade the size of a broadsword, slicing slow patterns in the air, before discarding it too. Then he uncovered a three-foot-long torque wrench with a slim stainless-steel handle that swelled at the end into a glistening and deadly crescent head. He brought the head down into his glove several times to hear the satisfying whack. He practiced a few horrendous death-dealing swing techniques—the sidearm golf follow-through, the overhead back-crushing ax chop, the short, quick, line-drive baseball checked swing—the wrench head making ragged divots in the hard-packed dirt floor. He worked up a light sweat and then shouldered his weapon, put the gloves in his back pocket, and went to see his mother.

The old house was set back against a low, rock-plated hill. A year-round spring wept from the face of the rock, and the dampness of it filled the house with the smell of wet leaves and impending rain. The house was a single-level ranch, low-slung, like a dog crouching to avoid a kick. August’s mother’s parents had built the house with their own hands and lived in it until they died. The old house looked up at the new house, the one August’s father had finished the year August turned one. The new house was tall, with a sharp-peaked roof. It had white shutters, a full wraparound porch. August’s grandparents had both died shortly before he was born, and the first thing his father had done when the farm became his was sell fifty acres of fallow pasture and build the new house.

“He feels like it’s his own,” August’s mother had said to him once, while smoking at the dining room table of the new house. “His people didn’t have much. Everything we got came from my side, you know. He would never admit it in a hundred years, but it bothers him.” She coughed. “It’s too big. That was my complaint from the get-go. It’s hard to heat too, exposed up on the hill like this; the wind gets in everywhere. My father would never have done it like that. He built the best possible house for himself and my mother. That’s the type of man he was.”