The Best American Short Stories 2015

by T. Coraghessan Boyle

  What comes next is a morning, three months later, when Cordelia does not get out of bed. I carry her to the street, but she cannot stand up. She does not wag her tail. She does not eat. I call James on his mobile in some other country. He sounds busy at first, but then he is listening, paying attention. The tenderness is there. He says, “Chéri, maybe it’s time.”

  I wait for Desi to arrive. We speak English together, because she does not speak so much French, after so many years. Enough to shop and to eat. She lives with other Indonesians, it is not necessary. “Come with me to the vet,” I say.

  Desi’s eyes slide away from me, and I see she does not want to go, but then she collects her bag. I carry Cordelia, and we find a taxi. I cannot drive and hold the dog also, and Desi does not drive. The taxi driver talks on his mobile, the radio is low—all in Arabic. Desi sits with her hands folded on her bag. Cordelia is very still in my lap.

  I think about seeing that boy the first time, when I was only a child, before everything happened. The crown of hair, the dazzling eyes, the bolt of understanding. N’en parlons plus jamais.

  At the vet’s office, I ask Desi to come to the back with me, but she shakes her head. She will wait.

  The vet greets Cordelia, cheerful as before. “Madame Lazarus!” he says. But I do not want more jokes. I put her on the table. The doctor examines her. I press my hands together to stop the shaking. I feel a skip in my heart and think of the wine I will have at lunch.

  “Ah, Cordelia,” the doctor says, stroking her. “Tu n’es pas immortelle, après tout.”

  Cordelia looks for the source of the touch, with her cloudy eyes.

  The doctor says it might be time. He says all the lines James suggested to him before, about the diminishing quality of life. I ask him to wait a moment. I go out to the waiting room, where Desi is sitting with a girl with purple hair and a small diamond in her nose. A big sheepdog lies at the girl’s feet. It lifts its heavy head to look at me, to see if I am a threat.

  “Desi,” I say. “The vet says it’s time. Will you come in?”

  Desi shakes her head, tears in her eyes. “I can’t,” she whispers. “I can’t see it.”

  “Don’t make her,” the purple-haired girl says. She has a German accent. “It’s terrible. I was here two months ago, with my old dog, and I cried for a week after.”

  I look at the German girl, whose business it is not. She is strong, a little heavy in the hips. I am the age of her grandfather. I do not want to talk about her dog, killed in this doctor’s office.

  I turn back to Desi. “Please come in,” I say.

  But Desi says no. She has cooked my food, cleaned my house, picked up after James for so many years I cannot count. Her job is to do as I ask, but she will not do this. “I can’t,” she says, and she is pleading.

  So I go back alone to the room where Cordelia is on the table. Her eyes look at nothing. James was right to bring her home, to give me something to take care of.

  “You look terrible,” the vet tells me. “Sit down.”

  The nurse brings me a glass of water and says something comforting.

  I think of James, our long life together, his shoetrees in the closet, his clothes on the floor. The dog is the last string to tie him to me, and now—snip. Soon I will start walking into the bedroom, staring at nothing, listening for voices that are not there.

  “It’s your decision,” the vet says.

  I nod.

  “You can hold her,” the nurse says, and she puts Cordelia into my arms. Then she puts a pad on my leg like a diaper, beneath the dog, and I think, This will be bad.

  Cordelia sniffs my hand, licks it once, and I am no longer sure about the quality of her life. She can still smell the world, she can still love. But then I remember the morning. Her legs not holding her up. I wish for a wild moment that I had brought Simone with me, my loyal wife, but she has never liked dogs. Allergique. The doctor is working—he ties a tourniquet on Cordelia’s leg, and then he prepares a needle. I think he will miss, he will jab it in my arm. But he doesn’t, he slips it into her thin leg where I can’t imagine there is a vein.

  Cordelia looks around the room for something. We have to wait some minutes for the tranquilizer to work. I feel her pulse in her throat and think again that this is a mistake. Three months ago, I got on my knees to push blood through this small body, and now I am letting the doctor kill her. She closes her eyes, and I think I will tell him this is wrong, but he is already there with another needle, another injection. Cordelia flinches, she makes a little sigh. Then her head sinks, and her chin is on my hand, her throat soft. The white pad on my leg becomes heavy—she has gone in the wrong place one more time. The doctor takes her from me, and the nurse puts her hand on my shoulder.

  Out in the waiting room, the German girl has her arm around Desi, and the two of them are crying. The sheepdog’s head is on the girl’s knee. Desi looks at me, her eyes wet and swollen, and I wonder, for the first time, if Cordelia will be the last string for Desi, also. She could find a new job and start again. She might find children to care for, to delight her as Cordelia did. It would be more interesting than an old man.

  I reach into my pocket for my wallet, but the receptionist shakes her head, makes a little gesture of sympathy. This is something, at least. They do not make you pay.

  If we lived in the country, we could wrap Cordelia in a blanket and bury her, but we have nowhere, so we leave her with the vet. My arms feel empty. Outside, we wait for a taxi. I see an old man walking down the street, bent almost in half, even older than I. He would have been a young man during the war, but old enough to fight or to work or to run. I think I need something to carry. My mind is confused. I have just killed my dog. A taxi pulls up to the curb.

  I turn to Desi, who is blowing her nose, looking at something in the street. Her black hair has some gray now. I never see her outside, in the sunlight. Her bag, bright yellow, hangs on her arm.

  “Don’t leave me,” I say.

  Desi looks up, surprised. Her eyes are red. The taxi is waiting, impatient. I think I will say everything now, I will speak of everything. There is not so much time.

  “Please don’t leave,” I say.

  SHOBHA RAO

  Kavitha and Mustafa

  FROM Nimrod

  THE TRAIN STOPPED abruptly, at 3:36 p.m., between stations, twenty kilometers from the Indian border, on the Pakistani side. Kavitha looked out the window, in the heat of afternoon, and saw only scrubland, an endless yellow plain of dust and stunted trees, as far as the eye could see. She knew what this meant. One of the men in the berth, the tall one Kavitha had been eyeing, calmly told the women to take off all their jewels and valuables and put them in their shoes. They’ll search everything, he said with meaning, which made the young woman in the corner blush. Two or three of the women gasped. The old lady started crying. There were eleven people crowded into their berth, including Kavitha and her husband, Vinod. They were all from Islamabad and had been squeezed onto the wooden benches of this train now for seven hours. There was an older couple who seemed to be traveling with their middle-aged son and his wife. The young woman in the corner was traveling with her mother and older brother. And the tall man was with his son, or so Kavitha presumed, though they looked nothing alike. The boy was not more than eight or nine years old but, of all of them, he seemed to remain the calmest, even more so than his father. He serenely took two thin pebbles, a curled length of twine, and a chit of paper, maybe a photograph, from his pockets and put them in his shoe.

  They heard a clamor farther down the train, a few baleful screams, then a series of thuds. Every door would be barred, they all knew, but when they were done looting the train, Kavitha hoped they would let it continue on as it was. She had heard stories, though: sometimes they uncoupled the bogies and sent them in different directions. At other times, they forced the men to disembark and allowed the women and children to continue. More than once, she had heard, they boarded with kerosene. Kavitha reach
ed out and took Vinod’s hand. It was out of habit, she realized, but it was still a comfort. They had talked of this, now and then, in the course of their ten-year marriage: which one might die first. Kavitha had always insisted that she wanted to go first, that she could not possibly bear the pain of living without Vinod. But that was a lie. She knew very well she would manage just fine without him, maybe even better than she had with him. Their marriage, arranged by their families when she was sixteen and he twenty-two, aside from one or two instances, had been mostly uneventful. Boring, really. He’d seemed handsome enough on the wedding dais but when she took a long look at him, a week or so after the wedding, his forehead was squat, and his eyes were dull. As the months went by, she noticed that the dullness persisted; his eyes flickered for a moment, maybe two, when he was on top of her, but then they died out again. Dull eyes? her friends had exclaimed. Just be happy he doesn’t beat you. True, true, Kavitha had agreed, but she secretly wondered if perhaps that is what it would take to bring his gaze to life: violence.

  There were four of them. The one who entered the berth first had a distended ear, fanned out like a cabbage leaf, and was clearly the leader. He stepped inside, holding a machete by his side, by the handle, swinging it like a spray of flowers. The others crowded behind him, holding sticks, and one a metal rod. Now there were fifteen in the berth meant for six, the heat growing even more unbearable, and the middle-aged man, the one who was there with his wife and parents, lunged, with a cry, at the metal bars of the train’s windows, trying to loosen them. It was pointless. They were welded in place. His wife and mother tried to calm him but he was weeping.

  Look, how sweet, the leader said, We have a baby in the berth. The leader smiled serenely, looked at each of them in turn, then put his hand on the shoulder of the man at the barred window and said, Here, let me help you. The man—with a tremulous look, his face stained by tears, his hands and shirtfront stained by the rust from the window—turned and looked at him. Come, come, the leader said, let me show you the way out. He pushed the others aside, and led the man to the door. The man, still shaking, the surprise of being led from the berth hardening into flight, took one quick look at his wife and parents and bolted out of the berth.

  Cabbage leaf smiled. You see how easy that was, he said.

  They stood in silence.

  Would any of you like to leave? he asked. A fly buzzed. They waited motionless, as if they had all anticipated the sounds of the scuffle that reached them from the other end of the bogie, followed by a loud thump, a scream, and then a strange and preternatural quiet. The old lady—the mother of the man who’d left the berth—let out a long, piercing wail. Now, now, the leader said, there’s no need for that. Then his voice dropped, it grew fangs. Your jewels, he said.

  It was a rainy afternoon. Kavitha was at home, preparing the evening meal of roti and dal with spinach and sweet buttermilk. Vinod was the tax collector for the district of Taxila and was home no later than eight every night. She sweetened the buttermilk because Vinod preferred sweet buttermilk to salty, and she didn’t have a preference. In fact, in the time since they’d been married, it seemed to her that she’d lost most of her preferences. She had once liked taking evening walks, but he’d always said he was too tired. She had liked weaving jasmine into her hair, but their scent had made him nauseous. When she noticed fallen eyelashes on her cheeks, she’d put them on the back of her palm, close her eyes, and make a wish. Then she’d blow on them. If they flew away, she liked to think the wish would come true. If not, she’d wait patiently for another eyelash. She’d believed this since she was a child. He noticed her once, collecting the eyelash, blowing it away, and asked her what she was doing. He hardly ever asked her about herself, so Kavitha looked at him, astonished, then talked for ten minutes about the eyelashes, and the wishes, and the waits, sometimes lengthy, for the next one.

  Vinod’s eyes seemed to flicker—or so she thought—and then he frowned.

  What is it? she asked.

  That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard, he said. It’s just plain silly.

  So what? Kavitha said; I’m not asking you to do it. It was the first time she had talked back to him, and she felt good for having done it.

  That was when he slapped her. Not hard, but just enough so that she understood. Understood what, she wondered. She looked, in the instant after the slap, into his eyes. They were empty. Not a flicker. Not a sign of anger, or regret, or even satisfaction. She looked down. She too felt empty.

  That was years ago.

  On this night, after preparing the evening meal, Kavitha sat at the window of their flat. Vinod would be home in an hour. The window was big and looked out onto a row of facing flats, and most clearly into the flat directly opposite. A young couple lived in it, Kavitha had noticed, and she liked to watch them especially. This was about the time the young husband was due home, and Kavitha waited anxiously for his arrival. It was not that they were ever lewd or inappropriate, or even that they did anything interesting or unusual; it was just that there was such sweetness between them. She could tell just by their gestures, by how they moved, by how their bodies seemed to lighten the moment the other walked through the door. On previous afternoons, she’d noticed that the young wife wore a plain cotton sari during the day and, just before her husband was to arrive, she would change into a more colorful fancy sari. Today when she emerged from the back room, she had on a yellow sari. Kavitha squinted and thought that it might be chiffon, with a blue border of some sort. The breeze swept up her pulloo as she walked from room to room. She looked like a butterfly. She looked like the petals of a flower. When the husband arrived, he had clearly brought home snacks to eat with their tea—perhaps pakora or maybe samosas, Kavitha guessed—because the young wife dashed to the kitchen and returned with a plate. Then she went back and, after a few minutes, brought out their teas on a tray. Kavitha watched them with envy. She nearly cried with it.

  Your jewels, he repeated.

  The middle-aged wife and the mother of the recently departed man wept silently. It was odd, but it felt like only now, only after there was one fewer person in the berth, did a pall descend on the group. They moved slowly; the shadow of the train lengthened. The August heat was oppressive. Sweat trickled down their faces, their clothes stuck to their bodies. Flies entered the berth in droves but the passengers were too scared to swat them away, to make any sudden movements. Kavitha licked her lips and tasted salt. Hurry up, the leader said. The three other men were outside the door, standing guard, Kavitha assumed. The leader, though, watched the passengers keenly. Each of the women had left a small piece of jewelry visible, so they wouldn’t suspect the ones in their shoes—Kavitha had left her earrings in, the young woman her nose-ring, the middle-aged and the elderly mother a few bracelets. They took them off and placed them in a pile on the wooden bench. Cabbage leaf looked at the pile, shook his head, and laughed. I know you have more jewelry than that, he said. When he finished laughing, he said, Would you like me to help you look?

  The women glanced from one to the other, then they looked at the men.

  Cabbage leaf—whose name was Ahmed; Kavitha had heard one of the men guarding the door call him that—waited patiently. When no one moved, he placed his machete next to the pile, seated himself beside it, and said, I’m going to enjoy this. Then he wrapped his arm around the waist of the young woman standing closest to him, and pulled her onto his lap. Yes, I am, he breathed into her neck, pulling her chunni off her shoulder.

  The brother of the young woman lurched forward. His mother caught the very end of his wrist but he slipped out. It didn’t seem possible in such a tiny space, with so many people crowded into it, but it felt to Kavitha as if he sailed across the berth, his arms reached out as if to strangle the bandit. But Ahmed was quicker. He swerved to the side, so that the brother landed in a heap against the seat. And in a flash of metal, one of the outside guards, the one with the rod, swung at the brother. All Kavitha heard was the t
hwack of metal against bone. The brother let out a howl, gripping his arm. Blood spurted from the wound. His mother kneeled next to him, using the pulloo of her sari to staunch the blood. It wouldn’t stop. It was now covering the floor of the berth, pooling around their shoes.

  My shoes, Kavitha thought.

  Get him out of here, Ahmed growled, We have enough flies as it is. The guard went into the passageway and yelled for help. Another one of the guards came in, and he and the one with the metal rod dragged the brother out. He whimpered as he left the berth.

  You see what happens to heroes, Ahmed said.

  Their berth was the last in the bogie, on the far end, next to the lavatories. Kavitha, seated next to the door and directly across from the little boy, caught a glimpse of the tiny steel sink that was used by the passengers to brush their teeth, and it was against this sink that the brother was propped up. Blood was still pouring out of the gash on his arm and she wondered if he might die. She looked up, and the little boy was watching her. There was, she noticed, intention in his gaze, and she looked away only when Ahmed addressed her.

  You, the leader said, pointing to Kavitha, Give me that.

  She had forgotten about her mangal sutra. She’d swapped the gold chain of her wedding necklace for turmeric-soaked thread just before the trip, for safety’s sake, but the round lockets were made of gold. How could she have forgotten? She slipped it over her head and handed it to him. Vinod seemed to wince. Was it for her or for the gold? Ahmed bounced it in his palm—the wedding necklace she’d not once taken off in ten years—up and down, up and down, as if weighing the gold. It must still hold the warmth of my skin, she thought. And then she felt a thrill, a rush of heat, flooding her body, to think that a man, any man, held in his hand the warmth of her body.

  The boy was still looking at her. Kavitha couldn’t understand it—his stare—but she felt too faint to return it. She hadn’t eaten in over seven hours; they had emptied their water bottle three hours ago. She closed her eyes. There had been a pregnancy in Kavitha and Vinod’s marriage, but the child had been stillborn. The stillbirth had been a culmination of many years of trying for children, and the next time Vinod had reached for her, an appropriate number of weeks after the failed pregnancy, she had looked at him evenly, a little sadly, and said, Please. No more. In her memory, that was the second instance of a flicker passing across his eyes. She knew it was unfair—all of it—but she felt gratitude toward Vinod for understanding, for not having touched her since, and in a small way, he had increased, incrementally, her love for him.