The Best American Short Stories 2014

by Jennifer Egan

  “Can you do less than zero?”

  “That’s going to be up to you. And your caregivers. I’m a believer that you keep on top of the pain. This shouldn’t be about you being in any discomfort.” She got up and put on her jacket—wool, with a Navajo design. “I’ll be by tomorrow, but if you have any concerns or questions, any emergency, someone’s always there.”

  I took my jacket off the coat rack. “Here, I’ll walk you out. I’ve got to feed the hens.”

  “Smooth,” Paul said. “Jesus Christ, why don’t you just ask her how long?”

  “I knew I was going to like you,” she said to him. “I’ll be seeing you tomorrow—that much I think we can count on.”

  I followed her to her car. “I’m not asking you to make a prediction,” I said. “But just from your experience.”

  “OK, based on nothing? I think he’ll move fast.”

  When I came back in he was sitting on the edge of the hospital bed, bare feet dangling, pushing the button and making it go up and down. “So, we going to break out the good stuff?”

  “Should you wait till what she gave you kicks in?”

  “Don’t start that,” he said. “You heard the lady.” He lay back, stuck out his tongue, and pointed at it.

  He dozed—call it that—until the middle of the afternoon, while I sat in the armchair, checking from time to time to make sure his chest was rising and falling, and making notes in my new paperback copy of Middlemarch; the covers had finally come off my old one. If Janna could hold the fort tomorrow while I went in to campus, that’s what I’d be teaching.

  “Let’s go for a ride.” I looked up: Paul’s eyes were open. “I want to see some trees, man. And can we bring some music? I got weed.”

  “If you’re up to it,” I said. “Stanley Brothers? You remember driving back from Roxbury that time?”

  “Not really,” he said. “Did I have that fucked-up Triumph?”

  “Yeah. Whatever became of that?”

  “Whatever became of anything? I should’ve kept a journal. Fucking years of fucking lost days.”

  The truck had a handle above the door frame that you could grab to pull yourself up onto the seat; Paul used both hands, but I still had to take his legs and hoist. I could feel the bones.

  We took back roads, dirt roads when I could find them. Cornfields with ranks of tubular stubble, falling-down barns, with Holsteins standing outside in the mud. Hunting season had started—that morning I’d heard gunshots in the woods—and we passed a double-wide where a buck hung from a kids’ swing set, one front hoof scraping the ground.

  “My kind of place,” he said. “You know, when they say you’re dead meat—like isn’t meat dead by definition?” He snapped the buck a salute. “Shit, I should have settled up here. Come to think of it, I have settled up here.”

  “I always thought you’d get a place out of the city. At least for weekends.”

  “I think it would have ruined it,” he said. “I was really just into the songs. Hey, can we have the Stanleys?”

  “I just want to say,” I said. “I admire the way you’re dealing with this.”

  “Yeah, wait till the screaming starts.”

  I put in a Stanley Brothers CD—Can’t you hear the night bird crying?—and he began packing a bowl. He blew out the first cloud of skunky smoke, then held it out to me. I put up my hand and opened my window.

  “You mind cracking yours just a little?” I said. “If this is that shit you had last summer . . .”

  “That? That was fucking ditchweed.” He exhaled again. “Yeah, actually I wouldn’t advise you.” He closed his eyes. “OK. Better. I haven’t heard this for fucking ever.”

  After a few miles, he packed the bowl again. “What’s so weird,” he said, “I can’t tell if something’s beautiful anymore. Like, is that beautiful?” He pointed at the CD player: the Stanley Brothers were singing “My Sinful Past”—where the harmony comes in on a hand reached down to guide me.

  “Well,” I said. “I mean I’m not always in the mood.”

  “OK, you don’t want to talk absolutes,” he said. “Can’t blame you there.”

  We stopped at the convenience store outside West Rumney—we’d run out of milk. “Anything I can get you?” I said.

  “I’m disappointing you,” he said. “You want to know what this is like.”

  “Not unless you want to tell me,” I said. “This isn’t about me.”

  “Right, see, that’s my point,” he said. “Listen, would they have eggnog this early? I mean in the year?”

  “That’s a thought.”

  “Yes it is,” he said. “Good for me, right? Could you leave the thing on?” We’d switched over to the King recordings; the Stanley Brothers were singing “A Few More Years.”

  But when I came out with the milk and a half-gallon of eggnog, already with holly wreath and red ribbon on the carton, he was sitting in silence. “I didn’t want to run down your battery,” he said. Could he have been crying? His eyes had looked red all day. And of course he’d been smoking. I had to help him get the eggnog open and hold the carton up so he could sip. “How did Bob Cratchit drink this shit?” he said. “Guess I can cross this off too.”

  Back at the house, he lay on the sofa for a while, then got up, bent over, groaned, and picked up the mandolin case. “You know, I haven’t played since your thing,” he said. “I want you to have this.”

  “Come on, buddy. I could never play mandolin for shit. There must be somebody who could really—”

  “Fuck somebody,” he said.

  Just two days later, he’d gotten so weak that Heather brought him a walker, which he used to get back and forth to the armchair and the bathroom. Then he stopped going to the armchair, and she brought in a commode; he could get his legs over the side of the bed, and if you’d bring the walker over he could get to his feet, go the two steps by himself, turn, and sit, in his open-backed hospital johnny. And then Janna had to help him; he wouldn’t let me. And then the bedpan. And then the day Heather came to catheterize him. He said to Janna, “Here goes our last chance.” That was the same day Heather hooked him up to the morphine. Think of this as the baseline, she told us, and then you give him more by mouth. This is in your hands, she told us. You understand what I’m saying?

  After our car ride, he never wanted music again. He’d brought pictures in stand-up Plexiglas frames: a photo of Simone, a postcard reproduction of Scipione Pulzone’s The Lamentation (1591)—I looked at the back—and a snapshot of the two of us, standing in front of my house. I set them up on the table by his bed, but I never saw him look at them.

  He screamed when we turned him to prevent bedsores—it took me and Janna together—but still insisted on being turned, until he didn’t. When he could no longer drink, we swabbed the inside of his mouth with supposedly mint-flavored sponges, the size of sugar cubes, on plastic sticks. At first he’d made faces at the taste of the morphine; then he was sucking at the dropper.

  One day, the day before the last day, he motioned for me to bend down and whispered, “Why will you not just do it? They’re not gonna say shit to you. She knows.”

  “Buddy,” I said, “you know I can’t.” Which she was the she? He’d gotten to a point where he was conflating Heather and Janna.

  “I’m not your buddy,” he said. “You cocksucker.”

  On his last night, we both slept in the living room with him—slept, I guess, isn’t the word—Janna on the sofa, me on the floor, and took turns getting up every half-hour to dose him again. I’d stopped drawing the morphine up to the exact line on the dropper: just squirted in as much as it would hold, then watched the tip of his tongue touch at the green crust on his lips. I’d write down the time and 20 mg, hoping they wouldn’t check my chart too carefully against what drugs would be left. When the light finally started going gray outside, I turned on his bedside lamp—I saw his eyelids tighten—gave him the next dropper, ten minutes early, then another one for good measure. In a while
, the moaning quieted down; I turned the lamp off, went to the window, and saw pink above the mountains. I pulled my fleece over my sweatshirt and went out to feed the hens. Frost on the grass, a faint quarter-moon still high.

  Walking back to the house, I saw the light go on in the living room. Janna was standing over his bed, holding his hand, the one with the needle taped to it. “Where were you?” she said. “He was asking for you.”

  I leaned over him; he was still breathing, but shallow breaths. “Should we call them?” I said.

  His eyes came open and he said, “I’ve never been here before.”

  “Don’t be afraid,” Janna told him.

  He rolled his head an inch one way, an inch the other. “I don’t know how to do this.”

  “You can just let go,” she said.

  “Oh fuck,” he said. “You are one stupid twat.”

  Janna’s head jerked back, but she kept hold of his hand.

  “Is there anything you want us to do?” I said.

  He closed his eyes. “You won’t.” He began drawing harder, deeper breaths. “I keep being mean,” he said.

  “Rest,” I said. I took his other hand.

  He rolled his head again. “I need to get this right.”

  Janna put her other hand on his, over where the needle went in.

  “We both love you,” she said. “It’s OK to go.”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  We watched him breathe. It took longer and longer for the next one to come, and then there wasn’t a next one.

  I looked at Janna. She pointed back at him. You could see it: there was nobody in there anymore.

  I let go of the hand. “I better call them.”

  “Can’t you take a minute?” she said. “This is what he came to give you.”

  After Heather left and the guy from the funeral home took the body away in the back of his black Escalade, I drove Janna into town for breakfast. It was still only ten in the morning. There was a family in the next booth, so it must have been Saturday. Or Sunday. One of the kids was playing games on his phone or whatever; I could hear the little beeps and the snatches of metallic music. How could this not be driving the parents crazy? Janna ordered a grapefruit that she didn’t eat; I had pancakes and no coffee. They were supposed to pick up the bed around noon, and I planned to sleep away the rest of the day.

  “How are you holding up?” I said.

  “He was absolutely right,” she said. “I am a stupid twat. At least you kept your mouth shut. We love you we love you we love you it’s all right to go. I’m going to be hearing that the rest of my life.”

  “He didn’t know what he was saying. We did the right thing for him.”

  “So that’s what you’d want? Somebody doing the right thing for you?”

  “You’re beating yourself up,” I said. “We’re both exhausted.”

  “This has to change.” She pushed the grapefruit away and waved to get the waitress. “Can you take me back to the house so I can get my car? Shit’s been piling up at my office.”

  “They can spare you for one more day.”

  “You don’t get what I’m telling you,” she said. “I’m not spending another night there. You can do what you want. Wear her fucking aprons, feed her fucking chickens. Sing your dead-people songs, whatever. Read your dead-people books. You’re going to kill yourself one of these days, making that drive in the winter. Look, this is my fault—I should have helped you. But you don’t even know who I am.”

  These days the summer parties happen in other people’s fields, behind other people’s farmhouses. So far this year I’ve been to one near Ludlow, Vermont, and another one an hour south of Albany. It’s always the same people, give or take, and the same songs, said to be timeless. Our crowd isn’t old enough yet to be dying off; they don’t even seem to age that much year by year. But their kids, whose names I never remember, keep getting older, until you don’t see them anymore.

  When I go, I go alone: Janna says if she has to hear a banjo one more time she’ll shoot herself, and I’m grateful to her for saying so. I’ve given Paul’s mandolin to the son of that banjo player, the guy I used to play with all those years ago. He’s nineteen or twenty, the son, loves the music and has the gift; he’d been playing some hopeless Gibson knock-off. You still see one or two like him. He makes it to some of the parties and we’ll do a song or two, I hope not just because he feels obliged. I suppose I’m getting too old to be standing out in a field on a summer night as the dew makes the strings slick, but I can still sing; having some age on me, maybe I sound more like the real thing.

  It only took Janna two months to sell the old house on the dirt road. She got us our asking price, enough to buy a three-bedroom Craftsman-style bungalow—an office for her, a study for me—ten blocks from campus, four blocks from the health-food store. I walk to class, except on the coldest days, and Janna rides her bicycle to work. I play squash once a week with my department chair. We’ve bought a flat-screen television, forty-six inches, high definition, for my ball games and her shows. I’m making notes toward a second book. If I can ever finish, it could get me invited to a conference or two; despite that trip to Brontë country, Janna says she wants to travel with me. You see all this as a defeat, I know. I would have. But I can’t begin to tell you.

  LAUREN GROFF

  At the Round Earth’s Imagined Corners

  FROM Five Points

  JUDE WAS BORN in a cracker-style house at the edge of a swamp that boiled with unnamed species of reptiles.

  Few people lived in the center of Florida then. Air conditioning was for the rich, and the rest compensated with high ceilings, sleeping porches, attic fans. Jude’s father was a herpetologist at the university, and if snakes hadn’t slipped their way into their hot house, his father would have filled it with them anyway. Coils of rattlers sat in formaldehyde on the windowsills. Writhing knots of reptiles lived in the coops out back where his mother had once tried to raise chickens.

  At an early age, Jude learned to keep a calm heart when touching fanged things. He was barely walking when his mother came into the kitchen to find a coral snake chasing its red and yellow tail around his wrist. His father was watching from across the room, laughing.

  His mother was a Yankee, a Presbyterian. She was always weary; she battled the house’s mold and humidity and devilish reek of snakes without help. His father wouldn’t allow a black person through his doors, and they didn’t have the money to hire a white woman. Jude’s mother was afraid of scaly creatures and sang hymns in the attempt to keep them out. When she was pregnant with his sister one August night, she came into the bathroom to take a cool bath and, without her glasses, missed the three-foot albino alligator her husband had stored in the bathtub. The next morning, she was gone. She returned a week later. And after Jude’s sister was born dead, a perfect petal of a baby, his mother never stopped singing under her breath.

  Noise of the war grew louder. At last, it became impossible to ignore. Jude was two. His mother pressed his father’s new khaki suit and then Jude’s father’s absence filled the house with a kind of cool breeze. He was flying cargo planes in France. Jude thought of scaly creatures flapping great wings midair, his father angrily riding.

  While Jude napped the first day they were alone in the house, his mother tossed all of the jars of dead snakes into the swamp and neatly beheaded the living ones with a hoe. She bobbed her hair with gardening shears. Within a week, she had moved them ninety miles to the beach. When she thought he was asleep on the first night in the new house, she went down to the water’s edge in the moonlight and screwed her feet into the sand. It seemed that the glossed edge of the ocean was chewing her up to her knees. Jude held his breath, anguished. One big wave rolled past her shoulders, and when it receded, she was whole again.

  This was a new world, full of dolphins that slid up the coastline in shining arcs. Jude loved the wedges of pelicans ghosting overhead, the mad dig after periwinkles that disappeared de
eper into the wet sand. He kept count in his head when they hunted for them, and when they came home, he told his mother that they had dug up 461. She looked at him unblinking behind her glasses and counted the creatures aloud.

  When she finished, she washed her hands for a long time at the sink. “You like numbers,” she said at last, turning around.

  “Yes,” he said. And she smiled and a kind of gentle shine came from her that startled him. He felt it seep into him, settle in his bones. She kissed him on the crown and put him to bed, and when he woke in the middle of the night to find her next to him, he tucked his hand under her chin where it stayed until morning.

  He began to sense that the world worked in ways beyond him, that he was only grasping at threads of a far greater fabric. Jude’s mother started a bookstore. Because women couldn’t buy land in Florida for themselves, his uncle, a roly-poly little man who looked nothing like Jude’s father, bought the store with her money and signed the place over to her. His mother began wearing suits that showed her décolletage and taking her glasses off before boarding the streetcars, so that the eyes she turned to the public were soft and somewhat misty. Instead of singing Jude to sleep as she had in the snake house, she read to him. She read Shakespeare, Hopkins, Donne, Rilke, and he fell asleep with their cadences and the sea’s slow rhythm entwined in his head.

  Jude loved the bookstore; it was a bright place that smelled of new paper. Lonely war brides came with their prams and left with an armful of Modern Library classics, sailors on leave wandered in only to exit, charmed, with sacks of books pressed to their chest. After hours, his mother would turn off the lights and open the back door to the black folks who waited patiently there, the dignified man in his watch cap who loved Galsworthy, the fat woman who worked as a maid and read a novel every day. “Your father would squeal. Well, foo on him,” his mother said to Jude, looking so fierce she erased the last traces in his mind of the tremulous woman she’d been.