The Best American Short Stories® 2011

by Geraldine Brooks

  Most mornings we walked to school together. Holly's hair would be wet from the shower, her eyes wide and glassy with fatigue; she'd yawn and say, "What's buzzin', cousin?" She liked to drag her fingers along the chain-link fences we passed, and to stop at Maverick Market to buy Diet Cokes and steal candy bars. I waited outside, worrying she'd get caught. We talked about what she'd do after graduation—some days she planned to enroll at the beauty college, others she wanted to dance at the Fox's Den out by the oil refineries—and about Roscoe, the collie she'd adopted in Florida. She told me how her little brother preferred her Aggie sweatshirt to his baby blanket. I invented stories of girls I'd been with, wild things named Rhonda and Mandy and Anastasia who attended different schools and who, I hoped, might make Holly jealous. Usually she'd just bump me with her hip and say, "You're more of a slut than I am." We never talked about the rumors that she and Julio had let a crowd of kids watch them in bed at a homecoming party, or that she'd recently been spotted leaving the Sea Ranch Motel with Mr. Mitchell, the geology teacher. Even my parents had heard about Mr. Mitchell. My mother said Holly was just trying to get her parents' attention, acting out because of the new baby. My father said she was trouble and if he caught me alone with her, he'd whip my ass. But I rarely saw her after we got to campus. Holly would disappear onto the school's smoking patio, a dismal slab of concrete where stringy-haired surfers and kids with safety pins through their eyebrows loitered, and I would go find Matt Rickard.

  Matt and I had been friends since elementary. We'd played on the same soccer team, joined and quit Boy Scouts together, leaned despondently against the gym bleachers and watched couples sway at the junior-high dances our parents made us attend. In our freshman year, Matt wore sleeveless shirts and tucked the cuffs of his camouflage pants into military boots; he had a pair of fatigues for every day of the week—desert camo, woodland and blue woodland, tiger-stripe and black tiger-stripe. For a while we'd been into guerrilla warfare. We bought Soldier of Fortune magazines, made blowguns from copper tubing, slathered our faces with mud when we crept under the lacy mesquite trees behind his house. We saved our allowances for the gun expos at the Bayfront Auditorium and loaded up on Chinese throwing stars and bandoliers of blank bullets, butterfly knives and pamphlets on chokeholds, and MREs that tasted like gluey chalk. We ate meals with the forks and spoons attached to our Swiss Army knives. Over the summer, though, I'd grown bored and embarrassed by the warfare stuff—my walls had been draped with camouflage netting, and over my bed I'd had a poster of one ninja roundhousing another—but Matt still liked it, so I'd recently told him he could have my cache. He was disappointed in me, I knew, as if I'd defected to the enemy, and probably the reason he hadn't yet come to collect my stuff was the hope that I'd change my mind. But I'd already packed everything into my army duffel, and each afternoon I waited for Matt to take it away. I didn't think we'd stay friends much longer.

  When my father came into my room on a Friday night in early October, I thought he'd say Matt was on the porch. I was on my bed, staring at the acoustic ceiling where the ninja poster had been and listening to my stereo. My father crossed the room and lowered the volume. He wore a short-sleeved shirt and a clip-on tie; he'd just gotten off work. He gazed through my window and into the backyard.

  "Is Matt here?" I asked.

  "You need to take care of Holly's dog for a few days."

  "Roscoe," I said.

  "Make sure he has food and water. Maybe play with him a little."

  I sat up on my bed. My father's voice sounded frayed, as if I were hearing him from far away. His hands were clasped behind his back. I thought I smelled cigarette smoke on him, but then I realized it was floating down the hall from the kitchen.

  "Are they heading out of town?" I asked. The Hensleys had a van and sometimes drove to Comfort or Falling Water in the Hill Country.

  "Don't go over there tonight," he said. "You can just start in the morning."

  "Okay," I said. A wind gusted outside. Tallow branches scraped against the side of the house.

  "If the dog shits on their patio, spray it down with the hose."

  "Is Mom smoking again?"

  "She might be, Josh," he said, and put his hand against the window. "Yes, that might be happening."

  In 1986 my father worked at the naval air station—most everyone's father did, including Holly's and Matt's—but he was also moonlighting at Sears, selling radial tires and car batteries, which he blamed on Reagan. It was the year the president denied trading arms for hostages in Iran and the space shuttle Challenger exploded and Halley's Comet scorched through the sky. It was the year I loved a reckless girl, the year being around my best friend made me lonely. It was the year my mother was working at the dry-cleaning plant and trying to quit smoking. I knew she occasionally snuck cigarettes—I'd seen her in the backyard on evenings when my father was at Sears—but she hadn't smoked in our house for months. On that night in October, when the filmy scent of smoke wafted into my room, I could only think that Holly's family was moving again. The last time her father had gotten news of his transfer, they were gone within a week.

  But they weren't leaving. There'd been an accident earlier that day, something involving Sam, Holly's little brother. My father only knew that Sam had been taken away in an ambulance and the Hensleys would likely spend a few nights with him at the hospital. He relayed the information in a detached tone, as if summarizing a movie he didn't want me to watch. He'd moved from the window to sit on my bed, where he looked small. He said their mail would be held and there was a key under the ceramic cow skull on their porch. I tried to remember the last time I'd seen Sam, but couldn't—maybe the previous weekend, when he and Holly drew on their driveway with colored chalk, or maybe when Mr. Hensley was watering the yard with Sam on his shoulders. In my room, my father kept dragging his hand over his face, as if trying to wake himself up. I asked if he knew how Holly was doing, and he said, "She's hurting, Josh. They're all hurting like hell."

  My mother baked all night—brownies and lemon bars, biscuits and an enchilada casserole. She fried chicken and sliced vegetables and made salami-and-cheese sandwiches that she quartered into triangles. When I went into the kitchen on Saturday morning, the counter was crowded with foil-covered dishes. My mother was walleyed. She poured me a glass of orange juice and put two pieces of cold fried chicken on my plate. "Breakfast of champions," she said.

  With all the foil, the kitchen was bright and strange. The table was tacky with humidity. My mother shook a cigarette from a pack, then lit it from a burner on the stove. I heard it sizzle.

  "Liz called last night," she said, and exhaled smoke toward the ceiling. Liz was Mrs. Hensley, Holly's mother. My mother said, "Little Sam is sedated in intensive care."

  "I don't know what's happening," I said.

  "He burned himself," she said. "He's scalded all over the front of his little body."

  Sam, my mother explained, had woken with a fever, so Mrs. Hensley kept him home from daycare. He spent the morning watching cartoons and napping on the living room couch. While he slept, Mrs. Hensley was cleaning the house and washing clothes, then decided to make tuna salad for lunch. She put water on to boil eggs. She checked on Sam on the couch, then stepped into the garage to put a load of laundry in the dryer. They had an attached garage, so she left the kitchen door open in case Sam woke up and called for her. She got sidetracked looking for dryer sheets and stayed out there longer than she'd intended. Then she heard her son screaming: he'd pulled the pot of boiling water down onto himself.

  I felt cored out, not like I was going to vomit but like I already had. I pushed my plate away. At Sam's last birthday party, my parents and I had given him a toy garbage truck. Holly gave him a baseball cap that read, I Wasn't Born In Texas, But Got Here As Soon As I Could. He'd been wearing it when Mr. Hensley watered their lawn.

  My mother opened the oven, looked inside, and then closed the door. Her cigarette was in an ashtray on the counter, smoke ribboning towar
d the open window.

  "That poor family," my mother said.

  "They're behind the eightball," I said. It was a phrase my father used.

  "They sure are," she said. "Liz couldn't find Holly until very late. She thought she was off with that Julio."

  "She had pep-squad practice," I lied. "I saw her when I walked home."

  "You did?"

  "There's a game this weekend," I said. "A big one."

  "Then that's a relief. I worried she was with the teacher again."

  "I don't think that really happened, the stuff with Mr. Mitchell," I said.

  "I know you don't, sweetheart."

  I took another bite of chicken, drained my orange juice. I said, "Matt might come over today. I'm giving him all my war stuff."

  "I'll leave some chicken for you two," she said. "Your father and I are taking the rest to the hospital."

  "I want to go," I said.

  She brought her cigarette to her lips, then stubbed it out. She said, "No, Joshie, I don't think you do."

  Their house had always been nicer than ours, and bigger. Over the years, workers had renovated the Hensleys' kitchen and added two rooms on the house's backside, a study and a game room. They had a bumper-pool table, thick carpet and Saltillo tile, lights with dimmer switches, and a fireplace. "Who needs a fireplace in Corpus?" my father had said one night. He was squinting through the peephole in our front door, watching smoke rise from the Hensleys' chimney. "Don't try to be something you're not, boy," he told me, and then told me again when they bought an aboveground pool for their backyard right before Mr. Hensley was transferred to Florida. I'd assumed the transfer was a demotion or punishment, but my father said Hensley had applied for it. (By way of explanation, he'd only said, "They're Republicans, Joshie.") While they were away, the Hensleys rented the house to a Catholic deacon and his wife, and when they returned, they paid to have new vinyl siding installed. It was gray with white and black trim, the shades of a lithograph.

  Until that October weekend, I'd never been alone in their house. It seemed illicit, like when Matt and I paged through his father's Playboys. The darkened rooms made me anxious. I had the sense I would do something I shouldn't, the dangerous and disappointing feeling that I couldn't be trusted. Had there been a route for me to bypass the house and still reach the garage where Roscoe's food was, I would've taken it, but I didn't have their garage-door opener—their automatic door was another extravagance my father resented—so I had to cut through the kitchen. I went twice on Saturday, three times on Sunday. I moved like a thief on each visit, never lingering or touching what I didn't have to. The air in the house smelled of potpourri, cloistered and spiced, and I tried not to breathe. I averted my gaze from the familiar and mysterious artifacts of the Hensleys' lives.

  And yet I couldn't keep from seeing the coffee table Mrs. Hensley had pulled over to the couch so Sam wouldn't roll off, Holly's Aggie sweatshirt spread over the cushions, little red high-top shoes upturned on the carpet. I pretended not to know the Hensleys and tried to piece together a different family based on evidence they'd left behind. Their son is an only child, I thought. His parents have taken him to a swimming lesson. Or I imagined all of the Hensleys were home and hiding, waiting for me to break or steal something. My heart pumped in my ears. I left the lights off. In the kitchen, the floor tile gleamed; Holly's father had come home briefly Friday night, mopped up the spilled water, and grabbed fresh clothes for everyone at the hospital. The copper-bottomed pot was in the sink. Four unopened cans of tuna were stacked on the counter.

  In the backyard, Roscoe always barreled into my legs and knocked me sideways. He jumped as high as my shoulders and scratched my chest through my shirt and licked my hand with his warm tongue. I let him chase me around the pool, and I threw pinecones for him to catch. We wrestled in the grass the way Holly had said he liked, then I scratched the scruff of his neck until he snored. I fed him more than I should. Before school on Monday morning, maybe because I'd been hoping Holly would appear on her porch and we'd walk to school together, I opened one of the cans of tuna and let Roscoe eat it from a spoon. That evening there was diarrhea all over the patio.

  At school, the story kept changing. Sam wasn't scalded, he'd drowned in the Hensleys' pool. He'd slipped on a wet floor and hit his head. His brain was swelling. He'd been hit by a car, he'd eaten roach poison. Someone claimed to have seen the geology teacher taking flowers to the hospital, and someone else said they'd been in the faculty parking lot and found him weeping in his truck. On Wednesday, Matt said he'd heard the whole thing was a lie to cover up how Sam had accidently shot himself with his father's unregistered pistol.

  We were standing by the statue of a mustang, the school mascot. Matt was in his blue woodland camos. He said, "I bet it was the Luger she showed us. If it was, the kid's toast."

  Shortly after she returned from Florida, Holly had taken me and Matt into her parents' bedroom and showed us her father's pistol. She'd been babysitting Sam, and we'd been climbing the retama tree in my front yard. We were wearing our camouflage with pellet rifles slung over our shoulders, pretending to be mercenaries. She'd called across the street, "Yall want to see something cool?" The pistol was a German Parabellum 1908, a semiautomatic Luger. We'd read about them in our magazines.

  "He burned himself," I told Matt. "He's sedated in intensive care, but he's going to pull through." I made up the last part. The night before, I'd asked my father about Sam and he told me to concentrate on my schoolwork and not to give Roscoe any more tuna.

  "I heard he did it in the game room," Matt said. "I heard there's a gnarly bloodstain under the pool table."

  "You heard from who?"

  "Jeff Deyo," Matt said.

  "You don't know Jeff Deyo," I said. Jeff Deyo was a red-eyed senior, a friend of Julio's who'd gotten held back. He wore the same flannel shirt every day, unbuttoned and tattered, and when I passed him in the hall, I smelled the smoker's patio.

  "We've been hanging out," Matt said. "We've been getting high. If you tell, I'll kick your ass."

  "You need to come get all of my gear. If you don't want it, I'll throw it away."

  "Don't take it out on me just because your girlfriend's brother blew his face off."

  "She's not my girlfriend," I said.

  "Right," he laughed. "She's dating Mr. Mitchell and you're with Anastasia from across town."

  "You're an asshole."

  "Check the game room," he said. "I heard the stain looks like a pot leaf."

  Later that night, Mrs. Hensley called. My father was working his shift at Sears, and I was watching television on the couch while my mother smoked beside me. After answering, my mother handed me the receiver and told me to hang up once she switched to the kitchen phone. While she made her way down the hall, I told Mrs. Hensley about Roscoe catching the pinecones I tossed. She thanked me and said Holly would call me once things calmed down with Sam. Then my mother said, "Okay, Joshie, I got it."

  "Okay," I said, but I just pushed the mute button and stayed on the line. I wanted to hear if Mrs. Hensley would say anything more about Holly, if she'd mention Mr. Hensley's Luger.

  "We're going to Houston," Mrs. Hensley said. "They're moving him to the burn unit at the Shriners Hospital."

  "Okay," my mother said. "Okay."

  "I don't know. I don't know if it's okay."

  "Are the doctors saying anything else?"

  "You're going to Houston, that's what they're saying. They're saying, We can't help him here."

  I checked out the game-room carpet on Saturday morning, then crept through the rest of the house that night. I knew I wouldn't find a bloodstain, just as I knew stealing through their hallways was a betrayal, but I couldn't stop myself. The moonlight canting through the blinds was bright enough in most rooms, but I also used the angle-head flashlight I'd bought at a gun expo. In the near dark, the Hensleys' house seemed smaller, not bigger, which surprised me. A fine layer of dust on the surfaces—the marble-topped dres
sers, the pool table's rails, the framed pictures on the walls—shone in the light, reflected it, and made me think of silt on a riverbed. Moving through their rooms gave me a jumpy, underwater feeling, as if I were swimming through the wreckage of a sunken ship, paddling from one ruined space to another. I avoided Sam's room.

  And I'd told myself I wouldn't go into Holly's room, but on Sunday night I did. The moon hung low in the sky, a lurid glow seeping through her curtains and puddling on the carpet. The room smelled of lavender. I'd been in there before, but stripped of noise and electric light, the layout seemed unexpected. Her bed was made, piled high with frilly pillows and stuffed animals—open-armed bears, mostly, and a plush snake stretching the length of her mattress. Four silver-framed photos topped her vanity: Holly and Sam in an orange grove, Julio on Padre Island flexing his arms and smirking, Roscoe licking Holly's face with her eyes closed, and a picture of Holly when she was younger, eating ice cream with a fork. Green and white streamers were tacked to her closet door, and when I moved too quickly, they fluttered and startled me. She had a banana-shaped phone on her nightstand, and I began worrying it would ring. Or I thought my father would silently appear in her doorway, his eyes narrow with disgust. Leave, I thought. Go home. In my chest, my heart was wild as a trapped, frantic bird.

  And yet I stayed. Outside, Roscoe trotted around the pool; his tags tinkled. Once, he started barking and I dropped to the floor and shimmied under Holly's bed. The Hensleys, I knew, had returned from Houston. I imagined Holly coming into her room and calling someone—Julio or maybe even Mr. Mitchell—to relay news about Sam. I imagined her turning off the lights and weeping and falling asleep with me under her. I considered bolting, trying to climb out the window and into the backyard, but knew I'd make too much racket. Roscoe kept barking. He was racing from one fence to another. I held my breath. I listened to phantom footfalls, the murmur of floorboards and studs behind the walls, the sad and random noises of an empty house at night. My hands were trembling, so I tucked them between my chest and the carpet. I still had the same underwater feeling, though now it was as if I were sinking, watching the surface grow blurry and distant. I waited to hit the bottom, to be discovered in the darkness.