The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2016 (retail) (epub)

  And then Dickey’s mask is in the air and he’s running toward me and everyone else is, too, and I’m being crushed under a pile of bodies. And for the life of me, I still can’t figure out why.

  Why would they do this?

  Why would they do this for me?

  David H. Lynn

  Divergence

  JUST AS HE WAS swinging his leg over the bike, Shivani brushed past and whacked him on the rump. “Watch yourself,” she cried.

  Jeremy Matthis bobbed up and onto his saddle. He caught his wife in a few strokes, swooshing past her on the street, and already he was marveling at the lightness of the new frame, the smooth response of derailleur and gears. At the first corner they cruised, slowing for a glance each way. Again he pushed ahead, wobbling lightly—the balance was entirely different from his ancient tourer.

  This would take some getting used to. And not just the new bicycle. He was entirely prepared to sacrifice the summer to countless adjustments, now that his book had finally appeared in the spring and, not coincidentally, the trustees of Ransom College had just this past weekend confirmed his tenure in the Classics Department. For months he’d been predicting that his promotion would alter nothing, that he wouldn’t feel in any way transformed once it had been granted. Yet already in the stretch of a few days he’d discovered how faulty that reasoning had been.

  It seemed that over the course of many years a tightly woven mesh of stress and anxiety had gradually and ever more tightly caged his heart, his lungs. Mostly he’d been unaware of the binding, except for the occasional snapping awake at four in the morning, sucking for air. Over these last few days that invisible harness had finally begun to loosen, to fade, shadow becoming light. Each time his lungs filled with air, it seemed almost a revelation, perhaps the start of a new life.

  A decade or more earlier, he’d steal an hour on hard-packed country roads in Virginia, digging with his old ten-speed to grind away the frustrations, dead ends, and humiliations that are the dues paid in grad school, and just such a bicycle as the one he was riding had been his dream. An expensive dream he’d scarcely ever acknowledged aloud. Two days ago, however, he’d arrived to meet Shivani for a celebratory dinner at their favorite restaurant, a trattoria on High Street. She’d spotted him through the large front window and was standing in her black dress and pearls by their special table, with one hand on the blue-and-silver Italian bike, a bright bow on its seat.

  Not until today had there been a real chance to get out on the road. They spun down to Main and sliced along an alley to the back entrance of a coffee shop, where their small group of friends was already gathered. Marty, Gretchen, and Lee were there, standing with their own bikes.

  As Jeremy swung onto the sidewalk, Owen Thurlow emerged from the shop with a cup of coffee. “Nice wheels,” he said, saluting the new bike. “I must be paying you too much.”

  “Since when are you paying him at all?” Shivani demanded. “I thought he was teaching just for the love of it. Anyway, this baby comes out of my check from the Attorney General.”

  The provost saluted her in turn.

  Everyone other than Owen was satisfied with water bottles and eager to be away. So, soon they were mounted again and cutting over to the Alum Creek path. The day was gray, an occasional faint drizzle keeping them cool but slicking the pavement. It took less than five miles of occasional weaving and dodging before they’d left the city behind, along with its joggers, baby strollers, and dog walkers. They were flying now across the rolling, open country of central Ohio, the river meandering near and away again from the old rail path.

  “Hey, fancy pants, quit showing off,” Owen grunted loudly.

  Jeremy swiveled and tossed him a wave. The machine he was riding yielded such a pure joy that, without quite realizing it, he’d been out front and pressing his friends beyond their usual pace. He eased, coasting so that Gretchen could swing into the lead. As he drifted back to her side, Shivani was breathing hard, but wouldn’t grant him the satisfaction of admitting it. She was also smiling broadly.

  “So?” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Nice.”

  He was feeling strong and swift—he’d remember that afterward. The rhythm of the ride, the entire day, was perfect. There was satisfaction even in the way his sweat was wicking efficiently into the breeze, except for this one annoying patch high on his brow, just under the lip of his helmet. He flicked at it with a finger, and in that instant spied the groundhog ambling out of tall grasses along the river. This too he recalled later. How it raised its snout, spotting them in turn.

  Maybe Jeremy was caught up in his own momentum, rhythm, surprise—he hesitated. Had he started to call out? The muscles in his throat tightened when he recalled the instant.

  For its part, the animal froze as well. Considered. Then with astonishing quickness hurtled its bulk of rolling muscle and fat across the path. Dodging Gretchen, it rammed heavily into Shivani’s spokes.

  —

  His eyes were already open. This he realized. But only gradually would they tighten toward focus, and only partly. The pounding pulse in his head throbbed more painfully as his vision cleared. But someone was just then sticking a finger in his eye, pushing one lid up and the other, and he was figuring she was a doctor—who else would poke him with such casual deliberateness?—and so this was a hospital. And he was in a hospital. Okay.

  —

  When he woke again he remembered the hospital right off. His own lack of surprise, of curiosity, surprised him. The dimmed light in the room seemed to thrum at the same rate as the thud of pain in his head. A woman was hovering between him and the light, looking for something in his face, studying him. Was this the doctor again? He started to ask and then, the effort too exhausting, fell back and far away. The woman glanced to the side, and then someone else, Shivani, was hovering too, closer. He felt her kiss on his lips.

  “Hey,” she said softly and held a straw to his mouth.

  Water was good. He sucked after more.

  “What the fuck,” he tried to whisper, water dribbling down his chin.

  —

  Next time, or maybe the time after, that’s when he began to realize something was wrong or at least different. Though he couldn’t put his finger on it. Couldn’t put a name to it.

  —

  Shivani had been speaking for a while, he realized this too, but his attention was drifting. He tried hard to appear attentive.

  “Do you remember?” she asked. She was asking him.

  “Not sure,” he mumbled. He was proud of that answer—it didn’t give him away.

  “You saw it just before, right? The groundhog.”

  The groundhog he did remember.

  “Sure,” he said.

  “I didn’t—that’s the thing. I felt Gretchen swerve and the thump as it hit my front wheel and then I was pitching over. Darling, brave Jeremy—you tried to catch me. So we were both going down. Owen and Lee ran right into us and down into the mangle. What a mess.” She sighed and he could tell she was struggling not to cry.

  He didn’t know what to say.

  He remembered the groundhog.

  “Your helmet split on the pavement just like it’s supposed to, but you were knocked cold anyway. The rest of us were nothing but cuts and scrapes.” Shivani was struggling with her own helplessness.

  He closed his eyes. Her voice, its elite Delhi-wallah cadence, more British than the Queen, was scraping, grating—annoying. It had never bothered him before. He knew that. But all this emotion, the concern and guilt, was radiating from her too. Demanding a response in kind. Was he supposed to provide sympathy?

  A quick surge of anger shivered him. His head was throbbing harder.

  The flame of his little rage expired almost instantly, leaving him frail, a spent wick on the hospital bed. He could not move.

  Jeremy groaned. Shivani stroked her cool hand across his forehead.

  She had been at his bedside when he woke—he remembered this too
—and he’d recognized her right off, her eyes tired, the stylish flair of her short hair, unusually mussed in the non-time of the hospital.

  He’d known who she was.

  He’d been glad to see her, truly, to sip the cool water through a straw, grateful not to be alone in this strange place.

  But now as he considered, and he was panting lightly through his mouth, he realized that even in that first moment awake he’d also felt—what?—different. Distanced. Dislocated. Watching this lovely woman from very far away. His wife. Hugging a silk shawl against the arid chill. Someone he knew so very well. And yet it seemed as though a tether between them had snapped, like a tendon torn at the bone hinge.

  A question occurred to him and he opened his eyes once more. “How long?” he whispered.

  She hesitated, searching his face. “You’ve been here two weeks.”

  That stopped him. It took a while to make sense.

  “Two weeks? I was out for two weeks?”

  Shivani nodded, and now she was looking sad and worried and guilty again, and relieved all at once, tears in her eyes.

  He turned his head. He figured the groundhog must have got away free and clear.

  —

  “You remember the groundhog?” This time it was Owen Thurlow, his pal the provost.

  He managed not to roll his eyes. “Sure,” he sighed.

  And all he didn’t remember: the shell of his helmet splitting. Cell calls to 911. The medevac copter. It had become a crazy therapeutic catechism, his wife and friends reciting the sequence over and over. Chanting the story of all that had swirled about while he remained an unconscious witness. As if capturing it in ever-finer detail might somehow penetrate to the heart of the matter. As if grasping precisely what had happened would bring him to himself. His old self.

  It was beginning to drive him crazy.

  Did they sense the truth?

  He would listen graciously, or pretend to, hiding his boredom and occasional flaring annoyance as best he could. The flashes of emotion, unwilled, unprovoked, unreasonable, were also unnerving. All his life he’d prided himself on his cool. Unlike other teenagers years before, unlike many adults to this day, he’d never allowed his emotions to run riot. This was one reason he’d been convinced that the silent libraries and controlled classrooms of the academy were his destiny.

  Of course, the recitations did also obviously help Shivani and Owen and Gretchen feel better about the outcome. That annoyed him too. So this time it was Owen Thurlow resurrecting the damned groundhog.

  A question struck him only now. “Why the hell did it take me so long to come out of it?” Jeremy demanded, as if he needed to get to the bottom of some truth buried from his gaze, his voice both hoarse and sharp.

  Owen seemed startled. “Well, you just didn’t wake up, not that first evening. The neurologists wanted to stabilize you. So they induced a coma to play it safe.” He hesitated before going on, as if this next verged on something more intimate. “I mean, Jesus, Jeremy, your brain was all bruised and swollen—it needed time to heal. But even that turned out not to be enough,” he said, trying to convince the patient after the fact. “Dr. Wainwright finally persuaded Shivani you needed surgery—she opened a patch of skull to relieve the pressure.”

  He lay still and considered. The image struck him as odd, as eerie: contemplating his own head laid open. It dizzied him. Tears welled up out of nowhere, trickling onto his cheek. He’d never been one to weep, certainly not in front of others. He swatted at them with one hand, an IV tube rattling awkwardly along. Thurlow seemed not to notice.

  From his first waking, nurses had been swabbing a wound on his head and changing the bandage every few hours. He’d assumed a gash from the original accident.

  And all along there’d been this headache behind his eyes, radiating deeper and deeper still, and it had never entirely disappeared. Now its presence seemed almost reassuring. Along with the thrum of his blood and the steady breaths in his chest, one after another.

  He’d never felt so fully the fragility of this enterprise. Living. He blinked away at a fresh rush of tears.

  —

  A day or two later he was being examined by Dr. Wainwright, the same neurologist who’d brought him back into the world. She must have been forty or forty-five, he guessed now, her tinted auburn hair cropped short. She was checking his eyes again, the stitches in his itching scalp. As she bent close over him in a lab coat and hospital fatigues, he smelled a faint mix of sweat and detergent and peppermint.

  “There’s this thing,” he said.

  “Mmm, hmm,” she said, shining a pocket flashlight into his other eye.

  “It’s hard to describe, to explain.”

  “Mmm, hmm.”

  “I just don’t feel like myself.”

  She flicked the flashlight off. “Are you experiencing discomfort? Nausea?”

  That distracted him for a moment. “Well, yes, actually—there’s some nausea. And sort of a constant headache. But that’s not what I mean.”

  “Okay.” She seemed only partly listening.

  “The thing is, I don’t feel like my old self. It’s like I’m not the same me anymore, if that makes sense. Something’s gone all haywire.” He was speaking softly. Could she even hear him now? His lips were dry.

  This was hard. He closed his eyes. But the struggle to mold words around it was already helping him grasp the slippery thing itself—the strange feelings of dislocation. As though he was staring out at the world from an angle slightly askew to what he’d ever known before. At least trying to explain the deeply unnerving sensation to Dr. Wainwright made it more real, more than just a vague unease.

  If this had also taken on the tones of a private confession, as much as a plea for advice or explanation, it was because he felt, well, guilty—as if he were somehow responsible for what had happened. Though he couldn’t imagine how. It occurred to him suddenly that if he were Catholic, he’d be having this chat with a priest—that notion provoked a snort of laughter. Which shot a bolt of pain through his head.

  He winced and lay silent, panting lightly, for a few seconds while she was making notes on his chart.

  “For one thing,” he murmured, taking up the thread again, “I’ve been having these crazy, veering emotions—wild swings, from rage to a kind of weepy sadness. It’s pathetic.” He sighed. “I’ve never been that kind of guy.”

  Still no direct response from the doctor. She was glancing at a bank of monitors.

  “Yeah,” he went on. “And it’s also how I’m seeing my friends. Even my wife. Like they’re strangers. I mean, I do know them. I’m just not relating the same way. About them. Even about myself.”

  A flash of heat flushed through him as he lay there. His cheeks burned and his brow was slicked with sweat. It might have been another burst of emotion, but it felt more physical than that. He wanted a sip of water. He wanted this woman to stop examining him for a moment and demonstrate some concern or at least pay him some attention.

  He wasn’t sure she’d even been listening. But now she did step back, a hand on the stethoscope draped over her shoulders. She studied him seriously—an odd look, almost as if she hadn’t until this moment taken him in as a whole person beyond patched head, bruised brain, dilated pupils.

  Nodding, she shrugged. “Yes,” she said. “I hear what you’re saying. This is all very uncomfortable and confusing—I can well imagine. But given the trauma you suffered, these feelings of, let’s call it disorientation, aren’t uncommon. And each case is so different. How symptoms manifest—there’s never any predicting.” She patted him on the leg.

  “My guess is you’re experiencing a response to a severe concussion. Believe me, Professor Matthis, it could be so much worse. As the injury fades, as your brain heals, many of these unhappy feelings will almost surely lessen and even disappear entirely.”

  “Okay,” he said, wanting to believe her. “But it sure doesn’t feel like it’s heading in that direction.”

/>   She hesitated, fumbling a roll of mints from her side pocket and slipping one into her mouth. Glancing at him again, she considered. “I do have one piece of practical advice, if you don’t mind my offering.”

  His eagerness was only too clear.

  “Now understand, this part lies outside my expertise. One of the clinicians or the chaplain may say something different. But I’ve seen other situations resembling this, and my suggestion is, keep these feelings to yourself, at least for the time being. Think of yourself as having been wounded—recovery is always going to be slower than you like. And for better or worse, confusion is part of that process. It’s understandable. Everyone understands.”

  Jeremy lay quietly, considering as best he could. His energy had already spent itself again, and weariness was beginning to crush him.

  She looked at him directly. “What I’m saying is, if you rush to share your—what?—your sense of all these emotional changes with your wife and friends, isn’t it likely they’ll only feel hurt and rejected? Not to mention more guilty because they’re all right and you’re not.

  “So,” she became brisk and businesslike again, picking up his chart. “What’s the point in upsetting everyone at this stage, when things may go back to the way they were?”

  “Sure,” he whispered, closing his eyes. “You’re right.”

  “What I can say with some confidence is that you’re healing very nicely—as rapidly as we could hope.”

  Even the shaded light in the room had begun to throb through to the back of his head.

  At some point Dr. Wainwright must have drifted away to other duties.

  —

  Oddly—it seemed odd to him—whenever he woke alone in the night, he never doubted his own sense of himself. His consciousness would tug free of the suck of heavy, vivid dreams that vanished without a trace, even as he broke through their surface. For a few moments he’d lie still in the dry air and dim light, thirsty, taking stock, trying to recapture for an instant an image, a feeling, that had already faded beyond his grasp. He was also relieved to be alone.