The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016

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

  “The women are inside,” he said. “You should let your mother know you’re here.”

  I found her talking with my sister at the breakfast-room table, filling orange and black paper bags with peanut butter cups, Mounds bars, and Snickers and stapling them shut. Margot was in the thick of a divorce—her husband wanted out of their childless marriage in order to marry his pregnant girlfriend—and as soon as she saw me, she went silent. I stood in the doorway and said, “Trick or treat.”

  Like our father on the ladder, my sister wouldn’t look me in the eye. She seemed to be holding her breath, hiding in plain sight, and when I bent to kiss her she said, “What was I supposed to do?”

  “Did I reproach you? You were being a good daughter, a good sister.”

  “But I made you come such a long way,” she said, warmer now. “And for what?”

  “Consider it a sort of dress rehearsal.”

  “A dress rehearsal?” my mother said.

  “For the real thing.”

  The dent of her smile disappeared.

  “Go help your father,” she said. “For God’s sake, the man just got out of the hospital.”

  So I asked him how I might help, and he told me to go upstairs and unlatch the screens. Though this was a ritual we’d performed every spring and fall until I moved East, time hadn’t abated the sense of trespass I felt on entering their bedroom. This was a place of secrets, of heated words and shouts. Once, when I was fifteen and Margot hadn’t yet turned thirteen, we found ourselves standing together outside their door, heads bowed. She said, “You know it’s about a woman, don’t you?” I nodded stupidly. Later, when the coast was clear, I snuck into their bedroom and rummaged through their nightstands seeking confirmation of The Woman’s existence. My father’s nightstand housed a small library of travel guides and foreign phrase books, though he never left the continental United States; my mother’s contained a cache of the sexual self-help classics of the 1970s—The Sensuous Woman, The Joy of Sex, Any Woman Can. I found it all so achingly hopeful and sad that I called off the search then and there.

  A shadow moved behind the window shade, my father’s silhouette cast by the Indian summer afternoon. Still giddy with a sense of reprieve, I decided that the time had come to settle the question of The Woman. I raised the shade as if opening a confessional window, but as soon as I saw his naked, frightened face through the wire mesh, my courage fell away. As an ex-altar boy, I knew that the latticed screen of the confessional was designed to hide the priest’s face as well as the penitent’s, and as a practicing lawyer, I’d learned that the first rule of cross-examination was never to ask a question you didn’t already know the answer to. So I slipped the hook from the eyelet, butted the bottom of the screen with my fist, and moved on to the next window.

  —

  In the dozen years since that Halloween, my parents had, between them, been hospitalized at least a dozen times, including an actual heart attack, a ministroke, and a tumble down the stairs. They were both eighty-two now and still living in that big, old house, but my sister and I had convinced them to sell the place and move into an assisted-living facility. When I flew out to discuss what needed to be done, I arrived to find a scatter of storm windows propped up one to a tree in the backyard. These were less than half of the ground-floor windows—either my father had run out of strength, or my mother had put her foot down—but they seemed a sort of offering to me, a gift. Welcome home.

  The four of us were gathered around the breakfast-room table, seated in the same places we’d occupied for as long as I could remember, when my father announced that they’d changed their minds; they’d decided to “stay put for the time being.” I could tell this wasn’t news to Margot and felt betrayed.

  “Lionel disapproves?” my mother said, her wide mouth smiling her small smile. “Lionel’s displeased?”

  “I didn’t say a word.” But of course I was displeased.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” my mother said. “It’s written all over your face.”

  “I think you’re making a mistake, is all.” My eyes were on my sister, who was writing on a yellow legal pad with a purple felt-tipped pen. Since her divorce, she’d gone to law school and joined a practice specializing in so-called family law. “A big one. Now’s the time to act, to make your move—while you still have the luxury of time.” But even to myself I sounded like a television commercial, and when Margot finally met my gaze, I asked, “Are you going to help me out here, or have you gone mute?” She tilted the pad of paper so that only I could see it. In big block letters, she’d printed, SOMEBODY PLEASE SHOOT ME!!!

  “Now, now,” my father said. His voice had become wispy, and he could see that I heard it. “I know I sound bad,” he said, “but I don’t feel bad—at least not as bad as I sound.”

  I pushed my chair back from the table and stood up. “Not that this hasn’t been perfectly delightful,” I said, “but some things need doing, whether you stay here or not.”

  “Such as?” my mother asked.

  “I’ll start with the rest of the storm windows.” I’d come there to be useful, and now I needed to channel that energy elsewhere. “It’s like a mausoleum in here.”

  “But it’s still cold at night,” my mother said.

  “If you think I’m going to haul myself back out here in a week or two just to—”

  “Are you really that anxious to put us away? Can’t you wait just a little longer? Maybe we can do you the favor of dropping dead and spare you the bother.”

  “Enough already,” Margot said. “Go do what you’ve got to do before you give us all an ulcer.”

  I went down to the basement, my father close behind, docent on my tour through the museum of my childhood. Between a paneled wall and a Ping-Pong table stood a group of tall Mayflower movers’ cartons, yet to be unpacked after half a century. It was like the end of Citizen Kane: stacks of board games, yellow canisters of petrified Play-Doh, tubes of Tinkertoys and Lincoln Logs, my sister’s Spirograph and Etch A Sketch and Easy-Bake Oven, a broken one-armed bandit and a scuffed, white plastic Stetson whose band read, “All the Way with LBJ.”

  “Boy, oh boy, I don’t envy you having to get rid of all this stuff,” my father said. I’d heard this before. As if for the first time, he led me past the enormous cast-iron furnace into what was once the coal room, where the screens and storm windows were stored. I carried the screens upstairs two at a time. A fine layer of dust, a little bit of all of us, had settled on their top edges.

  While my father went from room to room, unfastening the inside catches on the storm windows, I fetched the long extension ladder from the garage, planted its feet among the evergreens, and drew the rope through the pulley, hand over hand, the sound of metal scraping metal, until the top touched the bricks above my parents’ bedroom window. I climbed the ladder like the mast of a ship and saw shoals of snow still banked along the edges of the driveway and the shadows of the shrubbery, the leafy curve of the earth. After what seemed a very long time, my father came out of the house and took his position below, squinting up at me. I lifted the big storm window out of its frame, but after carrying the flimsy screens, my muscles weren’t prepared for its sudden weight, and it slipped from my grasp and plunged down through the April air, a guillotine of wood and glass.

  My heart seized. I looked down. My father stood at the bottom of the ladder, unfazed. The window lay intact across the tops of the evergreens. He looked at me, then at the window, then back up the ladder, and then he laughed, and I laughed to hear him laugh.

  By the time I reached the ground, we’d both stopped laughing, and to divert attention from the fact that I’d nearly killed him, I held forth on how insane it was to perform this high-wire act year after year; how he should have the storm windows converted, replaced, modernized; how this improvement would make the house that much more marketable. “Or do I sound too anxious to put you away?”

  “Go easy on your mother,” he said. “The woman’s
had to put up with a lot of nonsense over the years.” This seemed to me a strange accusation, strange and unfair, until I realized he was talking about his own nonsense, the Sixth Commandment, The Woman. He was inviting me, however obliquely, to draw him out. His confession was something I’d waited a lifetime to hear, and now I found myself terrified at the prospect. “You know, we’re not so different, you and me,” he added. “Not as different as you think.” He watched my face with a look of acute expectancy, sipping the air through parted lips, seeking any sign of encouragement.

  It was my move—all I had to do was ask—but a sudden shyness had overtaken me, and I shifted my attention to the nearest available prop. The storm window was of a long-antiquated design, divided into quadrants whose glass, by force of time and gravity, poured thicker toward the bottom. I pointed this out and said, “You know, it’s liquid.”

  “What is?” he asked, mildly annoyed. “Glass? But it’s not. It’s not liquid or solid. It’s—” His fingers moved over the lower-left quadrant, while his eyes continued to search my face. “It’s something in between.” His expression softened. “Some things are like that.”

  I recalled a visit to the glassworks of Murano with Jane and the girls ten years earlier, and I’d begun to describe it to my father when I remembered the kernel of regret at its center, the disgrace I’d crossed an ocean to escape, but this wasn’t the story I wanted to tell there among the evergreens. Suffice it to say that there was a woman in it and that I’d behaved badly, and though Jane had forgiven me, dismissing the affair as the classic male hedge against death, I knew even then that there was no such thing. When the glassblower stepped away from the furnace, twirling a dollop of molten fire at the end of his long metal pole, I felt my heart twisting there, my guilt. With a pair of primitive pliers, he worked at the orange-yellow hive—prodding, pinching, pulling—until it assumed the form of a horse frozen in mid-gallop, and though I mentioned neither my heart nor my guilt to my father, without these my story was hardly a story. He listened politely, but I saw that he’d grown bored and sad. This wasn’t what he wanted to hear; he wanted to be heard, to tell his own story, share his own shame. But shame, like prayer, is a solitary pursuit. I steered the conversation back to the here and now of converting the storm windows, how this would save energy and lower his heating bills.

  “I couldn’t if I wanted to.” His tone had turned resigned and distant. I knew I’d disappointed him. “The house has been declared a historic building. They won’t let you change a thing, not even the color of the shutters. It’s against the law. Imagine that.”

  He took his hand off the quarter-pane, and I noticed that its glass was thicker, clearer, of a different consistency than the other three, and it occurred to me that this was the one I’d broken half a century ago, its replacement. “That’s from the night Santa Claus didn’t come,” I blurted out. He regarded me without expression. “You know,” I insisted, and as I recounted the events of that evening and the following morning—my mother’s party dress, the snowwoman, “Nessun dorma”—the muscles in his face twitched, and he swallowed.

  “Sorry,” he said, “but I don’t remember any of that.”

  “Oh, come on, Dad.” I was embarrassed by the edge of desperation in my voice, and I smoothed my fingers over the feathery evergreens to calm myself. “It was operatic. I mean, an ambulance came, for Christ’s sake.”

  But the moment had passed; the confessional window slid shut.

  “I remember the dress,” he said, pressing his hand flat against the newer pane. “A partridge in a pear tree—well, that you don’t forget. But the rest?” He smiled. “No, that was somebody else’s life, not mine.”

  —

  Year after year, we’ve declined my parents’ invitation to celebrate Thanksgiving with them in the big, old house, opting instead to spend the holiday weekend on Nantucket with Martin, Claire, and Julia. It’s the closest thing we have to an actual family tradition. Though modest as traditions go, these long, late autumn weekends make me inordinately happy, in part because I love these friends, but more, I think, because I love that Quaker island, which I’ve seen only at its least temperate. I find that I am happiest on islands, perhaps because I was born on one, and because, consciously or not, my daughters leave their catalog of grievances behind on the mainland, and for the space of three days, we revert to the same trio that used to carve jack-o’-lanterns at the kitchen table.

  Last year, though, the girls didn’t come. Julia was spending the weekend at her fiancé’s parents’ house in upstate New York, and then my daughters begged off, claiming that it would be “weird” to go without her, leaving just Martin and Claire and Jane and me. That last Friday, as always, we drove down to Hyannis, took the afternoon ferry across the sound, checked into the bed and breakfast we’ve stayed at for twenty-four years straight, and settled into our rooms, each named for an old whaling vessel. At dusk, the inhabitants gathered at the top of Main Street to light the town Christmas tree, followed by the carol sing, and as always, we were among them, though I was acutely aware of the voices missing from that chorus.

  After dinner we returned to the inn. Martin opened the first of two bottles of Malbec he’d brought along. Though he is Jewish—or maybe because he is Jewish—Martin takes almost guilty pleasure in the trappings of Christmas. The holly and the ivy, Alastair Sim’s Scrooge, the carol sing. The four of us were sitting around the glass-topped kitchen table, talking about the origins of Santa Claus, and I somehow got on the subject of my family’s first Christmas in the big, old house. Martin found this funny, and it pleased me to make him laugh (though none of the others was laughing). By the time I got to “Nessun dorma,” he was laughing so hard that he seemed beyond listening. He’s probably the most controlled person I know, but now he was out of control, and it was strange and unnerving to behold.

  Finally I said, “It wasn’t that funny.”

  “It’s not funny at all,” Jane said. “It’s depressing. Pathetic, really.” But this only made him laugh harder.

  “He laughed to humor Lionel, and now he can’t stop himself,” Claire explained. Her eyes were fixed on Martin. “This isn’t the first time this has happened.”

  “Maybe he’ll stop if I tell him something really pathetic,” I offered. “Maybe a little tragedy’s just what the doctor ordered.”

  “It’s not funny, Lionel,” Claire snapped. Then, realizing how fierce she’d sounded, she added, softer now, but with a terrifying catch in her voice, “The last time this happened, he fainted.”

  Martin’s face had become a purple mask, his smile a rictus through which he gasped for breath, and I feared a blood vessel would burst, that he’d suffer a stroke or an aneurysm, that he might literally die laughing, and it would be all my fault. The rest of us sat by helpless, watching and not watching, saying and doing nothing, scared to move. A passerby glimpsing the scene through the window would assume we were torturing him.

  At last, his laughter became less breathless and then lifted altogether. He began to breathe normally, and wiping the tears from his cheeks, he apologized. He picked up the bottle and offered to refill our glasses, but something had gone out of the evening. We soon said good night and retired to our respective rooms.

  Upstairs, Jane finished unpacking and prepared for bed, but I’d been spooked by Martin’s laughing fit and wanted to talk about it, or at least to try.

  “Well, that was close,” I said.

  She pulled back the covers on the four-poster bed. “What was?”

  “That.” I nodded toward the door. “Martin. Downstairs. I really thought he might—” I couldn’t say it.

  “Oh, Lionel.” She came closer and touched my cheek. “No one ever died laughing.” She spoke as to a child afraid of the dark, but with the authority of loss, and I felt even more childish, though no less afraid. I pressed her hand, warm against my face. From the bathroom behind us came the persistent sound of a running toilet. “Do something about that, will you?” Jan
e said, turning, yawning. “I want to go to sleep, and it’s driving me crazy.”

  It was a simple repair—a matter of untangling the chain connecting the lift arm to the tank ball—but by the time I’d finished washing up and brushing my teeth, Jane was asleep. I lay beside her in that old bed where God knows how many others had lain, and I felt Nantucket Sound still roiling under me, along with the sudden notion that death could come smiling, even laughing. Trick or treat.

  Outside, the wind had picked up, rattling the ancient windowpanes. A car door slammed; a scrabble of voices and shouts rose from the cobblestones. I got out of bed and sat in a rocking chair by the window. Carefully, I raised the shade so as not to wake Jane. The pane was unprotected by a storm window, letting in the night sounds and the cold and the wind. My reflection flickered in the wavery glass—a frightened face, my father’s face—and I looked past it at the night, which, in spite of the old-fashioned streetlamps and the illuminated steeple of the First Congregational Church, felt darker and deeper than before. A dog barked in the distance, and I remembered Trixie running around my snowwoman, her lopsided orbit scarring the lawn for years to come, and I realized, with a pang, that somehow I’d left her out of the story I told downstairs. I sat there thinking of her running and running, her pink tongue flapping, and as I pressed my palm against the cold glass, my cell phone buzzed on top of the dresser. A shock ran through me. I knew without looking who it was and what she would say. Still, I picked it up and whispered, “Hello?” in the dark, and my sister said, “He’s gone.”

  Asako Serizawa

  Train to Harbin

  I ONCE MET A MAN on the train to Harbin. He was my age, just past his prime, hair starting to grease and thin in a way one might have thought passably distinguished in another context, in another era, when he might have settled down, reconciled to finishing out his long career predictably. But it was 1939. War had officially broken out between China and Japan, and like all of us on that train, he too had chosen to take the bait, that one last bite before acquiescing to life’s steady decline. You see, for us university doctors, it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. We all knew it. Especially back then.