The Best American Short Stories 2017

by Meg Wolitzer

Later that night, as my mother soaked her tired body in the bath and my father washed the evening’s dishes, I asked him if he’d always been faithful to my mother in their thirty years of marriage.

  He looked at me as if I’d done something terrible of which I should be very ashamed.

  “Never ask a man a question like that.”

  But later he came around to my corner as I lay on my mattress staring at the ceiling, my notebook beside me, turned to a blank page, and stood over me.

  “The answer is yes.”

  He paused, looked around the room and back at me.

  “Do you believe me?”

  “I will if you want me to.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “Okay, viejo. I believe you.”

  It has been years, but they say the end of the Capitolio restoration is in sight, the National Assembly will soon be able to move in, and for this reason, the Cuban government has decided to buy up the properties of those living around it for the purpose of creating more government office space. This is what the officials said when they came to see Natasha and her mother about being relocated. The compensation would be generous, they said. Fifty thousand dollars generous. I couldn’t believe it. Until last year, one couldn’t even buy or sell their own house, and now the government is playing real estate games? But Abel’s family got the same offer, and the other families in the building too.

  “Fifty thousand dollars is more than a person can earn in a lifetime in this country,” Abel says. “Where do you suppose the government is getting all that money?”

  “Who knows? Will you take the offer?”

  “We don’t have a choice. When the government says you go, you go.”

  Nobody has figured out Abel is the one who wrote the article for the USB newspaper telling everyone the American prisoner was being held in the back of a green house in Marianao next to Ciudad Libertad, right where Batista himself fled Cuba forever. He got that info from a neighbor who befriended one of the guards who said they were treating the old guy pretty good because he would be the ticket to get the Five Heroes back to the island and that’s exactly how it was. Abel scooped everyone.

  Natasha’s mother cries at the thought of leaving her home. We leave her to her tears and walk down to the Campoamor, where we still like to go to be alone though we’re not really alone because of the birds and cats and people who hide away in its mezzanine corners even while blocks of concrete fall off the walls and ceilings.

  We sit together near what used to be the stage, where great performers once sang, where elaborate sets and intricate costumes were worn. Natasha’s leg has grown supple and her ankles are almost identical in girth when I measure them with my fingers.

  Here in the Campoamor she is again that girl of the ripped sofa, who looks at me as if I pulled her out of darkness. Not the hard-edged girl I see walking on the street when she thinks she’s alone and doesn’t know I’m watching.

  Here in the Campoamor I love only her.

  She starts another one of her confessions. How her mother used to scold her for not going out enough, saying she’d never meet a nice man that way, would never get married, and would die alone in that apartment by the theater. Her mother said she had to get out into the world; the man of her dreams wouldn’t just show up and knock at her door.

  “And look what happened,” Natasha says, “Mamá was wrong.”

  I kiss her. But Natasha has more to say.

  “Vladi, what if I didn’t have a broken leg the day we met? What if I were paralyzed. Would you still have wanted to get to know me?”

  “Of course.”

  “But what if I couldn’t move my body an inch and I couldn’t touch you or kiss you or make love to you and I couldn’t feel anything. Would you still have fallen for me?”

  “Nata . . .”

  “Tell me the truth, Vladi. I won’t be mad.”

  “How can I separate your body from your mind and your heart when I love it all, Nata?”

  Of course she is unhappy with this answer. She doesn’t say so but her brows drop and she stares at the ground.

  “You read too many books, Nata. You’re always thinking the worst things.”

  “Maybe you don’t read enough. That’s why you’re always complaining you’re blocked.”

  “I read plenty,” I lie. “If I’m blocked it’s because I’m stuck on this maldito island.”

  “You would leave me if you had the chance. I know it.”

  Again, a look of sorrow that makes me want to splash her face with a bucket of water.

  “You’re the one about to be fifty thousand dollars richer. Maybe you’re about to leave me.”

  I don’t really believe this but when Natasha starts the game of punishing me for no reason I can’t help but play along.

  She smiles, feeling confident once again.

  I wonder if it’s because she’s young that she behaves this way. I wonder if ten years from now, she’ll grow into a woman more like Lily.

  When we go back to Natasha’s place, her mother has calmed, sitting on the sofa. “Come, children,” she says when she sees us enter. “Sit with me.”

  Natasha goes to her side and I sit on a chair across from the two of them. Natasha’s mother sighs and tells us she has come to a decision.

  “We will accept their money and move when they ask us to,” she says. “I will buy another apartment. Smaller. Perhaps further up in the hills, in Nuevo Vedado or La Víbora. I won’t spend more than fifteen thousand on it. I have a plan for the rest.”

  “What plan, Mamá?”

  “Ten thousand will get an instant visa to the U.S.,” Natasha’s mother says. “Twenty thousand will buy two.”

  “We’re leaving?” Natasha asks her mother.

  She shakes her head and points to Natasha and me.

  “No. You and Vladi are.”

  It used to be that $10,000 would buy you a spot on a powerboat shuttling across the Florida Straits in the middle of the night. Now ten thousand will cover a visa’s full bribe to completion at the U.S. Interests Section. No lines, no endless delays of two or three years and nonsensical denials; instant approval and processing of paperwork. A ticket off this rock called Cuba into the sky and the new unknown.

  I explain this to my parents who watch me over their dinner of pork stew. I already ate at Lily’s. That she feeds me is the main reason my parents don’t give me much grief about seeing her. But tonight I only speak of Natasha and how her mother has offered me a way out of this country on the condition that I marry her daughter. It’s not enough for Nata to have a marido, even if I promise to be forever faithful. She says her daughter deserves an esposo, bound by law and paper.

  Natasha thinks our getting married is the easiest part of all this. The difficult thing will be to leave her mother here alone.

  “It’s not how it used to be,” her mother said. “You will be able to come back and visit as much as you want and still have the opportunities that La Yuma offers.”

  “But why don’t you come with us?” Natasha asked her but her mother insisted she’s too old to start over.

  Then she relented a bit and said, “When you and Vladi have children I will join you over there and help you take care of them.”

  For my father, there is no question.

  “Go, mi’jo! What are you waiting for? Another revolution? Go!”

  My mother is not so easily convinced. It’s from her that I’ve inherited my skepticism.

  “Do you love Natasha?”

  “Yes.” Tonight I have no doubts.

  “Do you love this country?”

  “Yes,” I say, though of this I am not so sure.

  Later, I go back to Lily’s and tell her everything. She knows about Natasha. She knows to be discreet. But sometimes in bed I make the mistake of telling Lily I love her and then I regret it even though it’s true, for that moment. I don’t want to make Lily feel bad. She gives me so much when at times it feels as if Natasha only takes from me.


  When Lily and I are in bed it’s as if she cares only for my pleasure.

  “Lily,” I tell her, “you are an amazing woman. Your husband is a lucky man.”

  “What about your Natasha? Do you fuck her the way you fuck me?”

  “She won’t let me.”

  But Lily never asks if I love Natasha. Not even tonight.

  “You know if you go over there to La Yuma, you will have to work very hard. My husband tells me all the time how much he has to struggle just to survive. Nothing is free. You have to pay for the roof over your head, every ounce of electricity and water you consume. Every time you flush your toilet. You have to pay for the air you breathe.”

  “I know what it is to work, Lily.”

  “You? You’ve never even had a government job. Do you know what I did before I had my daughter? I cleaned toilets at the Calixto García Hospital. Do you know what happens in hospital bathrooms? The worst kind of waste you can imagine. I cleaned it all with my bare hands because most of the time we were short of gloves. Tell me, what work is it that you do?”

  “I write.”

  “You haven’t written five pages in the year I’ve known you.”

  “It takes some writers a year to write a perfect sentence.”

  “You can live on your invisible words here, Vladi. Not over there.”

  I think of Natasha. She once told me her first memory was of her sister dying. Natasha was three and her sister, Yulia, five. Their parents had taken them to a swimming pool near la Marina Hemingway, and within hours Yulia was burning with fever, a raw wound blossoming around a small cut on her elbow. They thought the bacteria would only take her arm but she died her first night in the hospital. They brought Natasha to say goodbye though she was already gone. She remembers the sight of her sister, hard, purple, and swollen. I told this to Lily once and it is the only time I’ve seen coldness wash over her face, her voice hollow as she said, “Children die all the time, Vladi. It’s nothing unusual.”

  My father had a girlfriend as a teenager, long before he met my mother, the daughter of a once-wealthy family from Camagüey who owned property all over the island, which was seized by the revolution except for one house on the edge of Miramar that the family was permitted to keep and live in. As it was forbidden to have American dollars, the girl’s father hid the hundreds of thousands of bills he’d accumulated, lining all the paintings with money, stuffing stacks under floorboards, between walls, burying piles beneath rose beds in the garden.

  There was so much money he could not hide it all and the man was so tormented by his fortune, terrified he would be discovered and imprisoned or executed, that one day he took all the dollars and made a pile of them behind the walls of the backyard, careful so nobody would see, and set it ablaze. There, the family watched as their fortune and inheritance burned, leaving nothing but scorched earth and the smell of smoke and ashes, which cleared with the afternoon rain.

  “What is the lesson here?” my father asked his son when he finished the story.

  I did not have an answer.

  Was the lesson that one should not get attached to money or that one should not trust the government?

  Was the lesson that if the man had held onto those dollars long enough, there would have been a time when it could have bought freedom for all of his descendants?

  “Tell me the lesson, Papá.” I wanted to know what I was supposed to learn.

  “I don’t know, Vladi. You’re a smart boy. I was hoping you could tell me.”

  Sometimes in my notebook I write suicide notes. Not because I want to die but because I think it’s an interesting exercise to see what sorts of things I have to say about my life, and also because I want to test myself, to see if I really have to write the last letter of my existence, to whom would I address it: to my parents, to Natasha, or to Lily.

  Dear Natasha, You make me fucking crazy. You still hide your body from me when we are naked. You talk and talk and talk. But then you go quiet and I love you more than ever and I want to rip you open like the sofa so I can love every bit of your bones. You are my conscience and this is why I so often want to escape you.

  Dear Lily, I remember when you saw me on the sidewalk and asked me to help bring your shopping bags to your apartment. Within minutes you were sucking me off as if you’d been waiting for me all your life. You make it hard to leave you. On the street we are strangers but in your home, you know me best.

  Dear Mamá y Papá. You raised me not to want what I don’t have. You didn’t give me a sibling because it was impractical and this is why I hate practical things. In my corner of our home I found solitude and have learned I never want to be alone but alone is the only way I know how to be.

  There are new barricades up around the Campoamor so until it is dismantled by road scavengers, Natasha and I can’t get in. On my way to see her, I ask one of the construction crew working on the Capitolio what plans there are for the theater, restoration or demolition, but he doesn’t know.

  “It’s been rotting for over fifty years,” he says. “For all we know, it will rot for fifty more.”

  I stop by Abel’s place. He’s out of phone cards so he can’t refill my minutes. We sit in his room where he shows me on his computer the piece he’s working on for this month’s contraband USB press, talking about how the government is displacing people yet again, not to make room for ministries and offices, like they say, but to sell entire buildings to foreign companies for luxury hotels and condominiums.

  “You think that’s what’s really happening?” I ask.

  “There are always money motives behind the official story,” Abel says.

  He’s been telling me for a while about all the foreign investors and enterprises coming to the island, looking to get a claw in before anyone else; technology executives, car manufacturers, even the exiled rum heirs trying to get back in the Cuba-future game, and compensated for what was taken from them so long ago.

  “What is your family going to do with the money?”

  “My parents are going to buy a place in Playa. They want to get away from the noise of the city. My sister is going to live with her boyfriend. I might find an apartment of my own around here if I can. What about Natasha and her mother? What will they do?”

  “They don’t know yet,” I say, because Natasha’s mother has sworn us to secrecy. She doesn’t want others to get the same idea and start a situation where you have to pay a bribe just to pay another a bribe.

  When I go to her apartment Natasha is waiting for me, the door wide open. She sits on the sofa and I sit close to her, ease her horizontal so that we are two long bodies locked together by ankles and elbows.

  Her mother has made the appointment for each of us. The first $500 went to getting us scheduled for the same day with the same employee.

  But before that, another appointment. The filing of papers for a civil marriage. Natasha says it’s not a real wedding. It’s just a legal decision.

  “So we won’t really be married?”

  “We will be, but not in the eyes of God.”

  “Since when do you believe in God?”

  “Since we decided to get married. A civil wedding is bad luck. We need to have another wedding in a church. We can do it in Miami. With a party and everything.”

  “We won’t have any friends to invite. We don’t know anybody over there.”

  “Ay, Vladi,” she says, and turns her body over so that we are nose to nose.

  When we arrive in Florida, Natasha’s mother’s second cousin, whom she’s never met, will meet us at the airport and let us live in a room he made out of the garage until we get organized and find our own place. Since I’ve known her, I’ve told Natasha I know how to speak a little English. When we get to the United States she will see I’ve been lying.

  She says the first thing we will buy when we have enough money is a computer for me so I can transfer all my notebooks to a hard drive and finish my novel. A big American publisher will distribut
e it. It will tell the truth about everything, she says. I don’t know where she gets these ideas, this certainty.

  Before I came here to be with Natasha, I was with Lily. We were naked on her bed, the metal fan in the corner of the room blowing hard over our sweaty bodies.

  “If I didn’t have a husband, maybe we could be something, Vladi.”

  “Maybe.”

  “When it’s time for you to leave, don’t say goodbye.”

  “I won’t.”

  We took a shower together before I left her and sometimes I wonder how it is that if Natasha knows me as well as she thinks she does, she can’t sense Lily on me, read on my face that I’ve made love all afternoon the way I read it on hers after we’re together.

  Natasha, I think. Who are you? Who am I? Who are we really?

  But then it’s as if she feels my distance and it’s Natasha who begins to strip me, pulling me on top of her and I ease into her, support my arms on the wooden edges of the torn sofa where I fell in love with her, my eyes fixed on the black orb of the Capitolio cupola blocking the sunset just beyond the window, and next to it, the Campoamor, its clandestine residents and starving animals receding into a pond of gray and blue shadows.

  DANIELLE EVANS

  Richard of York Gave Battle in Vain

  FROM American Short Fiction

  Two by two the animals boarded, and then all of the rest of them in the world died, but no one ever tells the story that way. Forty days and forty nights of being locked up helpless, knowing everything you’d ever known was drowning all around you, and at the end God shows up with a whimsical promise that he will not destroy the world again with water, which seems like a hell of a caveat.

  Dori must find something reassuring in the story. Dori is a preschool teacher and a pastor’s daughter, and she has found a way to carry the theme of the ark and the rainbow sign across the entire three days of her wedding, which began tonight with a welcome dinner and ends Sunday afternoon with brunch and a church service where, according to the program, her father will give a sermon titled “God’s Rainbow Sign for You.” The bridesmaids’ dresses are rainbow, not individually multicolored, but ROY-G-BIV-ordered, and each bridesmaid appears to have been mandated to wear her assigned color all weekend; the red bridesmaid, for example, wore a red T-shirt to the airport, a red cocktail dress to dinner, and now red stilettos and a red sash reading BRIDESMAID for the bachelorette party. When assembled in a group, Dori’s bridesmaids look like a team of bridal Power Rangers.