The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

by Laura Furman

  You only woke up when we were driving again and then you wanted to go back and find the tiger! It seemed to Essie that she could still feel her daughter sleeping against her chest, the hot breath against her neck, the sure damp weight of one who belonged to her.

  That evening the phone rang while Essie was in the kitchen with Ritu. Marian, she thought at once. Her fingers were oily; she looked for a rag and couldn’t find one, then tried to hold the receiver against her ear with just the palm of her hand. “Hallo?”

  It was the doctor. “So sorry for the delay, Mrs. Almeida. The results were misplaced in the lab. But they’ve come at last and it’s good news. Nothing malignant, totally benign. Come back in again this week and we’ll drain the fluid. You see, Mrs. Almeida, I knew you’d be a good patient!”

  She shifted the phone against her ear and nearly dropped it. “But the pain, doctor? And you don’t know the history. This very thing happened to my aunt and she—”

  “No, no, I’m telling you. You’re in perfect health. The pain is from the fluid only. It’s very common. There’s no danger at all, you mustn’t worry. Okay? Right then, come by this week. That will be that.” He laughed and rang off.

  Francis had drifted to the table, the way a dog might sniff at its empty bowl. Essie found she could not bear his expectant air. “Dinner’s not ready,” she snapped. “Another twenty minutes at least.”

  “Who was calling?”

  She shook her head, too annoyed to answer.

  “Was it the doctor?”

  She stared at him.

  “Marian said you had a … pain of some kind. A lump. What did the doctor say?” When she didn’t answer, he moved closer and put a hand on her arm.

  “I’m covered in oil.” Her voice was frayed; she was on the verge of tears she could not explain. “The doctor says it’s nothing serious. I have to go back next week to remove fluid, or some foolishness, I don’t remember exactly.”

  He grasped her arm for a moment, then let his grip loosen and patted her gently. He kept his eyes on the place where his fingers touched her skin. “I can go with you.”

  “No need,” she said. They stood quietly. When he released her she moved past him to the kitchen. “Twenty minutes,” she said. “Go find something to do until then.”

  The phone rang again after Francis was in bed. Essie had been waiting in her chair. For a while she had watched television, then she turned it off and waited in the dark. It was all over, she would tell her daughter. A fright, nothing more. They had prayed and their prayers had been answered.

  “Have you spoken to the doctor?” Marian asked.

  Essie paused. She felt the phone lines between them like tight ropes, felt the moment sharpen to a single shaved point upon which she must balance. She felt herself falling.

  “There’s no news, babe. He hasn’t called.”

  “Oh, God, Mum. It’s been two weeks! Give me his number, let me call him myself.”

  “No, no! No need! I—” But she stopped. “I’ll go myself next week. He’s out of the office now, on leave, but after the weekend I’ll go myself and ask.”

  “You promise, Mum? I mean, this is crazy, making you wait so long. I’m sorry I’m not there to go with you. Maybe Dad—”

  “Stop pulling your father into my affairs,” Essie said. “I’m perfectly capable of going on my own.”

  “Mum.” Marian’s voice was suddenly so small, so close to tears, that for a moment Essie imagined Nicole or Tara had come to the phone. “Mum, tell me honestly. Do you think it’s serious?”

  Later she wished there had been time to pray, time to beg Mary for an answer or for the strength to answer. How badly she wanted to reassure her child, to promise, no, no, nothing will happen—but how badly she needed to say yes, to show her daughter some part of the strain she had endured alone. “I don’t know,” she said, and her voice broke, and she began to weep.

  It would only be a little while, Essie told herself after they had said goodbye. In a few days she would tell Marian all was well, and nothing more need come of it. But she felt jittery, agitated, a churning in her stomach. She went to the kitchen for a glass of water, moving quietly. Ritu slept on a roll of bedding in one corner of the kitchen balcony, just beyond the spiral steps that led to the garden.

  She heard the cats before she saw them, a dark rustle, and flicked on the light. Blinding yellow for a moment, then the kittens twining near the empty rubbish pail, sniffing the rich dark stains. She could not see the mother at first, but then the cat leapt from the counter to the floor with a soft thud and stared up at her, so impudent, so fearless that Essie felt a surge of unaccountable fury. She caught up a whisk broom and beat the cat away with it.

  “Out, go on, out! Back you go!”

  “What, bhai? What, what?” Ritu had woken, lifting her head from her pallet and rubbing her eyes in the moonlight, but Essie kept after the cats—“Away with you!”—poking the broom until she had driven them onto the metal stairs. The mother cat dropped down two steps, turned, and hissed before she retreated, her tail lashing, her body curling sinuously around the central pole of the staircase, her half-grown kittens close behind her. At the bottom she leapt softly into the damp patch of earth where wash-water was thrown and stalked slowly, fearlessly into the garden.

  The next day only one of the kittens appeared. It sat, thin and piteous, near the threshold of the kitchen and made a noise that sounded like crying.

  “The mother is gone,” said Ritu, looking worried. But by midday Tiger had emerged from a tangle of undergrowth. She could not, however, be lured up to the balcony.

  “Offer a bit of chicken, she’ll come.”

  But the cat remained in the garden. Finally Ritu took food down to her, moving slowly down the spiral steps. The cat hissed when she ventured too close, but ate hungrily once Ritu had gone back up to the balcony.

  “See, bhai, Mummy is hurt.” Ritu pointed to a fresh wound on the cat’s shoulder.

  By late afternoon, the ginger kitten had curled to sleep in the corner where Ritu kept her bedding but the gray kitten had still not returned.

  Essie felt a dull certainty that there was nothing to be done and that she herself was culpable. “Just go and look for it,” she told Ritu. She waited until the girl had gone down one side of St. Hilary Road before she set off toward the shops in the other direction.

  The sun was still unseasonably hot and St. Thomas Road was in a state of upheaval. Men were shoulder high in pits, putting in new pipe, while women carried away baskets of rubble. Shoppers clambered past as though on river banks and Essie had to slowly pick her way past clots of clay and bits of broken pavement. At the juncture near St. Jerome’s, three cows were ravaging a rubbish pile and she thought of what the girls would say to that, the funny, loud, slow, American way they would say “cows.” She walked as far as the market and back along the shore where the Varuna fishermen lived, narrow winding streets that teemed with cats. She searched the next day and the day after that, but they never saw the gray kitten again.

  At the end of the third day, she sat in her chair and tried to answer Nicole’s letter. She described the tiger in the road, other tiger hunts she had seen with her uncle, and then she stopped writing, not certain how to continue. The evening had rusted to night. Marian would not call.

  She had given her daughter the good news. Perfect health, Essie said, and listened to Marian’s flood of love and relief. She had tried to take pleasure in her daughter’s words, tried to catch and hold them, to savor them later, but whatever Marian said had slipped away. The whole episode hardly seemed real. Essie felt empty and drained, as if the doctor’s needle had taken more than he intended.

  I never saw a tiger family, she wrote in reply to Nicole’s question. A tiger likes to live alone.

  Ritu came from the kitchen to clean the front room. Usually Essie would leave her to her task, but she felt rooted to her chair. She watched as Ritu brushed the dust and crumbs into cottony piles and flung them
from the stair landing. Then, with a damp rag in one hand and the tail of her sari draped over the other, Ritu squatted on her heels and began to swab the floor. Essie sat in silence, listening to the soft kiss of the rag dipped into her pail, the trickle of water as it was wrung, the whisper of cloth sponging over the tile. The wet floor met the dry floor in a scalloped line, lapping forward as Ritu advanced on her toes. She crept just behind the slick edge, pressing it further along the tile, fanning her arm in wide swaths before her. Essie thought of the tiger hunts she had seen as a girl, with beaters who tamped down the grasses for the rifle-bearers.

  Once I saw a tiger killed, but that—She stopped. What could she tell a six-year-old about population control?—was a big and old tiger. A naughty tiger who liked to frighten children. Would she give the child nightmares? There are no tigers in America. And none in Bombay, so you can come back soon. Only in the jungle.

  Dip and wring, dip and wring. At times, the scratch of the bucket as Ritu dragged it behind her. Her toe ring clicked against the floor like a fingernail tapping; past the table, the sofa, Essie’s own feet in slippers, all the landmarks of the room until she had reached the kitchen and then she peered onto the balcony.

  “Chota Ritu is staying, bhai. But Mummy is gone.”

  Ritu hung the rag over her wrist and picked up the bucket to swab downstairs, her bare feet leaving cloudy marks on the floor which had already begun to dry in streaks.

  Essie wrote, The only tiger here is your Tiger.

  Not true, of course. What to do, babe? I’ve looked and looked. But there was no one to witness all her searching, no one to appreciate her effort and penance, no one to share what she had always imagined she would share with her daughter. It came to Essie then, as she had not felt since she was a child, that there were parts of her nobody would know or understand, thoughts too numerous to record, adrift and orphaned, with no one to hear them. She closed her eyes and tried to pray, to imagine God the keeper of all her secrets, but all she could think of was the sleeping tiger. She had wondered then if God could see her and what exactly He saw: the light picking through a tangle of trees, her uncle’s hands, tense on the wheel, her own gold cross at the base of her throat, the child asleep in her arms. She wondered if He saw all that would happen once the tiger had awakened, if He knew now where the gray kitten had gone, if the mother had died.

  A few minutes later she picked up her pen again. Your cats are well and happy, darling, she wrote to Nicole. All three are fast asleep, happy here with me.

  The next day, nearly a month after he’d promised, Gopi turned up at last to harvest the coconuts. Essie had been sitting upstairs, replying one by one to the letters from Nicole’s class, when he arrived: a small, dark-skinned man from Kerala, his leather strap slung over his shoulder. He waited until she had finished scolding him and then he lifted his hands. His wife just had a baby, he told her in Hindi. The baby came early—so small. Gopi held his hands apart, the size of a breadfruit. For three weeks, no one knew what would happen. But now—he smiled suddenly, a flash of light in his dark face—the baby was fine. A son, his first son. A son will stay, he told her. Daughters grow up and marry and go, but a son will stay with his family.

  A few minutes later Gopi climbed the first tree. Essie had imagined standing with the girls beside her, watching the way he shimmied up, the strap looped around his waist, his bare feet curved around the trunk until he was lost in the thatch of palms at the top. She had already counted out the money she would give Gopi as a gift for the child.

  For the first time in years, she did not oversee the coconut harvest. Instead she went to the back of the house, down the narrow winding steps of the kitchen balcony. The sun never penetrated that one shady corner of the property, and she sat on the lowest stair, elbows on knees, feeling the cool soft mud on the hard skin of her feet. In the front yard, she could hear Gopi climbing, the leather strap slapping against the tree as he hoisted himself up. The gray kitten, Smoke, was gone, the Tiger-mother nowhere to be seen, but the ginger, Ritu, was picking a delicate path along the garden wall, and Essie had brought a piece of fish down from the kitchen especially. She lured the kitten right to her, caught safe in her lap when the coconuts came raining down.

  Lily Tuck

  Pérou

  THE YEAR IS 1940 and I lie fast asleep under a fur blanket in a Balmoral pram. The Midnight Navy Silver Cross pram, with its reversible folding hood and hand-sprung chassis, glides smoothly and silently down rue Raynouard. (Until recently, I thought rue Raynouard, located in the 16th arrondissement in the area of Paris known as Passy—as the names sound almost exactly alike—was named after the painter and spelled Renoir. Instead the street is named after a dull French academician, François-Juste Marie Raynouard.) Jeanne, my nurse, pushes the pram. Over her heavily starched white uniform, she wears a blue wool coat that is nearly the same Midnight Navy as the pram and that reaches unstylishly to her midcalf. She also wears thick cotton stockings, a pair of white lace-up shoes, and a coif. The coif, again the same matching navy blue, is secured to her forehead by a white bandeau and entirely covers her hair. Jeanne is pale, plain, and nearsighted. She wears glasses and, if ever I catch a glimpse of her without them, it takes me a moment to readjust to her face. Jeanne, whose last name I don’t remember or, worse, never knew since to me she was always simply Jeanne, comes from a village in Brittany. She is nineteen years old and will devote five years of her life to looking after me—years she will spend in Peru.

  Peru of all unimaginable places!

  Jeanne, we have to leave Paris. Leave France, is what I imagine my mother says to her.

  You’ll have to get a passport. A visa.

  Oui, Madame.

  Does she have a choice? Could she instead say:

  Non, Madame. I have to go back to mon pays, to ma famille.

  A large family: the men fishermen, the women uncomplaining, hardworking. Mother, father, grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, and cousins.

  Peru? Except for when, long ago, they went to Mont Saint-Michel on their honeymoon, neither one of her grandparents has traveled any farther than the city of Brest. As far as they are concerned Jeanne has disappeared off the face of the earth.

  Where in God’s name is that? Again and again Jeanne’s father, a large man with an appetite for food and life, asks his wife, Jeanne’s mother, Marie-Pauline. But, in the end, he looks it up for himself in one of the children’s school atlases and he sees how far away Peru is from Brittany. He shakes his head sadly; in his heart, he knows he will not see Jeanne again.

  Pérou, Annick, Jeanne’s younger sister and the prettiest, says with a huge sigh. How I envy her. I would do anything to get away from this boring, stupid place. And, in a few months’ time, on a warm summer morning, wearing her best dress, a sleeveless, red-and-white flower print, and bicycling quickly, without giving the village a single backward glance, she does.

  What is Jeanne thinking? Handsome, blond Daniel, the cleverest of her brothers, thinks.

  Or is she so attached to the child in the pram that she cannot be parted from her? Catherine, another sister, Jeanne’s favorite, who is a young schoolteacher and has started to cough up a little blood, wants to know.

  Unlikely.

  Probably, Jeanne, a simple girl, feels it is her duty.

  A Catholic, Jeanne is deeply religious.

  But Peru?

  Maybe she has simply misunderstood.

  Misunderstood the way everyone else at the time has.

  The British call it the “Phoney War.”

  The French, la drôle de guerre.

  For eight months, from September 1939 to May 1940, nothing much happens. Although the European powers have declared war on one another, none of them has yet launched a significant attack. Everyone is waiting—waiting for the German troops to march into Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Nonetheless, the Atlantic Ocean is already mined and ships no longer cross it with an assurance of safety—take, for example,
the HMS Courageous, sunk on September 17 with a loss of most of her crew, 518 men. A month later, on October 14, the HMS Royal Oak sunk as well, with an even greater loss, of 833 men.

  We three cross the Atlantic in July on board the SS Exeter. A ten-ton single-funnel cargo liner built by American Export Lines, the ship makes several risky round trips in 1940 and 1941 between Lisbon and New York, transporting thousands of refugees. Like, no doubt, the other refugees, we have left behind most of our belongings—the silver, the china, the paintings, even the elegant pram, which, in any case, I will soon outgrow. (Interesting to note, however, that during the war, the main part of the Silver Cross factory was requisitioned by the Air Ministry and, instead of making prams, it produced over sixteen million parts for Spitfire airplanes.) Photos taken on the deck of the SS Exeter show my mother, dressed in white shorts, leaning against the ship’s rail; on her head, tilted at a jaunty angle, is the ship captain’s cap. In another, wearing an adult life preserver that covers me from head to toe, I sit on the lap of a young man who, obviously, is not my father. There are a few snapshots of smiling passengers—unknown women and children—and finally a photo of the captain himself. He, too, is smiling, because, perhaps, he has only just recovered his cap from my mother, and he is wearing it. There are no photos of Jeanne.

  No one knew how long the war would last.

  Jeanne cannot have the faintest idea how long she will stay in Lima, Peru, a city she has never heard of and where, during that entire time, those very, very long five years, she will be completely cut off and receive no letters nor, for that matter, any news from her family and where, by the end of the war, she will not have a clue whether any of them are alive or dead—imagine! A city where it never rains, a city where it is always hot, exceedingly hot; a city where there are frequent earthquakes (a particularly devastating one—8.2 on the Richter scale—which causes massive damage to the city and nearly destroys the principal cathedral in Lima, occurs in 1940, only a few weeks before she arrives), and where most earthquakes occur in the middle of the night so that Jeanne has to quickly get out of bed with just enough time to put on her glasses but not enough time to get dressed or put on a dressing gown, and run into my room to wake me and get me out of bed so that, together, we can stand in the doorway of the room, said to be the safest place in the house; a city, a country, where she does not speak the language—Spanish—a city and a country where she knows no one. Absolutely no one. Not a single other soul. A country and a city where, during those five years, she will not learn to speak much Spanish—only a few rudimentary phrases to get by—and where she will not meet anyone except for perhaps a few other foreign nannies and the Spanish servants in the house—the cook, the gardener, the maid, the part-time chauffeur, all of whom look down on her. Or, if they do not look down, make fun of her. Her timid ways, her pale skin and thick glasses, her starched and spotless uniform, all of which they construe as unfriendly and snobbish, her not joining in with their jokes and complaints in the kitchen which, anyway, she has difficulty understanding, her not eating their spicy food, the fried beans, the tough roasted corn, her keeping herself to herself.