The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2018 (retail) (epub)

  “Forget it,” I said. “It’s too complicated.”

  My grandmother was kneeling next to Allen, who was on the couch playing Super Smash Bros. She was trying to turn his body toward her but he kept shrugging her off.

  “My own grandson won’t even look at me because I’ve let him down so completely,” she said. “I’m so ashamed. I’d rather die by his side than live a long life in China without him.”

  “He doesn’t give a shit,” I mumbled in English.

  When we finally got my grandmother into the backseat of the car, she reached through the open window and grabbed Allen’s arm. My father started the engine.

  “I said I don’t want to go,” Allen said, and started to cry.

  “Oh,” my grandmother wailed. “And now he’s crying for me.”

  My father nodded at me, and I stepped between them. It took all my strength to pry her fingers off his arm.

  “It’ll be too sad for him, nainai,” I said quickly. “We love you, have a good trip, see you next time.” Allen ran back into the house without looking back or waving. I heard my father raise the windows and engage the child-safety locks. My grandmother was trying to open the door, banging on the window with her fists like an animal. My father backed the car out of the driveway and drove up the C-shaped hill out of view. I heard a familiar low whine by my feet and looked down to see one of her hearing aids on the ground.

  “It’s like you just won’t go,” I said. I kicked it away from me, then ran to pick it up. I cradled it in my hand and tenderly brushed the sediment away, just like I did when I found my grandmother three years earlier, fallen on the asphalt, bleeding from her head.

  * * *

  —

  The night my grandmother told me she was leaving again for the third time, I felt strange inside. My father reassured me she would have the very best doctors back home, who would figure out what was going on with her headaches and sleepwalking, and once she was healed she could come back again. I wanted her to get better but I didn’t necessarily want her to come back. I lay in bed until everyone was asleep and then crept downstairs and out of the house, as I often did back then. I circled the neighborhood under a sliver of moon and imagined being born to a different family. On the walk back, I stopped in front of the purple house and followed the stepping stones to the backyard.

  I had a feeling she would be there, and she was, crouched by the chain-link fence, facing the purple trampoline. “Nainai,” I called out, even though I knew she could not hear me. I wanted to jump with her. Though I would forget in a few days, though my resistance to her would rise again, I felt her loneliness and it scared me.

  She stepped forward and then she was running, so fast that she looked like a young girl, no longer saggy and round in the middle. She was a straight line—something I could understand, something I could relate to. I closed my eyes, afraid she would trip. When I opened them again she was high in the air, her dress flying up. I knew there might come a time in my life when I would want to sleep next to her again, return to her after the uncertain, shapeless part of my life was over, when no one would mistake me for a child except for her. Her children and children’s children were children forever—that was how she planned to become God and drag us into her eternity.

  I was about to run to her, to reveal myself, when I realized she wasn’t awake.

  “Mother,” she said, as she jumped on the trampoline. “Mother, I didn’t want to leave you, but I had to go with Father into the mountains. Mother, you told me to take care of my brother and I let him fight and he lost his legs. Mother, I let you down. Mother, you said you wanted to die in my arms and instead I watched our house burn with you inside as I fled to the mountains. I told Father I wanted to get off the horse and die with you and he gripped me to his chest and would not let me get down. Mother, I would have died with you, but you told me to go. I should not have gone.”

  I took a step toward her. Her eyes were open but they did not see me. In the dark, I thought I would always remember this night and be profoundly altered by having seen her this way. But it was like one of those dreams where you think to yourself while the dream is happening that you must remember the dream when you wake—that if you remember this dream, it will unlock secrets to your life that will otherwise be permanently closed—but when you wake up, the only thing you can remember is telling yourself to remember it. And after trying to conjure up details and images and coming up blank, you think, Oh well, it was probably stupid anyway, and you go on with your life, and you learn nothing, and you don’t change at all.

  Lauren Alwan

  An Amount of Discretion

  HER HUSBAND’S INSTRUCTIONS WERE CLEAR. Within a year of his death, the sum of his collected work—the notebooks, drawings, prints, and paintings—would go to the institute where he’d taught painting for nearly five decades. As Jonathan’s executor, Seline was entrusted with the task, charged with inventorying the studio and dispatching the gift to the provost (the same provost who at the wake informed her, Scotch on his breath, that there would indeed be a posthumous retrospective with color catalog and scholarly overview). Knowing his art would have a home at the institute was Jonathan’s comfort in those final months. It meant the collection would not be divided and sold off, but remain intact, stewarded by an institution that knew and understood his work. Once the immediate legal and personal matters were settled, Seline’s work commenced. But as it happened, she’d only just begun her inventory when she came across her husband’s field journals.

  It was summer, a glum Los Angeles June, and sitting cross-legged on the studio floor she studied the journals. There were eight in all, and some she was seeing for the first time. Most contained notes on the weather, varieties of light and shadow, observations that couldn’t be made with a drawn line, even one as good as Jonathan’s. But there was one notebook, bound in green, she’d never seen before, and opening it, she found it was filled with marvelous sketches—deer, quail, details of lupine and monkey flower, globed brown hills with scrub oak clustered in the gaps. Her first thought was to make the green journal a gift to Finn. But then she couldn’t bear to break up the lot, and soon resolved that her stepson should have all eight. He was Jonathan’s only child and he’d spent countless weekends hiking the foothills with his father. While mindful of Jonathan’s instructions, Seline believed her executorship gave her the latitude, and the notion quickly became an imperative, not just for Finn, but for her, too. In those first months without Jonathan, Seline had wanted to reach out, but felt she had nothing to offer, and her wish to do so didn’t seem like enough.

  Now it was July, and Finn, a music major at San Francisco State, was about to start his final year. She planned to ship the notebooks by FedEx, but on the morning she sat down to write the e-mail found a message from him. He was coming to Los Angeles, he wrote, for his mother’s birthday, and asked if he could stop in on the way. Reading that, her eyes lifted from the screen. Finn was twenty-two, and she’d been his stepmother for nearly sixteen years, but she’d always relied on Jonathan for their connection. Might she yet have some closer bond with her late husband’s son? She replied to Finn saying yes, of course, to come, and mentioned she had something for him. Something she thought he might like.

  Maybe she should have stated her intention up front—she’d never been one for surprises herself—but her reasons for the gift struck her as too personal for e-mail. Better, she decided, to simply present the books in person. That way, she could explain herself, assure Finn that the gift conformed with his father’s wishes, and see firsthand his response. That point in particular was important, since the gesture expressed what she could not—her regret at the distance she’d put between them when Finn was young. There had been so many chances for them to be close.

  She’d never had much of a maternal temperament, yet on those weekend visitations and the annual two weeks each summer, she’d found
surprising pleasure in the Lego building and story reading and the cooking of macaroni and cheese. Finn had been an even-tempered, pleasant child, with an independent nature that made her task easy. Still, it was always a relief when the visits were done, and, released from having to care for a child not her own, she could return to her life with Jonathan and her work in the studio. On Sunday afternoons when they dropped Finn back at his mother’s, Seline would watch from the car as Jonathan walked him to the door and never once felt the pang her unmarried friends did, of being deprived of the bliss of babies and children. Instead, how unencumbered she felt! How free to return to her own needs and wishes.

  Her change of feeling had not come all at once. Not in those final, difficult days when she’d called Finn to his father’s side, or at the memorial, when he’d spoken about their hikes in the hills, how Jonathan taught him the names of the grasses and varieties of oak. It happened gradually. A few e-mails, an occasional phone call to discuss the gift of cash or transferring ownership of his father’s Volvo. With each exchange, Seline felt more at ease, as though a knot were loosening inside her, one she hadn’t known was there. In one call, Finn confessed he’d always thought she and Jonathan were cool parents, an admission that prompted in her a strange mix of guilt and pleasure. She told him how much she’d enjoyed their summers together, which was true. She simply left out the part about her relief.

  In another call, Finn mentioned a girlfriend, Anna. He’d known her since his freshman year, he said, but the friendship had turned romantic that spring, not long after Jonathan died, and they’d been living together since June, in a flat on Octavia Street. Anna had a child, he added, a four-year-old named Chloe, and she was living with them, too. There was no mention of the child’s father, and Seline did not ask, but the responsibility struck her as too great, the relationship moving too fast. On both points, there was little she could say. She’d met his father at thirty-two, a student in his graduate seminar, and soon after, they’d begun living together in her rented warehouse space. What right did she, Seline, have to express concern? And when, a few days after his first e-mail about the trip, she learned Finn’s visit would include Anna and Chloe, she was crestfallen. It meant the afternoon would be one of polite exchanges and small talk. It meant the gesture intended for Finn alone would be shared with strangers.

  The night before his visit, she worked late in the studio. The fall term would begin in three weeks, and for Seline would bring a full schedule at the institute. Normally, summer was reserved for her own work, but the recent weeks had been spent cataloging Jonathan’s work, leaving only the nights to complete a series promised to her dealer, and she was already behind schedule. That left only the morning hours to prepare for Finn’s visit.

  She’d offered to make lunch, and by ten o’clock the capon was roasted, only in need of warming before the meal. In the dining room, she set down a favorite blue madras cloth, pottery carried back from a trip to Portugal, heavy goblets bought secondhand in North Hollywood.

  There was a round of bread, olives from the Syrian grocer, and from the Italian bakery, a sacripantina. The dessert was Jonathan’s favorite, layers of cake and voluminous cream. “A cake my wife could never bake,” he liked to say.

  In the living room, sunlight burned through the sliding glass doors in a blinding sheet. Seline stepped forward to close the drapes, heavy linen lined with cotton duck. The southern exposure was intense, typical of Los Angeles, a high desert sun that parched the wood paneling and bleached the furniture and throw pillows. Jonathan would pull the drapes each day at this time to prevent damage to his books and paintings. Today, she decided, the drapes would remain open. She wanted the sweep of space and light, a mood that was uncluttered and airy.

  In the bedroom, she pulled a dress from the closet, a garnet column that grazed her ankles.

  The color was striking, but the simplicity called for embellishment. She twisted her unwashed hair into a tortoiseshell clip, found a lipstick, and ran it across her mouth, a deep color that gleamed on her lips. What kind of woman wore lipstick at home, she thought, capping the lid on the case. “Don’t overthink it,” Jonathan would say. Even with the effort, she felt unkempt.

  From the bureau, she took what she called the Damascus bracelet. She’d bought it at the Near East Bazaar in Glendale when she was a young art student, the bracelet a stand-in for the genuine jewelry she couldn’t afford. Made of silver alloy, the piece had eight filigree strands caught in an oblong clasp. It was a hinge clasp, with a pin that threaded through two tiny barrels, and fastening it had always required Jonathan’s help. She made several attempts, but the catch was impossible to work alone. Setting it aside, she took up a string of glass beads, a gift Jonathan brought home from a conference in Florence. Against the dress, the beads looked as she’d hoped, milky and lustrous.

  On the bed, the notebooks waited, wrapped in archival paper and packed in an acid-free box. That morning, Finn had called from the road. They’d been passing the aqueduct south of Modesto and expected to arrive on time. Seline opened the box, examined the row of eight spines in pale gray paper. The books looked anonymous, hardly the kind of thing you pinned your hopes on.

  She closed the door behind her, catching sight of her bare wrist. It was a shame, she thought as she left the bedroom. The bracelet was a trifle, cheap costume jewelry, but she would miss wearing it today. She always felt more like herself when she looked down and saw it there.

  * * *

  —

  Outside, Jonathan’s Volvo rounded the hill. Hearing the familiar engine, Seline stepped out in time to see the car pull forward, the blue exterior and headlights clouded like old eyes. Finn eased into the driveway with Anna in the passenger seat. Already they looked like tired parents, she thought, with empty chip bags and juice boxes on the dash. In the back, the child was asleep in the car seat, her head listed to one side.

  “We were just saying if we should wake up Chloe,” Finn said, coming around the car to meet her.

  Anna emerged from the passenger side. She was nothing like Seline imagined. A girl born and raised in San Francisco, she’d thought, would have a certain formality and polish, but Anna was tall and ungainly, wearing a faded shift and scuffed sandals. A pair of incongruous, oversize sunglasses were pushed atop her head. Her eyes were lovely—almond shaped and green—though her close-cut dark blond hair gave her a severe, unforgiving look.

  Seline extended her hand. “The drive down okay?”

  “Just long.”

  Anna reached into the back and unbuckled the car seat. A moment later the child appeared, her hair a soft brown nest, face still bearing the gloomy look of sleep. Anna directed her toward Finn, and the child made her way obediently. Dressed in overalls cut off at the knee and faded pink tennis shoes, she clutched a plastic bag of broken graham crackers. She took no notice of Seline, but went directly to Finn and slipped her hand in his.

  “Chloe, say hello to Seline.” The girl refused, and Finn waggled her hand, but she said nothing.

  Seline’s heart went out to the child, wakened in a strange place, made to speak to a person she didn’t know. “Let her be. She’s still sleepy.”

  Anna returned with a large canvas bag, and Finn led them inside, still holding Chloe’s hand. They stepped down into the carpeted living room, and Seline saw she was right to leave the drapes open. Daylight filled the room to its open-beamed ceiling, and outside, the view stretched into the haze.

  “Look,” Anna said, “at all this space to play.”

  The canvas bag was set down, and Chloe, with the bag of crackers in one hand, removed its contents with the other: an assortment of plastic fruits and vegetables, scruffy stuffed animals, and half-dressed dolls. The bag emptied, she pulled off her shoes, revealing the polish on her toes, cherry red and chipped to a series of ragged patches.

  “You look good, Seline,” Finn said.

  “N
o I don’t. I’ve been in the studio every night this week.”

  “I heard you’re a painter, like Finn’s dad,” Anna said, sweeping up Chloe’s shoes and setting them beneath the coffee table.

  “When I’m not teaching.”

  Anna turned to the glass sliders. “You can see quite a ways up here.”

  “Yes, my husband often—”

  “Don’t play with that.” Anna hurried across to Chloe and took an abalone shell from her hands.

  “She isn’t hurting anything.”

  “She knows better than to touch other people’s things.”

  “Here,” Finn said, crouching beside Chloe to examine her toys. “Let’s see what you brought. A horse, good. The blue dog.”

  “Sorry—your husband?”

  “Oh, I only meant—he loved the view.”

  “I never know where I am in LA,” Anna said, turning back to the window. “Is that downtown?”

  “No, it’s over the grade. You can set your bearings by those mountains.” Seline nodded to the east. “That’s inland. The coast is opposite, over the hills.”

  “Things are so far apart here. I guess I’m used to the city.”

  Seline had been to San Francisco only once. One frigid July years ago, Jonathan met with a dealer in one of the small galleries off Union Square. After, not knowing where else to go, they’d headed toward Chinatown. On the unfamiliar street, they pressed forward along the stone facades, feeling stray and small as children, and the chill penetrated her coat as though it were made of the thinnest cotton. She’d never been more grateful to slip into the dark recesses of a bar, where her frozen hands encircled an Irish coffee. Jonathan had smiled wearily—the meeting had not gone well—and noted the end of her nose was reddened to a perfect shade of alizarin crimson.

  “Can I get you anything?”