The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005

by Laura Furman

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  My father was convinced my mother had gone on vacation, to visit “somebody-or-other” Reynolds in Kansas City, one of those panty-raid girls. But just that afternoon I’d found a telephone number with a strange area code tucked in the box beside her engagement ring. I knew my mother had secrets, and one of them was that she didn’t plan on coming back.

  My father stared out at Van Dorn as if the hooded glaze of streetlights might tell him something. “Well, they didn’t mention a storm in Missouri,” he sighed.

  “But the snowflakes were covering it.” I could tell he was worried, and I wanted to show him I was worried too. I took a ruler off the letter desk, opened the French doors, and stepped into the blue glow of the garden. The patio was covered in snow, the table and chairs draped in sheets like a room closed up to keep out the dust. I turned my face upward, feeling the flakes burn my cheeks. It looked as if the sky ended right there above me, over our house. Perhaps it was only my father and I stuck in this white frozen world while everything else stirred with life.

  I pressed the ruler into the snow to test how many inches had fallen. When I was a little girl in Chicago, there had been a blizzard the day after my parents’ annual New Year's party. Some of the guests who had passed out in the spare rooms or on couches were trapped, and my mother was making them mimosas. My father and I had closed ourselves in the library to watch the snow. He had pretended to pull a quarter out of my ear, and I had screamed, thinking everything inside me had turned to silver. “Things could be worse,” he’d said. “Some people only produce pennies,” which had made me even more upset. I remember his face looking worried as he sat me down and showed me how he’d done the trick. Then we put on our boots and ventured outside, and my father had plunged a yardstick into the snow. We walked through the hushed city streets hand in hand, making guesses about how much new snow was falling.

  “Three inches, Daddy,” I said, stepping back into the living room and closing the door behind me. “Do you think she's all right?”

  “Of course. She's probably already in Kansas City.” My father turned off the television and sat back down. “I’ve been thinking.” He drummed his finger on the side of his head. “About getting a new couch. She’d like that, don’t you think?”

  I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, slapping his hand across his thigh. “She definitely would.” Then my father lay down, put one of the old couch cushions over his face, and sighed into the crease of it.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  My father didn’t answer.

  I went up to my parents’ bedroom and wandered through the dark, running my fingers over the bedspread, the nightstand, the cool glass surface of my mother's vanity table. In the mirror, my faced glowed blue with snow light. I imagined my blond hair turning into icicles, my lips sickly blue, and my mother floating beneath the surface of a frozen pond in a far-off place. I went over to the jewelry box and took out the number.

  I moved the telephone off the nightstand and threaded the cord into my mother's dressing room. I turned on the light, closed the door, and crouched in the plastic curtain of my mother's bagged dresses.

  I let it ring for a long time.

  “Hello?” he said, finally.

  “Hello.” My hands were shaking. “Listen, you don’t know me but— I’m calling to see if my mother's there.”

  “Well, that all depends on who your mother is,” he said slowly, and laughed as if it were some sort of joke.

  “Ann Peyton Hurst.”

  There was a pause on the other end of the line as if the phone had gone dead. I brushed a bit of plastic off my face and cinched forward on my knees. “Hello?” I said.

  “How did you get this number?”

  “I found it.”

  “Who is this?”

  “This is her daughter; who's this?”

  “Nils Ivers,” he said. “Maybe you haven’t heard of me. Your mother was an Ivers once. For about two weeks.”

  “I really need to get in touch with her,” I said. “There's a blizzard.”

  “Well, there isn’t any snow here” He paused. “Is she leaving someone else now?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Where are you?” he said.

  I didn’t answer for a second. Then I told him.

  “Well, you’re on the line with LA, sugar. This is a long-distance call.”

  “That doesn’t matter,” I said suddenly. “We’re rolling in money.”

  “Sounds nice. How old are you?”

  I paused. Fourteen was too young. “Seventeen.”

  “I bet you’re beautiful.”

  “Everyone says so.” I felt like my mouth was moving without my mind telling it what to say.

  “I bet you look just like her.”

  “I do,” I lied. “People can’t believe it.” It was the strangest feeling I had, like being a puppet, with someone else pulling the strings.

  “You sound like quite a sparkler. A real Roman candle. Have you ever thought about the movies? I always thought your mother should be in the movies.”

  “Sometimes,” I said. “But I’m more interested in other things.”

  “Like what?”

  “Horses and stuff. I can’t talk anymore. I have to go,” I said.

  “What's the rush? Is it a betrayal?”

  “I’m tying up the line.”

  “Ahhh,” he said. “I get it. There's a guy, right? He give you his jacket?”

  “He told me he’d call,” I said. “I have to go.”

  “Wait,” he said quickly. “People thought I didn’t love her. They were wrong about me. I did love her.”

  I hung up the phone.

  I leaned my head back against the wall and the beaded hems of dresses stirred inside bags as hangers knocked on the rack. My heart was thumping so hard I thought it might break my chest, and beat its way across the floor. My skin electrified my mind in strange directions, confusing wanting with not wanting. I saw my mother's Studebaker half-buried in a snowdrift on the side of the highway, the paint catching police lights like the gold wings of an angel. I pressed my face into the folds of a long black evening gown, and breathed deeply. I smelled plastic and, beneath it, my mother's spiced perfume.

  More than a foot of snow fell during the night, and the following day it kept on coming. Shapes in the garden dulled, then changed, leaving alien imprints on living room walls like the last sigh of a sinking ship.

  The morning Star didn’t arrive until evening. The people of Lincoln wondered what was happening, though there wasn’t anything to wonder about. Time had stopped. My father worked in his study with the door shut, and I couldn’t imagine what he was doing. It didn’t seem like anyone could possibly be working anywhere else in the world. I put on my boots and forced my way down the drive. The snow was almost up to my knees. It was hard to find my feet. You couldn’t make out the stumps of the elms anymore. The tops of the rhododendrons swelled like bubbles trapped on a frozen surface. When I opened the mailbox, the metal door creaked with cold. Snow tumbled off the top, a tiny avalanche—nothing inside. I watched the lights of a plow round the corner with the steadiness of a tank coming to rescue Lincoln from an invading army. Bring provisions, the neighbors wanted to scream, but no one had a voice. The world wouldn’t listen. Everyone had lost someone, and they were going to keep on losing for the rest of time.

  I imagined my mother to be the stuff of legends, torn from the arms of her true love, keeping Nils s telephone number for years like a secret treasure inside the box of the ring he had once given her. I imagined that my mother's first marriage had never been annulled, that she had never actually been married to my father at all, that I had been born out of wedlock, and it was therefore no wonder I found myself so alone in the world. The planets are not aligned, the fortune-tellers had declared on the day of my birth.

  Stories were easier to imagine in a snowstorm. History was tha
t much closer with the present so muffled, and it didn’t really matter what was true and what wasn’t when it was just one mind thinking alone. I wrote this down on a pad of paper and read it over and over to myself. It made me feel brilliant. I became so excited by what I’d written I wanted to scream it from the rooftops. Instead, I lurked outside my father's study door until he finally opened it.

  “You startled me!” he said. I shoved the paper at him without explanation. He held it out at a distance and squinted down at my writing because he wasn’t wearing his reading glasses. “It doesn’t really matter… what's true and what isn’t true,” my father read slowly, “when it's just one mind thinking about something alone.” He seemed to consider this for a moment. Then he nodded his head and raised his eyebrows. “Where did you get that idea?”

  “From my head,” I said.

  “I’m impressed, Susan. That's intelligent.” He handed it back to me. “You’ve got a point. I don’t agree with it though.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I believe in fact. A fact is a fact. I’m a rational thinker,” he said. “Drives your mother crazy.”

  I hoped he wasn’t going to start talking about her.

  “So, I’ve got a question for you,” he said instead. “If a tree falls in the woods and there's no one there to hear, does it make a sound?”

  I considered this a moment. “No,” I said, finally.

  “Whereas, I say yes. Most definitely, yes. A sound makes a sound regard- less. This is a very important point of dissension between us,” he said, holding me away from him. “I hope in spite of all this we can agree on something for lunch.”

  I put my arms around his waist and gave him a sideways hug. “There isn’t any choice,” I said. “We’re like people in the war.”

  My father ruffled my hair the way he had when I was a little girl. I hoped the snow would go on falling forever.

  We ate what we could find in the cupboards, canned foods collecting dust on the shelves left over from the days when my grandfather had been alive. I imagined stories trapped inside cans for years, denting the metal with angry little shouts, and the need to be heard. When the lids were opened, swollen metal sighed with relief.

  My father and I ate peaches with forks right out of the can. “It's funny,” he said in between bites. “I was just remembering that time my sister Portia tried to bury herself in the yard, and then yelled for someone to come and dig her out. I’d entirely forgotten until now.”

  “Why did she try to bury herself?” I asked.

  “It had to do with a story our mother told us about our grandparents,” my father said. “There was a terrible blizzard in McCook. Your great-grandparents Elsa and Hans were recently married and had just come from Sweden. They barely knew anyone in Nebraska, and they barely knew each other.”

  “Why did they get married if they barely knew each other?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, it was different then.” My father frowned. “Marriage wasn’t always about love.”

  “Was it about love with Elsa and Hans?”

  “Not at first. Feet and feet of snow fell, trapping them inside with no food for days, and nothing to keep them warm. My mother always said that by being snowbound, they were forced to endure an entire lifetime in one week. And only then did they fall in love. She always said it was love that kept them alive. Neither could bear to watch the other die. So they lived—for a long time, anyway.”

  “How did they keep each other alive with love?” I wanted to know.

  My father shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know, it's just a story.”

  My grandmother liked to tell that story, my father said, in an effort to point out the positive. Though families without heat were freezing, good men who had lost jobs lined up downtown in the hopes of laying their hands on a government shovel. My grandfather had always paid my father to dig out the driveway, but now he hired men, the first three strangers who came to the back door wearing ragged coats and desperate faces.

  When Aunt Portia first heard about Elsa and Hans, she went directly to her room and cut the hair off all her dolls. Then she took off the clothes and examined the plastic bodies, turning them over and over in her hands, looking between legs at nothing, tapping hollow chests, pulling arms and legs so the elastic ligaments snapped.

  My father found her standing beside a pile of mutilated dolls examining her auburn braids suspiciously in the mirror, as if she meant to cut them next. “What did you do that for?” my father said, picking up a bald glassy-eyed doll, and dropping it back on the pile.

  “I cut off the hair,” she said bitterly. “They are what they are now, and they’re not real. I’m done with dolls. I’m done with games. Somebody loves me, and I’m running away with him.”

  “Nobody loves ten-year-olds,” my father said.

  Aunt Portia marched downstairs and put on her coat and hat and slid the mittens my grandmother had knitted over her freckled little hands. She opened the French doors and stepped out into the snowy garden. My father tracked her around the side of the house, and watched her secretly from the cover of darkness. Portia dug a hole in the snow with her hands, lay down in the shallow grave, and covered herself as best she could. She had positioned herself outside the study, and through the window she could see my grandmother knitting sweaters for the Johannsons who had lost their farm in the dust storms. My grandfather put down his book and lit a cigarette, then went to the window. He couldn’t see Portia because of the reflection, but Portia didn’t understand this, and when she called for help, he couldn’t hear her either. “Save me,” Portia screamed. My grandfather peered out at the darkness for a moment, and then went back to his chair. “Help,” Portia said, and then she started crying. My father paused before making his presence known. He was thirteen. He didn’t want to seem like he cared too much.

  “Save me,” she sniffed.

  “Stand up,” he said.

  “I’m stuck, Thatcher.”

  “You’re not stuck, Portia,” my father said, but he crouched down and cleared the snow off her anyway. He offered Portia his hand and pulled her up, and tried to shake the snow out of her coat.

  “I killed my dolls,” she said. “I want them back.”

  “They’re not real. Remember?”

  “I killed a promise.”

  “You’re crazy,” my father said, taking her hand in his and dragging her back around the side of the house.

  “I promised myself I’d give them to Katharine Johannson,” she said. “Now she won’t even want them.” My aunt's teeth were chattering.

  “Come on,” my father said. “Come inside. I’ll make hot chocolate.”

  But Aunt Portia sat down in the snow against the French doors and refused to move. I pictured my aunt sitting there crying in the same garden, the same snow into which, years later, I’d press the ruler on the night my mother disappeared.

  After that they watched Portia carefully, my father told me. She was too serious for a girl her age, easily excitable. She wrote anonymous love letters addressed to no one and left them in places for people to find: Meet me behind the elm in the garden. I’ll be swinging from the branches. I love you, I love you, I love you. Was there a suggestion of suicide in

  those words? Could a ten-year-old even be capable of suicide? My grandparents studied the notes carefully for a clue, but none revealed itself. And then one day, Aunt Portia stopped writing. She got her hair cut short in a bob and waited for love to find her.

  “Uncle Freddy was love?” I said.

  “There were men before him, but I’m not getting into it,” my father said. “She was older than you though. Keep that in mind. You know, your mother found me. We were at a party. She turned to me and said, ‘Don’t you wish you were black?’” My father laughed. “I should have known what I was getting into.”

  “Was she drunk?” I said.

  “Of course not, Susan. Why would you say that?”

  “Well, it's kind of a stupid question.”


  My father shook his head and got up and put the cans in the sink. “It was charming. I thought it was charming.” Peach juice had dripped over the table in sticky little trails. The snow had begun to let up.

  “So Daddy, why do you think Aunt Portia buried herself?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe she just wanted to be saved.”

  “From what?”

  “Well, don’t we all want that in some way?” my father said.

  I wanted to know what it was he wanted to be saved from.

  “From humanity, Susan. There's too much brutality and unfairness in the world. People do horrible things to hurt each other.”

  “Like Starkweather,” I said.

  “And Hitler. And all the Communists.” But we both knew what we were really talking about. Loving my mother scratched you raw, and that rawness only made you want to be more tender.

  There was no school for two days, but on the second day, my father went to work, and I was left all alone to wander the house. I took an old album off the bookcase and opened it to a photograph of my father and Aunt Portia standing on either side of the elm tree in the garden. My father looked about my age. His face was smooth without the creases of worrying, and one of his arms snaked around the back of the trunk, the hand reaching out to pull my aunt's long auburn braid. My aunt's eyes were piercing. She stared directly at the camera without smiling, unaware of what her brother was about to do. I could see the future in that shot, the tug of hair, the pulling away the very second after the picture was taken, but I could not see any farther, even though I knew all that had come to pass. The elm looked tall and stately, as if it could never die, and there was no hint of my father's coming back to the very same house to fill his father's shoes, or that my mother would leave him just before a crippling blizzard in November of 1962. There was no hint of plumpness in Aunt Portia's features, or Uncle Freddy, or the three unremarkable children she would bear him. Portia and Thatcher were names that held the promise of Victorian love affairs. What had they dreamed of in their beds at night?