The PEN O. Henry Prize Stories 2012

by Laura Furman

  “No, never,” she said quickly.

  “Sometimes, actually,” retorted his father, who then smiled, pleased to have the chance to make trouble.

  “That’s not true,” said his mother, and then thought about it for a few seconds. “No,” she said again, assured of her answer.

  Caleb placed his finger on the worm and watched the animal bend and curl from his touch.

  He was learning to read, slowly, without much progress, though his mother seemed pleased. “The Browning Method of Typographical Comprehension and Reading,” she would proudly say as she held the pamphlet for Caleb to see. She would show him a letter from the deck of flashcards; they were up to L in the alphabet, a ninety-degree angle, a thumb and index finger extended. Once he had the letter, he was given a book, something random from a garage sale or one of her old college texts. He was to search the book for that single letter and circle it each time it appeared. He would scan the lines of each page for the shape of the letter, the space it occupied within a word. He had noticed how an E looked slightly different next to a C than it did to a D, the open mouth of the C inviting the E closer, while the D bowed out, pushing the E into the next letter. She never showed him a word, never touched a line of letters and made the sound of their joining. “When will I be able to read, though?” he would ask her, his hands smeared with ink. “Soon enough,” she would say. He did not believe her, but he had no choice. He needed her to tell him the things he would know.

  Now there was the baby involved, about to arrive. His mother’s stomach was huge. The unmistakable bulge seemed to suggest that she was growing shorter each week. Her belly was a thing she always cradled with both hands while she walked, as if she were afraid of injuring something with it instead of the other way around. She would weigh herself and then laugh, stepping off the scale as the arrow zipped back to zero, before Caleb could read the weight.

  “You didn’t tell me your weight,” he complained, but she would walk away, giggling.

  “It’s broken,” she would say. “It’s certainly not working correctly.”

  One night, when the baby shifted and pressed against his mother’s spine, she cried out and then instantly tried to pretend that she had been singing a song.

  “Maybe we could go to the doctor,” his father said. “Just a little preliminary visit.”

  “The baby is going to be big,” she said. “Why pay a doctor to solve that mystery for us?”

  When his father mentioned the hospital a second time, his mother frowned. “We decided, Felix. We decided that we would make a world apart from the world. We can’t give up on that every single time things seem difficult.”

  Caleb put his hand on her stomach and felt the baby kick twice, his mother wincing each time.

  When she had first explained to Caleb about the baby, the fact of it, she had sat down beside him on the floor and swept the math sticks, individually carved blocks the length and width of a finger which he used to add and subtract, out of the way. “We’re going to put math on hold for a while,” she said. “For the next few months, we’ll focus on science. Biology. Caleb?” He had picked up one of the math sticks and was rubbing his thumb across the smooth grain of the wood, but he put it back down. She smiled. He was learning. “We’re going to have another baby,” she said. “You’re going to be a brother.”

  “What?” he said, still trying to understand.

  “A baby. A little boy or girl.”

  “When?” he asked.

  “Soon,” she said. “Six or seven months.”

  “Why?” he asked.

  “Because your father and I thought we would all be happier with another person in the house, someone else to be a part of our family.”

  “Where?” he asked, moving along the questions he had been taught to ask when he did not know exactly what was happening.

  “Right here,” his mother answered. “Right here in the house.”

  She had worked to teach him the how of this baby, but it was difficult. She used hand gestures, stick figure drawings, biological terms like ovaries and sperm. Caleb still did not understand, though he nodded sometimes just to make her happy.

  “I know,” she said. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense, does it?” He nodded. “I think maybe I know a way to help you understand exactly what happens,” she said. “A way to learn.”

  Later that night, he could hear his parents as they argued in their room.

  “No,” his father said as he tried to keep his voice from rising. “Jenny, I am not going to do that.”

  “He wants to understand, Felix. He wants to know how it works.”

  “There are things he can learn from us and there are things he can learn on his own. We can’t teach him everything.”

  “We can,” she said. “You just don’t want to.”

  “I guess not,” he said, and then they were quiet.

  Caleb got out of his bed and crawled to his parents’ room. He looked through the open crack of the door. His mother rested her head on his father’s chest, and he stroked her hair. “You’re a good teacher,” he told her. “He’ll understand eventually.”

  “I am a good teacher,” she said, softly.

  The next morning, Caleb’s mother told him that she had talked to his father last night and they had realized that they weren’t entirely sure themselves how a baby came to be. “In some ways,” she said, “it’s a mystery, and mysteries can be just as wonderful as knowing.”

  It was evening. Snow fell heavily in the mountains and ice formed and then shattered, scraping along the tin roof of the house. His father had gone to the shed to collect wood for the stove. Even inside the cabin, Caleb could see his own breath. His mother breathed in short, rapid bursts and the dense air hovered around her. “It’s close,” she said, “it’s nearly time.”

  He was prepared for the baby. His mother wanted him to be near in order to observe what was happening, to be a part of the procedure.

  “We’re all making this baby,” she said. “Each one of us is doing our part.”

  While his father brought wood into the house and fed it into the stove, and his mother held the baby inside her and timed her contractions as the spasms shot across the surface of her face, Caleb placed new batteries in the flashlight and tested the brightness. He would hold the flashlight steady and direct the light toward the place where the baby would come, to help his father see the head when it emerged. He threw the light into the corners of the room and stared at the wide spot of light and how it illuminated the walls, the wood beams that his father had placed together to make the house. He swung the flashlight around on himself and stared directly into the light until his mother called out for him to focus on his work. He turned toward her figure, but all he could see was the leftover imprint of light, pure brightness, and it took several seconds before he could make out his mother, heavy with the baby and watching him.

  While she sat on the sofa with her legs pulled up to her chest, his father laid down a plastic sheet over the mattress, then one of the fresh bedsheets.

  “The same thing,” his mother panted, “do it over.”

  “I did all this the last time and the boy came out fine,” his father said. He placed another plastic sheet over the bed, followed by the final bedsheet. Caleb watched him and forgot his own work, which was to tape two copies of The Guinness Book of World Records together and place them in a sack. They had told him several times that the books were to keep his mother’s hips raised, an important task. He carefully edged the newly made book—taped together, unable to be opened and read—into the sack, trying hard not to rip the paper. His work did not seem nearly as interesting as the sheets, the bed, the place where everything would happen.

  “Why do you need two plastic sheets?” Caleb asked. Neither parent answered, focused on their own concerns. Blood, he thought. It had to be blood.

  “It’s happening,” his mother said calmly, her breathing unaltered. A puddle of liquid collected on the floor and seeped
between the slats of the wood, and his father ran over with a clean linen nightgown for her to change into. “Look away, Caleb,” his father shouted, but his mother laughed. “It doesn’t matter. It’s going to happen soon, Caleb,” she said as she slipped out of her nightgown and held her arms over her head. Though he had seen her naked before, Caleb turned and looked at the wall, embarrassed about the water that had pooled at her feet. “Once the membrane ruptures,” she continued, “something irreversible has occurred. You’ll see. The baby will be here soon.”

  The woodstove was burning full now. The windows fogged over, and somewhere deep in the woods, trees began to snap in half. The room was filled with empty plastic bags, bowls, and pillows. Cotton towels, steaming and sterilized, had been pulled from the oven, and smelled faintly of smoke. Next to the bed, the nightstand was covered with gauze and sanitary pads, everything a perfect, brilliant white. Caleb rubbed a hole in the fog on a window, stared out into the darkness at the expanse of ice and snow, and turned back to the sheeted bed, empty and white. On the edge of a wooden chair hung the still-wet nightgown. He noticed the reddish coloration that dotted it. His mother had told him about it. She had called it “bloody show,” but she had said she would tell him when it happened and she hadn’t. He was about to ask her about it when his father called for his help in moving his mother. She seemed calm, but her hands were shaking. Caleb wanted the baby to come.

  He held his mother’s left hand while his father stood on her right side and helped her to the bed. Without any apparent effort, his father lifted her into his arms and gently placed her on the bed. Her belly wobbled and she turned onto her side to face Caleb, who again placed his hand inside hers. “Soon,” she said, and grimaced as she squeezed his hand.

  Though they had insisted that he would help deliver the baby, his parents kept sending Caleb farther away from the bed to do various tasks. He went to the upstairs closet for a heating pad, though the house was already sweltering and dry with the heat from the fire. His father would hand him a pillow and send him into another room to shake the dust off it. When his mother complained of the heat, he took a plastic bag and stepped into the cold outside. His boots crunched the ice. With a wooden spoon, he broke up the snow and scooped it into the open bag before he finally twisted it shut. When he came back inside, he heard his father say, “I just don’t like this weather, all this ice.” He stopped talking when he saw Caleb, who held the already melting snow in his hands. “Bring it over here, son,” he said. His mother’s face was red and splotchy from the heat and the waiting, and Caleb hurried to the bed and placed the bag against her forehead.

  “That feels nice,” she said. She turned from Caleb and said to his father, “See? The snow helps.”

  His father sent him back outside for more. Each time he returned, his mother looked more and more exhausted. Her face was wrinkled with confusion.

  “It’s taking too long,” she said as she rolled softly from side to side.

  There were already seven bags of now-melted snow on the floor of the room, but his father asked him to go outside again. The bags reminded him of the time his father had returned from town with a plastic bag that held two goldfish and how quickly, almost instantly when they were placed in the waiting fishbowl, they had died. Caleb thought that moving them out of the bag had killed them but his parents assured him this was not true.

  His mother moaned in pain, and his father pushed him toward the door. He was beginning to trust the word of his parents less and less with each minute that passed without the baby’s arrival. His hands were numb but he plunged them into the snow again.

  Back in the house, the heat stung his face. His mother struggled to sit up, but the weight of her belly dragged her back down. His father wiped the sweat from her face and arms with a washcloth. A contraction traveled through her body and she screamed, the sound strangled and broken but loud. His parents continued to shift and reposition themselves, unable to settle into the thing that was happening. He had been so easy and now they were making something difficult and it was hard for Caleb not to be angry with his parents. The snow melted and spilled out of the bag, but he did not put it down. He was unsure of how to proceed, and he could only wait until his parents told him what was next.

  His mother relaxed for a moment, the time between contractions. In the brief space of calm, both of his parents finally noticed his presence, and their faces became unlined and assured.

  “Come closer,” his mother said, and Caleb placed the bag of melted snow on the floor and went to her. He wanted to touch her stomach, but he couldn’t do it, did not want to cause her any more discomfort. “It’s hard right now, but it will get easier,” she said, and Caleb only nodded, afraid to speak.

  His father went to the kitchen and returned with a jar of honey. “You need this,” he said to her as he unscrewed the jar, “for your strength.” Caleb reached out his hand for the jar, wanting to help. He took the wooden wand from inside the jar, sticky on his fingers, and drizzled honey onto his mother’s tongue. She smiled and then nodded for more. He did this three times, until she held up her hand. “It’s coming,” she said. “We need to get ready.” She grabbed the bedsheet in both hands, waiting for the contractions, and Caleb wanted to run back outside, into the cold and quiet and darkness, but he stayed beside his mother and waited for the baby to come.

  She screamed again, though Caleb could not hear the sound, only a humming as he stared at his mother’s open mouth and closed eyes. He could hear only the tree limbs as they crashed to the ground, the fire in the stove, the sound of his heartbeat. She screamed yet again and squeezed his hand tightly. The tips of his fingers all met at the same point, and the pain in his hand opened his ears to the sound of his mother, who now whimpered as the next contraction came.

  “Okay,” his father said, and crouched between her legs. “We’re getting close. Stay calm.”

  Caleb remembered the flashlight, which was at the foot of the bed. “I need to hold the flashlight,” he told his father, who again looked surprised to find him in the room.

  “No,” his father said, “you stay with your mother, hold her hand, give her honey and water. I don’t want you over here.” His mother nodded, squeezed his hand again, though her eyes were still closed.

  “But the flashlight,” Caleb whined, unwilling to give up his job.

  His father grabbed the flashlight and dragged an end table close to the bed. He turned on the flashlight and directed it toward Caleb’s mother. “See?” his father said. “This will work fine,” and Caleb instantly felt unnecessary; he was ashamed that his job could be performed by a table, that he was not going to learn anything from this.

  It was still snowing outside and filling up the space around the house until they were the only people left on earth, three of them crowded together, the fourth still to come. The air was hot and used up, ragged. His mother was breathing strangely now. The air left her body only to be sucked quickly back in, over and over. Her belly was stretched tight, to the point that the skin seemed to vibrate. Caleb was simply a hand to be held, a presence, as his mother never opened her eyes, only breathed and pushed and screamed when it became too much. It felt like seconds, though an hour had passed. Time was mixed up in the repetition of the actions, the darkness and snow outside, the fire in the house, the baby.

  It was coming now, no stopping it. His father called for her to push and his mother tried, her hand barely able to squeeze Caleb’s any longer. “Something’s wrong,” she kept saying, but his father seemed not to hear her, only ever asking her to keep pushing, to breathe, to bring this baby into the world. He shouted again for her to push, and she screamed back at him as the pain shook her, and Caleb held on. His body pulled farther and farther away from his hand and deeper into his heart, and he held his breath until he could not last any longer and had to take another huge gulp of air. He closed his eyes and even when his father said, “Here it comes, one more time,” he did not open them. Even when his mother screame
d with such force that her voice gave out. Even when his father whispered, “Oh, good Lord,” and the baby made its first sound, howling itself into existence, Caleb remained shut off from the things around him.

  When Caleb did open his eyes, the baby was still howling, its tiny lungs powering its body, as if sound were what kept it alive, and all he saw was what he had been told to expect. On the sheets, on his father’s hands and shirt, on the baby, or what he thought was the baby. Blood.

  His mother was now quiet. The baby overpowered all the other sounds in the room. As Caleb listened more closely, the sound alternated between a high-pitched and insistent howl and a low, rumbling moan. His mother let go of Caleb’s hand, and though he tried to hold on, eventually he let her go. His father moved quickly. He cut the cord, and a thin line of blood spurted across his face. He put the placenta in a bowl, where the mass seemed to move like a beating heart. The baby was now on a pillow on the floor, and it wriggled and barked, its body bluish-red. Caleb stayed near his mother. Though her breathing was regular again, her skin was pale, and his father shouted for him to help.

  Caleb didn’t move but then his father shouted again, “Goddamn it, Caleb, hand me the towels. Goddamn you.” Caleb lifted the stack of towels from the table and brought them to his father. On this side of the bed, he could fully see the blood on the sheets as it spread farther and farther out. At the sight of it, so much, Caleb felt dizzy. He got lighter, and then threw up on himself, clear and tasteless. His father didn’t seem to notice and kept working. He pressed the towel against Caleb’s mother, and a small red blot appeared on the clean white fabric and then, so painstakingly slow that it seemed a trick of the eye, grew larger. His father said, “Goddamn it, goddamn it,” the words quick like a succession of sneezes.

  Caleb’s mother finally spoke, hoarse and raspy words forced out of her body. “I want my baby.” The baby still screamed, the reason for all of this, now forgotten on the floor, the blood all they could focus on. His mother squeezed her legs together to hold the towel in place and Caleb’s father lifted the baby. He gasped as he held it in the light and then said, “Something’s wrong, isn’t it? The baby, this isn’t right.”