The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014

by Laura Furman

  Estelle hugs herself and shivers. “Please point that somewhere else,” she asks Tina. “I swear I won’t do anything.”

  “God, I love this place,” says Rainey. “Would you light me a cigarette? And may I have your cape, please?”

  Rainey watches Tina collect sixty-three dollars from the two wallets tossed on the table and a fistful of earrings from a bureau drawer. It takes Tina only a minute. The gun never wavers and she never stops watching Estelle and the boyfriend. She jams her prizes in the pocket of the boyfriend’s leather jacket, which she is now wearing. Then she positions herself by the white marble hearth. Estelle and the boyfriend are not playing at being robbed. They sit on the edge of the bed about as far apart as they can while still holding hands—the holding hands was Tina’s concession.

  Glancing at Tina, Rainey catches sight of herself in the mirror over the hearth, luxuriant hair spilling out the back of the tie-dyed scarf. “Look at us,” she says, giving Tina a light nudge. “Even with all this shit on, we’re still cute. We should take a Polaroid. You got a Polaroid, Estelle?”

  Tina keeps the gun aimed straight at Estelle as she turns quickly to look at herself in the mirror, then at Rainey. Her shoulders slump a little. She looks back at Estelle but says, “How can you tell it’s still us?”

  Rainey laughs. “You’re tripping, right?” Tina shrugs. They both know she hasn’t tried acid yet. “ ’Cause it looks like us,” says Rainey. “Right?”

  “I’m not sure,” says Tina.

  “You’re on blotter,” says Rainey, and waits for her to stop being spooky. Rainey once licked blotter off Gordy’s palm and spent hours watching the walls quilt themselves exquisitely, kaleidoscopically.

  “Who else would I think you are?” Rainey says. “Jimi Hendrix?”

  “I know what Jimi Hendrix looks like. Don’t move,” she snaps at the boyfriend, who is edging closer to Estelle. “I am tripping,” she says. “I don’t recognize myself.”

  Rainey isn’t sure she recognizes this Tina either, the one who sees a stranger in her own face. “Ever?”

  “That would be retarded. I mean, with the scarf on.”

  It’s Rainey’s turn to nosey around, as her father would say. She takes her time. Tina’s weirding her out. The nightstand alarm clock says they’ve been there only four minutes. Surely they can stay another four. She could swear that in the silence she can hear the clock whirr. The cape hangs heavy from her shoulders; it is too hot for the apartment but the weight feels terrific.

  On a closet shelf she finds a stack of typed and handwritten letters rubber-banded in red. She takes it down and sets it aside on the bureau. “You don’t want that,” says Estelle, half rising. “It’s old, it’s just junk—”

  “I don’t always recognize people on TV, either,” says Tina. “Or at school. You think there’s something wrong with me?”

  “Yes.” Rainey goes back to the hallway Pullman kitchen for a pair of shears.

  “Well, then fuck you,” calls Tina.

  “But there’s plenty of shit wrong with me too,” says Rainey, walking back in with the scissors.

  Rainey snips buttons from Estelle’s blouses, lace and ribbons from her nightgowns. She puts those on the bureau with the letters. “In winter?” says Tina. “When you put a hat on? I’m not a hundred percent sure it’s you till you say something.” She takes a deep breath and locks it up somewhere for a while. “At least I always know my grandmother.” She smiles; it’s a private, knowing smile. Rainey could almost swear there’s pride in it.

  She bites her lip. She prowls the room more aggressively. She finds two photo albums at the foot of the hearth and begins robbing them of photographs. “Not my father,” says Estelle, and starts to cry. “Not my grandfather.”

  “Who is this?” Rainey holds up a square color photo of a woman pretending to vamp in a one-piece bathing suit. Her smile is playful, as if she is somebody’s mother who would never really, actually vamp. Mothers interest Rainey: their presence, their absence, the way they react to the heat waves her body gives off in the proximity of their husbands and sons.

  “No one,” says Estelle.

  Rainey adds it to the stack. Estelle makes a high-pitched sound in her throat. Rainey, moving on, seizes two black journals from a nightstand drawer.

  “Oh my God, no,” says Estelle, but then she looks at Tina and the gun and closes her eyes.

  Rainey turns abruptly to face Tina. “Look,” she says, “if you ever don’t know who someone is, just ask me, okay?”

  “Do you think I’m crazy?”

  “Just ask me.”

  “Are we okay?”

  Rainey sighs like of course they’re okay, but she still hears it. He gets into your room every night.

  “Do you think I have schizophrenia?”

  “Just ask me,” Rainey says.

  She goes down the hall again, cape flapping behind her; she salvages a grocery bag from under the sink, unclips the receiver from the hallway wall phone and drops that in first. Then she drops in the letters, the cuttings, the photos, and the journals that she has piled on the bureau. The door lock, miraculously, requires a key on each side. She and Tina can actually lock these people in.

  “Who’s the woman in the photo?” demands Rainey.

  Estelle, crying, just shakes her head.

  “Take my watch,” the boyfriend tells Tina. “Leave her papers and take my watch. You’ll get fifty dollars for it, I swear.”

  “Thanks,” says Tina, as if startled by his generosity. She makes him give it to Estelle, who holds it out, shrinking from the gun.

  “The papers?” he says. But Tina’s admiring the watch in quick glances, and Rainey’s lost in a vision. She sees a tapestry made from scraps of handwriting and snippets of photos, tiny telegrams from the heart: patches of letters, strips of confessions, grainy faces of people who have, in one way or another, perhaps like her mother, split. She’ll sew buttons at the intersections, layer in some lace. In Rainey’s hands, such things will reassemble themselves into patterns as complex as snowflakes. She will start the tapestry tonight, in her pink room. What would Estelle do with this ephemera anyway, besides keep it closeted away?

  “You have Paul’s watch,” whispers Estelle. “Can I have my papers?”

  “Oh, it’s Paul?” Rainey looks at the boyfriend. “I don’t have Paul’s watch.” She swirls the cape and turns theatrically to Tina, who appears delicate in the leather jacket. “You have the watch, right?” Rainey sighs dramatically and runs her hands down the curves of her body, staring at Paul, who looks back at her with the directness of someone who respects the gun too much to move but is not exactly afraid. This intrigues Rainey tremendously.

  “I thought Paul would like me better, but she got the watch, so apparently not.” She’s just playing, but it seems to her that Tina looks at her sharply. “Listen,” she says to Tina, “let’s go. I’m great. I have every single thing I need.”

  She is surprised to see hurt flash across Tina’s eyes.

  “You’re great?” says Tina. “Why are you great? What’ve you got that you need?”

  Paul sits forward with interest.

  “Shut up,” says Tina, though he hasn’t said anything.

  “Don’t,” says Rainey. She is holding her grocery bag with one arm and has her left hand on the doorknob. “I said I believe you. Let’s go.” But Tina remains plastered to the hearth.

  “What’ve you got that you need?” says Tina. When Rainey doesn’t answer, she says, “What? You’ve got an albino freak who—” She stops, possibly because Rainey is staring her down, possibly out of restraint.

  “An albino freak who what?” says Paul.

  Rainey looks at Tina, flaming against the amethyst walls, radiant in her distress. She feels the gaze of Paul upon her, and she flushes. “I have everything I need from this apartment,” she says, as if talking to someone from a distant land.

  “Oh.” Tina visibly relaxes, as if warm water were being poure
d through her. “I don’t.” She turns a slow, thoughtful quarter circle, looking around the room.

  “Oh no,” says Estelle. “Please go. Please please please go.”

  “Get those scissors, would you?” says Tina, taking a few steps toward Estelle.

  Rainey picks them up off the nightstand, where she set them down after taking souvenir snippets from Estelle’s clothes, and swings them from one finger. “What are you going to do, cut her hair?”

  Tina smiles. “No, you are.”

  “Really? Seriously”—again she almost says Tina’s name—“what are you planning to do with her hair?”

  “Same thing I was going to do without it,” says Tina.

  Estelle lets go of Paul’s hand and clamps both her hands around her hair. “For Christ’s sake,” says Paul.

  Rainey wonders if the gun belongs to Tina now. Estelle’s hair belongs to Estelle, that much is true. “No,” she says. “This is between me and you.”

  “You said everything was okay,” Tina says. “You said you believed me. You said, ‘I’ll prove it.’ ”

  “I think she’s proven quite a bit,” says Paul.

  “Whose boyfriend are you? Be quiet,” says Tina.

  Rainey sets the grocery bag on the floor and puts her face in the bowl of her hands, scissors still dangling, so she can think. Tina is telling the truth now. It’s Rainey who’s lying: she does not believe a word about the grandmother, and things are not okay. She looks through her fingers from Estelle, who has wrapped her long hair protectively around her fist, to Tina, who waits to see if trust can be restored.

  She almost asks again about the woman in the picture. It’s the right moment: she holds the scissors and Tina holds the gun. Instead she takes a deep breath of amethyst air. “Forgive me,” she says, and for a moment, while neither Tina nor Estelle knows whose forgiveness she requires, she feels nearly free.

  “Here,” she says. She bends over quickly, so the tie-dyed scarf falls forward and the violet room swings back, grabs a thick sheaf of her own long, dark hair, and cuts.

  Allison Alsup

  Old Houses

  AS THEY GATHER FOR the spring block party on the Peabodys’ extra lot, the residents of Hillcrest Way think how lucky they are to live in old houses and among the kind of people who understand old houses and their architecture—Tudor, Colonial, Spanish Mediterranean. Every house on the street is different but in keeping with the neighborhood, scaled and proportioned. Houses that know who they are, Dennis Petersen calls them in an effort to distinguish them from the ones down the hill. The homes on the roads below are smaller, built on stingier lots and, in some cases, built too late to have the kind of distinct identity that old houses do. His own house is Norman, the first on the block, and built over a century ago.

  The latecomers make their way down the sidewalks toward the Peabodys’ lot, the women holding cheese trays and pasta salads, the men bottles of wine. They are all grateful to Richard and Katherine for having purchased the lot and for having saved it from the builders. They have seen what developers can do. When fire swept through the hills across town, the builders razed everything and erected rows of white boxes with no room for gardens or yards for children to play in. So after they place their offerings on the folding-table buffet on the Peabodys’ lawn, they all compliment Katherine on her growing collection of irises. They note, as always, with genuine delight, how the lot opens the view in just the right spot: a slice of steel-blue bay and beyond, the studded grid of downtown San Francisco. The view is better, they note, from this side.

  They are fond of the phrase original to the house. Moldings and inlaid oak floors original to the house. Built-in cabinets, box beams, coved ceilings and stained glass original to the house. Bannisters, mullions, muntins, French doors, glass knobs, telephone niches, carved mantels, fireplace grates, chandeliers, porthole windows and working shutters, all original to the house. The little bedroom on the ground floor, original to the house. All the old houses on Hillcrest have one—just a few steps from the kitchen and the back stairs. They don’t call it a maid’s room, except in private. Of course, no one has a maid anymore, only a woman who cleans and a gardener who comes once a week to mow and round up the leaves. Live-ins are for those in the hills above, people who can’t be bothered to walk their own dogs.

  In some of their houses, the little room has been converted into an office, sometimes into a discreet spot for the television. Five years ago, the Welshes lined the back wall with double-glazed windows and made a music studio where he could play the violin and she the French horn. The children played too, before they went to college and moved away. Since their remodel, Judith Goldman times her evening walks to coincide with the Welshes’ practice hour; sometimes Suzanne Collier joins her and they share news of their daughters who attend neighboring colleges in Massachusetts. Sometimes, however, Judith prefers to walk alone. The faint sound of the Russian composers and the sight of the cool evening fog weaving through the tall pines make her think of summers spent as a girl in upstate New York. She had her own little room remade into a library complete with a gas fireplace and matching high-back chairs. When she closes the door, her husband knows not to bother her.

  They stand clustered about the grass, sampling salads and refilling wineglasses. They like to think about all that their houses have witnessed. They all know the story of the Petersens’ house—built for a bachelor sea captain at the turn of the last century. Of course, there had been sea captains then. They all agree that with his thick sweaters and ruddy face, Dennis Petersen does indeed resemble a sea captain.

  You never own an old house, they agree, you just safeguard it for the next generation.

  By this, they mean their children, the eldest of whom have scattered. And really, given the way prices and taxes have risen, inheriting a house on Hillcrest is the next generation’s only hope for an old house in a good neighborhood. Of course, they themselves will never leave. They’ll have to be carried out feetfirst, they say, though they are careful to speak softly so that the old doctor won’t hear. His house, just across the street from the Peabodys’ lawn, rises above the thick clump of Katherine’s yellow irises. He is very old now and must decline the invitations to the block party. He sends his wishes from behind the closed curtains of his white stucco Spanish Mediterranean. They do not say so, but the other residents of Hillcrest are relieved. They have never understood why he chose to stay after what happened. They wouldn’t have been able to.

  Occasionally, an article appears in the paper, marking the tenth, twentieth, now thirtieth anniversary of the killings—the doctor’s first wife and older daughter, home from college for a visit between semesters. The case remains unsolved; the articles end with the usual plea for information. They have written to the paper and asked that the name Hillcrest be withheld from the article; it gives the wrong impression of the neighborhood. But of course, the paper still prints the street name and inevitably one of their kids learns of the crimes and they’re forced to tell the version they’ve agreed upon. They assure their children all this happened long before they moved in, another era really. They’re more careful now. It’s why Madeleine Welsh was right to phone the police about the stranger looking over the Colliers’ garden gate. Below them is a different city, where hooded youths with guns roam the flat streets. There isn’t a wall between them and the rest of the world. They must all watch out for one another. It’s why the block parties are so important. Still, what’s past is past.

  They omit certain details. They don’t tell the children the way the killer bound the two women with their own stockings or what he did to the girl. They don’t mention that it was the younger daughter, the one still in high school, who walked home from class to find her mother and sister on the living room floor just a few feet from the piano. Nor do they say that the front door had not been forced open or that the prime suspect lived just two doors down, in what is now the Dillingers’ house: a shaggy-haired, hollow-eyed teenage boy whose second-
story window faced the doctor’s house. They do not admit what they have all imagined from the black-and-white photo of the victims reprinted in the paper each year: the scrubbed coed opening the door, her pressed miniskirt, her straight smile and full brunette hair. Please, come in. They especially do not like to think about that. As parents, they have aimed to instill good manners in their own children. The police investigated, but couldn’t make a case against the boy. That hasn’t changed, the adults agree. Even with all the technology now, they have no faith in the cops. Instead, they tell their children, That was a long time ago. They’ve learned to be more careful now. They watch out for one another.

  Everyone claps encouragement as James and Madeleine Welsh arrive carrying their instruments in black armored cases. Each year they learn a new piece just for the party. James has never told his wife this, but he believes their music placates ghosts. Nor has Suzanne Collier ever revealed that years ago, after she saw the girl’s picture in the paper, she began to hear odd noises. She said nothing of it, even to Anne Dillinger, who had confided that she once hired a woman to burn sage in every room of their house. Judith Goldman keeps most thoughts to herself. Sometimes when she closes the door to her small library, she sits in her high-back chair and thinks about when the house was new. She imagines the young girls who once slept in her little room. She pictures their raw fingers and plain faces, the way they rose from narrow beds early in the morning to pin back mop-straight hair and light the fireplace. She imagines the routine of their days, cooking and cleaning for a family not their own, and how the girls must have longed for the few dark hours to themselves in this tiny room. She thinks of her own daughter, now three thousand miles away in a little dorm room. When Judith calls, her daughter does not seem relieved to hear from her or interested in news from the neighborhood. Judith doesn’t understand it, but she detects accusation, even disdain, in her daughter’s voice.

  Wineglasses are refilled, then everyone quiets as James and Madeleine settle their music stand on the grass. Anne Dillinger gently guides her husband away from the spinach dip. The first tendrils of the evening fog have crept in and some of the women slip on jackets they have knowingly brought. There is a general murmur about San Francisco summers. And there’s a breeze; the sheet music ripples. Dennis Petersen steps forward and, with thick, pink fingers, steadies the sheets. His tall frame looms to the side of the metal stand and they all smile, certain that in a past life, he held the pitted wood of a ship’s wheel with the same measured calm.