The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014

by Laura Furman

  Mrs. Defonte looked at us and then at Detective Gregerson. “I never should have hired them,” she said. “I just wanted some answers.”

  “Don’t we all,” said the detective.

  I didn’t think it was fair for Mrs. Defonte to blame us, but at the same time I did feel partly responsible for whatever it was that had happened to her husband, as though our mere presence had set something in motion that might have remained dormant otherwise.

  “We tried our best,” I said. “We did just what you asked. We were very professional.”

  “You should have seen the mess they left on the roof,” Detective Gregerson said. “Beer cans, food wrappers. Styrofoam cups, which are hell on the environment. And you shouldn’t take those caffeine pills.” He patted his chest. “Bad for the heart.”

  Mrs. Defonte folded her hands on the table and sniffed.

  When the police found out we’d posed as real detectives, we were charged with impersonating an officer, fined one thousand dollars, and stripped of our private investigator and gun licenses. Winslow & Co. was over. Because Julia had a prior, her probation was extended by five years. The police said that if it weren’t for overcrowding, she’d have gone right back to jail. That same week, a man was stabbed to death in the parking lot of our building in Opa-locka. Even after the body was taken away, streaks of dried blood stayed on the asphalt until it rained.

  The rest of the Defonte saga unfolded on local TV. Boca Raton resident vanishes into thin air! The story got a lot of airtime on Florida stations, but never went national. Still, I developed an addiction to the news. I would stay inside for days, reading and watching everything I could find. I would sleep for hours and wake up tired. Some nights I lay on the sofa and thought as hard as I could about what we’d seen, what it meant. Was his body in that building? Was Belinda Singer some kind of criminal mastermind? Had he faked his own disappearance and made off to South America? What had we missed? I didn’t come to a firm conclusion about anything.

  Julia had no patience for my brooding. The Defonte case reminded us all too much of our father—not just the vanishing, but the inscrutability of it. My sister threw away our Winslow & Co. business cards and letterhead and started working with a shady, unlicensed PI outfit, whose clients were usually as culpable as the people they wanted investigated—a husband with domestic violence priors looking for his wife, a crooked businessman searching for the equally crooked partner who fleeced him. I brought this up to Julia one night, the morality of it. Who isn’t guilty, she said, and maybe she had a point. On the nights she didn’t come home at all, I would wait up on the sofa, in the glow of the TV, and worry.

  New postcards arrived in the mail, another cloud and a rocky slope with scrubby bushes. I gathered all the cards and took them next door to Mirabella, who read tea leaves for a living. She was twenty-one, single, and rarely home. She took me into her bedroom. Her walls were covered with posters of tea leaves in various formations. She flopped down on her bed, spread the cards out in the shape of a rainbow, and examined them.

  “This is not in Florida.” Mirabella lay on her stomach. She had acne scars on her cheeks. She picked up the river and fanned herself with the card. “I don’t know what else to tell you. It’s hard to say more without all the pieces.”

  “Harder than reading tea leaves?”

  Mirabella said she wasn’t charging me and so I couldn’t expect her best work. Besides, she added, pointing at one of the posters with the card, the leaves always told the whole story.

  “Like I knew I was going to get robbed before it happened,” she said.

  “If you knew, why didn’t you do something?”

  “What could I do?” she said. “Not go home?”

  I looked at the poster. The tea was a soggy, dark swirl, like wet dirt in the bottom of a white cup. Maybe I just didn’t have a knack for seeing things.

  Back at the apartment, I called my husband. If he would tell me what he was sending pieces of and why, I was willing to give him the satisfaction of saying he knew working with my sister would only bring trouble. I tried calling three times, but I couldn’t get through; his cell phone had been disconnected. For a while I pretended the beep-beep-beep was my husband trying to reach me. I told myself he was using Morse code, which I had learned about in detective school. Hello, I said. I’m listening.

  One afternoon, when Julia was out on a job, two things happened: another postcard arrived. It looked like part of a gorge, the same shade of brown rock, the words WISH YOU typed across the back. The second thing would have been easy to miss. I was unwrapping a Hot Pocket in the kitchenette when I heard something on the news about a man in Nevada who had been arrested for defrauding senior citizens. I left the frozen Hot Pocket on the counter and went to the TV. According to the reporter, this man’s racket had been going on for two years. He had raked in hundreds of thousands. A Nevada DA said he would be punished to the fullest extent of the law. They showed the man being led up the steps of the courthouse. His hands were cuffed behind his back. A police officer gripped his elbow. He wore a gray trench coat. The wind blew his white hair across his face, revealing a toupee. He was much older, of course, but there he was.

  “No fucking way,” Julia said when I told her what I had discovered. The eleven o’clock news replayed the story and she gasped when she saw him walking up the courthouse steps. I felt relieved that she’d recognized him as immediately as I had. We called the number our mother had left; her boat was docked in the Maldives and she was on an excursion to a fishing village. We told the cruise director to tell our mother it was an emergency.

  For a weekend, Julia partook in my addiction to the news. We kept the TV on day and night. The Senate was considering a bill designed to safeguard the personal information of senior citizens, so our father’s story was getting national play. We read everything there was to read on the web. Julia let her cell phone ring. When we came across more photos of our father entering the courthouse online, she held on to my arm. In one, he was looking right at the camera, his gray eyebrows raised, his lips parted. Age spots dotted his face; his skin sagged. We made fun of his toupee to keep from crying.

  The facts went like this: Our father, posing as a financial consultant, had convinced seventeen elderly Nevadans to give him power of attorney over their finances and then fraudulently cashed checks on their accounts. The victims had lost everything. It was Mrs. Calhoun, a ninety-six-year-old widow, who got him caught. Her daughter got suspicious of our father and called the authorities. An investigation was launched. When our father was arrested, he was getting ready to skip town. I wondered what, if anything, he would have been leaving behind.

  On the first night, we printed news articles and cut out the photos of our father. We sat next to each other on the sofa, the TV blaring, and studied them under a magnifying glass. He and Julia shared the same high forehead and sharp cheekbones. I wondered if there was anything of him she saw in me.

  “He looks so old,” Julia said, rubbing her thumb over the paper.

  When we called our mother a second time, the cruise director was able to get her on the phone. We put Julia’s cell on speaker and told our mother everything. That we’d found our father in Nevada. That what had happened to him, where he’d been, was no longer a mystery. We were breathless, talking over each other. Once we finished, we leaned toward the phone and waited.

  “We’re going to Sri Lanka next,” our mother said. “We’re going to ride elephants.”

  “Mom?” we said. “Did you hear what we just told you?”

  “This wasn’t an emergency,” she whispered before hanging up.

  On the second night, we watched a TV special called Preying on the Elderly that featured our father and a con man right here in Florida, who had defrauded a whole retirement home full of seniors last winter. They showed one of our father’s victims, a hunched old man named Reginald. He was leaning into a walker, a tiny white dog at his feet. The program offered a list of tips for elders: Don�
��t give out personal information over the phone. Be suspicious if someone says you’ve won a fabulous prize. Get-rich-quick schemes never make you rich. Do background checks on everyone you meet. Julia pointed out that it sounded like the elderly were in need of private detectives. I nodded. I hoped Reginald was watching the same thing we were.

  Later, while Julia was in the shower, I realized that after our father was arrested, the postcards had stopped coming. I decided they hadn’t been from my husband after all, and was surprised by my disappointment. I didn’t say anything to my sister at first. I stood by the closed bathroom door and listened to the water. I took a beer from the fridge and drank it standing up. When Julia emerged from the shower, I suggested we watch a movie. I picked up the remote and started clicking through the channels. Beverly Hills Cop was on. All night, I kept my secret.

  On the third night, I couldn’t stop myself from telling Julia about my theory. My husband hadn’t sent the cards. It had been our father all along.

  “It makes sense,” I said. “A bunch were postmarked in Nevada.”

  “I should have known.” Julia was on the couch in a long T-shirt and socks. “A typewriter didn’t seem like his style. Too romantic.”

  I sat next to her. The news was on. Julia turned down the volume. The cards were stacked on the coffee table. He knew where we lived. He had kept track of us. Was it out of love, or a calculation, keeping tabs on his family in case he ran out of strangers to con? More questions we couldn’t answer. I wondered if he knew about my divorce and Julia’s stint in jail, if he had seen Mr. Defonte on the news and knew it had to do with us.

  “I think this one goes here.” Julia picked up the image of the gorge and placed it in the middle of the table. We put the sky and the clouds above it. The river to the left, the ledge to the right. We played with the positioning of the cards, tried to complete the sentence that began with WISH YOU.

  “ ‘Wish you well’?” I said.

  “ ‘Wish you luck’?”

  “ ‘Wish you were here’?”

  Julia looked at me. “If that’s what it says, I’m glad we’re not.”

  In the end, the puzzle didn’t tell us much. We still didn’t have enough pieces to know what it was for sure. We could tell it was a big dusty valley of some kind. Someplace out west, we figured. That part of the country was foreign to us.

  “The Grand Canyon?” I suggested.

  “Is it rocky enough?” Julia leaned over the coffee table, her head tilted. “What about Death Valley? That’s in Nevada, right?”

  I remembered hearing about the salt flats in Death Valley on TV. Badwater, they were called. The only animal that could survive there was some kind of snail. “Or the Mojave, in California? Do deserts have riverbeds?”

  Julia scooped up the cards and stacked them on the table.

  Years ago, when we were kids, we often played in the woods behind our childhood home. Somehow these nights had the same feeling as our games. At a certain point, Julia would always drop whatever we were doing and bolt into the woods. I would chase her, call after her, but she would just run and run. Finally I would climb the oak in our backyard and search for the peak of her head moving through the trees. I hardly ever found her. Usually I had to wait until she was ready to come out. Sometimes that took minutes; other times, hours.

  My sister stared at the TV. I heard sirens. At first it sounded like they were right outside, but after a while, they began to fade.

  “Here’s a story,” she said. “About two little girls who tried to make something out of nothing.”

  By Monday, Julia had reached her limit. That night she muted the TV and lay on the couch, her head in my lap. I nestled my fingers in her hair. It was thick and tangled and smelled like her coconut shampoo.

  “I can’t stay in this place anymore,” she said.

  At first I thought she was talking about Opa-locka and felt a wash of relief. “It’s about time. Where do you want to go?”

  Julia didn’t seem to hear me. “Mom was right. From now on, we should just pretend he’s dead.”

  I pulled my fingers out of her hair. “How can we pretend that? He’s right there on the news.”

  “It’s like being in a maze,” she said. “We’re never going to get anywhere.”

  She was right. Between Mr. Defonte and our father, I could feel myself being consumed by mystery. But that was beside the point. It didn’t even feel like a choice, to wade into all of this. I didn’t understand how she could decide to stop.

  “I have to let it go.” She sat up and rubbed her forehead. “I just have to.”

  A still of our father was on TV. It was from when he had just arrived in Nevada. He wore a yellow polo shirt and was smiling broadly, a neat crest of gray hair arcing over his forehead. It might have been under the worst circumstances possible, but he was back in our lives.

  “Look at him, Julia.” I leaned toward her and pressed my palm against her cheek. “He’s right there.”

  “I know he is,” she said. “And I wish he wasn’t.”

  After that night, she went back to working with the shady private investigators. She started coming home smelling like whiskey and smoke, a gun tucked into the waistband of her jeans, even though we’d lost the firearm license. Just in case, she told me. She got a pager and it buzzed constantly. She lost weight. Her hair thinned. The spaces beneath her eyes hollowed out. She looked the same as she did in jail, weary and sad. Once I heard her screaming at someone in our parking lot. By the time I looked out the window, my sister was alone and sitting on the ground, her face in her hands. I went downstairs and crouched in front of her, stepping in a small pool of gasoline. I placed my hands on her knees. Julia, I said. Look at me. She sighed and tipped her head back and for a moment I thought she was going to break out of whatever it was she’d fallen into. But then she jumped to her feet, went upstairs, and locked herself in her room. A few mornings later, I found her asleep on the couch, fully clothed, the gun on the coffee table. Her brown hair fell over her shoulders; her hands were folded under her chin. Her lips were parted in the exact same way our father’s had been in the photo we found online; they even had the same long, slender shape. On the couch, Julia was free of the sadness. She looked innocent and sweet and most people would have no idea what she was capable of. But I knew, because she was my sister. I knew she was keeping things from me.

  Here is what I kept from Julia: Twice a month, I would go to Boca Raton for Mrs. Defonte’s rehearsals. By late July, they were in final preparations for Don Giovanni. They had done the last two rehearsals in full costume; the stage held a pair of elaborate gold balconies connected by a wide staircase. The steps were covered by a plush red rug. A chandelier hung from the ceiling. It was like seeing the opera on opening night, minus the audience. I almost felt bad that I hadn’t paid anything.

  Mrs. Defonte was playing Donna Anna and the masked man was Don Giovanni. She wore a floor-length gown with lace sleeves and green brocade, the veil still clipped in her black hair. Her voice was as beautiful as ever. I wondered how much she thought about her husband, what she thought about him. I imagined she had theories of her own.

  Don Giovanni wore black pants, a white peasant shirt, and a wig. The basic problem in the story was that everyone wanted Don Giovanni to change, but he wouldn’t. It also showed how a person’s actions come back on them, how the seed of what happens next exists in what’s happening now. I had started going to the rehearsals because of Mrs. Defonte, but in the end, Don Giovanni was the one who held my interest.

  My favorite scene was set in a graveyard. Don Giovanni and the servant, Leporello, were surrounded by gravestones. Giovanni’s laugh summoned the ghost of the Commendatore, whom he’d killed in act 1. Leporello was frightened; Giovanni invited the Commendatore to dinner. He couldn’t know, couldn’t see, what would happen next.

  It was a terrible flaw, our inability to see where our lives were leading us. For instance, in the back row of the theater, I could never have
imagined that in late August, while Julia was stopped at a red light in Opa-locka, three blocks from our apartment, a man would walk up to her and shoot her in the head. She died at the scene. Our mother had to fly back from Muscat, her neck heavy with blue topaz, which, she had been told, would shield her from grief. I couldn’t have imagined how long I would stay in Julia’s apartment, out of a strange sense of loyalty, before I broke down and moved to Coconut Grove and took a job as an administrative assistant in a law firm, perhaps not so unlike the one Mr. Defonte had worked in. I couldn’t have imagined that, after my father pled out and was sentenced to fifteen years, I would have flown all the way to Nevada to see him in jail, to tell him that his daughter was dead and our mother might as well be, to tell him that I missed him, that I would never forgive him, that he could fuck his fucking postcards, and not be able to get past the entrance. In fact, I couldn’t even get out of the rental car. I sat in the parking lot for hours, blasting the Kingsmen CD I’d brought along, the postcards tucked into the glove compartment, before driving away. For the first ten miles I convinced myself that I was doing preliminary surveillance, that I would be back. I wondered if my husband would be consoled by the fact that the lies I told him were nothing compared to the ones I sometimes told myself. No, none of that seemed possible, as I watched Mrs. Defonte and Don Giovanni sing in a way that made my insides tremble.

  The Commendatore came back to Don Giovanni in the form of a statue. The singer was painted silver and wore a helmet and a cape made of chain mail; he reminded me of the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz. Even after I’d seen the whole opera, I kept willing Don Giovanni not to laugh in the graveyard, not to invite the Commendatore to dinner. Run away, I would whisper in the back row. Just run away. He never did, of course, and it wouldn’t have changed anything if he had.

  Reading The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014

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