The Best American Short Stories 2019

by Anthony Doerr

  “Not all of the places are like this. Your house is amazing.”

  He smiled crookedly. I blushed. Amazing—another fatuous word I used all the time in my copy. He must be used to women liquefying in his presence, I thought.

  “It is, isn’t it?” he said after a moment. The tone in which he said this was not at all boastful, but almost apologetic. I supposed that he was one of those rich people whose good fortune embarrassed him, the type who would refer to a family compound in Jackson Hole as “the cabin.” Typically I found this sort of thing irritating, but in Mac Follett it struck me as oddly touching—such discomfort and unease in a man who surely received affirmation at every turn.

  Lightning flashed, turning the sky briefly green. A sharp crack of thunder followed almost immediately. I flinched, and he smiled at this.

  “Big one,” he said. I wanted to say something witty, but I was all ooze. “You’re not from here.”

  “How can you tell?”

  Again lightning flashed and again I flinched.

  “You’ll get used to it,” he said. The thunder came, this time a sound like a spray of gunfire. He cleared his throat. “Don’t let me keep you.” He returned his gaze to the golfers. I turned and left the room quickly, unsure if he was trying not to impose on my time or if he’d grown bored with me.

  I surveyed the rest of the house. There were three other bedrooms, each sparsely furnished, the closets bare. A beautiful library with walls of knotty pine held only a few paperbacks. The pantry was stocked with things you might take on a camping trip: peanut butter, oats, jerky. I saw in these details an appealing asceticism, a minimalist self with no need for ornamentation. When I was finished, I stopped back at his bedroom. The rain had tapered. In the humid aftermath of the storm, the land that stretched beyond the windows appeared like soft fur.

  “All set,” I said, waving my notebook imbecilically.

  “You saw the observatory?”

  I looked at him quizzically.

  “It’s kind of hidden. Come. I’ll show you.”

  He clicked the remote and the TV sucked in the golfers. I followed him down the hall. He stopped at a door I had assumed to be a closet and opened it to reveal a narrow spiral staircase.

  “It’s all one tree trunk,” he said, sliding his hand along the banister. The wood was exquisite—intricately grained and polished to a whispery smoothness. I had the sense, then, that I was about to ascend into the house’s “essence,” that thing Bethany had spoken of with such unexpected earnestness.

  He began to climb, and I followed after him. I could feel his movement drawing me upward, and I could hear Kristin: “He took you to his observatory?”

  When I reached the top of the staircase he held out his hand for me. I took it, and he pulled me up into the gray light of the small room.

  “It’s something, isn’t it?” he said, hands stuffed in his pockets.

  I could only nod. There were no walls, only windows, and through them the prairie stretched in every direction. It would not be correct to say that it stretched to the horizon because I could not see any horizon line. At the edge of itself the prairie seemed simply to fade, land turning to dust turning to air.

  “It’s like floating,” I said.

  He smiled that crooked smile again.

  “You can make out Norman if you squint,” he said. “Over here.”

  Together we looked east, straining to make out the blurred gray rising. And because we were looking in the same direction when it happened, we both saw it: The clouds coalescing around a brown center. The center dropping from the sky to the ground.

  In the years since that day I have lived many places: Florida with its hurricanes, California with its earthquakes, and, for the past decade, Maine with its blizzards that bury cars and houses in stunning, sinister white. If you stop to think about it, the idiosyncrasy of these forces is astonishing. A vortex of clouds kissing the earth. The solid ground splitting and rippling. You could never imagine such things, if you didn’t already know they were possible. I have come to believe that life is different in each place, and I do not simply mean that in Florida you sandbag while in Maine you salt. What I mean is that a place and its disasters—its fathomless, inscrutable unknowns—are not separable. Oklahoma is its tornadoes, just as Maine, even on the mildest of spring days, is its snows, is a caved roof and a woman asleep in her bed, and then gone. The disaster is always there, because it takes up residence inside of you.

  Mac Follett didn’t hesitate. He grabbed my arm and led me back down the staircase. Before the living room window I froze, transfixed. The funnel cloud was soft and brown. Against the plains it seemed to stay perfectly still, and I understood that this must mean it was moving toward us in a straight line.

  “Come on,” he said, tugging at my arm. “There’s a shelter.”

  We hurried through the pelting rain, past the tree and across the terrace and the lawn, the tall grass whipping around my ankles. When we reached the shelter, he pulled open the heavy brown door and we climbed down into the earth. He closed the door behind us and I was plunged into darkness more total than any I have experienced before or since. I waved my hand in front of my face but saw nothing. For a moment the coherence of things seemed to break apart. I felt as if I were neither upside down nor right side up but tumbling through the darkness. Then suddenly it was light, and I was standing perfectly still with my feet on the packed earth floor. Mac had turned on a lantern that hung from a nail on the wall. I took in our surroundings: a few coolers stacked by the stairs, some cluttered shelves beyond the light of the lantern, two metal folding chairs in the center. The ordinariness of these things seemed wildly discordant with our situation, though I no longer remember if I found this comforting or unnerving. Honestly I think I was probably too panicked to feel much of anything. I sat. I hugged my knees to my chest and tried uselessly to slow my breathing.

  Mac paced slowly back and forth, hands plunged in his pockets. He did not look at me. For a minute or two he seemed to go completely inside of himself, as if he had forgotten my presence altogether, and I thought that we must be in even graver danger than I’d realized. I was drenched, and though the rain had been warm—unsettlingly so, like bathwater—I shivered, and this movement seemed finally to pull him out of something.

  He stopped pacing and looked at me. He unstuffed his hands from his pockets and squatted so that his eyes were level with mine.

  “You’re safe,” he shouted over the noise of the storm. “I promise.”

  In that moment, in a storm shelter in Oklahoma, with my hair hanging around my face in wet strings and Mac Follett, round-shouldered in the lamplight, promising that I was safe, I had the exhilarating sense that for the first time I was living a page from the secret text of my life. It was obvious, suddenly, that the storm raging on the other side of the shelter door was here for me, to catalyze my life with its force. I was supposed to be here, and here I was, and the purpose behind my being here was effortlessly legible. I could see what would happen in this moment and the next and the next just as I had seen all of the houses along the length of Redtail Road at once. I would be unfaithful to Steven. Mac Follett would tuck a strand of wet hair behind my ear, testing my resistance, and I would offer none. When the storm passed I would emerge into the watery light of its aftermath with him, the cured scent of his body and the chlorine of semen on my skin. “Stay,” he would say, and I would. For a day, then two. I would call Steven, and though there would be nothing I could say to explain, I would stay on the phone for hours, just talk, words strung together to create the impression of a gentle goodbye. Mac would not sell the house. We would remain there together, until my body was made of grass and dust.

  I sat on the folding chair, waiting for him to tuck my hair behind my ear and set the story in motion. And as I waited, two things happened. First, the storm subsided, the roar giving way to soft, defeated wailings. Second, my eyes adjusted to the dim light, and things that had at first been hidd
en became visible. I could see, on one shelf, a jumble of fishing gear—rods and waders, a khaki vest pinned with lures. On another, a dusty golf bag stuffed with clubs and a tin bucket of white and yellow balls. And, on a shelf in the corner, still half-concealed in shadow, a big camouflage rucksack and a blue cap with a gold medallion.

  “You were in the army?”

  He looked away from me.

  “My brother. In the Gulf.”

  “Oh,” I said. I tried to convey with my expression an all-purpose weightiness. I knew nothing about the Gulf. I knew no one who had gone, no one whose life had brushed even lightly against this war or any other.

  “This was his house. He built it himself. I’m just selling it. He died four months ago.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said reflexively.

  He winced.

  I understood then that I had misapprehended everything that had happened since I arrived at the house, which wasn’t his at all: the way he’d disappeared after letting me in; his unease when I told him how beautiful it was. And suddenly I felt very foolish, or maybe ashamed.

  He walked over to the shelf and picked up the cap, passed it back and forth from hand to hand, then set it back down.

  “I moved his things down here because I couldn’t keep seeing them,” he said.

  I wanted to tell him he didn’t need to explain, least of all to me, but I saw now that he did need to. The need glinted plainly in his eyes. It had been there all along, but I had missed it.

  “It’s OK,” I said, though what was OK, or for whom, I couldn’t tell you.

  We stayed down there a few minutes more in silence. When the sound of the storm had faded away, he pushed open the brown door and we climbed out. The light was the watery way I had imagined. The house was untouched—whatever path the tornado had taken, I could see no trace of it.

  Mac walked me to my car. “Thank you,” he said. For days afterward, I would hear his voice thanking me, and I would feel sick with everything I was beginning to know about myself. I got in the car quickly, backed down the long driveway, and went straight home. Two days later, I sent the copy to Bethany Parkhurst. On the market for the very first time, this exquisite post-and-beam home has been custom designed to take full advantage of its spectacular surroundings.

  In December, Steven’s company transferred him again, and we left Oklahoma for Nevada. Two years after that, when they summoned him back to corporate headquarters, he went to New York alone. I continued west to California.

  But first. Before we left the Sooner State, some months after that storm, I found myself in the dusty archives at City Hall. I couldn’t help myself—I needed to know, though I was suspicious of this need, as I was by then suspicious of nearly all of my wishes and desires. It took me only an hour or so to find what I was looking for.

  Terence Follett, 29, of Eakly, died January 16 from injuries sustained in a two-vehicle collision in Omega. An avid outdoorsman with a lifelong passion for astronomy, he enlisted in the army after graduating from West Central High. He was stationed in Landstuhl, Okinawa, and at Fort Irwin in California’s Mojave Desert. He then returned to Eakly, where he bought twenty acres. Selling the mineral rights made it possible for Terry to build his dream house. During Desert Storm he reenlisted and was deployed to Kuwait, where he assessed infrastructure damage in Al Wafrah. He had returned home in July. He is survived by his mother, Joanne Beams; his father and stepmother, Walter and Connie Follett; a brother, Maclean; and numerous aunts and uncles.

  That’s a good story, isn’t it? Rich and diverse in its settings, with a real sense of arc and one hell of a plot twist—to return home from a war in a faraway land only to die in Omega, Oklahoma. Even that name, Omega, sounds like something from a story, almost too evocative, too on-the-nose, to be real.

  I read an interesting article online last night. It said that earthquakes have come to Oklahoma. Scientists predict that this year seismic activity in the state will be six hundred times the historical average. Fracking is to blame. Wastewater injected into wells deep in the earth. After reading this I closed my computer, made myself a cup of coffee, and went out onto the heated porch to drink it. It’s winter here. I stayed up much of the night, watching the snow fall onto the fields beyond my house, and wondering what it must be like to feel the earth tremble in a place meant for other disasters.

  Maybe you think all of this is easy to interpret. A girl left the city and learned a thing or two. A silly young woman hoped to be ravished by a man who was not her husband. A marriage fell apart, and afterward a wife was wiser, though in some ways no better, than she had been before. Maybe it is only my personal stake in the matter that makes me want to believe it was not that simple. All I can say is that when I pulled up to the house on Redtail Road I thought life was one thing, and when I drove away I knew it was another. I knew, quite simply, that a life is not a story at all. It is the disasters we carry within us. It is amazing, it is exquisite, it is a stunning charmer, and it is noted in water and jotted in dust and the wind lifts it away.

  JIM SHEPARD

  Our Day of Grace

  from Zoetrope: All-Story

  Camp near the TN River

  Mon. November 21, 1864

  Dear Lucy,

  It commenced snowing at about dark here, & the wind is as cold as the world’s charity & blowing at a terrible rate. Some of the letters I sent came back. It is very uncertain about letters nowadays, tho I suppose it will do no harm to write more, & I wanted you to know that I’m still right-side up, tho you ought to see me now if you want a hard-looking case. Whiskers have grown out all over & I am ashamed to scan a looking glass. C.W. calls me Chief of the Brigands & looks as rough as I do. I had Georgie cut my hair & he made such a hash of it that it will take 12 months to grow out right.

  On the march north we lived 3 days on parched corn & then in the last week in the rain & mud just 2 biscuits a day to each man. When an officer rides by the boys all cry out, “Bread, bread, bread,” & tonight there was a meat issue but it featured so many shanks & necks that our requisition officer said next they’ll be throwing in the hoofs & horns. Still if nothing else the war has taught me to be less particular, & now when I see dirt in my victuals I just take it in.

  In our last camp we made a hut by driving timbers into the ground in the fashion of a stockade but here we sleep in what we call gopher holes, after we’ve built fires in them to dry & harden the earth. We huddle together & shiver like Belshazzar did when he saw the vision on the wall. Everyone wants to get at the Yankees to pillage their blankets. There is still a great deal of sickness in the regiment with measles & dysentery accounting for most of the casualties. A good many get sick that never get well again. C.W. hasn’t changed his shirt in 5 months & Georgie is a perfect tatterdemalion. He says that if his shirt rots any more he can make it a necklace. C.W. says in this army 1 hole in the seat of your britches means you’re a Captain, 2 a Lieutenant, & if you’re a private you don’t need to unbuckle to relieve yourself. Georgie has tried fashioning moccasins from some scraped hides but says they stink & stretch out in the heel on the march & whip him nearly to death. Back when barefoot men were excused from fighting many threw away their shoes the night before a battle, but now they’re compelled to perform as much duty as those well shod.

  I’m happy to hear my Georgie stories charm Nellie in particular. Tell her he is so small some of the boys like to call for him to come out of his hat because they can see his legs. He walks like he’s stepping over furrows & is always kicking his fellows’ shins on the march. He regularly announces to one & all that if he can just get an eye on Lincoln with his musket he’ll make a cathole through him. C.W. says that anyone who can make us smile so much is like loaf bread & fresh beef all the time, & that he is always hunting for something to raise his spirits given that he’s forced to sojourn in those low haunts of Sorrow. He claims Georgie’s tomfooleries & his wife’s letters to be his only remedies. He reads me his wife’s letters & I am always tired long
before she closes.

  We hear a great many things about reinforcements coming from west of the Mississippi, & also about the movement of Lee’s army in VA. Ten thousand rumors are current & many believe them all.

  Most of us are disheartened, even those who would not profess to it. C.W. calls Hood the Butcher & it is certain he is the most unpopular General in the army & some swear they will no longer fight under him. It’s said that the Brigadier Generals & Colonels & company officers have all been called together to forestall an uprising & that everyone all around regrets that poor Joe Johnston is gone. Yesterday Hood rode past our column & when it came time to give 3 cheers our 3000 men did not make as much noise as you would hear at a schoolhouse on the election of a chalk-tray monitor. He blames all setbacks on poor morale resulting from his predecessor’s continued retreats. He told us before our previous engagement that he would compare us to a mule team that had been allowed to balk at every hill: one portion would make strenuous efforts to advance while another would refuse to move & thus paralyze the whole. Many of us will not forget that in July he lost 8000 killed & wounded in 2 days trying to do what Johnston said could not be done. But we like our Colonel, who in his attentiveness to us puts me in mind of an old farmer gathering up his stray cattle.

  Lu! Do you miss your special friend? What a sight he now makes! He is conventional but unmarried, young but unhealthy, nostalgic but still isolate, war-weary but still the greenhorn, & awake to absurdity but still humorless. He is in all ways lacking polish, perspective, & resolve. He complains of others’ shortcomings but there is neither depth to his understanding nor breadth to his compassion. Chariness & uncertainty are his trademarks, as well as the desire for attachment without the willingness to make a clean breast of it. He can only hope that the careless & thoughtless boy who left you 2 years ago will return, if Providence so provides, more judicious & more considerate, & perhaps at the least he will have learnt how to associate with his fellow beings, however imperfectly, & that the world has not the narrow limits of his own little heart. Send news of your father & Nellie. Send news of your health, & thoughts. A rat just came right up to my candle as confused as if he were home. & now I am very sleepy & must close—