Best Debut Short Stories 2020

by Tracy O'Neill

  I gave the department secretary John Mark’s card and she went to get the head of Collections, a professor named Dr. Sherman. I was surprised, and then a little ashamed, when a tall, very tan woman, in khaki shorts and a denim button-up, introduced herself. She dusted her hands on the bottom of her shirt, and we shook. I followed her to Collections, which was in the basement.

  I wondered if all museum basements were exactly the same—full of things curators didn’t want anyone to see but couldn’t get rid of. Human remains, especially ones with problematic proveniences, often fell into this category. In the middle of the basement there was a makeshift room, made of plywood, with a lock on the door and a handwritten sign that said KEEP OUT. Dr. Sherman unlocked the flimsy door and went inside. As the sign directed, I kept out. She came back with a cardboard Kinko’s box. She hummed as she inventoried its contents. I checked her work against the accession sheet John Mark had given me.

  “All good, yeah?” Dr. Sherman asked.

  “Uh, I don’t know,” I said. “John Mark said this burial had one adult female and one juvenile—you’ve only got the adult female.”

  Dr. Sherman knitted her brow and checked the notes. She went back into the plywood room and shuffled around for a while before she came out again, empty-handed.

  “Well, you’re right, but I can’t find her,” she told me. “Why don’t you just take this gal for the time being.” She gestured at the skeleton. “Come back tomorrow for the other one?”

  “I have to leave tomorrow.”

  “Well, that’s a shame,” she said.

  “Why’s that?”

  “It’s no problem—we’ll get you the little one. Just gotta track ’em down.”

  “Yeah, all right.” I wrote down the motel phone number on an index card. “Call if you find it today? I can come back later.”

  She smiled; her lips were a lovely shape. I packed the bones up carefully, and then I shook Dr. Sherman’s hand and I imagined for a second what those long, tan fingers would feel like in my mouth. I dropped her hand.

  “You’ve got nice hands,” I said.

  “Thanks,” she said. She picked up the card and folded it in half, working the crease between her thumb and forefinger.

  BACK AT THE motel, I slid the box underneath the desk. Truth be told, of the two of us, Alice was the actual osteologist. I knew enough to get by, but she had been studying bioarchaeology before Tess, and she was already a qualified skeletal analyst. Once I’d watched her excavate a historic burial with a set of bamboo tools she’d made herself. Though a construction crew had truncated the grave with a large pipe, Alice took care to recover every bone that was left. I loved watching her work so much that eventually our crew chief noticed and threatened to dock my pay. Alice cackled at his reprimand. Yeah, get back to work, asshole, she shouted at me from across the site. I gave her the finger. The crew rolled their eyes at our attempts to flirt.

  I locked the room and went to find the girls. Alice was at the pool, stretched out on a white plastic chaise. Tess squirmed on her stomach. Alice wore a black bikini and her body looked different to me. She used to walk around the apartment in nothing but her socks just to drive me crazy; she had always been easy in her skin. But I hadn’t seen her like this in a while; I hadn’t seen her naked much at all. She had the straps of her top pulled down so her shoulders were bare and her clavicles were so sharp it hurt to look at them. I could see her ribs, too, stretched out as she was. She was wearing heart-shaped sunglasses that swallowed her face and made her look like a curly-haired cartoon. I wished I could take a picture of her because I was consumed, for a moment, by the feeling that I was on the brink of losing her completely. She waved for me to sit down next to her, which tore me from my thoughts.

  I sat down in the chair next to hers, but she stood up abruptly and put Tess in my arms. Then she dove into the deep end of the pool. When she surfaced she swam back over and spat a thick stream of water at us. Tess screamed and I jostled her like, It’s okay, it’s okay.

  “I have to go back in the morning,” I told her.

  Alice put her elbows on the edge of the pool and looked up at me.

  “Why?”

  “They’ve lost the little one and they’re still trying to track it down.”

  Alice tilted her head back so the sun shone on her throat and all her hair floated on the pool’s surface behind her.

  “We could go see the ocean after. If you want?” Oceans, like mountains, used to have a certain effect on Alice’s state of mind.

  “The pool’s just fine,” she said.

  She spat at us again and then she dipped quietly under the water and I waited for her to come up, but instead she swam the length of the pool and stayed underwater for what felt like minutes.

  IT WAS LATE when the phone rang. Too late. Alice and I were on the bed with a good foot between us. I had thought she was sleeping but she grabbed the phone fast.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello? Is William there?” I heard Dr. Sherman’s voice.

  “No.” Alice hung up the phone.

  “That was for work, Alice!” I shouted. “She’s the head of Collections.”

  “And? What in the hell is she calling for at this hour?”

  I shrugged; I had no answer for that.

  “You asshole,” Alice said.

  I tried to go to her but she pushed me away. The curls at her temple were damp. I wanted to touch her forehead but she turned away from me and put her pillow over her head.

  I WOKE UP hard. I reached for Alice, found her hand, and put it on my dick. She held me for a minute, cupping my balls. She let Tess scream and I wanted to fuck Alice so bad, but then she went to Tess and plucked her from the hotel’s borrowed crib. She fed her on the edge of the bed and I just lay there thinking about Alice’s body in the pool and about peeling that wet suit from her skin and tasting her. I sat up in bed hoping to pull her in to me, but I jolted backward when I saw the skull from the box grinning at me from across the room.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  Tess cried out.

  “William!” Alice shouted. “She was almost asleep.”

  She turned back to me. I motioned at the skull on the desk.

  “What’s that doing out?”

  “I was looking at it,” she whispered. “I was curious.”

  “About what?”

  “Never mind. I just forgot to put it away is all.”

  The floodlights from the parking lot outside filtered through the blinds and cast striped shadows on Alice and Tess, the bed, the skull. The sutures on top of the cranium gleamed and seemed to eat all the light in the room. I hurried to put it back inside the box, which I slid under the desk again. Alice glared at me with Tess still attached to her nipple. It occurred to me I was going crazy; I felt a heat emanating from her breasts. I reached out and touched them and they were hot beneath my fingertips. Then I put the back of my hand on her forehead and it came away wet.

  “You’re sweating,” I told her.

  “Obviously.” She wiped her temples and then put Tess on me and went into the bathroom where I heard her throw up. She flushed the toilet. When she started throwing up again I collected Tess’s things and threw on some clothes. I found the phone book under the Bible in the bedside table.

  When Alice came out from the bathroom, I told her we were going to the doctor. She didn’t protest. Her hair hung in limp curls, some of them plastered to her skull so I could see the shape of her head, like the cranium in the box.

  AT THE HOSPITAL they pumped her full of fluids and antibiotics and also something that knocked her out. I sat in the waiting room, nervously jostling Tess and surveying the pictures on the walls. The hospitals in Wisconsin all have pictures of exotic, mostly tropical locales—Hawaii or Florida or the Caribbean—palm trees and white sand beaches and brightly colored fish swimming through coral. I was surprised to see that the hospitals in Florida had the same photos. They hadn’t chosen pictures of the snow-covered fore
sts of northern Wisconsin or the grass plains of Wisconsin’s Driftless Area or the shores of Lake Michigan. A doctor touched my elbow gently and I stood up. Tess squirmed awkwardly as I squeezed her against me.

  “She’s going to be just fine,” he said.

  I nodded. “Thanks,” I said.

  “Mastitis is serious but highly treatable.”

  “Mastitis?”

  “Infection and inflammation of the milk ducts.”

  I made a face.

  “With antibiotics and rest she’ll be just fine.”

  I wished he would stop saying the word fine.

  “When can she go?”

  “We’ll keep her through the night but she’s free to go tomorrow. There’s something else, though.” The doctor motioned for us to sit. “I’m concerned about Alice’s mental health.”

  “I’m sorry?” My head felt thick.

  “I’ve referred her to a psychiatrist.”

  The doctor reached out and rubbed Tess’s chubby little arm and I instinctively pulled her away.

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

  The doctor handed me some pamphlets. “Here’s some literature,” he said. “Call me if you have questions.”

  “Alice is . . .” I waited. “Eccentric.”

  The doctor gave me a heavy look that I thought said, Oh, you poor, dumb fuck. And then he stood and left me alone with Tess and those stupid pictures on the walls.

  IN THE MORNING, the doctor said they were keeping Alice until midday because she was still dehydrated and also sleep-deprived. Let’s be honest, I told him, we’re all sleep-deprived. I took Tess with me to the university to inquire about the second box of remains. Dr. Sherman was surprised to see us, which is to say she was surprised to see Tess. On Dr. Sherman’s face, I watched myself turn into a completely different person. Neither of us mentioned the phone call.

  She brought us into the basement. She’d found the juvenile. I put Tess’s car seat on the floor and rocked it with my foot as Dr. Sherman inventoried the skeleton. When she’d counted all seven of the cervical vertebrae and placed them back in the box, she put her hand out to shake mine.

  “Where’s the cranium?” I asked her.

  She checked the sheet.

  “Tell John Mark—no cranium,” she said.

  “No cranium?”

  “Well, that’s right.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  This seemed an appropriate place for an apology but instead Dr. Sherman asked, “You’re a doctoral student?”

  “Yeah, I’m doing Mississippian ceramics.”

  “Ah, so you’re a pothead,” she said.

  I smiled like I hadn’t heard this joke a thousand times. “Sure.” I put the cardboard box under one arm and Tess’s car seat under the other.

  “Drive safe,” Dr. Sherman shouted after us.

  WE WENT TO pick up Alice from the hospital. She was ready, back in her own clothes, her bag hanging off one shoulder. When I hugged her, she was limp, and I still felt the heat in her breasts when they pressed against my chest.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  She moved her lips against my neck. “If you leave me again, I’ll kill you.”

  Alice leaned down to peer through the window. Tess was in the car seat, the box of juvenile bones beside her.

  “Jesus, William,” she said. “You couldn’t have put those in the trunk?”

  “Our dig kits are still back there. There’s no more room.”

  “Maybe you should just throw mine away,” she said.

  “Don’t say that.”

  Alice eased herself into the passenger seat. “Are we going to the ocean?” she asked me.

  “What?”

  “You said we could go to the ocean, Will.”

  “I don’t know. Are you feeling . . . okay?”

  She leaned her head against the window.

  “Whatever,” she said. “Let’s just go home.”

  WE STOPPED THAT night in a small town north of Atlanta. The signs off the highway advertised the local petting zoo with faded photos of peacocks. Alice pointed at them.

  “Hey,” Alice said. She poked me in the arm. A bit of electricity shocked my skin. “Do you remember the peacocks?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said. The first site we’d worked on together had been in a grassy field adjacent to a peacock farm. We’d slept in thin canvas tents, so we heard the birds when they cried in the night. They sounded like children afraid of the dark. Alice and I were grateful for the birds, believing they provided cover for our own nightly noise. When a tornado tore through the site late in the summer, it stripped the birds of their feathers and littered the field with their bodies.

  “We never saw any of them alive,” she said.

  WE WERE IN Indiana again when we ran into a whiteout. The cars slowed to a crawl and then eventually we stopped altogether. I put my blinkers on, but there was nothing to see outside. It felt as if we were in a tunnel, a wormhole, like maybe if I closed my eyes and opened them minutes or hours or years later I might wake to another world. I tried this, staring hungrily at the backs of my eyelids, but when I opened them the world outside was still white and without dimensions and Alice was bouncing her leg and watching me with wide eyes. The headlights from the southbound lane were soft orbs suspended in snowfall. Some people turned their lights off and on, off and on. What were they trying to say? We waited and it snowed in gusts that began to bury the car.

  The engine blew cold air through the heat vents and I smelled something on fire. There was a gash of white light in the air that opened up the storm, seemed to split the whole thing at its seam, and for a second I could see the line of cars stopped on the highway ahead, and then the storm closed around us again.

  “Thundersnow,” Alice said.

  Tess started screaming. There was another flash of lightning and the world went harsh white.

  “I went to the clinic,” Alice said. “I never told you.”

  “What happened?”

  “There was a girl outside, denim skirt to her ankles, waist-length braid, you know. She gave me a hundred-dollar bill and said I could keep it if I didn’t go inside.”

  Alice shivered and I turned to dig in the back, pushing aside the bones and our luggage for a blanket, which I put over her. She looked pale. The snow kept on and on.

  “What did you do?”

  “I kept the money.”

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  “I hope we die,” Alice said. Her eyes were closed.

  “You don’t mean that.”

  But I couldn’t be sure. Tess screamed louder and neither of us reached for her. It seemed all our time since she was born could be divided into two existences—the one in which Tess slept and the one in which she screamed.

  “I do. I’ve lost it.”

  A white, hot fear spread out from my heart.

  “Stop,” I said.

  “You’re not listening. You never listen to me.”

  She unbuckled her seat belt and the car shuddered in the wind. She twisted her body around and reached for Tess. I was afraid of her. She held our baby tight to her breasts and Tess quieted for a minute, rooting for the nipple, but when Alice didn’t pull her shirt down, Tess started screaming again.

  “For Christ’s sake, Alice, just feed her already.”

  But she wouldn’t. Instead she took the palm of her hand and put it over Tess’s tiny face, covering her nose and mouth, and she went silent without her breath, and I slapped Alice hard on the face, waking her from herself, maybe, and when her arms went slack I took Tess and held her into my sternum, where she still searched for Alice’s nipple. I kissed Tess’s eyelids, which were squeezed shut. Tried to think of something to say. Alice unbuttoned her shirt and her breasts were red, inflamed. She held her hands out and I wanted to keep Tess; I didn’t trust Alice at all, but I knew the baby was hungry and I couldn’t help her. I handed her over to Alice.

  TESS WAS FINALLY dozing when I heard the
sirens moving toward us. It was dark and massive drifts of snow continued to blow over the car. I thought I could see headlights, but maybe I was delirious. I couldn’t feel my feet. I tried the door but it was jammed, and guessing by the windows I figured the drift was four or five feet high. It was still snowing, although the wind seemed to be dying down. The sirens were closer and there was the sound of plows, the scrape of shovels, the swinging beams of flashlights. There were four National Guardsmen with headlamps and they pried the driver’s door open. One of them leaned in and his lamp lit up the inside of the car so brightly I squinted.

  The guardsman started to help me out, but I stopped him when I remembered the bones. The skeleton in the trunk was a lost cause, but I grabbed the box in the back seat, the one containing the juvenile remains, and held it to my chest as he pulled me out of the car by my armpits and I scrambled up through the tunnel of snow and into the night. On top of the drift, I sank a couple of inches and saw the car was buried much deeper on the other side; the snow had blown high over the top of the passenger door. The stretch of highway ahead was tundra. As far as I could see tiny armies were digging people out. I held the box tightly, suddenly petrified of spilling the bones on the highway, losing them for good.

  I crouched down to see Alice coming up out of that snow tunnel with Tess zipped into her coat. The guardsman was already up and out; she’d probably refused the help I’d accepted from him. She came out from the snow cave looking like some picture from my Anthro 101 textbook—an erotic portrait of an early human, wild hair, eyes shining, a child strapped to chest.

  The guardsmen escorted us to the tanks, and then to a motel in town.

  IT WAS AN old one-story motel—a wraparound building with white plastic chairs outside, doors that opened right onto the parking lot. A man was smoking a cigarette outside his room, wearing sweatpants tucked into snow boots. In the strip mall across the parking lot, I bought two bottles of red wine and Chinese takeout. I sat on the edge of the bed and ate out of the cartons. Tess slept in the hotel crib. There was a TV on the dresser and a mirror on the bathroom door that faced the bed. Looked as if there were fingerprints on it, like maybe somebody had fucked against it, or else someone had touched her mirror self with greasy hands, once. Alice took a shower and then sat down with me. She put her head in her hands and the vertebrae in her neck were sharp knobs. I thought of the box of bones I’d left buried beneath the snow. Alice toyed with a fortune cookie. She rolled the paper between her fingers and I remembered her hand over Tess’s face in the car.