The Best American Short Stories 2015

  “Away? Where could you possibly go?” cried Bertie.

  Lisa said she’d heard there was a good doctor in Phoenix; she’d start there.

  “For how long?” Bertie had asked—and when Lisa didn’t answer—“And I suppose you plan on taking the money with you?”

  “It is mine,” said Lisa.

  No one could argue with that.

  Jack pulled the cord, made his way to the rear exit of the bus. The door opened with a life-support hiss.

  Whiplash of light coming off a skyscraper. Jack held up his hand to block the sun’s reflection, a roundish blur of ghostly ectoplasm that hovered somewhere around the twentieth floor—which the boy’s street sense interpreted, correctly, as roughly five o’clock.

  Please be over soon, he thought, knowing full well that the day would linger for hours yet. Even after sunset, the heat would be terrible—the sidewalks, the streets, the buildings, radiating back the fire they’d absorbed all day. There’d be no relief until well after midnight.

  Jack walked south, toward the barrio, toward the sound of firecrackers, the whistle of bottle rockets. Later, at dark, the neon pompoms would come—the big holiday displays at the foothills resorts, and the city-sponsored show on Sentinel Peak, which half the time had to be stopped due to the scrub catching on fire. From the valley, you could watch the flames flowing down the mountain like lava. People looked forward to that as much as to the fireworks.

  Jack walked with no particular purpose and was surprised when he found himself standing before Flaco’s house. There was the white storybook fence around the neatly swept yard; the saint with her garland of artificial flowers, standing on a lake of tinfoil. At the Virgin’s feet, a weird mix of things: playing cards and plastic beads, and what looked like pieces of old bread. Jack had always loved this diorama, which lived inside a little cage like a chicken coop. To protect it from the rain, Flaco’s mother had explained.

  He wondered if she’d still recognize him, maybe give him some carne seca wrapped in a tortilla as thin as tissue paper. In so many ways, his life had started in this house. A thousand hopes and dreams. Jack wondered if they were still in there, inside Flaco’s spray-painted bedroom. Wondered too if there might be any crystal left in one of the old hiding spots.

  Five years was a long time, though. Someone would already have smoked it or flushed it down the drain. And besides, Jack didn’t have the stamina to crawl through another window. He was done with windows and doors. He half considered climbing inside the chicken coop with the saint.

  The sadness bloomed in his belly. It always started there—a radioactive flower, chaotic, spinning out in weird fractals until it found its way to his arms and legs, his quivering lips. Then the telltale buzz of electricity in his hair.

  See, this was the reason it was better to go fast with another person—so that when you crashed, you weren’t alone. The high too was better when shared. Sometimes he and Flaco, as a team, could increase the effect of the drugs, pinballing around the bedroom, generating so much heat they could barely stand the feel of their clothing. Often they’d ripped off their shirts, lain next to each other on the bed, watched in amazement as their words turned into flames, rose into the air like rockets.

  Flaco—and this was something Jack wished to mention in his documentary—Flaco had not died from crystal. It had been something else, something stupid, a car.

  Walking away from the imprisoned saint, Jack passed old women putting lawn chairs along the street, claiming spots. Brujas in flowered smocks and slappy flip-flops, some with brooms, territorial. Later they’d sit there with glasses of watermelon juice and watch the fireworks, the burning mountain.

  Farther south now, past Birrieria Guadalajara, where he and Flaco used to eat everything, even tongue.

  Lengua.

  Words no longer seemed chimeric to Jack, no longer seemed approximations for something else. They were earthbound now, which was what happened when you were sober. Jack clenched his fists—untrimmed nails digging into his flesh. All he wanted was to find a safe place before the blooms made a mess of the sky.

  He stopped at the railroad tracks. Stopped right between the iron rails, kicked aside some trash, and sat. In his dark jeans, his dirt-brown shirt, they might not even see him. “Ow,” he said, because of the stones as he lay down.

  While the sun cooked him, he became aware of how dirty he was. He could smell himself, even a slight tang of shit. Disgusting. His breath stank—and his stomach was bubbling, an ungodly flatulence from a diet of protein bars and black smoke. It was understandable why others would despise him. Most people lived their entire lives straight and had no ability whatsoever to see through surfaces—unlike Jack, who’d been schooled in crystal and who understood how easy it was to forgive.

  Who knew if Lisa forgave him? He hoped she didn’t. He was the one who’d thrown the Frisbee over the fence, a total spaz, missing Lisa by a mile. She’d pulled a face and told him to go get it. “You’re closer,” he’d shouted back. “You get it.”

  Jack turned his head, to see if he could spot the train. Flicker of distant traffic: metal and glass. Lost saguaros, catatonic, above which birds drifted in slow circles, like pieces of ash. To the east, the mountains, shrouded in dust, were all but invisible. The train would come eventually, the crazy quilt of boxcars, the fractious whistle.

  Oh, but it was so boring waiting for death! Jack had come to the tracks before. When the signal light began to flash, he jumped up. He wasn’t an idiot.

  Besides, he couldn’t help himself; his sadness was like a river, carrying him home.

  “You don’t like your life, make up another one.” Something Bertie used to say. Her children had, in the end, listened to her.

  Jack kept running, and when he got to Jamie’s he didn’t knock; he walked right in, sat at the table.

  It wasn’t long before Jamie came into the kitchen in his phony orange kimono (“Mijo! Mijo!”), flapping his arms, flushing, like something out of a Mexican soap opera.

  And though Jack didn’t laugh, he remembered the part of himself that had—and not so long ago. Still, he flinched when the man tried to touch his face.

  In the silence that followed, Jamie began to smile.

  “What?” said Jack—and Jamie said, “I’m just looking at you.”

  “Why?”

  “Do I need a reason?”

  Jack shrugged, evasive. “I’m sort of hungry.”

  “Well,” Jamie said grandly, “you’re dealing with an expert on that subject. The only question is: animal, vegetable, or mineral?” This last word sugarcoated, singsong.

  Jack looked up, hopefully.

  “Yes, mijo.” Jamie patted the pocket of his kimono. “I do I do I do.”

  “I do,” repeated Jack, feeling his heart leap straight into the man’s fat little hand.

  COLUM MCCANN

  Sh’khol

  FROM Zoetrope: All-Story

  IT WAS THEIR first Christmas in Galway together, mother and son. The cottage was hidden alongside the Atlantic, blue-windowed, slate-roofed, tucked near a grove of sycamore trees. The branches were bent inland by the wind. White spindrift blew up from the sea, landing softly on the tall hedges in the back garden.

  During the day Rebecca could hear the rhythmic approach and fall of the waves against the shore. At night the sounds seemed to double.

  Even in the wet chill of the December evenings, she slept with her window open, listening to the roll of the water sweeping up from the low cliffs, rasping over the run of stone walls, toward the house, where it seemed to pause, hover a moment, then break.

  On Christmas morning she left his present on the fireplace, by the small tree. Boxed and wrapped and tied with red ribbons. Tomas tore the package open, and it fell in a bundle at his feet. He had no idea what it was at first: he held it by the legs, then the waist, turned it upside down, clutched it dark against his chest.

  She reached behind the tree and removed a second package: neoprene boo
ts and a hood. Tomas stripped his shoes and shirt: he was thin, strong, pale. When he tore off his trousers, she glanced away.

  The wetsuit was liquid around him: she had bought it two sizes too big so he could grow into it. He spread his arms wide and whirled around the room: she hadn’t seen him so happy in months.

  She gestured to him that they would go down to the water in a few hours.

  Thirteen years old and there was already a whole history written in him. She had adopted him from Vladivostok at the age of six. On her visit to the orphanage, she had seen him crouched beneath a swing set. His hair was blond, his eyes a pellucid blue. Sores on his neck. Long, thin scars on his lower back. His gums soft and bloody. He had been born deaf, but when she called out his name he had turned quickly toward her: a sign, she was sure of it.

  Shards of his story would always be a mystery to her: the early years, an ancestry she knew nothing about, a rumor that he’d been born near a rubbish dump. The possible inheritances: mercury, radiation sickness, beatings.

  She was aware of what she was getting herself into, but she had been with Alan then. They stayed in a shabby hotel overlooking the Bay of Amur. Days of bribes and panic. Anxious phone calls late in the night. Long hours in the waiting room. A diagnosis of fetal alcohol syndrome gave them pause. Still, they left after six weeks, swinging Tomas between them. On the Aeroflot flight, the boy kept his head on her shoulder. At customs in Dublin, her fingers trembled over the paperwork. The stamp came down when Alan signed. She grabbed Tomas’s hand and ran him, laughing, through arrivals: it was her forty-first birthday.

  The days were good then: a three-bedroom house in Stepaside, a series of counselors, therapists, speech experts, and even her parents to help them out.

  Now, seven years on, she was divorced, living out west, her parents were gone, and her task had doubled. Her savings were stretched. The bills slipped one after the other through the letterbox. There were rumors that the special school in Galway might close. Still, she wasn’t given to bitterness or loud complaint. She made a living translating from Hebrew to English—wedding vows, business contracts, cultural pamphlets. There was a literary novel or two from a left-wing publisher in Tel Aviv: the pay was derisory, but she liked stepping into that otherness, and the books were a stay against indifference.

  Forty-eight years old and there was still a beauty about her, an olive to her skin, a sloe to her eyes, an aquiline sweep to her nose. Her hair was dark, her body thin and supple. In the small village she fit in well, even if she stood at a sharp angle to the striking blondness of her son. She relished the Gaeltacht, the shifting weather, the hard light, the wind off the Atlantic. Bundled up against the chill, they walked along the pier, amongst the lobster pots and coiled ropes and disintegrating fishing boats. The rain slapped the windows of the shuttered shops. No tourists in winter. In the supermarket the local women often watched them: more than once Rebecca was asked if she was the bean cabhrach, a word she liked—the help, the nanny, the midwife.

  There was a raw wedge of thrill in her love for him. The presence of the unknown. The journey out of childhood. The step into a future self.

  Some days Tomas took her hand, leaned on her shoulder as they drove through the village, beyond the abandoned schoolhouse, past the whitewashed bungalows toward home. She wanted to clasp herself over him, shroud him, absorb whatever came his way. Most of all she wanted to discover what sort of man might emerge from underneath that very pale skin.

  Tomas wore the wetsuit all Christmas morning. He lay on the floor, playing video games, his fingers fluid on the console. Over the rim of her reading glasses, Rebecca watched the gray stripe along the sleeve move. It was, she knew, a game she shouldn’t allow—tanks, ditches, killings, tracer bullets—but it was a small sacrifice for an hour of quiet.

  No rage this Christmas, no battles, no tears.

  At noon she gestured for him to get ready: the light would fade early. She had two wetsuits of her own in the bedroom cupboard, but she left them hanging, pulled on running shoes, an anorak, a warm scarf. At the door Tomas threw his duffle coat loose around the neoprene.

  —Just a quick dip, she said in Irish.

  There was no way of knowing how much of any language Tomas could understand. His signing was rudimentary, but she could tell a thing or two from the carry of his body, the shape of his shoulders, the hold of his mouth. Mostly she divined from his eyes. He was handsome in a roguish way: the eyes themselves were narrow, yes, but agile. He had no other physical symptoms of fetal alcohol, no high brow, no thin lip, no flat philtrum.

  They stepped out into a shaft of light so clear and bright it seemed made of bone. Just by the low stone wall, a cloud curtained across and the light dropped gray again. A few stray raindrops stung their faces.

  This was what she loved about the west of Ireland: the weather made from cinema. A squall could blow in at any time and moments later the gray would be hunted open with blue.

  One of the walls down by the bottom field had been reinforced with metal pipes. It was the worst sort of masonry, against all local tradition, but the wind moved across the mouths of the hollow tubes and pierced the air with a series of accidental whistles.

  Tomas ran his hand over the pipes, one by one, adjusting the song of the wall. She was sure his fingers could gauge the vibrations in the metal. Small moments like these, they crept up, joyously sliced her open.

  Halfway toward the water, he broke into a Charlie Chaplin walk—feet pointed out, an imaginary walking stick twirling as he bent forward into the gale. He made a whooping sound as he topped a rise and caught sight of the sea. She called at him to wait: it was habit now, even if his back was turned. He remained at the edge of the cliff, walking in place, rotating his wrist. Almost a perfect imitation. Where had he seen Chaplin? Some video game maybe? Some television show? There were times she thought that, despite the doctors, he might still someday crack open the impossible longings she held for him.

  At the precipice, above the granite seastack, they paused. The waves hurried to shore. Long scribbles of white. She tapped him on the small of his back where the wetsuit bunched. The neoprene hood framed his face. His blond hair peeked out.

  —Stay where it’s shallow now. Promise me.

  She scooted behind him on her hunkers. The grass was cold on her fingertips. Her feet slid forward in the mud, dropped from the small ledge into the coarse scree below. The rocks were slick with seaweed. A small crab scuttled in a dark pool.

  Tomas was already knee-deep in the cove.

  —Don’t go any farther now, she called.

  She had been a swimmer when she was a child, had competed for Dublin and Leinster both. Rows of medals in her childhood bedroom. A championship trophy from Brussels. The rumor of a scholarship to an American university: a rotator cuff injury had cut her short.

  She had taught Tomas to swim during the warmth of the summer. He knew the rules. No diving. End to end in the cove. Never get close to the base of the seastack.

  Twice he looked as if he were about to round the edge of the dark rock into the deeper water: once when he saw a windsurfer, yet again when a yellow kayak went swiftly by.

  She waved her arms: Just no more, love, OK?

  He returned to her, fanned the low water with his fingers, splashed it high around her, both arms in a Chaplin motion.

  —Stop it, please, said Rebecca softly. You’re soaking me.

  He splashed her again, turned away, dove under for ten seconds, fourteen, fifteen, eighteen, came up ten yards away, spluttering for air.

  —Come on, now. Please. Come in.

  Tomas swam toward the seastack, the dark of his feet disappearing into the water. She watched his wetsuit ripple under the surface. A long, sleek shadow.

  A flock of seabirds serried over the low waves in a taunt. Her body stiffened. She edged forward again, waited.

  I have, she thought, made a terrible mistake.

  She threw off her coat and dove in. The cold stunned t
he length of her, slipped immediately along her skin.

  The second she climbed from the water, she realized she had left her phone in the pocket of her jeans. She unclipped the battery, shook the water out.

  Tomas lay on the sand, looking up. His blue eyes. His red face. His swollen lips. It had been easy enough to pull him from the cove. He hadn’t struggled. She’d swum up behind him, placed her hands gently behind his shoulders, interlocked his fingers, pulled him ashore. He lay there, smiling.

  She whipped her wet hair sideways, turned toward the cliff. A surge of relief moved along her spine when she glanced back: he was following her.

  The cottage felt so suddenly isolated: the small, blue windows, the bright half-door. He stood in a puddle in the middle of the floor, his lips trembling.

  Rebecca put the phone in a bag of rice to soak the moisture, shook the bag. No backup phone. No landline. Christmas Day. Alan, she thought. He hadn’t even called. He could have tried earlier. The thought of him in Dublin now, with his new family, their tidy house, their decorations, their dramas. A simple call, it would have been so easy.

  —Your father never even phoned, she said as she crossed the room.

  She wondered if the words were properly understood, and if they were, did they cut to the core: your father, d’athair, abba? What rattled inside? How much could he possibly catch? The experts in Galway said that his comprehension was minimal, but they could never be sure; no one could guess his inner depth.