The Best American Short Stories 2013 (10 page)

“Actually, no, I don’t think you’re paying attention to what I’m saying.” She fixed him with a sad look, even though what she felt was positive rage. Inwardly, she was resisting the impulse to snatch their baby out of his arms. With one part of her mind, she saw this impulse as animal truth, if not actually unique to her; but with another part, she thought:
Every mother feels this way, every mother has felt this, it’s time to stand up
. She was not going to chalk this one up to postpartum depression or hormonal imbalances or feminine moodiness. She had come upon this truth, and she would not let it go. She felt herself lifting off. “You can’t be his mother. You can’t do this. I won’t let you.”

“You’re in a moment, Susan,” he said. “You’ll get over it.”

“No, I won’t get over it.” Raphael burped onto Elijah. “I’ll never get over it, and you will not fucking tell me that I will.”

“Please stop shouting,” he said, ostentatiously calm.

“This is not your territory. This is my territory, and you can’t have it.”

“Are we going to argue about metaphors? Because that’s the wrong metaphor.”

“We aren’t going to argue about anything. Put him down. Put him into the crib.”

Elijah stood for a few seconds, and then with painfully executed elaboration he lowered Raphael into the crib and pulled over him the blue blanket that Elijah’s mother had made for the baby. He started up the music box and turned around. Both his hands were tightened into fists.

“I’m going out,” he said. “I’ve got to go out right now.”

She closed her eyes, and when she opened them, he was gone.

She went downstairs and turned on the TV. On the screen—she kept the sound muted because she didn’t really want to get attached to the story—a man with an eagle tattoo on his forearm aimed a gun at a distant figure of indistinct gender. The man fired, whereupon the distant figure fell. The screen cut to a brightly lit room where male authority figures of some kind were jotting down notes and answering landline telephones while they held cups of coffee. Perhaps, she thought, this was an old movie. One woman, probably a cop, heard something on the phone and reacted with alarm. Then she shouted at the others in the room, and their shocked faces were instantly replaced by a soap commercial showing a cartoon rhinoceros in a bubble bath set upon by a trickster monkey, and this commercial was then replaced by another one, with grinning skydivers falling together in a geometrical pattern advertising an insurance company, and then the local newscaster came on with a tease for the ten o’clock news, followed by a commercial for a multinational petroleum operation apparently dedicated to cleaning up the environment and saving baby seals, and Susan scratched her foot, and she was looking at the no-longer-distant figure (a young woman, as it turned out) on an autopsy table as a medical examiner pointed at a bullet hole in the victim’s rib-cage area—tantalizingly close to her breasts, which were demurely covered, though the handheld camera seemed eager to see them—and Susan felt her eyes getting heavy, and then another, older woman was hit by a tram in Prague, which was how Susan knew she was dreaming. Sleeping, she wondered when Elijah would return. She wondered, for a moment, where her husband had gone.

When she woke up, Elijah stood before her, bleeding from the side of his mouth, a bruise starting to form just under his left eye. His knuckles were caked and bloody. On his face was an expression of joyful defiance. He was blocking the TV set. It was as if he had come out of it somehow.

She stood up and reached toward him. “You’re bleeding.”

He brushed her hand away. “Let me bleed.”

“What did you say?”

“You heard me. Let me bleed.” He was smilingly jubilant. The smile looked like one of the smiles on the faces of the angels in the Loreto chapel.

“What happened to you?” she asked. “You got into a fight. My God. We need to put some ice or something on that.” She tried to reach for him again, and again he moved away from her.

“Leave me alone. Listen,” he said, straightening up, “you want to know what happened? This is what happened. I was angry at you, and I started walking, and I ended up in Alta Plaza Park. I walked in there, you know, where it was dark? Off those steep stairs on Clay Street? And this is the thing. I wanted to kill somebody. That’s kind of a new emotion for me, wanting to kill somebody. I mean, I wasn’t looking for someone to kill, but that’s what I was
thinking
. I’m just trying to be honest here. So I went up the stairs and found myself at the top, with the view, with the famous view of the city.

“Everybody admires the view, and I looked off into the darkness and thought I heard a scream, somewhere off there in the distance, and so, you know, I went toward it, toward the scream, the way anybody would. So I made my way off into the shadows, and what I saw was this other thing.”

“This thing?”

“Yeah, that’s right. This other thing. These two guys were beating up this girl, tearing her clothes, and then they had her down, one of them was holding her down, and the other one was, you know, lowering his jeans. No one else was around. So I went in.

“I wasn’t even thinking. I went in and grabbed the guy who was holding her down, and I slugged him. The other one, he got up and punched me in the kidneys. The woman, I think
she
stood up. No, I
know
she stood up because she said something in Spanish, and she ran away. I was fighting these guys, and she took off. She didn’t stay. I know she ran because when I hit the guy who was behind me with my elbow, I saw her running away, and I saw that she was barefoot.”

“This was in Alta Plaza Park?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s in Pacific Heights. They don’t usually have crime over there.”

“Well, they did tonight. I was fighting with those guys, and I finally landed a good one, on the first guy, and I broke his jaw.
I heard it break
. That was when they took off. The second guy took off, and the one with the broken jaw was groaning and went after him. No honor among thieves.” He smiled. “Goddamn, I feel great.”

She lifted his hand and touched the knuckles where scabs were forming. “So you were brave.”

“Yes, I was.”

“You saved her.”

“Anybody would have done it.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t think so.”

She led him upstairs and sat him down on the edge of the bathtub. With a washcloth, she dabbed the blood off his hands and face. There was something about his story she didn’t believe, and then for a moment she didn’t accept a word of it, but she continued to wash him tenderly as if he were the hero he said he was. He groaned quietly when she touched some newly bruised part of him. He would look terrible for a while. How happy that would make him! She could easily get some steak, or hamburger, or whatever you were supposed to apply to a black eye to make the swelling go away, but no, he wouldn’t want that. He would want his badge. They all wanted that.

“Should we go to bed, doctor?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I love you,” she said. They would postpone the argument about feedings until tomorrow, or next week.

“I love you too.”

She took him upstairs and undressed him, just as if he were a child, before lowering him onto the sheets. He sighed loudly. She could hear Raphael’s breath coming from the nursery. She was about to go to her son’s room to check on him and then thought better of it. Standing in the hallway, she heard a voice asking, “What will you do with another day?” Who had asked that? Elijah was asleep. Anyway, it was a nonsensical question. The air had asked it, or she was hearing voices. She went into the bathroom to brush her teeth. She didn’t quite recognize her own face in the mirror, but the reflected swollen tender breasts were still hers, and the smile, when she thought of sweet Elijah bravely fighting someone, somewhere—that was hers too.

MICHAEL BYERS

FROM
Bellevue Literary Review

W
HEN I WAS
in college in Eugene I had a girlfriend named Nora Vardon. We had fallen together sort of accidentally, I talked to her first at a vending machine where we were both buying coffee, and things progressed in the usual slow ways, we went out one cold night to look at the blurry stars, and that led to some kissing, and from there we started the customary excavation of our families, revealing, not quite competitively, how crazy they both were, she with a raft of depressives and schizophrenics and me with a bunch of drunks, mainly the men on my father’s side. She had an open, genial, feline face, with big cheeks and dark eyes, and a big, soft body that was round in parts and that was covered, for three months out of the year, with the big textured bruises left by lacrosse balls. She was very pretty, really, and I counted myself lucky to be around her. I was skinny and out of necessity got cheap haircuts, so I wasn’t much to look at, and I tended to be secretive, I suppose you could put it that way, although I had nothing to be secretive about, being only twenty and unadventurous.

But Nora and I hit it off. She was studying botany, for which the college had a sort of reputation, and spent her hours in the long white greenhouses at the edge of campus. The heat affected her well. Her hair, brown and a little wavy, would become affixed to her cheeks, and as she worked at the potting tables her dark eyes would take on a comfortable, meditative languor there amid the odor of the soil and the dense humid air and the metallic smell of water dripping from the galvanized piping. To find Nora there I would have come from the library’s back door and out across a section of newly planted pines, which were staked to the earth as though they might otherwise pull up their roots and walk away. The sky in winter was usually sealed with a dense marine overcast, but inside the greenhouses the light was bright, brilliant, and contained. “My ride is here,” Nora would say to no one, as I came down the concrete walkway—or, “My Orlando,” with the accent purposely wrong, on the last syllable, and her mouth would make its charming little O, and I’d give her a kiss, and it would be enough to make me happy.

Nora and I had friends, most of them Nora’s, actually, and we did the usual collegiate things, mostly just drinking, sitting around talking until late: black Emory from Philadelphia, fat Harold the townie, tall flaxen Winnie from Texas, the sad red-haired poet Matt Grange. I worked with Matt three mornings a week in the alumni office, answering phones. Matt would sit at his desk, composing his lines and crumpling them up and throwing them away, and I would sit at my desk across the room from him, doing nothing, and every now and then a perfect peace would come over me, for no reason I could find, and even just sitting and typing under the fluorescent lights—with the rain clouds gathering beyond the tall windows—seemed a civilized and decent thing to do, maybe for the rest of my life. At the time I didn’t have much idea of what I wanted, in the larger sense, but it didn’t worry me. I thought I might like to work for a newspaper one day, maybe in Eugene, or maybe in Seattle, where I came from, but there was plenty of time, I thought, and plenty of time after that too. I wasn’t headed anywhere on any fast track, that was plain even then, and I didn’t have any kind of natural flair, but I had Nora, and it felt to me like a fair exchange. I was romantic, in the silly way of young men. The rest of my life, I imagined at the time, would be only a collection of details—addings-on—corollaries—to the central fact of Nora Vardon.

Eventually it came time to visit Nora’s parents, Jack and Annette Vardon, who lived a few hundred miles north in Vancouver, British Columbia. Mr. Vardon turned out to have a friendly oblong head and a mustache, and he worked—I was never quite sure about this—as an engineering manager, or a consultant engineer, maybe as a consultant to other engineering managers, at any rate he went off every day in his beige raincoat and came back at night and seemed to make a good living at his business, whatever it was. We didn’t see much of him. Mrs. Vardon stayed at home and played tennis in the backyard, and had given Nora her dark eyes and round girlish cheeks. “Orlando,” said Annette, on the back porch where we ate, “what an interesting name that is.” The day was unusual, almost warm, though it was only the middle of March.

“They wanted me to be different,” I said.

“You’re not Spanish?”

“No,” I said. “German, mostly.”

“We named Nora after her Spanish great-grandmother.” Nora’s mother wore a little white dress that showed her knobby knees. “Believe it or not, my mother always wanted to be Jewish. In fact she always
said
she was Jewish, but everyone knew she wasn’t. But she wanted to be.”

“Be Jewish?” I asked, for clarity.

“Oh, God knows why. She thought it had some cachet, I suppose. Out of the frying pan and into the fire, if you ask me, in terms of what you have to face in this world.”

“Sure.”

“Now, I admire the Jews,” said Annette.

“Mom.”

“I
do
. I guess everyone does these days. If you don’t, you’re an anti-Semite. But I suppose in admiring them I’m doing something wrong.”

“You’re making them exotic,” said Nora. “You’re
othering
them.”

“Well, I guess I don’t know what you mean. And they
are
exotic. They
are
. To me, they are. I don’t know any, really, except Elly Bergman, and she doesn’t count, she’s not really
anything
. Which not knowing any is a failing on my part. But they’re a very healthy people. Doctors. And they’re a
sad
people, which I like. I like sad people. It’s the way people should be. If everyone was sad, we wouldn’t have all these
problems
.” She cast her arms wide. “Don’t tell me we need all these
problems
.”

While visiting her parents Nora and I slept in separate bedrooms: me in her older brother George’s room (he was living in an apartment a mile or so away and had taken all his things with him, so the room had a neutral, underinhabited feeling) and Nora in her old childhood bedroom with the posters and so forth. Nora wouldn’t sneak in to see me at night, and I didn’t exactly want to take the initiative and go next door, but during the long days, with the father gone and the mother off somewhere with friends, we made up for it in George’s room. Not in hers, Nora insisted, because that would be too weird. And then afterward we’d laze around naked with the light through the windows, listening to the garbage trucks churn through the neighborhood. “I can’t believe she said those things,” said Nora. “You know, she’s always had a thing about Jewish people. I think she’s afraid she’s secretly somehow
one
of them. That her mother was right. That wouldn’t bother you, would it?”