The Best American Short Stories 2015 (50 page)

I wish you the very best of luck in your ventures
, Coxwell writes.
Godspeed
.

It is only when my father goes to put the letter back in the envelope that he discovers the second sheet tucked into one corner, folded neatly into quarters. He unfolds the quadrants, smoothes it against his arm.

In the dusky quiet, my father lets out a whoop. A single meticulous diagram covers the page: a balloon, perfect as a pearl.

Winter comes and goes. Spring.

My mother sweeps a cluster of fallen elderberry blossoms from the steps. As they whirl up around her broom, she sees they are newspaper, shredded into tiny bits.

The ice melts. The stream that empties into the lake swells and groans, the rushing of its overflow so loud it wakes my mother up at night. She lies there a moment, shivering a little under the thin quilt, then turns onto her side and lifts her nightgown so she can press her bare skin against my father's back. He is burning up all the time now, his body running on some strange, inexhaustible fuel.

She is out clipping the laundry on the line to dry one morning when my father steals all the pillowcases from the linen closet and spends an entire afternoon at the edge of the lake, tossing them into the air, where they billow and collapse like lungs. He pulls the leaves off her favorite alder and sits by the water for days, clumsily sewing them together, blunting her needle until it is unsalvageable. He takes all the silverware from the kitchen drawers; he spends the rest of the week building strange, gleaming cities in the sand. At mealtime they eat with their hands and my mother wonders idly if my father is going insane.

He disappears into the water for hours, swimming toward the horizon until the lake closes behind him. Not so much as a ripple to show where he's gone.

A mallard beats its wings, pitching its feet forward as it slows, flapping hard as it comes down to rest on the shore. Its body is sleek and fat, the feathers glossy. My father rubs his eyes and turns to a fresh page.

Balloon! Balloon! Balloon!

My mother begins spending all her time inside. She stops going into town. Stops wading in the stream, surprising unlucky trout. Stops walking the trails up to where the huckleberries cluster in fat blue-black globes, leaves her needlepoint to languish on the bedside table, the thread slowly unspooling. Instead, she stands in the kitchen, stirring sugar into cup after cup of tea, watching my father through the window. The spoon hitting the cup over and over again makes a sound like a little bell.

One evening, when my father finally emerges from one of his marathon swims, the sun hits him from behind just so; he is golden, glowing. The light is so strong it has the peculiar effect of drawing a second, shimmering man around the first, as though my father has doubled himself, gone into the water and emerged with a twin.

He lifts a hand to his forehead, squinting at something in the trees, and his twin does the same, his hand drawing a streak against the sky like a shooting star.

The spoon falls to the floor with a clatter, my mother's pulse suddenly wild.

That night while my father snores, my mother slips her hands under his nightshirt. She runs her fingers across his ribs, up and down the knobby articulation of his spine. He is so thin these days she might see through him. If she lit a candle and brought it under the sheets, she might see straight in to the mess of organs, that dense, wet tangle. She might see through to his heart, the tireless muscle of his desire.

And her?

In one swift motion, she yanks her nightgown up over her head.

At a certain point he clutches her around the waist and she freezes, her hips lifted a quarter-inch above his. But his hands fall away almost immediately. He groans; once, he murmurs her name. Or maybe it is
sorry
. Maybe it is
glory
. Or
goodbye
. She watches his eyes flutter open, the whites of them in the dark startling. After, she lies back against her pillow and folds her arms across her chest. Warmth rises from her like the mist that comes off the lake in early morning. Or like there is something dangerous running through her, both of them burning up from the same fever.

There are things my father wishes he could explain. Things he would like my mother to understand. The sky there is God, he wants to tell her. The ice is God. The fat, hideous walrus is God.

My mother places a pie in the window to cool, standing a few deliberate inches from the steam that rises from it, smelling of burnt sugar. The nausea has just come on. A little over two weeks ago now, but she'd known when the first day of her bleeding came and went without so much as a vague cramping. She has always been regular as a clock. Her body has never failed her. And now—well, now it has done only what she asked of it. She finds the nausea unpleasant but feels otherwise well enough; she is a little tired, occasionally dizzy. No appetite most of the day, though at times hunger comes upon her so suddenly, with such urgency, she finds herself racing to the kitchen to cram hunks of bread down her throat. It helps both nausea and fatigue to focus on a single point. Standing by the window, she pretends she is on a boat in the middle of a vast ocean, though she has never seen the ocean, never seen a body of water larger than this lake. She has never, truth be told, been anywhere. She grips the edge of the kitchen table, pressing her palms against the wood as her stomach rolls and flips. When she closes her eyes, she sees it: hope the size of a seed.

When my father comes in from chopping wood, cheeks red from exertion, she is standing over the pie, halving it, quartering, slicing it into eight. She does not turn around. All these months, he has never said one word about the balloon. He is like a child, afraid to speak his wish for fear of it never coming true. But of course it is ludicrous to pretend my mother doesn't know. Even before the letters, before he began covering the pages of his notebook with sketches and calculations, filling it with the many blueprints of his dreams—long before any of that, she saw it, the glint in his eye.

She does not know when my father's leaving turned from adventure to abandonment. Nor does she know when the freedom to do with her days what she pleases became its own oppression, but she pins some portion of the change to that afternoon up on the mountainside, picking berries. She had been happy tramping through the underbrush, the sun hitting her full-tilt. Her basket filled to the brim with fruit. She had been looking forward to the jam, to the elbow-deep immersion its making required, those many hours hers to do with as she wished. And then, as she turned halfway down to admire the view, something about the lake, the way it curled around the mountainside, still and unwieldy as a giant's finger—something about that had stopped her in her tracks. She had to lie down right there in the bushes and wait until the roaring in her head subsided. This is what she had meant to tell my father. Not about the bears, but about the loneliness that struck her, sudden as a storm.

She places a slice of pie on his plate.

How many pairs of socks, she says, turning, does he think he'll need this time?

At dinner he eats a little less each night. My mother serves him the same heaping plate, twice as much as covers hers, and he mentally quarters each portion and eats as slowly as he can, ignoring the groans of protest from his gut. They are both eating less and less. Pretending for very different reasons that everything is just as it has always been. She pushes her food around with her fork and drinks plain hot water, cup after cup. She has a headache, she says. She is just tired, she says.

My father stands on the shoreline in his undershirt, watching the moon glaze the frozen lake silver. He flips through his notebook, runs his finger across the pages covered top to bottom with his cramped print, his carefully detailed figures, the lists dutifully numbered and separated according to category. The few letters received in reply he keeps tucked into the back cover, the pages folded and refolded so many times the paper has been worn to unnatural softness, Coxwell's balloon diagram the texture of velvet.

My mother has stopped crying. For this, he is grateful.

A loon calls somewhere not too far from where he stands and he squints into the glowing darkness, searching.

Behind him, the last candle gutters out in the cabin.

Bal-loon
, cries the loon.
Bal-loon, bal-loon
.

The weather begins to turn again. The snow melts on the mountainside, sending down water like a biblical flood.

My mother wakes one night to a sensation so strange she nearly cries out: just below her rib cage, under the new softness in her belly, a small wave rolls through her. She lies there in the dark for hours after, pressing her hand against the memory.

The day my father leaves, my mother wakes early. She slips out of bed, pulls his favorite dress over her head. She has made a special trip into town the day before, buying provisions for pancakes: flour, butter, eggs, precious as gold. Even so, it is not until she stands there buttoning her dress in the semi-darkness, her fingers trembling so violently she finally abandons the last few, that she realizes what she will do. What she has been planning to do ever since she felt me in the night, flipping inside her like a little fish.

She stands in the kitchen, whisking salt into the flour. Her heart is everywhere: in her throat, her chest, the heat she feels in her cheeks. She will tell him over breakfast. She will get up from her chair as he wipes the last of the syrup from his plate, take his hand and place his palm flat against her belly, the give where, soon enough, I will push the skin out, taut as a drum.

“John,” she will say. “After your father. Dorothy if it is a girl.”

What he is leaving behind is no different that what he is leaving for, she will tell him. A truth stranger than any magic: Inside her is the wildest land.

She stands and pours the first of the batter on the griddle, making a neat row of circles. She is humming loudly to cover up the noise of her heart, a tune she used to sing with her sisters—so long ago now she remembers no more than the refrain:
my dear, my sweetheart, my hind
. When my father walks in, she turns away to hide her smile.

“Mary,” he says, and when she hears the determination in his voice something that is not me flips over inside her.
“Mary,”
he says urgently. “Listen to me,” he says. “I am going to change the world.”

And just like that, her smile disappears.

My father has been gone four months the night my mother wakes up to a band of pain like a vise tightening around the swell of her belly. She shifts onto her side and lies still as long as she can stand it. It is dark when she wakes, and as she turns onto one side, then the other, she watches the light begin to seep in around the edges of the curtains. She watches, in particular, one bar the width of her ankle, makes herself guess the length it creeps along the floor. When the pain gets worse, she stands and paces the small living room. It takes ten steps to go from one wall to another. ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR. She counts out loud. In between contractions, she puts wood into the stove, manages to get a few pots of water boiling. She can't imagine what she will do with the water but she remembers this from her own mother, the pots bubbling on the stove, remembers the births of each of her four younger sisters, the hot, salty smell that filled their small house, the dampness hanging in the air. She remembers the look on her mother's face, after, the blunt incredulousness of it. The broken veins beneath her eyes strange and beautiful, like crushed flowers. She remembers her sisters, each blonder than the last, and she, my mother, dark as an owl. How terrible that love should contain such contradictions. How utterly insane, she thinks, biting down on the pillow, that her body should think it can contain another human being. She ought to have known all along it is madness, this business of belonging. It is lunacy.

As the contractions get stronger, my mother stares out the window at the water, bright with the last of the moonlight, and counts off the seconds until they are done. She says the two names to herself, over and over again, like a spell.
John. Dorothy. John. Dorothy
. If she says them enough times, she reasons, eventually someone will appear to claim one of them, a stranger she will make her own.

Of course she will know me the instant I come howling into the world. She will know exactly who I am.

I am born at noon the next day. My mother tells me this is the first thing she did: she checked the clock. I am still attached to her when she looks. We are not yet two when she begins to keep track of me, the seconds I have been alive and then, after she cuts through the cord herself, cleaving my body from hers with a kitchen knife, the seconds I have been on my own.

This is what women do, she says.

By which she means she understands that one day I will leave her too. Lift off the ground, think myself beyond gravity.

Let go.

LAURA LEE SMITH

FROM
New England Review

T
HE DAY AFTER
his forty-eighth birthday was the same day Theo Bitner's seventy-five-year-old mother friended him on Facebook. It was also the same day his wife told him he needed to see a doctor. Or a therapist. “It's your mood,” she said. “It sucks.” Counting his mother, Theo now had eight Facebook friends. Sherrill, his wife, had 609. It was just past dawn, in the perfidious part of the day that implied anything was possible when, really, nothing was very likely. He regarded his Facebook profile, the faceless blue bust of a man staring from the margin of the screen where he should, by now, have uploaded a photo of himself. “Theo Bitner is new to Facebook,” the caption read. “Suggest a friend for Theo!” Sherrill finished dressing and left the room, and Theo leaned back in his chair. He stared at the ceiling in the corner of the bedroom, where he'd propped his computer, a hulking dinosaur of a tower, on a tiny table made of pressboard. By contrast, Sherrill had a Mac laptop the size of a place mat. She carried it around in a zippered rhinestone bag and took it with her to Starbucks and Crispers.