The Best American Short Stories® 2011 (21 page)

My mother opened the oven, looked inside, and then closed the door. Her cigarette was in an ashtray on the counter, smoke ribboning toward the open window.

"That poor family," my mother said.

"They're behind the eightball," I said. It was a phrase my father used.

"They sure are," she said. "Liz couldn't find Holly until very late. She thought she was off with that Julio."

"She had pep-squad practice," I lied. "I saw her when I walked home."

"You did?"

"There's a game this weekend," I said. "A big one."

"Then that's a relief. I worried she was with the teacher again."

"I don't think that really happened, the stuff with Mr. Mitchell," I said.

"I know you don't, sweetheart."

I took another bite of chicken, drained my orange juice. I said, "Matt might come over today. I'm giving him all my war stuff."

"I'll leave some chicken for you two," she said. "Your father and I are taking the rest to the hospital."

"I want to go," I said.

She brought her cigarette to her lips, then stubbed it out. She said, "No, Joshie, I don't think you do."

Their house had always been nicer than ours, and bigger. Over the years, workers had renovated the Hensleys' kitchen and added two rooms on the house's backside, a study and a game room. They had a bumper-pool table, thick carpet and Saltillo tile, lights with dimmer switches, and a fireplace. "Who needs a fireplace in Corpus?" my father had said one night. He was squinting through the peephole in our front door, watching smoke rise from the Hensleys' chimney. "Don't try to be something you're not, boy," he told me, and then told me again when they bought an aboveground pool for their backyard right before Mr. Hensley was transferred to Florida. I'd assumed the transfer was a demotion or punishment, but my father said Hensley had applied for it. (By way of explanation, he'd only said, "They're Republicans, Joshie.") While they were away, the Hensleys rented the house to a Catholic deacon and his wife, and when they returned, they paid to have new vinyl siding installed. It was gray with white and black trim, the shades of a lithograph.

Until that October weekend, I'd never been alone in their house. It seemed illicit, like when Matt and I paged through his father's
Playboy
s. The darkened rooms made me anxious. I had the sense I would do something I shouldn't, the dangerous and disappointing feeling that I couldn't be trusted. Had there been a route for me to bypass the house and still reach the garage where Roscoe's food was, I would've taken it, but I didn't have their garage-door opener—their automatic door was another extravagance my father resented—so I had to cut through the kitchen. I went twice on Saturday, three times on Sunday. I moved like a thief on each visit, never lingering or touching what I didn't have to. The air in the house smelled of potpourri, cloistered and spiced, and I tried not to breathe. I averted my gaze from the familiar and mysterious artifacts of the Hensleys' lives.

And yet I couldn't keep from seeing the coffee table Mrs. Hensley had pulled over to the couch so Sam wouldn't roll off, Holly's Aggie sweatshirt spread over the cushions, little red high-top shoes upturned on the carpet. I pretended not to know the Hensleys and tried to piece together a different family based on evidence they'd left behind.
Their son is an only child
, I thought.
His parents have taken him to a swimming lesson.
Or I imagined all of the Hensleys were home and hiding, waiting for me to break or steal something. My heart pumped in my ears. I left the lights off. In the kitchen, the floor tile gleamed; Holly's father had come home briefly Friday night, mopped up the spilled water, and grabbed fresh clothes for everyone at the hospital. The copper-bottomed pot was in the sink. Four unopened cans of tuna were stacked on the counter.

In the backyard, Roscoe always barreled into my legs and knocked me sideways. He jumped as high as my shoulders and scratched my chest through my shirt and licked my hand with his warm tongue. I let him chase me around the pool, and I threw pinecones for him to catch. We wrestled in the grass the way Holly had said he liked, then I scratched the scruff of his neck until he snored. I fed him more than I should. Before school on Monday morning, maybe because I'd been hoping Holly would appear on her porch and we'd walk to school together, I opened one of the cans of tuna and let Roscoe eat it from a spoon. That evening there was diarrhea all over the patio.

At school, the story kept changing. Sam wasn't scalded, he'd drowned in the Hensleys' pool. He'd slipped on a wet floor and hit his head. His brain was swelling. He'd been hit by a car, he'd eaten roach poison. Someone claimed to have seen the geology teacher taking flowers to the hospital, and someone else said they'd been in the faculty parking lot and found him weeping in his truck. On Wednesday, Matt said he'd heard the whole thing was a lie to cover up how Sam had accidently shot himself with his father's unregistered pistol.

We were standing by the statue of a mustang, the school mascot. Matt was in his blue woodland camos. He said, "I bet it was the Luger she showed us. If it was, the kid's toast."

Shortly after she returned from Florida, Holly had taken me and Matt into her parents' bedroom and showed us her father's pistol. She'd been babysitting Sam, and we'd been climbing the retama tree in my front yard. We were wearing our camouflage with pellet rifles slung over our shoulders, pretending to be mercenaries. She'd called across the street, "Yall want to see something cool?" The pistol was a German Parabellum 1908, a semiautomatic Luger. We'd read about them in our magazines.

"He burned himself," I told Matt. "He's sedated in intensive care, but he's going to pull through." I made up the last part. The night before, I'd asked my father about Sam and he told me to concentrate on my schoolwork and not to give Roscoe any more tuna.

"I heard he did it in the game room," Matt said. "I heard there's a gnarly bloodstain under the pool table."

"You heard from who?"

"Jeff Deyo," Matt said.

"You don't know Jeff Deyo," I said. Jeff Deyo was a red-eyed senior, a friend of Julio's who'd gotten held back. He wore the same flannel shirt every day, unbuttoned and tattered, and when I passed him in the hall, I smelled the smoker's patio.

"We've been hanging out," Matt said. "We've been getting high. If you tell, I'll kick your ass."

"You need to come get all of my gear. If you don't want it, I'll throw it away."

"Don't take it out on me just because your girlfriend's brother blew his face off."

"She's not my girlfriend," I said.

"Right," he laughed. "She's dating Mr. Mitchell and you're with Anastasia from across town."

"You're an asshole."

"Check the game room," he said. "I heard the stain looks like a pot leaf."

Later that night, Mrs. Hensley called. My father was working his shift at Sears, and I was watching television on the couch while my mother smoked beside me. After answering, my mother handed me the receiver and told me to hang up once she switched to the kitchen phone. While she made her way down the hall, I told Mrs. Hensley about Roscoe catching the pinecones I tossed. She thanked me and said Holly would call me once things calmed down with Sam. Then my mother said, "Okay, Joshie, I got it."

"Okay," I said, but I just pushed the mute button and stayed on the line. I wanted to hear if Mrs. Hensley would say anything more about Holly, if she'd mention Mr. Hensley's Luger.

"We're going to Houston," Mrs. Hensley said. "They're moving him to the burn unit at the Shriners Hospital."

"Okay," my mother said. "Okay."

"I don't know. I don't know if it's okay."

"Are the doctors saying anything else?"

"You're going to Houston, that's what they're saying. They're saying, We can't help him here."

I checked out the game-room carpet on Saturday morning, then crept through the rest of the house that night. I knew I wouldn't find a bloodstain, just as I knew stealing through their hallways was a betrayal, but I couldn't stop myself. The moonlight canting through the blinds was bright enough in most rooms, but I also used the angle-head flashlight I'd bought at a gun expo. In the near dark, the Hensleys' house seemed smaller, not bigger, which surprised me. A fine layer of dust on the surfaces—the marble-topped dressers, the pool table's rails, the framed pictures on the walls—shone in the light, reflected it, and made me think of silt on a riverbed. Moving through their rooms gave me a jumpy, underwater feeling, as if I were swimming through the wreckage of a sunken ship, paddling from one ruined space to another. I avoided Sam's room.

And I'd told myself I wouldn't go into Holly's room, but on Sunday night I did. The moon hung low in the sky, a lurid glow seeping through her curtains and puddling on the carpet. The room smelled of lavender. I'd been in there before, but stripped of noise and electric light, the layout seemed unexpected. Her bed was made, piled high with frilly pillows and stuffed animals—open-armed bears, mostly, and a plush snake stretching the length of her mattress. Four silver-framed photos topped her vanity: Holly and Sam in an orange grove, Julio on Padre Island flexing his arms and smirking, Roscoe licking Holly's face with her eyes closed, and a picture of Holly when she was younger, eating ice cream with a fork. Green and white streamers were tacked to her closet door, and when I moved too quickly, they fluttered and startled me. She had a banana-shaped phone on her nightstand, and I began worrying it would ring. Or I thought my father would silently appear in her doorway, his eyes narrow with disgust.
Leave
, I thought.
Go home.
In my chest, my heart was wild as a trapped, frantic bird.

And yet I stayed. Outside, Roscoe trotted around the pool; his tags tinkled. Once, he started barking and I dropped to the floor and shimmied under Holly's bed. The Hensleys, I knew, had returned from Houston. I imagined Holly coming into her room and calling someone—Julio or maybe even Mr. Mitchell—to relay news about Sam. I imagined her turning off the lights and weeping and falling asleep with me under her. I considered bolting, trying to climb out the window and into the backyard, but knew I'd make too much racket. Roscoe kept barking. He was racing from one fence to another. I held my breath. I listened to phantom footfalls, the murmur of floorboards and studs behind the walls, the sad and random noises of an empty house at night. My hands were trembling, so I tucked them between my chest and the carpet. I still had the same underwater feeling, though now it was as if I were sinking, watching the surface grow blurry and distant. I waited to hit the bottom, to be discovered in the darkness.

But the lights in Holly's room never came on, and eventually Roscoe settled down. I pulled myself out from under the bed. I thought of how Matt and I used to crawl on our bellies in the brush behind his house, our faces obscured with mud. It occurred to me that while I was hiding in the Hensleys' house, he might be getting high with Jeff Deyo, and I felt suddenly and intensely alone. I had an odd sense of erasure, as if I were seeing the set for a play be dismantled. It was disorienting. And now that I'd crossed into Holly's room, I knew I'd return every night. The knowledge left me feeling resigned and melancholy, but also shot through with boldness. Before leaving, I dialed Matt's number on the banana phone, and when he answered, I didn't say a word.

My father was off from Sears that Thursday, so when he got home from the base, we mowed the Hensleys' lawns. Maybe my mother had asked him to do it, or maybe he'd gotten the idea after finishing our yard. I hoped it meant the Hensleys would return soon. As he pushed our lawnmower across the street—the engine idling, the blades scattering debris like when a Chinook lifts off—I followed him with the rake and bag of clippings.

A cold front had silvered the sky, unraveled the clouds. The air smelled briny, and every so often a wind would gust and eddy the fallen leaves. I waited for my father to announce the Hensleys were driving back from Houston, but he never did. While he swept the back patio, I said, "Maybe when Sam comes home Mom will quit smoking."

He leaned the broom against the house and fished his handkerchief out of his pocket, wiped his forehead. Roscoe was snortling along the fenceline. I looked at my shoes, flecked with cut grass.

I said, "Maybe she'll be less stressed and—"

"Josh," he interrupted, "when Sam comes home, he might not look the same. We need to start preparing ourselves for that."

I nodded and dragged the rake across the grass; the trimmings jumped like grasshoppers. I thought of the picture in the silver frame on Holly's dresser, the one of her and her brother in the orange grove. Originally I'd assumed they were in Florida, but now I believed they might have been in the Rio Grande Valley. In the picture, they're holding hands and heading away from the camera so their faces are invisible. It had become my favorite thing in Holly's room. Since Sunday night, I'd lain on Holly's bed, opened her closet to press my nose into her clothes, even spritzed her perfume on my Windbreaker so I could inhale her at home. I'd dialed every number I could think of on her banana phone—my mother at the dry cleaner, my father at the base and Sears, the secretary at King and the principal and my own house—then hung up when anyone answered. I never looked in her drawers, and I never stole anything, but every night I considered taking the orange-grove picture. I could stare at it for hours, imagining where they might go once they stepped beyond the aperture.

"He's behind the eight ball," I said.

"This kind of thing can tear up a family," my father said. "It can rip even a strong family to shreds. It's not easy to watch."

"They need our help," I said. "You're saying we need to—"

"We'll help however we can, Josh, but what I'm saying is we're not going to let them drag us into their problems."

"I understand," I said, though I didn't.

"What I'm saying is when Holly needs a shoulder to cry on, don't let it be yours."

But the Hensleys didn't come home. Mrs. Hensley, I knew, called my mother late at night every couple of days, and I kept hoping to wake up and see their van in their driveway, but it never appeared. One night I overheard my parents talking about skin grafts and a neoprene bodysuit that would keep Sam's flesh hydrated, compressed. Their voices were hushed and somber. My father also mentioned how Mr. Hensley's sick leave and vacation days were long gone. Another night I thought they were talking about Sam again, but they were just discussing the breakdown of talks between President Reagan and Gorbachev in Iceland. The neighborhood started getting ready for Halloween, carved pumpkins appearing on porches and cardboard witches hanging in windows, and the temperature was dropping, especially in the evenings. In Corpus, the fall is damp and glomming. I laid out a pallet of blankets for Roscoe in the garage and started pouring warm water over his food. I used the copper-bottomed pot that Holly's father had left in the sink.