The Best American Short Stories 2015 (33 page)

At lunchtime, dazed with fatigue, Rebecca was brought home. A new quiet had insinuated itself into the cottage. The policemen came and went as if they had learned from long practice. They seemed to ghost into one another: almost as if they could slip into one another's faces. She knew them, somehow, by the way they drank their tea. Food had arrived, with notes from neighbors. Fruit bowls. Lasagna. Tea bags and biscuits. A basket of balloons, of all things: a scribbled prayer to Saint Christopher in a child's hand.

Alan sat next to her on the couch. He put his hand across hers. He would, he said, do the media interviews. She would not have to worry about it.

She heard the thud of distant waves. The labored drone of a TV truck filtered down from the laneway.

A Sunday newspaper called, offering money for a photograph. Alan walked to a corner of the cottage, cupped his phone, whispered into the receiver. She thought she heard him weeping.

Pages from the Israeli novel were strewn across her desk. Scribbles in the margins. Beside the pages, Mandelstam's memoir lay open, a quarter of the way through. Russia, she thought. She would have to tell them in Vladivostok, let them know what had happened, fill out the paperwork. The orphanage. The broken steps. The high windows. The ocher walls. The one great painting in the hallway: the Bay of Amur, summertime, a yacht on its water, water, always water. She would find the mother and father, explain that their son had disappeared swimming on the western seaboard of Ireland. A small apartment in the center of the city, a low coffee table, a full ashtray, the mother wan and withdrawn, the father portly and thuggish. My fault. I gave him a wetsuit. All my fault. Forgive me.

She wanted the day to peel itself backward, regain its early brightness, its possibility, its pour into teacups, but she was not surprised to see the dark come down. It was almost two days now.

Alan sat in the corner, curled around his phone. She almost felt a sadness for him, the whispered
sweetheart
, the urgent pleading and explanations with his own young children.

That night, lying next to him, Rebecca allowed his arm across her waist. The simple comfort of it. She heard him murmur her name again, but she did not turn.

At daylight she totaled up the hours: forty-eight.

Rebecca rose and walked out into the morning, the dew wet against her plimsolls. The television truck hummed farther up the laneway, out of sight. She stepped across the cattle grid. The steel bars pushed hard into the soles of her feet. A muddy path led up the hill. The grass in the middle was green and untrodden. Moss lay slick on the stone wall.

A piece of torn plastic was tangled in the high hedges. She reached in and pulled it out, shoved it deep into her pocket: she had no idea why.

Water dripped from the branches of nearby trees. A few birds marked out their morning territory. She had only ever driven this part of the laneway before. It was, she knew, part of an old famine road.

Rebecca stood awhile: the hum from the TV truck up the road seemed to cancel out the rhythm of the sea.

She leaned into the hard slope of the road, opened the bar of the red gate, stepped over the mud. The bolt slid back perfectly into its groove. She walked the center grass up and around the second corner to where the TV truck idled against the hedges. Inside, silhouetted against a pair of sheer curtains, three figures were playing cards. The curtains moved but the figures remained static. Across the front seat a man lay slumped, sleeping.

A small group of teenagers huddled near the back of the truck, sharing a cigarette, their breath shaping clouds of white in the cold. They nudged each other as she approached.

She stopped, then, startled by the sight. Alone, casual, adrift. He sauntered in behind the group, unnoticed. A brown hunting jacket hung from his shoulders. A hooded sweatshirt underneath. His trousers were rolled up and folded over. The laces of his boots were open and the tongues wagged sideways. Steam rolled off him, as if he had been walking a long time.

His mouth was slightly open. His lip was wet with mucus. Mud and leaves in the fringes of his hair. Under his right arm he carried a dark bag. The bag fell from his arm, and he caught hold of it as he moved forward. A long, gray stripe. The wetsuit. He was carrying the wetsuit.

He had not yet seen her. His body seemed to drag his shadow behind him: slow, reluctant, but sharp.
Sh'khol
. She knew the word now.
Shadowed
.

The door of the TV truck opened behind her. Her name was called. Mrs. Barrington. She did not turn. She felt as if she were skidding in a car.

She was aware of a bustle behind her, two, three, four people piling out of the truck. The impossible utterance of his name. Tomas. Is that you? Turn this way, Tomas. A yell came from the teenagers. Look over here. They had their phones out. Tomas! Tomas! Turn this way, Tomas.

Rebecca saw a furred microphone pass before her eyes. It dipped down in front of her, and she pushed it away. A cameraman jostled her. Another shout erupted. She moved forward. Her feet slipped in the mud.

Tomas turned. She took him in her arms with a surge of joy.

She held his face. The paleness, the whites of his eyes. His was a gaze that belonged to someone else: a boy of another experience.

He passed the wetsuit to her. It was cold to the touch and dry.

The news had gone ahead of them. The cheers went up as they rounded the corner toward the garden. Alan ran along the laneway in his pajamas, stopped abruptly when he saw the television cameras, grabbed for the gap in the cotton trousers.

Rebecca shouldered Tomas through the gauntlet, her arm encircling him tightly, guiding him to the front door.

In the cottage, a swathe of light dusted the floor. The female detective stood in the center of the room. Her name badge glinted. Detective Harnon. It struck Rebecca that she could name things again: people, words, ideas. A warmth spread through the small of her back.

A smell of turf smoke came off Tomas's clothing. It was, she later realized, one of the few clues she would ever get.

The cottage filled up behind her. She saw a photographer at the large plate-glass window. All around her, phones were ringing. The kettle whistled on the stove. A fear had tightened Tomas. She needed to get him alone. The photographer shoved his camera up against the windowpane. She spun Tomas away as the flash erupted.

Morning light stamped itself in small rectangles on the bedroom floor. Rebecca closed the window blinds. The helmet was lying on the bed. His pajamas were neatly folded and placed on a chair. She ignored the knocking at the door. He was shivering now. She held his face. Kissed him.

The door opened tentatively.

—Leave us be, please. Leave us be.

She touched the side of his cheek, then shucked the brown jacket from his shoulders. A hunting jacket. She checked the pockets. A few grains of thread. A small ball of fur. A wet matchbook. He lifted his arms. She peeled the sweatshirt up over his head. His skin was tight and dimpled.

A piece of leaf fell from his hair to the floor. She turned him around, looked at his back, his neck, his shoulder blades. He was unmarked. No cuts, no scrapes.

She looked down at Tomas's trousers. Denims. Too large by far. A man's denims. Fastened with an old purple belt with a gold clasp. Clothing from another era. Gaudy. Ancient. A bolt of cold ran along her arms.

—No, she said. Please, no.

She reached for him, but he slapped her hand away. The door rattled again behind her. She turned to see Alan's face: the stretched wire of his flesh, the small brown of his eyes.

—We need a detective in here, she said. Now.

In the hospital it was still bright morning and the air was motionless in the low corridors and muddy footprints lay about and the yellow walls pressed in upon them and the pungent odor of antiseptic made her go to the windows and the trees outside stood static and the seagulls cawed up over the rooftops and she stood in the prospect of the unimaginable, the tangle of rumor and evidence and fact, and she waited for the doctors as the minutes idled and the nurses passed by in the corridors and the trolleys rattled and the orderlies pushed their heavy carts and an inexhaustible current of human misery moved in and out of the waiting room every story every nuance every pulse of the city hammering up against the wired windows.

The water poured hard and clear. She tested its warmth against her wrist. Tomas came into the bathroom, dropped his red jumper to the floor, slid out of his khakis, stood in his white shirt, clumsily working the buttons.

She reached to help, but he stepped away, then gestured for her to leave while he climbed into the swimming togs. So, he wanted to wear shorts now while she washed him. Fair enough, she thought.

The house was quiet again. Only the sound of the waves. She keyed her new phone alive. A dozen messages. She would attend to them later.

After a moment she returned to the bathroom with her hands covering her eyes.

—Ta-da! she said.

He stood there, pale and thin in front of her. The swimming shorts were far too tight. Along his slender stomach she could see a gathering of tiny, fine hairs that ran in a line from his belly button. He hopped from foot to foot and cupped his hands over the intimate outline of his body.

He had been untouched. That is what Detective Harnon had said. He was slightly dehydrated but untouched. No abuse. No cuts. No scars. They had run all manner of tests. Later the detective had asked around the village. Nobody had come forward. There were no other clues.

They wanted him to come in for evaluation the following week. A psychologist, she said. Someone who might piece together everything that had happened, but Rebecca knew there'd never be any answers, no amount of probing could solve it, no photographs, no maps, no walks along the coastline. She would go swimming with him again, soon, down to the water. They would ease themselves into the shallows. She would watch him carefully negotiate the seastack. She would guide him away from the current. Perhaps some small insight might unravel, but she was aware she could never finally understand.

The simple grace of his return was enough.
I live, I breathe, I go, I come back, I am here now
. Nothing else.

Rebecca tested the water again with her fingers. She helped Tomas over the rim of the tub. Goose bumps appeared on his skin. His ribs were sharp and pale. He fell against her. The wet of his toes chilled her bare feet. She threw a towel around his shoulders to warm him, then guided him back toward the water. He finally placed both feet in the bath and let the warmth course up through his body. He cupped his hands in front of his shorts. She put her hand on his shoulder and, with gentle insistence, got him to kneel.

He slid forward into the water.

—There we go, she said in Hebrew. Let me wash that mop.

She perched at the edge of the bath, took hold of his shoulder blades, ran a pumice stone over his back, massaged the shampoo into his hair. His skin was so very transparent. The air in his lungs changed the shape of his back. She applied a little conditioner to his scalp. His hair was thick and long. She would have to get it cut soon.

Tomas grunted and leaned forward, tugged at the front of his shorts. His shoulders tautened against her fingers. She knew, then, what it was. He bent over to try to disguise himself against the fabric of his shorts. Rebecca stood without looking at him, handed him the soap and the sponge.

Impossible to be a child forever. A mother, always.

—You're on your own now, she said.

She moved away from him, closed the door and stood outside in the corridor, listening to his stark breathing and the persistent splash of water, its rhythm sounding out against the faint percussion of the nearby sea.

ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN

FROM
StoryQuarterly

1
.

W
ES AND LAURA
had not even known Helen was missing when the police brought her home at midnight. Her long bare legs were marbled red with cold, and she had tear tracks on her face, but otherwise she looked like her ordinary placid awkward middle-school self: snarled hair, chapped lips, pink cheeks. She'd lost her pants somewhere, and she held in one fist a seemingly empty plastic garbage bag, brown, the yellow drawstring pulled tight at its neck. Laura thought the policemen should have given her something to cover up. Though what did cops know about clothing: maybe they thought that long black T-shirt was a dress. It had a picture of a pasty overweight man in swashbuckler's clothes captioned, in movie marquee letters,
LINDA
.

“She's twelve!” Wes told the police, as though they were the ones who'd lured his daughter from her bed. “She's only
twelve
.”

“Sorry, Daddy,” Helen said.

Laura grabbed her daughter by the wrist and pulled her in before the police could change their minds and arrest her, or them. She took the garbage bag from Helen, uncinched the aperture, and stared in, looking for evidence, missing clothing, wrongdoers.

“Nitrous oxide party,” said the taller officer, who looked like all the Irish boys Laura had grown up with. Maybe he was one. “They inhale from those bags. The owner of the house is in custody. Some kid had a bad reaction, she threw them all onto the lawn. The others scattered but your daughter stayed with the boy in distress. So there's that.”

“There's that,” said Wes.

Helen gave her mother a sweet, sinuous, beneath-the-arm hug. She'd gotten so tall she had to stoop to do it; she was Laura's height now. “Mommy, I love you,” she said. She was a theatrical child. She always had been.

“You could have suffocated!” Laura said, throttling the bag.

“I didn't put it over my head,” said Helen.

Laura ripped a hole in the bottom of the bag, as though that were still a danger.