The Best American Short Stories 2014 (16 page)

“I said I would try, and I am. They've got us working fourteen-hour days. Someone has to pay the rent while you're on vacation.”

“Vacation? Is that what you think this is?”

“No one told you to go to Idaho. I mean, really, what were you thinking?”

Keller's voice fluctuates with his movements, and she imagines him stepping into his jeans. She wonders how many women have seen him do this. Sometimes he touches her in a familiar way, other times as if he's trying to please another woman. Lauren doesn't know if this other woman is a younger version of herself—the person he still believes her to be—or someone she's never met.

“I drove to New Orleans, Keller.”

“I know. Margot said some crazed woman took off in my truck. You're lucky she didn't call the police and report it stolen.”

“Is that her name? Margot?”

“She's Doug's wife. Doug and I work together. I rent the guest bedroom.”

“Do you really expect me to believe that?”

“Come on, Laurie. Don't do this.”

“I thought you were staying with your parents. Why would you lie to me? Why did that woman—Margot—look at me like
I
was the other woman?”

“Christ,” Keller says. “Is that what this is about?”

Lauren slumps against the counter. She doesn't know what to believe.

“Hello? Laurie? When are you coming back?”

“I'm not coming back. Come get your son.”

Lauren hangs up the phone. Her mother appears at the end of the hallway. Lauren says, “He's not coming.” She gathers the sleeping boy in her arms and carries him to the truck. Her mother follows in her housecoat and slippers, asking Lauren to leave Jonah.

“What if Keller comes for him?” she says. “What am I supposed to tell him?”

Lauren starts the engine. “Tell him he can come to me.”

“But Lauren,” her mother says, “this isn't about you.”

 

By mid-July, temperatures in the Salmon River Canyon break one hundred. Beetle-infested trees turn new shades of red, ribbons of rust among the dense green. Noxious weeds carry their seeds easily on the wind. A Forest Service helicopter flies over Cache Bar drainage, dropping purple streamers in honor of two fallen firefighters. The lookout at Stormy Peak complains of yellow jackets; Lauren complains of horseflies. They talk, always, of weather. It's the closest thing Lauren has had to a friendship in a long time.

For two days lightning storms ignite a series of spot fires, and for two days Lauren paces the windows with binoculars, glassing for phantom fires—sleeping fires that creep across the forest floor, waiting for a gust of wind or a snag of fuel. She stands at the Osborne Firefinder and looks through the vertical slot of the front sight, targets smoke in the cross hairs of the rear sight. Of the fires she reports, four still burn: the Spring Fire, the Bighorn Fire, and two smaller fires near the Corn Creek Boat Launch.

Lauren's head aches; her hands tremble. It's four o'clock in the afternoon and she hasn't looked in a mirror in two days. On the counter beside her a cup of coffee grows cold. She goes to the stove to heat more water, finds the kettle already near boil. These are the twenty-hour days Daniel has warned her about.

The boy goes to the door, as he has all day, and turns the locked handle. Lauren lowers the binoculars. “I know, buddy. We can't go out just yet.” She tries to sit him down with the road atlas, only to find he's penciled across all fifty states. She thumbs the pages quickly, like a flipbook, and sees an endless maze, a web of confusion.

That evening, Lauren straightens a wire clothes hanger and she and the boy roast marshmallows over the propane flame. Afterward, the boy lets the goat lick his sticky hands. They sit outside on a sleeping bag with the wind at their backs. Lauren has taken the four track pins from Keller's letterman jacket and attached them to the boy's sweatshirt, and the boy sits with his head bowed, examining the gold.

It's a cool night made warmer by the sight of the Bighorn Fire. From this distance the two-hundred-foot flames make the ponderosa appear as small as matchsticks, the flames extinguishable with the pinch of a finger. Steep terrain and high winds have kept firefighters out of the Bighorn Crags, and there's nothing to do but watch it burn.

In Lauren's pocket is a message from her mother, already a week old:
Keller says please come home
. The paper has worn soft between her fingers. This is something she's learned: nothing is safe, nothing is sacred. There is always another fire on another mountain. The boy closes his eyes. Wind shifts through the trees like the sound of cars passing, and it's easy to believe she's back in Galveston, she and Keller together with so much undone between them.

Lauren sleeps without dreams. And when she wakes, the boy is gone.

 

The sun is not yet over the ridge, the sky gritty with smoke. Lauren staggers to the edge of the bluff and peers into the rocky depths, hoping to see, and hoping not to see, the boy's red sweatshirt. She finds the goat pen open, the goat gone. The outhouse is empty; the storage unit is locked. The front door to the lookout squeaks on its hinges. She turns over a cardboard box, searches under the bed. She runs down the dirt road, cups her hands around her mouth, and yells the boy's name in every direction.

Finally, she radios dispatch. “He's gone,” she says. “I've lost him.”

Forty minutes later a Forest Service helicopter begins a search pattern around the lookout. Canyon winds surge up the draw and the helicopter tips, then rights itself again. Watching from the catwalk, her neck craned, Lauren feels on the verge of fainting. It is dangerous country, as steep as it is rugged, with nowhere to go but down. She thinks of Keller, of the boy's mother, her own mother, and she leans over the railing and vomits.

Daniel arrives with the deputy sheriff, two officers, and two tracking dogs. The deputy explains that the dogs are trained to sniff out drugs and cadavers. Lauren holds her knees at the sound of
cadavers
. The officers let themselves into the lookout and begin organizing a search grid. A red Suburban full of search-and-rescue workers arrives, with a trailer of ATVs and medical equipment. Behind them: a caravan of volunteers in their own vehicles. One of the volunteers looks to be the same age as Lauren. Their eyes meet, and Lauren sees what the woman sees—tangle of blond hair, swollen eyes, quivering jaw. She says to Lauren, “Why don't we go inside and talk, OK?”

Lauren tells her the boy is wearing a red sweatshirt, denim overalls, and a pair of white sneakers with heels that light up when he steps down. She tells her about the goat's golden coloring, its bell. She spells Keller's name, the boy's mother's name, and the name of the caseworker in Texas. She feels a pain in her ribs when she says, “We fell asleep outside.” The woman asks what time, and Lauren says, “After dinner, but before dark.” She tries to explain the boy's behavior by showing the woman the road atlas. The woman nods and writes everything down. It looks so small on the page.

They search until nightfall. The moon glows red behind a haze of smoke. Search-and-rescue teams rotate shifts. Forest Service trucks come and go. Wildland firefighters arrive with packs on their backs, ready to search at dawn. Someone has brought up a gas generator, and it rumbles outside, two floodlights illuminating a path. On the patch of grass where Lauren and the boy last slept, rescue workers set up pup tents.

A dozen people occupy the lookout. Lauren doesn't know where to sit or what to do with her hands. Styrofoam coffee cups litter the counter. Maps are unfolded on the bed and taped to the windows. The area left to cover appears an infinite number of acres. The deputy tries to comfort Lauren by saying a five-year-old boy can only get so far. “He'd never make it to the river,” he says, and Lauren cups her face in her hands.

Daniel unwraps a granola bar, says, “Eat something. It'll help.”

Her voice is raw and tight. “I can't call Keller,” she says. “I can't.”

“We already contacted him. He's on his way.”

That night Lauren sleeps in the back of Daniel's truck, parked beside the lookout with the tailgate lowered. She slips in and out of dreams, sees a beach lined with gulls, hears the beating of a hundred wings: helicopters, truck engines, window hinges, the kettle screaming, doors closing, the boy's laugh like a whisper. She opens her eyes. Over a two-way radio, someone refers to the boy as Lauren's son.

 

At the start of the second day, search-and-rescue workers meet outside the lookout to reevaluate their plan. Lauren cannot bear to listen. She knows they found the goat eating sunflowers on Long Tom Creek. She knows they found the boy's red sweatshirt on the trail to the spring. Lauren knows after twelve hours, the chances of recovering the boy begin to diminish. No one says as much, but she knows they are searching for a body.

Daniel asks everyone in the lookout to leave, holds the door as they file out. He turns down the volume on the radio, pours Lauren a cup of coffee. He says, “I'm sorry, Lauren,” and she says, “Don't say that. Don't make me hate you for saying that.”

He sits beside her on the bed, holds out his hand. Resting in the center of his palm is a single winged-foot pin. “I thought you might want this,” he says. “It was on the sweatshirt we found.”

Lauren looks away. To touch it feels like acceptance—of her mistakes, and of the boy's fate, which she so easily took into her own hands. He places the pin on the bed between them, and Lauren knows it will always be between them, that after today she'll have to bury this place, and this part of herself, all over again.

Daniel stands and faces the window, his silhouette a mountain among mountains. He says in a whisper, “Where are you, Jonah?”

In the corner of the windowpane, Lauren sees the boy's tiny handprints. She remembers holding the binoculars to his face, and how, when she lowered them, he put both hands to the pane, eyes roving the mountainside as if to say, “Something very fascinating is happening here.” Sometimes he looked at Lauren the same way, would reach out and touch her face, and she wondered what he saw that she couldn't—the fabric of her thoughts, circuitry of her nerves, blood coursing the chambers of her heart.

Lauren goes to the window and rips down the search maps. Daniel holds up his hand in protest. “Don't”—he starts to speak but falls silent. She empties a drawer on the floor and picks through the mess for a roll of tape. On her hands and knees she reaches under the bed for the boy's road atlas and pulls it toward her. She tears out the pages, state after state, the paper thudding against the spiral binding like tires on a rumble strip, a car veering from its path, and she doesn't stop until she reaches Texas, sees the little boat she drew for the boy in the Gulf of Mexico. A moment of hesitation, and then she tears it out too, the paper leafing to the floor.

Lauren adheres the first road map to the window and sunlight bleeds through the paper. The room dims one map at a time until she's covered every pane. She turns in a circle, following the boy's pencil from Alabama to Wyoming. The darkened lines resemble the electrocardiograms of a thousand heartbeats, the tributaries of a thousand rivers. It is as beautiful as it is haunting. There's a particular logic to the boy's work, a complex network of intersecting routes, and yet, even now, he remains a mystery to Lauren. She thinks, He is only a child. She thinks, This is as close as I will ever be to him again.

FROM
Agni

 

T
HE NEEDLE
: 21 gauge, 1.5 inches. A hogsticker. I'd liberated it from the thoracic care unit—they stock cannulas for emergency chest decompression, hammer one of those big-bore pins between the fourth and fifth intercostal to vent compacted air and blood. The contents of the syringe run as follows: 1 cc of Equipoise, a veterinary drug injected into cattle to render them fat and juicy, plus an additional 2 ccs of testosterone cypionate—i.e., roughly twenty times the testosterone a man my size produces in a week. I've never been one for half-measures.

I tried hormone replacement therapy. Creams, patches, gels, slow-release subdermal pellets sunk into my flanks. Only adrenaline can I produce regularly; the rest of my hormones are flatlined. The doc gawped at my T-levels and said: “Sure you weren't born a woman, Jasper?” We're old pals; he can joke. But HRT is the bailiwick of geriatric dynamos and middle-aged graspers. Plus you're rubbing that goo on your hands so the “T” can seep in—problematic, seeing as I handle loads of babies. Skin-to-skin transference, yeah? Good Dr. Railsback lays hands on little Janie Sue Macintosh and next she's growing a beard.

Shortly I'd be pumping the stuff into my rear end. A fine pincushion. But the sciatic nerve radiates from your hips—if the needle raked the nerve stem, I'd be doing the noodle-legged cha-cha. And if I dumped the stuff directly into a vein, it'd slam me into cardiac collapse. But fortune favors the brave, so tallyho.

I pierced the skin, aspirated, saw only the thinnest thread of blood, and bottomed the plunger.
Yeeeeessss
—there's the heatseeker.

I slipped the needle into a sharps bin and located the blister pack of capsules.
Fludara
. An anti-metastatic; it attacks the RNA, rots the helix, and kills the spread. The label read:
Avoid inhaling the dust from a broken caplet
. The urge to crack one and snort it up my nose was awesomely powerful. I swallowed two, then two more. My tongue flitted absently around my mouth; its nodules rasped against my incisors, but they were too dense to burst. My name went out on the PA. “Dr. Railsback to pediatrics . . .”

The vulcanized orthotic spacer on my left shoe made a jazzy
dunka-dunka-dunk
on the hospital tiles. Up to the fifth floor. The air in the NICU was heavy with pheromones: aliphatic acids, which waft from the pores of women who've just delivered. A distinctive scent. An undertone of caramelized sugar.