The Best American Short Stories 2014 (19 page)

“You're like that all the way up?”

“To my neck, yes.”

She fished her hand through the fly of my boxers. Her touch was dry but gentle. “Feels like the standard apparatus.”

A fragile voice said: “Mom?”

The boy had stepped through a door that connected to the adjacent room. At first sight I understood he'd been dealt a common genetic indignity. His chest had that telltale shrunken quality. The girl snatched up her top and went to him. I pulled up my trousers.

“What's wrong?” she asked the boy, who was perhaps six.

“Thirsty.”

She gave me a tight smile and held up one finger—
give me a minute
.

“Take your time,” I said. “In fact, I could use some water myself.”

I walked into the next room, which clearly they shared. Open suitcases, the smell of cough syrup and body butter. In the bathroom I unpacked two motel glasses from their paper wraps. I smiled at my reflection. Blood climbed the chinks of my teeth. I swished water around in my mouth, spat it red-tinged down the drain.

The boy rubbed sleep-crust from his eyes and accepted the glass. He drank, coughed a little, breathed heavily.

“CF?” I asked his mother.

“How can you tell?”

“I'm a children's physician. Saw the medicine bottles on the nightstand.”

Cystic fibrosis. A gene mutation. Hallmark symptoms: poor growth, low muscle tone, high incidence of infertility. The boy and I were practically brothers.

“Show him,” she said to me.

I sipped water, regarding her over the glass's rim.

“Please.”

I peeled off my shirt, flexed my right biceps. A single ticket to the gun show.

The boy said: “Are you sick?”

“Aaron. That's not nice to ask.”

“Yes. I'm sick.”

“You're not going to die, are you?”

“Aaron.”

“Not right here in front of you. I'll hold on a bit longer, I promise. Do you know where I was tonight, Aaron? An arm-wrestling contest.”

The boy said: “Did you win?”

“Not this time, but I've won before. Here, I'll show you how.”

I had him sit on one side of a small table while I sat on the other.

“Lay your arm on the table.”

Obediently, he did so.

“Let's work on your form, Aaron. Your butt's stuck way out for starters; scoot up, get closer. Now your arm's too straight. Bend your elbow, get your hand closer to your chin.” I gripped his hand, the bones birdlike. “Now you've got all the leverage and I've got none. Technique is what evens the odds. It doesn't matter how strong or fast your opponent is if you've got him beat on technique.”

I wanted to tell him:
Life is
all
technique. The world is full of us, Aaron. The mildly broken, the factory recalls and misfit toys. And we must work a lot harder. Out-hustle, out-think . . . out-technique
.

“Now if your opponent cranks your arm, don't panic. You can rest with your hand nearly pinned—the shoulder joint will prop you up.” I pushed his arm gently backward, demonstrating. “Feels stable, doesn't it?”

“Yeah.”

“Let your opponent exhaust himself, right? Then it's your turn. Concentrate on rotating your hand, pointing your knuckles at the sky. Try it, OK?”

The boy turned his hand over, peeling my wrist back.

“See? Now
you're
in control. And your opponent wants to quit. So make him.”

The boy bent my arm back. “You let me win,” he said.

“I did. But I'm an adult and I've been doing this a long time.”

His mother tucked him back in bed. She cocked her head at the neighboring room and said, “Still want to . . . ?”

“It's OK.”

I reached for my wallet. She trapped my hand in my pocket. We stood in the gauzy half-light. My cell phone chimed. Code blue at the hospital. So I hotfooted it back to the strip club and got into one of the taxis queued there. It wended down Stanley Ave., through pools of streetlight incandescence. I dialed the NICU, got Sandy on the line.

“Premature birth,” she said. “Signs of IVH.”

Intraventricular hemorrhage. Excessive pressure on the preemie's skull causes blood vessels to burst.

The cab dropped me at the ER. I shouldered through the swinging doors, moving fast, blitzed with adrenaline, stripped off my shirt in the prep area, and lathered my hands and arms with carbolic soap. A short hallway connected the prep area to the main surgical suite. The route took me past a series of glass-fronted rooms. In the final one, I saw Penny. I got only a flash of the delivery room—the blood, Penny's husband gripping her hand—before stepping into the surgical suite.

Penny's baby lay on the operating table. It—
he
, a boy—was covered in cottage-cheese-like vernix; his cheeks were feathered with lanugo hair. Dr. Beverly had strapped a mask over his mouth and nose.

“I've got him on a low dose of desflurane,” Beverly said. “There's not a lot of brain activity.”

The buildup of blood may've been screwing with the neurological rhythms. I selected the thinnest cannula, its gauge just wide enough to let the platelets out single-file. The procedure was tricky: pierce the fontanel and thread between the hemispheres into the ventricle shafts. Release the blood and bleed off the pressure without forfeiting too much cerebrospinal fluid—otherwise the unprotected brain would bounce against the skull case, killing motor function and the acute senses. Purely a “feel” operation—the equivalent of searching for water with a dowsing rod.

I positioned the needle in the center of the fontanel “diamond,” the four corners where the skull bone had yet to join. The tip dimpled the skin and slid in without resistance. I crouched, training my gaze tightly. It always amazes me just how wonderful a newborn baby smells. The skin so unlined. The world hasn't yet laid its marks on it.

“He's spasming, Bev,” I said. “You've got to stabilize.”

The rubber hose feeding into the baby's mask was kinked. Gingerly, Beverly straightened it.

“Dr. Railsback?” Sandy's voice: distant, tinny. “You OK?”

The slope of the child's nose . . . The fingers of my left hand tightened ever so slightly around the needle's shaft. The fast-twitch fibers vibrated like overtuned piano wires. It only takes one. Jesus. Signs and wonders.

“Jazz, pressure's building.”

I unscrewed the stent-clamp. A pressurized stream of blood jetted out. I willed myself to calm down—
begged
my body to do as it was told.

“Pressure's climbing,” Beverly said. “We're getting spikes on the EEG.”

I pulled the needle back half an inch, adjusted the angle, and reinserted. I'd be flirting with the pituitary gland.

We are all children of eggs
. Old Ashanti proverb. And yes, we start that way. Flawless at conception. But consider all the ways it can go wrong: a defect within the zygotic membrane, an erroneous replication in the DNA chain, a chromosomal hitch, a slight mis-expression of a critical peptide . . . imperfections so tiny that the strongest electron magnification reveals but a shadow of it. They are immeasurable in the truest sense; too often we measure them the wrong way, and they take on the weight of fate. The progenitor's sins passed down the bloodline. Such flaws are pearl-like: a body shapes itself around that tiny speck of grit. The pure mathematics of a healthy body and mind are staggering.

“We're black-spotting,” Bev said. “We're going dark in there.”

I gave the cannula the gentlest half-twist, hunting for the pocket. The steel slipped effortlessly through the folds, through storms of neurons snapping between those awakening synapses but going dark now, dimming . . . slowing now, going dark . . .

You've got to be tough for contingency's sake
. My mother was tanked to the gills when she told me this. She had left a stove element on and I'd touched it. My right hand still bears the concentric scar. She pressed ice to the burn cavalierly, never setting down the jelly jar in her free hand.
You're only medium tough, kiddo
, she'd told me.
Right in that meaty part of the curve
.

There was weakness inside me. Some nights I felt it as a discrete entity, shifting and ungrippable. It was nothing I could seek out or eradicate—as much part of me as my organs and flesh, inseparable from whatever goodness of character or strength of will I might possess. I am simply not built to true. And my witching-hour fear is that this inborn weakness—marrow-borne and incurable—will find its deepest groove at the worst possible instant.

I bloodhounded that phantom pressure, grappling with my own rising terror that found its outlet through my fingertips—be
still
, for God's sake, please—the needle's tip inching through the dark forever inside the boy's skull as one pure, clean thought blitzed through my own furied brainpan:

O my son my boy my son my baby baby boy—

FROM
The New Yorker

 

S
HE WAS IN THE BRIG
when her husband came home. Below her, neighbors reclined on their stoops, laughing and relieved, shaking off winter with loud cries and sudden starts. Someone unseen scraped a broom over a little courtyard, the rhythmic sound of brownstones in spring.

“In the brig!” Sarah called out and, with her wineglass at a tilt, looked down on the neighborhood. They called their six feet of concrete balcony overlooking the street the brig.

The children's voices carried in the blue air. Then the breeze came. It cut through the branches of the trees, turning up the silver undersides of the young leaves, and brought goosebumps as it went around her. The breeze, God, the breeze! she thought. You get how many like it? Maybe a dozen in a lifetime . . . and already gone, down the block and picking up speed, or dying out. Either way, dead to her, and leaving in its wake a sense of excitement and mild dread. What if she failed to make the most of what remained of this perfect spring day?

She finished her wine and went inside. Jay was thumbing listlessly through the mail.

“Hey,” he said.

“What do you want to do tonight?” she asked him.

“Oh,” he said, and paused over what looked like a credit-card offer. “I don't care. What do you want to do?”

“There's nothing you want to do?”

“I want to do whatever you want to do,” he said.

“So it's up to me to come up with something?”

He looked at her at last. “You asked me to come home so we could do something.”

“Because I want to do something.”

“I want to do something too,” he said.

“OK,” she said, “so let's do it.”

“Let's do it,” he said. Then he said, “What is it you want to do?”

 

She wanted to have a picnic in Central Park. They bought sandwiches from a place in the neighborhood and took the train into Manhattan. He unfurled a checkered blanket in the breeze and spread it under a tree whose canopy would have spanned the length of their apartment. In the mild wind, the leaves ticked gently back and forth, like second hands on stuck clocks. She wore a shimmery green sundress, with a thin white belt, slipped on quickly in the few minutes she gave them to get ready. His knees looked as pale as moons in last year's shorts. They ate their sandwiches and drank a little wine, and then they stood and tossed a Frisbee until it was just a white underbelly floating in the darkness. Before leaving, they walked into a little wooded area and with barely a sound brought each other off in two minutes with an urgency that had hibernated all winter, an urgency they both thought might have died in its hole. It was all right now; they could go home. But it was early, and he suggested going to a beer garden where they'd spent last summer drinking with friends. There was a flurry of texts and phone calls, and before too long their friends showed up—Wes and Rachel, Molly with her dog. They drank and talked until closing time. Sarah skipped ahead down the street on their way to the subway and then skipped back to him, leaping into his arms. It stayed warm through the night.

 

On their way into Manhattan, he told her that they had tickets to a movie that night. It was the 3-D follow-up to the sequel of a superhero blockbuster. He had gone online the day before only to learn that the IMAX showings were already sold out. He couldn't believe it. How far in advance did this city make movie tickets available for pre-purchase, and how much cunning did it take to get your hands on them? He hadn't even been able to get tickets to the early show at the regular theater, which would have been preferable—it had been a long week and he was tired, and, for God's sake, who thinks they need to plan more than a day in advance to see a movie? It was just a movie, it wasn't—

She put a hand out to stop him. “Jay,” she said. “I'm sorry, sweets. I can't see a movie tonight.”

“Why not?”

“It's too predictable,” she said. “Aren't you tired of movies? All we've done all winter long is go to movies.”

“But I bought the tickets. They're bought and paid for.”

“We'll get a refund,” she said. “I can't see a movie.”

“You're always telling me you like it when I plan things.”

“It's a movie,” she said, “not a weekend in Paris. I can't sit in a movie theater tonight, Jay. I'll go bonkers.”

“It doesn't start until eleven. The night's practically over by then.”

“Whose night is over?” she said. “Whose particular night?”

He didn't understand. “What are you getting so excited about?”

Her focus shifted, and she didn't answer. The train had slowed to a crawl and was now stopped altogether. Why had it stopped? They were sitting dead still in the bowels of the subway while the last hour or two—not even, not two—the last hour and change of daylight and breeze died out on the shoulders of those who had known better than to lock themselves inside the subway at such a delicate moment. Here was the underworld of the city's infinite offering: snags, delays, bottlenecks, the growing anxiety of never arriving at what was always just out of reach. It was enough to make you stand and scream and kick at the doors. Their ambitions should have been more modest. They could have walked over the Brooklyn Bridge and stopped midway to watch the sun go down.