The O. Henry Prize Stories 2011 (39 page)

As Esme alternated between flirtation and sullenness he tried for kindness. This wasn’t all her fault: he was helplessly responsive to vulnerability, and—he could admit it—he did have a tendency to rush in and try to fix whatever was wrong. Therefore he imitated Daisy’s forbearance when Esme couldn’t get even simple things right, like using hypoallergenic detergent instead of the regular kind that caused the baby to break out in a rash. The tender verbal scat of any mother cradling her baby was a language Esme didn’t speak. Her hold was so tentative the baby went round-eyed and chafed his head this way and that wondering who would come to his aid. More than once Esme neglected to pick up dangerous buttons or coins from the floor. She had to be reminded to burp him after nursing and then, chastened, would
sling him across her shoulder like a sack of rice. Could you even say she loved the baby? Breast-feeding might account for Esme’s sleepy-eyed bedragglement and air of waiting for real life to begin, but, Daisy said, there was absolutely no justifying the girl’s self-pity. Consider where she, Daisy, had come from: worse than anything this girl had gone through, but had Sean ever seen her spend whole days feeling sorry for herself, reading wedding magazines in dirty sheets, scarcely managing to crawl from bed when the baby cried? It wasn’t as if she had no support. Victor was right there. Who would have believed it? He was attentive to Esme, touchingly proud of his son, and even after a long day at the mill would stay up walking the length of the downstairs hallway with the colicky child so Esme could sleep. For the first time Victor was as good as his word, and could be counted on to deal uncomplainingly with errands and show up when he’d said he would. Victor’s changed ways should have mattered more to Esme, given the desolation of her childhood. Victor was
good to her
. Esme could not explain what was wrong or what she wanted, Daisy said after one conversation. She was always trying to talk to the girl, who was growing more and more restless. They could all see that, but not what was coming, because it was the kind of thing you didn’t want to believe would happen in your family: Esme disappeared. Dylan was almost four and for whatever reason she had concluded that four was old enough to get by without a mother. That much they learned from her note but the rest they had to find out. She had hitchhiked to the used-car dealership on the south end of town and picked out a white Subaru station wagon; Wynn Handley, the salesman, said she negotiated pleasantly and as if she knew what she was doing and (somewhat to Wynn’s surprise, you could tell) ended up with a good deal. Esme paid in cash—not that unusual in a county famed for its marijuana. She left alone—that is, there was no other man. Not as far as Wynn knew, and he was being completely forthcoming in light of the family’s distress. The cash was impossible to explain, since after checking online Victor
reported their joint account hadn’t been touched, and they hadn’t saved nearly that much anyway. Esme had no credit card, of course, making it hard to trace her. Discussion of whether they were in any way to blame and where Esme could have gone and whether she was likely to call and want to talk to her son and whether, if she called, there was any chance of convincing her to come back was carried on in hushed voices because no matter what she’d done the boy should not have to hear bad things about his mother.

With Esme gone, Victor began to talk about quitting the mill. The ceaseless roar was giving him tinnitus; his back hurt; there were nights he fell asleep without showering and woke already exhausted, doomed to another day just like the last, and how was he supposed to have any energy left for a four-year-old? Had Esme thought of that before she left, he wondered—that he might not be able to keep it together? No doubt his steadiness had misled her into thinking it was safe to leave, and when he remembered how reliable and fond and funny and tolerant he had been, anger slanted murderously through his body; and it was like anger practiced on him, got better and better at leaving him with shaking hands and a dilated sense of hatred with no nearby object; and he began to be very, very careful not to be alone with his little boy.

Dylan understood this. After nightmares he did not try his dad’s room, right next to his, but padded his way through the dark house up the narrow flight of stairs to the bedroom, where he slid in between Sean and Daisy. More than once his cold bare feet made accidental contact with Sean’s genitals, and Sean had to capture the feet and guide them away. This left him irritably awake, needing to make the long trip to the bathroom downstairs, and when he returned the boy was still restless and Sean watched him wind a hand into Daisy’s long hair and rub it against his cheek until he could sleep. Worse than jealousy was the affront to Sean’s self-regard in feeling so contemptible an emotion. This was a
scared little boy, this was his tight hold on safety, this was his grandfather standing by the side of the bed looking meanly down. Protectiveness toward his own flesh and blood had always been Sean’s ruling principle, and if that went wrong he didn’t know who he was anymore. He rose to dress for work one chilly 6:00 a.m. and noticed the amateur tattoos running cruelly down the boy’s arm. Had an older kid got hold of him somehow, was this some kind of weird abuse, why hadn’t he come running to his grandfather? Sean bent close to decipher the trail of descending letters.
I LOVE YOU
. Not another kid, then. Not abuse. But wasn’t that bad for him, wouldn’t the ink’s toxins be absorbed through his skin, didn’t she think that was going a little too far, inscribing her love on the boy while he did what—held his arm out bravely? Time, past time, for Sean to try to talk to Daisy, to suggest that day care would be a good idea, or a playgroup where the boy could meet other kids. When Daisy was tired or wanted time to herself she left the boy alone with the remote, and once Sean walked in on the boy sitting cross-legged while on the screen a serial killer wrapped body parts in plastic, and how could you talk to a child after that, what could you tell him that could explain that away? All right, they could do better. He supposed most people could do better by their kids. Maybe her judgment in taking a pen to the boy’s arm wasn’t perfect, but was it such a bad thing to have love inscribed on your skin, whoever you were? Half the world was dying for want of that. If Daisy adored this boy Sean could live with that. More than live with it: he admired it. He admired her for being willing to begin again when she knew how it could end.

Maybe Victor’s mood would have benefited from confrontation—a kitchen-table sit-down where, with cups of reheated coffee to warm their hands, father and son could try to get at the root of the problem—but envisioning his own well-meaning heavy-heartedness and guessing that Victor would take offense, Sean was
inclined to ignore his son’s depression. In most cases, within a family, there was wisdom in holding one’s tongue. Except for one thing: Victor could, if he concluded his chances were better elsewhere, take the boy with him when he left. This gave a precarious tilt to their household, an instability whose source was, really, Victor’s fondness for appearing wronged. He came home with elaborate tales of affronts he had suffered, but Sean knew the foreman and doubted any unfairness had been shown Victor. When Victor needed to vent, Sean steered clear and Daisy, rather than voicing her true opinion—that it was time he got over Esme—calmly heard him out. Victor could ruin his mother’s peace of mind by ranting at the unbelievable fucking hopelessness of this fucking dead-end town, voice so peeved and fanatical in its recounting of injustice that Sean, frowning across the dinner table, thought he must know how ridiculous he sounded, how almost crazy, but Victor kept on: he was only waiting for the day when the mill closed down for good and he could pack up his kid and his shit and get out. What were they, blind? Couldn’t they see he had no life? Did they think he could take this another fucking day? From his chair near his dad Dylan said, “Are we going away?”

“No, baby boy, you’re not going anywhere,” said Sean, at which Victor did the unthinkable, pulling out the gun tucked into the back of his jeans and setting it with a chime on his dinner plate and saying, “Then maybe this is what I should eat.” Daisy said, “Sean,” wanting him to do something, but before he could Victor pushed the plate across the table to him and said, “No, no, no, all right, I’m sorry, that was in front of the kid, that’s taking it too far, I know I know I know, don’t ask me if I meant it because you know I don’t but I swear to god, Dad, some days it crosses my mind. But I won’t. I never will.” Gently he cupped his boy’s head. “I’m sorry to have scared you, Dyl. Daddy got carried away.”

“I want that gun out of the house,” Daisy said. Sean had gone out into the starry night and folded the passenger seat of his truck forward and tucked the gun into the old parka he kept there. In bed that night
Daisy turned to him, maybe needing to feel that something was still right in their life, and while he understood the impulse and even shared it, he found he was picturing Esme’s pointed chin, her head thrown back, her urchin hair fanned out across a filthy mattress in the woods, an image so wrong and
good
he couldn’t stop breathing life into it, the visitation no longer blissfully involuntary but nursed along, fed with details; the childish lift of her upper lip as she picked at the gift-box ribbon came to him, the imagined grace of her pale body against the filthy mattress, her arms stretched overhead, her profile clean against the ropy twists of dirty hair, no she wouldn’t look, she wouldn’t look and he came without warning, Daisy far enough gone that momentum rocked her farther, Sean relieved when she managed the trick that mostly eluded her while also, in some far-back, disownable part of his mind, judging her climax too naked, too needful, and at the same time impersonal, since she had no idea where he was in his head, and this, her greedy solitary capacity, bothered him. In the slowed-down aftermath when their habit was to roll apart and stretch frankly and begin to talk about whatever came to mind, a brief spell, an island whose sanctity they understood, where they were truly, idly, themselves, their true selves, the secret selves only they recognized in each other, she didn’t move or speak and he continued to lie on her worrying that he was growing heavier and heavier, her panting exaggerated as if to communicate the extremity of her pleasure, and for a sorry couple of minutes he hated her. There was something offensive in her unawareness of his faithlessness. If he was faithless even in his mind he wanted it to matter and it couldn’t matter unless she could intuit it and hold him accountable and by exerting herself against him, as she had a right to, make him want to come all the way back to her. That was up to her. If she couldn’t do it then he might continue to be bewilderingly alone and even slightly, weirdly in love with the lost girl Esme, indefensible as that was, and astounding. Daisy squirmed companionably out from under, turned on her side, a hand below
her cheek, the crook of her other arm bracing her breasts, the light of her eyes, the creases at the corners of her smile confiding, genuine, her goodness obvious, the goodness at the heart of his world, the expression on his face god knows what, but by her considering stillness she was working up to a revelation. With Daisy sex sometimes turned the keys of the secretest locks and he could never guess what was coming, since years and decades of wrongs and sorrows awaited confession, and even now, having loved her for twenty years, he could be surprised by some small flatly told story of some terrible thing that had happened when she was a kid. Damage did that, went in so deep it took long years to surface. Tonight he had no inclination to be trusted, but could hardly stop her. “This thing’s sort of been happening. Maybe four or five times? This thing of the phone ringing and no one being there. ‘Hello.’ ” The
hello
was hers. “And no answer. And ‘Hello.’ And no answer. Somebody there, though. Somebody there.”

Such a relief not to have to travel again through the charred landscape of her childhood that he almost yawned. “Kids. Messing around.”

“No,” she said. “Her.” His frown must have been puzzled because she said, “Esme.”

“Esme.”

“Don’t believe me then but I’m right, it was her and the last time she called I said, ‘Listen to me. Are you listening?’ and there was no answer and I said, ‘Never come back.’ I didn’t know that was about to come out of my mouth, I was probably more surprised than she was. ‘Never come back.’ ”

“And then what?”

“And then she hung up.” She scratched one foot with the toes of the other. “And that’s not like me. And I didn’t have any right, did I?” Rueful smile. “If I’d said, ‘Honey, where are you? Are you in trouble?’ that would have been like me, right? And maybe she would have told me, maybe something is wrong and that girl has nowhere else to turn. She’s the kind of girl there’s not just one
filthy mattress in the woods in her life, not just one fantastic fuckup, but last time she was lucky and found us, and we let her come live in our house, and we loved her, I think—did we love her?—and I think if things got bad enough for her she’d think of us and remember we were
good
to her, weren’t we good to her?”

“Yes.”

“Yes and now it’s like I’m waiting for her to call again. Or turn up. I think that’s next. She’ll turn up. And I don’t want her to. I never want to see that girl’s face again.”

He couldn’t summon the energy for
I’m sure it wasn’t her
, even if that was probably true. He could also have accepted Daisy’s irrational conviction and addressed it with his usual calm.
Of course you’re angry. Irresponsible, not just to her little boy, but to us who took her in, who cared about her—she left without a word. It’s natural to be angry
.

He lay there withholding the consolation that was his part in this back-and-forth until she turned onto her back and stared at the ceiling.

I made a serious mistake with Esme once. Gave her a bracelet
. If he could have said that. If he could have found a way to begin.

Dent Figueredo wasn’t someone Sean thought of as a friend, but this sweet May evening they were alone in the Tip-Top, door open to the street alive with sparrow song and redolent of asphalt cooling in newly patched potholes, Dent behind the bar, Sean on his barstool thinking about taxes, paying no attention until he heard “I want your take on this.”