The Best American Short Stories® 2011 (26 page)

It is not that evening or the following one but the evening after, on the Sunday, that I am taken home. When I come back from the well, soaked to the skin, the woman takes one look at me and turns very still before she gathers me up and takes me inside and makes up my bed again.

The following morning I do not feel hot, but she keeps me upstairs, bringing me warm drinks with lemon and cloves and honey, aspirin.

"'Tis nothing but a chill, she has," I hear Kinsella say.

"When I think of what could have happened."

"If you've said that once, you've said it a hundred times."

"But—"

"Nothing happened, and the girl is grand. And that's the end of it."

I lie there with the hot-water bottle, listening to the rain and looking through my books, making up something slightly different to happen at the end of each, each time.

On Sunday I am allowed to get up, and we pack everything again, as before. Toward evening, we have supper and wash and change into our good clothes. The sun has come out, is lingering in long, cool slants, and the yard is dry in places. Sooner than I would like, we are ready and in the car, turning down the lane, going up through Gorey and on, along the narrow roads through Carnew and Shillelagh.

"That's where Da lost the red heifer playing cards," I say.

"Wasn't that some wager?" the woman says.

"It was some loss for him," Kinsella says.

When we get to our lane, the gates are closed and Kinsella gets out to open them, then closes them behind us, and drives on very slowly to the house. I feel, now, that the woman is trying to make up her mind whether she should say something to me, but I don't really have any idea what it is, and she gives me no clue. The car stops in front of the house, the dogs bark, and my sisters race out. I see my mother through the window, with what is now the second youngest in her arms.

Inside, the house feels damp and cold. The lino is tracked over with dirty footprints. Mammy stands there with my little brother, and looks at me. "You've grown," she says.

"Yes," I say.

"'Yes,' is it?" she says, and raises her eyebrows.

She bids the Kinsellas good evening and tells them to sit down—if they can find a place to sit—and fills the kettle from the bucket under the kitchen table. We move playthings off the car seat under the window and sit down. Mugs are taken off the dresser, a loaf of bread is sliced, butter and jam left out.

"Oh, I brought you jam," the woman says. "Don't let me forget to give it to you, Mary."

"I made this out of the rhubarb you sent down," Ma says. "That's the last of it."

"I should have brought more," the woman says. "I wasn't thinking."

"Where's the new addition?" Kinsella asks.

"Oh, he's up in the room there. You'll hear him soon enough."

"Is he sleeping through the night for you?"

"On and off," Ma says. "The same child could crow at any hour."

My sisters look at me as though I am an English cousin, coming over to touch my dress, the buckles on my shoes. They seem different, thinner, and have nothing to say. We sit in to the table and eat the bread and drink the tea. When a cry is heard from upstairs, Ma gives my brother to Mrs. Kinsella and goes up to fetch the baby. He is pink and crying, his fists tight. He looks bigger than the last, stronger.

"Isn't there a fine child, God bless him," Kinsella says.

Ma pours more tea with one hand and sits down and takes her breast out for the baby. Her doing this in front of Kinsella makes me blush. Seeing me blush, Ma gives me a long, deep look.

"No sign of himself?" Kinsella says.

"He went out there earlier, wherever he's gone," Ma says.

A little bit of talk starts up then, little balls of speech they seem to kick uneasily back and forth. Soon after, a car is heard outside. Nothing more is said until my father appears and throws his hat on the dresser.

"Evening, all," he says.

"Dan," Kinsella says.

"Ah, there's the prodigal child," he says. "You came back to us, did you?"

I say I did.

"Did she give trouble?"

"Trouble?" Kinsella says. "Good as gold, she was, the same girl."

"Is that so?" Da says, sitting down. "Well, isn't that a relief."

"You'll want to sit in," Mrs. Kinsella says, "and get your supper."

"I had a liquid supper," Da says, "down in Parkbridge."

I sneeze then, and reach into my pocket for my handkerchief, and blow my nose.

"Have you caught cold?" Ma asks.

"No," I say, hoarsely.

"You haven't?"

"Nothing happened."

"What do you mean?"

"I didn't catch cold," I say.

"I see," she says, giving me another deep look.

"The child's been in bed for the last couple of days," Kinsella says. "Didn't she catch herself a wee chill."

"Aye," Da says. "You couldn't mind them. You know yourself."

"Dan," Ma says, in a steel voice.

Mrs. Kinsella looks uneasy.

"You know, I think it's nearly time that we were making tracks," Kinsella says. "It's a long road home."

"Ah, what's the big hurry?" Ma says.

"No hurry at all, Mary, just the usual. These cows don't give you any opportunity to have a lie-in."

He gets up then and takes my little brother from his wife and gives him to my father. My father takes the child and looks across at the baby suckling. I sneeze and blow my nose again.

"That's a right dose you came home with," Da says.

"It's nothing she hasn't caught before and won't catch again," Ma says. "Sure, isn't it going around?"

"Are you ready for home?" Kinsella asks.

Mrs. Kinsella stands then, and they say their goodbyes. I follow them out to the car with my mother, who still has the baby in her arms. Mrs. Kinsella takes out the cardboard box with the pots of jam. Kinsella lifts a four-stone sack of potatoes out of the boot. "These are floury," he says. "Queens they are, Mary."

My mother thanks them, saying it was a lovely thing they did, to keep me.

"The girl was welcome and is welcome again, anytime," the woman says.

"She's a credit to you, Mary," Kinsella says. "You keep your head in the books," he says to me. "I want to see gold stars on them copybooks next time I come up here." He gives me a kiss then, and the woman hugs me. I watch them getting into the car and closing the doors and I feel a start when the engine turns and the car begins to move away.

"What happened at all?" Ma says, now that the car is gone.

"Nothing," I say.

"Tell me."

"Nothing happened." This is my mother I am speaking to, but I have learned enough, grown enough, to know that what happened is not something I need ever mention. It is my perfect opportunity to say nothing.

I hear the car braking on the gravel in the lane, the door opening, and then I am doing what I do best. It's nothing I have to think about. I take off from standing and race on down the lane. My heart feels not so much in my chest as in my hands. I am carrying it along swiftly, as though I have become the messenger for what is going on inside of me. Several things flash through my mind: the boy on the wallpaper, the gooseberries, that moment when the bucket pulled me under, the lost heifer, the third light on the water. I think of my summer, of now, of a tomorrow that I can't entirely believe in.

As I am rounding the bend, reaching the point where I daren't look, I see him there, closing the gate, putting the clamp back on. His eyes are down, and he seems to be looking at his hands, at what he is doing. My feet batter on along the rough gravel, the strip of tatty grass in the middle of our lane. There is only one thing I care about now, and my feet are carrying me there. As soon as he sees me, he grows still. By the time I reach him, the gate is open and I am smack against him and lifted into his arms. For a long stretch, he holds me tight. I feel the thumping of my heart, my breaths coming out, then my heart and my breaths settling differently. At a point, which feels much later, a sudden gust blows through the trees and shakes big, fat raindrops over us. My eyes are closed now and I can feel him, the heat of him coming through his good clothes, can smell the soap on his neck. When I finally open my eyes and look over his shoulder, it is my father I see, coming along strong and steady, his walking stick in his hand. I hold on as though I'll drown if I let go, and listen to the woman, who seems, in her throat, to be taking it in turns sobbing and crying, as though she is crying not for one but for two now. I daren't keep my eyes open and yet I do, staring up the lane, past Kinsella's shoulder, seeing what he can't. If some part of me wants with all my heart to get down and tell the woman who has minded me so well that I will never, never tell, something deeper keeps me there in Kinsella's arms, holding on.

"Daddy," I keep warning him, keep calling him. "Daddy."

FROM
The New Yorker

T
HE DUNGEON MASTER
has detention. We wait at his house by the county road. The Dungeon Master's little brother Marco puts out corn chips and orange soda.

Marco is a paladin. He fights for the glory of Christ. Marco has been many paladins since winter break. They are all named Valentine, and the Dungeon Master makes certain they die with the least possible amount of dignity.

It's painful enough when he rolls the dice, announces that a drunken orc has unspooled some of Valentine's guts for sport. Worse are the silly accidents. One Valentine tripped on a floor plank and cracked his head on a mead bucket. He died of trauma in the stable.

"Take it!" the Dungeon Master said that time. Spit sprayed over the top of his laminated screen. "Eat your fate," he said. "Your thread just got the snippo!"

The Dungeon Master has a secret language that we don't quite understand. They say he's been treated for it.

Whenever the Dungeon Master kills another Valentine, Marco runs off and cries to their father. Dr. Varelli nudges his son back into the study, sticks his bushy head in the door, says, "Play nice, my beautiful puppies."

"Father," the Dungeon Master will say, "stay the fuck out of my mind realm."

"I honor your wish, my beauty."

Dr. Varelli says things like that. It's not a secret language, just an embarrassing one. Maybe that's why his wife left him, left Marco and the Dungeon Master too. It's not a decent reason to leave, but as the Dungeon Master hopes to teach us, the world is not a decent place to live.

Now we sit, munch chips.

"If they didn't say corn, I wouldn't think of them as corn," Brendan says.

He's a third-level wizard.

"Detention?" Cherninsky says, and stands, squats, stands, sits. He's got black bangs and freckles, suffers from that disease where you can't stay in your chair.

"He chucked a spaz in Spanish," I say. "I heard one of the seniors."

"The teacher rides him," Marco says. Marco despises the Dungeon Master but loves his brother. I like Marco, but I'm no fan of Valentine. I'm a third-level ranger. I fight for the glory of me.

The door smacks open.

"Ah, the doomed." The Dungeon Master strides past us, short and pasty with a fine brown beard.

He sits behind his screen, which he's ordered us never to touch. We never do, not even when he's at detention. He shuffles some papers—his maps and grids. Dice click in his stubby hand. Behind him, on the wall, hang Dr. Varelli's diplomas. The diplomas say that he's a child psychiatrist, but he never brings patients here, and I'm not sure he ever leaves the house.

"When last we met," the Dungeon Master begins, "Olaf the thief had been caught stealing a loaf of pumpernickel from the village bakery. A halfling baker's boy had cornered our friend with a bread knife. Ready to roll?"

"I don't want to die this way," Cherninsky says.

Cherninsky always dies this way—we all do, or die of something like it—but he seems pretty desperate this afternoon. Maybe he's thinking of people who really have died, like his baby sister. She drowned in the ocean. Nobody ever mentions it.

"This situation begs the question," the Dungeon Master says, and sips from a can of strawberry milk. "Is bread the staff of life or the staff of death?"

"What does that mean?" Cherninsky asks.

"Read more," the Dungeon Master says. "Enrich yourself."

"We all read," Brendan says.

"I mean books," the Dungeon Master says. "I can't believe you're a wizard."

"Don't kill me in a bakery," Cherninsky says.

"Don't steal bread."

"What do you want? I'm a thief."

"Roll."

Cherninsky rolls, dies, hops out of his chair.

"So why'd you get detention?" he says.

"When did I get detention?"

"Today," I say. "You got it today."

The Dungeon Master peers at me over his screen.

"Today, bold ranger, I watched a sad little pickpocket bleed out on a bakery floor. That's the only thing that has happened today. Get it?"

"Got it," I say.

I know that he is strange and not as smart as he pretends, but at least he keeps the borders of his mind realm well patrolled. That must count for something.

"Now," the Dungeon Master says, "any of you feebs want to take on the twerp with the kitchen utensil? Or would you rather consider a back-alley escape?"

"Back-alley escape," Marco says.

"Valentine the Twenty-seventh?" the Dungeon Master says.

"Twenty-ninth."

"Don't get too attached, brother."

There are other kids, other campaigns. They have what teachers call imaginations. Some of them are in gifted. They play in the official afterschool club.

"I've got a seventeenth-level elf wizard," Eric tells me in our freshman homeroom. "She flies a dragon named Green Star. We fought an army of frost giants last week. What about you?"

"We never even see a dragon, let alone fly one. You have a girl character?"

"You play with that psycho senior, what's-his-face."

"The Dungeon Master," I say.

"He calls himself that? Like it's his name?