The Best American Short Stories® 2011 (38 page)

When they came to wheel off Dad to CAT scan, I kissed him on a small space on his forehead where there wasn't tape. While I waited, the naked lady made another brief appearance to collect her towel.

As she was leaving, I heard the triage nurse talking with security.

"Those aren't dog bites," she said.

When they called me in to see Dad, I felt something, like an aura. Those dog bites are an omen, I told myself over and over. I couldn't think of the mathematical term—
forecast?
They'd reinforced my certainty that Dad had taken a turn for the worse.

I found Dad sitting in front of a large computer, scrolling with a mouse, silent. I slipped in behind him and watched as he scrolled back and forth through radiographs of his brain. Then he turned around, all surprised.

"Ricky! What are you doing?"

He had that incredulous look on his face. I started chewing.

"They're not dog bites." Of all things, this is what I said.

"What?" He grabbed me in his arms and gave me a bear hug. "Son, that was a close one. Look." He scrolled through images of his brain on the screen. "Look at those gyri, son. Brain wrinkles but no blood. Nothing but an old-fashioned brainshake."

He patted his breast pocket as if he was looking for markers, but he had none.

Dad never accompanied me to another birthday party. Not because he didn't want to—the parties changed venues from roller rinks and lake houses to high school gymnasiums and then to grassy lots in the middle of nowhere. Parents weren't invited. Gift-giving stopped. Around the time Billy and I began to concern ourselves with good-looking women, we lost touch.

I ran into him years later. He confided to me after a keg stand that he missed my father. I told him that I did too. Dad and I had disagreed about my future, and I ended up enlisting in the air force to pay for a private college that in the end wasn't worth the money. I asked Billy if his family still had that canoe. He was headed on a canoe trip that night, in fact, with his brothers and friends. He couldn't believe I remembered.

Would you believe the military forced me to become a doctor? Not forced, but strongly suggested,
incentivized
it. Those with a personal or family history of Syndrome X (whatever it was that month) were encouraged to seek desk jobs, but desk jobs weren't for me, and so I studied medicine. (During the interview process, some air force doc told me, "We can't find anything wrong with you." I have my doubts.) Dad pretended like it was no big thing when I told him. Now we get together once a week and talk late into the evening, always about patients.

My son has something called Raynaud's syndrome. What this means is that his fingers turn dark blue when it's cold. It's more an inconvenience than a danger in a temperate climate like ours, but whenever there's the slightest chill in the air, I make him wear mittens. I buy him a pair every birthday.

Some nights when I'm tucking him in and telling him a story, I take off his gloves and show him his little fingers turning blue. Then I pretend like I'm chewing on them.

"Dog bites, dog bites," I say.

Except the other night the bright guy corrected me.

"They don't look like dog bites."

So I indulged him. "What do dog bites look like, then, son?"

And what did my little professor do? He bit me! Right on the wrist.

No!
I told him, little boys don't do that, human bites are dirtier than animal bites. But all he did was laugh like he knew better.

FROM
The New Yorker

"F
OR AN
eiii-dee
," they were saying. "We need to see Lisette Mulvey."

This was unexpected.

In second-period class, at 9:40
A.M.
, on some damn Monday in some damn winter month she'd lost track of, when even the year—a "new" year—seemed weird to her, like a movie set in a faraway galaxy.

It was one of those school mornings—some older guys had got her high on beer, for a joke. Well, it
was
funny, not just the guys laughing at her but Lisette laughing at herself. Not mean-laughing—she didn't think so—but like they liked her. "
Liz-zette
"—"
Liz-zette
"—was their name for her, high-pitched piping like bats, and they'd run their fingers fast along her arms, her back, like she was scalding hot to the touch.

They picked her up on their way to school. The middle school was close to the high school. Most times, she was with a girlfriend—Keisha or Tanya. They were mature girls for their age—Keisha especially—and not shy like the other middle school girls. They knew how to talk to guys, and guys knew how to talk to them, but it was just talk mostly.

Now this was—math?—damn math class that Lisette hated. It made her feel so stupid. Not that she
was
stupid. It was just that sometimes her thoughts were as snarled as her hair, her eyes leaking tears behind her dark-purple-tinted glasses—
pres-ciption
lenses—so that she couldn't see what the hell the teacher was scribbling on the board, not even the shape of it. Ms. Nowicki would say in her bright hopeful voice, "Who can help me here? Who can tell us what the next step is?" and most of the kids would just sit on their asses, staring. Smirking. Not wanting to be called on. But then Lisette was rarely called on in math class—sometimes she shut her eyes, pretending that she was thinking really hard, and when she opened them there was one of the three or four smart kids in the class at the board, taking the chalk from Nowicki. She tried to watch, and she tried to comprehend. But there was something about the sound of the chalk clicking on the board—not a
black
board, it was green—and the numerals that she was expected to make sense of: she'd begin to feel dizzy.

Her mother, Yvette, had no trouble with numbers. She was a blackjack dealer at the Casino Royale. You had to be smart, and you had to think fast—you had to know what the hell you were doing—to be a blackjack dealer.

Counting cards.
This was forbidden. If you caught somebody counting cards you signaled for help. Yvette liked to say that one day soon she would change her name, her hair color, and all that she could about herself, and drive out to Vegas, or to some lesser place, like Reno, and play blackjack in such a way that they'd never catch on—counting cards like no amateur could do.

But if Lisette said, "You're going to take me with you, Momma, okay?" her mother would frown as if Lisette had said something really dumb, and laugh. "Sweetie, I'm just joking. Obviously you don't fuck with these casino guys."

Vegas or Reno wasn't where she'd gone this time. Lisette was certain of that. She hadn't taken enough clothes.

In seventh grade, Lisette had had no trouble with math. She'd had no trouble with any of her school subjects. She'd got mostly B's and her mother had stuck her report card, open like a greeting card, to the refrigerator. All that seemed long ago now.

She was having a hard time sitting still. It was like red ants were crawling inside her clothes, in her armpits and between her legs. Stinging and tickling. Making her itch. Except that she couldn't scratch the way she wanted to—really hard with her fingernails, to draw blood—and there was no point in just touching where her skin itched. That would only make it worse.

The ridge of her nose, where the cartilage and bone had been "rebuilt"—a numb sensation there. And her eye—her left eye, with its tears dripping out.
Liz-zette's crying! Hey—Liz-zette's crying! Why're you crying, Liz-zz-zette?

They liked her, the older guys. That was why they teased her. Like she was some kind of cute little animal, like—a mascot?

First time she'd seen J.C. (Jimmy Chang—he'd transferred into her class in sixth grade), she'd nudged Keisha, saying, "Ohhhh," like in some MTV video, a moan to signal sex-pain, though she didn't know what that was, exactly. Her mother's favorite music videos were soft rock, retro rock, country and western, disco. Lisette had heard her in the shower, singing-moaning in a way she couldn't decipher—was it angry or happy?

Oh, she hated math class! Hated this place! Sitting at her desk in the row by the windows, at the front of the classroom, made Lisette feel like she was at the edge of a bright-lit room looking in—like she wasn't a part of the class. Nowicki said, "It's to keep you involved, up close like this," so Lisette wouldn't daydream or lose her way, but it had just the opposite effect. Most days Lisette felt like she wasn't there at all.

She swiped at her eyes. Shifted her buttocks, hoping to alleviate the stinging red ants. Nearly fifteen damn minutes she'd been waiting for the teacher to turn her fat back so that she could flip a folded-over note across the aisle to Keisha, for Keisha to flip over to J.C., in the next row. This note wasn't paper but a Kleenex, and on the Kleenex a lipstick kiss—a luscious grape-colored lipstick kiss—for J.C. from Lisette.

She'd felt so dreamy blotting her lips on the Kleenex. A brand-new lipstick, Deep Purple, which her mother knew nothing about, because Lisette, like her girlfriends, wore lipstick only away from home, and it was startling how different they all looked within seconds—how mature and how sexy.

Out of the corner of her eye she was watching J.C.—J.C., stretching his long legs in the aisle, silky black hair falling across his forehead. J.C. wasn't a guy you trifled with. Not J.C. or his "posse." She'd been told. She'd been warned. These were older guys by a year or maybe two. They'd been kept back in school, or had started school later than their classmates. But the beer buzz at the back of Lisette's head made her careless, reckless.

J.C.'s father worked at the Trump Taj Mahal. Where he'd come from, somewhere called Bay-jing, in China, he'd driven a car for some high government official. Or he'd been a bodyguard. J.C. boasted that his father carried a gun. J.C. had held it in his hand. Man, he'd fired it!

A girl had asked J.C. if he'd ever shot anybody and J.C. had shrugged and laughed.

Lisette's mother had moved Lisette and herself to Atlantic City from Edison, New Jersey, when Lisette was nine years old. She'd been separated from Lisette's father, but later Daddy had come to stay with them when he was on leave from the army. Then they were separated again. Now they were divorced.

Lisette liked to name the places where her mother had worked. They had such special names: Trump Taj Mahal, Bally's, Harrah's, the Casino Royale. Except she wasn't certain if Yvette still worked at the Casino Royale—if she was still a blackjack dealer. Could be Yvette was back to being a cocktail waitress.

It made Lisette so damn—fucking—angry! You could ask her mother the most direct question, like "Exactly where the hell are you working now, Momma?" and her mother would find a way to give an answer that made some kind of sense at the time but melted away afterward, like a tissue dipped in water.

J.C.'s father was a security guard at the Taj. That was a fact. J.C. and his friends never approached the Taj but hung out instead at the south end of the Strip, where there were cheap motels, fast-food restaurants, pawnshops, bail-bond shops, and storefront churches, with sprawling parking lots, not parking garages, so they could cruise the lots and side streets after dark and break into parked vehicles if no one was watching. The guys laughed at how easy it was to force open a locked door or a trunk, where people left things like, for instance, a woman's heavy handbag that she didn't want to carry while walking on the boardwalk. Assholes! Some of them were so dumb you almost felt sorry for them.

Lisette was still waiting for Nowicki to be distracted. She was beginning to lose her nerve. Passing a lipstick kiss to J.C. was like saying, "All right, if you want to screw me, fuck me—whatever—hey, here I am."

Except maybe it was just a joke. So many things were jokes—you had to negotiate the more precise meaning later. If there was a later. Lisette wasn't into thinking too seriously about later.

She wiped her eyes with her fingertips, like she wasn't supposed to do since the surgery.
Your fingers are dirty, Lisette. You must not touch your eyes with your dirty fingers. There is the risk of infection.
Oh, God, she hated how both her eyes filled with tears in the cold months and in bright light, like the damn fluorescent light in all the schoolrooms and corridors. So her mother had got permission for Lisette to wear her dark-purple-tinted glasses to school. They made her look cool—like she was in high school, not middle school, sixteen or seventeen, not thirteen.

"Hell, you're not thirteen—are you? You?" one of her mother's man friends would say, eyeing her suspiciously. But, like, why would she want to play some trick about her
age?
He'd been mostly an asshole, this friend of her mother's. Chester—
Chet.
But he'd lent Momma some part of the money she'd needed for Lisette's eye doctor.

This morning Lisette had had to get up by herself. Get her own breakfast—Frosted Wheaties—in front of the TV, and she hated morning TV, cartoons and crap, or, worse yet, "news." She'd slept in her clothes for the third night in a row—black T-shirt, underwear, wool socks—dragged on her jeans, a scuzzy black sweater of her mother's with
TAJ
embossed on the back in turquoise satin. And her boots. Checked the phone messages, but there were none.

Friday night at nine her mother had called. Lisette had seen the caller ID and hadn't picked up.
Fuck you, going away. Why the fuck should I talk to you ?
Later, feeling kind of scared, hearing loud voices out in the street, she'd tried to call her mother's cell phone. But the call hadn't gone through.
Fuck you. I hate you anyway. Hate hate hate you!

Unless Momma brought her back something nice, like when she and Lisette's father went to Fort Lauderdale for their "second honeymoon" and Momma brought back a pink-coral-colored outfit—tunic top, pants. Even with all that had gone wrong in Fort Lauderdale, Momma had remembered to bring Lisette a gift.

Now it happened—and it happened fast.

Nowicki went to the classroom door, where someone was knocking and—
quick!
—with a pounding heart Lisette leaned over to hand the wadded Kleenex note to Keisha, who tossed it onto J.C.'s desk. J.C. blinked at the note like it was some weird beetle that had fallen from the ceiling, and without glancing over at Keisha or at Lisette, peering at him through her tinted glasses, with a gesture like shrugging his shoulders—J.C. was so
cool
—all he did was shut the Kleenex in his fist and shove it into a pocket of his jeans.