The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015 Read online

  Liana paused her reverie to check her position, and sure enough she’d drifted farther from the shore than was probably wise. She knew from the lake swims of childhood vacations that distance over water was hard to judge. If anything, the shore was farther away than it looked. So she pulled heavily to the right, and was struck by how long it took to make the trees appear appreciably larger. Just when she’d determined that land was within safe reach, she gave one more stiff kick, and her right foot struck rock.

  The pain was sharp. Liana hated interrupting a swim, and she didn’t have much time before the equatorial sun set, as if someone had flicked a light switch. Nevertheless, she dropped her feet and discovered that this section of the creek was barely a foot and a half deep. No wonder she’d hit a rock. Sloshing to a sun-warmed outcrop, she examined the top of her foot, which began to gush blood as soon as she lifted it out of the water. There was a flap. Something of a mess.

  Even if she headed straight back to the Henleys’, all she could see was thicket—no path, much less a road. The only way to return and put some kind of dressing on this stupid thing was to swim. As she stumbled through the shallows, her foot smarted. Yet, bathed in the cool water, it quickly grew numb. Once she had slogged in deep enough to resume her sidestroke, Liana reasoned, Big deal, I cut my foot. The water would keep the laceration clean; the chill would stanch the bleeding. It didn’t really hurt much now, and the only decision was whether to cut the swim short. The silence pierced by tropical birdcalls was a relief, and Liana didn’t feel like showing up back at the house with too much time to kill with enraptured blah-blah before dinner. She’d promised herself that she’d swim at least a mile, and she couldn’t have done more than a quarter.

  So Liana continued to the right, making damned sure to swim out far enough so that she was in no danger of hitting another rock. Still, the cut had left her rattled. Her idyll had been violated. No longer gentle and welcoming, the shoreline shadows undulated with a hint of menace. The creek had bitten her. Having grown fitful, the sidestroke had transformed from luxury to chore. Possibly she’d tightened up from a queer encroaching fearfulness, or perhaps she was suffering from a trace of shock—unless, that is, the water had genuinely got colder. Once in a while she felt a flitter against her foot, like a fish, but it wasn’t a fish. It was the flap. Kind of creepy.

  Liana resigned herself: This expedition was no longer fun. The light had taken a turn from golden to vermillion—a modulation she’d have found transfixing if only she were on dry land—and she still had to swim all the way back. Churning a short length farther to satisfy pride, she turned around.

  And got nowhere. Stroking at full power, Liana could swear she was going backward. As long as she’d been swimming roughly in the same direction, the current hadn’t been noticeable. This was a creek, right? But an African creek. As for her having failed to detect the violent surge running at a forty-five-degree angle to the shoreline, an aphorism must have applied—something about never being aware of forces that are on your side until you defy them.

  Liana made another assessment of her position. Her best guess was that the shore had drifted farther away again. Very much farther. The current had been pulling her out while she’d been dithering about the fish-flutter flap of her foot. Which was now the least of her problems. Because the shore was not only distant. It stopped.

  Beyond the end of the land was nothing but water. Indian Ocean water. If she did not get out of the grip of the current, it would sweep her past that last little nub of the continent and out to sea. Suddenly the dearth of boats, Jet Skis, fellow swimmers, and visible residents or tourists, drunken or not, seemed far less glorious.

  The sensation that descended was calm, determined, and quiet, though it was underwritten by a suppressed hysteria that it was not in her interest to indulge. Had she concentration to spare, she might have worked out that this whole emotional package was one of her first true tastes of adulthood: what happens when you realize that a great deal, or even everything, is at stake and that no one is going to help you. It was a feeling that some children probably did experience but shouldn’t. At least solitude discouraged theatrics. She had no audience to panic for. No one to exclaim to, no one to whom she might bemoan her quandary. It was all do, no say.

  Swimming directly against the current had proved fruitless. Instead, Liana angled sharply toward the shore, so that she was cutting across the current. Though she was still pointed backward, in the direction of Regent and Beano’s place, this riptide would keep dragging her body to the left. Had she known her exact speed, and the exact rate at which the current was carrying her in the direction of the Indian Ocean, she would have been able to answer the question of whether she was about to die by solving a simple geometry problem: A point travels at a set speed at a set angle toward a plane of a set width while moving at a set speed to the left. Either it will intersect the plane or it will miss the plane and keep traveling into wide-open space. Liquid space, in this case.

  Of course, she wasn’t in possession of these variables. So she swam as hard and as steadily as she knew how. There was little likelihood that suddenly adopting the crawl, at which she’d never been any good, would improve her chances, so the sidestroke it would remain. She trained her eyes on a distinctive rock formation as a navigational guide. Thinking about her foot wouldn’t help, so she did not. Thinking about how exhausted she was wouldn’t help, so she did not. Thinking about never having been all that proficient at geometry was hardly an assist, either, so she proceeded in a state of dumb animal optimism.

  The last of the sun glinted through the trees and winked out. Technically, the residual threads of pink and gray in the early-evening sky were very pretty.

  —

  “Where is that blooming girl?” Beano said, and threw one of the leopard-print cushions onto the sofa. “She should have been back two hours ago. It’s dark. It’s Africa, she’s a baby, she knows absolutely nothing, and it’s dark.”

  “Maybe she met someone, went for a drink,” Regent said.

  “Our fetching little interloper’s meeting someone is exactly what I’m afraid of. And how’s she to go to town with some local rapist in only a bikini?”

  “You would remember the bikini,” Regent said, dryly.

  “Damned if I understand why all these people rock up and suddenly they’re our problem.”

  “I don’t like it any more than you do, but if she floats off into the night air never to be seen again she is our problem. Maybe someone picked her up in a boat. Carried her round the southern bend to one of the resorts.”

  “She’ll not have her phone on a swim, so she’s no means of giving us a shout if she’s in trouble. She’ll not have her wallet, either—if she even has one. Never so much as volunteers a bottle of wine, while hoovering up my best Cabernet like there’s no tomorrow.”

  “If anything has happened, you’ll regret having said that sort of thing.”

  “Might as well gripe while I still can, then. You know, I don’t even know the girl’s surname? Much less who to ring if she’s vanished. I can see it: having to comb through her kit, search out her passport. Bringing in the sodding police, who’ll expect chai just for answering the phone. No good ever comes from involving those thieving idiots in your life, and then there’ll be a manhunt. Thrashing the bush, prodding the shallows. And you know how the locals thrive on a mystery, especially when it involves a young lady—”

  “They’re bored. We’re all bored. Which is why you’re letting your imagination run away with you. It’s not that late yet. I’m sure there’s a simple explanation.”

  “I’m not bored, I’m hungry. Aziza probably started dinner at four—since she is bored—and you can bet it’s muck by now.”

  Regent fetched a bowl of fried-chickpea snacks, but despite Beano’s claims of an appetite he left them untouched. “Christ, I can see the whole thing,” he said, pacing. “It’ll turn into one of those cases. With the parents flying out and grilling all the
servants and having meetings with the police. Expecting to stay here, of course, tearing hair and getting emotional while we urge them to please do eat some lunch. Going on tirades about how the local law enforcement is ineffectual and corrupt, and bringing in the FBI. Telling childhood anecdotes about their darling and expecting us to get tearful with them over the disappearance of some, I concede, quite agreeable twentysomething, but still a girl we’d barely met.”

  “You like her,” Regent said. “You’re just ranting because you’re anxious.”

  “She has a certain intrepid quality, which may be deadly, but which until it’s frightened out of her I rather admire,” he begrudged, then resumed the rant. “Oh, and there’ll be media. CNN and that. You know the Americans—they love innocent-abroad stories. But you’d think they’d learn their lesson. It beats me why their families keep letting kids holiday in Africa as if the whole world is a happy-clappy theme park. With all those carjackings on the coast road—”

  “Ordinarily I’d agree with you, but there’s nothing especially African about going for a swim in a creek. She’s done it every other afternoon, so I’ve assumed she’s a passable swimmer. Do you think—would it help if we got a torch and went down to the dock? We could flash it about, shout her name out. She might just be lost.”

  “My throat hurts just thinking about it.” Still, Beano was heading to the entryway for his jacket when the back-porch screen door creaked.

  “Hi,” Liana said, shyly. With luck, streaks of mud and a strong tan disguised what her weak, light-headed sensation suggested was a shocking pallor. She steadied herself by holding on to the sofa and got mud on the upholstery. “Sorry, I—swam a little farther than I’d planned. I hope you didn’t worry.”

  “We did worry,” Regent said sternly. Her face flickered between anger and relief, an expression that reminded Liana of her mother. “It’s after dark.”

  “I guess with the stars, the moon…,” Liana covered. “It was so…peaceful.”

  The moon, in fact, had been obscured by cloud for the bulk of her wet grope back. Most of which had been conducted on her hands and knees in shallow water along the shore—land she was not about to let out of her clutches for one minute. The muck had been treacherous with more biting rocks. For long periods, the vista had been so inky that she’d found the Henleys’ rickety rowboat dock only because she had bumped into it.

  “What happened to your foot?” Regent cried.

  “Oh, that. Oh, nuts. I’m getting blood on your floor.”

  “Looks like a proper war wound, that,” Beano said boisterously.

  “We’re going to get that cleaned right up.” Examining the wound, Regent exclaimed, “My dear girl, you’re shaking!”

  “Yes, I may have gotten—a little chill.” Perhaps it was never too late to master the famously British knack for understatement.

  “Let’s get you into a nice hot shower first, and then we’ll bandage your foot. That cut looks deep, Liana. You really shouldn’t be so casual about it.”

  Liana weaved to the other side of the house, leaving red footprints down the hall. In previous showers here, she’d had trouble with scalding, but this time she couldn’t get the water hot enough. She huddled under the dribble until finally the water grew tepid, and then, with a shudder, wrapped herself in one of their big white bath sheets, trying to keep from getting blood on the towel.

  Emerging in jeans and an unseasonably warm sweater she’d found in the guest room’s dresser, Liana was grateful for the cut on her foot, which gave Regent something to fuss over and distracted her hostess from the fact that she was still trembling. Regent trickled the oozing inch-long gash with antiseptic and bound it with gauze and adhesive tape, whose excessive swaddling didn’t make up for its being several years old; the tape was discolored, and barely stuck. Meanwhile, Liana threw the couple a bone: She told them how she had injured her foot, embellishing just enough to make it a serviceable story.

  The foot story was a decoy. It obviated telling the other one. At twenty-three, Liana hadn’t accumulated many stories; until now, she had hungered for more. Vastly superior to carvings of hippos, stories were the souvenirs that this bold stint in Africa had been designed to provide. Whenever she’d scored a proper experience in the past, like the time she’d dated a man who confided that he’d always felt like a woman, or even when she’d had her e-mail hacked, she’d traded on the tale at every opportunity. Perhaps if she’d returned to her parents after this latest ordeal, she’d have burst into tears and delivered the blow-by-blow. But she was abruptly aware that these people were virtual strangers. She’d only make them even more nervous about whether she was irresponsible or lead them to believe that she was an attention-seeker with a tendency to exaggerate. It was funny how when some little nothing went down you played it for all it was worth, but when a truly momentous occurrence shifted the tectonic plates in your mind you kept your mouth shut. Because instinct dictated that this one was private. Now she knew: There was such a thing as private.

  Having aged far more than a few hours this evening, Liana was disheartened to discover that maturity could involve getting smaller. She had been reduced. She was a weaker, more fragile girl than the one who’d piled into Regent’s jeep that afternoon, and in some manner that she couldn’t put her finger on she also felt less real—less here—since in a highly plausible alternative reality she was not here.

  The couple made a to-do over the importance of getting hot food inside her, but before the dinner had warmed Liana curled around the leopard-print pillow on the sofa and dropped into a comatose slumber. Intuiting something—Beano himself had survived any number of close calls, the worst of which he had kept from Regent, lest she lay down the law that he had to stop hunting in Botswana even sooner than she did—he discouraged his wife from rousing the girl even to go to bed, draping her gently in a mohair blanket and carefully tucking the fringe around her pretty wet head.

  —

  Predictably, Liana grew into a civilized woman with a regard for the impositions of laundry. She pursued a practical career in marketing in New York, and, after three years, ended an impetuous marriage to an Afghan. Meantime, starting with Kilifi Creek, she assembled an offbeat collection. It was a class of moments that most adults stockpile: the times they almost died. Rarely was there a good reason, or any warning. No majestic life lessons presented themselves in compensation for having been given a fright. Most of these incidents were in no way heroic, like the rescue of a child from a fire. They were more a matter of stepping distractedly off a curb, only to feel the draft of the M4 bus flattening your hair.

  Not living close to a public pool, Liana took up running in her late twenties. One evening, along her usual route, a minivan shot out of a parking garage without checking for pedestrians and missed her by a whisker. Had she not stopped to double-knot her left running shoe before leaving her apartment, she would be dead. Later: She was taking a scuba-diving course on Cape Cod when a surge about a hundred feet deep dislodged her mask and knocked her regulator from her mouth. The Atlantic was unnervingly murky, and her panic was absolute. Sure, they taught you to make regular decompression stops, and to exhale evenly as you ascended, but it was early in her training. If her instructor hadn’t managed to grab her before she bolted for the surface while holding her breath, her lungs would have exploded and she would be dead. Still later: Had she not unaccountably thought better of shooting forward on her Citi Bike on Seventh Avenue when the light turned green, the garbage truck would still have taken a sharp left onto Sixteenth Street without signaling, and she would be dead. There was nothing else to learn, though that was something to learn, something inchoate and large.

  The scar on her right foot, wormy and white (the flap should have been stitched), became a totem of this not-really-a-lesson. Oh, she’d considered the episode, and felt free to conclude that she had overestimated her swimming ability, or underestimated the insidious, bigger-than-you powers of water. She could also sensibly have deci
ded that swimming alone anywhere was tempting fate. She might have concocted a loftier version, wherein she had been rescued by an almighty presence who had grand plans for her—grander than marketing. But that wasn’t it. Any of those interpretations would have been plastered on top, like the poorly adhering bandage on that gash. The message was bigger and dumber and blunter than that, and she was a bright woman, with no desire to disguise it.

  After Liana was promoted to director of marketing at Brace-Yourself—a rapidly expanding firm that made the neoprene joint supports popular with aging boomers still pounding the pavement—she moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, where she could now afford a stylish one-bedroom on the twenty-sixth floor, facing Broadway. The awful Afghan behind her, she’d started dating again. The age of thirty-seven marked a good time in her life: She was well paid and roundly liked in the office; she relished New York; though she’d regained an interest in men, she didn’t feel desperate. Many a summer evening without plans she would pour a glass of wine, take the elevator to the top floor, and slip up a last flight of stairs; roof access was one of the reasons she’d chosen the apartment. Lounging against the railing sipping Chenin Blanc, Liana would bask in the lights and echoing taxi horns of the city, sometimes sneaking a cigarette. This time of year, the regal overlook made her feel rich beyond measure. The air was fat and soft in her hair—which was shorter now, with a becoming cut. So when she finally met a man whom she actually liked, she invited him to her building’s traditional Fourth of July potluck picnic on the roof to show it off.