The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015 Read online

  “Are you sure you’re safe, sitting there?” David said, solicitously. They had sifted away from the tables of wheat-berry salad and smoked-tofu patties to talk.

  His concern was touching; perhaps he liked her, too. But she was perfectly stable—lodged against the perpendicular railing on a northern corner, feet braced on a bolted-down bench, weight firmly forward—and her consort had nothing to fear. Liana may have grown warier of water, but heights had never induced the vertigo from which others suffered. Besides, David was awfully tall, and the small boost in altitude was equalizing.

  “You’re just worried that I’ll have a better view of the fireworks. Refill?” She leaned down for the Merlot on the bench for a generous pour into their plastic glasses. A standard fallback for a first date, they had been exchanging travel stories, and impetuously—there was something about this guy that she trusted—she told him about Kilifi Creek. Having never shared the tale, she was startled by how little time it took to tell. But that was the nature of these stories: They were about what could have happened, or should have happened, but didn’t. They were very nearly not stories at all.

  “That must have been pretty scary,” he said dutifully. He sounded let down, as if she’d told a joke without a punch line.

  “I wasn’t scared,” she reflected. “I couldn’t afford to be. Only later, and then there was no longer anything to be afraid of. That’s part of what was interesting: having been cheated of feeling afraid. Usually, when you have a near-miss, it’s an instant. A little flash, like, Wow. That was weird. This one went on forever, or seemed to. I was going to die, floating off on the Indian Ocean until I lost consciousness, or I wasn’t. It was a long time to be in this…in-between state.” She laughed. “I don’t know, don’t make me embarrassed. I’ve no idea what I’m trying to say.”

  Attempting to seem captivated by the waning sunset, Liana no more than shifted her hips, by way of expressing her discomfort that her story had landed flat. Nothing foolhardy. For the oddest moment, she thought that David had pushed her, and was therefore not a nice man at all but a lunatic. Because what happened next was both enormously subtle and plain enormous—the way the difference between knocking over a glass and not knocking over a glass could be a matter of upsetting its angle by a single greater or lesser degree. Greater, this time. Throw any body of mass that one extra increment off its axis, and rather than barely brush against it you might as well have hurled it at a wall.

  With the same quiet clarity with which she had registered, in Kilifi, I am being swept out to sea, she grasped simply, Oh. I lost my balance. For she was now executing the perfect backflip that she’d never been able to pull off on a high dive. The air rushed in her ears like water. This time the feeling was different—that is, the starkness was there, the calmness was there also, but these clean, serene sensations were spiked with a sharp surprise, which quickly morphed to perplexity, and then to sorrow. She fit in a wisp of disappointment before the fall was through. Her eyes tearing, the lights of high-rises blurred. Above, the evening sky rippled into the infinite ocean that had waited to greet her for fourteen years: largely good years, really—gravy, a long and lucky reprieve. Then, of course, what had mattered was her body striking the plane, and now what mattered was not striking it—and what were the chances of that? By the time she reached the sidewalk, Liana had taken back her surprise. At some point there was no almost. That had always been the message. There were bystanders, and they would get the message, too.

  Manuel Muñoz

  The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA

  TIMOTEO REALLY IS NOTHING special, shorter than me and rounder, and hardly even a smile to break the dark moon of his face. I say no one special because it is still, after all these years, just me and him. No one special because I’m no different from any of the women who line up at the town bank, ready to exchange my saved collection of coins for a wad of sweaty bills. It takes money to get a man back from the border, more money than anyone might think.

  Some of us have rings on our fingers and some of us don’t, but we all know what it means to watch the calendar turn to the last of the month. We know what some of the farmers do on final Fridays, and we know what to do on Saturday mornings. The farmers put their dusty hands on a phone receiver and very calmly place a call to the migra. Then the men in the green uniforms arrive at the rows of whatever crops are in season—grapes or peaches or plums—and round up the men into vans. No one ends up paid for the week’s labor, and everyone gets a standard booking in either Visalia or Fresno before being hustled back onto the vehicles. By nighttime, the vans reach Bakersfield and start the slow ascent into the mountains. They will head through Los Angeles—where all our men know it’s easy to get lost, but expensive to live—then on to San Diego, where it’s just expensive to live. Finally, they’ll reach the border itself, and Tijuana, where the van doors open to let all of the men out so they can start over again.

  The bank teller counts out the bills as quickly as she can. She is a very pretty white girl who always wears skirts, her hair pulled up with simple barrettes. She knows the bus from Fresno stops once a week in our town now, Saturday midafternoon in front of the barbershop, as if the whole drama of deportation and return were a big plan between the migra and the charter companies. She hurries, and though she never says much of a pleasant word to any of us, I think it is because she doesn’t want us to miss the only bus going out of town, the only way to get our men back. I often wonder about the history of her good luck. I don’t always know what to think of the fact that she doesn’t have a ring on her finger, if it is a good or a bad thing.

  It’s always the same when I board the bus—it’s already half full, mostly women from Fresno and the little towns just south of it, like Fowler and Selma. I get a seat alone and the bus moves on to Goshen, then Tulare and Delano, each woman who boards more weary than the last. They’re all like me. Or at least, they look like me. I don’t know their histories. I don’t know if they came from South Texas like I did, were taken from school in the third grade to work in the fields like me. I was resentful of my parents for giving me the life of a dumb mule, and I left them almost to the minute of my eighteenth birthday, with only a scrap of paper with their address and phone number that I never ended up using. I walk around with a lot of pride because I did that, because I proved that I could support myself in a hard world. I did all right for myself for a while. Then I fell in love.

  When we get to Bakersfield, the bus is packed, and a young woman boards with a big sigh and looks at the seat beside me.

  “Con permiso,” she says, before she moves to sit down.

  I know just from looking at her that this is her first trip. She carries a cheap white purse in one hand and a bulky shopping bag in the other. She reminds me of all the women in town who everybody knows have just recently arrived from Mexico, because they go to the grocery store in high heels and tight dresses, doing their best to be like the American women they see on television.

  She’s wearing a purple dress and white high heels, and just by that I know she spends too much time watching the afternoon soap operas, not understanding that the women on those shows only scheme because they have no jobs to go to. It will take a while for her to someday let the TV station rest on the evening news with Jessica Savitch—the kind of person I wish I were smart enough to sound like—when the need to listen to English for practice turns into a wish to look like an intelligent and confident woman.

  She sits down quickly as the bus begins to pull out of the station, and when she adjusts the shopping bag under her legs, I look at her hands, but there isn’t a ring to be found.

  The bus is back on the road and, soon enough, I can feel the rise into the mountains, the climb into Los Angeles. My stomach flutters like the times when Timoteo and I boarded the cheap traveling carnival rides that sometimes set up in the town park, and I place my hand on my ribs, remembering.

  “Are you hungry?” the young girl says to me in Spanish.

>   I didn’t know she had been looking at me, and before I can answer, she reaches into the shopping bag and brings out something wrapped in foil. When I don’t take it immediately, she begins to unwrap it—a taco of corn tortilla and something orange—and tears off a piece for herself.

  “Take it,” she says, handing me the part still in the foil. It’s cold, but delicious: chorizo and potato. I nod my thanks. “Where are you headed?” she asks.

  “Los Angeles.” I think to ask where she might be headed but I already know.

  She says nothing for a moment, and just when I feel bad that I haven’t asked her a question, she finishes her food and carefully pulls a tissue from her bra to wipe her fingers. “Do you know Los Angeles very well?” she asks.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you know the city? Do you know your way around?”

  “I know some places. Around the bus station, I mean.”

  She dabs at her lips with the tissue before balling it into her fist. “Would you help me when we get there?”

  “Help you how?”

  She reaches for her cheap white purse and pulls out a folded piece of paper.

  The bus has darkened with the coming of sundown and the road’s curve into the high walls of the mountains. She shows me the paper—a map—in the bare light.

  “He told me to look for the park,” she says.

  I know the park and I know the agreed routine: Pershing Square, where I know to wait overnight to see if Timoteo might show up from Tijuana, spending a night at a motel near Seventh Street where the door opens out to the city’s loud darkness. If Timoteo doesn’t show, then I know to board the bus to San Diego, this time to the bus station almost within sight of the border, as if both countries wanted to make everything easier on everyone. Nearby is a park just like the one in Los Angeles, where everyone waits and waits and waits.

  If I don’t show up there, Timoteo always tells me, then you know it’s over.

  “I know that park,” I say to her. “It’s very close by.”

  “Would you mind showing me?”

  “Of course,” I say, but maybe I don’t say it with much conviction.

  “No, really,” she says. “I don’t know where I’m going. I’ve never had to stop in Los Angeles, and it’s a scary city.”

  “It’s big, but not scary when you get used to it.”

  “You’ve been there a lot? When did you cross over?”

  “I was born here,” I tell her in English. Then I say it again to her in Spanish, then I let her stay silent for a moment so she can know who she’s talking to. To me, she’s a young girl without a name. She’s someone who might not have anything in her purse except the folded-up map, who might not know how much money to take on a trip like this.

  I take the map from her hand. “Who are you going to see?” I tilt the paper toward the fading light of the bus window and follow the map with my clean finger. She doesn’t answer.

  “You don’t have to be married to be in love,” I tell her. “I understand.”

  She leans her head toward me, as if to study the map together. But there’s nothing to study. The street is a straight shot from the bus station to the park, and I trace it on the map with my finger. “When we get off at the station, a lot of people will head here, along this street, over to the park. It’s a long walk in the dark, but if you stay close to the group you can feel safe. You can take a taxi if you want to, but I think it’s a waste of money. And sometimes the drivers circle around just to cheat you, so be careful.”

  “Thank you—” she says to me, and I can tell by how she says it that she wants to insist, one more time, that I show her. But I meant to say we and a lot of people and stay close to let her know that she should just follow everyone, all of us on the same trip, the same type of man at the other end. She’s too young to understand though.

  “My name is Natalia,” she says.

  “Good to meet you,” I tell Natalia. The bus has gone dark and I can feel some of the gradual descent toward Los Angeles, so I lean my head against the window. I close my eyes as if to nap, but I don’t offer my name.

  She’s quiet while I pretend to nap and with my eyes closed, I think back to a Natalia I knew in South Texas, one of two other girls in my third-grade class. They were good friends to me, both of them, Natalia and the other one, and we sat in the last row of the classroom while the rowdy boys tried to impress the teacher. I remember third grade because it was the last year I ever had in school. I was a smart girl. I was smarter than the boys, and I was filled with a need to prove I was better than them. One day, our teacher asked the class a simple question. Which weighed more, a pound of feathers or a pound of gold? The boys went out of their way to explain why one would be heavier than the other, until I finally raised my hand. When the teacher called on me, I said, without hesitation, “A pound is a pound, no matter what.”

  On the bus, I open my eyes again to the silence I remember from the classroom. In the dark, all the women are sleeping, this new Natalia next to me, not the same girl, but the same thinking: Latch on to someone who can move around in the world, someone who can help you. I can’t imagine whatever happened to those girlhood friends, if they ever got out of South Texas, but I remember they were sweet to me after the teacher opened the top drawer of her desk, then came down the aisle with a white ribbon in her hand. The room went silent, almost dark, from everyone’s watching, and the teacher placed the ribbon in front of me. Do something with your life, Griselda.

  When we arrive at the station, I have to goad Natalia ahead so we can get off the bus. She stands so bewildered with her two bags at the rush of the station that it’s all I can do to not take her hand in mine. “Come,” I tell her, as a group of our fellow passengers makes its way to the exit, and she follows me through the grimy bustle of the station, the sleepy eyes, the baby strollers, the impatience. The better part of me says I should turn around to make sure she is close behind, that she hasn’t been swallowed up by what is, for her, the surprise of so many people at nine in the evening. I don’t ask if she’s hungry or if she’d like a drink or if she needs the restroom—there is never time for anything on a trip like this—and she follows me past the coffee-dispensing machines, the bank of pay phones, the ticket counters with their long lines of arguments. We follow the other passengers who had been on the bus, all of us a flock of birds swerving onto the street.

  Natalia is having trouble keeping up. She’s figured out that her white shoes are not made for walking, but I tell her nothing about the stupidity of wearing a dress. She should be smart enough for this world on her own, I think to myself, for the day that demands she do this trip alone with no one to help her. I can hear the click-click of her heels along the sidewalk, so I know she’s behind me. The sweat on my brow appears quickly; sometimes, the Los Angeles nights are balmy and bearable, but tonight it feels as if we brought the Valley heat with us. I can hear her breathing heavily behind me, but I don’t turn around. We hardly need the other passengers as our guides anymore. We’re walking quickly enough to show we are determined, not lost or tired, and our pace blends us into the life on the sidewalk: the late-shift weekend workers waiting at the city bus benches; the exhaust of the taxicabs idling at the corners; boys on bikes who are too young to be out so late; the hot fluorescence of a bodega, its vegetables wilting in the heat.

  “How much more?” Natalia finally says, and when I turn around, I can see the sweat stains in dark circles under her arms, how hard she tries to not show a slight limp in her right foot, a blister no doubt.

  “Two more blocks,” I tell her. The other passengers—we were never really a group at all—have long reached the park, fanned out to look for their men. We’ve almost reached it, and not once along the way were we spoken to or looked at, the street always humming with traffic, inviting what I know is a false sense of safety. “Will you remember the way back to the station?”

  “Yes,” she says, looking around, and she says it so confidently
that I have to believe her, even though I wonder about the man who she is coming to meet, if he would lead her by the hand back to the station. She says it so confidently that I know immediately that it has never occurred to her that her man might not have made it to the park to begin with.

  That’s when I know she is truly lost.

  “Come,” I tell her again, when we reach the edge of the park, and here, I know, is where her eyes will be opened, where she’ll learn to never again wear a purple dress on such a trip. “Stay with me,” I tell her as we approach the benches filled with men in T-shirts so white they glow in the dark, all of them waiting. I don’t call out Timoteo’s name—I learned a long time ago never to do that—and Natalia’s fear gets the better of her. She stays silent as we near the benches, close enough to the small groups to make out faces, sometimes a cigarette lighter briefly illuminating a circle of tired, anxious men. “Mamasita,” I can hear someone mutter, and the single word is followed by the ugly laughter of too many men to count. “¿Dónde me llevas?” says another one, and Natalia takes my hand out of sheer fright, her grip tighter than mine. If she wore a ring, it would have dug into me.

  We circle the park twice, then cut across it once, but Timoteo is not in any of the usual spots. I stand looking back at the darkness, thinking about whether I should go back in, or to give it another hour. But I know Timoteo has not made it to Los Angeles tonight, and that I need to board the bus in the morning and head to San Diego.

  “What do we do now?” Natalia asks. “He said he would be here.”