The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

“Hello?” he said, finally.

“Hello.” My hands were shaking. “Listen, you don’t know me but- I’m calling to see if my mother's there.”

“Well, that all depends on who your mother is,” he said slowly, and laughed as if it were some sort of joke.

“Ann Peyton Hurst.”

There was a pause on the other end of the line as if the phone had gone dead. I brushed a bit of plastic off my face and cinched forward on my knees. “Hello?” I said.

“How did you get this number?”

“I found it.”

“Who is this?”

“This is her daughter; who's this?”

“Nils Ivers,” he said. “Maybe you haven’t heard of me. Your mother was an Ivers once. For about two weeks.”

“I really need to get in touch with her,” I said. “There's a blizzard.”

“Well, there isn’t any snow here” He paused. “Is she leaving someone else now?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Where are you?” he said.

I didn’t answer for a second. Then I told him.

“Well, you’re on the line with LA, sugar. This is a long-distance call.”

“That doesn’t matter,” I said suddenly. “We’re rolling in money.”

“Sounds nice. How old are you?”

I paused. Fourteen was too young. “Seventeen.”

“I bet you’re beautiful.”

“Everyone says so.” I felt like my mouth was moving without my mind telling it what to say.

“I bet you look just like her.”

“I do,” I lied. “People can’t believe it.” It was the strangest feeling I had, like being a puppet, with someone else pulling the strings.

“You sound like quite a sparkler. A real Roman candle. Have you ever thought about the movies? I always thought your mother should be in the movies.”

“Sometimes,” I said. “But I’m more interested in other things.”

“Like what?”

“Horses and stuff. I can’t talk anymore. I have to go,” I said.

“What's the rush? Is it a betrayal?”

“I’m tying up the line.”

“Ahhh,” he said. “I get it. There's a guy, right? He give you his jacket?”

“He told me he’d call,” I said. “I have to go.”

“Wait,” he said quickly. “People thought I didn’t love her. They were wrong about me. I did love her.”

I hung up the phone.

I leaned my head back against the wall and the beaded hems of dresses stirred inside bags as hangers knocked on the rack. My heart was thumping so hard I thought it might break my chest, and beat its way across the floor. My skin electrified my mind in strange directions, confusing wanting with not wanting. I saw my mother's Studebaker half-buried in a snowdrift on the side of the highway, the paint catching police lights like the gold wings of an angel. I pressed my face into the folds of a long black evening gown, and breathed deeply. I smelled plastic and, beneath it, my mother's spiced perfume.

More than a foot of snow fell during the night, and the following day it kept on coming. Shapes in the garden dulled, then changed, leaving alien imprints on living room walls like the last sigh of a sinking ship.

The morning Star didn’t arrive until evening. The people of Lincoln wondered what was happening, though there wasn’t anything to wonder about. Time had stopped. My father worked in his study with the door shut, and I couldn’t imagine what he was doing. It didn’t seem like anyone could possibly be working anywhere else in the world. I put on my boots and forced my way down the drive. The snow was almost up to my knees. It was hard to find my feet. You couldn’t make out the stumps of the elms anymore. The tops of the rhododendrons swelled like bubbles trapped on a frozen surface. When I opened the mailbox, the metal door creaked with cold. Snow tumbled off the top, a tiny avalanche-nothing inside. I watched the lights of a plow round the corner with the steadiness of a tank coming to rescue Lincoln from an invading army. Bring provisions, the neighbors wanted to scream, but no one had a voice. The world wouldn’t listen. Everyone had lost someone, and they were going to keep on losing for the rest of time.

I imagined my mother to be the stuff of legends, torn from the arms of her true love, keeping Nils s telephone number for years like a secret treasure inside the box of the ring he had once given her. I imagined that my mother's first marriage had never been annulled, that she had never actually been married to my father at all, that I had been born out of wedlock, and it was therefore no wonder I found myself so alone in the world. The planets are not aligned, the fortune-tellers had declared on the day of my birth.

Stories were easier to imagine in a snowstorm. History was that much closer with the present so muffled, and it didn’t really matter what was true and what wasn’t when it was just one mind thinking alone. I wrote this down on a pad of paper and read it over and over to myself. It made me feel brilliant. I became so excited by what I’d written I wanted to scream it from the rooftops. Instead, I lurked outside my father's study door until he finally opened it.

“You startled me!” he said. I shoved the paper at him without explanation. He held it out at a distance and squinted down at my writing because he wasn’t wearing his reading glasses. “It doesn’t really matter… what's true and what isn’t true,” my father read slowly, “when it's just one mind thinking about something alone.” He seemed to consider this for a moment. Then he nodded his head and raised his eyebrows. “Where did you get that idea?”

“From my head,” I said.

“I’m impressed, Susan. That's intelligent.” He handed it back to me. “You’ve got a point. I don’t agree with it though.”

“Why?”

“Because I believe in fact. A fact is a fact. I’m a rational thinker,” he said. “Drives your mother crazy.”

I hoped he wasn’t going to start talking about her.

“So, I’ve got a question for you,” he said instead. “If a tree falls in the woods and there's no one there to hear, does it make a sound?”

I considered this a moment. “No,” I said, finally.

“Whereas, I say yes. Most definitely, yes. A sound makes a sound regard- less. This is a very important point of dissension between us,” he said, holding me away from him. “I hope in spite of all this we can agree on something for lunch.”

I put my arms around his waist and gave him a sideways hug. “There isn’t any choice,” I said. “We’re like people in the war.”

My father ruffled my hair the way he had when I was a little girl. I hoped the snow would go on falling forever.

We ate what we could find in the cupboards, canned foods collecting dust on the shelves left over from the days when my grandfather had been alive. I imagined stories trapped inside cans for years, denting the metal with angry little shouts, and the need to be heard. When the lids were opened, swollen metal sighed with relief.

My father and I ate peaches with forks right out of the can. “It's funny,” he said in between bites. “I was just remembering that time my sister Portia tried to bury herself in the yard, and then yelled for someone to come and dig her out. I’d entirely forgotten until now.”

“Why did she try to bury herself?” I asked.

“It had to do with a story our mother told us about our grandparents,” my father said. “There was a terrible blizzard in McCook. Your great-grandparents Elsa and Hans were recently married and had just come from Sweden. They barely knew anyone in Nebraska, and they barely knew each other.”