The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

I don’t know why I wanted to hear that voice again. It was like, if I heard that voice enough, I could actually become the way I wanted to be, which was beautiful, which was seductive, which was a woman loved and desired.

I went into the foyer and sat down at the telephone table, and dialed the number I had committed to memory.

He answered right away.

“Hello,” I said. “It's me again, Susan.”

“Well, hello, honey,” Nils said. “Find your mother yet?”

“No,” I said. “That's why I’m calling.”

“That hurts. I thought you’d call because you missed me. Do you?”

I wasn’t sure what I felt. “I don’t know. Do you miss her?”

I could hear him fumbling around with something, a pot or a dish. “No,” Nils sighed.

“Is that because she's with you?”

“No,” he said. “You’re sharp. You sound like a jealous lover. I kind of like it.”

“Why are you home in the middle of the day?” I wanted to know. “Don’t you work?”

“What are you, a detective? Why are you home from school?”

“It's a snow day.”

“Hmmm,” he said. “Can your boyfriend make it to come and visit or are you all alone?”

“He isn’t allowed over,” I said. “It's against my father's rules.”

“I bet you break the rules sometimes, though, don’t you? Your mother sure did.” Nils laughed.

“You mean when she ran away with you?”

“And other times. Never mind. What's he like, your boyfriend?”

“Well, he's wonderful and strong. He's faced a lot of tragedy, and that's what I’ve been trying to help him through.”

“How do you do that?”

I paused. “He's tough in front of everyone, but when he's with me he whispers all the things he's secretly scared of. I just let him cry it all out,” I said. “Sometimes he cries so much my hair gets wet with his tears.”

“What color is your hair?”

“Black.”

“Like your mother’s?”

“Yes.”

“What else do you do with your boyfriend to help him through?”

His voice sounded different. Angry somehow, as if he were getting revenge for something, but I was getting revenge for something too. The idea of that revenge made me tingle. “We take walks,” I said.

“That can’t be it,” Nils said. “Boys want more than walks. It's why they waste time taking walks to begin with.”

I didn’t know what to say anymore, so I just sat there with the receiver to my ear, my heart thudding against my ribs. The line was still as a held breath. I imagined Nils reading my silence in ways I was too shy to actually speak of. A line had been crossed. Was it possible to fall in love this way?

“Anybody there?” he said softly, as if he was afraid of waking me up.

I gave him a sign that was more of a sound than a word.

He spoke in that same hushed voice, like he was trying to imagine or remember a particular moment. “Tell me, did he take your virginity, Susan?”

I hung up the phone.

The walls seemed to close in around me and squeeze my lungs like a fist. The curtains rustled, and to me, they were souls of my grandparents who had died in our house whispering, You shook the tree. And for the first time I wasn’t happy to think of people coming back after they were dead, because they probably wouldn’t be happy with what they saw in me.

All at once, Nils was right there inside me, seeing the things I saw, feeling what I felt, twisting it all around. He could move through wires and tangle up my heart. There wasn’t any space between Los Angeles and Lincoln, Nebraska. Distance came together at a broken stoplight, and time, my mother and I, and Nils were all crashing into each other head-on. I had caused the accident, the crossing of paths, and Bang! The Forty-fifth Parallel disappeared.

The ring of the telephone broke the stillness. My heart flipped over. It jangled my nerves. I bit my fist. It rang, and rang. Three, four times. I got up and went into the living room and covered my ears with the couch cushions and mashed my lips up against the arm. It kept on ringing. Nils could do anything. He had lost my mother's money. He had made her crazy. He had done something horrible to her, I knew that now, something unforgivable, and yet she couldn’t let herself forget. What had Nils done to her? The telephone went silent. I needed to know.

I went up to my parents’ bedroom and took it apart. I emptied out drawers and ran my fingers along the cracks looking for false bottoms containing secret stashes of love letters. I poked my fingers into cold dark holes and pried apart hinges. I took out the insoles in heels and dumped the contents of purses on the dressing room floor. I found nothing. I sat on my knees staring in amazement at the mess I had made. The room looked burglarized. I left it that way, and went downstairs and opened the drawers in the letter desk where my mother kept addresses. I sifted through stacks of postcards from people I had never heard of, but none was from Nils. I took the books off the shelves and shook each one by the binding, but there wasn’t any note tucked between the pages, not even in Wuthering Heights.

A shaft of sunlight spilled into the living room, and then disappeared behind a cloud, leaving a shimmer of dust in its wake. And when the telephone rang for the second time, it was a sign. I watch my hand pass over the rotary, my fingers wrap around the receiver. The cold line tickled my arm. It was the only thing I could feel. “Hello?” I said.

“Susan?”

“Yeah?”

“It's Cora. Something happened.”

The cat was frozen solid, stuck on its hind legs, its claws tangled in the mesh of the Lessings’ screen door. A layer of snow had fallen over his black fur, and beneath a white dome piled high like a Klan hood, the green eyes were glassy, opaque with frost.

Cora and I stood on the back steps, staring at the cat in disbelief. “I thought you’d want to see it,” she said, wiping tear streaks off her round cheeks. “Toby boomeranged pop-tops at Cinders, so he didn’t think it was safe to come home until it was too late. You’re the first person I called.”

“Thanks,” I said, which sounded more insincere than I had wanted it to. I watched my breath float up in the sunlight like a cloud of dust, and then returned my eyes to the cat.

“What do I do with him?” Cora said.

“What about your parents?”

“Poppy's away on business. Mummy's working up in the studio. That means she's in an artistic fugue.”

“Is she an artist?”

“Well, Mummy's working in new mediums. She collects feathers and makes sculptures.” Cora looked down at the cat again and sniffled into her glove. “It's not like I can bury him. I can’t even touch him. Toby won’t come out of his room. He's put something against the door so I can’t get in.”

I stole a glance over my shoulder at the Harringtons’ house, where everyone said there had once been a murder. A light was on in an upstairs window, but I couldn’t see anyone inside. I imagined a woman removing her jewels, sitting down on her knees in the very spot where the bodies had been found, putting her face in her hands. The snow reminded her of things she had never experienced. The walls held in memories no one had lived to remember, and it all stayed there, sleeping under snow. For some people, quiet was not a good thing. Quiet meant being alone in the worst kind of way.

“I’ll touch him,” I said. I crouched down on my knees and knocked the dome of snow off the cat's head. I had never touching anything dead before. But I wasn’t really touching death, I assured myself. There were my fingers inside a glove, reaching out for ice and snow. “It almost doesn’t look real,” I said. “It's like wax.”

“He's real to me,” Cora said. “He's Cinders. He sleeps on my pillow. He was waiting all night in a blizzard for