The Best American Short Stories 2018 Read online

  Rio and his mother fly to Texas for the month of July to visit familia. My mother and I take them to the airport. Carmen has to stand on her toes to kiss my forehead. She holds my face in her hands and says, “We’ll be back before you can say Tenochtitlan.” My mother spends July harvesting the garden in our backyard. She does other things too, but mostly she is outside on her knees where she can pray in the dirt. I hear her say Carmen’s name to the tomatillos once. The tomatillos’ papery husks crack and flake when they are ready to be harvested. I watch my body do the same. I spend July under the paddleboats in the dark where I press my fingers to my lips and put my other hand down my shorts and say Rio’s name.

  Rio comes back taller and darker. Beside me in our bed his skin is still hot from Texas. He kisses me, like we had so many times before. Then he takes my pants off and pulls my cock out and licks his hand and gets my cock wet and puts me inside of him. After that we are fucking everywhere. We are naked when our mothers are at work in the taco stand. We fumble around in the darkness for each other, like moths to the only light in a room. Our sex life will never again be as exciting as when we are fourteen and sharing a bed.

  In August there is a summer camp in the city at the Baptist church. The campers are new every week. We are too poor to go to summer camp. The campers swim on a private beach. We think maybe they can walk on water. We see them splashing out by the buoys. We start to call the boys buoys. We walk up the shore and get as close as we can. They wave sometimes and others push their noses flat with their fingers and stick their tongues out. I have not said out loud what I am but I think about it all the time. Especially the summer when we are fourteen and watching the buoys throw footballs on the church’s private beach. I want to pick each mole from their pink backs and eat them like Raisinets. We walk ten minutes into Grand Haven to sit outside the chapel and listen to the Bible lessons. The pastor’s sermons scare us out from under the paddleboats for a few days. I think I am more scared than Rio. Rio is brave. Rio is the bravest boy I know the summer we are fourteen.

  There are days I’m not up for cove crawling, buoy watching, kissing inside the belly of the yellow slide at the park. I stay inside and read instead. Rio is not much of a reader and heads out to adventure without me. He calls me a faggot first, and then the screen door slams.

  We will not always get along. When we start high school he will start to play varsity baseball. Our mothers will go to every game. I will love the way he looks in a jockstrap. He will be trying too hard. I will tell him he is trying too hard and that nobody believes him and he will hate me. He will have the chance to be popular and he will take it. He will run away from home the summer he is fifteen. My tio, Valentino, will be visiting from Arizona. He will have rented a car. One night, when they are out walking the pier, Rio will take Tio Valentino’s rented car and drive it as far as Tennessee where a state trooper will pull him over. Rio will have just picked a car and followed. We will all drive down to Tennessee to pick him up from jail. Carmen will be furious. I will think he’s so fucking cool.

  We are subscribed to Michigan Animal Magazine this summer. Really we are taking them from the Johnsons’ mailbox, reading them, and then putting them back. We learn that cougars used to be native to Michigan but we drove them out. We learn that the feral swine are a problem. We already know that the state bird is a robin, but we learn that cranes fly necks extended—herons fly necks drawn back. We learn that what we thought were owls are mourning doves hooting in the trees. We learn that a monarch’s wings are orange with black veins, not orange with black stripes. I look at my veins, blue beneath my skin, and wish I could fly.

  Late August we are caught, giggling and naked, fucking in the preacher’s bed. From his house we’d collected sheets of cardstock paper with his parish’s name embossed along the top. He will tell the police officers hours later as we are being loaded into the backseats of the cop cars that he’d left a pair of good shoes at the lake house. This explained his unexpected visit. The preacher opens the door to the beach house and Rio and I jump from the bed, pulling on our swim-trunks. He grabs Rio by the hair and slams him into the wall. He thunders like a sermon. We get away and run and hide down in our spot by the paddleboats.

  Before we go home and before the cops arrive we are walking the shoreline, panting. Rio sees something and points. “Look,” he tells me. I see a brown mass—fur and antlers. It doesn’t move. I am scared to get closer. He runs ahead, kicking up sand. The beach looks so big, like he could get lost in it. I do not want to lose him. I follow, my ankles buckling to the uncertainty of the sand. The brown mass is huge. It is a monster—it could rear its ugly head and tear us limb from limb. It looks dead for weeks, stinking and bloated, its blood has turned the sand and water black. We know from Michigan Animal Magazine that this is a moose. Standing next to it Rio looks so small, but he is fourteen and taller and darker with skin still hot from Texas. He covers his mouth. We know from Michigan Animal Magazine that moose are only found in small numbers in the Upper Peninsula. We figure that the moose died up north and the water carried him here.

  Rio crouches, covering his nose. He says we have to do something. “What can we do?” I ask. He starts to gather twigs and shells, leaves and driftwood. He uses what we have: scattered branches, pebbles, brittle shells. He scatters them around the moose, creates a perimeter of earthly discharge to sanction off this bit of beach for the moose. I help him. I pull bentgrass up and pick flowers from the beach trees. We sit away from the moose and lean our heads on one another. We watch the shoreline for Wisconsin. The moose’s antlers have already begun to bleach clean in the sun.

  Our mothers will struggle through the winter. They will rely on second jobs cleaning houses. They won’t trust us alone in the same room together. The cop had been able to speak Spanish and had told our mothers what we’d been doing. The preacher dropped the charges. Rio will start to sleep with his mother and I will sleep with mine. Rio will crawl the coves without me. He is the gringo who falls through the ice that winter, but he will pull himself out and walk, shivering, back to our house where I will tell him how fucking stupid he is. I will take his clothes off and take my clothes off and press myself against him inside a scratchy mohair blanket.

  He will flunk out of college and move back home. Carmen will put him to work in the taquería. We will barely talk for months. He will become the kind of brave that says yes to everything. When I graduate college he will be in rehab fighting a heroin addiction. He will call saying that one of the steps is making amends and a week later we will end up fucking against the walls of the apartment I share with my boyfriend. He will break off in me like shells. I will meet my husband, Fisher, when I am twenty-six and he will meet Rio that same year at Thanksgiving and Rio will not be happy about it. In the kitchen, while Fisher is trying his best to speak with our mothers, Rio will tell me that no one can love me as hard and as real as he has every year since we were fourteen. I will say something to destroy him: “It took this long to find someone that could love the rest of you out of me.” Fisher will hear our voices rising and will step into the kitchen as Rio slams his fist against the laminate countertop. Fisher will ask if everything is all right. I will have to explain that night on the drive home about Rio and I.

  The summer we are fourteen and playing dress-up with our mothers’ clothes in their bedroom with Jesus hanging on a cross on the wall, we talk about getting older. We sit on my mother’s bed, the dresses zipped up halfway and pooling around our waists. We have not become monsters yet. We have not stolen the Euchre cards and buttons. We have not called the boys buoys. The boy from school that we hate has not drowned in the lake. The moose has not washed up on the banks of Lake Michigan. We do not know that we will never know our fathers. We will wonder what got into us. Outside, though the curtains are closed tight and all we can see are the curtains’ stitches in the sun, we know the beach is clean because summer is just getting started and the summer families haven’t moved in. Rio has just kissed
me for the first time.

  “I’ll get a sex change,” Rio says. He gathers the dress up around his hips and clips at his penis with two fingers.

  “I like you as a boy,” I tell him.

  “Then you’re gay,” he says.

  “Don’t you like me?” I ask.

  “I love you,” he says. “It’s wrong though. We have to stop or something bad will happen.”

  We take off the dresses and hang them in the closet.

  Cristina Henríquez

  Everything Is Far from Here

  from The New Yorker

  On the first day, there’s a sense of relief. There are other feelings, too, but relief is among them. She has arrived, at least. After three weeks. After a broken sandal strap, sunburn on her cheeks, mud in her ears, bugs in her hair, blisters around her ankles, bruises on her hips, boiled eggs, bottled water, sour berries, pickup trucks and train cars and footsteps through the dirt, sunrises and sunsets, nagging doubt and crackling hope—she has arrived.

  They tell her to sleep, but that can’t be right. First she has to find her son, who is supposed to be here, too. They were separated along the way, overnight, a few days ago. The man who was leading them here divided the group. Twelve people drew too much attention, he claimed. He had sectioned off the women, silencing any protest with the back of his hand, swift to the jaw. “Do you want to get there or not?” They did. “Trust me,” he said.

  He sent a friend to escort them. When she glanced back, she felt a shove between her shoulder blades. “It’s only for a few miles,” he hissed in her ear. “Walk.”

  By morning, the men were gone, the children gone. The friend, a man with sunglasses and a chipped front tooth, said, “I am here to take care of you.” What he meant was that they were there to take care of him. Four women. Which they did. Which they were made to do.

  “Where is my son?” she asks a guard who speaks Spanish. He shrugs in reply. “¿Mi hijo?” she asks anyone who will listen and many who won’t. “He’s five years old. He has black hair, parted on one side, and a freckle, right here, under his eye. He was wearing a Spider-Man shirt.” People just shake their heads.

  “There’s a family unit,” one woman says, pointing down the hall. “They have cribs,” she adds, as if that’s something.

  In the family unit, which is one large room, she searches every crib. She gazes down at infants and eight-year-olds curled against the bars. She scans the faces of the children watching Dora the Explorer on a television set mounted to the wall.

  “He’s coming,” a young mother sitting in the corner assures her. She has a child on her lap. “The same thing happened to me. The kids just take longer. They don’t walk as fast. Mine got here a whole week after I did. Everyone makes it eventually.”

  She wants to believe that’s true.

  The first night, she lies in a bed and listens to the noises of the women in the room with her. Dozens of them. They’re stacked neatly in bunk beds, like bodies in a morgue, and she stares at the bowing mattress above her, the straining metal coils, worried that they will not hold. She considers the possibility that the gray-haired woman who clambered up there earlier and who is snoring there now might fall through and crush her to death. She begins to laugh. What if? After everything? What if that’s how it ends? The sound of her laughter blooms in the dark. From across the room, a voice asks, “What the fuck is so funny?”

  They let her store: her clothes, her broken leather sandals, a plastic comb, an elastic hair band. They let her keep: the silver wedding ring she still wears even though her husband died four years ago. They take: her pocketknife (no weapons), a sleeve of Maria cookies (no food), a tin of Vaseline (no reason).

  In the morning, there’s a count. In the evening, there will be another. The guards yank the beige sheet off her bed, balloon it dramatically in the air. “Forty-eighteen, clear!” They move down the line.

  It’s a warehouse, this place: cement floors, fluorescent tube lights in the ceiling, flyers taped to the painted cinder-block walls—ads for phone services, for immigration attorneys, for psychologists. She takes it all in.

  After the inspection, she returns to the processing desk, near the front of the facility. Through the windows she can see a chain-link fence topped with a confection of barbed wire and, just beyond it, an open field speckled with wildflowers and long grass and a few broad trees.

  “My son?” she asks the woman sitting at the desk. “Gabriel Rivas? Did he get here yet?”

  The woman consults her computer. “Sorry,” she says. “No one by that name.”

  She stares at the woman, unsure of what to say.

  “Did you check the family area?” the woman asks.

  They get one hour to eat. Hash browns and syrup for breakfast. Chicken broth and French fries for lunch. Turkey cutlets and potato dumplings for dinner. So many potatoes. It’s a world made of potatoes. There is water to drink, but it tastes like chlorine, and it makes her nauseous.

  They take showers in the trailers. The guards control when the water turns on and when it turns off. Soap bubbles skim across the floor.

  In the bathroom, which is in a separate trailer, she wads up toilet paper and stuffs it into her underwear. A woman next to her notices.

  “Talk to Esme,” she says. “She’ll hook you up.”

  She finds Esme in the dayroom, watching TV. Esme offers to sell her a tampon for a dollar, money she doesn’t have.

  Esme is unsympathetic. She purses her lips. “At least you got your period,” she says. “Many of us don’t, you know, after what they do. We get pregnant instead.”

  She marks the days on her arm. A small dot on the inside of her wrist becomes a trail, then a winding chain.

  Periodically, new people arrive, escorted by border-patrol agents. A few every week. She watches them with their tattered backpacks, the children with stuffed animals in their arms. When the weather turns cold, people are wrapped in foil blankets as they trudge up the walk.

  “Did you see a little boy?” she asks every new arrival. “A boy who looks like me?”

  The people glance at her with weary, red-rimmed eyes. Some of them shake their heads. One after the other, none of them him.

  What if she’s forgotten what he looks like? What if she’s gone crazy? What if he’s here, lying in one of those cribs, and she sees him every single day without realizing he’s her son? What if it’s been too long? What if memory fails? What if everything fails, and getting through life is simply learning to cope with the failure? No, she scolds herself. Don’t think like that. Don’t let yourself give way.

  A woman named Alicia arrives from El Salvador with her six-year-old daughter in tow. They sleep in the bed together. They shower together. The girl won’t leave her mother’s side.

  “She’s nervous,” Alicia says, as if there’s a need to explain. “It was a terrible trip.”

  “Yes.”

  “We’re going to find her father in Minnesota.”

  “But this is Texas.”

  “Is it far?”

  And how, she wonders, does she answer a question like that. Is it far? Everything is far from here, even if it’s only across the street.

  She meets with a lawyer, a man in a stained tan sports coat. She asks him how long she’ll be here. She asks him what happens after this. “Eso depende” is his answer to both. Then: “Tell me everything. They’ll need to determine if you qualify for asylum, if you have credible fear.” And though she doesn’t want to relive it, she tells him about the day, a few months ago now, that the boys—boys whose mothers she knew from the neighborhood—pushed her off a moving bus and dragged her across a busy intersection, how she kept scrabbling her legs under her to try to stand, and how they kicked her to keep her down. How nobody helped her, how nobody stopped them because nobody knows how to stop boys like that. How they made her kneel in the alley behind the fruit store while they held a gun to her head and all took turns, how they put the gun in her mouth and made her suck tha
t, too, and how when they were finished they said, “You’re in the family now, bitch,” and laughed.

  “Why do you think they targeted you?” the lawyer asks.

  “I was alone.”

  “You’re not married?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “And you’re pretty.”

  She narrows her eyes.

  “And men—”

  “They were boys.”

  “Even more so. We have an expression here: Boys will be boys.”

  She feels a rising anger.

  “If we go back,” she says evenly, “they will do it again.”

  “We?” he asks. “Is there someone else?”

  “My son,” she starts, but her voice breaks. She clenches her fists. She digs her nails into her palms, determined not to cry.

  At night, lying in her bunk atop the beige sheet, she imagines running back the way she came, retracing her steps through the dirt and the weeds until she finds him standing in the overgrowth somewhere, hungry and cold. She wants to gather him up, to hold him close, to smell the apricot-sweetness of his skin, to feel the fuzz of his ear against her cheek, to say I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry—for what? Had she wanted too much? Safety for herself and for him? Was that too much? It hadn’t seemed like it at the time, but if she hadn’t wanted it they never would have left, and if they had never left she never would have lost him. She wouldn’t have lost everything.