The Best American Short Stories 2018 Read online

  Now that they are in that enclosed space, the boy cannot run. In frustration, he jabs at all the black numbered buttons on the panel, as high as he can reach, and turns to Mo-Sae in defiance. Whatever motion he has set off, Mo-Sae is powerless to stop it. He feels something engage, deep inside the elevator shaft, and the gears begin to shift. The elevator car begins to rise, but only for a moment. On the second floor, it stops. Its doors open and then close. On the next floor, it stops again. Open, close. The doors keep opening and closing on identical hallways, and Mo-Sae realizes that he has no idea which is his own. Still, he begins to find his panic subsiding. His breathing slows. This small space is manageable. Its lighting is plain, its corners exposed. The boy also becomes quiet.

  On the fifth floor, the doors open onto a scene with a difference. An elderly man with a cane is waiting to enter, so Mo-Sae and the boy exit the elevator car. Glancing down the hall, Mo-Sae notices that a certain door has been left ajar. Could it be their own? Had they left it open? No matter. They will find out soon enough. They head toward the open door. Walking through it, they see themselves reflected in the entryway mirror. They see paired shoes lined up neatly on the floor. That is when Mo-Sae realizes that by happenstance or miracle, he has gotten home.

  Time passes. The sun goes down.

  Mo-Sae feels in himself a lengthening of the patience and waiting with which he occupies his days. He moves about the house, looking for helpful things to do. The fact that Young-Ja is not home does not particularly trouble him at the moment. He clears the kitchen table, wipes it down. Shit, he says softly to himself as he waters the plants. Goddamn. The phone rings from time to time. He lets it.

  In the living room, he sees Jonathan, remembers Jonathan. The boy is asleep on the living room sofa. His open mouth, his sticky grasp. Mo-Sae brings a large towel from the bathroom and lays it over the boy, to make his sleep seem more intentional.

  A knock on the door.

  Opening it, Mo-Sae is momentarily surprised to find a dusky stranger in doctor’s scrubs. But of course, it is the son-in-law. The son-in-law is apparently Indian. Mo-Sae suddenly feels a sharp sympathy for his wife: how she must struggle with this!

  “Mr. Han? It’s Sanjay? May I come in?”

  Sanjay’s manner is pleasant, suggestive. Crossing the threshold, he knows to remove his shoes. “Christina sent me over. She went straight to the hospital. She says you weren’t answering the phone.”

  Hospital?

  Mo-Sae isn’t sure what to do with that information. It brings something deeply unwelcome to his sense of well-being, shows it as precarious. But he is also afraid, perhaps more afraid, to expose his confusion before a young man.

  Sanjay moves deeper into the house. In the living room, he notices Jonathan lying on the sofa, lightly sweating under a towel. “Oh,” he says. His face, beside the boy’s face, suddenly seems inevitable. “He’s sleeping.”

  Yes, sleeping.

  The two stand over the boy, not knowing how to progress from there. Young-Ja would know. Mo-Sae wonders why she is not around.

  Sanjay’s cellphone vibrates in his pocket. He walks to the far side of the room and takes the call with his back turned. Mo-Sae watches and listens, newly aware of Sanjay’s scrubs, the authority of his uniform, which seems bound up in the mysteries of his one-sided communication.

  “Christina? I’m here. How’s she doing?

  “So what’s the whole story? They found her where? In front of which bank?

  “How is it possible that nobody knew?

  “Okay, okay, I’m sorry.

  “Who’s the attending? Maybe I’ll give him a ring . . .

  “Jonathan? He’s fine.

  “I said he’s fine. He’s sleeping.

  “You want me to stay with him? With them?

  “Well, what do you want me to tell him?”

  Sanjay hangs up and looks toward Mo-Sae. He puts on a professional, chummy guise, telling Mo-Sae not to worry, that Young-Ja is in good hands, that the attending physician is a buddy of his. But Mo-Sae senses something false in his execution. When Sanjay falls silent, it is a relief for both men.

  Only, moments later, he is at it again. It seems this son-in-law of his can’t keep still, can’t keep quiet. He consults his phone. He looks around. “I see you grow spider plants!” Sanjay says, suddenly delighted. “Oh, and begonias! Christmas cactus!” He seems profoundly relieved to have stumbled on certain matters of fact.

  You like plants?

  “Just a hobby of mine,” says Sanjay, walking toward a plant with flat, sword-shaped leaves. “The scientific name of this one,” he tells Mo-Sae, “is ‘Mother-in-Law’s Tongue.’”

  Mo-Sae notices that Sanjay has lost all his discomfort and resumed his jokey doctor act. Perhaps this is part of Sanjay’s bag of tricks, to deliver bad news after his patients feel at ease. He watches Sanjay probe the soil in the pot with two diagnostic fingers. “Just don’t over-water,” Sanjay says. “Some plants thrive on neglect.”

  Once again, silence. There is a waiting quality to the silence.

  Then it occurs to Mo-Sae that Sanjay might be waiting for him to provide the next direction. That he, Mo-Sae, occupies a certain position as the father-in-law. That he has a certain power of permission and refusal.

  Go, says Mo-Sae.

  “I’m sorry?”

  You can go. Then come back. Just leave the boy. Let him sleep. I will keep watch.

  “Oh, no,” says Sanjay immediately. “Christina said I should stay.”

  But moments later, he relents. “Maybe I’ll just run out and grab a bite? I noticed a Carl’s Jr. on the way over. Haven’t eaten since breakfast. In and out of surgeries all day.”

  Still, he wavers.

  What, he doesn’t trust Mo-Sae with the boy?

  “Is okay,” he says to Sanjay. “Go.”

  After Sanjay leaves, Mo-Sae goes out onto the balcony, bringing with him pieces of the mystery that he couldn’t put together in his presence. Why was Sanjay here? What is the meaning of that phone conversation?

  Warily, he circles the matter of Young-Ja’s absence. But what can he make of it without her help? In all the ways that she is not what he had wanted—in her homeliness, her surprisingly conventional taste, her imperviousness to art or beauty, her stout resilience—she provides the resistance that distinguishes the reality from the dream.

  Below, darkness. The headlights of cars pulling in and out of parking spots. There is some pattern to their coming and going. If only he can figure it out, he will be able to make sense of other things as well. But as he applies his concentration, he becomes distractingly aware of certain sounds.

  No.

  Yes.

  The lights are tricky and misleading, but the sounds are actual sounds. They are coming from a nearby unit, perhaps through an open window. He senses the dawning of recognition, waits for it.

  Of course. It is an organ.

  An unseen musician is playing. Tentatively at first, as though it has been a while since he has been with an instrument. Chords, half-scales, just noodling around. Then, with growing conviction. The notes begin to come together, fall in place, mustering up to the start of a song. Yes. There’s the tune, faintly ridiculous, jaunty yet nostalgic. And here are the words, right there in his memory like a gift time had bestowed:

  Take me out to the ballgame

  Take me out to the fair

  Buy me some peanuts and cracker jacks

  I don’t care if I never get back

  As it sometimes happens, he simply begins to remember. His name is Han Mo-Sae, born 1940, ten years before the start of the Korean War. His wife is Han Young-Ja. Born 1945. In 1960, they met in Philadelphia. They married, bought a dry cleaners, Kim’s dry cleaning, and never bothered to change its name. They have two adult children.

  Those very children have talked. He has heard them speak. In this very balcony he had sat, not so long ago, with his eyes closed, pretending not to hear as his wife and children gathere
d around the kitchen table to discuss the problem of his continued existence. Who should care for him? Who should take him?

  If he feels an old flicker of indignation, a last assertion, it is easily extinguished. Oh, he doesn’t blame them. He loves them. He gets the impression that he is already looking back on a life; a life divested of time, ego, and even regard; a life weary of its own argument.

  A motion-sensor light momentarily illuminates the pool, then goes dark.

  Once, he remembers, his father had taken him swimming in Sokcho Beach. He enters the memory. His mother sits on a blanket by the rocks, under the pine trees. She waves. His father is in the ocean, motioning for Mo-Sae to come deeper into the water. His father has taken off his stern black scholar’s glasses, which he is never without. Mo-Sae sees him, framed against the sea and the sky; he can tell that his father’s nearsighted eyes, squinting, are unaccustomed to taking in the long view. Still, his father beckons, tells him not to be afraid. Tells him that swimming is like singing. That there is a scary little moment of trust, and then . . . nothing. You find that inside you are made of lightness and air.

  Mo-Sae wants to move toward that moment, to move deeper into its memory.

  But not just yet.

  He senses that there is still something for him in this place, holding him back, staking its claim. He goes back inside the apartment and walks from room to room. He turns on every light inside the house. A pull of the chain under the tasseled lampshade beside the sofa, and he notices the sleeping boy. The lamplight catches what is gold about his curls, his skin. There is nothing but innocence and conceit in those thin arms and legs. The expectation of tender-loving care.

  Where are his father and his mother, Mo-Sae wonders as he picks up a fallen bath towel and places it over the boy. When will they be back? Who will keep watch until they return?

  As the evening turns into night, Mo-Sae sits beside the front door, hugging his knees to his chest. He has angled his stance to keep the sleeping boy in his sights. He watches vigilantly so he will not forget.

  Emma Cline

  Los Angeles

  from Granta

  It was only November but holiday decorations were already starting to creep into the store displays: cutouts of Santa wearing sunglasses, windows poxed with fake snow, as if cold was just another joke. It hadn’t even rained since Alice moved here, the good weather holding. Back in her hometown, it was already grim and snowy, the sun behind her mother’s house setting by 5 p.m. This new city seemed like a fine alternative, the ceaseless blue sky and bare arms, the days passing frictionless and lovely. Of course, in a few years, when the reservoirs were empty and the lawns turned brown, she’d realize that there was no such thing as unending sunshine.

  The employee entrance was around the back of the store, in an alley. This was before the lawsuits, when the brand was still popular and opening new stores. They sold cheap, slutty clothes in primary colors, clothes invoking a low-level athleticism—tube socks, track shorts—as if sex was an alternative sport. Alice worked at a flagship store, which meant it was bigger and busier, on a high-visibility corner near the ocean. People tracked in sand and sometimes beach tar that the cleaners had to scrub off the floors at the end of the night.

  Employees were only allowed to wear the brand’s clothes, so Alice had gotten some for free when she started. Emptying the bag on her bed, she had been stirred by the pure abundance, but there was an awful caveat: her manager had picked them out, and everything was a little too tight, a size too small. The pants cut into her crotch and left red marks on her stomach in the exact outline of the zipper, the shirts creasing tight in her underarms. She left her pants undone on the drive to work, waiting until the last minute to suck in her stomach and button them up.

  Inside, the store was bright white and shiny, a low-level hum in the background from the neon signs. It was like being inside a computer. She got there at 10 a.m. but already the lights and the music conjured a perpetual afternoon. On every wall were blown-up photographs in grainy black and white of women in the famous underpants, girls with knobby knees making eye contact with the camera, covering their small breasts with their hands. All the models’ hair looked a little greasy, their faces a little shiny. Alice supposed that was to make sex with them seem more likely.

  Only young women worked the floor—the guys stayed in the back room, folding, unpacking and tagging shipments from the warehouse, managing stock. They had nothing to offer beyond their plain labor. It was the girls that management wanted out in front, girls who acted as shorthand to the entire brand. They roamed the floor in quadrants, wedging fingers between hangers to make sure items were hung at an equal distance, kicking dropped shirts out from under the partitions, hiding a leotard smeared with lipstick.

  Before they put the clothes on the racks, they had to steam them, trying to reanimate the sheen of value. The first time Alice had opened a box of T-shirts from the warehouse, seeing the clothes there, all stuffed and flattened together in a cube without tags or prices, made their real worth suddenly clear—this was junk, all of it.

  At her interview, Alice had brought a résumé, which she’d made some effort to print out at a copy store. She had also purchased a folder to transport the résumé intact but no one ever asked to see it. John, the manager, had barely asked about her employment history. At the end of their five-minute conversation, he instructed her to stand against a blank wall and took her picture with a digital camera.

  “If you could just smile a little,” John said, and she did.

  They sent the pictures to corporate for approval, Alice later discovered. If you made the cut, whoever did your interview got a $200 bonus.

  Alice fell into an easy rhythm at her post. Feeding hanger after hanger onto the racks. Taking clothes from the hands of strangers, directing them to a fitting room that she had to open with a key on a lanyard around her wrist, the mildest of authorities. Her mind was glazing over, not unpleasantly, thoughts swimmy and hushed. She’d get paid tomorrow, which was good—rent was due in a week, plus a payment on her loans. Her room was cheap, at least, though the apartment, shared with four housemates, was disgusting. Alice’s room wasn’t so bad only because there was nothing in it—her mattress still on the floor, though she’d lived there for three months.

  The store was empty for a while, one of the strange lulls that followed no logical pattern, until a father came in, pulled by his teenage daughter. He hovered at a wary distance while his daughter snatched up garment after garment. She handed him a sweatshirt, and the man read the price aloud, looking to Alice like it was her fault.

  “It’s just a plain sweatshirt,” he said.

  The daughter was embarrassed, Alice could tell, and she smiled at the father, bland but also forgiving, trying to communicate the sense that some things in this world were intractable. It was true that the clothes were overpriced. Alice could never have bought them herself. And the daughter’s expression was recognizable from her own adolescence, her mother’s constant commentary on the price of everything. The time they went to a restaurant for her brother’s eighth-grade graduation, a restaurant with a menu illuminated with some kind of LED lights, and her mother couldn’t help murmuring the prices aloud, trying to guess what the bill might be. Nothing could pass without being parsed and commented upon.

  When the father relented and bought two pairs of leggings, the sweatshirt, and a metallic dress, Alice understood he had only been pretending to be put off by the prices. The daughter had never considered the possibility that she might not get what she wanted, and whatever solidarity Alice felt with the father dissipated as she watched the numbers add up on the register, the man handing her his credit card without even waiting to hear the total.

  Oona worked Saturdays, too. She was seventeen, only a little younger than Alice’s brother, but Henry seemed like he was from a different species. He was ruddy-cheeked, his beard trimmed to a skinny strap along his chin. A strange mix of perversity—the background on his
phone a big-titted porn star—alongside a real boyishness. He made popcorn on the stove most nights, adored and replayed a song whose lyrics he happily chanted, “Build Me Up Buttercup,” his face young and sweet.

  Oona would eat Henry alive, Oona with her black chokers and lawyer parents, her private school where she played lacrosse and took a class in Islamic art. She was easy and confident, already well versed in her own beauty. It was strange how good-looking teenagers were these days, so much more attractive than the teenagers Alice and her friends had been. Somehow these new teenagers all knew how to groom their eyebrows. The pervs loved Oona—the men who came in alone, lured by the advertisements, the young women who worked the floor dressed in the promised leotards and skirts. The men lingered too long, performing a dramatic contemplation of a white T-shirt, carrying on loud phone calls. They wanted to be noticed.

  The first time it seemed like one of those men had cornered Oona, Alice pulled her away for an imaginary task in the back. But Oona just laughed at Alice—she didn’t mind the men, and they often bought armfuls of the clothes, Oona marching them to the cash register like a cheerful candy-striper. They got commission on everything.

  Oona had been asked by corporate to shoot some ads, for which she would receive no money, only more free clothes. She really wanted to do it, she told Alice, but her mom wouldn’t sign the release form. Oona wanted to be an actress. The sad fact of this city: the thousands of actresses with their thousands of efficiency apartments and teeth-whitening strips, the energy generated by thousands of treadmill hours and beach runs, energy dissipating into nothingness. Maybe Oona wanted to be an actress for the same reason Alice did: because other people told them they should be. It was one of the traditional possibilities for a pretty girl, everyone urging the pretty girl not to waste her prettiness, to put it to good use. As if prettiness was a natural resource, a responsibility you had to see all the way through.