Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

She looks at the woman—she can’t help it—with delirious hope.

“I might know something,” the woman says.

“Like what?” Her heart pounds. She can hear the echo of it deep in her ears, even amid the clatter and scrape of silverware, the grumble of voices around them.

“Your ring,” the woman says.

For a moment, she’s confused, but then she understands. “Tell me,” she says.

The woman nods at the ring.

“Tell me first.”

A smile spreads like an oil slick across the woman’s face, but she doesn’t speak.

She keeps her eyes on the woman, her round face and her widow’s peak, as she touches the ring on her finger. It’s looser now than when she arrived. She twists it gently and slides it off. She closes her hand around it. When she gives it to the woman, she feels part of herself go numb.

“Tell me,” she says again.

The woman fits the ring over the tip of her thumb. “I heard about a boy they found on the side of the road,” she says. “They took him to a hospital in Laredo.”

“How old?”

“Ten?”

She forces herself to swallow. “No,” she says weakly. “My son is younger.”

“Oh, is he?”

She nods.

“Sorry,” the woman says. “I thought maybe it was him.”

She loses track of the dots. She loses track of herself.

Alicia and her daughter are released. Marta is sent back. She doesn’t see Esme again.

And yet. Every day she waits for him by the front door. She sits on the floor, knitting her fingers in her lap.

And then—

“Gabriel!”

She scrambles to her feet. Mixed up in a tangle of people, there he is. His dark, combed hair, the freckle beneath his eye. God in Heaven! It’s him! She lunges forward and wrests him from the crowd. She falls to her knees and pulls him into her arms. She’s so flooded with shock and gratitude that she can hardly breathe. Her nose in his hair, the smell of him almost unbearably sweet. Her hands cupping his shoulders, those same slight shoulders, as small and breakable as eggs. “Gabriel,” she whispers again and again. She can feel him shuddering. “It’s O.K.,” she tells him through tears.

Around her there is cheering. Or is it shouting? Why is everyone shouting? A woman’s voice saying, “Don’t touch my boy! Mateo!” And why does she feel hands on her now, prying her away, tugging her back as she reaches for him—isn’t it him? isn’t it? but it looked so much like him!—hands that carry her down the hall, hands that shove her into a room, hands that turn the key in the lock.

She crumples to the floor and blinks in the dark. From inside the box, she screams.

And then one day there are leaves on the trees, and wild-magnolia blossoms on the branches, bobbing gently in the breeze. She will stay in this place, she tells herself, until he comes. Through the window in the dayroom, she watches the white petals tremble, and, in a gust, a single blossom is torn off a branch. The petals blow apart, swirling, and drift to the ground.

She closes her eyes. Where has she gone and what has she become? The blisters have healed, the bruises have faded, the evidence has vanished—everything dissolves like sugar in water. It’s easy to let that happen, so much easier to give in, to be who they want you to be: a thing that flares apart in the tumult, a thing that surrenders to the wind.

I was going to sleep in a museum—with any luck, next to Esau Abraham, a boy so gorgeously Jewish he held the entire Old Testament in his name, in the perfect contours of his face. I had this theory about boys, that if they just got close enough to me, and sort of focused in, they would forget about the obvious deterrents, the glasses, the frizzy hair, the underdeveloped body. I was zany, I really went for it, I knew all the good dick jokes. Everyone talks about personality like it’s a bad thing but the fact is, without one, you’ve got nowhere to go but ugly.

It’s the beautiful people, isn’t it, who most often wind up dead or alone.

We took a bus, not a yellow school bus but one of those real ones, with plush red seats and TVs, although we weren’t allowed to turn the TVs on. Esau Abraham’s mom, Mrs. Abraham, was on the bus, one of the parent chaperones. This was a problem but not necessarily a dealbreaker. She loved her son. She wanted what was best for him. We could be allies.

Someone opened up a giant bag of Cheetos. We were going to have dinner in the museum cafeteria but a bus ride demanded snacks. The bag got passed around, and soon the smell of powdered cheese was upon us all like a pollen. I knew even as a kid that kids were disgusting, the constant hand to mouth, the reckless tactility. Most of us did not wash our hands after we used the bathroom—a fact I’d empirically uncovered by spending a lot of time in the bathroom. I hid in stalls to avoid certain things, which was my right, which was all of our right.

The bus driver was a middle-aged woman who clipped her turns close. The second time we bounced off a curb, Mrs. Abraham jostled up to the front and rapped on the Plexiglas. “Hey,” she said. “This is a bus full of kids you’re driving. Can you please be more careful?”

“Lady, I been driving kids a long time. They love it rough.”

She wasn’t wrong. We did like it rough. The higher we bounced, the better.

The year before we’d gone to the planetarium. Esau Abraham wasn’t at our school then. I had big plans for Sam Bell—got behind him in line so that I could sit next to him—but as we entered the darkened room, Allison nudged ahead of me. “Sam,” she’d said. “Sam, you dropped this,” and handed him a VISITOR button. His VISITOR button was fastened to his shirt, so we all knew it was a big fat lie. But I gained a lot of admiration for her just then.

We hit a pothole and I flew a couple inches into the air. “Take it easy!” yelled Mrs. Abraham.

“Not much I can do about the roads!” the bus driver called back gleefully.

There was a rumor that the local news team would be at the museum when we got there, since this was the first time an elementary school class—or any class—had been invited to spend the night. As an event, it was just hitting all the right chords for me: a sleepover, not at my house, at the museum of natural history, with boys.

I just loved boys so much, it was a sickness, it was a secret. I had to pretend I didn’t love them as much as I actually did. I didn’t want to be boy crazy. Once boy craziness became your signifier you couldn’t be taken seriously. Your art would be ignored. I worked so hard on mine, I fully expected to have a gallery showing of my gouaches and charcoal sketches within the year. Esau Abraham was a really good drawer and I looked forward to our future collaborations, the font of mutual encouragement we would fill together.

When we pulled up to the museum and the bus came to an especially jarring stop, I slung my overnight bag over my shoulder, tucked my sleeping bag under my arm, and squeezed into the aisle behind Mrs. Abraham. I leaned in and breathed in to see if I could learn anything additional about Esau. She smelled like Vicks VapoRub and faintly, confusingly, bacon. In the dusk, we gathered on the wide sidewalk in front of the museum. Sure enough, a newsman was talking to Ms. Green, our teacher. What a moment for her, for all of us. She was smiling and talking with her hands, her rosy face exuberant. I could tell she felt famous, and honestly, I think we all did.

Once inside, we were led to the Discovery Room, where we were told to find a place for our bags and sleeping bags. I was startled; I did not expect this to happen so soon. The Discovery Room had a hodgepodge of hands-on exhibits, some insects and fish, a family of stuffed wolves behind glass, and an enormous sculpture of the human brain that you could walk inside. Each of the four lobes was a different color and came with a mini audio tour.