Рон Рэш - The Best American Short Stories 2018

“Yes.” I remove it from my wallet. She takes it and scans the names in front of her. “Voting today. Good girl,” she says. “You are still so beautiful.”

“Thank you.”

“Are you married yet?”

“Um,” I say, “yes. I am.” I think of Dennis, his image slotting neatly into my mind. “I got married last year.”

“That’s good,” Mrs. Guo says. She makes a mark with her pen. “Mr. Guo and I are moving to San Francisco. We’re leaving in a month.”

I don’t know what to say to that.

“We never forgot… Mr. Guo and I are always grateful that you wrote that letter for us.”

“It was nothing, really.”

“No,” she says, “it was a kindness. A true kindness.”

“I’m sorry it didn’t work out,” I said.

“Mei you guanxi.” She gestures to an empty voting booth, and says, “You take care, Wendy,” as I walk away.

After her body was found, and even after it was clear that suicide was an impossible explanation, there remained a contingent that insisted Becky must have killed herself. Such a strange girl, with such dark thoughts—no surprise that she had ended up dangling from a tree. And yet Becky was strange in the most conventional of ways: a Sex Pistols pin on her JanSport, a streak of hair the color of holly berries. Witchcraft or Satanic practices could explain the otherwise physical impossibility of how, but I bristled at such associations, which only accelerated Becky’s inevitable mythology. Becky could be anything, once she died, and the rest of us would have to live.

I used to avoid being in the same room as Becky. It was too much to have two Chinese girls in one place, I thought, and Becky must have felt the same way because she often entered a room, spotted me, and then backed out to find her own domain. Usually this happened at parties. Sometimes it happened at restaurants. Once at a museum: a gallery of watercolors that looked like wounds.

After she died, of course, this was no longer the case. Now I find myself wanting to talk to her. I want to ask, Are you scared, too? Even knowing that I am not alone would be its own strange balm.

Dennis and I own a television, but we use it primarily for movies and his video games, and only recently activated the free cable that comes with our internet connection. I have, till now, resisted watching the breakneck election coverage, but it is already on when I get home. I find Dennis sitting in the corduroy easy chair, checking his phone with the television glowing and muttering across the room; I kiss him and put down my bag and stretch out on the sofa, staring at the ceiling. Right now, the news anchor says, the electoral votes are 129 to 97, which seems impossible—it was not so long ago that the candidate was thought too volatile to even win a primary.

“How was the consult?” he asks.

I had almost forgotten the consult. “It was okay.”

We are silent. Polls are now closed in forty states.

“Do you think you’ll do it?”

“I’m not sure.”

He asks, “Are you scared?” I wish I could see his face, but I imagine it: Dennis with his bespectacled eyes on his phone, performing the act of emotional multitasking. While I’ve been psychotic, he’s been phone banking. He even went canvassing door-to-door, which sounds nightmarish to me—but Dennis is white and male and good-looking without being threatening—I never use the word disarming, but he is that, too.

“I read a book about ECT earlier this week. In the worst-case scenario, I won’t remember major events in my life. I might even have trouble forming new memories. They don’t even know how ECT works—a guy named Ugo Cerletti decided to use electricity on the brain because they thought epilepsy and schizophrenia were somehow antagonistic. Before ECT, they’d use camphor to induce convulsions, but camphor never became as popular as shock therapy.”

“What are the odds you’ll have memory loss?”

“I don’t have hard numbers. I don’t know if there are any. It’s something that might happen. I would have to make peace with that.”

“When do you have to decide?”

“Soon, I guess.” I realize I’m drawing a red X on my thigh with the nail of my right index finger. “I know Dr. Hoch wants to get me on the wait list as soon as possible, if I’m going to do it.”

Dennis says that it’s my decision and that he’ll support me no matter what, which is kind and supportive and the right thing to say.

I look at Twitter again. Everyone is talking about the election, about moving to Canada, about the apocalypse. A Canadian writer says, “The grass is always greener!” The Southern Poverty Law Center is still reporting election-related hate crimes. One friend is live-tweeting her experience of watching Casablanca for the first time. “Does anyone else think Humphrey Bogart looks like J. D. Salinger?” she asks. I read an article about people chanting “Lock her up!” at a rally. I read about a Muslim schoolteacher in New York City who had her hijab torn off by a stranger in broad daylight. (“MCM LIES,” is one reply.) I read about gaslighting. I read an essay about having a younger brother with brain cancer, and I start to cry even though I don’t have any siblings and no one I know is dying.

“Oh my God, Florida,” Dennis says. “He just took Florida.”

I look at the TV through wet eyes, where his fleshy, grinning face appears with the words FLORIDA and 29 ELECTORAL VOTES. He has won. No one has conceded yet, but still, he has won.

I’m here, said Becky.

“It’s over,” I say.

Dennis says, “I think so.”

I tell him that I’m going to bed. He says something back.

In the bathroom, where I avoid looking in the mirror—an aversion to my own face is one of my latest symptoms—I turn on the tap and let the water run cool over my fingers. I stand at the sink for a long time, until I cannot remember what I am doing; I lose the next move. Suddenly, and too loudly, a girl calls my name.

MARIA ANDERSON’s fiction is forthcoming or has appeared in the Mississippi Review, the Missouri Review, the Iowa Review, and the Atlas Review. She’s an editor at Essay Press, and she has been awarded residencies from Joshua Tree National Park, the AMK Ranch Research Center in Grand Teton National Park, and the Crosshatch Center for Art & Ecology. She lives in Bozeman, Montana.

■ I lived in Missoula, Montana, for a short time and had always been fascinated by Bonner, the tiny town a couple miles east on the interstate where a few of our friends lived. I wanted to set a story there. I grew up on a cattle ranch outside of town, and spent a lot of time alone as a child, wandering through the woods with our German shepherd. I wanted to work through some of the feelings that go with this kind of deep-seated physical and emotional isolation.

I wrote the first draft of this story at Coal Creek Tap while doing my MFA in Laramie, at the University of Wyoming. It felt easier to focus with people drinking beer and playing cribbage around me. My early readers will remember several especially awful middles and endings to this story—a scene in a strip club with a dancer named Anaconda, a moment in a hotel where men attempt to steal dog semen from a fridge. But what I kept returning to was the main character, and how it feels to have a loved one vanish, whether emotionally or physically, and to know that this is one of the old mysteries you hear about. Someone is there one moment and irreversibly gone the next. Even if that person is right in front of you, you can feel the horror of having lost them already. The horror isn’t that they’re gone, but that this vanishing is unfair and unexplainable.