The Best American Short Stories 2018

Jacob Guajardo What Got Into Us ^{from Passages North}

Rio is the bravest boy I know the summer we are fourteen. The beach is ours and all its coves and sandcastles. I have bug bites like beads of sap on my legs. It is June in Michigan and we giggle like princesses as we pull dresses on in the bedroom our single mothers share. We clip on earrings and hate their heaviness. We imagine our lives as women and say the things we think they would say. We tuck our penises between our skinny legs and walk with our thighs together. When we are through we hang the dresses up and put the earrings back inside their cedar boxes at his mother’s bedside. We promise not to tell anyone. There is a handshake, a promise with our bodies that I will not remember until years later when I see the neighbor boys slapping hands before they part for dinner.

The summer we are fourteen Rio kisses me for the first time as he zips me into a dress. The dress is blue and white polka dotted and the zipper snags on my tighty-whiteys. The kiss feels like a bug landing on my shoulder. He kisses my lips after he kisses my shoulder. The smell of his teeth is the smell of our shared lunch, fried bologna sandwiches and rice and beans. We made the sandwiches ourselves, the rice and beans we heated up in the microwave. He does not zip the dress up all the way. My shoulder will sting later—like it had been a bee on my shoulder, not the harmless fly I’d felt. It will not always feel like stinging. When my husband kisses my shoulder it will feel good.

We kiss when we think we are alone. We flip paddleboats on the beach and kiss beneath them, the seats dripping water on us. We kiss at the playground where there are secret places in the wooden infrastructure of the jungle gym. We get away with too much this summer.

We grow up on Marlin Street in swim-trunks. Our mothers drive their Chevy with every window down. The wind ruffles our hair like pages in a book. Years from now I will move away from Marlin Street. Not far—a few streets. Close enough that our mothers can walk, thumbing their rosaries, to my house and sip mimosas on the porch, where they will laugh like Spanish witches.

But we grow up on Marlin Street in a beach house. The beach house is blue and has a screened-in porch. On the porch there are two white plastic chairs and a second-hand end-table between them where our mothers sit with their sangrias. We sit on the splintered wood beside them or sit inside on the couch. Our mothers cannot afford to own two houses—will never be able to afford to own two houses. They sleep on two twin-beds in the master and Rio and I sleep together in our room on one queen size. We never have friends over from school.

Families rent out the beach houses for brief Michigan summers, but our mothers own a taquería on the boardwalk. We own our vacation home. Our mothers are known by locals as the Taco Sisters. They are not sisters. They are not sisters the way Rio and I are not brothers. They are childhood friends—immigrants’ daughters who grew up translating for their mothers and fathers. They asked for what their parents could not. They are not sisters but they shared beds and sleeping bags on the floors of dirty shacks.

They tell us we washed up on the shores of Lake Michigan. They say they spotted us lit up by the lighthouse against the rocky shoreline. They say gulls carried us to their doorstep. They fit us with seafarers’ names. Mine is Delmar, his is Rio. Both our mothers’ names are Maria—Maria Carmen and Maria Blanca.

We will never know our fathers. We know that they were light-skinned and fair of hair. Rio’s hair looks like bleached coral. My hair is black but my skin might as well be butterscotch pudding. The only way we look like our mothers is our eyes. When we ask about our fathers they tell us, in English, that they are no longer a park of the picture—an idiom they’ve grown up saying wrong. We imagine our fathers must have been small men to leave such boisterous women. Our mothers never complained, never cursed men and their unwieldy cocks. I will ask about my father again when I am leaving Marlin Street for college and my mother will ask if they were not enough.

The locals gave the taquería the unofficial name Authentico. Our mothers had bought a neon sign to advertise their authentic Mexican cuisine: tacos el pescado, camarones rebozados, paella de marisco, arroz con pollo. The gaudy neon sign flickered over the walk-up window. They’d meant to name the place El Lago, but the loan from the bank bought them just one sign. We made fun of the unofficial name. We warned that someday a couple hermanos could open up a place called Genuino and ruin them. We sit outside the taquería on picnic tables and pick gum off the seats. We watch our mothers fry tortillas and wipe their hands on grease-licked aprons. Our mothers shoo us off the picnic table when the stand is busy. Years from now, when our mothers can’t spend every day making tacos for tourists anymore, and I tell them I am too busy to run the place, Authentico will close up. I will buy the sign from them and hang it in my garage.

The vacation families drive their cars too fast down Marlin Street. They are on their porches smoking sausages, or taking boats out on the lake. They are fucking on the beach inside murky coves. We hear them and call them monsters. We call anything we cannot explain that June monsters. In Michigan, summer is only a few months in the middle of the year, but our mothers love the beach year round. It means every winter we have to hear about some gringo trying to walk on the lake and drowning. One year the gringo will be a boy from our high school that we hate and they will never pull his body from the lake and we will feel bad for having hated the boy. Our mothers make the holy triangle up and down and side to side.

We break into the empty summer houses. We scare the spiders out and play house. We spend the night in the empty beds after our mothers pass out drunk from rum and Cokes. We make the beds every morning, fluffing up the pillows. We take things that do not belong to us. Things we think no one will miss. I take cards from Euchre decks and tape them inside a lined paper journal. Rio cuts buttons from Sunday bests and carries them around in a velvet bag like they are marbles. We are monsters. We carve our initials into the underbellies of the summer homes’ expensive wood furniture. We lie under the giant oak frames of the summertime beds with a set of keys and cut away at the bed flesh. We find out that if the wood has not cured long enough the furniture will bleed. When I am twenty-eight and expecting my first child I will wonder what had gotten into us that summer and hope my child is not a monster.

When I am twenty-eight and expecting my first child, my husband and I will drive up Marlin Street to show my mothers the first sonogram. The child will be growing inside a woman we have paid through an agency. The surrogate will be a healthy, Latina woman getting her PhD in women’s studies at the college in Kalamazoo. I will believe that this detail will make my mothers proud. I will struggle to find the best way to tell them. I will expect that they will not understand. I will expect that they will have questions I will not know the answers to. I will bring them a flyer from the agency complete with illustrations and a number to call should they have any questions. They will make the holy triangle, up and down and side to side.

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.