The Best American Short Stories 2020 Read online

  “John,” he said. “Goddamnit!” He seemed angry with me, presumably for interrupting his death. “It’s not working,” he said, and gazed up at me like a distressed child. He lifted Julia under an arm and tried to pull himself out of the hole with a pine limb. I offered my hand, but he slapped it away. When he started to fall backward, I wrapped my arms around his chest.

  “Lift me up, for God’s sake.”

  I planted my heels and struggled backward. We hovered over the hole for a moment and tumbled against a tree with our arms wrapped around each other, my face pressed against his cheek. He groaned as if I’d just stomped on his toe and scrambled away from me on all fours to lean against the caretaker’s truck.

  “I’m here for you,” I said.

  My grandfather and I lay on our sides facing each other. People in our field were quiet. The surf splashed with every other breath. The tendons and muscles in my lower back had seized, and a gash below my elbow bled onto my white shirt. I hadn’t noticed the injury when my grandfather and I fell over, but I felt it now.

  “I’m on a lot of medication,” I confessed.

  “Does it help?” my grandfather asked.

  The wedding guests started to clap and leave their seats. As a way, I sensed, of not looking at me, my grandfather raised his bony hand and shaded his eyes to survey the crowd. Women in ankle-length dresses and men in dark suits spilled over the grass.

  “Who are all those goddamned people?” he demanded.

  “It’s a wedding,” I said. “Bridget . . .”

  “Yes. But who are they? Where the hell did they come from?” The muscles twisted under the creases and folds of his face, and I felt what he felt—​revulsion at these strangers. “Jesus,” he said, “what am I going to do?”

  I turned away from him to face the beach, where four kids played on a pile of driftwood. Sandy-haired, somewhere between the ages of five and eight, they must’ve come with the guests. A woman my age, their mother or maybe a nanny, sat on a rock watching over them. My feeling that they trespassed had less to do with my inability to recognize them or that the beach belonged to our family than the sense that they threatened to eclipse my memories of being their age. They removed their shoes, rolled up their pants, and inched forward as a group into the shallows.

  Wheels crunched over branches—​my grandfather on his tricycle, slipping through the trees. I rose to my feet and jogged down the trail after him. With his cane stuck in the holster, he pedaled along the slope of Devereux’s Field and turned left on the trail to the landing. Julia sat in the rear basket watching me slowly gain ground. As I pulled even with him, he looked through the trees to the west—​in the direction of the car he wasn’t licensed to use anymore, his home on Second Street in Vaughan where he’d grown up, and all the people he’d known since birth, most of whom were now in the ground at Oak Hill Cemetery.

  “I don’t want the house,” I called to him.

  “The house is mine!” he roared at me. In taking his eyes off the path, he almost veered into the ditch and had to slow to regain control. For a moment I thought he might stop, but then the tricycle sped up and bumped over the ruts, leaving me behind.

  I recovered my breath and shuffled the rest of the way to the landing, where I found the tricycle ditched next to a tree. Across the channel, my grandfather tied up to the mainland dock and hefted Julia out of the skiff. The whole process took him much longer than it once had. He wrapped his arm around the cleat and pulled himself facedown onto the planks. Julia licked his cheek. When he didn’t move for more than a minute, I thought maybe he had accomplished his goal after all. A moment later, though, he pushed himself to his knees and rose to his feet.

  From my right, I heard Melissa call my name. She was standing on the boathouse’s porch.

  “I couldn’t find you at the ceremony,” she said, “so I went looking.”

  Her leather-soled shoes dangling from one hand, she seemed to float over the rocky ground as she drew near. Her skin pulsed around a mosquito bite almost exactly in the middle of her forehead. She was beautiful, perfect.

  “Can we go to the reception now? I’m hungry,” she said.

  “Are you going to marry me?” I said, my voice rising in my throat. She grimaced and lifted my elbow to look at the cut; the bleeding had stopped, but my arm still stung.

  Across the water, Julia barked at my grandfather’s side. He took one excruciating step, rested over the railing with his mouth open, took another step, and paused to look back at me.

  “Melissa,” I said, my face growing hot, “what am I going to do?”

  “You’ll live,” Melissa said as she let go of my arm and laid her cool palm against my cheek, “just like the rest of us.”

  MICHAEL BYERS

  Sibling Rivalry

  FROM Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet

  Ten years after the one-child law went into effect the synths were a common sight. In the Burkharts’ neighborhood the Hughes brand had become the most popular and that’s what the Burkharts had, the Hughes Fully Human: superhigh-mobility musculature, self-growing chassis, Real AI, and it was just sort of amazing to watch them change as they grew, from the day you brought them home from the Birthing Unit (along with the two blue nylon suitcases full of accessories and equipment), amazed at how real she looked, but what else would she be but real? And then a few years later this daughter of yours was clinging to your pantleg outside the worn blue doors of the kindergarten wing on the first day of school, afraid to go in, her hair shining in the September sun, her older brother standing in line expressing an airy unconcern, backpacks everywhere, everyone knowing (mostly via conversation, it was very hard to tell just by looking) who was and who wasn’t but you didn’t make such distinctions out loud, it wasn’t polite, and in fact in some sense it really didn’t matter. Your emotional centers were fooled by the physical imitation, and the AI was the real thing, and the growth was to human scales—​so what was the difference, anyway? Well, what? It became a philosophical question more than anything, or at least a question to gossip about, which people were always happy to do.

  But people had always gossiped about their kids.

  As for Peter Burkhart—​well, by now he just thought of Melissa as their kid (and it had happened very quickly, she was theirs to love, theirs to keep safe and healthy, to teach right from wrong). She was a good girl. She resembled them strongly (and after the endless scans, she had better), she played the piano pretty well for a now seven-year-old but she was no genius, as none of her forebears had been, musically speaking. Loved reading, like both her parents. Great at the monkey bars. (And what an animal pleasure they got when they watched her swinging out, a pleasure in her grace, “I used to be able to do that,” Julie said, watching, protective, as was still sometimes their habit, discounting in advance any sense that their daughter wasn’t human, wasn’t theirs, although of course she wasn’t, not in the way their parents and everyone in the world until this generation had experienced human and theirs . . .)

  A flaring release, and Melissa would land springily on the wood chips, already running toward the swings.

  “That too,” Julie said, “although maybe not that well.”

  And Melissa would veer toward them, tilting a little, hurl herself into his wife’s arms and croon, “Maamaa!”

  Then scramble to be down and off again, just like her brother Matt had done a few years earlier.

  * * *

  They had worn the clips for the two-week remote brain scan, clumsy and a little painful at times, the procedure enough to turn away some people, in fact, but that was all right, the thinking being that if you couldn’t meet even this minimum threshold of commitment you shouldn’t have a child anyway. Of any kind. Three days of almost total immobility at the end. And beyond this all the details, your own childhood medical records, your baby pictures, your old googletracks, all your tweets, wads, gremlins—​basically everything you could gather. She was theirs. From and of them. And, like a
ny kid, she was also entirely herself, closed, secretive when she wanted to be, inventing herself as she grew older. Assembling herself from the parts at hand. She liked poetry, recently had been reciting “To An Old Woman” while jumping rope on the front sidewalk. She had recently developed a sort of a flopping, galumphing personal style—​full of dramatic hurling of herself into chairs, big sweeps of the hair, the habit of marching into a room to deliver a proclamation, i.e., “Matt—​is—​bothering me! And I told him, nicely, to stop jumping out and scaring me, and then he keeps doing it! ”

  Whereupon Matt would leak weepily into view, eleven years old and still prone to tears, and say he didn’t mean to, and he didn’t—​

  “Yes you did! ”

  (Sweep dramatically away.)

  As far as Peter could tell, and Julie agreed, Matt and Melissa related just like normal siblings—​loved, hated, relied on each other, took each other for granted.

  Like normal.

  She had aversions. She hated lightning and thunder. She had tempers. She could put up a hell of a fight too, over nothing, or seemingly nothing, smashed back in the red corduroy chair in the corner of the bedroom, knees drawn up to her chest, avoiding bath time: “I’m not dirty.”

  “Everybody takes a bath every now and then, even when they’re not dirty.”

  “No,” she said.

  He came forward into the room. She scowled and pushed herself deeper into the chair.

  “Mel, there’s going to be a timeout,” he said, “unless you come now. And either way you’re going to end up having a bath.”

  “I don’t need one!” she shouted. “It’s not fair!”

  “How is it not fair?”

  “Because if I don’t need one, why do I have to have one!”

  He came forward and swept her up wriggling under his arm (she felt different from Matt, the weight was distributed internally a little differently, how he couldn’t quite say—​or maybe it was just the difference between boys and girls) and carried her into the bathroom. The water was already pounding into the tub and when he set her down she bolted for the door again. He blocked it with his knee and she began to flail at him with her fists.

  It was often useful in such a moment, he and Julie had found, to switch horses in midstream, as it were, and Julie now appeared from down the hall, a pencil in her hair. Wordlessly she took her place beside him.

  “Doesn’t want a bath,” he said.

  Girl stuff, maybe, he thought belatedly.

  “What’s up, Matt?” he said as the boy came edging down the hall.

  “She’s, like, crazy,” Matt told him.

  “You used to have tantrums,” Peter said, “just like that.”

  “Well,” Matt scoffed, “please accept my apologies.”

  Like normal.

  * * *

  So apparently here they all were: in the future, suddenly. Although the laws were still all confused. It was a patchwork, a Fully Human’s exact legal status varying from state to state, so when they all drove to Yosemite and spent a week at a dude ranch, and later hiked into Yellowstone to observe the giant sulfur-spewing fountains, they had to peg several sets of documents in case they were pulled over by any of the state patrols between Michigan and their various destinations—​prime-coded certificates of parenthood.

  And of course to him and his wife and their friends all this was all complicated and interesting, as it was to everyone their age, because all of it had come along when they were old enough for it to be new and strange. But they recognized too that it wouldn’t be interesting for long, not in the same way, not even to them. Synths had existed in one way or another for almost thirty years, but only since the one-child law had they become really common.

  The Supers had been around for almost as long, although that was a different story.

  It was an interesting time to live.

  His wife, in her gentle, curious, patient way, liked to think about these things, and to talk about them with friends. Talk about them in person, she would insist, not over the cookie, which meant people came over on a Saturday, say, for an eggs-and-bagels-and-mimosas brunch on the front porch. A throwback sort of gathering, on their decidedly throwback porch, in their decidedly throwback neighborhood, where everyone had pitched in to mount pitons on the telephone poles to keep the Supers out, and where, because the house was one you tended to pass while walking up to the university, they ended up seeing people accidentally anyway, their friends tending to accumulate here like sticks in a stream, hanging up for a while in an eddy of wine and crackers while the kids played whiffleball on the lawn and the girls arranged themselves in the shady areas by the lilacs and chatted their hearts out. Antique in its way, even a little self-conscious, maybe, but people were attracted to them, he supposed, for this kind of style. But it wasn’t really a style. It was just how he and Julie liked to live.

  Among their friends the question that had arisen lately was the eventual sex lives of their children, both natural and synth. How would you feel if your son or daughter dated someone of the opposite kind?

  “I wouldn’t mind if maybe they were dating,” fat Jerry proposed from the depths of his wicker chair. “I don’t know about getting married.”

  “People do it already.”

  “Well, I know people do it, Carl, I just don’t really—” What was it? Emma wrinkled her nose and picked up her glass again.

  Jerry said, “It’s the sex thing.”

  Max set down his champagne flute with exaggerated, comical force. “Well, I’ve done it.”

  “Done what?”

  Max lifted his chin and said, “I—​have had sex—​with a synth.”

  “Well, we know all about you, Max.”

  “With a Fully or a Semi, though,” Jerry insisted.

  Max said, “A Semi.”

  “Oh, well, who hasn’t.”

  “I haven’t!” Emma fluted, then flushed, sitting up in her chair, reaching for her glass. “Just for the record.”

  Max said, “Sixty-four percent have, who would admit to it.”

  Jerry said, “Okay, but most of those aren’t Fully Humans, right, they’re not old enough. How old is Chris Cope now?”

  “He just turned twenty-eight, I think,” Julie said.

  “He turned twenty-eight on May eleventh,” Max said, checking his cookie.

  “So the oldest Fully Human is twenty-eight, but there’s only like a hundred that’re over, what, twenty-five? So it’s not the same.”

  “I am among the sixty-four percent who have had sex with a Semi,” Max announced. “And it was a success for all involved.”

  “Me too!” Toni grinned.

  “That’s only two out of, what?” Will counted. “Nine. Twenty-two percent.”

  “There are holdouts among us,” Max said.

  “Hands!” Martin insisted, his heavy brow knitting. “Show of hands.”

  “Truth or Dare,” Toni protested, but she put her hand up. “Come on, you guys,” she laughed. “Don’t leave me alone out here.”

  “I’ve had one, once,” his wife said.

  “Once was enough for our Julie,” Toni said, kindly.

  But something complicated was rising in Julie. Peter knew what it was, and he laughed in advance. She’d never told anyone about this, as far as he knew.

  “Actually”—​Julie flushed—​“he was a Super.”

  There was a clamor around the table. Laughter, exclamations. Glances at Peter. He lifted his eyebrows, shrugged, acquired his glass from the table.

  “Oh my god,” Toni breathed, “we have to hear about it.”

  “Was that before—?”

  “It was before,” Julie said. “Obviously. I mean, I know I’m not supposed to be the wild and crazy one”—​she fingered her top button—​“but . . .”

  “When? Where?” Toni pressed a hard hand into her thigh. “We have to hear every detail.”

  “No!” She laughed.

  He had heard the story, of
course, long ago. Why was she telling people now?

  She cast him a secret, giddy, cringing look.

  “She’s very nice about it,” Peter said. “She never mentions anything about it to me, you know, when, say, there’s a call for comparisons.”

  His wife laughed again, grateful to him. “That is not what I wanted to talk about!” she exclaimed. “I wanted to talk about how, you know—​like, all our kids will just have grown up with one another and they’ll think it’s perfectly normal, just like we grew up with—​you know, whatever.”

  “Like cookies,” Peter said.

  “Like cookies.” She smiled again. “Which was the same thing for our parents. I mean, sort of for us, but not really. I just think being conscious of what’s new and what’s not, I just think that’s—​it’s a good thing to be conscious of it, and to make choices.”

  “That’s not fair,” Toni groaned. “You can’t just say you had sex with a Super and change the subject.”

  But Julie only pursed her lips in comical daintiness and said nothing.

  A clutch of shrieking children stampeded past the porch.

  Emma said, volunteering, “Well, to your rescue slightly, about cookies, my mom still complains about hers, like, how do I turn it off? And I’m like, Mom, you’re not supposed to turn it off, that’s the point.”

  “Your mother likes to complain,” Will said.

  “My parents still don’t have cookies,” Julie said. “I mean, you know, they’re sort of hippies.”

  “Like mother, like daughter,” Max suggested.

  “Well!” Julie flushed again. So pretty, with her swept blond hair, her air of delighted embarrassment. “Like, none of this stuff you actually need, we’ve made it this far. My mom still has an actual phone. Sometimes she still sends me texts.”