Thunderstruck & Other Stories

by Elizabeth McCracken

  She recognized Tommy Mason’s sister from news reports or neighborhood gossip. She stared for a while, confirmed the identity with the head of reference. No harm in answering, he thought.

  Tommy Mason’s sister was in the mysteries, because that’s what her grandfather still read. Maybe he needed to read them especially now, to know that murders happened in this way: someone was killed, and there were clues and an explanation, and at the very end a madman or bitter wife was led away, and nobody but the murderer wept. She looked at the books, at the skull-and-crossbones stickers the cataloging department stuck on the spines of mysteries. She selected three and tucked them close to her chest and was halfway across the floor to the stairs when the children’s librarian stepped in front of her and said, “I knew her, you know.”

  Tommy Mason’s sister looked towards the ground. That was where she always looked. The children’s librarian tried to lower herself into eyeshot.

  “I knew the woman your brother murdered.” And then, in her storytelling voice, the calm one that explained that Rosetta Stone was a thing and not a person and wasn’t that wonderful, she said, “Your brother’s a monster. A freak.”

  Everyone watched the two of them, the children’s librarian with her tough, tiny soldier’s shoes, Tommy Mason’s sister dressed the way all the library teenagers dressed: baggy pants, sneakers, a hooded warm-up jacket—ready, the way they all were, for an escape. Except she didn’t. She stood there, and then she turned away and walked to a table. The children’s librarian went downstairs. She gave her footsteps extra echo. Tommy Mason’s sister sat and began to cry.

  It didn’t look serious at first, and people tried to give her privacy. She held the books to her as if they were a compress for her heart, and tears slid down her face and onto the table, which was itself carved with hearts, declarations of love and being: CK WAS HERE. WANDA + BILLY. We didn’t know anything about her. We didn’t even know her first name.

  She stayed there for an hour. The reference librarians didn’t know what to do. One of them approached her, said, “Dear, can I call somebody?” The girl didn’t move. Her tears were so regular they seemed mechanical, manufactured inside her for this purpose: to darken the wooden table in front of her, to pave the carved grooves of graffiti.

  The head of reference called down to the children’s room. “I don’t care,” he said into the phone. “You come up here.” The other librarians thought that this was like asking the snake that bit you to come suck out the venom.

  You could tell the children’s librarian expected to be chewed out. She figured that the girl she’d accused was long gone, that her matter-of-fact words were just one more thing that the Masons would discuss, outraged, over dinner. But there the girl was.

  So, then. The children’s librarian sat at the table. Such a clumsy young woman, really. She whispered something to the crying girl. She reached to touch the girl’s elbow. The elbow stayed put.

  I didn’t, said the children’s librarian.

  No response.

  I’m lost—

  —for words,—without her.

  A dead person is lost property. You know this. Still, you’ve been searching for what was taken. You know—you’ve been schooled in this fact—that what you owned will never be returned to you. But you’re still owed something. You can’t eat lunch with your friend, her fingers marking chess moves across the board. You can’t hear those same fingers on a computer keyboard or feel them on your shoulder at a time you need them. People take their hands with them, no matter where they go.

  Surely there is happiness somewhere in the world. And God will forgive you if, for a moment, you labor under the common misconception that happiness is created—you’d swear one of the students has done a science-fair project on this—when two unhappy people collide and one of them makes the other unhappier. It’s steam, it’s energy. It works: you feel something rise in you. But it doesn’t last.

  The children’s librarian began to cry, too. Not like Tommy Mason’s sister, beautiful in her sorrow, but like one of the toddlers refused longer visiting hours with the bunny. She rearranged her features into something terrible. When she caught her breath, you could hear it, you would think it hurt. Nobody felt sorry for her. Then she left the table and walked up the stairs to the balcony to watch what would happen. As she passed the reference desk, she said, “Call her family.”

  They had to find the phone number by looking up Tommy Mason’s library record. His card was still delinquent.

  “Is this Mr. Mason?” the head of reference asked. That sounded frightening. He tried, “Your daughter—” but that was worse. Then he said, “This is the library—” as if the building were calling. “This is the library, Mr. Mason. Your daughter is fine, she’s here, but I think you better pick her up.”

  The entire family arrived, and the father with his florid face sat next to her at the table. Sarah, he said, don’t you want to go home? Let’s go home, Sarah, and then the mother and sisters said it, too: Let’s go home, Sarah. They stayed there awhile, and we wondered whether they’d ever leave. Maybe they’d move in. There were worse places for a troubled family to live. We had plenty of books and magazines. We had a candy machine downstairs. They could move into the religion section in the corner, a quiet, untouched neighborhood with a window. They could string up a curtain and never be bothered. A nice cul-de-sac far from the chaos of the cookbooks, the SAT guides.

  They did not look up to see the children’s librarian on the dull staircase. Sarah did not direct them there.

  The Masons bundled Sarah up in their eight bare arms, the devoted family octopus, and led her out the door. She was a child who could be rescued. She could be taken home and given a meal and put to bed; they could slip the puffy sneakers she wore off her feet. In the morning, the sneakers would still be there where she’d left them, waiting for her to put them on and pull the laces tight and live the rest of her life.

  The books in her arms set the alarm off on the way out. No one stopped her.

  Up on the balcony stairs, the children’s librarian stopped crying. She didn’t move. The few patrons there stepped around her, because there was only the one staircase. The head of reference went to her. He sat down; he set his hand on her shoulder to steady himself.

  “You’ve done a terrible thing,” he said, and she nodded. Then he took her hand, the way he wished he had taken Juliet’s hand, or Sarah’s—or a dozen sad girls he’d known before but never discussed. “Everyone does,” he said.

  “Not everyone,” said the children’s librarian.

  “You just know that you have, that’s all.”

  The Masons would have been home by then. We thought we could feel the door of the house, closing behind them.

  It’s been months since Sarah left us, more months since Juliet died. The Masons gave up and moved to another city nearby; Tommy Mason hasn’t even gone on trial yet, though they’ve decided that when he does, it will be as a juvenile and not as an adult. He’s in the news every now and then. The family goes to another library, in a town where the grandfather was never a mayor and Mason is an unremarkable name and their blond looks don’t mean anything. But they don’t know that their library is in our computer network. Their new library is a relative of ours, which means we can look their cards up on the computer if we want to, we can renew their books and erase their fines and wonder if they ever think about us.

  The children’s librarian is living with her cruel thing. We have forgiven her. We go into the children’s room. She is silent behind the desk cutting out Santa Clauses or Easter eggs or autumn leaves, which children will cover with cotton balls and glitter. We talk to the finches, those filthy creatures. We imagine opening the cage and telling them to go ahead—it wouldn’t be the first time—they should go ahead and fly. Even though we don’t open the door, we tell them anyhow. Stranger things, we tell them, have happened.

  The House of Two Three-Legged Dogs

  In the December rain, the buildin
gs around the town square were the color of dirty fingernails. Still, the French had tried to jolly things up a bit. Decorations hung from streetlamps, though at midday, Tony couldn’t tell what lit bulbs would reveal at night: A curried prawn? A goiter? People had dangled toddler-size nylon Father Christmases out their windows, each with a shoulder-borne sack of presents. There were dozens of Father Christmases, and they hung slack, sodden, like snagged kites. They looked lynched.

  Tony drove the rattletrap Escort he’d just bought around Bazaillac’s covered market a second time. He and Izzy and the kids had lived in the countryside nearby for eleven years. At the start, people in town called them Les Anglais, because they were the only ones. Now the whole valley was overrun with English. You could fly into Bergerac for three quid on Ryanair, flash the mere cover of your passport to the on-duty Frenchman, and strike out. You could buy an old presbytery or millhouse for next to nothing, turn the outbuildings into gîtes and rent them for the summer, and then sit back and live the good life—or so the English thought. They renovated or half-renovated the properties and then lost interest, complained about how many other English were in the area: you couldn’t go into a market without being assaulted by the terrible voices of your countrymen. Tony had heard that Slovenia and Macedonia were the new places to go. He wished Slovenia and Macedonia luck.

  In the meantime he was looking for his son. The car was a present for him, and Tony was now struck by a problem: he wanted to hand Malcolm the keys and walk away, but Malcolm, if he were found, would be drunk, wanting to keep drinking, and then how would Tony get home?

  They’d figure it out, he decided.

  Sunday, winter: nothing was open but Bar le Tip Top on one side of the square, and the Café du Commerce on the opposite. Both were pretty much Anglophone bars now. The frivolous drinkers might start out in the Tip Top and then cross under the covered market to the Commerce for a change of scenery. The serious drinkers stayed put at the Commerce. Tony’s son, Malcolm, was a serious drinker.

  Between the rain on the outside and the smoke and condensation on the inside, the Commerce window was a blur of fairy lights and whitewashed lunch specials. The arcade was deep, and in good weather, Emile, the owner, set up tables under the arches; now there was only a creaking signboard listing the day’s menu. Tony stared at the door and tried to will Malcolm through it, but Malcolm had never once stopped drinking because of Tony’s will or wishes or pleas or even—embarrassingly, Tony hated to remember it—tears. He looked back across the square. A fat man ambled underneath the market roof: Sid, another serious drinker, whom Tony knew from his own days of serious drinking. Tony honked. Sid turned, his gray beard tinseled with wet, his bald head cloud-colored in the market’s shadows. In his peach sweatpants and jacket he looked like the washing-up cloth of the gods, soaked and proud. The Escort’s window required three hands to open, so Tony cracked the door instead. Sid pulled it open.

  “Good God,” said Sid. He leaned his head into the car. “Where’d the car come from? Bloody Knight Rider.”

  “What?” said Tony.

  “Knight Rider. You’ve seen that program. Talking car? Hasselhoff?”

  “No idea,” said Tony. “Have you seen Malcolm? The car’s for him. Christmas present.” He’d bought it from a fleeing Italian. He didn’t know whether a car would make a difference, but he hoped so.

  “Reminds me,” said Sid. “Where are you off to? The house? I have something for you.”

  Someone shouted from the door of the Commerce. Not Malcolm. The Maori ex-footballer stepped out, smiling expansively. His English girlfriend—someone else’s wife—hooked her chin on his shoulder and stared in desolation. She had money. The Maori was a kept man. Together they looked like the masks of comedy and tragedy on a proscenium arch.

  Sid stood up and his stomach, an impressive spherical object, came into the car, crowding Tony over. “Knight Rider, hey?” he called across. He pounded on the roof of the car.

  “HahahahahaHA!” said the Maori, nodding in his disconcerting, rapid-fire way. “Sid! Absolutely! You drinking, Sidney?”

  Sid leaned back into the car. These days he was mostly Malcolm’s friend, though he was Tony’s age. He had the unsavory charisma of a man on a remote island who’d let himself be worshipped by the natives as a god, who might even use his watch and pocket torch as signs of his divinity. “You going home, yeah?” he said to Tony. “I have something to bring you. Be over in a tick. One jar and I’m there. All right?”

  “Have you seen Malcolm?” Tony repeated.

  “No, mate,” said Sid. “Not for a few days.”

  “Ask the Maori, is he in the bar?”

  “Christ, you think he’s a Maori? He’s a sham. He only claims—”

  “Ask him.”

  Sid sighed and straightened up, and the stomach reasserted itself. “Colin?” he called across the car. “Malcolm back?”

  The Maori laughed and shook his head.

  “Sorry, mate,” Sid told Tony, slapping the top of the car again. “See you in a bit.”

  Tony watched him cross over. Beneath the arcade, the Maori tried to faire la bise, but Sid did not submit to kisses; Sid ducked. They went inside. All the various Irish Johns would be there, too. There were so many now, according to Malcolm, they had to number them: John the Irish One, John the Irish Two, and so on. They were up to John the Irish Eight.

  In the wintertime the Commerce was filled with the skint and the rowdy. Any one of the regulars could be accused of drinking himself to death, but all together and out in public and in France, they were merely living the good life. Who wouldn’t rather drink himself to death in a foreign country? Your mother couldn’t nag you, the wine was cheap. You weren’t in danger of drinking yourself to mere ruined health.

  The Commerce had been his and Izzy’s local when they could still afford bars, back before the bankruptcy. They went every night under the pretense of improving their French. It was a long, dark, friendly bar, with a snooker table in the middle and a vending machine that dispensed cans of nuts at the front. The girls and Malcolm loved that machine; they were practically brought up at its foot. They’d turn the big cold key that worked the mechanism and check for fallen coins or cans of peanuts, even though Emile put out baskets of peanuts for free.

  Malcolm had been ten years old when he’d come to France. He’d been living with his mother and stepfather, and one night the stepfather had called up Tony. “He’s hard to get along with, this kid. Don’t you think?” No, Tony didn’t think. If Malcolm had a fault, it was that he got along too well, with angels and sinners: his teachers cried when they had to punish him. At any rate he was put on the ferry, and Tony had met him, and brought him to the house to live with him and his stepmother and stepsisters, and together they went nightly to a bar, where the boy learned to speak French and to drink hard without ever taking a lesson in either. At that front table he turned from a cowering child into a charming sot.

  It’s a shame about us, Tony thought. It was a shame, for instance, that he and Izzy had exactly the same weaknesses and bad habits. They were both terrible with money, and they had a soft spot for animals. No, soft spot didn’t cover it. They were about animals the way some of their friends were about drink: They snuck abandoned animals into the house. They bought animals with money they didn’t have. They swore they needed no more animals in the morning and showed up with more animals in the evening. They had two three-legged dogs, two four-legged dogs, several puppies, six indoor cats, countless outdoor cats, untold kittens, goats, the old horse Nelson, at least fifty budgies. They would be ruined by animals.

  But when the farmer down the road appears at your house with a three-legged dog and explains that he knows you already have one—apparently a single three-legged dog is all you need to become famous for three-legged dogs—what can you do? And if your two three-legged dogs fall in love, and your new three-legged dog ends up pregnant by your old three-legged dog—well, you’d have to have a harder heart than To
ny had to send all those four-legged puppies away.

  He hid the Escort in the barn because he hadn’t told Izzy about it: they’d decided not to exchange presents this year. The house was cold inside, a shambles. They’d bought it two years before from a Dutchman who had run it briefly as a home for delinquent French boys. Then the boys ran away, or were taken away by the government, leaving behind eight bedrooms smelling of piss and three outbuildings that had been set mildly on fire. Tony and Izzy bought the property for nothing, practically, though even that “nothing” was a gift from Tony’s father. “Buy this house outright,” he’d said. “I’m tired of worrying about you.” The bankruptcy laws in France were awful: for years they would not be allowed to own property, to even have a bank account. The French would teach them a lesson. So they’d had to put the house in Malcolm’s name; the girls were underage at the time. They’d hoped he’d rise to the occasion.

  At the far end of the main room, the kitchen lay in pieces. A bag of garbage sat on the sofa like a person. Tony moved it, then filled a carafe of wine from the box on the kitchen island and set it on the mantelpiece to warm. He built a fire in the stove underneath. Izzy would be with the budgies. He decided to leave her alone.

  “Hello, little mother,” he said to Macy, who lay in her basket nursing her pitch-black pups. She was a poodle the way Malcolm and the girls were French: generally she could pass, but an authentic poodle might find her a little vulgar. Now she lifted her head and regarded Tony with the weary love of a woman for a dissolute husband. There was a knock at the door. She looked at it.

  “I’ll get it,” Tony told her.

  The puppies took no notice, and the four-legged dogs were elsewhere, but Aldo came skittering down the hall in full bark and filled the room with hysterics that woke up all but the most blasé of the kittens. His missing front leg and barrel-chested Airedale’s bark gave him a wounded-veteran air.