At le boulevard Richard-Lenoir, near the Bastille, Helen bought a vinyl purse with a long strap, in which she kept a few euros, a ChapStick, her name and address, a notebook for writing down her favorite sights. She walked hand in hand with Kit: they were suddenly friends, as though their fighting had been an allergic reaction to American air. Both girls picked up French as though by static electricity, and they spoke it to each other, tossing their hair over their shoulders. “Ouais,” they said, in the way that even Laura, whose brain seemed utterly French-resistant, now recognized as how Parisians quackingly agreed.
There were so many pâtisseries and boulangeries and fromageries that they rated the pain au chocolat of one block against the pain au chocolat of the next. The candy shops were like jewelry stores, the windows filled with twenty-four-carat bonbons. The caterer Laura worked for had given her money to smuggle back some young raw milk cheeses that were illegal in the United States, and Laura decided to taste every Reblochon in the city, every Sainte-Maure de Touraine, so that on the last day she could buy the best and have them vacuum-packed against the noses of what she liked to imagine were the U.S. Customs Cheese Beagles.
Paris was exactly what she had expected and nothing like it. The mullioned passages full of stamp shops and dollhouse-furniture stores, the expensive wax museum the girls wanted to go back and back to despite not recognizing most of the counterfeit celebrities, the hot-chocolate emporia and the bare-breasted bus-stop ads. These were things she had not known were in Paris but felt she should have. The fast-food joint called Flunch, the Jewish district with its falafel (“Shall we have f’laffel for flunch,” Wes said nearly every day). She never really got her bearings in the city, no matter how she studied the map. Paris on paper always looked like a box of peanut brittle that had been dropped onto the ground, the Seine the unraveled ribbon that had held it together.
“What’s your favorite thing in Paris?” Wes asked.
“My family,” she answered. That was the truth.
After a while they bought a third pay-as-you-go phone for Helen and Kit to share, so the girls could go out in the city together after lunch. Then Wes and Laura would go back to the apartment. She thought every languishing marriage should be prescribed a three-quarter bed. They didn’t even think to worry about M. Petit on the other side of the wall until later, when news of his careful, decorous life floated back to them: a ringing phone, a whistling teakettle, a dainty plastic clatter that could only be a dropped button. This was why it was good to be temporary, and for the neighbors to be French.
“How did you know?” Laura asked Wes.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“Helen. How good she’d be here.”
“I don’t know. I just—I felt it. She is, though, isn’t she? Good. Sweet. Back to her old self.”
Her old self? Laura thought. Helen had never been like this a day in her life.
Still it was a miracle: take the clumsy, eager-to-please girl to Paris. Watch her develop panache.
Then it was August. It was hot in Paris. They hadn’t realized how hot it would be, and how—Laura thought sometimes—how dirty. The heat conjured up dirt, centuries of cobblestone-caught filth. It was as though Paris had never actually been clean, as though you could smell every drop of blood and piss and shit spilled in the streets since before the days of the revolution. Half the stores and restaurants shut for the month, as the sensible Parisians fled for the coast. French food felt tyrannical. When they chose the wrong place to eat, a café that looked good but where the skin of the confit de canard was flabby and soft, the bread damp, it didn’t feel like bad luck: it felt as though they’d fallen for a con. As though the place had hidden the better food in the back, for the actually French.
Laura was ready to go home. August was like a page turning. July had felt lucky: August, cursed. From the first day, Laura would think later, no mistake.
The day of Helen’s accident—or perhaps the day before; they would never know exactly when the accident happened—she was as lovely and childish as ever. In the makeup section of the Monoprix, she lipsticked a mouth on the edge of her hand, the lower lip on her thumb and the upper on her index finger.
“Bonjour,” she said to her mother, through her hand.
“Bonjour, madame,” said Laura, who did not like speaking French even under these circumstances. The Monoprix was air-conditioned. They spent a lot of time there.
France had refined the features of Helen’s face—Laura had always thought of them as slightly coarse, the thick chap-prone lips, the too-bright eyes—the face, Laura thought now, of a girl who would do anything for a boy, even a boy who didn’t care. Her own face, once upon a time. But in Paris, Helen had changed. She had lost the eagerness, the oddness, the blunt difficulty of her features. She had become a Parisienne. Laura tucked the label of Helen’s shirt in, felt the warmth of her back, and with the force of previously unseen heartache she knew: they would fly back in three days and nothing, nothing would have changed. They would step back into the aftermath of all they hadn’t dealt with.
“Are you looking forward to going home?” Laura asked.
Helen pouted. Then she jutted her thumb out, made her bee-stung hand pout, too. “Non,” she said. “J’adore Paris. I’d like to stay here forever.”
“Not me,” said Kit. “I miss Frogbert.”
“Who?” said Helen.
“Our dog,” said Kit. “Oh, very funny.”
“Forever,” Helen said again. “Daddy!” she called across to her father, who was just walking into the store with an antique lampshade. He wanted to stay in France forever, too. Laura could imagine him using the lampshade as an excuse: How can we get this on the plane? We’d better just stay here.
“Look!” he said. “Hand-painted. Sea serpents.”
And they were, a chain of lumpy, dimwitted sea serpents linked mouth to tail around the hem of the shade. It was a grimy, preposterous thing in the gleaming cosmetic aisle of Monoprix.
Helen took it with the flats of her palms. “It’s awesome,” she said. “Daddy, it’s perfect.”
Laura did not think she had ever seen that look on Helen’s face—not just happiness, but the wish to convey that happiness to someone else, a generosity. That was the expression Laura tried to remember later, to paste down in her head, because soon it was gone forever, replaced with a parody of a smile, a look that was not dreamy but dumbstruck, recognizable, not Cinderella asked to the ball, but a stepsister, years later, finally invited back to the palace, forgiven. Because twelve hours later, Wes and Laura, asleep in their antique bed, heard a familiar, forgotten noise: Wes’s American cell phone, ringing in the dresser drawer. Why was it on? Laura answered it.
“Have you a daughter?” said the voice on the other end.
The voice belonged to a nurse from the American Hospital of Paris, who said that a young girl had been brought in with a head injury.
“She have a shirt that say Linda,” said the nurse. “She fell and striked her head.”
Laura went to the girls’ room, the phone pressed to her ear. Kit was asleep among the square pillows and the overstuffed duvet. Her hair was sweat damp. Helen’s bed was empty. Laura looked to the window, as though it was from there she’d fallen, the pavement below upon which she’d struck her head. It was locked into place, ajar to let the air in but fixed. If Helen had left the apartment it would have been the ordinary way.
“Je ne comprends pas,” Laura said, though the nurse was speaking English.
“She need someone here,” said the nurse. “It’s bad.”
2.
This was why you had two children. This is why you didn’t. Wes stood outside their old, old, unfathomably old building. There were no taxis out and he couldn’t imagine how to call one. He wondered whether he’d wanted to come to Paris because of the language: the way he’d felt coddled by lack of understanding, delighted to be capable of so little. By now he could get along pretty well, but this question, how Paris wo
rked in the middle of the night, seemed beyond his abilities. Who he needed: Helen, to help him make his way to Helen. The Métro didn’t run this late, he knew that much. Upstairs Kit slept on, Laura watching over her, which was why he was alone on the street. She was the spare child. The one who wasn’t supposed to be here. The one who was all right. In his panic he had not wanted to go away from her: he’d wanted to crawl into Helen’s empty bed, not even caring how warm or cold the sheets were, how long she’d been gone, as though that child were already lost and the only thing to do was watch over the girl who was left.
He GPS’d directions on his smartphone, the American one. Four and a half miles, in a wealthy suburb called Neuilly-sur-Seine. He would walk: he couldn’t think of an alternative. If he saw a taxi he would flag it down but the main thing was movement. Westward, as fast as he could, and then he felt he was in a dull, extravagant, incredible movie. He had a quest, and every person he passed seemed hugely important: the man carrying the dozing child, who asked for directions Wes couldn’t provide (he hid the phone, he didn’t want to stop); the two police carrying riot shields though Wes could not hear any kind of altercation that might require them; the old woman in elegant, filthy clothing who was sweeping out the rhomboid front of a café. All summer he and his women had walked. “It’s the only way to understand a city,” Wes had said more than once, “we are flâneurs.” Now he understood that wandering taught you nothing. Only when you moved with purpose could you know a place. Towards someone, away from someone. “Helen,” he said aloud, as he walked beneath the Périphérique’s looping traffic. He had not driven a car in more than a month. They looked like wild animals to him. Everything looked feral, in fact. He wanted a weapon.
It took him more than an hour to get to the upscale western suburb of the American Hospital. By then the sun was rising. He stumbled in, shocked by the lights, the people. He didn’t want to talk to anyone but Helen, he just wanted to find her, but he knew that was impossible so he stopped at the lit-up desk by the door. The sign above it said INFORMATION. Was that INforMAtion in English, or informaCEEohn in French?
“J’arrive,” he said, as the waiters did in busy restaurants, though they meant, I will and not I have. He added, “I walked here.”
The man behind the desk had short greasy bangs combed down in points, like a knife edge. “Patient name?”
Wes hesitated. What sort of shape was she in? What information had Laura given the hospital? “Helen Langford.” He found some hope inside him: of course Helen was conscious. How else would they have got Wes’s American phone number? She wouldn’t have remembered the French one.
“ICU,” said the man with the serrated hair.
But it turned out that Helen had taken her mother’s American phone, had been using it all summer to call first the U.S. and then Paris, to text, to take pictures of herself. When the battery drained, she swapped it for Wes’s, recharged, swapped them back. The hospital had found the phone in her pocket, had gone through the contact list and eventually found him.
The ICU doctor was a tall man with heavy black eyebrows and silver sideburns. Wes felt dizzied by his perfect English, his unidentifiable accent, the rush of details. Helen had been dropped off at the front door by some boys. She probably had not been injured in this neighborhood: the boys brought her here, as though American were a medical condition that needed to be treated at a specialist hospital. They had done a CAT scan and an MRI. The only injury was to her head. She had fallen upon it. Her blood screened clean for drugs but she’d had a few drinks. “Some sweet wine, maybe, made her clumsy. Hijinks,” said the doctor, dropping the initial h. Ijinks. Not an Anglophone then. “Children. Stupid.”
“Is she dead?” he asked the doctor.
“What? No. She’s had a tumble, that’s true. She struck her head. Right now, we’re keeping her unconscious, we put in a tube.” The doctor tapped his graying temple. “To relieve the pressure.”
What was causing pressure? “Air?” Wes said.
“Air? Ah, no. Fluid. Building up. So the tube—” The doctor made a sucking noise. “So far it’s working. Later today, tomorrow, we will know more.”
Wes had expected his daughter to be tiny in the bed, but she looked substantial, womanly. Her eyes were closed. The side of her head was obscured by an enormous bandage, with the little slurping tube running from it. No, not slurping. It didn’t make a sound. Wes had imagined that, thanks to the doctor.
Her little room was made of glass walls, blindered by old-fashioned wheeled screens. There was nothing to sit on. For half an hour he crouched by the bed and spoke to her, though her eyes were closed. She was slack. Every part of her.
“Helen,” he said, “Helen. You can tell us anything. You should, you know.” They’d been the kind of parents who’d wanted to know nothing, or the wrong things. It hit him with the force of a conversion: all along they’d believed what they didn’t acknowledge didn’t exist. Here, proof: the unsayable existed. “Helen,” he said to his sleeping daughter. “I will never be mad at you again. We’re starting over. Tell me anything.”
A fresh start. He erased the photos and texts from the phone: he wanted to know everything in the future, not the past. Later he’d regret it, he’d want names, numbers, the indecipherable slang-ridden texts of French teenagers, but as he scrolled down, deleting, affirming each deletion, it felt like a kind of meditative prayer: I will change. Life will broaden and better.
Half an hour later he stepped out to the men’s room and found Kit and Laura wandering near the vending machines. Kit had been weeping. Oh, the darling! he thought. Then he realized that Laura had been grilling her. She was not a sorrowful little sister. She was a confederate.
“We took a taxi,” said Laura miserably.
“Good,” said Wes.
“Nobody will tell me anything,” said Laura. “The goddamn desk.”
“All right,” said Wes. “She’s—”
“How did she get here?” said Laura. “Who dropped her off?”
“Nobody knows,” said Wes, which was what he’d understood.
“Somebody does!”
“Look,” said Wes. Before they went to see Helen, he wanted to explain it to her. What he knew now: they needed to talk about everything. They needed to be interested in their daughters’ secrets, not terrified. He sat them down on the molded bolted-together plastic chairs along the walls. He was glad for the rest. “We’re lucky. They dropped her off, they did that for us.”
“Cowards,” said Laura.
Wes sat back and the whole line of chairs shifted. Cowards would have left her where she was. Bravery got her here. He knew what kind of kid he’d been, a scattering boy, who would not have stopped to think till half a mile away. Adrenaline flooded your conscience like an engine you then couldn’t start. But Helen hadn’t been that kind of kid. She had stayed with the boy in distress, the officers of a month ago had said, and the universe had repaid her.
“I’m sorry,” said Kit. “I’m so, so sorry.” She was still wearing her rose-patterned nightgown, with a pair of silver sandals. She looked like a mythical sleep-related figure: Narcolepta, Somnefaria. As soon as he thought that, Wes felt the need to sleep fall over his head like a tossed sheet.
“Who are they?” Laura suddenly asked Kit. “You must have met them.”
“She’d leave me somewhere and make me promise not to budge.”
“French boys?”
“I don’t know!” said Kit.
Every night for a week, Helen had snuck out to see some boys. She had met them on one of the sisters’ walks together; the next walk, she sat Kit down on a park bench with a book and told her to stay put. At night, she took either her mother or her father’s American cell phone; Kit slept with their shared phone set to vibrate under her pillow. When Helen wanted to be let back in, she called till the buzzing phone woke up Kit, who snuck down the stairs to open the front door.
Kit was going to be the wild child. That’s what they had said, bac
k when she was a two-year-old batting her eyes at waiters, giggling when strangers paid attention. It was going to be Kit sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night, Helen lying to protect her.
You worked to get your kids to like each other and this was what happened.
They went to the ICU. When Kit saw her sister, she began to cry again. “I don’t know anything else,” she said, though nobody was asking. “I just—I don’t know.”
Laura stayed by the door. She put her arm around Kit. She could not look at anyone. Wes thought she was about to pull the wheeled screens around her, as though in this country that was how you attended your damaged child. A mother’s rage was too incandescent to blaze unshaded. “How do they even know she fell?” she whispered. “Maybe she was hit with something, maybe—was she raped?”
Wes shook his head uneasily. There was Helen in the bed. They needed to go to her.
“How do you know?” said Laura.
“They checked.”
“I will kill them,” she said. “I will track down those boys. I hate this city. I want to go home.” At last she looked at Wes.
“We can’t move her yet.”
“I know,” said Laura, and then, more quietly, “I want to go home now.”
Well, after all: he’d had the width of three arrondissements to walk, getting ready to see Helen. As a child he’d been fascinated by the bends—what scuba divers got when they came to the surface of the ocean too fast to acclimate their lungs to ordinary pressure. You had to be taken from place to place with care. Laura had gone from apartment to taxi-cab to hospital too quickly. Of course she couldn’t breathe.
But it didn’t get any easier as the day went on. She looked at Helen, yes, and arranged her hair with the pink rattail comb a nurse had left behind. All the while, she delivered a muttering speech, woven of curses: she cursed their decision to come to Paris; she cursed the midmorning’s comically elegant doctor who inflated her cheeks and puffed when asked about Helen’s prognosis; she damned to hell the missing boys.
Thunderstruck & Other Stories Page 16
