Thunderstruck & Other Stories

by Elizabeth McCracken

  “They say boys,” said Laura, “but if they didn’t see them, how do they know?”

  “We need to solve the problems we can, honey,” said Wes.

  That afternoon Kit and Laura took the Métro back to the city. Kit was seven, after all.

  He didn’t get to the apartment until ten. Laura was already in bed but awake. They talked logistics. In two days they were scheduled to fly home. It made more sense for Laura to stay with Helen—she was a freelancer, Wes’s classes started in a week—but there was the question of language. The question of Paris.

  “I’ll stay,” Wes said. They were in bed. Beyond, M. Petit’s apartment was silent. Kit was asleep in the twin bedroom on the other side of the hall.

  Laura nodded. “Shouldn’t we all?” Then she answered herself. “Third grade.”

  “Third grade,” said Wes. School started for Kit in a week, too. She shouldn’t miss it. “We’ve got the phones. Imagine what this used to be like.” They’d talked about that, how appallingly easy technology made it to be an expat these days. “Listen, I’m sure, I’m sure in a week, or two—we can bring her home.”

  Neither of them could wonder aloud what change in Helen’s condition would allow that.

  “Where will you stay?” Laura asked.

  “Oh, God. I hadn’t thought.”

  He knocked the next morning on M. Petit’s door. Two young men answered. One of them was holding some dark artwork in a large frame. The other was folding a cup into one of the panes of an unfurled newspaper.

  “Bonjour,” said Wes, and then he couldn’t think of what to say.

  “English?” said one of the men, a balding redhead.

  “Yes. American.” Wes pointed at the door behind him.

  “Ah!” said the redhead, and Wes could see M. Petit in his expression. In both of their faces, actually. His sons. The redheaded man explained: their father had died suddenly, unexpectedly.

  “Oh, no,” said Wes. “I am sorry.” He felt a tender culpability, as though his own disaster had seeped through the walls and killed the old man. He tried to remember the last time he’d heard M. Petit’s morning routine.

  “So you see,” said the redhead. “We must pack.”

  “We’ve had an accident,” said Wes. “My family. An emergency. I was wondering if I could extend the lease.”

  “Ah, no. No. Actually my daughter is moving in, next week, with her husband. Newlyweds.”

  Wes nodded. He felt a tweak in his chest, disappointment or despair. He needed to stay, as cheaply as possible, and he couldn’t imagine where he might start looking for shelter, or how long it would take.

  “But,” said the son. “Would you like—you could perhaps rent this?” He pointed at the floor of M. Petit’s apartment, the same warm burnt orange tiles as next door. Wes peered down the hallway into the murk. “Very sudden, you see.”

  “Yes,” Wes said. “Thank you. Merci. Merci mille fois.”

  He took the semester off from school. His department head said they’d figure things out so he could still draw a salary—a course reduction, a heavier load in the spring. Better to solve it now for everyone involved than to wonder every day whether Wes might be coming back.

  On the day of the flight he and Laura and Kit went to the hospital. Kit said goodbye to her sister tearfully, lovingly, crawled into the bed and stroked Helen’s hair and said, “I promise, I promise, I promise.” What promise? Wes thought she would tell him when they said goodbye at the airport, though when they got there Kit was awkward, unhappy, her hands bunched under her chin as though, if he tried to draw her close, she would fight him off with her elbows. “Goodbye, Kitty,” he said. She nodded.

  He thought then that he should find a place to lie down, like Helen. You said goodbye to someone differently if they were supine. But he didn’t see any benches, and if he lay on the ground, he’d be pummeled by European feet and suitcases. Security, perhaps. Send ahead his belt and shoes (only in prisons and airports did a stranger tell you to take them off). Put his sad sorry body down. Kit might not fall for it at first. “Dad,” she would say, humiliated, because now she had to bear the humiliation for her sister as well. But then, surely, as he disappeared, his head, shoulders, beltless waist, as the agents saw the truth of his kidneys, his empty pockets, she would run to him, grab at his feet—no. Feet first, so that she had enough time to whisper that promise in his ear.

  In the end he picked her up. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that. Her toes knocked against his shins. “We’ll talk every day,” he said.

  “I know,” she answered.

  Then he kissed Laura. “Call me when you get in.”

  “It’ll be too late.”

  “No,” he said. “Not possible.”

  He watched them go through the checkpoint. Laura kept waving, go, go, but he couldn’t, not until they disappeared from sight.

  He took the train back into the city, to move his suitcase into M. Petit’s apartment. The furniture was ancient, fringed, balding. The windows looked onto the courtyard, not the street. It felt like the depressed cousin of the apartment where they’d been so happy. The right place to be, in other words. The bathroom had a slipper tub, deep and short, with a step to sit on. How had M. Petit climbed into it? The bed was in a loft. No octogenarian should have to use a ladder to go to sleep. Everything in the world now looked like something to fall from. He decided he would sleep on the little L-shaped couch, in case M. Petit had died in the bed. He put the sea-serpent lampshade in the middle of the coffee table and fell asleep. He surprised himself by sleeping through the night. He checked the phone: a text from Laura, Arrived will call in my morning/your afternoon. He went, for the third day, to the hospital.

  The border between consciousness and coma was not as defined as Wes had been taught by television to expect. They’d stopped sedating her. Helen did not come bursting to the surface, as though from a lake. She rose out of unconsciousness by millimeters over the next few days. Her nose woke up. Her forehead. Her cheeks. Her eyes. The pressure in her skull abated; the ventric tube came out.

  She had the daft look of a saint. Even her hands were knotted together at her chest, as though in prayer. Her mouth was open. The nurses combed her hair, what was left of it, and then called in the hospital’s hairdresser, who cropped it like Jeanne d’Arc’s.

  In the hospital Wes studied Helen as he had when she was an infant. Around and around her face, the knotted fingers, the angles of her shoulders. She wasn’t a baby, of course. She was a girl, thirteen in a month, with breasts, whose body would keep going further into adulthood no matter whether her brain could catch up. The doctors said it was still too early to tell.

  He tried to find his daughter in this girl’s expression, but she’d been so completely revised, and then he tried to comfort himself: Helen was past worry. The worst would not happen to her because it already had. There were no decisions to be made right now. She wouldn’t die. She was, for the moment, beyond any psychological complexities. He had to be here. That he could manage.

  At the end of every day, he walked back to Paris, all four and a half miles: beneath the Périphérique, through the seventeenth arrondissement, down le boulevard Malesherbes, and he spoke to Laura, his ear throbbing against the plastic of the phone. She sounded far away, relieved. He related the latest diagnosis: they were still assessing whether Helen’s brain injury was focal or diffuse. Her brain was still swollen in her skull. It might take her years to recover. Laura told him the news of America: the insurance company was being extraordinarily good at working with the hospital; the cell-phone company would not forgive the nearly thousand-dollar bill for Helen’s purloined Parisian phone calls and text messages. Sometimes Kit was there, though there were swimming lessons and playdates and flute lessons or just the sound of the slamming door as she went outside.

  “We miss you,” Laura would say.

  “We miss you, too,” he answered.

  “You miss us. Helen doesn’t
miss anything.”

  “We don’t know.”

  “I feel it.”

  “OK,” he said, because she might have been right.

  By the time they’d talked themselves out he was back in the third arrondissement, and then he would zag towards the river. He walked as they had their first jet-lagged day, to exhaust himself before climbing the stairs to M. Petit’s apartment, so he could fall asleep without hearing the noises of the granddaughter and her husband in that three-quarter bed on the other side of the wall. Or on the sofa, or any corner of his old home. Sometimes he thought, That’s us still, and I am M. Petit, and he tried to find the part of the wall that bordered on what had been the girls’ bedroom. Maybe he would hear them scheme. Maybe this time he could stop it.

  Or maybe he’d just hear the neighbors fucking.

  One night on the way home he found a little store that catered to Americans, big boxes of sugary cereal, candy bars, and he wanted to buy them for Helen, whose nasogastric tube had just been taken out, though she was fed only purees. The store carried every strain of American crap. French’s mustard, Skippy peanut butter, Stove Top stuffing, even Cheez Whiz. He’d been gone long enough from the U.S. that he felt sentimental about the food, and he’d been in Paris long enough to feel superior to it.

  Then he saw the red-topped jar of Marshmallow Fluff.

  “Something sweet for you,” he said to Helen the next morning. He hunted around for a spoon and found only a tongue depressor. That would do.

  Helen closed her eyes as the Fluff went in, as her round mouth irised in around the stick. Wes felt electrified. Before this moment Helen had been a blank, as mysterious to him as she must have been to the emergency room when she’d first arrived: a girl who’d dropped from the sky. Unidentified. Cut off from her history.

  Now she opened her eyes, and he could see, for the first time, Helen looking out of them, though (he thought) she couldn’t see anything. She was sunk in the bottom of a well. Everything above her was hidden in shadows. He could see her trying to make something out. Her mouth, agape, opened further, with muscle, intent, greed: more.

  He dug out a larger dollop. Closed eyes, closed mouth, but when the tongue depressor went in Helen began to cough. It was a terrible wet sound.

  “Are you all right?” he said. He wondered whether he should put his finger in her mouth, scoop it out, and then he did, and Helen bit down. First just pressure, the peaks of her molars, then pain. He tried to pull out his finger. “Wow. Helen,” he said. “Helen, please, Helen, help! Help!” and then her jaw relaxed, and he stood with his wet, indented finger, panting.

  The doctor on the floor was Dr. Delarche, the tall woman who’d so infuriated Laura. By the time she peered in Helen’s mouth all the Fluff had melted away except a wisp on her upper lip.

  “What is this?” she asked Helen. She touched her chin, looking over her face. “Hein? This sticky thing.”

  Wes still held his sore finger. “Fluff.”

  “Floff?” The doctor turned to him. “What is this floff?”

  The lidless jar had fallen to the bed—he pulled it out from under the blanket, and inclined the mouth towards the doctor. “Marshmallow, um, crème,” he said, pronouncing it the French way. “You put it on bread, with peanut butter.”

  Dr. Delarche looked incredulous. “No,” she said. “This is not good for the body. Even without traumatic brain injury but certainly with. No more floff.”

  “OK,” he said, exhilarated.

  His mistake had been to believe that the girl in the bed wanted nothing. But that was Helen, and Helen was built of want. She longed, she burned, even if she couldn’t move or swallow Marshmallow Fluff. He wished he could find her boys so they could sit on the edge of the bed and read to her; he wished he could take her into the city, let her drink wine.

  Well, then. He needed to find what she wanted, and bring it to her.

  That evening, after the walk, he found himself on a street that seemed lined with art supplies: a pen shop, a painting shop, a paper store. In the paint shop he bought a pad that you could prop up like an easel, and watercolors in a little metal case with a loop on the back for your thumb, for when you painted plein air. It was the sort of thing he’d have bought for the girls in an ordinary time. He hadn’t painted himself since graduate school—he’d been a print-maker, and that’s what he taught—and it had been even longer since he’d used watercolors. But Helen had. She’d taken lessons at home. Perhaps she could teach him. That’s what he would tell her.

  “Ah!” said the doctor, when she saw him set up the pad. “Yes. Therapy. Very good. This will help.”

  They began to paint.

  Yes, Helen was there, she was in there. She could not form words. She smiled more widely when people spoke to her but it didn’t seem to matter what they said. But with the brush in her hand—Wes just steadying—she painted. At first the paintings were abstracts, fields of yellow and orange and watery pink (she never went near blue) overlaid with circles and squares. She knew, as he did not, how to thin the paint with water to get the color she wanted.

  Soon she was moved to a private room on another floor. The hospital manicurist (“How very Parisian!” said Laura, when he told her) gave her vamp red toes and fingernails. Wes’s favorite nurse, a small man who reminded him of a champion wrestler from his high school, devised a brace from a splint and a crepe bandage to help with the painting, so that Helen could hold her wrist out for longer, though she still needed help from the shoulder.

  “She’s painting,” said Wes on the phone. He’d blurted it out at the end of a conversation, standing in front of the front door of the building: until then he hadn’t realized he’d been keeping it a secret.

  “What do you mean?” asked Laura.

  He explained it to her: the brace, the watercolors.

  “What is she painting?”

  “Abstracts. I’ll take a picture, you can see.”

  There was a silence.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I sighed. You mean she’s painting like an elephant paints.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s an elephant who paints. Maybe more than one. They stick a brush in its trunk and give it a canvas. The results are better than you’d think. But it’s not really painting, is it? It’s moving with paint. She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

  “She does,” said Wes. “She’s getting better.”

  “By millimeters.”

  “Yes! Forward.”

  “What good is forward, if it’s by millimeters?” said Laura. “How far can she possibly go?”

  “We don’t know!”

  “I wish she had—” Laura began. “I just don’t know what her life is going to be like.” Another silence.

  Wes knew it wasn’t sighing this time. He said, “Listen. I gotta go.”

  He had not had a drink since the early morning call from the hospital; he’d had the horrible thought he might have woken up and caught Helen sneaking out that night, had he been entirely sober. Now he thought about picking up a bottle of wine to take to M. Petit’s. He passed by the gym he’d seen before, which was still open though it was ten at night. A woman sat at street level in a glass box, ready to sign him up. She wore ordinary street clothes, not exercise togs.“Bonjour, madame,” he said. “Je parle français très mal.” “Ah, non!” said the woman. “Très bien.” She seemed to be condescending to him, but in a cheerful, nearly American way.

  The actual gym was in the basement. By American standards it was small, primitive, but there were free weights—he’d lifted pretty seriously in college—and a couple of treadmills. From then on he came here after his long walk, his phone conversation with Laura, because only exertion blunted the knowledge that Laura wished that Helen had died. He hoped Laura had something to do, to blunt her own knowledge that he knew she felt this way and disagreed.

  For some reason one of the personal trainers took a dislike to him, and was always bawling him o
ut in French, for bringing a duffel bag onto the gym floor, for letting his knees travel over his toes when he squatted, for getting in the way of the French people who seemed always to be swinging around broom handles as a form of exercise. The trainer’s name was Didier, according to the fliers by the front desk; his hair was shaved around the base of his skull, long on top. Like an oignon, Wes thought. Didier drank ostentatiously from a big Nalgene bottle filled with a pale yellow liquid, and it pleased Wes to pretend the guy was consuming his own urine. It was good to hate someone, to have a new relationship of any kind with no medical undertones.

  When I’ve been here a year, he thought one night, as he performed deadlifts in the power rack, when we find the right place to live, me and Helen—then I’ll get a girlfriend. The thought seemed to have flown into his head like a bird—impossible, out-of-place, smashing around. It didn’t belong there. It couldn’t get out.

  After three weeks, Helen was not just better, but measurably better: she held her head up, she turned to whoever was speaking, she squeezed hands when people said her name.

  And she painted. The abstracts had hardened, angled, until Wes could see what she meant. She was painting Paris. Back in the U.S. they had thought Helen had talent and they’d seized on it, bought her supplies, sent her to classes, not just painting but sculpture, pastel, photography. The problem was content, no better than any suburban American girl’s: Floating princesses. Pretty ladies. Ball gowns.

  Now she painted stained glass and broken buildings in sunshine, monuments, gardens. He could feel her hand struggling to get things right. She drew faces with strange curves and bent smiles. The first time she signed her name in the corner in fat bright letters Wes burst into tears.

  Staff and visitors took her paintings away, without asking, and Wes had to hide the ones he particularly wanted. He was waiting for the right one to mail to Laura, he told himself, but every day’s paintings were better than the last. He wanted to send the best one.