Thunderstruck & Other Stories

by Elizabeth McCracken

  One morning he ran into Dr. Delarche on his way to Helen. “Monsieur,” she said, and beckoned him. Wes was alarmed. There was never any news from doctors about Helen. He either had to ask or see for himself. And besides, Dr. Delarche worked in the ICU.

  “I must ask you something,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “My husband is a documentarist. I wonder—I told him about Helen and her painting. He wishes to do a little film.”

  “Oh!” said Wes. “Yes!”

  The documentariste was a shaggy handsome Algerian named Walid who made Wes like Dr. Delarche better: he had an air of joy and incaution. “You don’t mind?” he said. His camera was one of those cheap handheld things, a Flip—Laura’s mother had given them one the year before. Wes had better video capabilities on his Nikon, back at the flat. He imagined most of the footage would feature the profile of Walid’s wide calloused thumb.

  He didn’t tell Laura about the filming. She would tell him to throw the doctor’s husband out of the room. Do not turn our child into a freak show, she would have said—

  —but Wes knew that was all that Helen had ever really wanted.

  Not love, and not quotidian attention: since she was a child she liked to scare and alarm her parents and strangers and he did not believe anymore that it was some sort of coded message—a cry for love! She just wants you to talk to her! Helen wanted love but no ordinary sort. She wanted people to gape. Left alone in the U.S., she would have not just had her nose pierced, nor her ears, she would have got not just black forked tattoos across the small of her back: she would have obliterated herself with metal and ink, put plugs in her earlobes, in her lips. People would have stared at her. They would have winced and looked away. She wanted both.

  Now she had both.

  He was not stupid enough, not optimistic enough, to think that she would have made this bargain herself. She wouldn’t have given up the boys in some strange part of Paris, offering her wine, watching her do something stupid before she fell. But if she were in bed in a hospital, she would—not would, but did—want to be the most interesting girl in the bed who ever was. Filmed and fussed over. Called, by the more dramatic of the nurses, miraculous. Visited by the sick children of the hospital, who were brought by well-meaning religious volunteers.

  Helen’s room was a place of warmth and brightness. Everyone said so. Walid kept filming, though Wes was never clear to what end.

  “Perhaps,” said Walid one day, “when we are finished, the boys she was with? They will see this film.”

  “They could come to visit!” said Wes.

  “Eh?” said Walid. He stopped filming and regarded Wes. “Turn themselves in. Repent. That’s terrible, to abandon a girl, isn’t it? You are American and you want them dead,” he explained. “We, of course, do not believe in the death penalty. Anymore: we have had our bumps. But still. Terrible.”

  “She is an inspiration,” said Dr. Delarche one day as Wes and Helen painted. “This is not a bad thing.” Dr. Delarche leaned against the wall in the lab coat she made look chic: it was the way she tucked her hands in the pockets. Since Wes had agreed to let Walid film, she came to the room nearly every day, though never when Walid himself was around. Maybe she had a crush on him, though that seemed very un-French. He had a crush on her.

  “The light in the paintings,” she said to him. “Like Monet, hein?”

  “God, no,” said Wes. “I hate Monet. Where you going, Helen? Red? Here’s red.”

  “Renoir,” suggested Dr. Delarche.

  “Worse. No,” said Wes, “I will take your side against the Italians with wine, and coffee, and even ice cream, but painting? They have you beat. The French are too pretty.”

  “We are pretty,” Dr. Delarche agreed. “And cheese also, we are better. Wine, of course. Everyone know that. So then. You are making plans?”

  He shook his head pleasantly, not knowing what she meant.

  “Soon Helen will go,” she said.

  “Die?” He stopped his hand and felt the pressure of Helen wanting to move, but he pulled the brush from the brace and set it down. He was sorry he’d said the word in front of her.

  “Ah, no!” said Dr. Delarche. She sounded insulted that he’d misunderstood her so badly. The French, in his experience, were often insulted by other people’s stupidity. “From here.”

  “To another hospital.”

  “Home. To the United States. You will talk to the social workers, see what they know—she is better. Of course. She is much, much better, and now she is strong enough to travel. So, hurrah, isn’t it? You will go home to your family.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  He left the hospital then; he almost never walked out of the building during the day. Neuilly-sur-Seine looked like a stage set built by someone who had never been to Paris and imagined it was boring: clean nineteenth-century buildings with mansard roofs, little cafés that served coffee in white china cups, nothing notable or seedy. He thought about taking Helen back to M. Petit’s apartment and he realized that was the real reason he’d started going to the gym: he lifted weights so he could lift Helen. Five flights up. Into the slipper bath. Around Paris, even. He’d walked enough of the city to know it was a terrible place for a wheelchair. No Americans with Disabilities Act, no cutouts in curbs. It would be easier on foot.

  He would carry her to the Jardin des Plantes. They would paint the animals in the zoo, visit the mosaicked tearoom at the mosque. In his head he saw her improve by time lapse: her mouth closed, she sat straighter. He didn’t care that their short-term visas would expire in two weeks. He could not picture them in America.

  If she could not walk or speak in America, then she would not walk or speak for the rest of her life, and that was something he would not accept.

  But when he called Laura on his way home that night, she said she was coming in two days. Kit would stay with friends. Her brother had given her a last-minute ticket. She wanted to see for herself how Helen was doing.

  As Wes waited at the airport he worried he wouldn’t recognize his wife—he always worried this, when meeting someone—and his heart clattered every time the electric double doors opened to reveal another exhausted traveler. When she came out, of course, he knew her immediately, and he felt the old percolation of his blood of their early dates, when he loved her and didn’t know what would happen. That’s her, he thought. She crossed the tile of the airport and it was no mirage of distance. She fell into him and he loved her. He felt ashamed of every awful thought he’d had about her for the past weeks. They held each other’s tiredness awhile.

  “You feel different,” she said. “Thinner. You look kind of wonderful. How’s Didier?”

  “I hate him with every fiber of my being. You look more than kind of wonderful.”

  She shook her head. Then she said, “I don’t want to go back there.”

  “Where?” he said. “Oh. Well, that’s where Helen is.”

  “That’s not where Helen is.”

  “She’s better. She’s—she’ll know you’re there.” As soon as he’d said it he realized he’d been telling Laura the opposite, to comfort her: Helen didn’t really know who was there and who wasn’t and therefore it was all right that Laura and Kit were thousands of miles away in America.

  “Really?” said Laura.

  “Yes.”

  “How does she show it?”

  They headed down to the airport train station. Wes had already bought the tickets back into Paris. At last he said, “She’s painting. She’s still painting, Laura.”

  The train stopped in front of them with a refrigerated hiss and they stepped on. “I know.”

  “What?”

  “Kit showed me. On YouTube. I mean, it doesn’t show her painting. She’s not really, is she. I don’t believe it.”

  He had heard about news traveling on the Internet, but he imagined that was gossip, or affairs, or boss badmouthing: it traveled locally, not from country to country.

  �
�Who’s really painting?” said Laura. “The therapist, or someone. One of those religious women. In some of the shots you can see a hand steadying her elbow.”

  “Helen,” said Wes. “I promise. Come on. She’ll show you.”

  At the Gare du Nord, Laura said, “Let’s take a cab. Let’s go see Helen.”

  “Don’t you want to drop off your suitcase?”

  She shook her head. “I wish you’d found another place to stay.”

  They went to the stand along the side of the station. He hadn’t been inside a taxi since their first day in Paris. Mornings, he went to the hospital underground, afternoons he came back by foot. He felt suddenly that every national weakness a people had was evident on its highways.

  “Do you have cash?” Laura asked as they pulled up.

  “I thought you did.”

  “I just got here. I have dollars.”

  He dug through his pockets and found just enough. They stepped outside.

  “I hate it here,” Laura said, looking at the clean façade of the hospital.

  “I know. I hate it, too.”

  “No. You’re better than me. You don’t hate it. You hate the situation. That’s the right response. Me, I want to run out the door and never come back. I would, if I could.”

  “This way,” he said. “They moved her.”

  At first Wes was struck by how good Helen looked, the pink in her cheeks, the nearly chic haircut. Then he glanced at Laura and then he understood how little, really, their daughter had changed. It had been six weeks. She looked dazed and cheerful. She couldn’t speak.

  “Hi, honey,” said Wes. “Look. Mommy’s here.”

  “Oh, God,” said Laura.

  “Sshh,” said Wes.

  But Laura was by the bed. She touched Helen’s cheek. “Honey,” she said. “Sweetheart. Shit.” She looked down the length of Helen and pulled up the sheet: her bent knees with the pillow between, the wasting muscles, the catheter tube. She shook her head, rearranged the sheet. “I know, I know what you think of me, Wes.”

  “I don’t—”

  “It’s not that it’s not her. It’s that—whoever this person in the bed is, she’s where my Helen should be. That’s what I can’t get over and it’s what I know I have to.”

  Laura was wearing a dress she had bought in the July sales when they’d first arrived, red, with blue embroidered flowers on the shoulders like epaulets. She had belted it too tight. She had lost weight, too.

  “Just sit,” he said to her. “There are chairs. Here’s one. We’ll paint. Shall we paint, Helen?”

  He wound the brace around her wrist, always a pleasing task, and slid in Helen’s favorite long-handled brush, meant for oils, not watercolors. He propped up the pad on the wheeled table that came over the bed, got the water, the colors, dampened the paints. They began.

  “You’re doing it,” said Laura.

  “No,” he said patiently. “I’m just steadying her hand.”

  “Then let go,” said Laura.

  He did, and he believed it would happen: her hand would sail up, like a bird tossed in the air. It would just keep flying. Yes, that was right. If anything, he wanted to tell Laura, he was holding her hand too still, he was interfering. She didn’t need him anymore.

  But her hand went ticking down to the bottom of the page, and stopped.

  Helen’s jaw worked, and Laura and Wes watched it. She had not made a noise in weeks. She did not make one now. The short haircut looked alternately gamine and like a punishment. Wes picked her hand back up, placed it, let go. Tick, tick, to the bottom of the page.

  “So you see,” said Laura.

  Wes shook his head. No. She’d needed the help but he was not capable of those paintings.

  And if he was, what did that mean? The paintings were what was left of Helen.

  “She’s not a fraud,” said Wes.

  “No, I don’t think she is,” said Laura. “I don’t think she’s anything. She’s not at home, Wes.”

  “Isn’t she?” said Wes.

  “No,” said Laura. She tapped her head. “I mean here, in her brain, she’s not at home. It doesn’t matter where her body is. Her body will be at home anywhere. But it matters where your body is. We need to take her home and you, too.”

  “It isn’t just me who’s seen it,” said Wes.

  “Who doesn’t love a miracle girl,” said Laura, but with love. “I wanted one, too, honestly. I would have loved it, if it had been real.”

  But, thought Helen—because Helen was at home, Helen heard everything—wasn’t it more of a miracle this way? Her mother was right. She could not move her hands: that was her father. But she saw the pictures in her head, those fields with the apartment blocks, that golden light—and she couldn’t move her hand to get them on the paper. Her father did. There was the miracle everyone spoke about, in English and in French. The visiting nuns said it was God, but it was her father who took her hand and painted the pictures in her head. Every time he got them right: the buildings, the light posts, those translucent floating things across her field of vision when she wasn’t exactly looking at anything, what as a child she thought of as her conscience—floaters, her father once told her they were called. “I have them, too,” he’d said. They were worse in the hospital, permanent static. She saw, he painted the inside of her snow-globe skull, all those things whizzing around when she fell—the water tower on top of the building, the boy who’d kissed her, the other boy who’d pushed her, those were their faces in the corner of the page, the bottles of wine she’d drunk—back home she’d had beer and peppermint schnapps and had drunk cough syrup, but not wine. Wine was everything here. Those boys would come visit her. They’d promised they would when they dropped her off. She had to stay put. Don’t let her take me, Daddy. Her mother hadn’t looked her in the eye since she’d come into the room, but when had she, ever, ever, ever, thought Helen. All her life, she’d been too bright a light.

  “Careless Helen,” said Laura, and then to Wes, “Do you know, I think I’ve only just forgiven her.”

  “What for?” asked Wes.

  She rubbed her nose absentmindedly. “Funny smell. What is that?”

  Not medicine nor illness: the iridescent polish the manicurist had applied to Helen’s toes.

  In order to wake up every morning, thought Wes, he’d convinced himself of a lot of things that weren’t true. He could feel some of his beliefs crumble like old plaster—life in Paris, walking the streets with Helen in his arms, revenge on Didier, even Dr. Delarche’s crush. Of course they would go back to the States, where Kit was, they would talk to experts, they would find a facility, they would bring Helen home as soon as they could, where she would be visited by Addie of the braces and the clarinet, and boys from her school. She might never walk again. But her body would persist. It was broken but not failing. She was theirs for the rest of their lives, and then Kit would inherit her. That was what Laura had seen from the first day, and it had crushed her, and she was only just now shifting that weight from her chest.

  Helen painted. That was real. He knew his own brain, what it could make up and what it couldn’t. He looked at his wife, whom he loved, whom he looked forward to convincing, and felt as though he were diving headfirst into happiness. It was a circus act, a perilous one. Happiness was a narrow tank. You had to make sure you cleared the lip.

  For Edward

  for every reason

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Enormous thanks to Henry Dunow, Susan Kamil, Noah Eaker, Ann Patchett, Duchess Goldblatt, Paul Lisicky; to the American Academy in Berlin, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Bogliasco Fellowship Program for miraculous support; to the editors who have published these stories in magazines and anthologies, including John Freeman, Robin Black, Adrienne Miller, Joyce Carol Oates, Geraldine Brooks, Allison Wright, W. Ralph Eubanks, and particularly Michael Ray of Zoetrope: All-Story, who got me writing short stories again with the right question at the right time.

&nb
sp; BY ELIZABETH McCRACKEN

  Thunderstruck & Other Stories

  An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination

  Niagara Falls All Over Again

  The Giant’s House

  Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN is the author of The Giant’s House, which was nominated for the National Book Award; Niagara Falls All Over Again, winner of the PEN/Winship Award; Here’s Your Hat What’s Your Hurry; An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination; and Thunderstruck & Other Stories. She has received grants and awards from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She is currently the James A. Michener Chair in Fiction at the University of Texas at Austin.

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  @elizmccracken

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