The Sadness of Beautiful Things: Stories

by Simon Van Booy

  Chelsea carefully picked on a waffle. “I hated being young.”

  Her mother stood quickly from the breakfast table; her bottom lip was shaking. “Do you even remember that? Do you?” The woman’s face wrinkled, as though collapsing. She reached very slowly for Chelsea’s hair. But the child rose too, ignoring the hand, choosing instead to meet the woman’s anger. “When can I have my phone!”

  Then they heard the man’s voice. “Everything will be fine once we get used to this.”

  Chelsea sighed through her smart braces, as they changed color from silver to neon blue. “Why are you both being so weird?”

  “Try and remember one movie,” her father said, “your favorite movie, Chelsea.”

  But the girl was defiant, which in its own way placated their fears.

  “I don’t have a favorite because I never got to choose.”

  “That’s not true,” said her mother, still standing over the girl.

  “Yes, it is; anything I love, you hate.”

  “She’s right, Helen,” the man said with a pleased look. “She’s got a point there—we never let her watch anything scary.”

  The woman nodded without speaking. For her there was nothing scarier than what was happening to them now.

  Then the father said, “Maybe she can pick out a horror film she’s always wanted to see? Something that’ll really frighten us.”

  “Seriously, Dad?”

  “You’re home now,” said her mother, “this is where you belong, and where we all have to recover from what’s happened.”

  The second night in her bed, the girl started screaming. Her father was first in the room. “Chelsea,” he said, touching her arm, “. . . it’s just a bad dream, Chelsea, wake up.”

  They knew she was out of it when terror bunched into heavy, gasping sobs, as though each wave of emotion were being pulled, with great force, from somewhere, far away.

  Her mother stroked the girl’s forehead, feeling that inside every child is someone very small and without language; a stowaway from long ago.

  The woman could see this little girl now. Could feel her presence with them, in the room. A measure of what was lost.

  Three.

  In the morning her father filled the sink with hot water. He dipped a cloth and spread the steaming towel on his face. He rinsed the shaving brush and made lather in a bowl. Then he began scraping at the small hairs. After, he pulled up handfuls of cold water onto his cheeks. Combed his hair. Splashed aftershave from a blue bottle.

  Chelsea’s mother wanted to clean. It was the morning of the third day. She started with the windows. But there were fingerprints and breath marks from before the accident. And while sweeping she found hairs, skin flakes, a smile of toenail—but the woman kept moving, kept turning her hands in circles, trying to rub away the tiny parts of their old selves.

  Chelsea was silent. In her room wearing headphones, listening to music on an ancient MP3 player. In the afternoon, they ate pizza and watched a horror film about a child who lived in the walls of an old house and couldn’t love anyone without eventually killing them.

  The next day, the girl stayed in her room. At lunchtime her parents knocked and entered with a plate of cookies and something to drink. On the floor were their daughter’s favorite books and a drawing pad. A few colored markers had rolled to the edges of where she was sitting, cross-legged, staring at photographs of summer camp. Chelsea had been drawing from the pictures. She had made girls from black lines, then filled their bodies with colored ink. Each girl had a cell phone, and there were bubbles filled with writing.

  Her father was the first to notice her dolls were missing from their usual place on the shelf. In a corner of the room was a pile of shoes and dresses, which the girl had covered up with pieces of paper ripped from her pad. For a year, the dolls had not been taken down. Their daughter had been opening herself to the world, and no longer needed her imagination to make things come alive. When they didn’t leave, the girl went back to coloring. Her parents looked around for the dolls, but couldn’t see where they were.

  After a whole week of meals on trays and single-syllable answers—the woman said it felt as if they were living out the same day over and over again. When they heard Chelsea’s music through the door, they knew it was safe to talk.

  “She’s not comfortable with us, John, and that’s why she’s barricaded herself in there.”

  “She just wants to be in her room—like any thirteen-year-old.”

  “Something is very wrong with that child.”

  “Of course it’s wrong,” said the man, “that’s why we’re here.”

  Helen looked at her hands. The skin on them was dried out from cleaning.

  Her husband touched them. “I think we might be scaring her, Helen, I think that might be it.”

  “I feel she’s indifferent to us.”

  “Well we’re her parents, and it’s only the trial period.”

  Helen clenched her teeth. Made an effort to swallow the feeling that was clawing its way to her mouth. After some moments, she managed to release the words calmly, though it shocked her to hear them out loud.

  “I feel like I’m betraying our real daughter,” she said, remembering hair and nails in the dustpan, “that she’s lost and we’re not looking for her.”

  This comment seemed to surprise the father, as though it were his faith he’d imagined breaking first. After all, he had witnessed more than his wife. Even now, when his eyes were closed, he could still see the pieces of their child under plastic sheets. But since coming home, he had been learning to impersonate the man he remembered before the accident. Helen had stayed upstairs in the hospital ward, where Chelsea’s torso and head were tangled in tubes and wires, suspending her between this world and others, in a place they couldn’t get to.

  Her brain was active, the doctors knew that for certain. But Chelsea couldn’t breathe without a machine pushing air into her lungs, then pulling it out. And she would never wake up. There was no chance of that.

  At night, with the ward in darkness, when they were alone, John listened. Got close with his head down. Pretended Chelsea was asleep and just listened.

  * * *

  • • •

  They could still hear Chelsea’s music through the door of her bedroom. John made something hot to drink and they sat down.

  “Maybe if we hadn’t been told,” he said, “it might be working.”

  “But we were told, John.”

  They looked at Chelsea’s bedroom door, to make sure it was still closed.

  “But if no one had been told,” her husband said again, “then it really could be like it was before.”

  His wife’s face hardened. “It will never be like before, and neither will we.”

  “It could be if you let it.”

  “I can’t, John, that’s the point.”

  Her husband felt something fiery rise into his mouth.

  “Listen to me,” he said with more gentleness than he had intended, “what else can we do? This was the only option, you know that.”

  Outside a motorcycle went past, shifting clumsily through the gears. Then suddenly, Chelsea was standing there, in her bedroom doorway. Her mother jumped up.

  “What’s happening?” she said. “Why is Mom crying?”

  “Mom is just upset about what happened.”

  Chelsea had on denim overalls and was barefoot. John could see that she had painted her toenails with colored markers. Some of the ink had gotten on her skin. It was a normal thing, except now it felt garish.

  The doctor said they would know after three months if it were possible to go on.

  * * *

  • • •

  They ate leftover pizza for dinner and watched another film. This one was about a fox trying to feed his family with stolen chickens.

 
When John put Chelsea to bed, she asked if Mom was really okay.

  “She will be,” her father said, not really believing it.

  “But why is this all such a big deal? I’m totally fine.”

  The doctor, a woman called Irene, had warned them the girl would remember only being in the hospital for a day or two. John looked deep into the eyes of the child, trying to find a tunnel that would lead him somewhere familiar. He knew a part of him could believe it, could really do it with enough practice. What was truth anyway—but an excuse for violence?

  He touched the girl’s forehead. “Just don’t worry, Chelsea. We’re going to do our best.”

  “Why can’t I go back to school? I want my life back, Dad.”

  “This is your life now. In this house with us, your mom and dad.”

  “But what’s wrong with me? Am I dying or something?” Her eyes moved from side to side.

  John laughed to break his expression of shock. “We’re all going to die, someday.”

  “Then why is Mom being weird?”

  “She’s overwhelmed. We almost lost you.”

  “Well, you’re acting like I died or something.”

  John took a deep breath.

  “Do you remember dying?”

  “Just the bus stop,” the girl said, her cheeks turning red. She seemed about to cry. John wondered if he should call his wife in. This was so much like their daughter. “I was wearing my virtual reality glasses,” she confessed, leaning forward, putting both arms around her father. “I know you told me I couldn’t because it’s dangerous, and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Daddy.”

  She lay back down and looked into her father’s face. “That’s why you won’t let me have them, isn’t it? Because I disobeyed you and Mom by wearing my virtual reality glasses?”

  “Don’t worry about that now, Chelsea, it’s too late—just try and tell me what you remember after the bus stop.”

  John braced for the answer, watching the girl search her memories and pull words together.

  “Just waking up in the hospital with you and Mom staring at me.”

  “Then you’re lucky,” he said, trying to keep his breathing steady. “We’re all lucky actually.”

  “Am I different since the accident, Dad?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” John told her. “We’re going to love you no matter what.”

  Four.

  The next day, John found his wife in the hallway still wearing her nightgown. She was looking at photographs they had put in frames, moving slowly across the wall of faces, each one now anchored to a different moment of grief.

  “If you’re trying to find imperfections, you won’t,” John said gently.

  It was early. Chelsea was still sleeping.

  “You sound like them.”

  “Whatever they did worked.”

  “Well, it’s not working for me.”

  Her honesty made him angry. But he held his temper to prevent her courage from turning to recklessness. “I meant physically, Helen.”

  He looked past his wife’s head at a picture of Chelsea on the beach as a toddler. She had on a white cotton hat with ruffles. Her arms and legs were like pink sausages under the shade of a beach umbrella. She was bending to look at something outside the frame. She was young then and couldn’t speak. The emotion and curiosity was in her face, yet to be culled by language. John laid both hands on his wife’s shoulders.

  “Can’t we just try, Helen?”

  She pulled away bitterly. “I am trying! Isn’t that obvious?”

  “But she’s exactly the same, she—”

  “Not to me, John—I’m her mother, remember?”

  “Well, you’re not really acting like it.”

  Helen turned. Her face looked cold and haggard.

  “Because it feels like a betrayal.”

  “You have to make yourself believe it, Helen—that’s how it works. Come on . . . give yourself permission to be happy again. There’s no other way.”

  Her face dropped the way it had at the hospital, into a shapeless agony. It reminded John of the giant theatrical mask on the entrance gates to their daughter’s summer theater camp.

  “I don’t think I can go on.”

  “You have to, Helen, or this family will break apart.”

  “Because of me?”

  “Because of your unwillingness to love.”

  “But that’s the point—I feel the exact opposite. Like loving is the worst thing I could do.”

  “But why?”

  “Because it would mean the love before meant nothing.”

  But love is love, he wanted to say.

  They steered their eyes back to the pictures that now seemed to mock them.

  “I don’t know what’s worse,” she said, “grief or guilt.”

  “She can never find out—you have to promise me that.”

  “That’s the worst part,” said his wife. “Think how she’d suffer if she knew, John.”

  “But that’s good! Doctor Irene said that was part of the plan—for us to worry about her suffering means we love her.”

  Helen nodded, but after a moment said, “I think we need to leave this house.”

  “The doctor recommended three months.”

  “I know, but staying inside like this is not helping.”

  “Where will we go?”

  “It doesn’t matter—but we need to do something, as a family.”

  “Okay,” John said, “that I can understand.”

  * * *

  • • •

  He made some coffee and called Chelsea from her room. Talked about where they would go.

  “What are we running away from now?” she said.

  “It’s something we need to do,” Helen told her.

  “I’ll check the charge on the car tonight,” John added, “and fill the microfridge with infused water.”

  “How come I can go out, but not go back to school? My friends will think I’m dead! When can I go back to school? Tell me!”

  The voice was familiar, but her insistence felt sinister, beyond what was normal. Helen stood quickly, spilling her coffee. “You aren’t going back to school, for God’s sake! How many times do we have to tell you that? Christ!”

  The skin tightened on the girl’s face. The mother and father waited but she did not speak. There was no sound. Only her eyes were moving.

  John spoke then, afraid of what might be going on inside their daughter.

  “Please go into your room, Chelsea. Mom and I will figure this out.”

  Helen watched her go, then turned to her husband. “Our real daughter would never, ever, ever behave like that.”

  John sat very still as the words cut through him. “Maybe that’s because her real mother would never have spoken to her like that.”

  “Jesus Christ,” she said. “You’re a bastard, John, a real bastard.”

  He got up then and went out of the room. She could hear his feet on the stairs. Then a door closing. She was alone with the stained tablecloth and her ragged breathing. She sat like that for a long time, feeling as though all she had to do was pull out the tangle of her insides and discard them.

  But over dinner the mood was different. Helen complimented Chelsea on her manners, and on a drawing she had made. It showed a girl standing on a cliff edge looking out to sea.

  John kissed his wife on the head when he rose to collect dishes. She touched his hand.

  For one meal, it seemed as though they might be able to go on.

  Over dessert, Helen asked where they were going.

  “The sea,” John said.

  “You loved the beach,” said her mother.

  “In the summer,” Chelsea said, “not now.”

  John tried to keep the good mood going. “It’s ni
ce all year-round, just different.”

  “How come I can go to the beach but not to school?”

  “It’s just a day,” Helen said, her voice hoarse from crying. “We can always stay in the car if it’s too much.”

  “It’s settled,” John said. “Tomorrow, we’re going for a family day at the seaside.”

  That night, Helen and John had sex for the first time since their daughter’s accident. It was quick and hard, as though they were trying to break through the rubble of emotions that had accumulated between them. After, they held hands and imagined the sea. How the endless water would make them feel.

  Five.

  Some time ago, about a month after the accident, John and Helen drove from their home to a part of the hospital where the incubation labs were housed. At first they wanted to touch it—touch her. But it wasn’t her yet. The body looked exactly the same. Every scar, every freckle—even tiny craters on her knees from where she had fallen off her tricycle. The technician told them the body was woven from a fabric that was grown. The blood had some elements of real blood to prevent hemophilia. The company kept an Italian artist on staff, to check the skin pigmentation and other things only an artist might see. John remembered him from the e-brochure. The artist had long hair and wore a scarf.

  They would be one of the first families to try the new technology, which was why it had been offered at no cost. The company was financed in part by the drone industry, and staffed by medical engineers and marketing gurus. The chief physician, Dr. Irene Weber, had promised that, despite the graphic nature of the accident, the company had paid for a media blackout, so that Chelsea would not accidentally stumble upon anything, if she found a way to go online.

  The immediate goal was for her to really feel and really live.

  “What if she finds out,” Helen asked, “or realizes she’s not growing up, what then?”

  “Call me Irene,” said the doctor. “To be honest, Helen, we don’t know. She might not notice she’s not aging if she feels okay.”

  “Well then, it’s lucky we live on a desert island, where she’ll have no other children to compare herself to.” They should have known then it wasn’t going to work.