Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

Instead, she likes to snuffle close to her mother’s skin. The best spot is Joyce’s skin in the hollow just below her cheekbones and just above her jaw: you have to get close, you have to get nearly under Joyce’s nose to settle in. Sometimes Missy gets in the way and cuts off her mother’s breath. She doesn’t mean to. The biting, pinching child bites and pinches, along her mother’s arms, her pale stomach.

“Look,” Joyce says to her son, and displays her forearms, which are captioned with strange anaglyphic sentences, spelled out in hives.

Gerry Goodby was twelve when his little sister died. Now he’s a seventeen-year-old six-foot-tall lacrosse player. He has watched his mother turn from a human woman into some immaculate vegetable substance, wan, thin, lamplit. What will you do , his father says. He means about college. For the past five years, Gerry and his father have had the same alternating conversation. I want to live with you , Gerry will say, and his father will answer, You know that’s impossible, you know your mother needs you . Or his father will say, This is crazy, she’s crazy, come live with me , and Gerry will answer, You know that’s impossible .

He was the one who closed up Missy’s room. A year after she died, his mother wheezing, weeping, molting on the sofa. She gave him the directions. Don’t touch a thing. Just seal it up . He nailed over the doorway with barrier cloth, then painted over that with latex paint. His mother felt better for nearly a month.

Sometimes he stops in the hallway and touches the slumped wall where Missy’s door used to be. He feels like a projection on a screen, waiting for the rest of the movie to be filled in. This is intolerable , he thinks. He’s always thought of intolerable as a grown-up word, like mortgage .

Missy the allergen, Missy the poison. She’s everywhere in the house, no matter how their mother scrubs and sweeps and burns and purges. She’s in the bricks. She’s in the new bedding, in the nontoxic cleaning fluid. She leeches and fumes and wishes — insofar as ghosts can, in the way that water wishes, and has a will, sometimes thwarted and sometimes not — that the house were not shut up so tight. She rises to the ceiling daily and collects there, drips down, tries again. Outside there’s a world of blank skin, waiting for her to scribble all over it.

“I would die without you,” Joyce Goodby tells her son one morning. He knows it’s true, just as he knows he’s the only one who would care. Sometimes he thinks it wouldn’t be such a bad bargain, his mother’s death for his own freedom. Anyone would understand. Anyhow, it’s time to leave for school. She won’t die during the school day; at least, she hasn’t so far.

Across the street Santos shuts Johnny Mackers in a steamer trunk in the attic instead of walking him to kindergarten. Then Santos, liberated, guilty, decides to skip school himself. He walks to the corner and gets on the bus that says, across its forehead, DOWNTOWN VIA PIKE . He has just enough change to pay his fare. The bus is crammed with people. A man in a gray windbreaker stands up. “Hey,” he says. “Kiddo. Sit here.”

Santos sits.

The world goes on. The world will. At any moment you can look from your window and see your neighbors. The fat couple who live next door will bicker and then bear hug each other. The teenage boys will play basketball with their shirts off. The elderly lady next door waits for the visiting nurse; her bloodhound snoozes in the sun like a starlet, one paw across his snout. You want to drape that old, good, big dog’s sun-warmed fawn-colored ears on your fists. You want to reassure the elderly lady, tease the fat couple, watch — just watch — those shirtless, heedless boys. You have to get out , your family says, it’s time. It’s time to join the world again . But you never left the world. You’re filled with tenderness, with worry for every living being, but you can’t do anything — not for your across-the-street neighbors, or for the people on the next street, or around the corner, or driving on the turnpike two blocks away, or in the city, or the whole country, the whole world, west and east and north and south. You are so unlucky you don’t want to brush up against anyone who isn’t.

You will not join a group. You will not read a book. You’re not interested in anyone else’s story, not when your own story takes up all your time. When the calamity happened, your friends said, It’s so sad. It’s the worst kind of luck , and you could tell they believed it. What’s changed? You are as sad and unlucky as you were when it happened. It’s still so, so sad. It’s still the worst kind of luck.

The dead live on in the homeliest of ways. They’re listed in the phone book. They get mail. Their wigs rest on Styrofoam heads at the back of closets. Their beds are made. Their shoes are everywhere.

The paint across the door is still tacky. It’s dumb to even be here. Joyce swears she can smell the fiberboard headboard of the bed through the barrier cloth, the scratch-and-sniff stickers on the desk, the old lip gloss, the bubble bath in containers shaped like animals arranged on the dresser top, the unchanged mattress, the dust. The dress from Bloomingdale’s that had been hers and then Missy’s, in striped fabric like a railroad engineer’s hat. The Mexican jumping beans bought at a joke shop before the diagnosis, four dark little beans in a plastic box with a clear top and blue bottom that clasped shut like an old-fashioned change purse. You warmed them in your hands, and they woke up and twitched and flipped: the worms who lived inside dozed in the cold but threw themselves against the walls when the temperature rose.

“Worms?” Missy had asked. Her nose was lacy with freckles, pink around the rim. “How do we feed them?”

“We don’t,” said Joyce.

“Then they’ll starve to death!”

Quickly Joyce made up a story: the worm wasn’t a worm, it was a soul. It was fine where it was, it was eternal, and if the bean stopped moving that only meant the soul had moved on to find another home. Back to Mexico? asked Missy, and Joyce said, Sure, why not . (Who knows? Maybe that’s why the worms woke up when they got warm — they thought, At last we’re back home in Oaxaca .) Back then, reincarnation was a comforting fable. In fairy tales, people were always born again as beasts, frogs, migrating swans.

Now Joyce feels the world shake and thinks, Mexican jumping bean . She can’t decide whether the house is the bean and she’s the worm, or the bean’s her body and the worm her soul.

Neither: someone has wrenched open the wooden storm door of the sun porch and let it slam behind him. Then the doorbell rings.

Johnny Mackers has escaped. He’s kicked his way out of the trunk, the one his great-grandmother emigrated from Ireland with, still lined with the napkins and tablecloths she thought she’d need for a new life. She once told Johnny a story about a monkey that belonged to a rich family she worked for, and though he knows that monkey died in the rich family’s house, he was sure the trunk smelled of monkey, as well as the inventory of every story his great-grandmother ever told him: whiskey, lamp oil, house fires, a scalded baby’s arm treated with butter, horse sweat, lemon drops, the underside of wooden dentures. The trunk turned out to be made of cardboard held together with moldy oak and cheap tin. He kicked one end to pieces and crawled out. The wreckage scared him. It was as though he’d kicked his great-grandmother apart before she’d had a chance to get on the boat and sail to Boston and meet her future husband at an amusement park and have children.