Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

“Well, he’ll stop breathing,” said Rena. “So.”

“I’ll call the airline,” said Sylvia. “I’ll hurry. Lisa’s — no, we’ll drive to the airport right now—”

“We need you to stay there,” said Rena.

“We? Who?”

“I’ve talked to Marjorie. That’s what she wants.”

“Where are you?”

“I’m here at the hospital. I drove up last night, when things started to look bad.”

“Rena!” said Sylvia, and now she was standing up, the phone cord wrapped around her hand (that twisted, loved, comforting phone cord, like a length of worry beads). “Rena, of course I have to be with him, I have to—”

“Mom,” said Rena. “No.”

“I can help! If she’ll let me! Aaron ,” said Sylvia, as though that was the problem, a mother needed to say her dying child’s name aloud, to call him back to life.

“This isn’t about you,” said Rena, in her kindest voice.

Well, who was it about, then? That was the thing: Rena always remembered that Sylvia was their mother but somehow forgot that this meant they were Sylvia’s children.

“And you can help,” said Rena. “Keep Lisa with you, and happy. Tomorrow — when it’s over, it would be wonderful if you could bring her home. All right?”

“What do I tell her?” said Sylvia.

“Nothing. That’s very important, Mom. All right? Marjorie needs to figure out what to say. She’s the mother.”

“All right,” said Sylvia. “OK. You’ll call me?”

And then Rena’s voice fully broke, and she said, “Of course. You’ll be the first one. I’ll see you soon.”

· · ·

There were only eight units in the building, all with the same floor plan, identical or mirrored, depending. To see what other people did with their apartments was disconcerting, a separated-at-birth moment. Your life would look like this, if you weren’t you. She could hear dim mechanical sounds inside Mrs. Tillman’s apartment after she’d rung the bell. What was her first name, anyhow? Sylvia imagined a tag on her that said (like her husband’s goods) TILLMAN. That’s what brand of woman she was. Sylvia was doing her best not to cry. She had a few seconds more of doing her best on her own.

The door opened to reveal Mrs. Tillman, behind her a wall of hung decorative plates, each with a scene of Hummels through the seasons. China plates with china figurines. Sylvia was panting, she realized.

Then she reminded herself that she had a job: to keep Lisa happy.

“Ah!” said Tillman. Her hair was coral-colored. She leaned on a walker that seemed too short for a tall woman. It gave her a restrained look, as a lunatic is restrained in a sanitarium. “Hello, Syl. We had a little problem.”

Sylvia wondered, for a moment, whether Mrs. Tillman had had a stroke; then she saw that she’d merely applied her lipstick off-center.

“We had a little problem,” Mrs. Tillman repeated. “We used something without permission. Talcum powder.” She gestured at a dusty-headed, teary-eyed Lisa, who stood by a garish bird-patterned sofa. Lisa knows , thought Sylvia. How does she know?

“I wanted to look like I had a powdered wig,” said Lisa.

“Ah!” said Sylvia. “Did you say you were sorry, darling?”

Lisa nodded.

“So we had a little spank,” said Tillman in a bright voice, “and now we are friends again.”

A little … spank? Sylvia tried to make sense of this. Tillman nodded encouragingly, and then mock-spanked the back of her own wrist, to illustrate.

“You spanked her?” Sylvia looked at the plates again and saw them for what they were: portraits of children who in five years would join the Hitler Youth, little lederhosened, dirndled monsters. She wanted to pluck the plates one by one from the wall and smash them, and then she realized the strange feeling in her arms was her hands, which were heavy as sandbags and had been since she’d hung up the phone. Grief had made them huge. They felt ready to drop off her wrists. Lisa couldn’t get out, not past the walker, which seemed not the support of an elderly woman but a torture device to be used on small children. Sylvia reached over and picked the walker up and moved it closer to Tillman’s body.

“Syl!” said Tillman, stumbling back, and so Sylvia grabbed her by the wrist. The other hand she held out for Lisa, who took it and was out of the apartment and under her grandmother’s wing, smelling of ticklish, tickling babyhood.

“Are you crazy?” Tillman said. “Let go!”

Sylvia was still holding Tillman’s wrist. She felt she could snap it. The ulna of a Hummel: of course china people had china bones.

“I’ll call the police!” said Tillman.

“You?” said Sylvia. “Call them! I’ll have you arrested!”

“You’re hurting me! Let go!”

“Call the police!” Sylvia said. “You don’t spank someone else’s child! Nobody’s! It’s barbaric!”

“Grandma,” said Lisa. “It didn’t even hurt! Please!”

Sylvia flung Tillman’s wrist back at her, and the door closed. From the other side they heard Tillman say, “The police? You call the police on me, I’ll call them on you!” A thud: she must have struck the inside of her door; then they heard the chain lock slide closed.

They stood in the hallway together, Sylvia and Lisa, not yet bereaved.

“Let’s just get out of here,” said Lisa. “Let’s go to the party. Let’s go the back way.”

Poor girl , thought Sylvia, but she meant herself.

She was returning to her body. Her hands still felt oversized, but filled with helium. All she really wanted was to go to her apartment, to her bedroom, to the back of her walk-in closet, to sit among the shoes. She thought she might feel better if she gnawed on one.

No. They had to keep busy. That was the only way they might manage. She didn’t know what a ventilator was, exactly. Did it go over your face? Down your throat? Whenever she heard the words life support she pictured a series of cords attached all over a sick person’s body, all leading to one enormous plug in the wall: that was the plug that was pulled, when you pulled the plug. Suddenly she understood life support as something that involved a certain amount of brute force. A shim, a brace. The phone might be ringing in her apartment even now. They walked away, down the back steps. When her children were little and first came home from school to tell her things they’d learned — for instance, that Ponce de León had come to the United States on Columbus’s second voyage — she’d always felt unnerved: they knew things she didn’t. Now they still did. Aaron would die. He would die. (She repeated this in her head a few more times.) And apparently this death was not about her and not about Lisa.

They were outside now, in the sun. The street smelled of gunpowder and lemonade. Little kids held their hands in the bright showers off sparklers. Everyone else was in shorts and sleeveless shirts, Sylvia saw. Nobody else was in costume.

“Don’t eat anything with mayonnaise,” she told Lisa.

“Because it’s fattening?”

“It goes bad in the heat. You could die from hot mayonnaise. No potato salad. Listen, darling. It isn’t right that Mrs. Tillman spanked you. No one has the right to spank you, you understand?”

Lisa nodded seriously. Then she said, “Can you fix my queue?”

“Your what, darling?”

“My pigtail.” The girl turned and presented her back. Sylvia tightened the sad braid, the brown hair slippery under the talc, faded, like a sun-damaged photo. The bow was blue. Her shoulders were broad. Sylvia stroked them. Without turning around, Lisa said, “My dad spanks me sometimes.”