Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

“Of course they’re real,” Peter Elroy said. “And they’re coming. Not for you. They wouldn’t eat you. You’re too small. Too thin. All bone. A wolf would look at you and think, Disgusting .”

“Dis-custing,” the girl echoed.

“But I’m lovely,” said Peter Elroy. “I’m delicious.”

“We’ll protect you,” said the boy.

“Darling,” said Peter Elroy, “it’s all right. Let them come.”

And they did, one night soon afterwards.

1.

Wes and Laura had not even known Helen was missing when the police brought her home at midnight. Her long bare legs were marbled red with cold, and she had tear tracks on her face, but otherwise she looked like her ordinary placid awkward middle-school self: snarled hair, chapped lips, pink cheeks. She’d lost her pants somewhere, and she held in one fist a seemingly empty plastic garbage bag, brown, the yellow drawstring pulled tight at its neck. Laura thought the policemen should have given her something to cover up. Though what did cops know about clothing: maybe they thought that long black T-shirt was a dress. It had a picture of a pasty overweight man in swashbuckler’s clothes captioned, in movie marquee letters, LINDA.

“She’s twelve!” Wes told the police, as though they were the ones who’d lured the girl from her bed. “She’s only twelve .”

“Sorry, Daddy,” Helen said.

Laura grabbed her daughter by the wrist and pulled her in before the police could change their minds and arrest her, or them. She took the garbage bag from Helen, un-cinched the aperture, and stared in, looking for evidence, missing clothing, wrong-doers.

“Nitrous oxide party,” said the taller officer, who looked like all the Irish boys Laura had grown up with. Maybe he was one. “They inhale from those bags. The owner of the house is in custody. Some kid had a bad reaction, she threw them all onto the lawn. The others scattered but your daughter stayed with the boy in distress. So there’s that.”

“There’s that,” said Wes.

Helen gave her mother a sweet, sinuous, beneath-the-arm hug. She’d gotten so tall she had to stoop to do it; she was Laura’s height now. “Mommy, I love you,” she said. She was a theatrical child. She always had been.

“You could have suffocated!” Laura said, throttling the bag.

“I didn’t put it over my head,” said Helen.

Laura ripped a hole in the bottom of the bag, as though that were still a danger.

This was her flaw as a parent, she thought later: she had never truly gotten rid of a single maternal worry. They were all in the closet, with the minuscule footed pajamas and hand-knit baby hats, and every day Laura took them out, unfolded them, tried to put them to use. Kit was seven, Helen nearly a teenager, and a small, choke-worthy item on the floor still dropped Laura, scrambling, to her knees. She could not bear to see her girls on their bicycles, both the cycling and the cycling away . Would they even remember her cell-phone number, if they and their phones were lost separately? Did anyone memorize numbers anymore? The electrical outlets were still dammed with plastic, in case someone got a notion to jab at one with a fork.

She had never worried about breathing intoxicating gas from Hefty bags. Another worry. Put it on the pile. Soon it might seem quaint, too.

She blamed her fretting on Helen’s first pediatrician, who had told her there was no reason to obsess about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. “It’ll happen or it won’t,” said Dr. Moody. Laura had found this an unacceptable philosophy. Her worry for the baby had heat and energy: how could it be useless? Nobody had warned her how deeply babies slept, how you couldn’t always see them breathing. You watched, and watched, you touched their dozy stomachs to feel their clockwork. Even once the infant Helen started sleeping through the night, Laura checked on her every two hours. Sometimes at two A.M. she was so certain that Helen had died, she felt an electric shock to the heart, and this (she believed) started Helen’s heart, too: her worry was the current that kept them both alive. Kit, too, when Kit, a surprise, crashed sweetly into their lives.

Maybe that was what happened to Helen. She was supposed to be an only child. She’d been promised. Kit was a flirtatious baby, a funny self-assured toddler. She made people laugh. Poor awkward honking Helen: it would be hard to be Kit’s older sister. Growing up, Laura had hated the way her parents had compared her to her brother — Ben was good at math, so there was no point in her trying; Laura was more outgoing, so she had to introduce her brother to friends — but once she had her own children she understood comparison was necessary. It was how you discovered their personalities: the light of one child threw the other child into relief, no different from how she, at thirteen, had known what she looked like only by comparing the length of her legs and the color of her hair to her friends and their legs and their hair.

Helen hit her sister; Helen was shut in her room; afterwards all four of them would go to the old-fashioned ice cream parlor with the twisted wire chairs. She and Wes couldn’t decide when to punish and when to indulge, when a child was testing the boundaries and needed discipline, and when she was demanding, in the brutish way of children, more love. In this way, their life had been pasted together with marshmallow topping and hot fudge. Shut her in her room. Buy her a banana split. Do both: see where it gets you.

Helen sneaking out at night. Helen doing drugs.

Children were unfathomable. The same thing that could stop them from breathing in the night could stop them from loving you during the day. Could cause them to be brought home by the police without their pants or a good explanation.

That long night Laura and Wes interrogated her. Laura, mostly, while Wes examined the corners of Helen’s bedroom and looked griefstruck. Whose house? Laura asked. What had she been doing there? What about Addie, her best friend, Addie of the braces and the clarinet? Was she there? Laura wanted to know everything. No, that wasn’t true. She wanted to know nothing, she wanted to be told there was nothing to worry about: she wanted from Helen only consolation. She knew she couldn’t yell comfort out of her but she didn’t know what else to do. “What were you thinking ?” she asked Helen, too loudly, as though it were thinking that was dangerous.

Helen shrugged. Then she pulled aside the neck of the T-shirt to examine her own shoulder and shrugged again. Over the bed was a poster that matched her T-shirt: the same guy, light caught in the creases of his leather pants, pale lipstick, dark eyeliner.

“What happened to your nose?” Laura asked.

Helen covered it with her hand. “Someone tried to pierce it.”

“Helen! You do not have permission.”

Wes said, looking at the poster, “Linda sure is pretty.”

“ He’s not Linda,” said Helen. “Linda’s the band .”

Laura sat down next to her. Helen’s nose was red, nicked, but whoever had wielded the needle had given up. “Beautiful Helen, why would you?” Laura said. Helen bit her lip to avoid smiling straight out. Then she looked up at the poster.

“He must be hot in those pants,” Wes said.

“Probably,” said Helen. She slid under her bedclothes and touched her nose again. “I’m tired, I think.”

“Poor Linda,” said Wes. He rubbed his face in what looked like disbelief. “To suffer so for his art.”

· · ·

“We’ll go to Paris,” Wes told Laura. It was four A.M.

“Yes.” They were exhausted, unslept. Helen seemed like an intelligence test they were failing, had been failing for years. Better to flee. Paris. “Why?” she said.