Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

“Helen’s always wanted to go.”

“She has?”

“All those children’s books. Madeline . Some Richard Scarry mouse, I think. Babar. Kit’s old enough to enjoy it now. We’ll — we’ll get Helen painting lessons. Kit, too, if she’s interested. Or I’ll take them to museums and we’ll draw. Eat pastries. Get out of here. Your brother’s always offering us booty from his frequent-flier millions. Let’s say yes . Let’s go.”

The biggest ice cream sundae in the world. Wes taught printmaking at a community college and had the summer off. Laura worked for a caterer and was paid only by the job. They’d have to do it frugally but they could swing it.

“All right,” said Laura. They stayed up till morning, looking at apartments on the Internet. By seven A.M. Ben had e-mailed back that he was happy to give them the miles; by eight they had booked the flights. They arranged for one of Wes’s students to look after the house and the dog for the five weeks they’d be gone. It was astonishing how quickly the trip came together.

The plan was to disrupt their lives, a jolt to Helen’s system before school started again in the fall. The city would be strange and beautiful, as Helen herself was strange and beautiful. Perhaps they’d understand her there. Perhaps the problem all this time was that her soul had been written in French.

They flew overnight from Boston; they hadn’t been on a plane since before Kit was born. Inside the terminal they tried to lead the family suitcases, old plaid things with insufficient silver wheels along the keels, prone to tipping. Honeymoon luggage from the last century: that was how long it had been since they’d traveled. At Charles de Gaulle, all of the Europeans pulled behind them like obedient dogs their long-handled perfectly balanced bags and they murmured into their cell phones. Laura patted her pocket, felt the switched-off phone that she’d been assured would cost too much to use here, and felt sorry for it. Her suitcase fell over like a shot dog. Only Helen seemed to understand how to walk through the airport, as though it were a sport suited to the pubescent female body, a long-legged stride that made the suitcase heel.

Outside the morning was hot, and French, and blinding, and Wes was already loading the cases into the trunk of a taxi with the grim care of a man disposing of corpses. Laura thought: What a bad idea this was . She squeezed into the back of the cab between the girls, another old caution: proximity sometimes made them pinch each other. She had to fold her torso along the spine like the covers of a book. Wes got into the passenger seat and unraveled the piece of paper with the address of the apartment they’d rented over the Internet.

“Excusez-moi,” Wes said to the driver. “Je parle français très mal.” The cab driver nodded impatiently. Yes, very badly, it was the most self-evident sentence ever spoken: anything Wes might have said in French would have conveyed the same information. The driver took the scrap from Wes’s hand.

“L’appartement,” said Helen, “se trouve dans le troisième arrondissement, je crois, monsieur. Cent vingt-deux rue du Temple.”

At this the driver smiled. “Ah! Bon! Merci, mademoiselle. Le troisième, exactement.”

They were so smashed into the back Laura couldn’t turn to look at Helen. “You speak French!” she said, astounded.

“I take French, Mommy. You know that. I don’t speak it.”

“You’re fluent!” said Laura.

The street was crooked, and the taxi driver bumped onto the sidewalk to let them get out. In English he said, “Welcome here.” Across the street were a few wholesale jewelry and pocketbook stores, and Laura was stunned by how cheap the merchandise hanging in the window looked, and she wondered whether they’d managed to book an apartment in the only tacky quarter of Paris. The door to their building was propped open. The girls moaned as they walked up the stairs, dragging their bags. “I thought it was on the fourth floor,” said Helen, and Wes said, “They count floors differently here.”

“Like a different alphabet?” said Kit.

The staircase narrowed the further up they went, as though a trick of perspective. At the top were two doors. One had an old-fashioned business card taped to it. M. Petit . That was their contact. Wes knocked, and a small elderly man in an immaculate white shirt and blue tie answered.

“Bonjour!” he said. He came out and led them to the other door. He held on to the tie, as though he wanted to make sure they saw it. “Bienvenu, venez ici. Ici, ici, madame, monsieur, mademoiselles.”

“Je parle français très mal,” said Wes, and there was that look again. M. Petit dropped his tie.

“You do it, Helen,” said Laura.

“Bonjour, monsieur,” said Helen, and he brought them around the apartment and described everything, pantomiming and saying, “Vous comprenez?” and Helen answered in a nasal, casual, quacking way, “Ouais. Ouais. Ouais.”

“What did he say?” Wes asked when M. Petit had gone.

“Something about hot water,” she said. “Something about garbage. We need to get calling cards for the phone. He lives next door if we need anything.”

“Something about garbage,” said Kit. “Real helpful.”

The apartment was tiny but high-ceilinged, delightful, seemingly carved from gingerbread: a happy omen for their trip, Laura decided. The girls would sleep in twin beds in one room, Wes and Laura across the hall in a bed that was nearly double but not quite. A three-quarters double bed, like the three-quarters cello that Helen played. The windows looked out on next-door chimney pots. The living room was the size of its oriental rug. The kitchen included a sink, a two-burner hot plate, a waist-high fridge, and a tabletop oven. It was the oldest building any of them had ever stood in.

“Why are the pillows square?” Kit asked.

“They just are ,” said Helen knowingly. She leaned her head out the little window. Five stories up and no way to shimmy down , thought Laura. Helen said, “I want to stay here forever.”

“We’ll see,” said Wes. “Come on. Let’s go. Let’s see Paris.”

Jet lag and sunshine turned the city hallucinogenically beautiful. “We’ll keep going,” said Wes. “Till bedtime. Best way to deal with jet lag.” Down the rue des Francs Bourgeois, through the Place des Vosges over to the Bastille, along the river, across one bridge, and another: then they stood staring at Notre Dame’s back end, all its flying buttresses kicking at Laura’s sternum.

“Notre Dame is here ?” said Helen. An insinuating wind tugged at the bottom of her shirt; she held it down.

“In Paris, yes,” said Wes.

“But we just walked to it?”

Wes laughed. “We can walk everywhere.”

They kept walking, looking for the right café, feeling the heat like optimism on their limbs. Laura swore Helen’s French got even better as the day went on: she translated the menu at the café, she asked for directions, she found the right amount of money to pay for midafternoon crepes. She negotiated the purchase of two primitive prepaid cell phones, one for Wes and one for Laura. At home the girls had phones, but in Paris they would always be with one of their parents.

What was that odd blooming in Laura’s torso? A sense that this was how it happened: you became dependent on your children, and it was all right.

They kept moving in order to stay awake until it was sort of bedtime. At six Laura thought she could feel the sidewalk tilting up like a Murphy bed, and they went to the tiny grocery store behind their building, got bread and meat and wine, and held up the line first when they didn’t understand they needed to pack their own groceries, and again when they couldn’t open the slippery plastic bags. Once they were out, they felt triumphant anyhow. Wes raised the baguette like a sword.