Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

“Who?” said Helen.

“Our dog ,” said Kit. “Oh, very funny.”

“Forever,” Helen said again. “Daddy!” she called across to her father, who was just walking into the store with an antique lampshade. He wanted to stay in France forever, too. Laura could imagine him using the lampshade as an excuse: How can we get this on the plane? We’d better just stay here .

“Look!” he said. “Hand-painted. Sea serpents.”

And they were, a chain of lumpy, dimwitted sea serpents linked mouth to tail around the hem of the shade. It was a grimy, preposterous thing in the gleaming cosmetic aisle of Monoprix.

Helen took it with the flats of her palms. “It’s awesome,” she said. “Daddy, it’s perfect.”

Laura did not think she had ever seen that look on Helen’s face — not just happiness, but the wish to convey that happiness to someone else, a generosity. That was the expression Laura tried to remember later, to paste down in her head, because soon it was gone forever, replaced with a parody of a smile, a look that was not dreamy but dumbstruck, recognizable, not Cinderella asked to the ball, but a stepsister, years later, finally invited back to the palace, forgiven. Because twelve hours later, Wes and Laura, asleep in their antique bed, heard a familiar, forgotten noise: Wes’s American cell phone, ringing in the dresser drawer. Why was it on? Laura answered it.

“Have you a daughter?” said the voice on the other end.

The voice belonged to a nurse from the American Hospital of Paris, who said that a young girl had been brought in with a head injury.

“She have a shirt that say Linda ,” said the nurse. “She fell and striked her head.”

Laura went to the girls’ room, the phone pressed to her ear. Kit was asleep among the square pillows and the overstuffed duvet. Her hair was sweat damp. Helen’s bed was empty. Laura looked to the window, as though it was from there she’d fallen, the pavement below upon which she’d struck her head. It was locked into place, ajar to let the air in but fixed. If Helen had left the apartment it would have been the ordinary way.

“Je ne comprends pas,” Laura said, though the nurse was speaking English.

“She need someone here,” said the nurse. “It’s bad.”

2.

This was why you had two children. This is why you didn’t. Wes stood outside their old, old, unfathomably old building. There were no taxis out and he couldn’t imagine how to call one. He wondered whether he’d wanted to come to Paris because of the language: the way he’d felt coddled by lack of understanding, delighted to be capable of so little. By now he could get along pretty well, but this question, how Paris worked in the middle of the night, seemed beyond his abilities. Who he needed: Helen, to help him make his way to Helen. The Métro didn’t run this late, he knew that much. Upstairs Kit slept on, Laura watching over her, which was why he was alone on the street. She was the spare child. The one who wasn’t supposed to be here. The one who was all right. In his panic he had not wanted to go away from her: he’d wanted to crawl into Helen’s empty bed, not even caring how warm or cold the sheets were, how long she’d been gone, as though that child were already lost and the only thing to do was watch over the girl who was left.

He GPS’d directions on his smartphone, the American one. Four and a half miles, in a wealthy suburb called Neuilly-sur-Seine. He would walk: he couldn’t think of an alternative. If he saw a taxi he would flag it down but the main thing was movement. Westward, as fast as he could, and then he felt he was in a dull, extravagant, incredible movie. He had a quest, and every person he passed seemed hugely important: the man carrying the dozing child, who asked for directions Wes couldn’t provide (he hid the phone, he didn’t want to stop); the two police carrying riot shields though Wes could not hear any kind of altercation that might require them; the old woman in elegant, filthy clothing who was sweeping out the rhomboid front of a café. All summer he and his women had walked. “It’s the only way to understand a city,” Wes had said more than once, “we are flâneurs .” Now he understood that wandering taught you nothing. Only when you moved with purpose could you know a place. Towards someone, away from someone. “Helen,” he said aloud, as he walked beneath the Périphérique’s looping traffic. He had not driven a car in more than a month. They looked like wild animals to him. Everything looked feral, in fact. He wanted a weapon.

It took him more than an hour to get to the upscale western suburb of the American Hospital. By then the sun was rising. He stumbled in, shocked by the lights, the people. He didn’t want to talk to anyone but Helen, he just wanted to find her, but he knew that was impossible so he stopped at the lit-up desk by the door. The sign above it said INFORMATION. Was that INforMAtion in English, or informaCEEohn in French?

“J’arrive,” he said, as the waiters did in busy restaurants, though they meant, I will and not I have . He added, “I walked here.”

The man behind the desk had short greasy bangs combed down in points, like a knife edge. “Patient name?”

Wes hesitated. What sort of shape was she in? What information had Laura given the hospital? “Helen Langford.” He found some hope inside him: of course Helen was conscious. How else would they have got Wes’s American phone number? She wouldn’t have remembered the French one.

“ICU,” said the man with the serrated hair.

But it turned out that Helen had taken her mother’s American phone, had been using it all summer to call first the U.S. and then Paris, to text, to take pictures of herself. When the battery drained, she swapped it for Wes’s, recharged, swapped them back. The hospital had found the phone in her pocket, had gone through the contact list and eventually found him.

The ICU doctor was a tall man with heavy black eyebrows and silver sideburns. Wes felt dizzied by his perfect English, his unidentifiable accent, the rush of details. Helen had been dropped off at the front door by some boys. She probably had not been injured in this neighborhood: the boys brought her here, as though American were a medical condition that needed to be treated at a specialist hospital. They had done a CAT scan and an MRI. The only injury was to her head. She had fallen upon it. Her blood screened clean for drugs but she’d had a few drinks. “Some sweet wine, maybe, made her clumsy. Hijinks,” said the doctor, dropping the initial h. Ijinks . Not an Anglophone then. “Children. Stupid.”

“Is she dead?” he asked the doctor.

“What? No. She’s had a tumble, that’s true. She struck her head. Right now, we’re keeping her unconscious, we put in a tube.” The doctor tapped his graying temple. “To relieve the pressure.”

What was causing pressure? “Air?” Wes said.

“Air? Ah, no. Fluid. Building up. So the tube—” The doctor made a sucking noise. “So far it’s working. Later today, tomorrow, we will know more.”

Wes had expected his daughter to be tiny in the bed, but she looked substantial, womanly. Her eyes were closed. The side of her head was obscured by an enormous bandage, with the little slurping tube running from it. No, not slurping. It didn’t make a sound. Wes had imagined that, thanks to the doctor.

Her little room was made of glass walls, blindered by old-fashioned wheeled screens. There was nothing to sit on. For half an hour he crouched by the bed and spoke to her, though her eyes were closed. She was slack. Every part of her.

“Helen,” he said, “Helen. You can tell us anything. You should, you know.” They’d been the kind of parents who’d wanted to know nothing, or the wrong things. It hit him with the force of a conversion: all along they’d believed what they didn’t acknowledge didn’t exist. Here, proof: the unsayable existed. “Helen,” he said to his sleeping daughter. “I will never be mad at you again. We’re starting over. Tell me anything .”