Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

“Yes,” Wes said. “Thank you. Merci. Merci mille fois .”

He took the semester off from school. His department head said they’d figure things out so he could still draw a salary — a course reduction, a heavier load in the spring. Better to solve it now for everyone involved than to wonder every day whether Wes might be coming back.

On the day of the flight he and Laura and Kit went to the hospital. Kit said goodbye to her sister tearfully, lovingly, crawled into the bed and stroked Helen’s hair and said, “I promise, I promise, I promise.” What promise? Wes thought she would tell him when they said goodbye at the airport, though when they got there Kit was awkward, unhappy, her hands bunched under her chin as though, if he tried to draw her close, she would fight him off with her elbows. “Goodbye, Kitty,” he said. She nodded.

He thought then that he should find a place to lie down, like Helen. You said goodbye to someone differently if they were supine. But he didn’t see any benches, and if he lay on the ground, he’d be pummeled by European feet and suitcases. Security, perhaps. Send ahead his belt and shoes (only in prisons and airports did a stranger tell you to take them off). Put his sad sorry body down. Kit might not fall for it at first. “Dad,” she would say, humiliated, because now she had to bear the humiliation for her sister as well. But then, surely, as he disappeared, his head, shoulders, beltless waist, as the agents saw the truth of his kidneys, his empty pockets, she would run to him, grab at his feet — no. Feet first, so that she had enough time to whisper that promise in his ear.

In the end he picked her up. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that. Her toes knocked against his shins. “We’ll talk every day,” he said.

“I know,” she answered.

Then he kissed Laura. “Call me when you get in.”

“It’ll be too late.”

“No,” he said. “Not possible.”

He watched them go through the checkpoint. Laura kept waving, go, go , but he couldn’t, not until they disappeared from sight.

He took the train back into the city, to move his suitcase into M. Petit’s apartment. The furniture was ancient, fringed, balding. The windows looked onto the courtyard, not the street. It felt like the depressed cousin of the apartment where they’d been so happy. The right place to be, in other words. The bathroom had a slipper tub, deep and short, with a step to sit on. How had M. Petit climbed into it? The bed was in a loft. No octogenarian should have to use a ladder to go to sleep. Everything in the world now looked like something to fall from. He decided he would sleep on the little L-shaped couch, in case M. Petit had died in the bed. He put the sea-serpent lampshade in the middle of the coffee table and fell asleep. He surprised himself by sleeping through the night. He checked the phone: a text from Laura, Arrived will call in my morning/your afternoon . He went, for the third day, to the hospital.

The border between consciousness and coma was not as defined as Wes had been taught by television to expect. They’d stopped sedating her. Helen did not come bursting to the surface, as though from a lake. She rose out of unconsciousness by millimeters over the next few days. Her nose woke up. Her forehead. Her cheeks. Her eyes. The pressure in her skull abated; the ventric tube came out.

She had the daft look of a saint. Even her hands were knotted together at her chest, as though in prayer. Her mouth was open. The nurses combed her hair, what was left of it, and then called in the hospital’s hairdresser, who cropped it like Jeanne d’Arc’s.

In the hospital Wes studied Helen as he had when she was an infant. Around and around her face, the knotted fingers, the angles of her shoulders. She wasn’t a baby, of course. She was a girl, thirteen in a month, with breasts, whose body would keep going further into adulthood no matter whether her brain could catch up. The doctors said it was still too early to tell.

He tried to find his daughter in this girl’s expression, but she’d been so completely revised, and then he tried to comfort himself: Helen was past worry. The worst would not happen to her because it already had. There were no decisions to be made right now. She wouldn’t die. She was, for the moment, beyond any psychological complexities. He had to be here. That he could manage.

At the end of every day, he walked back to Paris, all four and a half miles: beneath the Périphérique, through the seventeenth arrondissement, down le boulevard Malesherbes, and he spoke to Laura, his ear throbbing against the plastic of the phone. She sounded far away, relieved. He related the latest diagnosis: they were still assessing whether Helen’s brain injury was focal or diffuse. Her brain was still swollen in her skull. It might take her years to recover. Laura told him the news of America: the insurance company was being extraordinarily good at working with the hospital; the cell-phone company would not forgive the nearly thousand-dollar bill for Helen’s purloined Parisian phone calls and text messages. Sometimes Kit was there, though there were swimming lessons and playdates and flute lessons or just the sound of the slamming door as she went outside.

“We miss you,” Laura would say.

“We miss you, too,” he answered.

“ You miss us. Helen doesn’t miss anything.”

“We don’t know.”

“I feel it.”

“OK,” he said, because she might have been right.

By the time they’d talked themselves out he was back in the third arrondissement, and then he would zag towards the river. He walked as they had their first jet-lagged day, to exhaust himself before climbing the stairs to M. Petit’s apartment, so he could fall asleep without hearing the noises of the granddaughter and her husband in that three-quarter bed on the other side of the wall. Or on the sofa, or any corner of his old home. Sometimes he thought, That’s us still, and I am M. Petit , and he tried to find the part of the wall that bordered on what had been the girls’ bedroom. Maybe he would hear them scheme. Maybe this time he could stop it.

Or maybe he’d just hear the neighbors fucking.

One night on the way home he found a little store that catered to Americans, big boxes of sugary cereal, candy bars, and he wanted to buy them for Helen, whose nasogastric tube had just been taken out, though she was fed only purees. The store carried every strain of American crap. French’s mustard, Skippy peanut butter, Stove Top stuffing, even Cheez Whiz. He’d been gone long enough from the U.S. that he felt sentimental about the food, and he’d been in Paris long enough to feel superior to it.

Then he saw the red-topped jar of Marshmallow Fluff.

“Something sweet for you,” he said to Helen the next morning. He hunted around for a spoon and found only a tongue depressor. That would do.

Helen closed her eyes as the Fluff went in, as her round mouth irised in around the stick. Wes felt electrified. Before this moment Helen had been a blank, as mysterious to him as she must have been to the emergency room when she’d first arrived: a girl who’d dropped from the sky. Unidentified. Cut off from her history.

Now she opened her eyes, and he could see, for the first time, Helen looking out of them, though (he thought) she couldn’t see anything. She was sunk in the bottom of a well. Everything above her was hidden in shadows. He could see her trying to make something out. Her mouth, agape, opened further, with muscle, intent, greed: more .

He dug out a larger dollop. Closed eyes, closed mouth, but when the tongue depressor went in Helen began to cough. It was a terrible wet sound.

“Are you all right?” he said. He wondered whether he should put his finger in her mouth, scoop it out, and then he did, and Helen bit down. First just pressure, the peaks of her molars, then pain. He tried to pull out his finger. “Wow. Helen,” he said. “Helen, please, Helen, help! Help!” and then her jaw relaxed, and he stood with his wet, indented finger, panting.