Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

A boy. He’s fallen through the chimney or he’s a forgotten toy of Missy’s come to life. What else can explain him here, brown and naked next to the rocking horse he’s just dismounted, a gray towel turbaned around his head. He’s pulling two-handed at the cord that works Blaze’s voice box, but Blaze has had a stroke and can’t speak, he just groans apologetically before the boy interrupts him with another tug. Through the half-drawn shades the police lights color Winter Terrace: blue, less blue, blue again.

Outside, the neighborhood kids sit on the sidewalk, their feet in the gutter, daring the cops to tell them to move along. The little smoking kid, the one who likes to swear, is missing. The kids are working on their story. When did you last see him? a policeman asks, but the fact is the woman, who is not crying yet, will get her boy back. That is, she’ll get one of her boys back: the one she hasn’t missed yet is missing for good, forever, and by tomorrow morning he will be his mother’s favorite, and by tomorrow afternoon the police will have questioned everyone on the street, and the neighborhood kids will pretend that they remember Santos, though they can’t even make sense of his name. He will pass into legend, too.

Inside Missy Goodby’s room, Gerry obeys his mother: he looks at the little boy. He wonders how to sneak him back home. He wonders how to keep him forever.

The ad should have read: For rent, six-room hovel. Filled Mrs. Butterworth’s bottle in living room, sandy sheets throughout, lingering smell .

Or: Wanted: gullible tenant for small house, must possess appreciation for chipped pottery, mid-1960s abstract silk-screened canvases, mouse-nibbled books on Georgia O’Keeffe .

Or: Available June: shithole .

Instead, the posting on the college website called the house at 55 Bayberry Street old and characterful and sunny, furnished, charming, on a quiet street not far from the college and not far from the ocean. Large porch; separate artist’s studio. Just right for the young married couple, then: Stony Badower and Pamela Graff, he thirty-nine, redheaded, pot-bellied, long-limbed, and beaky, a rare and possibly extinct bird; she blond and soft and hotheaded and German and sentimental. She looked like the plump-cheeked naughty heroine of a German children’s book who’d just sawed off her own braids with a knife, looking for the next knifeable place. Her expression dared you to teach her a lesson. Like many sentimentalists, she was estranged from her family. Stony had never met them.

“America,” she said that month. “All right. Your turn. Show me America.” For the three years of their courtship and marriage they’d moved every few months. Berlin, Paris, Galway, near Odense, near Edinburgh, Rome, and now a converted stone barn in Normandy that on cold days smelled of cow pies and on hot days like the lost crayons of tourist children. Soon enough it would be summer, and the barn would be colossally expensive and filled with English people. Now it was time for Maine, where Stony had accepted a two-year job, cataloging a collection of 1960s underground publications: things printed on rice paper and Popsicle sticks and cocktail napkins. It fell to him to find the next place to live.

“We’ll unpack my storage space,” he said. “I have things.”

“Yes, my love,” she said. “I have things, too.”

“You have a duffel bag. You have clothing. You have a saltshaker shaped like a duck, with a chipped beak.”

She cackled a very European cackle, pride and delight in her ownership of the lusterware duck, whose name was Trudy. “The sole exhibit in the museum. When I am dead, people will know nothing about me.” This was a professional opinion: she was a museum consultant. In Normandy she was helping set up an exhibition in a stone cottage that had been owned by a Jewish family deported during the war. In Paris, it had been the atelier of a minor artist who’d been the longtime lover of a major poetess; in Denmark, a workhouse museum. Her specialty was the air of recent evacuation: you knew something terrible had happened to the occupants but you hoped it might still be undone. She set historic spectacles on desktops and snuggled appropriate shoes under beds and did not overdust. Too much cleanliness made a place dead. In Rome she arranged an exhibit of the commonplace belongings of Ezra Pound: chewed pencils, drinking glasses, celluloid dice, dog-eared books. Only the brochure suggested a connection to greatness. At the Hans Christian Andersen Museum in Odense, where they were mere tourists, she lingered with admiration over Andersen’s upper plate and the length of rope that he traveled with in case of hotel fire. “You can tell more from dentures than from years of diaries,” she’d said then. “Dentures do not lie.” She herself threw everything out. She did not want anyone to exhibit the smallest bit of her.

Now Stony said, solemnly, “I never want to drink out of Ikea glasses again. Or sleep on Ikea sheets. Or — and this one is serious — cook with Ikea pans. Your husband owns really expensive pans. How about that?”

“I am impressed, and you are bourgeois.”

“Year lease,” he said.

“I am terrified,” said Pamela, smiling with her beautiful, angular un-American teeth, and then, “Perhaps we will afford to have a baby.”

She was still, as he would think of it later, casually alive. In two months she would be, according to the doctors, miraculously alive, and, later still, alive in a nearly unmodifiable twilight state. Or too modifiable: technically alive. Now she walked around the barn in her bra, which was as usual a little too small, and her underpants, as usual a little too big, though she was small-breasted and big-bottomed. Her red-framed glasses sat on her face at a tilt. “My ears are not plumb,” she always said. It was one of the reasons they belonged together: they were flea-market people, put together out of odd parts. She limped. Even her name was pronounced with a limp, the accent on the second syllable. For a full month after they’d met he’d thought her name was Camilla, and he never managed to say it aloud without lining it up in his head beforehand — paMILLa, paMILLa — the way he had to collect German words for sentences ahead of time and then properly distribute the verbs. In fact he did that with English sentences, too, when speaking to Pamela, when she was alive.

He e-mailed the woman who’d listed the house — she was not the owner, she was working for the owners — and after a month of wrangling (she never sent the promised pictures; he was third in line, after a gaggle of students and a clutch of summer people; if the owners rented it out for the summer they could make a lot more money) managed to talk her into a yearlong lease, starting June 1.

The limp, it turned out, was the legacy of a stroke Pamela’d had in her early twenties that she’d never told him about. She had another one in the farmhouse two weeks before they were supposed to move; she hit her head on the metal Ikea counter as she fell. Stony’s French was good enough only to ask the doctors how bad things were, but not to understand the answer. Pamela spoke the foreign languages; he cooked dinner; she proclaimed it delicious. In the hospital her tongue was unemployed, fat in her mouth, and she was fed through a tube. Someone had put her glasses on her face so that she would look more herself. A nurse came in hourly to straighten them. They did this as though her glasses were the masterpiece and all of Pamela the gallery wall — palms flat and gentle, leery of gravity. He sat in a molded green chair and dozed. One night he woke to the final nurse, who was straightening the glasses, and then the bedsheets. She turned to Stony. The last little bit of French he possessed drained out through the basin of his stomach.