Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

The doctor on the floor was Dr. Delarche, the tall woman who’d so infuriated Laura. By the time she peered in Helen’s mouth all the Fluff had melted away except a wisp on her upper lip.

“What is this?” she asked Helen. She touched her chin, looking over her face. “ Hein? This sticky thing.”

Wes still held his sore finger. “Fluff.”

“Floff?” The doctor turned to him. “What is this floff?”

The lidless jar had fallen to the bed — he pulled it out from under the blanket, and inclined the mouth towards the doctor. “Marshmallow, um, crème ,” he said, pronouncing it the French way. “You put it on bread, with peanut butter.”

Dr. Delarche looked incredulous. “No,” she said. “This is not good for the body. Even without traumatic brain injury but certainly with. No more floff.”

“OK,” he said, exhilarated.

His mistake had been to believe that the girl in the bed wanted nothing. But that was Helen, and Helen was built of want. She longed, she burned, even if she couldn’t move or swallow Marshmallow Fluff. He wished he could find her boys so they could sit on the edge of the bed and read to her; he wished he could take her into the city, let her drink wine.

Well, then. He needed to find what she wanted, and bring it to her.

That evening, after the walk, he found himself on a street that seemed lined with art supplies: a pen shop, a painting shop, a paper store. In the paint shop he bought a pad that you could prop up like an easel, and watercolors in a little metal case with a loop on the back for your thumb, for when you painted plein air . It was the sort of thing he’d have bought for the girls in an ordinary time. He hadn’t painted himself since graduate school — he’d been a print-maker, and that’s what he taught — and it had been even longer since he’d used watercolors. But Helen had. She’d taken lessons at home. Perhaps she could teach him. That’s what he would tell her.

“Ah!” said the doctor, when she saw him set up the pad. “Yes. Therapy. Very good. This will help.”

They began to paint.

Yes, Helen was there, she was in there. She could not form words. She smiled more widely when people spoke to her but it didn’t seem to matter what they said. But with the brush in her hand — Wes just steadying — she painted. At first the paintings were abstracts, fields of yellow and orange and watery pink (she never went near blue) overlaid with circles and squares. She knew, as he did not, how to thin the paint with water to get the color she wanted.

Soon she was moved to a private room on another floor. The hospital manicurist (“How very Parisian!” said Laura, when he told her) gave her vamp red toes and fingernails. Wes’s favorite nurse, a small man who reminded him of a champion wrestler from his high school, devised a brace from a splint and a crepe bandage to help with the painting, so that Helen could hold her wrist out for longer, though she still needed help from the shoulder.

“She’s painting,” said Wes on the phone. He’d blurted it out at the end of a conversation, standing in front of the front door of the building: until then he hadn’t realized he’d been keeping it a secret.

“What do you mean?” asked Laura.

He explained it to her: the brace, the watercolors.

“What is she painting?”

“Abstracts. I’ll take a picture, you can see.”

There was a silence.

“What?”

“Nothing. I sighed. You mean she’s painting like an elephant paints.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s an elephant who paints. Maybe more than one. They stick a brush in its trunk and give it a canvas. The results are better than you’d think. But it’s not really painting, is it? It’s moving with paint. She doesn’t know what she’s doing.”

“She does,” said Wes. “She’s getting better.”

“By millimeters.”

“Yes! Forward.”

“What good is forward, if it’s by millimeters?” said Laura. “How far can she possibly go?”

“We don’t know!”

“I wish she had—” Laura began. “I just don’t know what her life is going to be like.” Another silence.

Wes knew it wasn’t sighing this time. He said, “Listen. I gotta go.”

He had not had a drink since the early morning call from the hospital; he’d had the horrible thought he might have woken up and caught Helen sneaking out that night, had he been entirely sober. Now he thought about picking up a bottle of wine to take to M. Petit’s. He passed by the gym he’d seen before, which was still open though it was ten at night. A woman sat at street level in a glass box, ready to sign him up. She wore ordinary street clothes, not exercise togs. “Bonjour, madame,” he said. “Je parle français très mal.” “Ah, non!” said the woman. “Très bien.” She seemed to be condescending to him, but in a cheerful, nearly American way.

The actual gym was in the basement. By American standards it was small, primitive, but there were free weights — he’d lifted pretty seriously in college — and a couple of treadmills. From then on he came here after his long walk, his phone conversation with Laura, because only exertion blunted the knowledge that Laura wished that Helen had died. He hoped Laura had something to do, to blunt her own knowledge that he knew she felt this way and disagreed.

For some reason one of the personal trainers took a dislike to him, and was always bawling him out in French, for bringing a duffel bag onto the gym floor, for letting his knees travel over his toes when he squatted, for getting in the way of the French people who seemed always to be swinging around broom handles as a form of exercise. The trainer’s name was Didier, according to the fliers by the front desk; his hair was shaved around the base of his skull, long on top. Like an oignon , Wes thought. Didier drank ostentatiously from a big Nalgene bottle filled with a pale yellow liquid, and it pleased Wes to pretend the guy was consuming his own urine. It was good to hate someone, to have a new relationship of any kind with no medical undertones.

When I’ve been here a year , he thought one night, as he performed deadlifts in the power rack, when we find the right place to live, me and Helen — then I’ll get a girlfriend . The thought seemed to have flown into his head like a bird — impossible, out-of-place, smashing around. It didn’t belong there. It couldn’t get out.

After three weeks, Helen was not just better, but measurably better: she held her head up, she turned to whoever was speaking, she squeezed hands when people said her name.

And she painted. The abstracts had hardened, angled, until Wes could see what she meant. She was painting Paris. Back in the U.S. they had thought Helen had talent and they’d seized on it, bought her supplies, sent her to classes, not just painting but sculpture, pastel, photography. The problem was content, no better than any suburban American girl’s: Floating princesses. Pretty ladies. Ball gowns.

Now she painted stained glass and broken buildings in sunshine, monuments, gardens. He could feel her hand struggling to get things right. She drew faces with strange curves and bent smiles. The first time she signed her name in the corner in fat bright letters Wes burst into tears.

Staff and visitors took her paintings away, without asking, and Wes had to hide the ones he particularly wanted. He was waiting for the right one to mail to Laura, he told himself, but every day’s paintings were better than the last. He wanted to send the best one.

One morning he ran into Dr. Delarche on his way to Helen. “Monsieur,” she said, and beckoned him. Wes was alarmed. There was never any news from doctors about Helen. He either had to ask or see for himself. And besides, Dr. Delarche worked in the ICU.