Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

“I must ask you something,” she said.

He nodded.

“My husband is a documentarist. I wonder — I told him about Helen and her painting. He wishes to do a little film.”

“Oh!” said Wes. “Yes!”

The documentariste was a shaggy handsome Algerian named Walid who made Wes like Dr. Delarche better: he had an air of joy and incaution. “You don’t mind?” he said. His camera was one of those cheap handheld things, a Flip — Laura’s mother had given them one the year before. Wes had better video capabilities on his Nikon, back at the flat. He imagined most of the footage would feature the profile of Walid’s wide calloused thumb.

He didn’t tell Laura about the filming. She would tell him to throw the doctor’s husband out of the room. Do not turn our child into a freak show , she would have said—

— but Wes knew that was all that Helen had ever really wanted.

Not love, and not quotidian attention: since she was a child she liked to scare and alarm her parents and strangers and he did not believe anymore that it was some sort of coded message — a cry for love! She just wants you to talk to her! Helen wanted love but no ordinary sort. She wanted people to gape. Left alone in the U.S., she would have not just had her nose pierced, nor her ears, she would have got not just black forked tattoos across the small of her back: she would have obliterated herself with metal and ink, put plugs in her earlobes, in her lips. People would have stared at her. They would have winced and looked away. She wanted both.

Now she had both.

He was not stupid enough, not optimistic enough, to think that she would have made this bargain herself. She wouldn’t have given up the boys in some strange part of Paris, offering her wine, watching her do something stupid before she fell. But if she were in bed in a hospital, she would — not would , but did —want to be the most interesting girl in the bed who ever was. Filmed and fussed over. Called, by the more dramatic of the nurses, miraculous. Visited by the sick children of the hospital, who were brought by well-meaning religious volunteers.

Helen’s room was a place of warmth and brightness. Everyone said so. Walid kept filming, though Wes was never clear to what end.

“Perhaps,” said Walid one day, “when we are finished, the boys she was with? They will see this film.”

“They could come to visit!” said Wes.

“Eh?” said Walid. He stopped filming and regarded Wes. “Turn themselves in. Repent. That’s terrible, to abandon a girl, isn’t it? You are American and you want them dead,” he explained. “We, of course, do not believe in the death penalty. Anymore: we have had our bumps. But still. Terrible.”

“She is an inspiration,” said Dr. Delarche one day as Wes and Helen painted. “This is not a bad thing.” Dr. Delarche leaned against the wall in the lab coat she made look chic: it was the way she tucked her hands in the pockets. Since Wes had agreed to let Walid film, she came to the room nearly every day, though never when Walid himself was around. Maybe she had a crush on him, though that seemed very un-French. He had a crush on her.

“The light in the paintings,” she said to him. “Like Monet, hein ?”

“God, no,” said Wes. “I hate Monet. Where you going, Helen? Red? Here’s red.”

“Renoir,” suggested Dr. Delarche.

“Worse. No,” said Wes, “I will take your side against the Italians with wine, and coffee, and even ice cream, but painting? They have you beat. The French are too pretty.”

“We are pretty,” Dr. Delarche agreed. “And cheese also, we are better. Wine, of course. Everyone know that. So then. You are making plans?”

He shook his head pleasantly, not knowing what she meant.

“Soon Helen will go,” she said.

“Die?” He stopped his hand and felt the pressure of Helen wanting to move, but he pulled the brush from the brace and set it down. He was sorry he’d said the word in front of her.

“Ah, no!” said Dr. Delarche. She sounded insulted that he’d misunderstood her so badly. The French, in his experience, were often insulted by other people’s stupidity. “From here.”

“To another hospital.”

“Home. To the United States. You will talk to the social workers, see what they know — she is better. Of course. She is much, much better, and now she is strong enough to travel. So, hurrah, isn’t it? You will go home to your family.”

“Of course,” he said.

He left the hospital then; he almost never walked out of the building during the day. Neuilly-sur-Seine looked like a stage set built by someone who had never been to Paris and imagined it was boring: clean nineteenth-century buildings with mansard roofs, little cafés that served coffee in white china cups, nothing notable or seedy. He thought about taking Helen back to M. Petit’s apartment and he realized that was the real reason he’d started going to the gym: he lifted weights so he could lift Helen. Five flights up. Into the slipper bath. Around Paris, even. He’d walked enough of the city to know it was a terrible place for a wheelchair. No Americans with Disabilities Act, no cutouts in curbs. It would be easier on foot.

He would carry her to the Jardin des Plantes. They would paint the animals in the zoo, visit the mosaicked tearoom at the mosque. In his head he saw her improve by time lapse: her mouth closed, she sat straighter. He didn’t care that their short-term visas would expire in two weeks. He could not picture them in America.

If she could not walk or speak in America, then she would not walk or speak for the rest of her life, and that was something he would not accept.

But when he called Laura on his way home that night, she said she was coming in two days. Kit would stay with friends. Her brother had given her a last-minute ticket. She wanted to see for herself how Helen was doing.

As Wes waited at the airport he worried he wouldn’t recognize his wife — he always worried this, when meeting someone — and his heart clattered every time the electric double doors opened to reveal another exhausted traveler. When she came out, of course, he knew her immediately, and he felt the old percolation of his blood of their early dates, when he loved her and didn’t know what would happen. That’s her , he thought. She crossed the tile of the airport and it was no mirage of distance. She fell into him and he loved her. He felt ashamed of every awful thought he’d had about her for the past weeks. They held each other’s tiredness awhile.

“You feel different,” she said. “Thinner. You look kind of wonderful. How’s Didier?”

“I hate him with every fiber of my being. You look more than kind of wonderful.”

She shook her head. Then she said, “I don’t want to go back there.”

“Where?” he said. “Oh. Well, that’s where Helen is.”

“That’s not where Helen is.”

“She’s better. She’s — she’ll know you’re there.” As soon as he’d said it he realized he’d been telling Laura the opposite, to comfort her: Helen didn’t really know who was there and who wasn’t and therefore it was all right that Laura and Kit were thousands of miles away in America.

“Really?” said Laura.

“Yes.”

“How does she show it?”

They headed down to the airport train station. Wes had already bought the tickets back into Paris. At last he said, “She’s painting. She’s still painting, Laura.”

The train stopped in front of them with a refrigerated hiss and they stepped on. “I know.”

“What?”

“Kit showed me. On YouTube. I mean, it doesn’t show her painting. She’s not really, is she. I don’t believe it.”