Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

He had heard about news traveling on the Internet, but he imagined that was gossip, or affairs, or boss badmouthing: it traveled locally, not from country to country.

“Who’s really painting?” said Laura. “The therapist, or someone. One of those religious women. In some of the shots you can see a hand steadying her elbow.”

“Helen,” said Wes. “I promise. Come on. She’ll show you.”

At the Gare du Nord, Laura said, “Let’s take a cab. Let’s go see Helen.”

“Don’t you want to drop off your suitcase?”

She shook her head. “I wish you’d found another place to stay.”

They went to the stand along the side of the station. He hadn’t been inside a taxi since their first day in Paris. Mornings, he went to the hospital underground, afternoons he came back by foot. He felt suddenly that every national weakness a people had was evident on its highways.

“Do you have cash?” Laura asked as they pulled up.

“I thought you did.”

“I just got here. I have dollars.”

He dug through his pockets and found just enough. They stepped outside.

“I hate it here,” Laura said, looking at the clean façade of the hospital.

“I know. I hate it, too.”

“No. You’re better than me. You don’t hate it. You hate the situation. That’s the right response. Me, I want to run out the door and never come back. I would, if I could.”

“This way,” he said. “They moved her.”

At first Wes was struck by how good Helen looked, the pink in her cheeks, the nearly chic haircut. Then he glanced at Laura and then he understood how little, really, their daughter had changed. It had been six weeks. She looked dazed and cheerful. She couldn’t speak.

“Hi, honey,” said Wes. “Look. Mommy’s here.”

“Oh, God,” said Laura.

“Sshh,” said Wes.

But Laura was by the bed. She touched Helen’s cheek. “Honey,” she said. “Sweetheart. Shit.” She looked down the length of Helen and pulled up the sheet: her bent knees with the pillow between, the wasting muscles, the catheter tube. She shook her head, rearranged the sheet. “I know, I know what you think of me, Wes.”

“I don’t—”

“It’s not that it’s not her. It’s that — whoever this person in the bed is, she’s where my Helen should be. That’s what I can’t get over and it’s what I know I have to.”

Laura was wearing a dress she had bought in the July sales when they’d first arrived, red, with blue embroidered flowers on the shoulders like epaulets. She had belted it too tight. She had lost weight, too.

“Just sit,” he said to her. “There are chairs. Here’s one. We’ll paint. Shall we paint, Helen?”

He wound the brace around her wrist, always a pleasing task, and slid in Helen’s favorite long-handled brush, meant for oils, not watercolors. He propped up the pad on the wheeled table that came over the bed, got the water, the colors, dampened the paints. They began.

“You’re doing it,” said Laura.

“No,” he said patiently. “I’m just steadying her hand.”

“Then let go,” said Laura.

He did, and he believed it would happen: her hand would sail up, like a bird tossed in the air. It would just keep flying. Yes, that was right. If anything, he wanted to tell Laura, he was holding her hand too still, he was interfering. She didn’t need him anymore.

But her hand went ticking down to the bottom of the page, and stopped.

Helen’s jaw worked, and Laura and Wes watched it. She had not made a noise in weeks. She did not make one now. The short haircut looked alternately gamine and like a punishment. Wes picked her hand back up, placed it, let go. Tick, tick, to the bottom of the page.

“So you see,” said Laura.

Wes shook his head. No. She’d needed the help but he was not capable of those paintings.

And if he was, what did that mean? The paintings were what was left of Helen.

“She’s not a fraud,” said Wes.

“No, I don’t think she is,” said Laura. “I don’t think she’s anything. She’s not at home, Wes.”

“Isn’t she?” said Wes.

“No,” said Laura. She tapped her head. “I mean here, in her brain, she’s not at home. It doesn’t matter where her body is. Her body will be at home anywhere. But it matters where your body is. We need to take her home and you, too.”

“It isn’t just me who’s seen it,” said Wes.

“Who doesn’t love a miracle girl,” said Laura, but with love. “I wanted one, too, honestly. I would have loved it, if it had been real.”

But, thought Helen — because Helen was at home, Helen heard everything — wasn’t it more of a miracle this way? Her mother was right. She could not move her hands: that was her father. But she saw the pictures in her head, those fields with the apartment blocks, that golden light — and she couldn’t move her hand to get them on the paper. Her father did. There was the miracle everyone spoke about, in English and in French. The visiting nuns said it was God, but it was her father who took her hand and painted the pictures in her head. Every time he got them right: the buildings, the light posts, those translucent floating things across her field of vision when she wasn’t exactly looking at anything, what as a child she thought of as her conscience— floaters , her father once told her they were called. “I have them, too,” he’d said. They were worse in the hospital, permanent static. She saw, he painted the inside of her snow-globe skull, all those things whizzing around when she fell — the water tower on top of the building, the boy who’d kissed her, the other boy who’d pushed her, those were their faces in the corner of the page, the bottles of wine she’d drunk — back home she’d had beer and peppermint schnapps and had drunk cough syrup, but not wine. Wine was everything here. Those boys would come visit her. They’d promised they would when they dropped her off. She had to stay put. Don’t let her take me, Daddy . Her mother hadn’t looked her in the eye since she’d come into the room, but when had she, ever, ever, ever, thought Helen. All her life, she’d been too bright a light.

“Careless Helen,” said Laura, and then to Wes, “Do you know, I think I’ve only just forgiven her.”

“What for?” asked Wes.

She rubbed her nose absentmindedly. “Funny smell. What is that?”

Not medicine nor illness: the iridescent polish the manicurist had applied to Helen’s toes.

In order to wake up every morning, thought Wes, he’d convinced himself of a lot of things that weren’t true. He could feel some of his beliefs crumble like old plaster — life in Paris, walking the streets with Helen in his arms, revenge on Didier, even Dr. Delarche’s crush. Of course they would go back to the States, where Kit was, they would talk to experts, they would find a facility, they would bring Helen home as soon as they could, where she would be visited by Addie of the braces and the clarinet, and boys from her school. She might never walk again. But her body would persist. It was broken but not failing. She was theirs for the rest of their lives, and then Kit would inherit her. That was what Laura had seen from the first day, and it had crushed her, and she was only just now shifting that weight from her chest.

Helen painted. That was real. He knew his own brain, what it could make up and what it couldn’t. He looked at his wife, whom he loved, whom he looked forward to convincing, and felt as though he were diving headfirst into happiness. It was a circus act, a perilous one. Happiness was a narrow tank. You had to make sure you cleared the lip.

Enormous thanks to Henry Dunow, Susan Kamil, Noah Eaker, Ann Patchett, Duchess Goldblatt, Paul Lisicky; to the American Academy in Berlin, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, and the Bogliasco Fellowship Program for miraculous support; to the editors who have published these stories in magazines and anthologies, including John Freeman, Robin Black, Adrienne Miller, Joyce Carol Oates, Geraldine Brooks, Allison Wright, W. Ralph Eubanks, and particularly Michael Ray of Zoetrope: All-Story , who got me writing short stories again with the right question at the right time.