Elizabeth McCracken - Thunderstruck & Other Stories

“No?” he said.

This nurse was a small brown rabbit. Even her lips were brown. She wobbled on her feet as though deciding whether it was better if the mad husband caught and ate her now, or there should be a chase. Then she shrugged.

When someone dies it is intolerable to be shrugged at. He went back to the farmhouse to pack. First his suitcase, an enormous green nylon item with fretful, overworked zippers. Then Pamela’s, that beige strap-covered duffel bag that looked like a midcentury truss. He had to leave France as soon as possible. He stuffed the bag with the undersized bras and oversized underpants, her favorite pair of creased black patent-leather loafers, an assortment of embroidered handkerchiefs. He, he needed a suitcase and a computer bag and then any number of plastic sacks to move from place to place, he collected souvenirs like vaccinations, but all of Pamela’s belongings fit in the duffel. When he failed to find the duck, he remembered the words of the lovely Buddhist landlady in Edinburgh, when he’d apologized for breaking a large Italian bowl painted with plums: “We have a saying: it was already broken.” Even now he wasn’t sure if we meant Buddhists or Scots. He would leave a note for the landlady concerning the duck, but of course the loss of the duck could not destroy him.

The weight of Pamela’s bag was like the stones in a suicide’s pocket. Stony e-mailed his future boss, the kindly archivist, asked if he could straighten things out with the house — he would come, he would definitely come, but in the fall. My wife has died , he wrote, in rotten intelligible English. He’d wept already, and for hours, but suddenly he understood that the real thing was coming for him soon, a period of time free of wry laughter or distraction. The duffel bag he put in the closet for the French landlady to deal with. The ashes from the mortuary came in an urn, complete with a certificate that explained what they were, to show to customs officials. These he took with him to England, where he went for the summer to drink.

The Not-Owner of the house was a short, slightly creased, ponytailed blond woman in a baseball cap and a gleaming, fricative black tracksuit that suggested somewhere a husband dressed in the exact same outfit. She waved at him from the not particularly large front porch. For the past month she’d sent him cheerful e-mails about getting the lovely house ready for him, moving furniture, outfitting the kitchen, all of which came down to this: what have you spent your money on during your time on earth?

Books, art, cooking equipment. Oh, and a collection of eccentric but unuseful tables. That was it. Could they make room for tables, books, pots, pans, paintings? Of course, she wrote back. He’d chosen this house because it was not a sabbatical rental: even before — a word he now pronounced as a spondee, like B.C. — he longed to be reunited with his books, art, dishes, the doctor’s table, the diner table, the various card catalogs, the side table made from an old cheese crate. He didn’t want to live inside someone else’s life, and sabbatical houses were always like that. You felt like a teenager who’d been given too much responsibility. Your parents were there frowning at you in the very arrangement of the furniture, how the spatulas were stored.

The house wasn’t a Victorian, as he’d for some reason assumed, but an ordinary wood-framed house painted toothpaste blue. Amazing, how death made petty disappointments into operatic insults.

“Hello!” The woman whooshed across towards him. “I’m Carly. You’re here. At last! It seems like ages ago we started talking about you and this house!”

The porch was psoriatic and decorated with a series of camp chairs. “I’m glad you found summer people,” said Stony.

Carly nodded. “Yes. The last guy moved out this morning.”

“Ah,” said Stony, though they’d discussed this via e-mail over the last week. It was his ingratiating way, as a lifelong renter, to suggest unnecessary, helpful things, and he’d said he’d arrive on the fourth instead of the third so she’d have more time to arrange for cleaners.

“Here’s the living room,” she said. He followed her. Small, silky Carly, her head covered by the boy’s cap. He felt like an about-to-be-retired greyhound being led by a jockey: big-nosed, cow-eyed, trying to be good despite his nerves. He might end up on a farm or destroyed, depending on which turn she took.

Not a jockey, of course, jockeys didn’t ride greyhounds.

“Fireplace,” said Carly. “Cable’s still hooked up. Maybe you’ll be lucky and they won’t notice.” A round-jawed teenager sat on a leather settee with a handheld video game, frowning at the screen like a Roman emperor impatient with the finickiness of his lions. “It’s a nice room. These old houses have such character. This one — do you believe it? — it’s a Sears, Roebuck kit. You picked it out of the catalog and it was delivered and assembled.”

He could hear Pamela’s voice: This is not an old house . The barn in Normandy was eighteenth century, the apartment in Rome even older. The walls were lined with homemade bookshelves, filled with paperback books: Ionesco, the full complement of Roths — Henry, Philip, Joseph. “Fireplace work?”

“There was a squirrel incident,” said Carly vaguely. She swished across the entryway. “Dining room. The lease, I’m sure you’ll remember, asks you to keep the corner cupboard locked.” The cupboard in question looked filled with eye cups and egg cups and mustache cups. In the corner, a broken Styrofoam cooler had been neatly aligned beneath a three-legged chair; a white melamine desk had papers stuck in its jaw. Kmart furniture , he thought. Well, he’d have the movers take it down to the basement. “Kitchen’s this way.” The kitchen reminded him of his 1970s childhood and the awful taste of tongue depressors at the back of the throat. It looked as though someone had taken a potting shed and turned it inside out. A pattern of faux shingles crowned the honey-colored cupboards; the countertop Formica was patterned like a hospital gown. A round fluorescent light fixture cupped and backlit a collection of dead bugs. High above everything, a terra-cotta sun smiled down from the shingles with no sense of irony, or shame, whatsoever.

The smell of Febreze came down the stairs, wound around the smell of old cigarettes and something chemical, and worse. “Four bedrooms,” said Carly. She led him up the stairs into one of the front rooms, furnished with a double mattress on a brown wooden platform. It looked like the sort of thing you’d store a kidnapped teenage girl underneath. The café curtains on the windows were badly water-stained and lightly cigarette-burned. “Listen!” said Carly. “It’s a busy street, but you can’t even hear it! Bedclothes in the closets. I need to get going,” she said. “Tae kwon do. Settle in and let me know if there’s anything else I can do for you, all right?”

He had not stood so close to a woman all summer, at least not while sober. He wanted to finger her ponytail, and then yank on it like a schoolyard bully. “Can I see the artist’s studio?” he asked.

“Forgot!” she said. “Come along.”

They walked through the scrubby backyard to a half-converted garage. “Lock sticks,” said Carly, jiggling a door with a rice paper cataract over its window. “Looks dark in here till you turn on the lights.”

The art studio was to have been Pamela’s: she was a sometime jeweler and painter. Stony did not know whether it made things better or worse, that this space was the most depressing room he’d ever seen. The old blinds seemed stitched together of moth wings. A newsprint Picasso danced on a bulletin board. The smell of mildew was nearly physically painful. Along one wall a busted hollow-core door rested on sawhorses, and across the top, a series of shapes, huddled together as though for warmth. Pots, vases, bowls, all clearly part of the same family, the bluish gray of expensive cats. He expected them to turn and blink at him.