Thunderstruck & Other Stories

by Elizabeth McCracken

  “Shouldn’t you be in bed?” Peter Elroy asked. He pointed at the hallway behind them and frowned, though he knew he was less frightening now that it was dark and his glasses were just clear glass.

  “We had a bad dream,” said the boy.

  “About the volf,” said the girl.

  He did not feel repentant. All he ever wanted: people thinking of him against their will. What got him in trouble in the first place.

  “Are wolves real?” the boy asked, in a voice that knew the answer.

  They had not come to him for comfort: they would have woken the Young Mother for that. She would have told them that there were no wolves in Connecticut. Or she would have lied entirely, said, no, wolves were not real, not anymore, they belonged with ancient Egypt and dinosaurs and Knights of the Realm and pirates of the Long John Silver sort, in books and legend, the glittering viciousness children loved, sabers, fangs, cutlasses, claws: things they could claim for themselves because the original owners were extinct.

  “Of course they’re real,” Peter Elroy said. “And they’re coming. Not for you. They wouldn’t eat you. You’re too small. Too thin. All bone. A wolf would look at you and think, Disgusting.”

  “Dis-custing,” the girl echoed.

  “But I’m lovely,” said Peter Elroy. “I’m delicious.”

  “We’ll protect you,” said the boy.

  “Darling,” said Peter Elroy, “it’s all right. Let them come.”

  And they did, one night soon afterwards.

  Thunderstruck

  1.

  Wes and Laura had not even known Helen was missing when the police brought her home at midnight. Her long bare legs were marbled red with cold, and she had tear tracks on her face, but otherwise she looked like her ordinary placid awkward middle-school self: snarled hair, chapped lips, pink cheeks. She’d lost her pants somewhere, and she held in one fist a seemingly empty plastic garbage bag, brown, the yellow drawstring pulled tight at its neck. Laura thought the policemen should have given her something to cover up. Though what did cops know about clothing: maybe they thought that long black T-shirt was a dress. It had a picture of a pasty overweight man in swashbuckler’s clothes captioned, in movie marquee letters, LINDA.

  “She’s twelve!” Wes told the police, as though they were the ones who’d lured the girl from her bed. “She’s only twelve.”

  “Sorry, Daddy,” Helen said.

  Laura grabbed her daughter by the wrist and pulled her in before the police could change their minds and arrest her, or them. She took the garbage bag from Helen, un-cinched the aperture, and stared in, looking for evidence, missing clothing, wrong-doers.

  “Nitrous oxide party,” said the taller officer, who looked like all the Irish boys Laura had grown up with. Maybe he was one. “They inhale from those bags. The owner of the house is in custody. Some kid had a bad reaction, she threw them all onto the lawn. The others scattered but your daughter stayed with the boy in distress. So there’s that.”

  “There’s that,” said Wes.

  Helen gave her mother a sweet, sinuous, beneath-the-arm hug. She’d gotten so tall she had to stoop to do it; she was Laura’s height now. “Mommy, I love you,” she said. She was a theatrical child. She always had been.

  “You could have suffocated!” Laura said, throttling the bag.

  “I didn’t put it over my head,” said Helen.

  Laura ripped a hole in the bottom of the bag, as though that were still a danger.

  This was her flaw as a parent, she thought later: she had never truly gotten rid of a single maternal worry. They were all in the closet, with the minuscule footed pajamas and hand-knit baby hats, and every day Laura took them out, unfolded them, tried to put them to use. Kit was seven, Helen nearly a teenager, and a small, choke-worthy item on the floor still dropped Laura, scrambling, to her knees. She could not bear to see her girls on their bicycles, both the cycling and the cycling away. Would they even remember her cell-phone number, if they and their phones were lost separately? Did anyone memorize numbers anymore? The electrical outlets were still dammed with plastic, in case someone got a notion to jab at one with a fork.

  She had never worried about breathing intoxicating gas from Hefty bags. Another worry. Put it on the pile. Soon it might seem quaint, too.

  She blamed her fretting on Helen’s first pediatrician, who had told her there was no reason to obsess about Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. “It’ll happen or it won’t,” said Dr. Moody. Laura had found this an unacceptable philosophy. Her worry for the baby had heat and energy: how could it be useless? Nobody had warned her how deeply babies slept, how you couldn’t always see them breathing. You watched, and watched, you touched their dozy stomachs to feel their clockwork. Even once the infant Helen started sleeping through the night, Laura checked on her every two hours. Sometimes at two A.M. she was so certain that Helen had died, she felt an electric shock to the heart, and this (she believed) started Helen’s heart, too: her worry was the current that kept them both alive. Kit, too, when Kit, a surprise, crashed sweetly into their lives.

  Maybe that was what happened to Helen. She was supposed to be an only child. She’d been promised. Kit was a flirtatious baby, a funny self-assured toddler. She made people laugh. Poor awkward honking Helen: it would be hard to be Kit’s older sister. Growing up, Laura had hated the way her parents had compared her to her brother—Ben was good at math, so there was no point in her trying; Laura was more outgoing, so she had to introduce her brother to friends—but once she had her own children she understood comparison was necessary. It was how you discovered their personalities: the light of one child threw the other child into relief, no different from how she, at thirteen, had known what she looked like only by comparing the length of her legs and the color of her hair to her friends and their legs and their hair.

  Helen hit her sister; Helen was shut in her room; afterwards all four of them would go to the old-fashioned ice cream parlor with the twisted wire chairs. She and Wes couldn’t decide when to punish and when to indulge, when a child was testing the boundaries and needed discipline, and when she was demanding, in the brutish way of children, more love. In this way, their life had been pasted together with marshmallow topping and hot fudge. Shut her in her room. Buy her a banana split. Do both: see where it gets you.

  Helen sneaking out at night. Helen doing drugs.

  Children were unfathomable. The same thing that could stop them from breathing in the night could stop them from loving you during the day. Could cause them to be brought home by the police without their pants or a good explanation.

  That long night Laura and Wes interrogated her. Laura, mostly, while Wes examined the corners of Helen’s bedroom and looked griefstruck. Whose house? Laura asked. What had she been doing there? What about Addie, her best friend, Addie of the braces and the clarinet? Was she there? Laura wanted to know everything. No, that wasn’t true. She wanted to know nothing, she wanted to be told there was nothing to worry about: she wanted from Helen only consolation. She knew she couldn’t yell comfort out of her but she didn’t know what else to do. “What were you thinking?” she asked Helen, too loudly, as though it were thinking that was dangerous.

  Helen shrugged. Then she pulled aside the neck of the T-shirt to examine her own shoulder and shrugged again. Over the bed was a poster that matched her T-shirt: the same guy, light caught in the creases of his leather pants, pale lipstick, dark eyeliner.

  “What happened to your nose?” Laura asked.

  Helen covered it with her hand. “Someone tried to pierce it.”

  “Helen! You do not have permission.”

  Wes said, looking at the poster, “Linda sure is pretty.”

  “He’s not Linda,” said Helen. “Linda’s the band.”

  Laura sat down next to her. Helen’s nose was red, nicked, but whoever had wielded the needle had given up. “Beautiful Helen, why would you?” Laura said. Helen bit her lip to avoid smiling straight out. Then she looked up at
the poster.

  “He must be hot in those pants,” Wes said.

  “Probably,” said Helen. She slid under her bedclothes and touched her nose again. “I’m tired, I think.”

  “Poor Linda,” said Wes. He rubbed his face in what looked like disbelief. “To suffer so for his art.”

  · · ·

  “We’ll go to Paris,” Wes told Laura. It was four A.M.

  “Yes.” They were exhausted, unslept. Helen seemed like an intelligence test they were failing, had been failing for years. Better to flee. Paris. “Why?” she said.

  “Helen’s always wanted to go.”

  “She has?”

  “All those children’s books. Madeline. Some Richard Scarry mouse, I think. Babar. Kit’s old enough to enjoy it now. We’ll—we’ll get Helen painting lessons. Kit, too, if she’s interested. Or I’ll take them to museums and we’ll draw. Eat pastries. Get out of here. Your brother’s always offering us booty from his frequent-flier millions. Let’s say yes. Let’s go.”

  The biggest ice cream sundae in the world. Wes taught printmaking at a community college and had the summer off. Laura worked for a caterer and was paid only by the job. They’d have to do it frugally but they could swing it.

  “All right,” said Laura. They stayed up till morning, looking at apartments on the Internet. By seven A.M. Ben had e-mailed back that he was happy to give them the miles; by eight they had booked the flights. They arranged for one of Wes’s students to look after the house and the dog for the five weeks they’d be gone. It was astonishing how quickly the trip came together.

  The plan was to disrupt their lives, a jolt to Helen’s system before school started again in the fall. The city would be strange and beautiful, as Helen herself was strange and beautiful. Perhaps they’d understand her there. Perhaps the problem all this time was that her soul had been written in French.

  They flew overnight from Boston; they hadn’t been on a plane since before Kit was born. Inside the terminal they tried to lead the family suitcases, old plaid things with insufficient silver wheels along the keels, prone to tipping. Honeymoon luggage from the last century: that was how long it had been since they’d traveled. At Charles de Gaulle, all of the Europeans pulled behind them like obedient dogs their long-handled perfectly balanced bags and they murmured into their cell phones. Laura patted her pocket, felt the switched-off phone that she’d been assured would cost too much to use here, and felt sorry for it. Her suitcase fell over like a shot dog. Only Helen seemed to understand how to walk through the airport, as though it were a sport suited to the pubescent female body, a long-legged stride that made the suitcase heel.

  Outside the morning was hot, and French, and blinding, and Wes was already loading the cases into the trunk of a taxi with the grim care of a man disposing of corpses. Laura thought: What a bad idea this was. She squeezed into the back of the cab between the girls, another old caution: proximity sometimes made them pinch each other. She had to fold her torso along the spine like the covers of a book. Wes got into the passenger seat and unraveled the piece of paper with the address of the apartment they’d rented over the Internet.

  “Excusez-moi,” Wes said to the driver. “Je parle français très mal.” The cab driver nodded impatiently. Yes, very badly, it was the most self-evident sentence ever spoken: anything Wes might have said in French would have conveyed the same information. The driver took the scrap from Wes’s hand.

  “L’appartement,” said Helen, “se trouve dans le troisième arrondissement, je crois, monsieur. Cent vingt-deux rue du Temple.”

  At this the driver smiled. “Ah! Bon! Merci, mademoiselle. Le troisième, exactement.”

  They were so smashed into the back Laura couldn’t turn to look at Helen. “You speak French!” she said, astounded.

  “I take French, Mommy. You know that. I don’t speak it.”

  “You’re fluent!” said Laura.

  The street was crooked, and the taxi driver bumped onto the sidewalk to let them get out. In English he said, “Welcome here.” Across the street were a few wholesale jewelry and pocketbook stores, and Laura was stunned by how cheap the merchandise hanging in the window looked, and she wondered whether they’d managed to book an apartment in the only tacky quarter of Paris. The door to their building was propped open. The girls moaned as they walked up the stairs, dragging their bags. “I thought it was on the fourth floor,” said Helen, and Wes said, “They count floors differently here.”

  “Like a different alphabet?” said Kit.

  The staircase narrowed the further up they went, as though a trick of perspective. At the top were two doors. One had an old-fashioned business card taped to it. M. Petit. That was their contact. Wes knocked, and a small elderly man in an immaculate white shirt and blue tie answered.

  “Bonjour!” he said. He came out and led them to the other door. He held on to the tie, as though he wanted to make sure they saw it. “Bienvenu, venez ici. Ici, ici, madame, monsieur, mademoiselles.”

  “Je parle français très mal,” said Wes, and there was that look again. M. Petit dropped his tie.

  “You do it, Helen,” said Laura.

  “Bonjour, monsieur,” said Helen, and he brought them around the apartment and described everything, pantomiming and saying, “Vous comprenez?” and Helen answered in a nasal, casual, quacking way, “Ouais. Ouais. Ouais.”

  “What did he say?” Wes asked when M. Petit had gone.

  “Something about hot water,” she said. “Something about garbage. We need to get calling cards for the phone. He lives next door if we need anything.”

  “Something about garbage,” said Kit. “Real helpful.”

  The apartment was tiny but high-ceilinged, delightful, seemingly carved from gingerbread: a happy omen for their trip, Laura decided. The girls would sleep in twin beds in one room, Wes and Laura across the hall in a bed that was nearly double but not quite. A three-quarters double bed, like the three-quarters cello that Helen played. The windows looked out on next-door chimney pots. The living room was the size of its oriental rug. The kitchen included a sink, a two-burner hot plate, a waist-high fridge, and a tabletop oven. It was the oldest building any of them had ever stood in.

  “Why are the pillows square?” Kit asked.

  “They just are,” said Helen knowingly. She leaned her head out the little window. Five stories up and no way to shimmy down, thought Laura. Helen said, “I want to stay here forever.”

  “We’ll see,” said Wes. “Come on. Let’s go. Let’s see Paris.”

  Jet lag and sunshine turned the city hallucinogenically beautiful. “We’ll keep going,” said Wes. “Till bedtime. Best way to deal with jet lag.” Down the rue des Francs Bourgeois, through the Place des Vosges over to the Bastille, along the river, across one bridge, and another: then they stood staring at Notre Dame’s back end, all its flying buttresses kicking at Laura’s sternum.

  “Notre Dame is here?” said Helen. An insinuating wind tugged at the bottom of her shirt; she held it down.

  “In Paris, yes,” said Wes.

  “But we just walked to it?”

  Wes laughed. “We can walk everywhere.”

  They kept walking, looking for the right café, feeling the heat like optimism on their limbs. Laura swore Helen’s French got even better as the day went on: she translated the menu at the café, she asked for directions, she found the right amount of money to pay for midafternoon crepes. She negotiated the purchase of two primitive prepaid cell phones, one for Wes and one for Laura. At home the girls had phones, but in Paris they would always be with one of their parents.

  What was that odd blooming in Laura’s torso? A sense that this was how it happened: you became dependent on your children, and it was all right.

  They kept moving in order to stay awake until it was sort of bedtime. At six Laura thought she could feel the sidewalk tilting up like a Murphy bed, and they went to the tiny grocery store behind their building, got bread and meat and wine, and held u
p the line first when they didn’t understand they needed to pack their own groceries, and again when they couldn’t open the slippery plastic bags. Once they were out, they felt triumphant anyhow. Wes raised the baguette like a sword.

  They turned down their little street. Up ahead of them a heavyset woman hurried in the middle of the road with a funny hitch, then suddenly turned, worked a shiny black girdle to mid-thigh, and peed in the gutter, an astounding flood that stopped the Langfords.

  Helen said, “Awesome.”

  “That,” said Kit, “was impressive.”

  “City of lights,” said Wes.

  In their medieval apartment, they ate like medieval people, tearing bread with their teeth, spreading butter with their fingers. They all went to bed at the same time, the girls in their nightgowns—Kit’s patterned with roses, Helen’s another Linda XXL T-shirt. “Good night, good night,” said Laura, standing between their beds. They had never shared a room, her girls. Then she and Wes went across the hall to the other room.

  The necessary closeness of the three-quarters bed amplified everything. Her tenderness for Wes, who had been so sure this was the right thing; her worries about how much money this trip would cost; her anxiety at having to use her threadbare high school French. She understood this was the reason she was thirty-six and had never been to Europe. It was a kind of stage fright.

  In the morning they discovered that the interior walls were so thin they could hear, just behind the headboard, the noise of M. Petit emptying his bladder as clearly as if he’d been in the same room. It was a long story, the emptying of M. Petit’s bladder, with many digressions and false endings.

  “We’re in Paris,” whispered Wes.

  “I thought there would be more foie gras and less pee,” Laura whispered back.

  “Both,” said Wes. “There will be plenty of both.”

  In Paris, Helen became a child again. She was skinny, pubescent, not the lean dangerous blade of a near-teen she’d seemed at home, in skin-tight blue jeans and oversized T-shirts. In Paris you could buy children’s shoes and children’s clothes for a person who was five-two. The sales were on, clothing so cheap they kept buying. Helen chose candy-colored skirts, and T-shirts with cartoon characters.