Thunderstruck & Other Stories (21 page)

“Je ne comprends pas,”
Laura said, though the nurse was speaking English.

“She need someone here,” said the nurse. “It’s bad.”

This was why you had two children. This is why you didn’t. Wes stood outside their old, old, unfathomably old building. There were no taxis out and he couldn’t imagine how to call one. He wondered whether he’d wanted to come to Paris because of the language: the way he’d felt coddled by lack of understanding, delighted to be capable of so little. By now he could get along pretty well, but this question, how Paris worked in the middle of the night, seemed beyond his abilities. Who he needed: Helen, to help him make his way to Helen. The Métro didn’t run this late, he knew that much. Upstairs Kit slept on, Laura watching over her, which was why he was alone on the street. She was the spare child. The one who wasn’t supposed to be here. The one who was all right. In his panic he had not wanted to go away from her: he’d wanted to crawl into Helen’s empty bed, not even caring how warm or cold the sheets were, how long she’d been gone, as though that child were already lost and the only thing to do was watch over the girl who was left.

He GPS’d directions on his smartphone, the American one. Four and a half miles, in a wealthy suburb called Neuilly-sur-Seine. He would walk: he couldn’t think of an alternative. If he saw a taxi he would flag it down but the main thing was movement. Westward, as fast as he could, and then he felt he was in a dull, extravagant, incredible movie. He had a quest, and every person he passed seemed hugely important: the man carrying the dozing child, who
asked for directions Wes couldn’t provide (he hid the phone, he didn’t want to stop); the two police carrying riot shields though Wes could not hear any kind of altercation that might require them; the old woman in elegant, filthy clothing who was sweeping out the rhomboid front of a café. All summer he and his women had walked. “It’s the only way to understand a city,” Wes had said more than once, “we are
flâneurs
.” Now he understood that wandering taught you nothing. Only when you moved with purpose could you know a place. Towards someone, away from someone. “Helen,” he said aloud, as he walked beneath the Périphérique’s looping traffic. He had not driven a car in more than a month. They looked like wild animals to him. Everything looked feral, in fact. He wanted a weapon.

It took him more than an hour to get to the upscale western suburb of the American Hospital. By then the sun was rising. He stumbled in, shocked by the lights, the people. He didn’t want to talk to anyone but Helen, he just wanted to find her, but he knew that was impossible so he stopped at the lit-up desk by the door. The sign above it said
INFORMATION
. Was that
IN
for
MA
tion in English, or informa
CEE
ohn in French?

“J’arrive,”
he said, as the waiters did in busy restaurants, though they meant,
I will
and not
I have
. He added, “I walked here.”

The man behind the desk had short greasy bangs combed down in points, like a knife edge. “Patient name?”

Wes hesitated. What sort of shape was she in? What information had Laura given the hospital? “Helen Langford.” He found some hope inside him: of course Helen was conscious.
How else would they have got Wes’s American phone number? She wouldn’t have remembered the French one.

“ICU,” said the man with the serrated hair.

But it turned out that Helen had taken her mother’s American phone, had been using it all summer to call first the U.S. and then Paris, to text, to take pictures of herself. When the battery drained, she swapped it for Wes’s, recharged, swapped them back. The hospital had found the phone in her pocket, had gone through the contact list and eventually found him.

The ICU doctor was a tall man with heavy black eyebrows and silver sideburns. Wes felt dizzied by his perfect English, his unidentifiable accent, the rush of details. Helen had been dropped off at the front door by some boys. She probably had not been injured in this neighborhood: the boys brought her here, as though
American
were a medical condition that needed to be treated at a specialist hospital. They had done a CAT scan and an MRI. The only injury was to her head. She had fallen upon it. Her blood screened clean for drugs but she’d had a few drinks. “Some sweet wine, maybe, made her clumsy. Hijinks,” said the doctor, dropping the initial h.
Ijinks
. Not an Anglophone then. “Children. Stupid.”

“Is she dead?” he asked the doctor.

“What? No. She’s had a tumble, that’s true. She struck her head. Right now, we’re keeping her unconscious, we put in a tube.” The doctor tapped his graying temple. “To relieve the pressure.”

What was causing pressure? “Air?” Wes said.

“Air? Ah, no. Fluid. Building up. So the tube—” The doctor made a sucking noise. “So far it’s working. Later today, tomorrow, we will know more.”

Wes had expected his daughter to be tiny in the bed, but she looked substantial, womanly. Her eyes were closed. The side of her head was obscured by an enormous bandage, with the little slurping tube running from it. No, not slurping. It didn’t make a sound. Wes had imagined that, thanks to the doctor.

Her little room was made of glass walls, blindered by old-fashioned wheeled screens. There was nothing to sit on. For half an hour he crouched by the bed and spoke to her, though her eyes were closed. She was slack. Every part of her.

“Helen,” he said, “Helen. You can tell us anything. You should, you know.” They’d been the kind of parents who’d wanted to know nothing, or the wrong things. It hit him with the force of a conversion: all along they’d believed what they didn’t acknowledge didn’t exist. Here, proof: the unsayable existed. “Helen,” he said to his sleeping daughter. “I will never be mad at you again. We’re starting over. Tell me
anything
.”

A fresh start. He erased the photos and texts from the phone: he wanted to know everything in the future, not the past. Later he’d regret it, he’d want names, numbers, the indecipherable slang-ridden texts of French teenagers, but as he scrolled down, deleting, affirming each deletion, it
felt like a kind of meditative prayer:
I will change. Life will broaden and better
.

Half an hour later he stepped out to the men’s room and found Kit and Laura wandering near the vending machines. Kit had been weeping.
Oh, the darling!
he thought. Then he realized that Laura had been grilling her. She was not a sorrowful little sister. She was a confederate.

“We took a taxi,” said Laura miserably.

“Good,” said Wes.

“Nobody will tell me anything,” said Laura. “The goddamn desk.”

“All right,” said Wes. “She’s—”

“How did she
get
here?” said Laura. “Who dropped her
off
?”

“Nobody knows,” said Wes, which was what he’d understood.

“Somebody does!”

“Look,” said Wes. Before they went to see Helen, he wanted to explain it to her. What he knew now: they needed to talk about everything. They needed to be interested in their daughters’ secrets, not terrified. He sat them down on the molded bolted-together plastic chairs along the walls. He was glad for the rest. “We’re lucky. They dropped her off, they did that for us.”

“Cowards,”
said Laura.

Wes sat back and the whole line of chairs shifted. Cowards would have left her where she was. Bravery got her here. He knew what kind of kid he’d been, a scattering boy, who would not have stopped to think till half a mile away.
Adrenaline flooded your conscience like an engine you then couldn’t start. But Helen hadn’t been that kind of kid. She had stayed with the boy in distress, the officers of a month ago had said, and the universe had repaid her.

“I’m sorry,” said Kit. “I’m so, so sorry.” She was still wearing her rose-patterned nightgown, with a pair of silver sandals. She looked like a mythical sleep-related figure: Narcolepta, Somnefaria. As soon as he thought that, Wes felt the need to sleep fall over his head like a tossed sheet.

“Who are they?” Laura suddenly asked Kit. “You must have met them.”

“She’d leave me somewhere and make me promise not to budge.”

“French boys?”

“I don’t know!” said Kit.

Every night for a week, Helen had snuck out to see some boys. She had met them on one of the sisters’ walks together; the next walk, she sat Kit down on a park bench with a book and told her to stay put. At night, she took either her mother or her father’s American cell phone; Kit slept with their shared phone set to vibrate under her pillow. When Helen wanted to be let back in, she called till the buzzing phone woke up Kit, who snuck down the stairs to open the front door.

Kit was going to be the wild child. That’s what they had said, back when she was a two-year-old batting her eyes at waiters, giggling when strangers paid attention. It was going to be Kit sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night, Helen lying to protect her.

You worked to get your kids to like each other and this was what happened.

They went to the ICU. When Kit saw her sister, she began to cry again. “I don’t know anything else,” she said, though nobody was asking. “I just—I don’t know.”

Laura stayed by the door. She put her arm around Kit. She could not look at anyone. Wes thought she was about to pull the wheeled screens around her, as though in this country that was how you attended your damaged child. A mother’s rage was too incandescent to blaze unshaded. “How do they even know she fell?” she whispered. “Maybe she was hit with something, maybe—was she raped?”

Wes shook his head uneasily. There was Helen in the bed. They needed to go to her.

“How do you
know
?” said Laura.

“They checked.”

“I will kill them,” she said. “I will track down those boys. I hate this city. I want to go home.” At last she looked at Wes.

“We can’t move her yet.”

“I know,” said Laura, and then, more quietly, “I want to go home
now
.”

Well, after all: he’d had the width of three
arrondissements
to walk, getting ready to see Helen. As a child he’d been fascinated by the bends—what scuba divers got when they came to the surface of the ocean too fast to acclimate their lungs to ordinary pressure. You had to be taken from place to place with care. Laura had gone from apartment to taxi-cab to hospital too quickly. Of course she couldn’t breathe.

But it didn’t get any easier as the day went on. She looked at Helen, yes, and arranged her hair with the pink rattail comb a nurse had left behind. All the while, she delivered a muttering speech, woven of curses: she cursed their decision to come to Paris; she cursed the midmorning’s comically elegant doctor who inflated her cheeks and puffed when asked about Helen’s prognosis; she damned to hell the missing boys.

“They
say
boys,” said Laura, “but if they didn’t see them, how do they know?”

“We need to solve the problems we can, honey,” said Wes.

That afternoon Kit and Laura took the Métro back to the city. Kit was seven, after all.

He didn’t get to the apartment until ten. Laura was already in bed but awake. They talked logistics. In two days they were scheduled to fly home. It made more sense for Laura to stay with Helen—she was a freelancer, Wes’s classes started in a week—but there was the question of language. The question of Paris.

“I’ll stay,” Wes said. They were in bed. Beyond, M. Petit’s apartment was silent. Kit was asleep in the twin bedroom on the other side of the hall.

Laura nodded. “Shouldn’t we all?” Then she answered herself. “Third grade.”

“Third grade,” said Wes. School started for Kit in a week, too. She shouldn’t miss it. “We’ve got the phones. Imagine what this used to be like.” They’d talked about that, how appallingly easy technology made it to be an
expat these days. “Listen, I’m sure, I’m sure in a week, or two—we can bring her home.”

Neither of them could wonder aloud what change in Helen’s condition would allow that.

“Where will you stay?” Laura asked.

“Oh, God. I hadn’t thought.”

He knocked the next morning on M. Petit’s door. Two young men answered. One of them was holding some dark artwork in a large frame. The other was folding a cup into one of the panes of an unfurled newspaper.

“Bonjour,”
said Wes, and then he couldn’t think of what to say.

“English?” said one of the men, a balding redhead.

“Yes. American.” Wes pointed at the door behind him.

“Ah!” said the redhead, and Wes could see M. Petit in his expression. In both of their faces, actually. His sons. The redheaded man explained: their father had died suddenly, unexpectedly.

“Oh, no,” said Wes. “I am sorry.” He felt a tender culpability, as though his own disaster had seeped through the walls and killed the old man. He tried to remember the last time he’d heard M. Petit’s morning routine.

“So you see,” said the redhead. “We must pack.”

“We’ve had an accident,” said Wes. “My family. An emergency. I was wondering if I could extend the lease.”

“Ah, no. No. Actually my daughter is moving in, next week, with her husband. Newlyweds.”

Wes nodded. He felt a tweak in his chest, disappointment or despair. He needed to stay, as cheaply as possible,
and he couldn’t imagine where he might start looking for shelter, or how long it would take.

“But,” said the son. “Would you like—you could perhaps rent this?” He pointed at the floor of M. Petit’s apartment, the same warm burnt orange tiles as next door. Wes peered down the hallway into the murk. “Very sudden, you see.”

“Yes,” Wes said. “Thank you.
Merci. Merci mille fois
.”

He took the semester off from school. His department head said they’d figure things out so he could still draw a salary—a course reduction, a heavier load in the spring. Better to solve it now for everyone involved than to wonder every day whether Wes might be coming back.

On the day of the flight he and Laura and Kit went to the hospital. Kit said goodbye to her sister tearfully, lovingly, crawled into the bed and stroked Helen’s hair and said, “I promise, I promise, I promise.” What promise? Wes thought she would tell him when they said goodbye at the airport, though when they got there Kit was awkward, unhappy, her hands bunched under her chin as though, if he tried to draw her close, she would fight him off with her elbows. “Goodbye, Kitty,” he said. She nodded.