Thunderstruck & Other Stories (20 page)

“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 up 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.

At le boulevard Richard-Lenoir, near the Bastille, Helen bought a vinyl purse with a long strap, in which she kept a few euros, a ChapStick, her name and address, a notebook for writing down her favorite sights. She walked hand in hand with Kit: they were suddenly friends, as though their fighting had been an allergic reaction to American air. Both
girls picked up French as though by static electricity, and they spoke it to each other, tossing their hair over their shoulders.
“Ouais,”
they said, in the way that even Laura, whose brain seemed utterly French-resistant, now recognized as how Parisians quackingly agreed.

There were so many
pâtisseries
and
boulangeries
and
fromageries
that they rated the pain au chocolat of one block against the pain au chocolat of the next. The candy shops were like jewelry stores, the windows filled with twenty-four-carat bonbons. The caterer Laura worked for had given her money to smuggle back some young raw milk cheeses that were illegal in the United States, and Laura decided to taste every
Reblochon
in the city, every
Sainte-Maure de Touraine
, so that on the last day she could buy the best and have them vacuum-packed against the noses of what she liked to imagine were the U.S. Customs Cheese Beagles.

Paris was exactly what she had expected and nothing like it. The mullioned passages full of stamp shops and dollhouse-furniture stores, the expensive wax museum the girls wanted to go back and back to despite not recognizing most of the counterfeit celebrities, the hot-chocolate emporia and the bare-breasted bus-stop ads. These were things she had not known were in Paris but felt she should have. The fast-food joint called Flunch, the Jewish district with its falafel (“Shall we have f’laffel for flunch,” Wes said nearly every day). She never really got her bearings in the city, no matter how she studied the map. Paris on paper always looked like a box of peanut brittle that had been
dropped onto the ground, the Seine the unraveled ribbon that had held it together.

“What’s your favorite thing in Paris?” Wes asked.

“My family,” she answered. That was the truth.

After a while they bought a third pay-as-you-go phone for Helen and Kit to share, so the girls could go out in the city together after lunch. Then Wes and Laura would go back to the apartment. She thought every languishing marriage should be prescribed a three-quarter bed. They didn’t even think to worry about M. Petit on the other side of the wall until later, when news of his careful, decorous life floated back to them: a ringing phone, a whistling teakettle, a dainty plastic clatter that could only be a dropped button. This was why it was good to be temporary, and for the neighbors to be French.

“How did you know?” Laura asked Wes.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Helen. How
good
she’d be here.”

“I don’t know. I just—I felt it. She is, though, isn’t she? Good. Sweet. Back to her old self.”

Her old self?
Laura thought. Helen had never been like this a day in her life.

Still it was a miracle: take the clumsy, eager-to-please girl to Paris. Watch her develop
panache
.

Then it was August. It was hot in Paris. They hadn’t realized how hot it would be, and how—Laura thought sometimes—how dirty. The heat conjured up dirt, centuries
of cobblestone-caught filth. It was as though Paris had never actually been clean, as though you could smell every drop of blood and piss and shit spilled in the streets since before the days of the revolution. Half the stores and restaurants shut for the month, as the sensible Parisians fled for the coast. French food felt tyrannical. When they chose the wrong place to eat, a café that looked good but where the skin of the confit de canard was flabby and soft, the bread damp, it didn’t feel like bad luck: it felt as though they’d fallen for a con. As though the place had hidden the better food in the back, for the actually French.

Laura was ready to go home. August was like a page turning. July had felt lucky: August, cursed. From the first day, Laura would think later, no mistake.

The day of Helen’s accident—or perhaps the day before; they would never know exactly when the accident happened—she was as lovely and childish as ever. In the makeup section of the Monoprix, she lipsticked a mouth on the edge of her hand, the lower lip on her thumb and the upper on her index finger.

“Bonjour,”
she said to her mother, through her hand.

“Bonjour, madame,”
said Laura, who did not like speaking French even under these circumstances. The Monoprix was air-conditioned. They spent a lot of time there.

France had refined the features of Helen’s face—Laura had always thought of them as slightly coarse, the thick chap-prone lips, the too-bright eyes—the face, Laura thought now, of a girl who would do anything for a boy, even a boy who didn’t care. Her own face, once upon a time. But in Paris, Helen had changed. She had lost the eagerness,
the oddness, the blunt difficulty of her features. She had become a Parisienne. Laura tucked the label of Helen’s shirt in, felt the warmth of her back, and with the force of previously unseen heartache she knew: they would fly back in three days and nothing, nothing would have changed. They would step back into the aftermath of all they hadn’t dealt with.

“Are you looking forward to going home?” Laura asked.

Helen pouted. Then she jutted her thumb out, made her bee-stung hand pout, too.
“Non,”
she said. “
J’adore Paris
. I’d like to stay here forever.”

“Not me,” said Kit. “I miss Frogbert.”

“Who?” said Helen.

“Our
dog
,” said Kit. “Oh, very funny.”

“Forever,” Helen said again. “Daddy!” she called across to her father, who was just walking into the store with an antique lampshade. He wanted to stay in France forever, too. Laura could imagine him using the lampshade as an excuse:
How can we get this on the plane? We’d better just stay here
.

“Look!” he said. “Hand-painted. Sea serpents.”

And they were, a chain of lumpy, dimwitted sea serpents linked mouth to tail around the hem of the shade. It was a grimy, preposterous thing in the gleaming cosmetic aisle of Monoprix.

Helen took it with the flats of her palms. “It’s awesome,” she said. “Daddy, it’s perfect.”

Laura did not think she had ever seen that look on Helen’s face—not just happiness, but the wish to convey that happiness to someone else, a generosity. That was the expression
Laura tried to remember later, to paste down in her head, because soon it was gone forever, replaced with a parody of a smile, a look that was not dreamy but dumbstruck, recognizable, not Cinderella asked to the ball, but a stepsister, years later, finally invited back to the palace, forgiven. Because twelve hours later, Wes and Laura, asleep in their antique bed, heard a familiar, forgotten noise: Wes’s American cell phone, ringing in the dresser drawer. Why was it on? Laura answered it.

“Have you a daughter?” said the voice on the other end.

The voice belonged to a nurse from the American Hospital of Paris, who said that a young girl had been brought in with a head injury.

“She have a shirt that say
Linda
,” said the nurse. “She fell and striked her head.”

Laura went to the girls’ room, the phone pressed to her ear. Kit was asleep among the square pillows and the overstuffed duvet. Her hair was sweat damp. Helen’s bed was empty. Laura looked to the window, as though it was from there she’d fallen, the pavement below upon which she’d struck her head. It was locked into place, ajar to let the air in but fixed. If Helen had left the apartment it would have been the ordinary way.