The Best American Short Stories 2015 (35 page)

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. Somehow 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. But 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.

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

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

2
.

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 GPSed 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. Toward someone, away from someone. “Helen,” he said aloud, as he walked beneath the Périphérique's looping traffic. He had not driven a car in over 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
INforMAtion
in English, or
informaCEEohn
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 United States 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.”