The Best American Short Stories 2015 (36 page)

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 sneaked 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's 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 sneaked 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 taxicab 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 back 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 held an unfurled newspaper and was folding a cup into one of its panes.

“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, tenderly, 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.

He thought then that he should find a place to lie down, like Helen. You said goodbye to someone differently if they were supine. But he didn't see any benches, and if he lay on the ground, he'd be pummeled by European feet and suitcases. Security, perhaps. Send ahead his belt and shoes (only in prisons and airports did a stranger tell you to take them off). Put his sad sorry body down. Kit might not fall for it at first.
“Dad,”
she would say, humiliated, because now she had to bear the humiliation for her sister as well. But then, surely, as he disappeared, his head, shoulders, beltless waist, as the agents saw the truth of his kidneys, his empty pockets, she would run to him, grab at his feet—no. Feet first, so that she had enough time to whisper that promise in his ear.

In the end he picked her up. He couldn't remember the last time he'd done that. Her toes knocked against his shins. “We'll talk every day,” he said.

“I know,” she answered.

Then he kissed Laura. “Call me when you get in.”

“It will be too late.”

“No,” he said. “Not possible.”

He watched them go through the checkpoint. Laura kept waving,
go, go
, but he couldn't, not until they disappeared from sight.

He took the train back into the city, to move his suitcase into M. Petit's apartment. The furniture was ancient, fringed, balding. The windows looked onto the courtyard, not the street. It felt like the depressed cousin of the apartment where they'd been so happy. The right place to be, in other words. The bathroom had a slipper tub, deep and short, with a step to sit on. How had M. Petit climbed into it? The bed was in a loft. No octogenarian should have to use a ladder to go to sleep. Everything in the world now looked like something to fall from. He decided he would sleep on the little L-shaped couch, in case M. Petit had died in the bed. He put the sea-serpent lampshade in the middle of the coffee table and fell asleep. He surprised himself by sleeping through the night. He checked the phone: a text from Laura,
Arrived will call in my morning/your afternoon
. He went, for the third day, to the hospital.

The border between consciousness and coma was not as defined as Wes had been taught by television to expect. They'd stopped sedating her. Helen did not come bursting to the surface, as though from a lake. She rose out of unconsciousness by millimeters over the next few days. Her nose woke up. Her forehead. Her cheeks. Her eyes. The pressure in her skull abated; the ventric tube came out.

She had the daft look of a saint. Even her hands were knotted together at her chest, as though in prayer. Her mouth was open. The nurses combed her hair, what was left of it, and then called in the hospital's hairdresser, who cropped it like Jeanne d'Arc's.

In the hospital Wes studied Helen as he had when she was an infant. Around and around her face, the knotted fingers, the angles of her shoulders. She wasn't a baby, of course. She was a girl, thirteen in a month, with breasts, whose body would keep going further into adulthood no matter whether her brain could catch up. The doctors said it was still too early to tell.

He tried to find his daughter in the face, but she'd been so completely revised, and then he tried to comfort himself: Helen was past worry. The worst would not happen to her because it already had. There were no decisions to be made right now. She wouldn't die. She was, for the moment, beyond any psychological complexities. He had to be here. That he could manage.

At the end of every day, he walked back to Paris, all four and a half miles: beneath the Périphérique, through the seventeenth arrondissement, down le boulevard Malherbes, and he spoke to Laura, his ear throbbing against the plastic of the phone. She sounded far away, relieved. He related the latest diagnosis: they were still assessing whether Helen's brain injury was focal or diffuse. Her brain was still swollen in her skull. It might take her years to recover. Laura told him the news of America: the insurance company was being extraordinarily good at working with the hospital; the cell-phone company would not forgive the nearly thousand-dollar bill for Helen's purloined Parisian phone calls and text messages. Sometimes Kit was there, though there were swimming lessons and play dates and flute lessons or just the sound of the slamming door as she went outside.