The Best American Short Stories 2015 (37 page)

“We miss you,” Laura would say.

“We miss you too,” he answered.

“
You
miss us. Helen doesn't miss anything.”

“We don't know.”

“I feel it.”

“OK,” he said, because she might have been right.

By the time they'd talked themselves out he was back in the third arrondissement, and then he would zag towards the river. He walked as they had their first jet-lagged day, to exhaust himself before climbing the stairs to M. Petit's apartment, so he could fall asleep without hearing the noises of the granddaughter and her husband in that three-quarter bed on the other side of the wall. Or on the sofa, or any corner of his old home. Sometimes he thought,
That's us still, and I am M. Petit
, and he tried to find the part of the wall that bordered on what had been the girls' bedroom. Maybe he would hear them scheme. Maybe this time he could stop it.

Or maybe he'd just hear the neighbors fucking.

One night on the way home he found a little store that catered to Americans, big boxes of sugary cereal, candy bars, and he wanted to buy them for Helen, whose nasogastric tube had just been taken out, though she was fed only purees. The store carried every strain of American crap. French's mustard, Skippy peanut butter, Stove Top stuffing, even Cheez Whiz. He'd been gone long enough from the U.S. that he felt sentimental about the food, and he'd been in Paris long enough to feel superior to it.

Then he saw the red-topped jar of Marshmallow Fluff.

“Something sweet for you,” he said to Helen the next morning. He hunted around for a spoon and found only a tongue depressor. That would do.

Helen closed her eyes as the Fluff went in, as her round mouth irised in around the stick. Wes felt electrified. Before this moment Helen had been a blank, as mysterious to him as she must have been to the emergency room when she'd first arrived: a girl who'd dropped from the sky. Unidentified. Cut off from her history.

Now she opened her eyes, and he could see, for the first time, Helen looking out of them, though (he thought) she couldn't see anything. She was sunk in the bottom of a well. Everything above her was hidden in shadows. He could see her trying to make something out. Her mouth, agape, opened further, with muscle, intent, greed:
more
.

He dug out a larger dollop. Closed eyes, closed mouth, but when the tongue depressor went in Helen began to cough. It was a terrible wet sound.

“Are you all right?” he said. He wondered whether he should put his finger in her mouth, scoop it out, and then he did, and Helen bit down. First just pressure, the peaks of her molars, then pain. He tried to pull out his finger. “Wow. Helen,” he said. “Helen, please, Helen, help! Help!” and then her jaw relaxed, and he stood with his wet, indented finger, panting.

The doctor on the floor was Dr. Delarche, the tall woman who'd so infuriated Laura. By the time she peered into Helen's mouth all the Fluff had melted away except a wisp on her upper lip.

“What is this?” she asked Helen. She touched her chin, looking over her face. “
Hein?
This sticky thing.”

Wes still held his sore finger. “Fluff.”

“Floff?” The doctor turned to him. “What is this floff?”

The lidless jar had fallen to the bed—he pulled it out from under the blanket, and inclined the mouth toward the doctor. “Marshmallow, um,
crème
,” he said, pronouncing it the French way. “You put it on bread, with peanut butter.”

Dr. Delarche looked incredulous. “No,” she said. “This is not good for the body. Even without traumatic brain injury but certainly with. No more floff.”

“OK,” he said, exhilarated.

His mistake had been to believe that the girl in the bed wanted nothing. But that
was
Helen, and Helen was built of want. She longed, she burned, even if she couldn't move or swallow Marshmallow Fluff. He wished he could find her boys so they could sit on the edge of the bed and read to her; he wished he could take her into the city, let her drink wine.

Well, then. He needed to find what she wanted, and bring it to her.

That evening, after the walk, he found himself on a street that seemed lined with art supplies: a pen shop, a painting shop, a paper store. In the paint shop he bought a pad that you could prop up like an easel, and watercolors in a little metal case with a loop on the back for your thumb, for when you painted
plein air
. It was the sort of thing he'd have bought for the girls in an ordinary time. He hadn't painted himself since graduate school—he'd been a printmaker, and that's what he taught—and it had been even longer since he'd used watercolors. But Helen had. She'd taken lessons at home. Perhaps she could teach him. That's what he would tell her.

“Ah!” said the doctor, when she saw him set up the pad. “Yes. Therapy. Very good. This will help.”

They began to paint.

Yes, Helen was there, she was in there. She could not form words. She smiled more widely when people spoke to her but it didn't seem to matter what they said. But with the brush in her hand—Wes just steadying—she painted. At first the paintings were abstracts, fields of yellow and orange and watery pink (she never went near blue) overlaid with circles and squares. She knew, as he did not, how to thin the paint with water to get the color she wanted.

Helen was moved to a private room on another floor. The hospital manicurist (“How very Parisian!” said Laura, when he told her) gave her vamp red toes and fingernails. Wes's favorite nurse, a small man who reminded him of a champion wrestler from his high school, devised a brace from a splint and a crepe bandage to help with the painting, so that Helen could hold her wrist out for longer, though she still needed help from the shoulder.

“She's painting,” said Wes on the phone. He'd blurted it out at the end of a conversation, standing in front of the front door of the building: until then he hadn't realized he'd been keeping it a secret.

“What do you mean?” asked Laura.

He explained it to her: the brace, the watercolors.

“What is she painting?”

“Abstracts. I'll take a picture, you can see.”

There was a silence.

“What?”

“Nothing. I sighed. You mean she's painting like an elephant paints.”

“What do you mean?”

“There's an elephant who paints. Maybe more than one. They stick a brush in its trunk and give it a canvas. The results are better than you'd think. But it's not really painting, is it? It's moving with paint. She doesn't know what she's doing.”

“She does,” said Wes. “She's getting better.”

“By millimeters.”

“Yes! Forward.”

“What good is forward, if it's by millimeters?” said Laura. “How far can she possibly go?”

“We don't know!”

“I wish she had—” Laura began. “I just don't know what her life is going to be like.” Another silence.

Wes knew it wasn't sighing this time. He said, “Listen. I gotta go.”

He had not had a drink since the early morning call from the hospital; he'd had the horrible thought he might have woken up and caught Helen sneaking out that night, had he been entirely sober. Now he thought about picking up a bottle of wine to take to M. Petit's. He passed by the gym he'd seen before, which was still open though it was ten at night. A woman sat at street level in a glass box, ready to sign him up. She wore ordinary street clothes, not exercise togs.

“Bonjour, madame,”
he said.
“Je parle français très mal.”

“Ah, no!”
said the woman.
“Très bien.”

She seemed to be condescending to him, but in a cheerful, nearly American way.

The actual gym was in the basement. By American standards it was small, primitive, but there were free weights—he'd lifted pretty seriously in college—and a couple of treadmills. From then on he came here after his long walk, his phone conversation with Laura, because only exertion blunted the knowledge that Laura wished that Helen had died. He hoped Laura had something to do, to blunt her own knowledge that he knew she felt this way and disagreed.

For some reason one of the personal trainers took a dislike to him and was always bawling him out in French, for bringing a duffle bag onto the gym floor, for letting his knees travel over his toes when he squatted, for getting in the way of the French people who seemed always to be swinging around broom handles as a form of exercise. The trainer's name was Didier, according to the flyers by the front desk; his hair was shaved around the base of his skull, long on top. Like an
oignon
, Wes thought. Didier drank ostentatiously from a big Nalgene bottle filled with a pale yellow liquid, and it pleased Wes to pretend he was consuming his own urine. It was good to hate someone, to have a new relationship of any kind with no medical undertones.

When I've been here a year
, he thought one night, as he performed deadlifts in the power rack,
when we find the right place to live, me and Helen—then I'll get a girlfriend
. The thought seemed to have flown into his head like a bird—impossible, out of place, smashing around. It didn't belong there. It couldn't get out.

After three weeks, Helen was not just better, but measurably better: she held her head up, she turned to whoever was speaking, she squeezed hands when people said her name.

And she painted. The abstracts had hardened, angled, until Wes could see what she meant. She was painting Paris. Back in the U.S. they had thought Helen had talent and they'd seized on it, bought her supplies, sent her to classes, not just painting but sculpture, pastel, photography. The problem was content, no better than any suburban American girl's: Floating princesses. Pretty ladies. Ball gowns.

Now she painted stained glass and broken buildings in sunshine, monuments, gardens. He could feel her hand struggling to get things right. She drew faces with strange curves and bent smiles. The first time she signed her name in the corner in fat bright letters, Wes burst into tears.

Staff and visitors took her paintings away, without asking, and Wes had to hide the ones he particularly wanted. He was waiting for the right one to mail to Laura, he told himself, but every day's paintings were better than the last. He wanted to send the best one.

One morning he ran into Dr. Delarche on his way to Helen.
“Monsieur,”
she said, and beckoned him. Wes was alarmed. There was never any news from doctors about Helen. He either had to ask or see for himself. And besides, Dr. Delarche worked in the ICU.

“I must ask you something,” she said.

He nodded.

“My husband is a documentarist. I wonder—I told him about Helen and her painting. He wishes to do a little film.”

“Oh!” said Wes. “Yes!”

The
documentariste
was a shaggy handsome Algerian named Walid who made Wes like Dr. Delarche better: he had an air of joy and incaution. “You don't mind?” he said. His camera was one of those cheap handheld things, a Flip—Laura's mother had given them one the year before. Wes had better video capabilities on his Nikon, back at the flat. He imagined most of the footage would feature the profile of Walid's wide callused thumb.

He didn't tell Laura about the filming. She would tell him to throw the doctor's husband out of the room.
Do not turn our child into a freak show
, she would have said—

—but Wes knew that was all that Helen had ever really wanted.

Not love, and not quotidian attention: since she was a child she liked to scare and alarm her parents and strangers and he did not believe anymore that it was some sort of coded message—a cry for love! She just wants you to talk to her! Helen wanted love but no ordinary sort. She wanted people to gape. Left alone in the U.S., she would not just have had her nose pierced, nor her ears, she would not have got just black forked tattoos across the small of her back: she would have obliterated herself with metal and ink, put plugs in her earlobes, in her lips. People would have stared at her. They would have winced and looked away. She wanted both.

Now she had both.

He was not stupid enough, not optimistic enough, to think that she would have made this bargain herself. She wouldn't have given up the boys in some strange part of Paris, offering her wine, watching her do something stupid before she fell. But if she was in bed in a hospital, she would—not
would
, but
did
—want to be the most interesting girl in the bed who ever was. Filmed and fussed over. Called, by the more dramatic of the nurses, miraculous. Visited by the sick children of the hospital, who were brought by well-meaning religious volunteers.

Helen's room was a place of warmth and brightness. Everyone said so. Walid kept filming, though Wes was never clear to what end.

“Perhaps,” said Walid one day, “when we are finished, the boys she was with? They will see this film.”

“They could come to visit!” said Wes.

“Eh?” said Walid. He stopped filming and regarded Wes. “Turn themselves in. Repent. That's a terrible thing, to abandon a girl, isn't it? You are American and you want them dead,” he explained. “We, of course, do not believe in the death penalty. Anymore: we have had our bumps. But still. Terrible thing.”

“She is an inspiration,” said Dr. Delarche one day as Wes and Helen painted. “This is not a bad thing.” Dr. Delarche leaned against the wall in the lab coat she made look chic: it was the way she tucked her hands in the pockets. Since Wes had agreed to let Walid film, she came to the room nearly every day, though never when Walid himself was around. Maybe she had a crush on him, though that seemed very un-French. He had a crush on her.

“The light in the paintings,” she said to him. “Like Monet,
hein
?”