by Jason Gurley
Eleanor is confused. “What?”
My family, Mea says. I wish to bring them peace.
“My family is fine,” Eleanor says.
That is naive, Mea says. But that is not your fault.
Eleanor is quiet.
You believe that your family—that you yourself—can move only forward in time. Therefore their affairs can only be addressed in a reactive way. But in this you are incorrect.
“I don’t understand,” Eleanor says.
You are in the rift now, Eleanor, Mea answers. You have absented yourself from the stream of time. Like me, you exist outside of time. Time is the river below your feet. Think of yourself as a bird. You may fly upriver, and you may fly downriver. You may also fly higher, or lower, or in any other direction you—
“You can alter the past,” Eleanor says, suddenly.
Yes.
“My family—”
Yes.
“They—we—haven’t been fine for a long time.”
I am aware.
“But how?”
Eleanor, Mea says. I must ask you a question now.
Eleanor says, “Okay.”
If you could heal your family, would you?
“Of course,” Eleanor answers immediately.
What if there were conditions?
“I wouldn’t care.”
If, for instance, healing your family meant that you had to relive a part of your life—would you do it?
Eleanor thinks of the terrible morning all those years ago, of her mother bleeding behind the wheel, of her sister draped in a sheet.
“I would do anything,” she says softly.
That is what I hoped to hear, Mea says. Our purposes are aligned. We may begin.
“How do you know about my family?” Eleanor asks, her colors urgent and bright in the darkness.
Ask the proper question, Mea says.
Eleanor struggles with this. “I don’t know the right question,” she says, almost shouting.
Slow, Eleanor, Mea says. Agitation will expel you from the rift, as before. Be calm. Think.
Eleanor counts, slowly, to fifty. In that space of time, it seems as if a billion years have flickered by. But she rests in the darkness, feels her body grow still.
“I don’t know the question,” she says, finally. “Tell me what to ask.”
You asked my name, Mea says.
“Yes,” Eleanor says.
And then the correct question comes to her, and she is afraid to ask.
Do not be frightened. It is only a question. It changes nothing that is not already true.
Eleanor feels the darkness inside her, the same dark that is within Mea, and it stills her fears.
Before she asks the question she knows the answer, and she wants to weep.
Ask.
Eleanor does. “Who are—who were you?”
And Mea answers.
The keeper stands upon the crest of the hill, staring out into her valley. It only resembles a valley now to her, and only barely. Its familiar wide bowl shape is gone, one entire slope of it crushed like fireplace embers. The earthquakes since the mountain was destroyed have been fierce, shaking the peak beside the rubble into pebbles itself. For the first time the keeper can see beyond the mountains that have embraced her for so many years.
Beyond the mountains is nothing at all.
The clouds seem to tumble to the earth, where they swirl into a dense fog so thick it appears solid. She cannot see trees or other mountains through the fog. She thinks that it might spill through the gap-toothed wound in the mountain ridge, but it doesn’t. It frightens her. The fog is unnatural.
She stands there for a time, watching the sluggish river of melted rock cascading through the trees and into the valley itself. It is cooling now, solidifying slowly, steaming like a campfire doused with water.
Her shadow curls around her feet, having returned to her now.
“It’s all gone,” the keeper croaks.
Her shadow is silent, as it always is.
The hill beneath her feet rumbles, and she drops to her knees, afraid that the quakes and their aftershocks will throw her to the ground and break her bones. She feels more fragile now than ever, and the terrible black poison in her belly has begun to spread farther, its awful stain deepening between her breasts, wrapping around her hips.
The rumble is not another earthquake, nor an aftershock.
She senses her shadow tugging at her ankles. It stretches away behind her, like a puppy straining at a leash, and the keeper turns.
In the cupped palm of earth between the hills, the beasts are moving. No—one of them is moving. The largest beast takes a thunderous step away from the keeper, then another. In the black ink of the beast’s long shadow, its smaller companion struggles on its knees, unable to stand.
“What are you doing?” the keeper rasps.
The large beast pauses, turns. The keeper watches, astonished, as the beast entwines its long neck with the smaller beast’s crooked one. Their necks wind together like strands of rope. The largest lows softly, and then its neck tightens, and it leans backward. The tension draws the small beast to its feet. It sways uncertainly, and for a moment the keeper is afraid it will pitch over and die before her.
But it finds its balance, uneasy though it may be, and with halting steps begins to follow the large beast over the hill.
“Wait,” the keeper whispers.
She stands up and tries to run, but her knees are too weak, and she falls. The earth is brittle and black underneath her. It leaves charcoal smudges on her skin as she struggles upright again.
“Wait,” she says again, but the beasts have found their gait.
They are heading for the hole in the mountains.
The beasts are leaving the valley.
Eleanor can hear him hit the water.
Mea has learned much since Eleanor’s previous visit to the rift. She has put Eleanor back into the world at the precise moment of her departure, but has deposited her gently on the island shore. Eleanor is naked, and she goes to the rowboat and finds Jack’s windbreaker. It is just long enough to cover her. She frowns at her bare legs, at the visible, fine hairs there.
“Jack!” Eleanor shouts.
She doesn’t think he can hear her over the waves, which heave in large shelves, higher than before. She worries for him. The water is frigid, and moves in such broad swells that she wonders if he will be able to swim around the hook of the island, back to the boat.
But he does.
He doesn’t see her. She can see even from this distance that he is shaking.
Idiot, she thinks to herself. You should have gone up and gotten your clothes.
But it wouldn’t have done Jack any good. Their clothes were already soaking wet when they took them off.
The sky turns dark, and Jack comes ashore like a ghost, pale and chattering. He staggers and almost falls onto the pebbled shore, and Eleanor could strangle herself for the danger she’s put him in. What would have happened to him if she hadn’t returned to this same when? She pushes the image of a hypothermic, shuddering Jack out of her mind, and runs to him.
His eyes widen at the sight of her.
“Don’t try to talk,” she says.
He quivers like an arrow. She takes his windbreaker off, not caring anymore that she is naked, and wraps it around Jack’s shoulders. She rubs him down vigorously. He shakes so hard that he can barely stand. His eyes flutter shut, then snap open.
“Into the boat,” she says.
She helps him in, and he sinks to the bottom and curls into a ball. Eleanor leans against the boat with all her might, and shoves it into the sea, then leaps inside.
“I’ll get you home,” she says to Jack.
Darkness falls over Jack like a sheet. She can almost see it happen.
She takes up the oars, and hopes she can row them back.
She slaps him awake on the shore. He doesn’t respond, so she slaps him again, and he twitches
, a little. She hits him harder, with the flat of her hand, and he starts awake. His eyes are shot through with red twine, and his lips are the color of frozen plums.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “It was the only way to wake you up.”
He blinks, and tries to look around.
“D-don’t g-go,” he stammers. His voice is small and reedy.
“We’re on the beach,” Eleanor says. “I can’t get you onto the bicycle by myself.”
“Bi-bi-bi—” he tries to say.
“Can you hang on while I ride?” she asks.
Jack can only nod, and the nod turns into a spasm, and she wraps him up in her own cold arms while he shakes and shakes.
She puts him into the bathtub and runs water over his pale skin. The house is quiet except for the rush of water and the knock of Jack’s knees against the tub. The water overtakes him. She makes sure it isn’t more than lukewarm, and watches as his body takes on the slightest tinge of pink again.
Jack takes long, deep breaths, and she says, “Can you sit up on your own?”
He nods.
“I’ll make you some warm milk,” Eleanor says. “Stay here. Don’t drown.”
She finds another of Jack’s T-shirts in his bedroom, and pulls on a pair of his shorts. They’re too big, so she rolls the waistband down until it’s thick enough to hang on her hips.
The kitchen looks the same as it did hours before, when they sat at the table, poring over Jack’s box of memories, drinking watery hot cocoa. Eleanor pours milk into a coffee mug, and warms it in the microwave, and while it turns and turns inside the humming box, she studies the room more carefully. It occurs to her that every object she sees has a maker, has a lifespan, has a history. Someone put it together, or pulled levers on a machine that assembled it. Someone even assembled the machine that assembled the objects, probably someone who was even long dead by now.
Time is a river, Mea told her. You exist outside of it.
That was how it felt, too, inside the rift. But here, on the outside again—for this is how Eleanor thinks of the world around her now—she is all too aware of the passage of time. The glowing red numbers that jitter and change on the microwave readout. The faint tick of a clock somewhere in the house. She looks at the dining table and its chairs and wonders where they will be in twenty years, or fifty. They aren’t expensive pieces of furniture, and probably won’t last that long, but they have a story all the same. She imagines the dining set changing hands at a yard sale someday, or following Jack to college, or gathering dust, left behind after Jack’s father passes away.
She looks around the house and thinks, Time is a gift.
The microwave chimes.
He cradles the mug in his hands. Eleanor turns off the faucet.
“How do you feel?” she asks, but she can already see that he is going to be okay. His eyes are lit up from the inside again, and while the redness is still terrible, it is fading even now.
“You rowed us b-back,” he says. “How did you do that?”
Eleanor smiles and shrugs. “You did it,” she says. “Can’t be all that hard.”
He tries to smile, but it comes off as a grimace.
She lifts his hands and the mug of milk. “Drink,” she says. “Just be still, and warm up.”
“Hypo—” he begins.
“I don’t think you have hypothermia,” she says. “Your fingers and toes looked okay to me.”
He nods, then his eyes widen again. “Where did you g-g-go?” he asks. “Did it—”
Eleanor smiles brightly. “It worked,” she says.
Jack nods once more. “G-good.”
“I know what it all means now,” Eleanor says. “Everything is going to be okay.”
She sits on the edge of his bed after tucking him in. He’s wearing sweatpants, a sweatshirt, a wool hat, socks, a fleece jacket. The tremble hasn’t gone away entirely, but it has diminished.
“I have to go away again,” she says. “But I told Mea to let me come back and make sure you were safe first.”
He looks confused.
“It’s a long story, Jack. I can’t tell you all of it right now, but I’ll tell you when I come back.”
“From wh-where?”
“There’s something I have to do,” Eleanor says. “I can’t explain it. It’ll sound crazy, but it’s all going to be just fine.”
She touches his cheek softly. Jack leans into her hand.
“You did a very important thing for me,” Eleanor says. “You’re the only person who could have. You might not ever know how important it is. You probably won’t even remember it later. So I want to tell you before I leave that—that you—that what you did means everything to me.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t underst-st-stand.”
“I know.” She kisses him on his pink, rough cheek. “Thank you.”
“Wait,” he says.
But Eleanor is already heading for the door.
“It’s all going to be okay,” she says, pausing in the doorway. “Every single thing is going to be okay.”
And she leaves.
She coasts down the hill on Jack’s bicycle, and winds through town, past the darkened shops and blinking neon signs. The rain has stopped, but the roads are still slick. She pedals into her mother’s neighborhood, past squishy, puddled lawns and dripping mailboxes.
She stops at the end of the street and leans on one foot.
Her father’s Buick is parked in the driveway. She doesn’t know how much that means now, or if it means anything at all.
She wants to go inside the house. She wants to wake them up, and throw her arms around them both, and tell them that everything is going to be fine. But leaving them again would be impossible. They wouldn’t understand, and they wouldn’t let her go.
So she turns and points the bicycle toward the shore road, and the rowboat.
Eleanor crosses the sea that her grandmother so often swam, to the island that haunted her mother’s childhood, and climbs it in the dark. She doesn’t bother to shed Jack’s clothes this time. She wonders if they will come with her, or flutter down to the ocean, empty.
Without hesitating, she walks to the sharp edge of the cliff, and leaps.
She plunges through the sky, then tears through it, and the warm, pleasant dark welcomes her in.
Mea has been waiting.
Hello, Eleanor, Mea says.
“Hello, Esmerelda,” Eleanor answers.
Eleanor settles into the darkness for a long visit. The more time she spends tangled in the black, laughing at the fine, stringy webs of color that burble up every time she moves, the less she thinks about Anchor Bend, and Jack, and her parents. She doesn’t even think about her sister—her sister who has somehow become something new and proud and strange—until Mea speaks.
Eleanor, Mea says.
The colors grow still, and Eleanor turns over in the black tide. Mea is close to her, nearer than before. Eleanor can feel her sister’s presence, as if a field around her own body is slightly disturbed by another. She and Esmerelda, two disembodied minds, two magnets drawn together.
Eleanor, Mea repeats. You returned for a reason. Do you wish to know what it is?
“You already told me,” Eleanor says, distracted. “It’s about healing our family.”
Do you wish to know how?
“Tell me what it was like,” Eleanor says.
Mea is confused. What do you mean?
“Did you see us? Were you looking down on us? Did you see yourself?”
When I died.
“Right,” Eleanor says. “What was it like when you showed up here? Did you know what it was all about? Did someone explain it to you like you did for me?”
You want to talk about this? Mea asks.
Eleanor nods, and a slow wash of orange bleeds into the darkness. “I want to know what you felt,” she says. “Don’t you want to know what I felt?”
I saw you, Mea answers. I understand how you felt. You were sad.
What else is there?
“It was the worst thing that ever happened in my life,” Eleanor says. “And now I’m here, and we’re together again. I just—I want to catch up.”
But we have something very important to do.
“Yeah, I know, but—we’re not in a hurry, right? You can go anywhere in time, you said you could. So we could talk for a million years, and still go right back to where we started. Couldn’t we?”
Yes.
“I missed you.”
I know.
“You must have missed me,” Eleanor says. “Or Mom or Dad.”
It is not the same for me, Mea says. I do not feel these things as you do.
“Oh.” Eleanor is quiet for a moment. “Then why did you bring me here?”
So we can set things right, Mea says. And then all will be right again.
“That’s all,” Eleanor says.
Yes.
“You didn’t miss me, even a little?”
It would hurt your feelings if I answered truthfully.
“You didn’t miss me,” Eleanor says. “I don’t know what to think about that.”
I am not Esmerelda, Mea says. Not the way you remember her. This is why I have taken a new name.
The darkness suddenly feels cavernous and empty to Eleanor. “This isn’t what I expected. Why does it matter to you that things are fucked up back home with Mom and Dad, with me? Why do you even care? You don’t have any feelings.”
You are upset.
“I’m heartbroken,” Eleanor says.
These things matter because I am here, Mea says. I am here because things are not right.
“It’s all about what’s best for you, then.”
What is best for me is also infinitely better for you.
Eleanor doesn’t say anything for a long time. She hangs in the dark, and thinks about standing astride her bicycle on the corner of her mother’s street. She wishes she had gone inside.
“Okay,” she says at last. “What are we supposed to do?”
For Eleanor’s sake, Mea tries very hard to remember her previous life. She has seen it many times over, has returned to the moment her life ended, observed it carefully. She has memorized the tiny events that contributed to it, the threads that tangle up in that knotted, violent second of human history.