Eleanor

by Jason Gurley

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Eleanor

  Copyright © 2014 Jason Gurley

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form, except for reasonable quotations for the purpose of reviews, without the author’s written permission.

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  ALSO BY JASON GURLEY

  Novels

  Eleanor

  Greatfall

  The Man Who Ended the World

  The Settlers

  The Colonists

  The Travelers (forthcoming)

  Collections & Short Stories

  Deep Breath Hold Tight: Stories About the End of Everything

  The Last Rail-Rider

  The Book of Matthew (The End of Greatfall)

  The Caretaker

  The Dark Age

  Wolf Skin

  Neptune Confidential

  Anthology Appearances

  From the Indie Side

  Synchronic: Thirteen Tales of Time Travel

  Help Fund My Robot Army!!! & Other Improbable Crowdfunding Stories (forthcoming)

  The Robot Chronicles (forthcoming)

  ACCLAIM FOR JASON GURLEY AND ELEANOR

  “Jason Gurley will be a household name one day.”

  – Hugh Howey, New York Times bestselling author of Wool

  “Haunting… if you liked The Ocean at the End of the Lane, you’ll love Eleanor.”

  – Peter Cawdron, author of Feedback and Xenophobia

  “Gurley’s masterful prose is reminiscent of Neil Gaiman… enchanting, haunting and powerful.”

  – Ernie Lindsey, USA Today bestselling author of Sara’s Game

  “Ambitious, challenging… as original as A Wrinkle in Time. Jason Gurley creates worlds I deeply want to explore.”

  – Michael Bunker, author of Wick and Pennsylvania

  “Jason Gurley is the kind of storyteller that makes you excited to sit down and spend a day reading.”

  – Ted Kosmatka, Nebula Award-nominated author of Prophet of Bones

  “An amazing talent… brings the human side to science fiction.”

  – Matthew Mather, bestselling author of The Atopia Chronicles

  “Proof that science fiction can be as emotionally evocative as the finest literary writing.”

  – William Hertling, author of Avogadro Corp.

  “Gurley’s works have the precision of memoir, finding that delicate balance between the fantastic and the poignant.”

  – Samuel Peralta, award-winning author of How More Beautiful You Are

  “Jason Gurley is a manipulative bastard. He grabs you at the beginning of the story and doesn’t let you go until you’ve experienced exactly what he wants you to. Let him.”

  – MeiLin Miranda, author of An Intimate History of the Greater Kingdom

  “Jason Gurley is one of today’s premier independent authors. (His) stories capture… the loneliness behind our wants.”

  – Erik Wecks, author of Aetna Adrift

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  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  Part One

  Part Two

  Part Three

  Part Four

  Epilogue

  Dear Reader

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  She sits in the breakfast nook and watches the rain. It falls with purpose, as if it has a consciousness, as if it intends to eradicate the earth, layer by layer. The front lawn is hard to make out in the downpour, but Eleanor can already see that the top layer of soil has been churned into mud. Her flowers bend sideways, petals yanked off by the storm. By afternoon only the thorny rose stems will remain.

  “A little rough out there,” Hob says, sliding into the nook, across the table from her.

  Eleanor loves mornings, but particularly mornings like this. It’s why Hob built the nook for her last year, one of the few things he made for her during their marriage that was truly useful. The nook gave her mornings a sense of place and direction, something they had been lacking before. It isn’t much, just a little slim table jutting from the wall, flanked by short benches just wide enough for a single person on each side. At first Eleanor thought it presumptuous that Hob had made two benches—she was possessive of her mornings, of the quiet before her day became a thing owned by other people—but Hob rarely joined her, somehow understanding that he wasn’t building a table for their little family but a submersible, a vessel for a woman who would happily sink to the bottom of the ocean and live there, alone, for the rest of her days, content with the view and with a few good books.

  Eleanor watches the rain fall outside and agrees. “Indeed.”

  “Rougher than usual,” Hob adds. He sips his tea with the faintest slurp.

  Eleanor cringes, just a bit, but Hob notices.

  “Sorry,” he says. “Habit.”

  She knows. It’s what he says each time. She searches immediately for something to say next. If she doesn’t, he’ll take her silence as an invitation to explain the habit, and he’ll tell her again of his years during the war, the years stationed in Okinawa, of the Japanese way of slurping to indicate their pleasure with and appreciation of a dish.

  “Do you think it will clear?” she asks, cupping her tea in her hands to warm them. Her fingers are long and narrow and envelop the mug. Her mother had wished her to play the piano, citing her fingers as the sole reason, but Eleanor had never felt music in her bones. She had tried, for a time, to please her mother. No—she had tried for years to please her mother. But after a few weeks of plinks and clanks on the old upright piano in the hallway, Eleanor had admitted defeat. Her mother had left the keys exposed, the wooden cover open, for the rest of her life, the dust gathering on the ivory a sort of tribute to her disappointment in Eleanor.

  As if Eleanor had needed a reminder.

  “News report says three days of this,” Hob answers, his stories of Okinawa forgotten. “We should stay in this afternoon,” he adds, almost hopefully.

  Eleanor shakes her head. “No,” she says. “We don’t—”

  “We don’t stay in,” Hob says, completing her familiar sentiment. “I know.”

  “Good,” Eleanor says, lifting her tea to her lips. “You know better.”

  Hob takes this personally, as he often does, and turns his attention intensely
to his tea. He watches the steam curl up, and Eleanor notices his shoulders draw tight, the way that they do when one of his attacks begins. He unfolds his stubby fingers, then closes them around the cup, then unfolds them again. She can hear tiny snaps and pops from his knuckles.

  “Hob,” she says, but already he can barely hear her. She knows this, but she speaks gently to him anyway. “Hob. Look at me, please.”

  She repeats this three times before he finds the strength to lift his head. And it is strength that he requires, even for such a small thing.

  This condition has not always been present. When she met Hob—nearly ten years ago now, she realizes—he wasn’t yet bowed by the memories of the war. He was, as men tended to be, proud—and even as they both recognized that something was changing in him, he’d rejected her suggestions that he talk to someone.

  “Hob,” she says once more, and he meets her eyes briefly, then looks away, trying to focus his gaze on something distant, something through the window. Tears fill the bowl of his eyelids and threaten to spill over, and in embarrassment, he stops breathing, focusing all his body’s energy on evaporating those humiliating tears.

  “Hob,” she says again. She sets her cup of tea aside and slides her hands over his own, feeling the knobs of his knuckles like vertebrae beneath her fingers. His hands are warm and unyielding, as if his skin sheathes bones of iron. Her thumbs find the softer part of his hands, the part between his own thumbs and index fingers, and she rubs lightly, willing his body to relax.

  She had, eventually, convinced Hob to see someone. She offered to join him, but Hob, proud even in moments of weakness, refused. So Eleanor had stood in the hallway of the clinic, her ear pressed to the door, listening to the doctor’s sonorous murmur, and to Hob’s reluctant, gravelly replies.

  “Shortness of breath?” the doctor had asked. “Muscle tension? Mental distraction?”

  She couldn’t hear Hob’s reply, but took it for an affirmative.

  “Can you describe what you’re feeling? Not medically,” the doctor clarified. “Just—tell me like you’re telling a child. Close your eyes. What do you feel when it happens?”

  Eleanor listened to the long pause, and when Hob finally answered, she bit her lip.

  “I carry the world,” he said, his words muffled by the office door. “Sometimes it’s just too heavy.”

  She strokes Hob’s hands now, and reminds him to breathe, and he nods and hears her. His tears spill over and fall onto the table and onto his hands, his hard hands, and she can feel him try to shake her loose so that he can wipe them away, as if they’re evidence of a crime he is ashamed to have committed. Eleanor lets him, wondering at this man who loves her so, and yet who cannot find the strength to simply be himself in her presence.

  “I’m sorry,” he says. His voice is thick, the voice of someone trying not to betray his emotions. “I’m sorry, it’s—”

  “Hush,” Eleanor says softly. “You’ve nothing to apologize for.”

  He blinks rapidly to clear his eyes, then takes a deep, restorative breath. She still finds him handsome, though she must admit to herself that his anxiety—for that is what the doctor told him he was feeling—was taking its toll on him. He’d put on weight in the last few months, and had taken to shopping for his clothes alone, as if he could hide the changes he was going through. But she watched the numbers on the tags of his pants, and they kept climbing. She felt terrible for wishing that she knew how to fix him, as if she harbored resentment toward his condition—not for his sake, but for how it affected her. They slept together rarely now. Hob often drifted off in front of the television, in the recliner that she gave him for his birthday last fall, and she would sometimes creep downstairs and find him awash in the light of dead air, static or an off-the-air program card on the screen.

  “Rough out,” Hob says again, as if nothing has happened.

  “Indeed,” Eleanor answers. She almost tells him that she loves him, then thinks better of it.

  From the doorway comes the sound of small feet, and they both turn and smile at the little girl standing there, dark hair in need of a brush, too-large nightgown floating around her like a halo.

  “Good morning,” their daughter says in her sing-song way. She crosses the kitchen and clambers up onto the bench beside her mother, just small enough to squeeze in.

  “Morning, Ags,” Hob says. “Breakfast?”

  “Cinnamon toast!” Agnes says, patting her palms on the little tabletop.

  “Oh, Hob, I’ll take care of it,” Eleanor says, but he shakes his head and waves her off, and goes to the breadbox and the spice rack and stands there, assembling his daughter’s breakfast, his back to them both. The three of them settle back into Hob’s stage play, everybody back on script, the world firmly upon his shoulders once again.

  “Mama,” Agnes says, drumming on the table with her little fingers. “I’ve made up my mind. I’m going swimming with you today.”

  “Oh?” Eleanor says. “What about that?”

  Agnes follows her mother’s pointed finger to the rain outside. “Oh,” she says, crestfallen. Then she brightens. “I’ll just swim under the water instead.”

  “There you go,” Eleanor says. “It’s all just water.”

  “It’s all just water,” Agnes repeats, singing the words. “But really, I want to come!”

  “I know,” Eleanor says. “Maybe we’ll go to the city pool after. What do you say?”

  “No, no, no,” Agnes says. “The ocean!”

  “Ocean’s too dangerous for little girls,” Hob says, turning to show Agnes a plate with three slices of bread. “How’s this?”

  Agnes inspects the buttered bread and the fine layer of cinnamon and sugar sprinkled on top. She points at one of the slices. “This one is sad,” she says. “It only has a little cinnamon.”

  Eleanor smiles and watches Hob swirl back into the kitchen, a fresh and changed man around his daughter. With a flourish, he dashes more cinnamon onto the impoverished piece of bread, and then Agnes leaps up to help him arrange the bread on the oven pan and slide it into the broiler. Eleanor turns back to the rain, musing for a moment on the father that Hob has become—a cheerful entertainer of their daughter—and wonders if, years from now, Agnes will remember him as a man who hid his feelings from her. He certainly tries to hide them from his wife, and perhaps fails only because Eleanor is older, and more perceptive, than their little girl.

  She thinks about this for a moment, but the rain takes her attention away again.

  Despite the steady rain, the sea is warmer in the early afternoon. This is a relative term; warmer does not mean that the water is warm, only a few degrees less cold. Eleanor stands in the shallows, wearing the thermal wetsuit that Hob ordered for her. She always feels restricted in the suit, at least until she’s submerged and it begins to flex with her movements.

  Each afternoon, at two o’clock, Eleanor and Hob drive down to the ocean shore. The Pacific spreads wide and gray before them like a rippling, dark parachute. Behind them, their little town of Anchor Bend goes about its own routines. The first wave of fishing trawlers returns at this time, chugging into port a few miles up the coast, trailing inky belches of oily black smoke. The fishing lanes are crowded, and the patchwork sound of collision horns is nearly constant.

  It is Eleanor’s favorite time of day.

  Hob says, “Hold up a second, there,” as if Eleanor is about to plunge into the sea and leave him far behind. She looks over her shoulder at him, holding her hand up to her eyes to block the glare of the bright gray sky, and watches him cross the gravelly beach on unsteady feet. He is fully dressed and carries a waterproof duffel bag, inside which are Eleanor’s clothes and a short stack of fat, fluffy towels. Hob’s boots echo on the short pier, heavy and hollow sounds that she has come to love dearly.

  She crouches and inspects the water at her feet. It’s clearer than usual, even with the rain dancing on the surface. She watches a tiny crab pick its way over the pebbles, i
ts delicate shell wobbling on its back. It passes her toes, almost touching her, and then moves along into deeper water.

  Eleanor flexes her toes, digging deep into the sand beneath the layer of smooth stones. She’s ready to go.

  “Come on now, Hob,” she calls.

  “All right, already,” comes his faint reply.

  She squints and watches as he pulls at the lashes that keep the old rowboat moored to the dock. It isn’t their boat, but it’s been there for as long as either of them can remember. It belongs to the town now, which means that sometimes when the two of them come to the beach, the boat isn’t there, and Hob cancels the afternoon swim altogether.

  She doesn’t like it when Hob takes charge.

  “Come on,” she shouts again.

  But he’s got it. He throws the duffel down into the boat, then steps aboard himself. By the time he settles in and grips the oars, Eleanor is already away, fifty yards off the shore, stroking hard against the current.

  In her younger days, Eleanor was a competitive swimmer. As the star member of the high school swim team, she set district and state records in freestyle events. Her achievements carried her to college, where she swam alongside equally strong women, yet still claimed record after record. Her coach at Oregon State registered her for an Olympic qualifying event, but Eleanor never made it. At twenty-two years old, she had already met and fallen in love with Hob, despite their age difference. They married between her junior and senior years of college, and then Agnes arrived—a slow and steady swell that began small and built into a wave that swamped Eleanor’s dream.