by Jason Gurley
“Ellie!” she shouts up the stairs. “You better be ready!”
Eleanor sits alone in her father’s workshop, studying the tiny, unfinished house. It’s dim in the attic. The rain has turned the world outside to pleasant gray. She prefers days like this to any other kind of day. There is no sunshine, just rain. At age six, her favorite word is “inclement.” She uses it whenever she can, having learned it from her first school closure of the year. Today can certainly be described as inclement.
But the light spilling through the circular window at the far end of the attic is too pale, too removed from the work bench, and Eleanor cannot see the details of her father’s latest project. Reluctantly, she reaches up to the lamp and snaps it on. A warm orange glow floods the workspace, and the small house before her casts a long brown shadow across the table.
She can see it clearly now, and can almost pick out the last part her father painted. There’s a hardened dollop of blue paint beneath one tiny windowsill. She can picture his careful, deliberate brush stroke. He would have realized that there was too much paint on the brush. Under ordinary circumstances, he would have dabbed the excess paint on the mouth of the small bottle, but he had probably been in a hurry, in which case she could imagine him stroking the exterior of the house this way, then that way, and working the extra blob of paint into the narrow crevice beneath the windowsill, where it was mostly hidden from view, a secret that only she can share with him.
The rest of the house is well constructed. She thinks it’s probably her father’s best work yet. The floor plan is creative, different from the houses that she draws during art hour at school. Her houses are single-room blocks with leaning doors and lumpy rooftops. Her father’s are split-level constructions, sometimes with elaborate windows that reach all the way from the floor to the ceiling of a room.
Her favorite days were spent in the attic with him, perched on the stool on the other side of the table. She would be careful to stay out of his light. He would pull the lamp to his eye and peer through the magnifying lens at the house, delicately pressing the skeleton bones of the structure into the styrofoam foundation with tweezers.
“Why do you make little houses?” she had asked him, once.
“Well,” he answered, slowly, drawing the words out as he fit a miniature chimney stack into place, “because I’m not a very good architect.”
“What’s an architect?”
He smiled at her without looking up. “Someone who designs buildings. They say where everything goes and what it looks like.”
“Why aren’t you a good one?”
“I’m not a very good student,” he confessed. “You have to be a good student to be a good architect.”
“Oh,” Eleanor replied. Then she said, “But you make pretty houses.”
“Well, thank you, sweetheart.”
She watched him a little longer, then asked, “What’s your work instead?”
“You know the answer to that,” he said. “What does Daddy do for a job?”
Eleanor bit her lip. “Real cheese.”
“Realty,” he corrected.
“I know,” she said, then laughed. “Real cheese is funnier.”
But she had sensed his discomfort with the topic. At six years old, she wasn’t able to parse the subtext of that conversation, but years later she would understand that her father had failed at achieving his dream, and that he comforted himself by getting as close to it as possible. Instead of designing homes, he tried to sell them. And at night and early in the mornings, he built tiny homes in the attic of their house.
She studies the unfinished house on the table now and marvels at the microscopic detail: the insect-sized staircase leading to the front door, the little brass knocker on the door itself. Her favorite part is the lawn and trees, something her father’s houses didn’t always include, but which this one does. The lawn spreads wide around the roofless home, rolling with little hills and small trees. The driveway is empty, but a perfect little mailbox stands at the end of it.
Down the attic stairs, the second-floor door bangs open. Eleanor jumps, jostling the little house in her hands.
Her mother calls upstairs. “Ellie! You better be ready!”
“I’m ready, Mom,” she shouts back.
“Good,” her mother answers.
Eleanor hears the door creak as Agnes begins to close it again, but then the sound stops.
“You shouldn’t be up there without your father,” her mother adds. “Come on down now.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Eleanor jumps down from the stool. It rocks under her bottom, and she takes a moment to steady it before heading downstairs.
That’s when she notices the mailbox, its post snapped clean in half.
The attic door opens a little more, and Eleanor comes out, looking sheepish.
“You know your dad wouldn’t like you being up there alone,” Agnes says.
Eleanor nods meekly, and stares at the floor.
“No time for moping,” Agnes says. “I can’t find my galoshes.”
“Your rain boots?” Eleanor asks. “They’re by the back door.”
Agnes shifts her jaw and goes into her thoughts, then snaps her fingers. “That’s right—I was covering the petunias.”
Eleanor turns to go back into her room, but Agnes puts a hand on her shoulder.
“No goofing off,” she says to her daughter. “I need you both downstairs. We’re late.”
Paul will be returning from Boca Raton in just under two hours. He had complained to Agnes on the phone last night that he’d only seen the inside of the Holiday Inn—his room, the banquet hall where the realty seminar was being held—for six days straight. He had put postcards in the mail, little quaint photographs of gulls on the sterns of sailboats, funny pictures of elderly women in bathing suits, but none had arrived yet.
“I don’t want to hear it,” Agnes said. “You’re in Florida. It’s your own damn fault if you can’t find the beach.”
She knew the strain in her voice was obvious. Paul had taken this trip despite knowing that she was reaching her limits—he had traveled three times last month, and there were his regular nights drinking with Barn, and a few late showings in the new beachfront development—but he went anyway. Maybe he didn’t know how little patience Agnes had to work with in the beginning. Maybe he couldn’t tell that it was running out.
“How are things going?” he asked.
But her problems wouldn’t matter much to him. The walls of his hotel room were so close to his face that he couldn’t see past them. Agnes and her problems weren’t real, not until he got home again and they were something he had to confront and solve.
“When you get home,” Agnes answered, “I’m driving to Portland, and I might spend all your money on wine and a suite of my own. And I might not ever come back.”
“Agnes—”
But she had hung up on him, and her frustration hadn’t diminished overnight.
She scurries downstairs now. On the landing behind her she can hear the bathroom door open, and Eleanor and Esmerelda murmuring together. Agnes takes the bottom step with a hop and almost falls down. The red runner that covers the hardwood floor bunches up under her feet, and she slides and grabs at the banister.
She steadies herself, and kicks the runner flat again.
Her boots are exactly where Eleanor had said they were, like little sentries beside the sliding glass door. It’s one thing off her back, and she exhales slowly. The glass is cool and she rests her forehead against it and watches the rain falling in the back yard. Her breath fogs the glass, and then the fog quickly retreats when she inhales. Then it comes back with the next breath.
The back yard was supposed to be her place—her version of Paul’s attic. The petunias are lined up carefully beneath the plastic cover she put out the night before, safe from the rain, but now she doesn’t care. They’re only flowers. If they’d been destroyed by the rain, what would it matter? Paul would only tel
l her to get some more from the nursery. He wouldn’t consider the care she’d put into them, teasing them out of the ground, transforming them from hard bulbs into delicate, lovely paintings.
She’s serious about the hotel room in Portland.
Upstairs, the twins are fighting. She can hear the murmur of their voices carry through the ceiling.
She should go up and pull them apart, but the glass feels nice against her skin, and her hair hangs around her face, separating her from the world outside, creating a small space that is all her own. She lets the glass fog over. She can feel the chill radiating off of it, and each breath she lets out is warm and slow. The contrast between the temperatures is delightful.
Agnes closes her eyes. A lifetime of rainy mornings like this one. They are beautiful in their own cold way, but they burrow into her and turn her into somebody else. An angry mother, a lost child. Every rainy morning reminds her of her mother.
What little she remembers of her.
“It’s all water,” she mutters to herself. “Fucking water.”
Agnes pushes away from the glass door. She slips her feet into her boots. They slide in comfortably. The rubber creaks. She sighs again. Her shoulders are tight. Her head has begun to pound. She reminds herself to breathe—in, out, slowly, slowly—but the migraine will come along anyway, and there is nothing to be done about it.
She goes to the foot of the stairs and calls again for the girls.
They appear at the top, disheveled, elbowing each other for standing too close. They’ve been fighting.
“Get your coats,” she tells them. “We’re late.”
She presses her thumbs against her temples gently, and moves them in circles. The girls reappear and thunder down the stairs. Agnes winces.
This is not the time for one of her headaches.
She takes her own raincoat from the peg beside the front door and puts it on. She leaves it open, because it’s a stiff coat, and getting into the car is difficult when it’s zipped up. Her purse hangs on another peg, and she grabs it, too, then reaches instinctively for the small foyer table. Her fingers meet the empty surface, and she looks down.
“Keys,” she says, looking around.
The girls are standing beside her in their coats: purple for Esmerelda, blue for Eleanor. The different colors were Paul’s idea. “So we can tell them apart,” he said.
Agnes points at the coats. “Switch,” she says. “We don’t have time.”
Eleanor sighs and shrugs out of the purple coat. “You’re not supposed to be able to tell,” she complains.
But Agnes pats the pockets of her coat, ignoring her daughter.
Jingle.
Esmerelda is holding the ring of keys on one finger.
Agnes exhales in a rush. “Thank you,” she says. “Are we ready?”
She looks again at her daughters. Esmerelda has a book in one pocket of her coat. Eleanor has a spiral notebook and a pencil case. Given time to themselves, the girls often retreat into their own worlds in exactly this way. Esmerelda reads books that she has sneaked from her parents’ stash, tired of her Nancy Drew mysteries, and Eleanor draws elaborate pencil maps—underground tunnels full of misdirection and booby traps.
“What book did you take?” Agnes asks.
Esmerelda looks away. “Oh, just a book. It’s nothing.”
Agnes lets it go. She’d discovered a copy of The Shining under Esmerelda’s pillow a few weeks earlier, and had interrogated the girl. As it turned out, Esmerelda didn’t understand most of what she was reading, but she understood the Danny parts of the story. To her, The Shining seemed to be the story of a boy who got to play all day in an empty hotel. It sounded like an adventure.
“Let’s get going, then,” Agnes says.
She opens the door and takes a surprised step back. In the short time since she put her boots on, the rain has become a torrent, thundering down on the lawn and driveway as if the earth itself might crack in two. She ushers the girls onto the front porch with her, and locks the front door.
“Count of three?” Eleanor asks, looking up at Agnes.
“Go now,” Agnes says, putting a hand on each girl’s back and pushing them toward the porch steps.
The three of them run squealing into the rain. It pounds on their thin coats. Their boots splash in lakes that have formed on the driveway. The blue Subaru gleams in the pale storm light. Eleanor and Esmerelda wrestle for control of the front door, jostling each other.
“In, in, in!” Agnes shouts over the rain.
But the doors are locked.
They scream and run back to the safety of the porch, breathing hard, their faces slick and wet. Esmerelda stomps in place.
“Front seat,” Esmerelda says.
“It’s my turn,” Eleanor argues.
“Mom,” Esmerelda howls. “I called the front seat—”
“We don’t have time for you to fight over stupid things,” Agnes says. “Figure it out. Okay? Now count to five, then come after me.”
Agnes turns and darts to the car. Her hood falls away, and her hair instantly darkens and fastens itself to her skin in long heavy tendrils. She jams the key into the lock and yanks the door open and heaves herself into the driver’s seat. She slams the door behind her and sits, stunned. The girls appear at the windows a moment later, yelling and pounding on the glass. Agnes snaps out of her momentary haze and throws the locks.
Esmerelda reaches for the front door handle, but Eleanor throws a hip and beats her to it, scrambling into the front seat.
“Mom,” Esmerelda complains, standing beside the car in the downpour.
“Inside! Now!” Agnes barks.
Esmerelda jumps and splashes down in a puddle, angry, then climbs into the back seat and slams the door as hard as she can.
Eleanor turns around and looks at her sister triumphantly.
Esmerelda sticks her tongue out.
“Buckle,” Agnes says.
She starts the car and slides the heater control to full in one motion. The engine thrums to life, and the vents blast cold air. Eleanor pushes the vents toward the ceiling.
“Are we late?” Esmerelda asks, wiping the rain from her eyes.
Agnes turns to answer, then flinches as a drop of water smacks her in the eye. She tilts her head back and inspects the ceiling. The cloth lining is dark, soaked through. Water collects slowly into a fat bead, then falls onto her.
“Fuck,” Agnes says.
“Mom!” Eleanor gasps.
“Yes, all right?” Agnes says, a little more angrily than she intends. She yanks the stick into reverse, then turns, snaking one arm over the back of Eleanor’s seat. She pushes the gas, and the Subaru rattles down the drive and arcs into the street. “We’re very, very late.”
“And the rain doesn’t help,” Eleanor adds.
“Right,” Agnes says. “The rain doesn’t help.”
“I like the rain,” Esmerelda says.
“Don’t be difficult,” Eleanor says, glaring at her twin.
“What?” Esmerelda asks, defiantly. “It’s only water.”
Agnes stares at her daughter in the mirror.
“What?” Esmerelda asks, softer this time.
Agnes drives as fast as she dares through the neighborhood, then wrenches the car onto the avenue that will carry them through town to the highway. After a moment of driving, Eleanor folds open her notebook and continues drawing a map that looks like a cross-section of a militant anthill. In the back seat, Esmerelda unbuckles and slides closer to the window, then buckles herself in again. She watches the passing cars, then focuses on the steam on the window. With her fingernail, in very tiny print, she writes her mother’s swear word in the steam. Then she quickly erases it. She takes out her book; this time it’s Jaws. She turns to the part of the book where Hooper and Chief Brody’s wife begin their affair, curious at the words there and what they mean.
The road hisses under the car, and every passing car sends up a fan of water that lands on the S
ubaru with a staccato splash. The girls, accustomed to these sorts of storms, don’t look up from their diversions.
Agnes follows the coast road to the highway. She only takes this road when they must drive to Portland. She tries not to look when the rows of houses and scruffy fields of pine fall away and the rocky beaches spread out beside the ocean, but it isn’t easy, and eventually she looks anyway. They’ve already driven past the pier where her father borrowed the rowboat, and the section of beach where her mother would dive into the sea for her daily swim. But she can still see Huffnagle looming out there on the horizon, dark and knotted, its hunched back scraping the black clouds above.
Anchor Bend is small and sits on Oregon’s coastline like a burl on a redwood, knobby and hard. It is a postcard town, nestled into the pines, quiet and unassuming. Its sunsets are spectacular, its mornings gloomy and drenched with fog. The town was built to serve the sea, and during the second war, it thrived, coming into its own as a small-market port. Thousands of tons of machinery left America through the tiny keyhole of Anchor Bend. Engines for troop transports, windshields and doors for command vehicles—even the occasional wing structure for a bomber. Those were good years, and as the sea became a good customer, the fisheries and canneries followed. Working families flocked to the town, and it swelled from its original population of two thousand to nearly thirty-seven thousand in just two years.
These days the docks and warehouses are still there, battered and rusted but standing, though the fisheries are gone, moved up the coast into Washington. A fire had torn through the industrial district, reducing the two largest fisheries to ash and cinder. Management had opted not to rebuild, and their scorched lots stand empty even now.
Anchor Bend recalls its populous, profitable past, but has very little pride left. Entire suburbs stand empty. Street after street of unoccupied homes, some of them condemned, sag and grow old in small, unnoticeable ways. The herd has thinned, and fewer than twelve thousand people remain within the town’s borders. Most are simply holding on until a better life someplace else beckons.
It’s a strange town for a realtor. Nobody at Paul’s annual conference can tell him how to sell a home in a town where empty houses lie discarded on the side of the road like crushed cans.