Eleanor

by Jason Gurley

  “She’s getting older,” Paul says. “She’s got high blood pressure. And diabetes, I think.”

  Eleanor begins to cry, and her father puts his hand on her shoulder, and Officer Sheila turns away, but Jack steps closer to her and puts his arms around her. His arms are warm and alive and Eleanor cries, and somewhere inside her she allows herself to enjoy this feeling, this feeling of being held, of being enfolded by another person, because even with everything that has gone wrong now, it is still the first time in so very long that she has felt anything like that at all.

  In the quiet, then, she hears Gerry’s soft, labored breathing, and that feeling goes away.

  Eleanor sits on the couch in her father’s office. The paramedic has given her a blanket. It’s rough, and folds around her like—like burlap, she thinks regretfully. But it warms her. She didn’t know that she was cold until the paramedic wrapped it around her.

  The sounds of the office are unnatural today. Gerry’s rattling breath. The paramedic’s equipment scraping and knocking around. Jack, pacing. Eleanor feels small and responsible, somehow, for the wrongness of the world. That’s what it is: wrong. She struggles with her thoughts, but they don’t make any sense. She feels displaced, as if the world she inhabits has shifted, has become foreign to her.

  She doesn’t even know if it’s really the same Saturday.

  A blur in her vision distracts her. She looks up to see her father standing at his office window, his hands locked behind his back. He stares through the window at the sea wall. The shark statue is visible in the distance, and she wonders if he saw her there before. The sun is going down, and the statue flares gold as the light seeps away. Her father is a dark silhouette, pink around the edges.

  He sighs heavily, and Eleanor can almost feel it in her bones. Her father doesn’t look well, and that is surprising to her, because just yesterday—was it yesterday?—he was fine. Just yesterday the world was righted upon its axis, and all was well. The summer had been pleasant, even easy. But now her father looks as if he has endured a battle. He is tired—she can see it in the slump of his shoulders, the curve of his spine. He hasn’t shaved. His face is prickly under a few days of stubble. His clothes are wrinkled.

  Were his clothes wrinkled like that earlier in the day, when she and Jack had stopped by to steal bottles of orange juice from the office refrigerator? Eleanor can’t remember.

  She thinks of her mother, then, because her father’s condition is not unlike Agnes’s. Her mother, who isn’t here. Who is probably at home, as usual, tucked into her chair, fingers curled around a bottle of something. For a moment, Eleanor hates her, but this is nothing new. There have been many such moments during the past seven years. There will be many more. This is what it is like when a child must raise herself and her parent.

  Eleanor doesn’t fool herself anymore. She knows that her mother doesn’t care about her. Suspects, sometimes, that her mother even hates her. She can see the pain and anger in Agnes’s eyes when she is somewhat lucid. She knows that her mother blames her—irrationally, but that doesn’t matter—for Esmerelda’s death. Hates her for being the one who lived.

  Did Agnes even love them when they were alive? Eleanor wonders this often. Her sister seems to have taken on a new shape in death, a regal shape, as Agnes has built up Esmerelda’s memory into a towering figure in their dark home.

  Eleanor sighs now, too.

  In the lobby, Jack sits behind Gerry’s desk, turning idly this way and that in the chair. He looks forlorn and helpless, and stares down at his hands. He notices Eleanor watching him, and glances up, then away. He looks at her again, then mouths something—Come here, perhaps?—and jerks his head toward the little kitchen behind him.

  Eleanor gets up. The couch creaks, but her father doesn’t notice, and again she feels like something critical has changed. When she was small and tripped and bumped her head and cried, he would scoop her up and lock her in his arms and press his cheek to hers and whisper in her ear. You’re okay, he would say. I’m right here. I love you.

  And that would make everything better.

  Her father sighs again.

  Eleanor leaves the room and follows Jack into the kitchen. She doesn’t look at Geraldine, still laid out on the sofa, still rattling like a loose gutter.

  Jack pulls open the refrigerator and takes out a box of cranberry juice. He holds it up questioningly. Eleanor shakes her head, and he takes the box for himself, puncturing the foil cover with the straw and bumping the refrigerator door closed with his hip.

  “Is your dad okay?” Jack asks.

  Eleanor shrugs. “I don’t know. He will be.”

  “He was really upset,” Jack says.

  “Gerry—”

  Jack nods. “She just—she just went empty,” he says. He wrinkles his nose. “Not empty. But—do you know? She just fell down.”

  Eleanor looks at her feet. “Did you—never mind.”

  Jack says, “You’re going to tell me what happened now, right?”

  “Jack,” she says. “I don’t know what happened.”

  “No,” he says. “I think you do. I think you have an idea, even if you don’t really know.”

  She’s quiet, and then she says, “I really don’t know.”

  “But something happened,” he says. “Don’t lie to me. And it happened before. Didn’t it?”

  Eleanor takes a slow breath, then looks at Jack solemnly. “Yes.”

  “What did it feel like?” he asks.

  He pulls out a chair for her, and she sinks into it, bundled in her scratchy blanket. He pulls out another for himself, and sits next to her, facing her, the juice box cupped in his hands.

  “I don’t think I can explain it,” she says.

  Jack doesn’t look away.

  “Try,” he says.

  So she does.

  In the little kitchen in her father’s office, while her father stands like a frozen statue at the window in the next room, while his receptionist lies damaged on the sofa nearby, Eleanor tries to put into words what is happening to her, and discovers that she has plenty of words, indeed.

  Three days, not two.

  It takes that long to reach the foothills below the crash site. Three days of slogging through the muck and rising water. The keeper’s valley is slowly filling like a bowl, the first time in what must be a hundred years. She walks, gripping a long stick in one hand, and her shadow flits on the surface of the water beside her. The water is cold, bitterly cold, but the keeper barely feels it. If she wanted to, she could warm the water to a boil with a thought.

  But she doesn’t want to.

  She looks up at the mountain above, at the great pines that stretch into the sky. Beyond their crowns she can see smoke. It has thinned to small curls, and twists up from the crash site.

  “Just another few hours,” she says to her shadow. “We’re almost there.”

  The higher she climbs, the warmer the ground becomes. She can smell the acrid, scorched tang of burned fuel. The bed of pine needles at her feet is blackened. A faint mist swims up in the darkness, and within a few minutes, the ground is obscured. With each step, the keeper’s feet stir the mist, and she catches a glimpse of her boots, slick and glommy with muck. The laces have gone black, saturated with muddy water.

  This forest has burned and regrown twice since the keeper arrived in the valley so long ago. The earth here has never forgotten its pain. It cradles the heat of its own death, always just beneath the surface, as though releasing the memory would be to forget it forever, to risk succumbing to the fresh hell of fire again and again. But the forest burns, and always will burn, and it will always return. It is the way of the trees. There will always be strange things crashing from the sky to set the woods alight.

  The keeper’s valley is an open wound, doomed to scratch itself until it bleeds and bleeds.

  She prefers it this way.

  She knows something of pain.

  The keeper crests a small rise, and the trees
here have thinned. She turns and looks at the valley sprawling behind her. Her cabin is a speck in the distance, a thread of smoke rising from the chimney. She wonders if it will burn down while she is gone. She almost laughs at the idea. Her cabin, suddenly in the middle of a great lake, burning to cinders.

  Oh, well. If a spark leaps from the fireplace onto the rug and takes her cabin, it is no concern. She will build another one.

  She looks beyond the cabin. What interests her is not the smoke or the rug or the fireplace, but the beasts.

  They lumber down from the mountains at the farthest end of the valley, framed against the morbid gray sky. Their heavy steps are silent at this distance. The largest beast comes down first, her head and neck lost in the clouds. The mountains are no challenge to her, and she steps almost gracefully down their slopes as the keeper watches.

  The second, smaller beast follows, its gait broken. Its limp has grown more pronounced—or perhaps it just seems that way because of the steep incline that it must negotiate.

  Even from this distance the keeper can tell that one of the beast’s legs is horribly wounded.

  “What happened to you?” she wonders aloud.

  She knows that the beasts will bed down somewhere in the valley, where the river was before it swelled and merged with the new lake. They don’t seem to mind sleeping in the water. To them it is only a puddle. That they are visible to her even here, more than a hundred miles north, is a testament to their stunning size. When they lie down for the night, she will know. The earth will shake beneath her feet, even this far away. Needles will tumble from the trees. Standing water will ripple and churn.

  But she is perplexed by their movements. The beasts should be migrating south, not there already. That they are that far south now is a curiosity, an irregularity. That they appear to be marching north is unusual, and she is concerned.

  The keeper senses that the world around her has fallen out of time with itself.

  The plane’s wreckage is a marbled glow beyond the trees. It turns the branches and needles gold as night falls.

  “This is her fault,” the keeper says. “That damned child.”

  That damned child, indeed, leaping from dream world to dream world as if she were some sort of damp, fresh god, born just moments before, toddling about in the dark and wrecking everything, ignorant of the destruction in her wake.

  The keeper has never encountered anything like the girl before.

  She turns to her shadow, thin and barely visible in the falling dark.

  “Have you?” she asks. “Have you seen anything like her before?”

  Her shadow does not answer, but it does not need to.

  “No,” the keeper mutters. “No, she is something new.”

  She begins to climb again, intent on reaching the wreckage before midnight.

  Eleanor is quiet during the car ride to her father’s apartment. The car sways and bumps over the wet asphalt, triggering a strange new sensation, one of being unhitched from the world that passes by, as if Eleanor rides on some current that moves at a different pace from the rest of the universe. She rests her head against the passenger window. The glass is cool and pleasant on her skin. It grounds her, a little.

  Paul drives carefully, a little more slowly than usual. He is still quiet himself, but he casts sideways glances at Eleanor as he drives.

  Finally he says, “Penny for your thoughts?”

  Eleanor gives him a half-smile, but nothing more.

  Paul coasts to a stop at a red light, and it changes almost immediately, casting a sickly green glow on Eleanor’s skin.

  “Are you worried about your mom?” he asks. “I left her a message.”

  Eleanor doesn’t look at him. “I’m always worried about her.”

  Paul sighs. “She’s drinking again. Isn’t she.”

  Eleanor doesn’t answer. She doesn’t need to. Agnes hasn’t stopped drinking in years.

  “I’m sure she knows you’re safe,” Paul says.

  “Not likely,” Eleanor says, in a voice so quiet she can barely hear it herself.

  “What?”

  “I said I’m sure she does.”

  Paul nods, then says, “You know it’s killing me, right?”

  Eleanor lifts her head off the glass. “What’s killing you?”

  “Not knowing what happened,” he says. “I don’t know what’s happening with you, and it scares me.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it right now,” Eleanor says.

  “I know,” Paul says. He shifts in his seat so that he’s facing her, just a little. “I know you don’t want to, but—Ellie, I can’t not know. You’re my little girl.”

  Eleanor doesn’t say anything.

  “This is serious,” he says. “Don’t you realize—”

  “Of course I realize that,” Eleanor snaps. “It happened to me.”

  Paul falls silent, and Eleanor immediately feels guilty.

  “I mean—it must have been the most awful thing for you—” she says.

  “It was,” Paul interrupts. “It was exactly the most awful thing ever, Ellie. If I prayed, then I would pray every day and every night that you never have to go through anything like this. This has been the worst year ever.”

  Eleanor feels his words like a fist. “The worst,” she says, aware of a hollow inside her chest. “No. It isn’t the worst.”

  Paul opens his mouth, then closes it. “I—I didn’t mean—”

  “And I did go through it, Dad,” Eleanor says. “Do you think I wanted to? Do you think I have any idea—”

  She falls quiet, and sulks in the passenger seat, suddenly angry with her father. How could he make this about him?

  “Goddammit,” Paul says. He thumps his palms on the steering wheel in frustration. “Goddammit, Eleanor. I wiped your bottom. I gave you baths. You used to run around in circles and then throw your arms around my knees and say, ‘Dada, up.’ If you ever got hurt, it killed me—so do you know what it felt like to find out that you were just—just gone?”

  Eleanor folds her arms and slides down in her seat.

  “It felt like someone ripped my bones out,” Paul says. “Like I couldn’t stand up. I was imagining my little girl—my baby girl, just knee-high—out there all alone.”

  “I’m not your baby girl anymore,” she says. “I’m not knee-high. I’m taller than Mom.”

  “You know what I mean, El—”

  “Stop making this about you!” she says. “Who are you?”

  Paul blinks, startled.

  “Take me home,” she says.

  “We’re going home,” Paul answers, reeling.

  “Not your home,” Eleanor says, teeth flashing. “My home. The one that I didn’t leave.”

  Paul is silent, and for a moment Eleanor feels a cold crush of regret, but then Paul smacks his hand on the dashboard, hard, and says, “Does your mother even ask you about your day when you come home from school? Is she ever coherent? Do you have to feed her like a fu—like a baby? Is she even really your mother anymore?”

  “I want to go home,” Eleanor says quietly.

  “My home,” Paul barks, and then his voice drops to a growl. “You’ll stay in my home on my weekends, and this is my weekend.”

  Eleanor doesn’t answer him. She sits in the pale dashboard light, staring straight ahead into the dark, and Paul seethes behind the wheel.

  “Your mother can take care of herself,” he adds. His nostrils flare when he says it.

  Eleanor says, softly, “No, she can’t.”

  Paul swings the wheel and the car thumps up the ramp into the apartment parking lot. He pulls into his assigned space and turns the key, and the engine cuts out, and the car falls into a tense hush. He sits still for a moment, his hand frozen on the key, and then he exhales in a rush and turns to Eleanor. His eyes soften, and he starts to talk, but Eleanor just pushes the door open and climbs out, and closes it behind her.

  She’s halfway up the stairs before her father can ope
n his door to follow. She can hear him trudge up the stairs behind her. She knows what he had hoped for tonight—a comfortable evening, one that would restore the balance of things. A bowl of soup, a Saturday-night movie. She would fall asleep on the couch and he would put a blanket over her. He would feel like a good parent, and Eleanor would be safe.

  There will be none of that tonight.

  She turns out the light in the bedroom that will never feel like hers, and climbs into the bed that still doesn’t feel broken in, and pulls the blankets up to her chin. She sees her father’s shadow interrupt the sliver of light beneath the bedroom door. He lingers there for a minute, then two, and she hears him mumble something, then shuffle away.

  She remembers a brighter time, sometimes. When her mother was young and stern, but happy, most of the time, and her father would come home from work and shrug off the weight of his day and Eleanor would wait for the sound of the attic door opening, and follow him upstairs to watch him build entire worlds out of sticks and paper.

  Now it seems like all anybody ever does is tear the world apart.

  A bowl of chocolate ice cream. Coca-Cola poured over the top, the cold scoops crusted over, caramel brown. Eleanor taps at the brittle layer with her spoon, satisfied by the tiny cracking sound it makes.

  “That’s no kind of breakfast,” her father says, yawning.

  “It’s all you have,” she says, without looking up.

  “That’s not—” he says, but then he opens the refrigerator and stops. “Yeah. It’s all I have.”

  He takes containers out of the refrigerator. They were transparent, once, but the plastic is clouded, and the contents are indecipherable and mushy with mold. He drops them unceremoniously into the garbage can, one by one.

  “They’ll smell by afternoon,” Eleanor chides.

  “I’ll take the trash out,” he says.

  “No trash on Sundays.”

  “Yeah,” he says, “but there’s a dumpster, and—”

  “Dumpster’s full,” Eleanor says. “Might as well leave them in the icebox until Monday.”