Wonderland

by Zoje Stage

  It was only after Eleanor Queen was born that Orla came to fully appreciate what her parents had endured. She’d doubted then her own ability to carry on if anything happened to her heart—and that’s what her daughter became the moment she was born, Orla’s heart, on the outside of her body. As Orla grew up, she and her family never forgot about Otto, but he became less a part of their everyday lives. When she was ten, they stripped the carpeting out of his old room and put up a mirror and a barre so she could practice dancing whenever she wanted. By the time she turned thirteen, they didn’t talk about him much anymore; he was pictures on a wall, a birthday, a death-day.

  She was so busy with dance, and her parents were so supportive. Only later did she wonder if they threw themselves so fully into her interests as a distraction from their pain. But they arranged their schedules to pick her up from school early every day and drive her to her preprofessional dance classes. One or both of them went with her when she auditioned for competitive summer programs. And her parents saved up their vacation weeks, and they all traveled as a family to San Francisco, Toronto, and, finally, New York City when she was accepted into each of those competitive summer programs.

  It hadn’t struck her as odd or exceptional that they never complained about the cost of her training or the money spent on airfare, hotel rooms, and new leotards and shoes. On her own in New York City, she came to understand how financially blessed her upbringing had been and how advantageous it was to have endlessly supportive parents. When she had roommates, before she lived with Shaw, she’d tried to keep the refrigerator and cupboards stocked with food and never asked her roomies to pitch in. Some of them kept crazy hours—taking extra dance classes, working extra jobs—trying to make their way in the city. She’d held more than one hand at Penn Station or Port Authority, kissed more than one wet cheek, as a friend or soon-to-be-former roommate packed it in and went home. The city was merciless in its mangling and disposal of dreams.

  Orla never forgot that her talent might not have been enough, nor her hard work; her parents—and their support—had been the magical element of the equation that made her life, her dreams, possible. Her parents came to see her in every new role, a weekend here, a weekend there, every season, until she retired. How many costumes had they seen her wear for different roles in ECCB’s jazzy Nutcracker? Her whole life, they made her feel like she was everything they’d ever wanted—and never the only child they had left.

  Orla thought about these things as hours passed into days. They were wretched days. She heard the hacking cough again—and knew it wasn’t Tycho. It wasn’t Eleanor Queen either, as she was always nearby and the coughing came from the second floor. The house had started to smell bad too, but in her morose state, Orla couldn’t tell if it was them—their unwashed bodies and clothes—or…something else.

  They couldn’t risk trying to flee again, and a part of her didn’t want to leave Tycho behind. He would haunt this place, and it might be the only bit of him she’d ever have. The powerlessness of their situation weighed on her, but every time she caught Eleanor Queen concentrating, trying to communicate with the spirit, Orla severed her connection. She’d shake her or clap angry hands in the girl’s face. Eleanor Queen insisted that they needed answers, that it was the only way, but Orla couldn’t let her channel such a dangerous entity anymore. She told her daughter she’d think of something. She told her the tree would die soon and they would be released.

  What was she still missing? This was tormenting her too. The imagery in Shaw’s paintings. The pentagram in the hand of a dying girl. And the more visceral things. The coughing. The sickly stench. When she got too bored, Eleanor Queen would sniff along the walls, searching for a dead rodent. She never found one. But the puzzle pieces were everywhere, as fragile as cherry blossoms in a strong wind. None of Orla’s theories stuck together, and Eleanor Queen maintained she had no sense of a girl. The thing that was tormenting them might be female, but She wasn’t human.

  In her worst moments, Orla wondered if Eleanor Queen had told the spirit—on purpose or accidentally—that they were running away. Maybe some part of Eleanor Queen hadn’t wanted to leave, the part that still had compassion for the thing and Her plight. Or maybe She had sensed them leaving the land when they passed the invisible threshold at the mailbox.

  They subsisted in the living room like two forgotten prisoners; their supplies dwindled, but no one came with the key to set them free. They were often sleepy, weakened from lack of food. Eleanor Queen made the couch her territory; from there she read her books and kept a watchful eye on her mother. Sometimes Orla sat in the ugly plaid chair. Sometimes she lay sprawled on the mattress. She’d scold herself in her mind—Figure something out!—but then succumb to absent staring and thinking about the past. Too many times, Tycho became Otto, and she saw herself as a little girl playing with a baby brother who talked and walked and looked like her son. But he still ended up insectival, curled up in an urn with his Tinkertoys spine.

  Inevitably, it also made her think of Shaw. And Ziploc bags full of freezer-scorched meat. Is that what he would look like if she went out and lifted the tarp? And what of Tycho? The best she could hope for was that he’d fallen asleep, slipping into death while his fingers and toes burned with the false heat of hypothermia.

  She shut her eyes and clenched her fists, the invisible once-smooth worry stones now jagged; her palms bore the bloody half-moons of her fingernails digging too often and too hard. But it was the only coping method she had to keep from continually bursting into tears in front of Eleanor Queen—though her daughter was too aware not to know what was going on.

  She felt it as Eleanor Queen perched beside her on the ugly plaid chair’s arm. “Mama.”

  Orla peeked at her. Then she squeezed her nose, as if her emotions were just looking to drip from somewhere. Eleanor Queen pulled her mother’s hand away, glanced at the red hieroglyphs etched on her palm.

  “We can’t hide forever.”

  She nodded, because her daughter sounded so reasonable. She wanted to scream, not at Eleanor Queen, but at the cruel hopelessness of their situation. The thing out there was unreasonable; It had proven that (and maybe It didn’t deserve a gendered pronoun). Sometimes Orla wished she could let herself drift into an endless sleep. Who had she been to assume for so many years that heaven was a fantasy, a fiction? Why couldn’t there be a marshmallow wonderland where a billion souls reunited? She wanted to try it, dying. Would Tycho be there? Shaw? Otto? Could she be one of those mothers who sacrificed their children first and then committed suicide?

  The thought punched her in the throat. No. There were more things they could try. And this wasn’t how her company of graceful warriors would behave, nor the women who’d earned spots at the table—or on the floor—of The Dinner Party.

  Orla swept Eleanor Queen onto her lap, enveloped her in her arms. She felt ribs, bones, through her daughter’s dirty pajamas. They’d been surviving on disgusting things. Brothy soups made with water, dried oregano, and garlic powder. Salad dressing swirled on a few mouthfuls of rice. Orla felt it in her own body, the eating away of her muscles. She’d been strong, but eventually her energy-consuming organs would run out of things to siphon calories from. They were running out of time. She chastised herself for taking those two days to mourn Tycho—or had it been three? And could she really call it mourning? It wasn’t like she’d been sitting shiva as her Jewish friends did or doing anything practical to honor the dead.

  No. She’d let herself fall into a quicksand of slimy, sticky self-pity and inactivity. Her eyelids drooped; she wasn’t sure she had the strength to climb away from her misery. Maybe it was the lack of nutrients. Everything was so cloudy, so nebulous and hard to follow—time, her thoughts, her movements.

  Wake up!

  “Is it Christmas Eve?” she asked her daughter.

  “I think so.”

  “Okay. Okay.” She wasn’t certain what she was going to do, but she was going to do something to s
alvage Christmas, and her daughter’s future. “You should go to bed early, so Santa will come.”

  Skepticism made an aged and doubtful mask of Eleanor Queen’s increasingly narrow face. But she kissed her mother’s cheek and acquiesced.

  37

  Orla didn’t stop Eleanor Queen as she bypassed the mattress and went upstairs, listless and subdued. Sometimes the girl liked to nap in her bedroom, but they still spent their nights camped on the living-room floor. Tonight Orla wanted to lay out a surprise; the least she could do was bring up the Christmas gifts. Maybe she’d call Eleanor Queen back down later. The thing knocked on her child’s mind at random times, and Orla couldn’t miss an opportunity to put a stop to it.

  Die already. That would be the best Christmas gift of all, if Eleanor Queen awoke in the morning, eyes wide and gleeful, the entity severed from her consciousness.

  She glanced around the basement as she went down the stairs; maybe there was something yet to find. The old man’s belongings hadn’t yielded any definitive clues, and if he had a special hiding place, it remained hidden. If only he had been receptive, aware of the thing on his land, maybe none of this would have happened. (If he were still alive, she would’ve killed him.) Everything in the cold cellar looked familiar; it had no more secrets to give up. Her husband’s heart—the furnace he’d loved—was still keeping them alive; its reassuring presence burned off some of her bitterness.

  The Christmas gifts were concealed in a big box marked LAMP/FRAGILE. There weren’t a lot; they hadn’t finished Christmas shopping, and Shaw and Orla had decided not to exchange presents since they’d purchased so much for the house. The children’s gifts were already wrapped, one special thing for each of them and a few smaller ones. They’d learned long ago to wrap everything the moment it was brought into the house. In the apartment, sometimes they’d had nowhere better to hide things but atop the kitchen cupboards or in their one bulging closet. The sight of Tycho’s presents made her breath hitch for a moment, but she carried his things upstairs with Eleanor Queen’s, and switched off the basement light.

  It hadn’t occurred to her to decorate, to hang any of the Christmas lights or the festive drawings and ornaments that the children had made. And the last thing she wanted to think about was a tree. But now, looking around the living room, arms full of presents, she saw a squatter’s mess; her daughter deserved more than that.

  She plopped the gifts onto the couch and quickly tidied the room. Even though the mattress would soon be back in use, she straightened all the bedding, fluffed the pillows. Maybe she’d let Eleanor Queen open her presents at midnight. That might be a nice surprise, and different from what they’d always done together as a family.

  There’s only two of us now.

  Tycho’s presents, again, threatened to undo her. Would they have the same effect on Eleanor Queen? She couldn’t stop seeing herself slipping beneath the water, her baby boy trapped on the ice, calling, “Mama.” What if she had let go of Eleanor Queen? Her efforts to clamber back onto the floe might have sent Tycho tumbling into the water, and they all might have come home together. She couldn’t forgive herself; it was almost as bad as the mistake she’d made with her husband. If only she’d known the water was a conduit, she could have grabbed them both and jumped. But she hadn’t known. And at that moment, only Eleanor Queen had seemed in imminent danger.

  Around and around the anguish spun.

  Orla pinched Tycho’s lumpiest, softest present. A monkey with long arms and legs and Velcro on the hands and feet. Eleanor Queen had had a similar one that she used to attach around her neck and waist and wear like an appendage. He loved his stuffed animals. Orla knew what all of the reindeer wrapping paper hid and imagined her son giggling as he tore open his treasures. The special Lego kit he’d been wanting. Supersoft fleece pajamas covered with…polar bears. (She winced.) And a rocket-ship backpack on which she’d sewn an authentic NASA patch.

  Could they hold a memorial of some sort for him? Make these gifts an offering to him, wherever he was? Would Eleanor Queen like that, a sense of closure, or would it break something inside her? Children’s souls, like their bones, were more pliable than adults’ and could bend a fair ways before breaking. But that didn’t mean they weren’t deeply affected. Trauma swam inside them, left bundles of eggs on swampy leaves; sometimes too many hatched. They could grow and gather and turn a person into someone else. Orla hoped that wasn’t happening to her brilliant girl.

  Afraid of making things worse, she arranged only Eleanor Queen’s gifts around the wood-burning stove. It was the best centerpiece they had, and in its own way, it symbolized life. The rest she carried into Shaw’s studio to hide in his closet.

  She lingered in his room. It smelled of him; he was everywhere. She’d kept his door closed, afraid of the reminders. But now she realized she needed the reminders, just as she needed not to forget the fierce women who had made her stronger. His paintings were like kisses, freely given, so much a part of him. Here he was on display, on his two easels and on the floor leaning against the walls.

  Maybe there was something of Shaw’s that she could give to Eleanor Queen as an extra-special gift. She squatted down and examined the paintings, turning each over to see if Shaw had scribbled a title anywhere. Some, she knew, had names, and maybe there was one in particular that spoke of daughters or of love.

  The paintings were beautiful, but the prominence of trees…even if the thing wasn’t a tree but some essence that lived inside it, it still didn’t seem like an appropriate gift. She considered finding the paintings he’d done in the city before they left; maybe one of those would work. But she couldn’t quite sever herself from the mysterious woodland images and the cabin that Shaw had…channeled? He’d mistaken It for his muse; Orla understood why, based on the depth and detail of his work. Once again, the camouflaged forms captured her.

  “What were you trying to say?” she asked aloud, spotting an assemblage of leaves that, viewed sideways, revealed the contemplative look of a human face. “Did you sense something out there? A consciousness? Did you know it was in the tree?” She sighed, letting herself fall into a sitting position on the floor. “Do you have the answers—are they here somewhere? I need to know what It wants. Why It won’t let us go.”

  “I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  The voice startled her so much that she scampered backward, knocking into one of Shaw’s easels. The painting toppled onto her head, and only after she tossed it aside—as if a rattlesnake had fallen on her—did she get an unobstructed view of the speaker.

  Orla opened her mouth to scream, but the scream wouldn’t come.

  She whimpered, pushing herself along the floor to get away from the figure who stood in the doorway.

  He stepped toward her to close the distance, but recognizing her fear, he held out his hands and made the same two gestures she’d once made to the snow rollers: Stop. Innocent.

  Her features aghast, her heart a revving semi on a collision course, Orla shook her head and gaped at her husband.

  Shaw took another step forward. “I can’t stay for long—”

  “How are you doing this? How can you do any of this?” She wasn’t fooled. This was an illusion or a trick. Or maybe the final avalanche of her sanity making its riotous descent toward the void.

  He knelt down a few feet in front of her, so similar in mannerisms to her husband that Orla felt herself inching forward, wanting to embrace him. To apologize. To hold him and never let go. But she kept her distance even as her eyes scrutinized him, expecting to find a flaw, a glitch in his appearance that would expose the sham of his identity. But he looked in every way, from his crooked teeth to his messy hair, like the husband she needed—

  “I can’t stay like this for long,” he said again. His voice had a robotic quality, as if he were trying too hard to make each word clear, and the tempo and pitch were a bit askew. “It’s the most difficult thing, more taxing than conjuring beauty in nature, to communicate lik
e you do. But you need answers—”

  “Yes. Please!” She rose to her knees.

  “You shouldn’t have stopped the young one when we were making so much progress.”

  He—It—was talking about Eleanor Queen. A moment ago Orla had wanted to touch him to verify his solidity—was he warm with life?—but now she wanted to slap his face, knock the mention of her child from his traitorous mouth.

  “I didn’t do this to hurt any of you, and I’m sorry for what’s happened. I know I’ve made mistakes. I thought the little boy would follow you into the water. I had to make a quick choice—channel the two of you to safety, or try to maintain the ice where he floated. I needed a lot of power to do either; I couldn’t do both.”

  Orla wept. Hearing the acknowledgment of Tycho’s death from her husband (even if he wasn’t)…raucous sobs threatened to crack her open. Shaw slipped forward and embraced her, which only made her cry harder. It felt like the man she knew. She clung to him. He didn’t stroke her hair or whisper in her ear the way a lover would, but just to have him for a moment…she wanted more, but he pulled back.

  “Listen,” he said. Orla obeyed the command. She smeared away her tears and snot with the back of her hand and gave the thing her rapt attention. “I need you to understand—”

  “Why are you doing this to me?”