Eleanor: A Novel

by Jason Gurley

  “Lady,” the pickup driver says, his voice wary.

  Agnes turns in her seat and looks toward the rear window. She doesn’t understand the angle of things. “Tilted?” she asks. “Are we tilted?”

  “Lady,” the driver says again.

  Agnes turns to the driver and sees him staring at the windshield, and so she looks at the windshield, too, and sees the gaping hole there, the broken safety glass scattered across the dashboard and the hood beyond, and then something moves and she sees a matted hank of red hair snagged in the broken glass, a few errant strands fluttering wet and heavy in the breeze. Blood clogs the hair like paint in the bristles of a brush, is streaked across the hood of the car, thinning in the rain.

  She stares at this for a long time, and then looks at Eleanor, who is stirring again, coughing, and then she looks at the driver, who says, “Lady, was there someone else—” and Agnes turns and looks at the empty back seat of the Subaru and feels that chewing sensation inside her turn ravenous, chasing the terrible wail out of her mouth and into the air where it hangs and haunts her dreams forever.

  Captain Mark finally and somewhat reluctantly pushes back from the bar. He’s flying deadhead back to Boston, he explains, and doesn’t have the luxury of an unexpected overnight stay in Portland, and so must get back into the sky. He shakes Paul’s hand, then warmly says, “I’m sure everything will be just fine. Things usually are.”

  Paul nods and smiles and raises his glass in a small gesture of thanks, but when Captain Mark disappears around the corner, he turns back to his glass and downs the last bit of warmed-over beer and exhales in a rush. He climbs down from the stool, perfectly steady, and grabs his bag.

  “Thanks,” the airport bartender says, cheerless in his green vest and golden bow tie.

  Paul nods and falls into the throng of arriving passengers on the concourse. By now Agnes and the girls are more than an hour late. He’s called the house and gotten the machine—“Hey, it’s the Witts, leave us a message,” followed by the girls singing in unison, “So we can delete it!”—and his several trips to the window looking out upon the arrivals ramp have been fruitless. No sign of the car, no sign of the girls. No Agnes.

  He was angry at first. He’s tired, it’s been a long trip. There’s a two-hour drive ahead. All he wants to do is fall asleep early in the bed he and Agnes share, then maybe wake up in the middle of the night, when everyone else is asleep, and work a little on his latest model, or maybe nudge Agnes into a bit of sleepy sex.

  But he isn’t angry anymore. He’s worried, and thinking about the hours ahead. They won’t involve retiring early, or making love to his wife, or working in the attic. The world has tilted underneath him. Even if everything is fine—even if it is just traffic—he’s too unnerved by his worries to even think of relaxing.

  He flags a taxi outside baggage claim, looking hopefully at the ramp one last time before he tosses his bag into the back seat and climbs inside. It takes a long time to get through the city proper to Highway 26. Captain Mark was correct—there had been acres and acres of traffic, and it hadn’t broken up in the hour that they’d spent over beers. The taxi slows to a crawl, picking its way through the snarl of vehicles like a bird tiptoeing through brambles, and Paul grows more and more impatient with every moment.

  “Can you detour me to a phone?” he asks the driver, who shrugs and works his way across three lanes to the first exit. He pulls into the parking lot of a gas station, and Paul leaps out and runs to the pay phone by the air compressor and water dispenser. He dials, covering his ear to mute the sound of the compressor, which is still rattling loudly, as if someone plugged too many quarters into the thing and it’s still happily and uselessly thrumming away. Paul dials the house again.

  “Hey, it’s the Witts, leave us a message—so we can delete it!”

  He waits for the dull beep and says, “Aggie? Esmerelda? Girls? Pick up. Pick up?”

  But nobody picks up.

  He stares out the passenger window of the taxi as the driver merges onto Highway 26. The city gives way to forest, and then the forest gives way to the flash of tunnel lights, and then the forest returns again. The hill grows steeper, and as the car climbs higher, the rain grows stronger.

  “Where you have been?” the driver asks Paul.

  “What?” Paul asks. “Sorry.”

  “Where you are coming from?”

  “Oh,” Paul says. “Florida.”

  “Ah,” the driver answers. “Sunshine. Water.”

  “Right,” Paul says, leaning his head against the passenger window again.

  “All this beauty you have missed,” the driver says with a chuckle, raising one hand to indicate the rain and rising fog.

  Paul doesn’t answer, just keeps staring up at the trees as they speed by. The driver is quiet until they pass a commotion on the opposite side of the freeway.

  “Shameful,” the driver says, his somber tone suggesting a great disappointment in humanity.

  Paul doesn’t look up, so he doesn’t see the now-empty family Subaru, crumpled like a ball of tinfoil in the rain. He doesn’t see the moving van wedged beneath it, or the emergency technicians working to remove the body from its front seat. Had he looked up, he would have seen a police cruiser angled sideways in the two nearest lanes, and the steady march of traffic squeezing by in the one remaining lane. He’d have seen the flashing lights of the two ambulances and the fire engine. He’d have seen the concerned pickup driver and the woman who had gone to the call box standing in the rain, drenched and wringing their hands.

  Though it’s broken, its fragmented bits clinging to embedded rebar, the concrete divider would have prevented Paul from seeing the small white sheet on the asphalt, rippling gently under the falling rain, a still, child-sized lump beneath it.

  “Shameful,” the taxi driver says again. By the time Paul realizes that the man is talking, and looks up to see what he means, the accident has fallen away behind them, and the taxi drives on, leaving rubberneck drivers in its wake, carrying Paul away from his family and to the coast, where his dark and empty home stands, waiting.

  Eleanor wakes up from a dream that she is falling, not toward anything in particular, but from some indeterminate height, and without gathering much speed. In her dream she has been tumbling slowly, almost gently, through a pleasant updraft. There was no earth below her, only endless blue. She doesn’t wake from the dream because it frightens her—she dreams this dream all the time—but because the migraine that sent her to bed early the night before has returned, manifesting itself in a red pulse above and behind her left eye. She visualizes the pain in much the same way every time it returns: as a long, hollow, strong needle that slides through her eye and into her brain, and then, not content with simply invading, begins to rotate like a long spoon in a cauldron. It scrambles her thoughts and puts her pain receptors on high alert, and she starts from bed so quickly that she almost tumbles to the floor—something else that is not an uncommon occurrence.

  The red pulse starts with pinpoint accuracy, almost a single red dot flexing and trembling, overlaying her vision, and then it broadens, as it always does, until her left eye sees the world through an alarming red haze. She focuses on each breath that she takes in and releases, visualizing the air rushing through her nose, into her lungs, and out again. She imagines that the outgoing breath carries her pain away with it.

  Today it doesn’t help. She loses sight in her left eye a moment after waking, and she can tell that today is one of the worst days, because flickers of red encroach upon the sight in her remaining eye, like a filmstrip curling and melting on the reel.

  “Mom,” Eleanor says, but her voice comes out in a whisper. Even that small sound aggravates the migraine, and the pain swells like the sea, threatening to overtake her.

  She turns in her bed, delicately lowering her feet to the floor. Her head pounds with every tiny movement, but she doesn’t have a choice. She needs to find her mother, who will know what to do.


  Except this is just an errant thought, and dimly, through the flaring pain, Eleanor knows this. Agnes will not know what to do. It wouldn’t matter if she did. Agnes is most likely in the same place she was when Eleanor went to bed the night before: curled into a worrisome and small ball in the blue corduroy-upholstered recliner in the den. Agnes will be lost to Eleanor, lost to the whole world around her, courtesy of the slim, tall vodka bottle that will almost certainly stand near-empty on the end table.

  This realization swims up to Eleanor through the red sea around her, and she adjusts her course of action. In the bathroom, in the medicine cabinet, is a plastic bottle of migraine pills. She gets to her feet, arms extended to steady herself, and walks across the carpeted bedroom floor at a ponderous pace.

  In the hallway, she stands on the cool hardwood floor. The smooth wood feels like a balm on her skin, rather than the painful overstimulation of the carpet, its every loop a barb in her heightened state. During the worst headaches, her every cell becomes hyper-sensitive, attuned to each air molecule that brushes against her. A mote of dust collides with her skin like a meteor. Everything hurts.

  She can faintly hear Agnes snoring downstairs.

  On an ordinary day she would wake a bit later, shower and dress, and prepare breakfast for herself, making a little extra for her mother. As the toast browned in the toaster, she would go to the den and wake Agnes, and make her eat something. Agnes would pick at her breakfast with trembling hands; her eyes, red and bleary, would stare through the table at nothing. Eleanor would kiss her mother’s cheek and leave her at the table, then ride her bicycle to school. Later she would return home to find her mother asleep again—sometimes in the blue corduroy recliner, sometimes on the couch, on very rare occasions in her bed upstairs. Sometimes Agnes wouldn’t have moved from the table at all. Mostly she remains confined to the ground floor, perhaps recognizing, despite her degraded condition, that stairs are a dangerous gauntlet for a woman who is almost constantly drunk.

  Eleanor finds the bottle of migraine pills and takes three of them, scooping water from the bathroom tap to wash them down. She pats her hand dry on a towel and returns to her room. The clock radio beside her bed reads 7:14, and she feels a bolt of panic. When the numbers flip to 7:15, the clock radio will come alive with the loud jangles of 97.3, the sonic shrapnel of which will almost surely drop Eleanor to the floor, where the red will overtake her entirely. So she walks as quickly as she can without sending seismic waves from her feet to her brain.

  She makes it, sliding the alarm’s switch to the off position and in the same movement softly flying into her bed, visualizing a feather wafting from the ceiling to the creaky mattress. She pulls the blankets over herself and lies very still on her back and pulls her extra pillow over her face and presses it down, down against her humming skin and eyes, feeling the surge of her heartbeat through her veins; and after a very long while, she crashes into sleep, and stays home from school with her incapacitated mother, who snores on in the blue corduroy chair downstairs.

  When Eleanor wakes, her bedroom has fallen into cool gray shadow. She blinks slowly, but the red gauze has removed itself from her eyes, and she lies still for a long moment, attuned to her body’s state of being, and realizes that the migraine has gone away, leaving behind only the slightest headache. The long needle is gone; the thrum of blood pounding in her veins has receded.

  She sighs, then takes in several slow breaths, releases them, and feels her muscles relax.

  She turns onto her side and looks at the clock. 8:22. Which means she has slept for more than twelve hours. She lies there, still, shifting her attention to the sounds of the house. The faint ticking behind the wall means that the heat has recently shut off, and Eleanor reminds herself to adjust the thermostat later. Winter has long since become spring, and the house has felt uncomfortably warm lately.

  Beyond the heating system, Eleanor hears nothing at all. She wonders if her mother has slept the entire day away, too. She dresses as though it is morning and the day lies new and glistening before her, pulling on a pair of clean shorts and a bright orange T-shirt with Stussy printed across the middle in aggressive script. She runs her hands through her short red hair, grateful for its abbreviated length, which means there are no painful tangles to brush out. She has kept her hair short for all the years since the accident, the memory of Esmerelda’s torn hair and bits of scalp forever seared into her mind.

  Eleanor shakes her head to clear the memory, then opens the door to the hallway. She pauses again on the landing, cocking her head and listening for any sounds, but none come from downstairs. The ceiling above her creaks a little, and she glances up, curious, and notices that the attic door is open. A thin, dim light shines through the narrow opening.

  Eleanor pulls the door open and looks up the stairs and sees the glow of a light. She cannot see past the half-wall at the top of the staircase, but she hears the creak again, slower and more pronounced now.

  “Agnes?” Eleanor calls.

  She climbs the stairs carefully. They’re caked with dust, but the dust is thinner in alternating patches on each step. Footprints, made by unsteady feet.

  “Agnes?” she calls again.

  She reaches the top of the stairs and sees that the single bulb fixed to the ceiling is alight, its weak glow barely illuminating the empty attic. Her mother sits cross-legged in the middle of the floor, her back to Eleanor. There is a bottle of Wild Turkey beside her, but no glass, and as Eleanor opens her mouth to ask Agnes what she’s doing, her mother lifts the bottle and tilts it against her lips.

  “Mom?” Eleanor asks. “What are you doing?”

  Agnes turns, startled by Eleanor’s sudden appearance. Eleanor is startled, too, by the bright bloom of red in her mother’s face, the delicate latticework of broken blood vessels in her cheeks and on the slope of her nose. Agnes’s brown hair is beginning to lighten and turn gray—something Eleanor is surprised she hasn’t noticed before. Her mother’s eyes are ringed with deep, dark circles, like bruises. Her skin is oily and marked with clogged pores.

  Agnes doesn’t answer.

  The attic floor creaks beneath Eleanor’s feet as she joins her mother. There is a cardboard carton on the floor in front of Agnes, one of only a few objects left in the attic since her father cleared out years ago. Eleanor recognizes the box immediately, and reaches for the lid to seal it up again.

  “No,” Agnes snaps, her voice thick and indistinct. “Don’t you dare.”

  “You shouldn’t be going through her stuff,” Eleanor says.

  “Don’t tell me what to do.”

  Agnes takes another sip from the bottle, and the liquor glistens on her lips, which are otherwise dry. Eleanor has a sudden urge to grab her mother beneath her arms and drag her down the stairs and into her bedroom, to strip her and throw her into the shower, to scrub her clean, to prop her on the bed and brush her hair until it shines again, to rub cream into her face and press a tube of balm to her lips, to restore her mother to the woman she once was.

  But then her mother says, “You’re just a—”

  Flecks of spittle land on Eleanor’s bare legs. “Ungrateful,” she finishes. “You’re ungrateful.”

  Eleanor just stares at her mother. “I’m not, either,” she says, finally.

  Agnes shakes her head. “She should be here.”

  “Her name is Esmerelda,” Eleanor says.

  “Don’t you say her name to me,” Agnes hisses.

  “She’s my sister,” Eleanor says. “My twin! Do you think you’re the only one who misses her? Do you think you’re the only one who feels guilty?”

  Agnes wilts. “I was driving,” she moans.

  Eleanor sinks to her knees beside her mother. She touches her mother’s hands. “You aren’t responsible,” she says quietly. “How could you blame yourself for this?”

  Agnes hides behind her limp hair, sobbing.

  “It’s not your fault,” Eleanor says again. She tries to pull her mother
close, but Agnes stiffens and stops crying.

  Her mother glares up at her through a curtain of hair. “You chose the front seat,” she accuses.

  Eleanor opens her mouth, but cannot think of anything to say.

  “Don’t want to hear that, do you?” Agnes says.

  Eleanor recoils from her mother. “Don’t say—”

  “What? That it’s your fault? Yours? That I wish you were dead, too—”

  “Mom,” Eleanor gasps.

  “—so that I wouldn’t have to see her poor face every time I look at you?”

  Eleanor goes, leaving her mother in the attic with the box of Esmerelda’s baby clothes and stuffed animals and the little white card from the hospital with her inky small footprints and the taped-down tiny lock of red hair and the small square packet with her first lost tooth. She takes the stairs carefully, wondering what would happen if she should trip and break her neck and leave her mother alone. Maybe it would serve her right. Would she even grieve? Or would she feel released from the awful bonds of motherhood?

  “That’s right,” her mother calls down the stairs after her. “That’s right, you should run away! Run out of here, go somewhere far away!”

  Eleanor decides as she pushes the attic door closed that she will never have a daughter. Mothers and daughters are horrible, horrible to each other.

  In the morning, Jack is waiting at the end of the driveway, standing astride his bicycle. His skinny legs are capped with small and tasteful sneakers, the sort that the kids at school like to mock because the shoes are absent any swoosh or trifecta of stripes. Jack barely seems to notice this—in fact does not notice that his classmates chuckle behind their hands at his clothing, at his jeans with the worn-out knees, his backpack that frays around the straps, even at his hair, which he demonstrates little talent for styling.

  These are all things that Eleanor likes very much about him.