Eleanor: A Novel

by Jason Gurley

  The children laugh. Eleanor cannot hear their words, but she recognizes the shout of excitement from Jack, and the squeal from little Eleanor, and then the two of them are running in crazy loops around the field, Jack trying to tag Eleanor, Eleanor barely escaping. They collapse into the grass and pull up big handfuls of it, and Jack finds a honeysuckle bush, and they pop the blossoms off and suck at them.

  Eleanor walks out into the field. She cannot help herself. She is entranced—fearful, but compelled to see her younger self up close, to inspect her like a captured moth. She is quiet, afraid she might startle the children, but they don’t seem to notice her at all. She watches them drop the honeysuckle blossoms and practice somersaults and handstands in the grass, their clothes growing progressively more and more stained.

  “Hello,” she says when she reaches the edge of the baseball diamond.

  The children do not acknowledge her, and for the first time, Eleanor wonders if they can see her at all. So she walks into the field, inserting herself into the middle of their gymnastics routines, and little Jack tumbles right past Eleanor’s feet without spying her.

  “Hello,” she says, looking down at him.

  He doesn’t answer, and Eleanor decides that this is a dream. Then she laughs at herself softly for not realizing that sooner. One doesn’t simply bump into one’s child doppelgänger without some serious dream action taking place.

  She pauses. What does that mean for her body back in the cafeteria? Did she fall asleep mid-step? Face-plant onto the tile floor?

  She certainly hopes not. She doesn’t want to wake up in the hospital or in the nurse’s office with a broken nose.

  Eleanor sinks to the ground and watches the children play. She remembers days something like this. She and Esmerelda and their mother would meet Jack and his mother at Franklin Park, and while the children would scamper over playground equipment and dig in the sandboxes, their mothers would chat happily over a thermos of coffee.

  She looks around now, but though there are benches, there are no mothers, no coffee, no playground equipment.

  Above her, the sun has moved on, and the rich blue sky has become a watery pink. Eleanor cannot see as clearly, and squints at the children as they run to a duffel bag on the ground. Little Jack comes out of the bag with a handful of slim gray sticks, and Eleanor wonders what they might be. Jack produces a lighter—Eleanor looks around, wondering why she doesn’t see any adult supervision, and then remembers for the hundredth time that this is a dream, and relaxes her guard—and touches it to one of the sticks. The tiny stem bursts into staticky orange light, and Jack hands the sparkler to little Eleanor.

  They dance around the meadow, painting elegant curls and spirals in the dusk with their sparklers, and Eleanor smiles to herself. There was a time, in the years before the accident, when she and her sister and their parents would spend the evening in the yard, watching the sun fall behind Anchor Bend and into the sea, sometimes landing right behind Huffnagle Island, silhouetting its outcropping of rock as it fell. They would wait for the fireflies to come out, then the girls would run around the yard with bottles, trying to capture the insects before bedtime was declared.

  She sighs, calmed by the memory.

  In the falling dark, the sparklers finally run out of light, and Eleanor watches as her tiny self takes Jack’s hand, and the two children vanish through the bushes from which they had emerged hours and hours ago.

  Eleanor gets up and follows. She cannot see beyond the bushes, but she pushes into them anyway, expecting to find the children hurrying across the meadow toward one of the distant farmhouses, but the bushes are full of night and shadow and she pushes through them and falls onto the damp square tile floor of the third-floor girls’ bathroom at Anchor Bend High.

  Eleanor is alarmed. She pushes herself into a sitting position and leans against a stall divider and wraps her arms around herself. She is shivering. The bathroom is dark, lit only by the late-afternoon sun coming through the small, square window above the sink. She is aware that this is wrong, that everything is wrong, that it is too late in the day and that she was nowhere near this bathroom when she—what? Fainted?

  Her brain feels as if it is shorting out. She cannot grasp a single clear thought. She just sits on the floor, trembling.

  She wishes Jack were here.

  It doesn’t work.

  Mea cannot pull the red-haired girl through the membrane. She tries, but the girl seems to slip out of her grasp. If this is all that happens, it will be okay—Mea thinks that she can try again, perhaps even a moment later—but that isn’t all that happens. The red-haired girl seems to notice Mea. She doesn’t look up, doesn’t seem to meet Mea’s amorphous gaze—but something shifts in her just before she passes through the doorway. Mea can tell that the girl recognizes it, but the girl keeps walking anyway.

  And then she simply disappears.

  Mea is aghast—another feeling she is not accustomed to. She flattens herself against the transparent wall, as if she can find a better vantage point from a thousand different angles. But the girl is just gone, just absolutely gone.

  Mea turns to the darkness. She thrums her question into the dark, pleading for an answer, but none comes.

  She turns back to the world on the other side of the wall, but the blackness has inserted itself between Mea and the view, and she can no longer see the girl or the place she comes from.

  Mea pleads with the dark.

  Why? Where?

  But no answer comes to her. So she waits, and waits, and waits, feeling the steady pressure of the darkness against her backside, feeling it breaking around her as if she is a rock in a stream. Memories push past her, memories that she ordinarily would have been curious to observe, but she pays them no mind. Mea has little interest in the passing of a comet, in the eruption of a deep-sea volcano, in the birth of a bear cub in a cave.

  She waits, and waits—

  The red-haired girl reappears, and the darkness pulls back from the membrane to reveal her curled on a floor, huddled small and afraid in shadows.

  Mea feels a vibrant rush of feeling within her belly, a terrible wish to enfold the girl, to reassure her—but of what? Mea reaches for her, but the membrane stands between them, and the red-haired girl remains still and fearful.

  There are few places as unnerving as an empty school at night.

  After what feels like hours—the orange glare of the sun through the little square window has turned pink, then purple, then has smoked itself out, leaving the bathroom dusky and formless to Eleanor—she finally gets to her feet. The tremble in her hands and knees has faded, but her first steps are uncertain. She reminds herself of a spindly-legged pony, just born.

  The hall outside the bathroom is dark and empty. Eleanor peers up and down its length, and tentatively calls, “Hello?” Her voice seems to echo softly off the lockers and closed classroom doors, and no voice returns her question.

  The bathroom door creaks and sighs, the sound magnified by the silence around her, and Eleanor cringes as the noise bangs off the walls like her voice did a moment ago. She steps into the hall. The bathroom door hisses closed behind her.

  For the first time she notices that she is not wearing the denim shorts and T-shirt that she dressed in that morning. Her feet are bare on the cold floor, and the yellow sundress from her dream hangs still and lifeless to her knees.

  Eleanor turns and pushes the bathroom door open again, and feels for the light switch. She finds it and flips it, and the fluorescent bars overhead hum and crackle and buzz and flicker to life. The bathroom looks the same at night as it does during the day, at least when the lights are on, and for a moment Eleanor allows herself to believe that it’s really daytime after all, and that if she goes back into the hallway she’ll bump into students coursing from class to class, and someone will mutter at her for getting in the way, and all will be right with the world again.

  But the bathroom is still vacant, and the square window still displays a
darkening sky, and Eleanor feels the emptiness of the school in her bones. She walks across the tile floor, feeling the faint stickiness of the previous evening’s floor polish, the gentle sucking sound as she lifts one foot, then the other. She pushes open the stall doors, hoping that she will find her clothes there, perhaps, but the stalls are unoccupied and empty.

  She sighs and pushes her fingers up through her hair and massages her scalp the way her father once showed her—the way he would ease his headaches after a long and stressful day of selling houses to ghosts—and she stops in horror. Her hands still pressed to her head, she runs four steps to the sink and looks fearfully into the mirror mounted to the tile wall.

  The mirror is smeary and scratched—someone at some point has carved the words WE ALL IS WHORES across the glass, a sentiment that Eleanor has often contemplated, searching feebly for the life truth that might be buried in such an unseemly phrase—but Eleanor can still make out her reflection just fine.

  The Eleanor staring back at her has long, beautiful red hair.

  She runs.

  Through the bathroom door, down the long and haunted hallway, past the lockers stuffed with homework and forgotten lunches and letterman jackets, past the classrooms and their abandoned desks and blackboards with swirls of smeared lessons and assignments, to the tall staircase that anchors the west end of the school. She runs, but she cannot outrun her sundress or her red hair, and so on the second story she stops to catch her breath, and she decides to return to the scene of the crime.

  The cafeteria is on the first floor. Its two sets of double doors are closed, but they are not locked. Eleanor leans against the metal bar that bisects the door, and it depresses, and she pushes the door open. She goes into the cafeteria, which is hollowed out and gapes in the dark, its long lunch tables folded up and pushed to the perimeter, its hard plastic chairs stacked like leaning chimneys beside the tables. The buffet serving counter is shut up tight, a metal shade pulled over its glass front.

  Eleanor stands at the doorway and closes her eyes, picturing her last memory.

  She had been leaving the cafeteria. She’d walked past Mrs. McDearmon’s stern face, had heard Jack calling for her. She had gone through the door, intending to—what? She hadn’t thought about it then, but she probably would have ended up in one of the bathrooms, hiding inside a stall until the lunch hour had passed. But that didn’t happen.

  Instead, she had walked through the door and into that alien farm world. She thinks of it as Iowa, the label that had occurred to her while she was there, because it reminded her of her father’s favorite movie, Field of Dreams, with the ballplayers disappearing into the tall corn—literally disappearing, vanishing right there on the screen. She remembers one of the ballplayers asking if he was in heaven, and the other guy says, no, it’s Iowa, and so Eleanor thinks of that strange place as Iowa.

  Is that what had happened to her?

  Had she walked out of her school cafeteria and into an Iowa meadow?

  She stares dubiously at the cafeteria doors. One door is closed, and its twin is sagging closed, and Eleanor watches it shut, clicking firmly into place.

  She steels herself and pushes the door open again, leaning on it until it notches into its fully open position, and then she does the same with the other door. The doorway is wide open now, both doors locked into place. She stands before them, then takes a tentative step forward.

  Then she remembers the static, the hum that she felt—it was like being at the science museum and putting her hands on that clear globe with the forks of electricity arcing inside it. The tiny hairs on her skin had lifted, and she had felt—something. Unsettled. Nervous.

  She waves her hand at the doorway, fluttering her fingers, but that strange field of energy isn’t there now. There’s no tingle in the air, and her hair—somehow long again—stays where it is.

  Eleanor walks through the door.

  Nothing happens.

  She crosses the threshold of the cafeteria once, twice, again and again, but nothing happens. Each time she finds herself either in the common room—surrounded by trophy cases and dangling pennants and vending machines and hand-lettered poster boards advertising the Sadie Hawkins Dance and the Anchor Bend-Roseville game on Friday—or in the cavernous cafeteria, its belly lit by two giant windows that spill over with faint evening light.

  “I’m going crazy,” Eleanor mutters to herself.

  She goes into the common room, and thinks about going home. She can’t explain where time has gone—for her it was noon, and now it is night. Did anybody see her? Where did she go? Surely Mrs. McDearmon would have noticed if Eleanor had simply winked out like a firefly, wouldn’t she? Maybe Eleanor didn’t go anyplace at all. Maybe she didn’t go to Iowa, or Venus, or wherever. Maybe she had simply wandered up to the third floor, in a trance or something, and just fallen asleep in the bathroom. Wouldn’t a janitor have found her? Wouldn’t someone have discovered her and called a teacher over? No, she thinks—the cleaning staff works after hours, everybody knows that.

  Her brain relaxes. Surely this explanation is logical enough.

  But it doesn’t explain her missing clothes.

  Or her hair, which has grown ten inches in a day.

  “They’re going to lock me up,” she says to herself.

  But she pushes the thought away and turns her attention to the problem of escaping the school. She has seen the large chains and padlocks that bind the doors shut. In the morning she often arrives early to school and has to wait outside for one of the faculty members to unlock those chains.

  She wanders the halls, stopping at every exterior set of doors, but they are all indeed chained shut. She feels a little bit like a ghost, and perhaps she is one. Perhaps she died when she passed through the magical cafeteria doors, like a video game character who attempts to pass through a sparking electrical field, and now Eleanor is doomed to wander and haunt the school forever.

  This concept tumbles around in her mind as she makes her way around the outer hall, pausing to test more doors, and she wonders what sorts of things a ghost might do to occupy itself in a dark and empty school for decades and decades. She could leave messages on blackboards to frighten students, she thinks with a small smile. She could scratch creepy messages into the mirrors—maybe a retort to the whores commentary upstairs—or she could rain basketballs across the gymnasium floor during assembly. But that sort of thing would only be entertaining for so long, and eventually, she worries, she would get bored, and then what? More than that, schools eventually are torn down, and where would she go then? Would she haunt the empty grounds? Haunt the strip mall that would inevitably spring up in its place? Or would she perish with the building, her ectoplasmic self dissipated into nothing?

  None of the doors are unlocked.

  She finishes her perimeter check at the front of the school. Through the doors she can see the shadowy parking lot, empty of vehicles, and the bus loop, also empty. For the first time it occurs to her that she may be trapped here all night long, and what will she do tomorrow when the students and teachers arrive and she’s here with strange long hair, barefoot, like some Robinson Crusoe washed up on a tile beach, living feral in the janitor’s closet?

  The janitors.

  As if she has conjured them with her thoughts, a small caravan of little white cars and a white panel van appear, their headlights blinding her as the vehicles turn into the school’s parking lot. Eleanor watches as five people climb out of the cars and go to the van and start unloading equipment: vacuum cleaners and mops and what looks like a giant sander.

  The cleaning crew talk amongst themselves, laughing at some joke. They gather around the front doors and wait, chuckling, while their leader unlocks a faculty access door in the side of the building. He goes inside, and a moment later appears at the front doors, unlocks the chain, and pushes one of the doors open. The crew starts to filter in, dragging their cleaning supplies behind them on casters and in buckets, and before the door closes, E
leanor darts out from behind the front hall trophy case and runs through the front door and into the cold evening.

  The very, very cold evening.

  She turns around and runs back through the door. The five cleaners stand frozen in the hall, staring at her.

  “I got locked in,” she says to the startled men and women. “Can someone give me a quarter for the pay phone?”

  Her father’s Buick is warm. The stereo is on, and her father’s favorite band, Bread, is singing her father’s favorite song. The singer’s voice is warm, too—comforting, Eleanor thinks, almost a bit like warm bread itself. The song triggers an old memory—a fragment of a memory, really—of Eleanor and Esmerelda zipped into the snugglebun: a strange, sleeping-bag-like construct with flaps that fold over the occupant’s shoulders and snap into place like oversized sleeves. The girls are perhaps five years old, and small enough to lie side by side in the snugglebun. They’re stretched out on the floor in front of the fireplace. A fire crackles. Eleanor’s father reads National Geographic and sips his coffee. Her mother knits in the rocking chair, moving slowly back and forth. The only sound in the room comes from her father’s record player.

  Eleanor can’t remember what happened next, but it doesn’t matter. The moment is as warm as her father’s car right now, and as perfect a memory as she could hope to conjure. She has not thought of that moment in a very long time. Maybe since it happened.

  “Want to tell me what happened?”

  Eleanor watches the streetlights slowly pass over the windshield, their reflections distorted into long, shining bars. There are few cars on the street, and fewer shops open. Anchor Bend rolls up the sidewalks early, which means it has to be at least seven o’clock.

  “What time is it?” she asks.

  Her father pushes a button on the console. On the stereo face, the luminous blue Cassette is replaced with a digital readout.