by Jason Gurley
“Seven forty,” he says. “So? How does my smart girl manage to get locked up in the school?”
Eleanor looks out the window so she doesn’t have to lie to her father’s kind face. “I went to the nurse’s office,” she says. “I wasn’t feeling well.”
“How do you feel now?”
“Okay,” she says with a shrug. “I guess I fell asleep there.”
“Nobody checked on you?” Paul thumps the steering wheel. “Irresponsible sons of—I’ll call the school tomorrow and give them a piece of my mind.”
“Dad, it’s okay,” she says. “It was probably just an accident.”
“Okay?” he asks. “You think it’s okay for the adults in charge to just forget about a student? To lock her in the school overnight?”
“It wasn’t overnight.”
“It could have been, though,” he says. “That’s the point here. It’s irresponsible behavior.”
Eleanor sighs. “Okay.”
“What?” her father asks, noticing her dissatisfaction. “It’s uncool for a father to worry about his daughter?”
“It’s fine, Dad,” she says.
“Maybe it is uncool. But I’m uncool, so it works out.”
“You’re fishing, Dad,” Eleanor says.
“Hey, what’s going on with your hair?” he asks, reaching across the seat and taking one long lock in his fingers. “How did I not notice you were growing it out?”
She feels a pang of alarm. She has forgotten to tie her hair back so that he won’t notice the difference.
“Um,” she says, and then the stoplight ahead of them abruptly turns red.
“Crap,” her father mutters. He holds his arm out in front of her like a turnstile and brakes hard. “Sorry.”
“It’s fine,” she says, grateful for the distraction. “Thanks for coming to get me.”
“Yeah, well,” he says. “That’s what good parents do.”
Eleanor chooses not to comment on her father’s disparagement of her mother, but she knows that this won’t matter, and it doesn’t.
“Did your mother even pick up the phone?” he asks. Then he answers his own question. “I’ll bet she didn’t.”
“I called you, Dad.”
Paul nods and flips the blinker, and takes a slow right. “Yeah, but you did that for a reason, didn’t you,” he says. “You knew I’d answer. You knew that I would be there for you.”
“Dad,” Eleanor cautions.
“No, Eleanor, come on, now,” he says. “What if something had happened and I wasn’t around? What would you have done?”
Eleanor shrugs lightly. “I don’t know, Dad,” she says dismissively.
“Well,” he says, talking almost to himself now, “I know your mother wouldn’t have been there for you. Maybe you could have called Jack, if he was old enough to drive, but you know how his father is.” He turns to Eleanor sharply. “Don’t you ever get in a car with Jack’s dad, do you hear me?”
Eleanor nods and looks away. “I know, Dad.”
Paul sighs. “I know you know. We’ve talked about it a hundred times. I know. I just worry. I don’t like not being there for you every day.”
Eleanor frowns. “We’ve talked about this, too.”
“I just don’t see why you couldn’t have come to live with me,” Paul says, and Eleanor detects the familiar tones of hurt and disappointment in her father’s voice. She can hear the unspoken question: Wasn’t I good enough for you?
“Mom needs me,” Eleanor says. “You know it wasn’t personal.”
“Listen to you,” Paul says. “You sound like such an adult. Grown-up women say that a lot, you know. Nothing personal. The context is usually very different, but the words sound so mature when you say them. You sound mature. You’re not growing up too fast, are you?”
“Dad,” Eleanor groans.
“Your mother doesn’t need you,” Paul says. Then he pauses, as if he can hear Eleanor’s jaw fall open. “Wait, I didn’t mean it like that. Came out wrong. What I mean is, your mother needs someone. She needs—I don’t know. A caregiver. Actually, no, what your mother needs is a detox tank.”
“Dad, stop it.”
“I just don’t—”
“Stop it. I’ll get out and walk.”
Paul falls silent, and Eleanor folds her arms.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “It isn’t your fault that you love your mother. It isn’t your fault that she’s—”
“Dad—”
“—the drunk that she is,” he finishes.
Eleanor unbuckles her belt and a small red square lights up on the dashboard in front of her father and a chime sounds.
“Let me out,” she says.
“Eleanor, buckle your seatbelt.”
“Let me out right here or I’ll jump out,” she says.
“Buckle up and don’t be a child,” her father says. “We’re almost there anyway. I promise I won’t say anything more about your mother.”
Eleanor snaps her belt buckle and crosses her arms and picks her knees up and rests her feet on the seat. For the remaining few turns, neither she nor her father says anything at all. There is only the sound of the tires grasping the asphalt and releasing it, the hum of the heater and rush of the blower, the dulcet sounds of another Bread song, and then the car thumps up onto the inclined driveway.
Eleanor unbuckles her belt and grumbles, “Thanks for the ride,” and before she closes the door she can hear her father say, “Bet she won’t even answer the door for you,” and Eleanor knows he’s right, that Agnes is probably somewhere in the dark womb of the house, passed out as usual, unaware that her daughter has been missing for hours—and the worst part of all is really so much worse: that even if she knew, she probably wouldn’t care very much. She probably wouldn’t care very much at all.
Eleanor scoops the extra key out of the planter beside the door, shakes off the handful of dry potting soil and little styrofoam beads, and waves the key at her father. She can see him nod and wave back, and then the car vibrates in reverse out of the driveway. The frame sags a bit as it meets the road, and then the car rolls away, and Paul waves again as Eleanor unlocks the door and slips into the dark house.
The red-haired girl is different.
Mea watches her as she circumnavigates the high school, poking at doors and peeking through windows, and she can see the differences clearly. The girl isn’t dressed in the same attire as she was before. More than that, her red hair is much, much longer than it was. Mea fixates on the hair for a time, watching as it sways across the girl’s back as she walks. It’s beautiful, but it is also very, very familiar.
Familiarity is a foreign concept here in the dark. It haunts her, has haunted her since she discovered the red-haired girl in the stream of memories.
She knows her.
Mea does not understand this, or how it is possible. Mea is one with the darkness, with the ancient, forever black. She is unlike the memories that swim past her. She has never existed outside of the dark. But somehow she knows this red-haired child. Somehow the child is familiar to her.
She must talk to the child. She must communicate with her.
Mea feels another thing, another new sensation. Her shape has grown more rigid since her discovery of the girl, as if she is being bottled herself, her own inky form taking the shape of a container, of a cell that binds her. She feels panic, and worry, and—stress.
The girl will have the answer for her.
Mea watches and waits for the right moment to reach for the girl again.
Agnes stands in a pale rectangle of light. Around her the house is dark. The refrigerator door is open, but she doesn’t remember opening it. There’s food inside that she doesn’t remember buying. Milk and eggs and a loaf of bread. Some packaged meat. A plastic blue container with a yellow sticky note affixed to it.
She leans over. The note reads: Mom. Egg salad.
There’s a small heart scrawled beneath the words.
And a letter E
.
This is how it happens. She forgets, almost every time. She sees a note like this, sees the letter E. She forgets—just for a moment—that Esmerelda has been gone all these years. She mistakes the note for Esmerelda’s, a kind message to her mother.
The note is Eleanor’s, of course.
Esmerelda has been gone for nearly eight years, but Agnes sees her every time she opens her eyes. She told Eleanor to put away the family photos years ago, but it is as if they still stand on the mantel, still hang on the walls. The empty spaces they once occupied still appear full to Agnes, with Esme’s small round angel face staring back at her.
Agnes takes the blue container out and peels the note off and crumples it on the counter. The refrigerator thumps closed beside her. She pries open the lid and looks inside. Chopped egg whites, yellow paste of yolk and mayonnaise and pickles. She wants to eat it, knows that she should eat it, or anything, but she can’t. The smell turns her stomach, activates her gag reflex, and she barely makes it to the sink. What comes up is mostly liquid, cheap bourbon and vodka. She isn’t sure when she last ate, but her stomach tells her it probably wasn’t in the last couple of days.
She runs the faucet, then sinks to her knees and rests her forehead against the cool metal of the refrigerator door.
The worst of it is Eleanor.
Agnes sees her living daughter through a haze. Now and then Agnes will awake in the chair and find Eleanor drawing a blanket over her, and she’ll say, “Esme, oh dear—” and then Eleanor’s mouth will open and speak in Eleanor’s voice, shattering the illusion. It isn’t Eleanor’s fault that she has her sister’s face, that she is a walking reminder of all the years Esmerelda will never live.
But Agnes cannot look at her.
She stands up shakily, knowing she should eat something, at least drink some water, but instead she goes to the china cabinet in the dining room and kneels down and opens the lowest door. She knows the arrangement of the tall serving platters by heart, the wide rectangles of bone china that stand on little pedestals, and she finds the bottle-shaped thing behind one, and takes it out. She barely glances at the label. She knows it is whiskey by its shape, knows by its weight that it contains enough to sink her again into the dark long before Eleanor gets up for school.
She carries the bottle through the hall, and her reflection appears in the window, and Agnes stops and looks at herself. In the thin glare of moonlight she can see her face, almost gaunt beneath her unhealthy hair. She cannot see her mother in her own appearance. She barely remembers what her mother looked like. But she sees her father there, a little, and that reminds her of her mother, and Agnes thinks that if she hadn’t thrown up, if she were still buzzed on the liquor in her stomach, she might have pitched the bottle through the window.
She is young, but does not look it. She feels like a woman who has lived through the Depression, a woman who has watched her babies die, who is beaten down by circumstance and who succumbs to it, who doesn’t fight back, because why fight back, why would you ever fight back when it hurts so much less to just lie down?
Agnes settles in the chair and opens the bottle, and for just a moment doesn’t drink. The whiskey smell calms her, eases her nerves just enough to make her think to herself, in one small moment of clarity, All isn’t lost, I still have Eleanor—and then the moment dissipates, because thinking of Eleanor means that she thinks of Eleanor’s smiling green eyes, matched so cleanly to her red hair, and then she can only see Esmerelda’s red hair, shreds of it caught in the broken windshield, blood streaked on metal and vinyl, the smell of gasoline and exhaust, the tang of adrenaline, the coppery charge of blood on her teeth, and the moment becomes a monster, becomes Agnes’s demon.
There are so many demons.
Agnes tips the bottle back and her eyes flutter closed, and she swallows, and swallows again, and the burn of it tells her it will be okay, that everything will be just fine, because the burn is always followed by the dark, and the dark is followed by—
Peace. Or something very much like it.
She drinks, and eventually her grip loosens on the bottle, and she slips into that dark where Esmerelda, where Eleanor, where nobody else is permitted.
Eleanor’s mother is asleep in the blue corduroy chair. She is shivering and dressed only in a thin T-shirt and underwear. An open bottle is slanted against her hip, and one of Agnes’s hands is curled loosely around the neck.
Eleanor studies her mother for a long moment. The woman before her is delicate, with bones that show through her skin in strange places. Her mother’s collarbone is pronounced, her skin wrapped around it like a leather grip on a piece of bone knife. There are deep hollows above and below the bone. Agnes’s chest looks almost concave to Eleanor.
Eleanor thinks back to the memory of the fireplace and tries to picture her mother as she was then: her face fuller, with round and bright cheeks, and eyes that caught the orange light and internalized it until she almost seemed to glow. Her mother was never heavy, but there had been a roundness to her that Eleanor loved. Her mother’s hugs had been soft and encompassing where her father’s were firm.
The woman before her looks nothing like the woman of the memory.
The woman before her barely eats, even when Eleanor prepares a meal for the two of them. She hardly leaves the house, though she must leave sometimes, because mysterious new bottles of liquor appear in places where there were none previously. Eleanor hates to think about these daytime excursions to the liquor store. Her mother is almost never sober, and it seems inevitable that one day she will put her car into a building, or sail through a busy intersection without stopping.
Eleanor exhales slowly. “Mom?”
Agnes doesn’t stir.
Carefully, Eleanor extricates the bottle from her mother’s grip. Agnes’s fingers fall limp against her body. Eleanor collects the smaller bottles from the side table, too, the glass loudly clinking as the bottles knock together, but her mother doesn’t notice. Eleanor carries the bottles into the kitchen and considers upending them all into the sink, but then she thinks about her mother getting behind the wheel of the Honda in their garage, intent on restocking the vanished supply, and so she sets the bottles aside instead.
The blanket that she usually draws across her mother is on the floor in a heap beside the chair, and for the briefest moment, Eleanor almost hates her mother for lying there, paralyzed and freezing cold, with the warm blanket only a foot away from her. Then she thinks of her father and the way he talks about Agnes, and she relents.
“There should be someone in the world who loves you despite you,” she whispers to her mother.
She unfolds the blanket and spreads it over her mother’s sleeping form, tucks it tightly beneath her weight. She goes to the thermostat and adjusts it upward a few degrees, then stands there until she hears the deep hammer of the heating system coming to life. The floor vents push warm air out in a rush, and Eleanor sighs, aware in that moment that her entire existence—at least since the accident—is one enormous sigh, made up of a thousand smaller sighs, and at this thought she sighs again.
Then she goes upstairs, and too late, she feels the hum of static embrace her as she steps through her bedroom door.
The sight of the woman in the chair unnerves Mea. The woman appears to be little more than a shell: alive, but for no visible purpose. Mea watches the red-haired girl care for the woman, giving her warmth, and something strange and foreign flares inside Mea; she feels something very much like compassion. For the shell-woman, for the red-haired girl—a deep heat saddled with sadness.
The red-haired girl goes away and climbs some stairs, and Mea cannot resist any longer. When the girl approaches a new doorway, Mea reaches for her, hoping to draw her into the dark, into the black, where she can sit with the girl and communicate with her and understand the importance of all that she is seeing in the girl’s world.
She sees the expression on the girl’s face change, as if the red-haired girl somehow knows that
Mea is there. Mea pushes against the thin membrane that separates the dark from the girl’s world, and for a moment it appears that the girl will slide right through the membrane—for a moment Mea almost feels the girl’s hand stretch into the black, real and touchable and right there—and then the girl vanishes again, just the way she did in the high school, and Mea trembles with regret and unhappiness.
But this time she sees the girl, in a way.
The girl seems to fall into the crack between her world and Mea’s, into the tiniest of spaces between the girl’s bedroom and the slippery membrane that encases the darkness, and in that strange space—which Mea has never noticed before—the girl becomes a faint light, a tiny red orb that floats away like a bit of dandelion fluff.
Mea watches her, aware that she is somehow seeing through many worlds into a realm she never knew existed. She wonders what it is—where it is—but the darkness spills over her view again, shielding her from this new mystery, and Mea roars at the dark, demanding an answer, an explanation.
But the dark owes her nothing, and the vast stream of memories simply rushes on, leaving Mea behind in the black.
It happens again.
Eleanor feels the surge of static, the not-so-subtle tug of something, as if a black hole has opened up in her bedroom and is trying to suck her right through the doorway. She doesn’t have time to say a word, but a terrible thought unfolds in her mind like a vortex of its own—what if nothing is real, what if everything is just made up and anything can happen—and she feels a powerful urge to resist the thought, because to give in to it, to even consider it, would swallow her alive, would unhinge her sanity.
Because there is no reason that Eleanor should be doing anything other than stepping into her own bedroom right now, to remove the strange yellow sundress, to put on her coziest, safest flannel pajamas, to tuck herself into her bed. Perhaps she would even find her way into the old boxes in her closet, and find her softest childhood stuffed animals, and bury herself in them, to drown herself into a sleep that is as loved and cared-for as her old blankie, her stuffed turtle.
