Eleanor: A Novel

by Jason Gurley

  “Dad,” she says, and she feels her panic well up inside, and her eyes fill with tears.

  “It’s okay, Ellie,” he says. “It’s okay, it’s okay. Just breathe.”

  The nurse says, “Ellie, my name is Shelley. Hey, that’s kind of funny, isn’t it? Ellie, Shelley. Ellie, Shelley. Kind of want to say that five times fast, don’t you?”

  Eleanor stares at her uncomprehendingly. The nurse’s eyes crinkle in a smile.

  “Eleanor, you’re in a hospital room right now,” she says. “Do you know how you got here?”

  Eleanor shakes her head, frightened, and her tears spill over onto her cheeks. She glances at her father, who appears to be on the verge of tears as well, and has to look away from him.

  “Ellie,” Shelley says, calmly. “Can you tell me when you were born?”

  “D-December,” Eleanor says.

  “December what? Slow breaths, okay? In… out. In… out.”

  Eleanor takes a long, shaky breath.

  “Good. Okay. December what?”

  “E-Eleventh,” Eleanor says, trying to steady her voice.

  “Good,” Shelley says brightly. “Very good. Do you remember what year?”

  Eleanor closes her eyes, then opens them. “Nineteen seventy-eight,” she says, after a moment.

  “Very good,” Shelley says. “And who is the man here with me?”

  “My d-dad,” Eleanor says, fighting back a sob. “He’s my dad.”

  “Good,” Shelley says again. “Now—Eleanor, I have to ask you this, and no matter what you’re feeling, I want you to tell me the absolute truth, okay?”

  Eleanor looks at Shelley strangely, then nods.

  “I want you to remember that this is a safe place, and that nothing bad will happen to you here,” Shelley says. “Do you understand?”

  Eleanor nods again. Her father stands at the foot of the bed, and his own tears begin streaming down his face.

  “Do you know why you’re here?” Shelley asks. “Can you tell me what happened to you?”

  Eleanor’s eyes flick in her father’s direction, then to the ceiling, then back to Shelley.

  “No,” she says, and she begins to shake her head from side to side, but the fresh heat of pain she felt earlier lingers at the corners of her consciousness, threatening to return.

  Shelley looks at Paul, then back at Eleanor. “Okay. It’s okay. We’re going to keep you here for a little while, okay? Just to make sure you’re doing okay, and to give you a little space to maybe remember some things. Is that okay?”

  Eleanor nods.

  Shelley steps back. “Okay. Your father’s here now. I’m going to be right outside. If there’s anything you need, or you’re in pain, or you remember something and just need to talk, I want you to press the button on that little remote control next to you. See it?”

  Eleanor glances down and sees a beige-colored box with a blue button on it, an attached cable running off the bed and out of sight. She nods again.

  “Okay. You’re going to feel pretty tired here in a few minutes,” Shelley adds. “Don’t fight that. Sleep as much as you can. Your body is still trying to recover from—from things.”

  Shelley leaves the room, and Paul comes to Eleanor’s bedside, and Eleanor looks up at her father, keeping her neck as rigid as she can, and she sees his tears, and she begins to cry again.

  Paul is not by Eleanor’s bed when she wakes. The room is dim, and she realizes that it is very early in the morning. A window opposite her bed is pink with the sunrise, made gauzy by thin linen curtains pulled mostly shut. She flicks her eyes this way and that, remembering the stark pain that chewed at her skull when she moved her head, and takes in the details of her room. There isn’t much to observe. She’s in a hospital room. There’s an empty second bed to her left, a yellow hard plastic chair to her right. A framed piece of art, dusky pink flowers in a white vase, hangs over the chair.

  Eleanor hears the muffled sound of a toilet flushing, then the hiss of running water. The door in the corner opens and her father steps out of a small bathroom and sees that Eleanor is awake.

  “Private bathroom,” he says, gesturing at it with his thumb. “Nice digs you’ve got here, Ellie.”

  But his smile is weak. She sees his worry printed on his face.

  “What happened?” she asks.

  Paul sighs and sits down in the yellow chair, then shrugs. “I’m really not sure,” he says. “Your mother is the one who found you.”

  “Mom?” Eleanor asks, dubiously. She cannot imagine her mother getting out of the blue chair for any reason at all.

  “She said she heard a loud noise and went upstairs,” Paul says. “She found you on the floor of your bedroom, just lying there. She said the wall was—she said it looked like it had been punched in.”

  Eleanor can hardly process this detail. “You and Mom—talked?”

  Paul nods, then leans forward. “Ellie, do you know what today is?”

  She thinks about this. “Yesterday was Monday,” she says. “So today is Tuesday. It’s the last week of school.”

  Paul’s lip trembles. She almost doesn’t notice.

  “What?” she asks slowly.

  “It’s Saturday,” Paul says.

  Eleanor blinks. Her father holds her gaze, but she looks away, confused.

  “You missed the last week of school,” he says, taking her hand in his. “Ellie, we didn’t know where you were.”

  Eleanor frowns. “That’s not right,” she says. “That isn’t possible. It’s Tuesday.”

  “Jack is the one who noticed,” Paul says. “He was worried when you didn’t answer the door on Tuesday morning for school. He rode his bicycle over to my apartment, and I called your mother.”

  “And she answered?” Eleanor asks. “She doesn’t even hear the phone.”

  “She heard it, and I asked her to check on you, and she said that you weren’t in your room.”

  Eleanor can feel her hand shaking, just a little. Her father squeezes it harder.

  “Ellie,” he says, softly. “She said your clothes were just—they were just in a pile upstairs. I came over and I looked through the whole house with your mother, and you weren’t there. We were so scared—”

  “I don’t believe that,” Eleanor says. “I don’t believe she was scared.”

  “She was terrified,” he says. “Your mother was terrified. She kept talking about your grandmother.”

  Eleanor turns her head at this, and grunts at the burst of pain in her neck. “Grandma Eleanor? She never talks about her.”

  “I’ve told you the story,” Paul says.

  “She disappeared, right. I know,” Eleanor says. “But why—”

  “Your mother was afraid that you had—had gone away, too,” Paul says. “You know she’s always felt like it was her fault. I think—I think maybe she felt guilty. For—well, you know. Maybe she had a moment of clarity.” He takes a long breath and Eleanor can hear it rattle in his lungs. “I think she was worried that she had put too much on you, and you’d run away, too.”

  “But—Grandma Eleanor didn’t run away,” Eleanor says. “ She—she committed—I would never even think about that.”

  “I know,” Paul says. “And, technically, I don’t think anybody knows if she… killed herself. Someone saw her swim out to sea, and nobody saw her come back. That’s not really the same thing.”

  Eleanor levels her eyes at her father. “Dad,” she says. “That doesn’t happen for real. She would have drowned.”

  “Probably true,” he says. “But you never know.”

  Eleanor doesn’t argue with him. She knows the story of her grandmother’s disappearance because her Grandpa Hob often told it during his later years, his voice thick with sadness and regret as he talked about her and the child that would have been named Patrick, or Patricia. She knows that Grandma Eleanor had been pregnant, and that her own mother had been younger than the twins were when Esmerelda died, and she knows that Grandpa Hob blamed
himself, and that her mother blames herself. Nearly thirty years after her grandmother’s suicide, the consequences of her final swim still reverberate through everyone’s lives.

  “Ellie,” her father says, softly. “Where were you all week?”

  She doesn’t know what her father is talking about—there’s no way that she’s been away for most of a week. But she sees the pain on his face, and realizes the worry that he’s been carrying on his shoulders, and she aches, knowing she is the reason for this. Since Esmerelda’s death, Eleanor has been careful to tread lightly through her parents’ lives. The last thing she ever wanted was to give them a reason to fear for her. It hasn’t changed things very much, though. Her father left her mother after a few terrible, grief-stricken months. Eleanor remembers the fights, the awful words that her father said to her mother—It’s your fault she’s dead—and she remembers her mother’s horrible words to Eleanor herself: Why were you the one who lived? Her parents took their grief out on each other, and on Eleanor herself, in a way.

  Esmerelda’s death split their family as finely as an atom, and the resulting detonation blinded them all.

  When Eleanor wakes again, her father is asleep in the yellow chair. He has scooted it up against the wall. His shoes are beside the chair, his socks stuffed inside. He looks uncomfortable, his neck turned at an angle and his chin resting on his shoulder. It’s late afternoon, and the sun is on its way down again, bathing the room in gold, and it occurs to Eleanor that several days of her life have disappeared. Four sunrises and sunsets, at least. This thought tumbles around in her mind, and then it lodges in her throat, and she feels a sense of regret—as though something has been taken from her, and her body wants to mourn that loss.

  She concentrates instead on Monday, remembering the things that she doesn’t want to tell her father or Shelley the nurse about. She’s afraid that saying the words out loud will somehow make her worst fears real—that she has lost some piece of her mind somehow. She has never heard of children vanishing through doorways that make their hair stand on end and suck at them like an undertow. The very idea reminds her of something from one of Esmerelda’s science fiction novels.

  But she believes that it was real.

  She has stepped foot on strange earth, has buried her body in the mud, has felt cold and heat.

  When she found herself in the third-story bathroom at school, she was wearing the yellow sundress from Iowa. Her hair was long. Whatever has happened to her is real. She has brought pieces of these—whatever they are—daydreams? nightmares?—back with her.

  Which means that her mother probably discovered her naked and streaked with mud on her bedroom floor.

  She longs for Esmerelda’s company. She needs someone to talk to who won’t think she’s insane. She wishes her mother were—no. Her mother was never that sort of mother. There was only Esmerelda, who would slip out of her own bed and climb into Eleanor’s and whisper, “Backs,” which was Eleanor’s cue to turn over. Esme would turn the opposite way, and the twins would scoot together until their backs touched. Eleanor would say, “What’s wrong?” and Esmerelda, facing into the dark but warmed by her sister, would say, “I broke the lamp in the attic,” and then Eleanor would confess something.

  She cannot remember how old they were, but one night Eleanor climbed into Esme’s bed. “Backs,” she whispered, and then, when she felt the heat of her sister’s body, Eleanor said, “I found a picture of Grandma Eleanor.”

  “Where?” Esmerelda asked.

  “A box in the garage,” Eleanor answered. “There were a lot of things in there. Grandpa’s stuff.”

  “What was she like? Was she beautiful?”

  “I guess,” Eleanor confessed. “She didn’t look like Mom. Not much.”

  “I bet she was beautiful in person.”

  “Why doesn’t Mom ever talk about her?”

  The conversation had ended there—maybe the bedroom door had opened. Eleanor couldn’t remember why.

  More than anything, she wishes now she could snuggle up to her sister.

  “Backs,” she whispers, alone in her hospital bed.

  But Esmerelda is dead, and so there is really only Jack, and Jack wouldn’t understand.

  Jack. Eleanor feels a pang in her chest. He must be worried sick about her. She’ll ask her father when he wakes if he’ll call Jack and tell him that she’s okay. But that’s not really true. She isn’t okay. She hasn’t asked her father about the pain in her neck, but she knows that Shelley the nurse will probably tell her about it sooner or later. Eleanor can’t see any casts on her arms or legs, but her upper body feels as if it has been squeezed in a vise. She simply aches.

  She thinks again about the strange sensation that she felt at the door, and decides to accept it. What’s the most outlandish possibility she can dream up? Maybe she’s built up static electricity somehow, and the doors have zapped her. But her bedroom door was open and made of wood, so that seems unlikely. Her mind turns over ridiculous scenarios, but it stops on one of them, and Eleanor thinks about it for a long time, for hours while her father sleeps, and she cannot find a reason to discard this hypothesis.

  Twice in the recent past, Eleanor has walked through a doorway that leads to somewhere visible, and she has instead found herself in an unfamiliar place. If she grants the premise that something unnatural—that something supernatural—is happening to her, then it makes sense: for reasons she cannot understand, doors are turning into portals to other somewheres.

  Somewhere over the rainbow, she thinks. Through the looking glass. Down the rabbit hole. Into the wardrobe.

  “Nonsense,” she mumbles to herself.

  Sleep overtakes her soon after. The sun falls out of sight and the hospital room sinks into shadow, and as Eleanor drifts into the dark, she dreams of other worlds and magical doorways and fairy tales.

  The keeper’s view of the sky is obscured by ragged clouds. They are more dense than the average cloud, and sometimes the keeper imagines that they are simply the bottom of a great column of thunderheads that stretches high into the atmosphere, impenetrable to the sun. They might well be, for the keeper has never seen the sun, or very much of its light.

  It rains in her valley, often for months on end. The water pools in the meadow, turning it to a soggy marsh, and on her walks she rolls her pants to her knees and squishes through the wetlands. During the worst storms, the entire valley becomes a bowl, and the puddles become small ponds, and the ponds become a lake, and the earth is swallowed up by dark water. She knows that there are lakes high in the mountains that contribute to this, spilling down the craggy slopes in great gushes when the rain causes them to swell. When this happens, the keeper retreats into the highest foothills. There is a shallow cave at the base of one of the mountains, and she lives by the light of a small fire and waits out the storm. Her patience is great, and the floodwaters always recede. They always have. She has had to rebuild her cabin several times before, and is certain that she will have to rebuild it many more.

  She loves living in the meadow too much to trade it for a cabin in the hills.

  She built the most recent incarnation of the cabin three or four years ago. It is small and tidy, outfitted with only the things she needs. In addition to the fireplace, she owns a table and a single-person bed—hardly a bed, more of a cot—and a few pots and utensils. She makes her own clothes from a stash of fiber and thread and material that never seems to diminish. She makes only what she needs.

  Her shadow is her only company, except when the seasons change and the cabin darkens in the shadow of the great passing beasts. The thin glass in the cabin windows trembles with the beasts’ heavy steps, and sawdust drifts down from the raw pine ceiling. She often stands on the porch with a cup of hot tea, cradling the mug in her hands as the beasts pass her by. They are as tall as the mountains, their bodies like mountains themselves, and they walk on long, spindly legs that seem to descend from the clouds. Their shadows might stretch for miles if there were muc
h sunlight, but instead their shadows are murky and shapeless, for their bodies blot out most of the sky itself.

  The keeper once thought to name the beasts, but she never has. They arrived in the valley as a pair. The first is almost beautiful in its immensity, with a long neck that vanishes into the clouds. Its steps are proud and sure and full of purpose, and when its feet thud against the earth, the keeper hears music, a long, low, resounding tone. She is not certain that the beast is female, but its movements do suggest to her a certain femininity.

  The second beast is heavier, bulkier. It is not as tall, and its steps are far less delicate. During the beasts’ last migration it seemed that the second beast might be sick. It had stumbled often, and a rumbling groan had issued from its body with each ponderous step. The keeper could see huge divots carved into the earth where the beast had dragged one weak leg. Once she saw it totter, as if it had lost all sense of balance, and she had been afraid that it would crash down upon her and her cabin. It had righted itself, but only by throwing one leg out blindly. That immense leg had sheared an entire hillside clean off the map, uprooting hundreds of trees, exposing rich dark soil and slants of buried granite. The shock had rippled across the meadow, buckling one of the struts that held up the keeper’s porch and nearly causing the entire overhang to collapse.

  The migration of the beasts echoes the subtle change of the seasons, and the keeper knows that as the beasts vanish into the mountains miles and miles to the north, she can expect snow soon after. It will fall gray and poisonous, carpeting the valley floor like soot.

  There is nothing elegant about winter in the valley.

  Winter is the only season during which the keeper forgoes her patrol of the meadow. She hibernates in the cabin until the beasts return and the snow turns to gray rain again.

  This morning, she stands on the porch, cradling her tea, buried in her old shawl. Her feet are chilled even in her heavy boots, but she pays her body’s aches and pains no mind. She can smell the impending snowfall in the air—can in fact see the smudge of it in the distance, already falling onto the farthest peaks, as if one of the clouds has scraped its belly open on the jagged mountain and is spilling its toxic bile onto the earth.