by Jason Gurley
The snow is coming early this year, and the keeper has not seen the beasts in quite some time. She does not know where they go, or where they came from before they entered her valley. She knows the meadow and the peaks and forests well, but she has never found the place where the beasts bed down or graze, if such things are a part of their routine. They are a mystery to her, refugees who have claimed asylum in her valley.
She turns her attention to the south again, to the gaping wound in the treeline, and thinks of the pale intruder. The child’s arrival has changed the land, both visibly and spiritually. The keeper can feel a twinge in the air that was not there before. She knows the seasons and the secrets and the ghosts of her valley. But something strange and new has affected her home, and for a moment—just a moment—she feels a tiny spark of fear inside her.
And then it is gone.
The keeper sips her tea, then looks down at her shadow huddled beneath her.
“She’ll be back, I think,” the keeper says. “You be ready.”
Her shadow flattens out, changing its shape beneath her, as if gathering itself for battle.
“You be ready,” the keeper repeats.
Eleanor will have to make up her missed finals in the summer, the school district tells her mother in a crisp letter, but otherwise her sudden absence from school should not present too great a problem. We are happy that Miss Witt is home safely, the letter reads. Eleanor folds it and puts it back into the envelope addressed to Agnes, then drops it in the trash can.
Her mother takes only a few days to return to her habits, the fright of Eleanor’s disappearance not a powerful enough catalyst to disrupt the routine. She curls up in the blue corduroy chair with a scowl that lingers on her face long after she has passed out. Eleanor’s father stops by the house every day after work. He parks his Buick in the driveway and sits there, engine idling, until Eleanor comes out.
“Come inside,” she tells him each night. “I’ll make hot chocolate with marshmallows.”
But each night he declines, and after a while, when he is certain that whatever happened to Eleanor will not happen again, and when she no longer has to wear the cumbersome neck brace, and the visible signs of her injuries have passed, her father calls Eleanor before he leaves the office, and if all is well, he simply goes to his own apartment. All is well occurs enough consecutive times that eventually her father doesn’t feel the need to call, and soon Eleanor sees him only on visitation weekends.
Eventually, all things return to normal. Spring becomes summer, and summer is uncharacteristically hot and bright in Anchor Bend this year. Eleanor and Jack bike around town almost daily, sharing a packed lunch among the tourists on the waterfront, parking their bikes at the Safeway and darting inside to score a jawbreaker from one of the nickel machines. Jack asks a few times what happened to her, but Eleanor never quite puts the right words together to tell him about her theory, about the portal to places like Iowa and the gray forest, and so she doesn’t tell him anything except that she’s okay.
At night she climbs the attic stairs. She sweeps the hardwood floor and tidies up the clutter from her mother’s last visit. She misses the sprawling acreage of the models her father built, the magnifying lamp that revealed their tiny flaws and her father’s signature. She stretches out on the floor with a stack of notebook paper and a pencil, and she draws what she remembers of Iowa, of the ash forest, and in her drawings, Eleanor is always a small and startled figure, overcome by the strangeness of all that surrounds her.
For months and months, Mea quivers in the darkness. New emotions charge through her like electricity, and the sensation of each is uncomfortable. The darkness says nothing to her, and she does not ask, but she feels—feels!—as if she has done something very, very wrong. Mea has never encountered another being in the dark, none like her, and yet she believes that if she had, they might be appalled by her.
Or perhaps they wouldn’t, because they would not be infected with these feelings, these emotions.
She worries over the red-haired girl. One of Mea’s peculiar new feelings is guilt. She feels responsible, horribly and directly responsible, for the girl’s accident. She watched the girl appear from nowhere, as if the charged air inside her house had simply conjured her and fired her like a cannonball at her bedroom wall. Mea does not know pain in the way the red-haired girl knows pain, but she knows she cannot put the girl through such things any longer.
Whatever Mea has hoped to achieve from this—this experiment—must be forgotten.
So for months and months—months and months that pass in the red-haired girl’s world but which unfold like eons in Mea’s dark river—Mea allows the blackness to close over her like water, to swallow her into its dark belly. She lingers there, suspended in a state of shame, and does not think of the red-haired girl.
The darkness allows this, for a time.
And then, when Mea has wallowed for long enough, it tells her its secrets.
August arrives with a storm.
Eleanor and Jack are on the pier, perched on the tall base of a lamppost, looking for whales. Word had spread through town that morning that a pod of grays was resting in the harbor, just beyond the marina. The pier is clogged with tourists and locals alike, men and women in shorts and tank tops and flip-flops. The tourists are pink and rosy, scorched by a sun they hadn’t planned to encounter above the Oregon coast. This is a mistake Eleanor and Jack giggle at. You can always spot the tourists, the locals say, by their lobster-like faces.
But today the rain comes from nowhere, and the tourists scatter, leaving mostly locals behind. Eleanor and Jack climb down from the lamppost and fill in the gaps that the tourists have left. They lean on the railing, squinting through the powerful downpour.
“I don’t think they’re really here,” a woman to Eleanor’s left says.
“Hush,” the man beside her says. “They’re waiting for the looky-loos to clear out.”
Jack elbows Eleanor, and they both grin behind their hands.
Eleanor hasn’t thought about her accident in weeks. Her neck has healed; for a long time it hurt to look in any direction, and then one day the pain was gone, and she just didn’t think about it anymore. She finished her makeup classes by the end of July, and since then has spent her days on her bicycle, patrolling the town with Jack. Today their plan had been to bike to Rock, a little town just down the coast from Anchor Bend. There isn’t anything to see or do in Rock, but Jack had told her that the journey was adventure enough, and she had agreed. Then they heard about the whales sunning themselves in the harbor, and left their bicycles chained to a street sign, their plans forgotten.
“I don’t see them,” the woman says again.
“Wait,” the man says. “Be quiet.”
Jack and Eleanor lean over the rail as far as they can, fifteen or twenty feet above the gray sea, and watch the rain spatter on the surface. Seagulls bob on the slow waves, flapping their wings in place. Now and then one lifts off and noisily relocates itself some distance away from the others; and then a few seconds later, the others follow, and the cycle begins again.
The whales surprise Eleanor. She has fixed her gaze on the water just short of the horizon, expecting tiny whale bodies to bump to the surface, spout a tiny jet of salt water into the sky, and dive deep again. But they appear no more than twenty yards from the pier, three of them, a clear family unit. One whale is as large as the pier is long, and Eleanor gasps.
“There!” the man cries.
“Where?” the woman asks. “Where are they—”
The man grabs the woman’s head in both of his hands and turns her face in the direction of the beasts.
“Ohhhhh,” she sighs. “They’re so big.”
A medium-sized whale is a few yards away from the largest one, and between them a small one floats, turning over once, then again.
“It’s a family,” the woman says. “That’s the baby.”
Jack shakes his head and whispers in Eleanor’s ear
. “I’d call them tourists, but they actually live near me,” he says.
Eleanor watches the whales drift by. They seem to be in no particular hurry. The rain patters on their bodies. Their flukes are the size of a car.
“Pretty big,” Jack says.
Eleanor doesn’t answer.
“Hey,” he says. “You okay?”
Eleanor cocks her head without taking her eyes from the whales. “What?”
“You all right?” he asks again.
A fourth whale surfaces, smaller than even the baby. It swims hard to catch up to the rest of the little pod, though they aren’t moving quickly. Eleanor watches it carefully, and feels a sudden urge to scoop it out of the water in a net—a very large net—and take it home and put it in her bathtub, and keep it warm and pat its back, and laugh when it spouts water all over the bathroom.
“Eleanor,” Jack says. He touches her shoulder, and it breaks the spell, and Eleanor looks at him.
“What?” she says.
“You’re spacing out.”
She looks down at the whales again. The medium-sized one dips below the surface, then the baby sinks, too. The littlest one isn’t far behind.
“Wait, wait,” the woman beside Eleanor says. “They didn’t sneeze yet! They have to sneeze, I have the camera out!”
“It’s not called sneezing,” the man chides.
The largest whale slowly turns over, its enormous flukes churning the water like the paddle wheel on an old-fashioned riverboat, and then it, too, goes below. Eleanor watches until the whales descend too deep, their shapes fading from view, and then her vision refocuses on the slapping waves left behind on the surface.
“Goddamn it,” the woman says. “I wanted to do the one-hour photo and go show Charles.”
“We can wait,” the man says. “They’ll come back up.”
But the skies really open up then, as if the ocean itself is falling from the clouds, and in an instant the people on the pier are drenched. The downpour is loud and drowns out the woman’s shout. She and the man run for the parking lot.
Eleanor stares at the place where the whales were. The rain churns the sea until it seems to boil.
“Hey,” Jack says, putting his hand on her shoulder. “I don’t know if you noticed, but it’s really raining now.”
Eleanor looks up at him.
“You okay?” he asks again.
Her red hair is dark with rain and plastered to her face. It has grown long over the summer, framing her face in a way that Jack has noticed. Eleanor has only been half aware of the way he looks at her. She understands that he is attracted to her now, like boys are to girls, but for most of the year she has been distracted, for obvious and mysterious reasons.
He raises his hand as if he might brush the wet hair from her face, and there’s a strange nervous twinge inside her chest. She feels it take her breath from her, and she looks away from him at the same instant, and the moment is severed as cleanly as a thin wire clipped by a cutting tool. She looks up at the rain and closes her eyes. It falls so hard that it stings and leaves red welts on her skin.
“We should get inside,” Jack says.
Eleanor squints at him. If he is aware of the moment that almost was, he doesn’t show it, and she is strangely grateful for this discretion, if that’s what it is at all. She nods her head. “Dad’s office,” she says.
Jack says, “Good idea.”
They leave their bikes chained on the street and run instead, their feet smacking against the wet road and splashing in deep puddles that weren’t there just a few minutes before. The waterfront road is empty of people, and Eleanor glances to her left and sees that every shop is filled with wet people, some of them pressed to the windows, forlorn and disappointed by this turn of the weather.
For nine years, Eleanor has walked into her father’s little real estate office and been met by Geraldine’s wide, buoyant smile. Gerry mans the reception desk as if it is a great ship, and she is its captain. Eleanor has always thought of Gerry as the captain of her father’s entire office. She has worked for Paul Witt Realty through two divorces—the first ended shortly after she was hired, when she returned home for her lunch break and discovered her husband in bed with a woman she didn’t recognize; the second fell apart when her new husband decided that he would like to be a she—and through the loss of her two sons. Gerry’s boys were much older than Eleanor, but she had suffered plenty of hair-touslings from them when they had visited their mother at work.
Eleanor remembers the last time she saw them. It was after Esmerelda died, so she must have been eight or nine years old. She was flattened on the green sofa in her father’s office, drawing pictures on his stationery while Paul sat behind his desk—an uneven skyline of manila folders and property listings and property restriction books. Had her father worked for anyone but himself at the time, he probably would have lost his job for all the time he spent behind that cluttered desk, staring blankly through the blinds at the sea.
It had been raining that day, Eleanor thinks, though she cannot be certain. It was the sort of day that a storm might attend to. Those were gray months, a year or two into what Eleanor has always thought of as the dim years.
Geraldine had tapped on Paul’s office door, nudging it open slightly. Eleanor looked up at Gerry, who smiled kindly in her direction, then turned to Paul and said, “Mr. Witt, the boys are due on the bus in a few minutes. They just wanted to say thanks.”
“Yes, all right,” Paul said. He got to his feet slowly. His face was pale and grayish. He moved like someone thirty years older. He reached out his hand to Eleanor, who took it and walked beside him into the lobby.
Gerry’s sons were there, dressed in khaki uniforms and squashed, short-billed caps. Their last name was stitched onto the breasts of their jackets: Rydell. Eleanor looked up at her father. Paul smiled, though nobody in the room was convinced by it, and held his hand out. The boys, Joshua and Charles, the former tanned from too much time in the sharp summer sun, the latter pale and red-haired like Eleanor herself, shook his hand in earnest.
“We just wanted to say how much—”
“It’s not much,” Paul interrupted. “But you’re welcome.”
“They’ll eat like kings,” Gerry said. “Not every boy goes overseas with such nice care packages.”
“If Josh doesn’t eat it all on the plane,” Charles said with a grin.
But Paul had only nodded. His plastic smile weakened. Eleanor and Geraldine both noticed, but the boys seemed oblivious.
“All right, all right,” Gerry said, flapping her hands at her sons. “Let’s get moving. You don’t want to be marked AWOL before you even get to boot camp.”
Joshua nodded at Paul and stuck his hand out again. “Thank you very much, sir,” he said, stiffly.
Charles bent down and looked Eleanor in the eye. “Your dad’s a pretty good man,” he said. “You’ll be a good girl, right?”
Eleanor felt her eyes well up. She didn’t understand why. She just began crying.
Charles stood up and looked at Paul, and then his mother. “I didn’t say anything,” he said.
“Go, go,” Gerry said, folding her boys into one big hug. “She’ll be all right.”
Eleanor pressed her face into her father’s stomach. He put his hand on her head, but it didn’t comfort her the way she so deeply wanted to be comforted. His hand rested there like a weight, as if she was nothing more than an armrest. She had stopped crying. What was the point if nobody was going to tell her that things would be okay?
“I have a bad feeling about this,” he said, watching Gerry usher the boys out onto the sidewalk.
Eleanor didn’t know what he meant, but she shared the sentiment. She had only bad feelings about everything in those days.
Geraldine eventually came back inside, her eyes shining and damp. She took up her position behind the desk again, and shooed Paul and Eleanor back into his office, and things returned, for better or worse, to normal. Eleanor re
turned to her drawings, and Paul returned to his lonely desk, and Geraldine’s sons flew first to boot camp, and then, weeks and weeks later, to their post in Europe.
They never returned, and they never arrived. Geraldine appeared at work one morning with the same blank stare that Paul so often wore, and her grief shook him out of his own, at least enough that he inquired about the boys, and she told him about the officer who had come to her door. The boys’ transport plane had gone dark somewhere over the Atlantic, and it hadn’t been found. It had been wiped away like a smudge on a window, vanishing clean out of the sky as if it had never been there at all.
Paul tried to send her home, but she wouldn’t go. She remained at her desk, captain of the ship, and continued to care for Paul and Agnes and Eleanor during their own dark days. She would bring casseroles and potato salad and pot roasts from home and send them with Paul. Eleanor ate many of Gerry’s meals in those days. Her own mother had already learned to drink, and was going outside less and less.
In a way, Geraldine Rydell had mothered Eleanor.
Eleanor and Jack can see Gerry inside the realty office. The rain hammers the road around them, and Jack runs for the door.
“Wait,” Eleanor says, but Jack has already gone inside.
She can see Gerry jump up from the desk and go to Jack. She exclaims over his condition, like a very animated mime, and Jack turns and points outside. Points at Eleanor. Gerry looks past Jack and sees Eleanor standing on the opposite sidewalk, and goes to the office door and opens it and yells across the street.
“Ellie, for Pete’s sake, come inside! You’ll catch cold!”
Eleanor can feel the warmth radiating from Gerry even all the way over here, across the street. The office is lit up, gold against the darkening gray sky. Her father’s blinds are pulled, but she knows he is in there, too. His Buick is parked at the curb. She can go inside and stand on a mat and maybe drip-dry. At least inside it’s sure to be warm. The temperature outside has plummeted, and Eleanor feels a shiver course through her body.
