Eleanor: A Novel

by Jason Gurley

  Paul closes the refrigerator door, then tousles Eleanor’s hair. She cringes away from him.

  “Wash your hands,” she says.

  He lathers up in the sink. “We should go to Dot’s,” he says.

  “I’m already eating,” Eleanor retorts.

  “Come on,” Paul says. “Breakfast. It’ll be good.”

  “It’s already almost nine,” she says. “It’ll be packed. We’ll have to stand in line.”

  Paul dries his hands on a towel, then puts his hands on his hips. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I’m sorry about last night,” he says.

  “I don’t care,” Eleanor says. She drops her spoon into the bowl, then pushes away from the table and dumps the dishes into the sink.

  “Hey,” he says, putting his arms out.

  She sidesteps them, going around the small folding table that serves as his dining table.

  “Ellie,” he says. “You’re having a rough week.”

  “Understatement,” she scoffs.

  “I’m worried about you.”

  “Yeah?” she asks. “Good for you. Mom probably isn’t. You feel better about that?”

  “Eleanor—”

  “She’s probably in the same place she was when I left two nights ago,” Eleanor says. “Or maybe not. Maybe she realized I threw out the bottle.”

  “Ellie—”

  “I always regret throwing the bottles out,” Eleanor says, softly. “Because when she finds out they’re gone, she just finds some way to get out of the house for another one. And Mom drunk in her chair is much better than Mom drunk anyplace else. But I do it anyway. Do you know why? Because I hope she’ll stop. And I do it knowing she can’t.”

  “Eleanor—”

  “But at least she’s honest about her life,” Eleanor snaps. “She might be a drunk, but she doesn’t pretend she’s anything else. She might hate me, but she doesn’t ever pretend she doesn’t. What are you doing that’s so fatherly? Besides yelling at me all the time now.”

  “You have to come live with me,” Paul says. “You can’t live with her anymore. You can’t do it, I won’t let you—”

  “Won’t let me what?” Eleanor demands. “Won’t let me make my own choices? Right, because you’re so good at making them for all of us, aren’t you. Just because you send a check every month doesn’t mean you own us!”

  Paul recoils, stunned. “Ellie, I—”

  “I live with her,” Eleanor says firmly, “because without me, she—my mother—will die. Do you understand that? She’ll give up. She’ll drink herself completely to death. And you made this choice for me when you fucking left. Do you know that? Did you ever think of that?”

  Paul opens his mouth, but Eleanor steps forward and pushes him.

  “I’m the only thing keeping her from drinking until she’s dead,” Eleanor snaps, pushing her father again. “Me! And do you know what I get for that? Pure hatred. She looks at me and she sees Esmerelda, and she can’t handle the horrible crushing guilt she feels, and do you know what? I don’t blame her. Do you get that? Do you get that every day I look in the mirror and I hate myself because I see Esmerelda staring back at me? Do you get that you’re the only one here who gets to make any kind of choice for himself at all? Because the rest of us can’t!”

  Her father’s eyes fill with tears and he stares at her wordlessly.

  She stops pushing, and takes a few steps back, breathing hard. “And I won’t come live with you, no matter what you say. Because right now, you’re also the only one of us who managed to abandon the ship, Dad. You walked out because it was too hard to stay, and I get that, too. Do you know what happens if I come to live with you? Do you?”

  “Ellie—”

  “I get up in the morning and I walk through the house, and you see me, and one day you see me in shadow, and you mistake me for her,” Eleanor says. “You mistake me for Esmerelda, and that’s how it starts. You start to see her in me, and then you—goddammit, Dad, then you start to fall apart. And the only thing that keeps that from happening is me not living here. I can’t destroy you both. I’ve already destroyed her, so the least I can do is stay and keep her from killing herself.”

  Eleanor chokes back a heavy sob, and Paul says, “Ellie, sweetheart—” and steps forward.

  “Leave me alone,” Eleanor says.

  She storms out of the kitchen.

  A moment later she returns.

  “Look,” she says, her voice hard. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what’s going on. Things are—I can’t explain it. And neither can you, or anybody else, and I just want to be left alone. Okay?”

  Paul stares. “Okay,” he says, finally.

  “Good,” she says.

  She stomps out again, and goes to her bedroom and gathers some clothes, and stomps down the hall to the bathroom. She can hear Paul on the phone, leaving another message for her mother—“She’s safe and she’s with me, call if you get this”—and she wishes she could hit her father right now, just knock him over and tell him to behave like a father, not like an asshole.

  She puts her clothes on the bathroom counter, then stands there, staring at herself in the mirror. She looks angry, she thinks. It hurts to look angry. Her jaw is tight, her brow furrowed severely. She exhales, and then tries to soften her face. It isn’t easy, but she does it. She studies her reflection.

  She looks tired, though she somehow slept all night. Her hair is tangled and needs to be washed. It’s stiff from the salty sea air. There are dark hollows beneath her green eyes, strange and ominous against her pale skin. She has a sour taste in her mouth from the Coke and chocolate ice cream. She brushes her teeth, staring herself down.

  She wishes she could rewind the last day and start again. She would bike to Rock with Jack. They’d eat sandwiches in the park, and walk around the small main street, looking through shop windows at the businesses on life support. She always wondered how little niche shops like those survived in a town with only a couple of hundred residents. Are there that many people in small towns who need hand-painted novelty cows to hang in their kitchens?

  If she could begin again, then this morning she and her father would have gone to the store for groceries, and they’d have made French toast and scrambled eggs, and they’d have laughed over breakfast. And maybe she would have confided in him and told him what frightens her. Because if there is only one thing in the world that she can trust, it is the knowledge that she is afraid, though of what she has no idea. She would tell him what has happened to her, and about Iowa, and the muddy mountain, and about—about Gerry’s poor boys.

  She misses her family.

  The telephone rings in the kitchen, and she can hear her father answer it. She ignores it, but then he says, “—you’re okay?” and she listens.

  “—so glad you’re all right,” her father says. “Did the doctor say what—wait, a minor stroke? Gerry, that’s—”

  Gerry.

  Her father is quiet for a moment, listening. Then he says, “Should you even be on the phone? You sound upset. Is your doctor there? Can I—”

  More silence, then: “What do you mean, she saw something? Saw what?”

  A chill passes over Eleanor.

  Gerry knows.

  “—under a lot of strain,” Paul says. “You need to rest—”

  Now Eleanor can hear Gerry’s voice, a faint but insistent buzz. She sounds scared.

  “Gerry,” Paul says. “Gerry. Gerry. Listen—if—listen to me.”

  Buzz, buzz.

  “A stroke is serious business,” Paul says. “Do they know you’re on the phone?”

  Eleanor looks at herself in the mirror. She’s gone pale. She steps out of the bathroom and into the hall. She can see her father framed in the kitchen doorway, the telephone cord dangling around his knees.

  “Gerry,” he says. “Please. Rest. I’ll come see you today. Okay? You need to rest.”

  Buzz, buzz.

&
nbsp; “Okay. Okay, I promise. Okay, Gerry.”

  Her father hangs up the phone, and then turns and sees Eleanor standing there.

  “Ellie,” he says. “Gerry—she had a stroke.”

  Eleanor just stares at him.

  “She said you—she said you—no, it’s crazy,” he says.

  “She says I saw her boys,” Eleanor says.

  Paul puts his hand to his forehead. “That’s what she said. How did you—”

  “No,” Eleanor says, and she feels a rush of nausea again, and she turns and goes through the bathroom door, and too late she feels the tingle of electricity, and she says, “No—”

  And the apartment seems to explode around her.

  It takes a little longer than the keeper expects to reach the downed plane. She arrives before the sun rises, though she does not think of time in precisely this way, as a series of sunrises and sunsets. In the valley, that cycle is invisible to her. The valley is simply dim. Sometimes it is less dim, and that is what the keeper considers “day,” and when it is more difficult to see, then that is “night.”

  When she comes upon the crash, she pauses at the edge of the forest—this edge which was not an edge only a day before, but the heart of these mountain woods. She thinks back to the plane’s sudden appearance and ferocious descent, and stares now at the crime scene before her. She had hoped—in some childlike corner of her cold heart—that the plane was a hallucination, that the fire in the forest wasn’t real.

  It is real.

  The trees are upended and thrown aside like toothpicks. A great swath of forest has been torn open. Many of the trees are like spears, tangled high in the branches of the forest that remains, and the keeper knows that they will remain there, caught in the teeth of their brothers and sisters, until they rot and become soft and fall to the earth again.

  The plane has dived into the ground like a spade, digging its own long grave. It does not much resemble a plane now. Hollow sections are crumpled and shredded. The keeper sees a few broken seats, the crushed tail. A wing stands almost upright in the dirt.

  Pine needles and ash float lazily down from above, enjoying the brief break in the storm.

  She is relieved to see that most of the burning wreckage has been extinguished by the rain. Damp or not, if the forest had caught, the valley would have gone up in a few days’ time. Thousands of acres would have been blackened and consumed. The keeper would have survived, perched on her cabin—almost a boat now—in the middle of her meadow. She would have rested there for decades, patiently watching as the forest slumbered, black and broken and smoldering, until its slow rebirth began. She would have waited a century for it to creep across the foothills and into the mountains again.

  Part of her wishes that it had happened just that way.

  What a sight that would have been.

  But she is glad that it did not happen. She suspects the beasts would have fled the valley, and that they might never return.

  She surveys the wreckage, but sees no survivors. There are no bodies, whole or in pieces, and she is relieved by this. She is the only human to have walked this valley, and she prefers that things remain that way.

  It begins to rain again.

  The keeper turns her face up into the downpour. The rain captures the ash that had landed on her skin and traces fine black streaks down her face. She does not open her mouth to the rain. The falling ash has soured it. She can smell the cold tang of airplane fuel suffusing the air around her.

  She feels her shadow leap at her feet, and opens her eyes.

  “What is it?” she asks.

  The shadow pivots around her, pinned to her feet.

  She looks up, and sees it.

  A pulse of light echoes in the heavy clouds high above the mountain.

  It is not much, can hardly be called lightning. It is simply a heartbeat, a single, muted note. It blooms deep within the clouds, then contracts, flickers, and is gone. It does not return.

  The keeper blinks against the rain.

  “I saw you,” she whispers.

  She looks down at her shadow.

  “We’re losing our grip, I think,” she says, quietly. “The beasts. Now this. Strangers in our home.”

  Her shadow says nothing, but she can feel it quake.

  She turns her eyes back to the clouds, but the flare of light is gone.

  She knows what it was.

  Who it was.

  “This is my home,” she whispers. “You cannot have it.”

  The sky rumbles in response, and the rain begins to fall harder.

  What am I doing wrong?

  The darkness swells around Mea like a storm, heavy and thick and pushing into every available space. She can feel her own shape respond to it, and change, but she feels a surge of irritability. This bewilders her—for so long she has been one with the darkness, but these newborn emotions she feels seem to have perforated that union. She feels the darkness as a second entity, and she is the first.

  Or perhaps it is the other way around. She is beginning to feel like an intruder.

  You are impatient, the darkness suggests. The seal was not bonded.

  Mea had leaped at the opportunity to take Eleanor out of her father’s apartment. When the girl had gone back into the bathroom, Mea had quickly pushed the membrane into place, but this time something different happened. Eleanor didn’t fall into the dream realm, as before. This time the membrane seemed to act as a slingshot, Eleanor its bullet. It snapped and twanged musically, and fired Eleanor through the doorway and into the bathroom wall. She collided with the wall so hard that even Mea cringed to see it, and she knew instantly that this was much worse than the time before.

  Eleanor lies in a heap now on the floor. The tiles on the bathroom wall have shattered and fallen down upon her. The wall is crushed inward—there is a huge hole in the drywall, and Mea can see exposed studs and wires beyond it. The bathroom light flickers. A single violent crack runs end to end through the mirror.

  Mea watches as Eleanor’s father rushes to the doorway, stopping short when he sees his daughter crumpled in a pile of plaster dust and broken tile. Her red hair is splayed wide. Chunks of chalky drywall dangle from the wall, holding on in brown paper strips. The toilet tank is fractured, and water leaks onto the floor.

  Eleanor stirs, and blinks up at her father, and both Paul and Mea are horrified to see that one of Eleanor’s eyes is shot through with blood. Then both of her eyes roll back and she collapses roughly against the jagged debris, and Paul shouts, though Mea cannot hear his voice, and he falls to his knees and gathers Eleanor to him, and lifts her up.

  Why is this so hard? Mea inquires. It seems so simple.

  You wish to bring a human into the rift, the darkness says. Nothing is ever simple. It has never been done.

  Mea didn’t know this.

  But it is possible? she asks. You told me that it could be done.

  I told you that I think it can be done. The girl is special, as you are special.

  Mea turns back to the scene, and watches as an ambulance comes, and Eleanor is loaded into the back, and the paramedics prevent Paul from climbing in with her, and a police officer arrives and talks to Paul.

  I will bring her, Mea says. She needs me.

  Be careful with her, the darkness advises. You have weakened her.

  Mea settles down against the membrane like a child might press against a window to watch the snow fall, or flames dancing in a fireplace. The red-haired girl’s next days unfold quickly, and Mea waits for them to pass rather than leaping forward through time.

  She is anxious to try once more.

  But first Eleanor must heal.

  Eleanor wakes up in a hospital bed again.

  This is the third time she can remember this happening to her. Twice this year alone.

  The first time was seven years ago.

  She doesn’t want to think about that.

  She blinks up at the ceiling, at a grid of fluorescent lights and acousti
c tiles. There is something off about her vision. She closes her eyes, blinks rapidly, but it doesn’t change. She closes her left eye. The ceiling is sharp and clear. She closes her right, and the view through her left eye is clouded, indistinct. The world appears to be underwater.

  She tries to lean forward, but something holds her back. She looks down, but can’t see much beyond her chin from this angle. Her hands are free, however, and she lifts first one, then the other. There is a bandage around each of her arms. A slim IV tube is lodged in the pit of her right elbow.

  Oh, no, she thinks.

  She sags against her pillow, and turns her head. There is a window covered with a dull gray curtain. There is a lamp. There’s a reproduction of a Monet on the wall, behind smudged glass. To her left—it is hard to crane her neck, but she cannot tell why—there is glass, a window that looks inward instead of outward, and through it she can see a nurses’ station, and just to the right of it is her father, in conversation with a doctor in a white jacket—and a police officer in uniform. She can hear their muted voices, the muffled crackle of chatter from the radio on the cop’s shoulder. A pair of shiny handcuffs hang on his belt.

  Her father glances toward her then, and his face changes when he sees that she is awake. He starts in her direction, and Eleanor smiles at him. Then the doctor and the police officer take her father by the wrists and arms, and Eleanor’s smile fades. Something isn’t quite right. Her father looks surprised, and she can hear his voice grow loud, and then there is a tiny beep from a machine beside her bed, and Eleanor feels the world fog over.

  “Eleanor?”

  “Eleanor.”

  “Eleanor.”

  “Here she comes. There she is.”

  Eleanor rises from sleep. Today is going to be a good day, she thinks. She remembers arguing with her father last night, but the reasons for the fight seem silly to her now. Maybe she’ll find him and apologize. Maybe they can have breakfast at Dot’s, down by the sea wall. They can watch the sea lions hunting in the harbor.

  But when she opens her eyes, she is not in her bed in her father’s apartment, and the person beside her bed is not her father.