Eleanor: A Novel

by Jason Gurley

  “My dad told me once that he can’t remember ever not seeing the boat here,” Jack says, and as he says it, the gloomy fog on the water thins, and the boat appears, a small thing that looks a hundred years old, maybe more. “It was yellow once,” he adds, but the paint has flaked and bleached, and it is now mostly pale and bone-colored. It bobs gently on the calm water. The dock creaks beneath their feet.

  “It looks like it’ll sink,” she says.

  Jack only smiles.

  Eleanor shivers despite her scarf and hat and mittens and raincoat. She thinks of the blanket in Jack’s backpack, but she worries that she’ll seem greedy—or needy—if she asks for it, so she doesn’t.

  Aside from Jack’s voice, the only sounds out here are the churn of the oars in the water, the worrisome groan of the boat itself, the quiet lapping of the sea.

  “I’ve been out here before,” Jack says.

  “You never told me that,” she says, her teeth chattering audibly.

  “Cold?” he asks.

  She tries not to nod, but she can’t help herself.

  “Here,” he says, taking off his windbreaker. Underneath he is wearing his hooded sweatshirt, and he lifts it over his head. There is only a T-shirt beneath it. He stops rowing for a moment, and tosses the sweatshirt to Eleanor.

  “You’re going to freeze,” she says.

  “I’m built for the cold,” he says. “I’ll be fine.”

  “No,” Eleanor says. “You’ll freeze, and then I’ll be out here alone, and that will make me very sad. And then I’ll be very angry with you for being so stupid.”

  She throws the sweatshirt back. He looks down at it, then at her.

  “Come on,” he says. “Are you sure?”

  She nods. “But give me the stupid blanket.”

  He grins at her, and it makes her smile, too.

  Huffnagle has never been a tourist attraction. There are no shops. There aren’t any roads. Nobody lives on the island. It juts up from the sea like a hunk of shrapnel, twisted and dark. The view from its summit is lovely, but to witness it, a visitor must scale a jagged, steep path to the island’s peak. There are no handrails. There’s no proper dock for a boat. The island’s condition serves as its own No Trespassing sign.

  The shops along the waterfront sell T-shirts with Huffnagle’s silhouette printed in the center, above a legend that reads The Island of Lost Boys. Eleanor has never been fond of the shirts. No boys were ever lost to the island.

  But her grandmother was.

  “Dad told me that nobody goes to the island because it’s too much work,” Jack says, pulling the oars, lifting them, pulling them again. “He said that now and then someone wrecks their boat on the rocks and gets stranded, or gets hurt, and the Coast Guard has to send out a special rescue boat, and it’s embarrassing and expensive.”

  “No,” Eleanor says. “People go to the island. They just don’t talk about it.”

  Jack grins.

  “What?” she says. “I’m not lying. Kids go out there to have sex. It’s like the worst make-out point in the whole state.”

  Jack laughs. “I don’t think you’re lying,” he says.

  “Good.”

  “I know you aren’t lying.”

  She doesn’t take his meaning, and stares at the faint shape of the island, growing slowly darker as they draw nearer.

  “I know you aren’t lying because I’ve been there,” Jack says.

  Eleanor stares at him. “You have not.”

  “I told my dad I wanted to,” he says. “You know what he said to me?”

  Eleanor shakes her head.

  “He said, ‘I’ve been there,’” Jack says.

  That was the summer Jack climbed everything, Eleanor remembers. He scaled the water tower behind the school. He skipped class and climbed onto the roof of the school itself. During a basketball game—the last game before they threw him off the team—he ignored a pass and shimmied up the goal post instead, then just sat there, behind the backboard, kicking his feet and dodging projectiles chucked at him by the crowd.

  “I thought about swimming out there,” Jack says. “But it’s a really long way. And Dad said he heard a rumor that someone drowned swimming out there, a long time before we even moved here. He was the one who told me about the boat, and how he went out there once when my uncle was in town. They didn’t do much, just got drunk and then rowed back, but he did it, so I figured I could, too.”

  “It was my grandmother,” Eleanor says.

  Jack looks confused.

  “Who drowned. It was my grandmother.”

  Jack’s jaw slides open. “I—are you serious?”

  “My mom’s mom,” Eleanor says. “I was named after her. She was a competitive swimmer. This was where she used to train, swimming to the island and back.”

  “Oh, my god,” Jack says. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  Eleanor shrugs. “I never met her. Mom was only—five, I think.”

  “Jesus,” Jack says.

  The blanket keeps her warm, though the damp chill of the mist pecks at her exposed face.

  “What did you do?” she asks. “On the island. Did you take some girl out there?”

  Jack wrinkles his nose. “No,” he insists. “I went by myself.”

  “I bet it was boring,” she says, smiling behind the scarf.

  “Did you know they call the water around the island ’the boneyard’? Did you know that?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Because of all the rocks,” he explains. “I guess way back in the old days, pirate ships used to run aground on them. Before the lighthouse.”

  “There weren’t pirates out here,” Eleanor says.

  “Well, old ships. Whatever.”

  “This boat is going to crash on those rocks, isn’t it,” she says. “We’re going to die, aren’t we.”

  “We’re going to be fine,” Jack says. “I know where to land. Try to relax.”

  She does. She tries very hard to relax, but trying is often relaxation’s undoing. Jack falls silent, and works harder at the oars, and Eleanor closes her eyes. She thinks about her mother, alone in the hospital room. Being diagnosed with liver disease has not improved her disposition, or made her any less inclined to drink. Eleanor has taken to staging daily interventions, and Agnes, her eyes fiery and her breath toxic, has slapped her a few times, and pushed her to the floor. There have been no apologies, and Eleanor expects none to come. Her mother will die, but it will not be because death has found her mother. It will be because her mother dared death to come visit.

  She cannot relax. The world around her is a living, breathing metaphor. The boat is her mother’s frail body, groaning under Eleanor’s weight. The sea is the poison that waits below, ready to consume her when she stumbles. The island is death, and she carves a resolute path—a straight shot, as Jack said—to death’s very door.

  Eleanor’s hips throb. Her body aches from the cold.

  Her father worries her. His concern for Agnes on the day they found her had moved Eleanor. She had watched him take her mother’s hand, and stupidly pinned a hope on that moment, a hope that one day her family might reunite, that she might be her father’s daughter, her mother’s daughter, again.

  For years now her father has hated her mother. Hated her for the accident. Blamed her for Esmerelda’s death. Hated her for failing Eleanor. But at that moment in the bedroom—Ags, her father had whispered—Eleanor had thought that maybe her father would discover how to forgive her mother.

  She thinks now that his anger has only retreated. She can see the signs. It will come back. And it horrifies Eleanor to think that this is what adulthood is like: two people, cowering behind their grief, lashing out at each other like injured animals.

  “You aren’t the only ones who miss her,” Eleanor mumbles behind her scarf.

  Jack doesn’t hear her. He rows, and rows.

  And Huffnagle looms ominous and large with every fresh pull of the oars.


  Time is a river, and it flows in a circle.

  While weeks and months pass in Eleanor’s cold, gray world, Mea floats beside her milky, fibrous window, watching in silence as Eleanor sleeps and wakes and eats, as she quietly attends to her sick mother, as she slumps into a state of tolerance of her father. Mea watches Eleanor’s injuries heal, and is relieved that the girl eventually walks without hobbling, that the galaxy of bruises on her body begins to weaken and fade.

  And eventually she begins to think of trying again.

  She worries, a little, that Eleanor will never cross the boundary of her own world, that she will never find her way into the rift. Mea worries that she does not know enough about these worlds to guide Eleanor across their borders. As a shepherd, Mea is a failure, grievously injuring and often losing altogether her sheep.

  Mea has observed Agnes carefully during this time. Eleanor’s mother is not well. She is pale and damp and thin. The bathrobe she wears almost all the time seems to swallow her whole. The woman visibly recoils from Eleanor, even as her daughter cares for her. She complains when Eleanor brushes her stringy hair. She shouts at Eleanor for no reason whatsoever. Mea cannot hear the sounds, but she can read the woman’s face, and the woman’s face is a window into a black, charred world.

  In the past year of Eleanor’s life, Mea has become a sort of invisible patron to the girl. If Mea were an ordinary human being, trapped in the confines of Eleanor’s reality, she would be the neighbor across the lane who sits at her window, peeking through the blinds with binoculars. She would be the researcher who hides in the jungle, watching the indigenous tribe from afar, charting their movements and recording their behaviors in a journal. By observing, Mea has become a part of the story. She has affected Eleanor’s life, and that cannot be taken back.

  And if she ever achieves her goal—to yank Eleanor right out of the world—then Eleanor’s life will be forever changed.

  If she succeeds, there will be no going back.

  She watches the little boat now as it traces a watery path across the bay. Lazy loops of froth spill out behind it, a sort of aquatic jet stream. Mea thinks that this is beautiful, this strange disturbance of the sea. Eleanor’s world today is morose and dismal, stodgy gray clouds and persistent, soupy fog, and rain that stabs through the mists like falling needles.

  Beautiful.

  Mea thinks the same of Eleanor. The girl is not beautiful in the way that people notice, but the boy with her notices. He seems to see what Mea sees, the well of beauty that is tucked away inside the girl, masked by the drawn expressions she wears, by her tired shoulders. She carries weights, Eleanor, and Mea thinks that if the weights were removed, Eleanor might almost glow.

  The boy below her leans into the oars, pulling with all his might. Mea can see the slim, strong cords of muscle in his arms, the tightness in his knuckles with each pull, the way his fingers relax and cup the oar handles loosely when he lifts them deftly from the water. He doesn’t speak now, though he was laughing a few minutes before. He is determined, his lips tucked between his teeth. He concentrates, and Mea wonders what he is thinking. She can read Eleanor well, but the boy is a mystery to her, as are the other people who live in Eleanor’s world.

  The portal seems to track Eleanor as surely as if there is a string connecting the two of them.

  She is special, the darkness explained before. But only to you.

  Below her the boy navigates the boat through a field of rock, and the sea coughs the vessel into the shallow waters of the island shore. The boy holds his hand up, as if to tell Eleanor to stay where she is, then clambers out of the rickety little boat and drops into thigh-deep gray water, and tugs the boat onto the island’s little gravelly beach.

  Mea follows Eleanor’s worried gaze and studies the towering cliff above, and the clouds that seem to be made of the scratchiest wool.

  Something occurs to Mea—the beginning of an idea.

  She turns to the darkness, and the darkness has been watching her watch Eleanor.

  Yes, the darkness says. It will work.

  The island rises up from the sea like a broken old fortress, like a villain’s lair in a movie. The rocks surrounding it are sharpened by storms and the bones of dead sailors—dead pirates, she thinks with a smile. What little grows on the island is hardy and tough, weeds and vines and little twisted trees. She can see the beginning of the cliff path from here, cluttered with small boulders and overgrown with reedy brambles. The side of the sheer cliff is streaked with white.

  “Bird shit,” Jack says, and he jumps out of the boat.

  Eleanor gasps involuntarily.

  “Oh, hush,” Jack chides. “I have waders on.”

  She wonders how she failed to notice that before, but he does. He’s wearing fishing waders that reach to his waist, with suspenders that disappear beneath his hooded sweatshirt. She watches as Jack grips the bow of the little boat and pulls, leaning almost parallel with the water. She worries that he’ll fall in anyway, and soak himself, and freeze while she ineffectively tries to row the stupid boat back to shore. She also thinks that he’s lying about not being cold. His face is pink and pale, and he’s shivering.

  “This was a stupid idea,” she says.

  He just grunts and drags the boat, and then Eleanor can feel a tiny tremor in the hull as it strikes gravel. Jack pulls, and the bottom of the boat grinds on the rocky beach, and then it stops, firmly embedded in the little stones, and Jack lets go and falls on his butt on the beach, breathing hard.

  “Is this the spot?” she asks. “Where your dad and uncle landed?”

  He nods, and sticks out his hand. “Hop out,” he says. “Careful.”

  She takes his cold hand and steps delicately across the boat’s bottom, then over the side. Jack urges her to step away from the boat, then turns back and tries to pull it farther onto the beach. It budges only an inch or two, and seems to freeze in place. Water laps at the boat, and Eleanor says, “It’s going to float away.”

  Jack kicks the boat. It doesn’t move. “It’s not going anywhere,” he says.

  “I think the ocean is a little stronger than you,” Eleanor says. “What about the tide?”

  “Islands don’t have tides,” Jack says.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Eleanor says. “Every piece of land has tides.”

  “I didn’t even pull the boat up this far the last time I came out here,” he says. “It was fine.”

  She stares at him. “It’s going to get sucked out to sea, and we’re going to be alone on the island, and nobody will know where we are, and we’ll die,” she says.

  “What happened to your grandmother?” Jack asks. “Did she really drown?”

  Eleanor looks up at the cliff wall. “I don’t think ‘bird shit’ is the technical term,” she says.

  Jack is still breathing hard. He stares up at the white streaks on the rocks. “Guano?”

  “Guano is bat shit,” Eleanor says.

  “You’re bat-shit,” Jack says.

  Eleanor stares at him, and then they both laugh.

  “Let’s climb up,” he says.

  “I don’t know.”

  She cranes her neck and sees the quilt of clouds beginning to pull apart, separating like cotton. On the other side, the sun is a pale white ball. She stares at it for a second, and then blinks hard to clear the purple after-image.

  “Hey,” Jack says. “We’re here, right? We might as well get our money’s worth.”

  Eleanor looks suspiciously at the path. “Okay,” she says. “But if I die out here, I’m blaming you.”

  The path is not altogether untamed, she discovers. Enough people have climbed it that there is some hardpack, but the brambles she saw from below choke the path completely in some places. Now and again Jack has to help her across, and the scraggly branches and roots snag her jeans. They climb in silence, their feet crunching on the rocks and skittering pebbles. She can hear the distant call of seagulls, the slow crush of waves on the shore as it falls farth
er and farther below her. The far-away bellow of a foghorn. Jack’s labored breath. Her own.

  And nothing else.

  The hum of traffic, the buzz of streetlights, the bustle of tourists. The rumble of garbage trucks in the neighborhood. The clink of her mother’s bottles, keeping her awake in the small hours of the morning. Her father’s quiet disappointment, palpable in every sigh he sighs.

  She concentrates on every step, focusing all her energy on a single task: Don’t fall down.

  The entire world seems to have been scraped away, and she realizes that she is grateful to Jack for bringing her to the island. It feels, a little bit, as if she has left reality behind her, and has entered a place where there is only the island, this place of death and strangeness, this secret world so close to her home and yet so very far from anything she knows. There is only the island, and Jack, and Eleanor, and Eleanor is, for this moment, happy.

  She blinks away tears before Jack sees them.

  Her breath comes heavy. The cords of her neck tighten. Her hair is damp with sweat and rain, and clings to her face in strings. The keeper clenches her teeth, and shouts, and she feels her body exhausting the last of her reserves, her strength almost gone. Her eyes are closed. Her entire body tenses, and she rises up onto her toes, and vibrates, as if by sheer force of will she might rocket into the sky, gravity a broken manacle at her feet.

  The keeper’s shadow waits in the trees, some distance away, watching her. She looks like the conductor of some great orchestra, lifting one hand, waving the other. She points at the wreckage of the airplane, then raises her hands as if opening a window, then closes her fingers into fists, then shoves them at the sky. The shadow is made tired simply by watching her.

  The keeper almost buckles under the effort of lifting the wreckage. She hears the groan and wrinkle of metal, and opens her eyes, and watches as the last section of the tail rises slowly upward. It hovers there, trembling, and the keeper steels herself, and then pushes at the levitating mass, pushes with all her mind and might.