Eleanor: A Novel

by Jason Gurley

  It is the first time she is aware of her passage between worlds, and she is determined to understand it, to remember it. For a moment, as the air shimmers, she sees a cloud of black tar. It begins as a tiny jet, a crystal of ink, and then unfolds like a flower, expanding, crackling. She can hear it, reaches her arms forward. The rift is blacker than black, its edges spreading wide to take her in.

  It sings to her.

  She had imagined it differently. She had thought of the rift as a perfect, rectangular door, a black window that she could step through, and a tiny, traversable chasm between her world and the rift itself—the chasm that would lead to the world of dreams, into her ash forest and the farm on another planet.

  But that isn’t how it happens at all.

  She feels a coldness in the space before her—not from the rift, but from something in front of it—and as she steps forward, the cold seems to grip her like a thousand hands, and she feels herself crushed between them, the weight of a million Earths on all sides, and the world she can see—the living room, the smoky, undulating rift—folds up like a box, and Eleanor becomes nothing at all.

  Mea presses herself against the portal.

  The darkness looms behind her, a great ocean.

  She is gone, Mea says.

  Eleanor falls like a tiny ember into that ocean, and they watch her as she is carried far, far away.

  For the first time, Mea has a strange feeling.

  What is it? the darkness asks.

  I felt—something.

  What did you feel?

  Water, Mea says. She hesitates, then says, Are we alone?

  The darkness does not answer.

  Which is an answer all its own.

  The first thing she notices is that she is not naked.

  Her body is wrapped in some sort of animal hide. The clothing is the color of death, a peculiar and lifeless blue, unlike the hide of any animal she has ever seen before. Her feet are wrapped in the same hide, and taut, sinewy cords wind around it, turning it into something like boots.

  The second thing she notices is the fire, and the fire shows her everything else.

  It flickers in a small, round pit, circled by stones. Its light reveals cold black soil, smoothed of life. A floor. There are bits of furniture—a chair made of cut tree limbs is held together with thin ropes, maybe the same as what binds the hide to her feet.

  She can dimly make out the walls of a structure around her. They flap and billow softly, and she realizes they’re not solid. They’re hide as well, tanned and tethered to slim poles, and lashed to the ground to keep out the—

  Snow.

  Some of it has crept into the tent structure anyway. She sees it collecting around the base of the animal-skin walls, mixed with dirt, as if it has been shoveled back, or kicked back by someone’s foot.

  There’s little else in the tent with her. Some rudimentary utensils on a stump beside the fire. A metal cup, some flint.

  She tries to sit up, but pitches to one side. Her body throbs and aches, as if she has been thrown from a car. She’s colder than she has ever felt.

  “Hello?” she says to the empty tent, but nobody answers.

  The tent walls flap angrily, and snow rushes in beneath one end. It melts quickly, warmed by the fire, and sinks into the dark soil.

  She puts her feet on the ground and stands up. Her legs are numb and heavy, and her first step closer to the fire is a bad one, and she falls like a titan, crashing into the tree-branch chair.

  When she wakes up she grimaces. Her legs are made of concrete; there is dirt in her mouth. The earth is cold, an ancient cold that swims up from the permafrost and fills her lungs with ice. The fire—so close to her face, she notices, and realizes how close she must have come to burning herself to death—has dwindled, a small orange blanket that chews on ash-crusted wood.

  A flap opens in the tent and snow whips in, stinging Eleanor’s skin. She puts an arm over her eyes. The whiteness beyond the tent blinds her.

  A dark figure stomps its feet, snow flying everywhere, and drops a bundle of cut wood on the ground. Eleanor is afraid, suddenly, and drags herself away from the fire with her feeble arms.

  The figure stands still, watching her, bundled in heavy furs. The stranger’s face is dark in shadow, the fire too weak to light it.

  Eleanor’s body feels like lead, and she collapses to the ground after only a few inches.

  “Leave me alone,” Eleanor whispers, panicked. Her lips are cracked and cold.

  The figure bends and scoops up a few pieces of wood, and lumbers close to the pit. The stranger brushes back the charred bits of used-up trees, carefully arranges the fresh pieces in the center. Eleanor watches as the person removes one brown, furry glove, then leans close to the tiny flame, cupping a palm around it and softly breathing life into its belly.

  It takes time, but the fire warms the icy chunks of new wood, and tiny veins of the new stuff flare and smolder and smoke, and then the wood begins to glow orange. Eleanor rolls onto her back and stares up at the ceiling of the tent, and notices for the first time the hole above her. Smoke twists up like licorice and passes through the hole and into the dark, cold world beyond.

  The stranger walks to Eleanor and goes to one knee. Eleanor is too exhausted and cold and defeated to protest. She looks up and sees that the person’s face is wrapped in dark cloth. The stranger peels it back, and Eleanor wishes she could fall again, fall straight through the Earth and come out again someplace else. She is afraid of her mother’s dream world, and what her mother might do to her in it.

  She feels helpless, paralyzed.

  Then the mask falls away, and her father smiles down at her.

  Eleanor begins to cry, and her father lifts her into his arms. She buries her face in the wet fur of his strange cloak, grateful that he exists in her mother’s dreams. Maybe her father can help her save her mother. Maybe she won’t have to do this alone.

  His voice is crisp and joyful in her ear.

  “My Esmerelda,” he whispers. “You’ve come back to me.”

  And Eleanor realizes that this isn’t her mother’s dream at all.

  Paul is hunched over the fire when Eleanor wakes many hours later. She watches him from a pallet of animal skins and furs. He stirs something in a pot that hangs from a tripod over the flames. She sniffs the air, and he hears her, and turns.

  “Awake,” he says.

  She nods.

  “I’ve made something for you,” he says, nodding at the pot.

  She nods again. “Okay.”

  He turns back to it, dips a ladle into the mix, and lifts it to his lips and slurps loudly.

  “Not ready yet,” he apologizes.

  “Okay.”

  She remains beneath the heavy furs and flexes her toes. Unlike the day before, she can feel them, though they burn and ache. She can feel the muscles in her calves tense, too. A good sign, she thinks.

  “Dad,” she says. “What happened to my legs?”

  He settles back into the wooden chair and surprises her by lighting a long, slim pipe. Her father has never smoked.

  “Found you,” he says.

  “Found me?”

  “In the crick,” he answers.

  “I don’t remember,” Eleanor says.

  “You were on the bank in the snow,” he says. “Legs broke through the ice.”

  This isn’t her father at all, she thinks. He father doesn’t talk this way. Her father doesn’t smoke, or wear fur.

  “Blue as the old skies,” he says. “Your legs were.”

  “The old skies?” she asks, confused.

  “The old blues,” he says. “Before the grays.”

  She stares at him.

  “Long time ago,” he says, seeing her confusion, “the skies were blue as birds.”

  “And now they aren’t?”

  “Then you went away from me,” he explains. “And so did the blue.”

  He leans forward and sniffs the pot, then settles back into th
e chair again. He puffs on the pipe, and a sweet smell fills the tent.

  “They’ll return now,” he says. “Now that you’re home again.”

  “Where are we?” she asks. “What is this place? Why are you dressed that way?”

  Now her father looks confused. “It’s our home, love. Always has been.”

  He climbs out of the chair and comes to her bedside. His palm is rough on her forehead, nothing like her father’s skin should feel. Her father’s touch is softer than this. Her father has the hands of a realtor. This person before her—this person is a mountain man, with hands like a bear’s.

  “You’re addled,” he says. “The cold-bite does it. It’ll ease.”

  He rocks back onto his knees and sniffs the air.

  “Food’ll be awhile,” he says. “Sleep more, if you like.”

  The newness, the strangeness of it all overwhelms her. Sleep, she thinks. Sleep.

  So she does.

  When she wakes again, everything seems different.

  The tent is bright, the fire extinguished. She blinks, adjusting to the light. The roof of the tent has been rolled back, and high above her she can see slate-blue skies, thin clouds disintegrating like cotton candy. The door to the tent is pinned open, and the white, snow-bound world has been replaced by a green one. There are distant hills, and she sees a thin wire of blue carved there—the crick, of course.

  Directly before her, a green shoot has pushed up through the dirt.

  As she watches, it unfolds a pair of damp, new leaves, and a tiny white flower surges forward.

  “This is a dream,” she says aloud. “A dream. It’s a dream.”

  She lingers at the flower, then looks around for a bee. As if she has conjured it from nothing, a fat yellow bee swoops past her ear and circles the flower before landing gingerly upon its ivory petals.

  “Pink,” she says.

  The flower blushes, and changes its color.

  Her father appears in the doorway of the tent then. “Awake!”

  Eleanor points at the flower. She starts to tell him what just happened—then she sees him, and forgets. His furs are gone, replaced by what looks like an animal-skin poncho. His heavy beard is half-gone, and in his hand is a sharp rock. The smooth side of his face is flecked with tiny cuts and beads of blood.

  He waves his hand at her. “Come,” he says. “Come see the new world!”

  Eleanor can only stare.

  He laughs—hoots—and prances out of sight again. She can hear water splashing, can hear him gasp as he cuts his face again with the shaving rock.

  Her fur blanket has been replaced with a single animal-hide sheet. She pulls it back and is surprised to see that her father has removed the hide leggings and boots from her body. She’s wearing a poncho just like his. Her legs are pink and alive, and she wiggles her feet. Nothing hurts. Everything is fine.

  “This is so bizarre,” she says quietly.

  Her belly rumbles, but she ignores it. Whatever her father eats, she wants no part of it.

  She gets up and walks slowly to the door of the tent, just as one entire wall falls away. Her father, bare-faced and alive, releases another set of lashes and begins to roll up the wide swath of stitched-together hides.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Sun,” he says, pointing up. “Don’t need this now.”

  Eleanor steps out into the grass—there is grass, everywhere, as if there wasn’t just a field of snow here minutes ago—and squints in the bright light, watching her father work. He happily deconstructs the tent, folding up the hides and gathering the tent poles. As he works, she shields her eyes from the sun and surveys the land around her.

  Even in the warm light, a terrible chill stabs through her belly at what she sees.

  There are thousands of them.

  They spread out in all directions from the tent site. Each is a cross made from the branches of a tree, or from ashen firewood remnants, the two bits held together by more of that twine she saw before. The sight of the graves crawling away from the tent is unlike anything she has ever seen. It is as if her father has set up camp in the middle of a old battlefield.

  He puts his hand on her shoulder, and she jumps and shouts.

  He ignores this, and says, “What do you see?”

  She looks up at him. Every nick from his primitive shave-job has been pasted over with a damp bit of soil.

  Her father is insane.

  “What do you see?” he asks again, sweeping his hand wide.

  She shakes her head to clear it.

  “I—graves,” she says.

  “No,” he says. “Memories.”

  She doesn’t say anything to that.

  “Every day that my Esmerelda was gone,” he explains, “I make one.”

  Thousands of markers. Seven thousand, maybe eight. Eleanor cannot remember how old she is now, but she, too, has counted the days since Esmerelda died. A memory rushes back of a notebook she kept under her pillow, hidden from her mother. She had tried to write Esmerelda’s name once for every day her sister had been gone. She filled the notebook quickly, and lost count of how many days she had recorded. By the end, after she had filled the pages and the cardboard covers of the notebook, she had lost the ability to make any sense of Esmerelda’s name. It transformed into something alien and unfamiliar, something without meaning.

  “But now my Esmerelda is home,” her father says. “And we must work.”

  He turns, and produces a wooden bucket filled with sticky black tar. He puts it on the ground, and then hands Eleanor a stick. He shows her how to dip it into the tar and stir it around, folding the black stuff over the stick in a thick paste.

  “Not too close to your hand,” he says. “Bad.”

  He snaps flint against a knife blade, and a spark falls from his hands.

  “Put your stick here,” he says.

  She holds it out, and he makes more sparks. One settles on the tar, and instantly it whooshes to life, consumed by flame. Eleanor shouts and drops the stick, but her father catches it before it falls to the ground.

  “Hold here,” he says. “And do what I do.”

  He makes another torch for himself, then says, “Come.”

  He walks into the field and tips the torch, touching it to the first of the thousands of crosses. After a moment, the cross begins to burn. Her father smiles happily, and nods at her to do the same. She watches him set another on fire, then another, until ten are burning before her.

  He waits.

  Heat radiates from the torch like an oven. Eleanor carries it into the field and stops before one of the untouched crosses. She imagines her father kneeling in the snow, teeth chattering, lashing two sticks together, then hammering them into the hard ground. She thinks of her notebook, of the empty bed that occupied the room she once shared with her sister—the bed she had to haul to the curb on her own, because her parents were too broken to help her. She remembers boxing her sister’s things and carrying them to the attic, then trying to forget every night about holes: the gutted side of the room she couldn’t bear to fill; the hole in the attic where she had jammed Esmerelda’s things in unmarked boxes, hoping she might forget where she’d put them; the hole her sister’s tiny body had punched in the windshield of her mother’s car.

  Like her father, she tips the torch to a cross, and they work side by side, burning the fields clean of memories.

  She stays with her father for weeks. The crosses crumble into small black piles of charred wood. The skies are blue all day. She asks about the tent—what if it rains? But this land knows no rain. Her father’s dream world seems to exist in a binary state. Everything is wonderful, or everything is painful. Mistaking her arrival for the return of his perished daughter has reversed his world. Sunflowers push up overnight. The creek deepens into a river, and they swim and splash in the sunlight.

  At night she tells him stories of where she has been, building a history for Esmerelda. She tells him of the lands beyond the mountains, o
f shining cities filled with beautiful people who make exciting things and share them. He asks her where her favorite place was, and she tells him about Anchor Bend, about the town and its history, about the people who have made homes and lives there.

  She does not know if she is fooling herself, but she thinks she sees a spark of recognition in his eyes when she talks about the tide wall, about the shops and businesses on the main street.

  “I met a woman there,” she says one evening.

  “Where?”

  “In Anchor Bend, the town beside the sea.”

  She has begun to speak like her father, slipping into his cadence and the sense of history that swells in his clipped sentences. He, in return, has met her halfway, saying more than a few words at a time, his speech becoming ever so much more casual.

  “What was her name?”

  Eleanor says, “Agnes.”

  Her father nods. “Agnes. A sturdy name.”

  “Yes, and a pretty one,” Eleanor says. “She grew up far away from Anchor Bend, in a place called the Midwest. Her father was a farmer.”

  Paul listens intently, lying on his back, staring up at the ocean of stars.

  “She lives there with a girl,” Eleanor says. She’s frightened of saying the wrong thing, or too much, but she must try.

  “What girl?”

  “She has a daughter.”

  Her father grunts. “Daughters are life.”

  “Her daughter looks just like me,” Eleanor says.

  Paul turns onto his side. Their bedrolls are a few feet apart. He plucks at the grass. “Just like you?”

  Eleanor nods, not looking at him. She watches the moon, and wonders if it is the same moon that hangs over the real Anchor Bend.

  “Her name—” Eleanor stops.

  Her father waits.

  “Her name is Eleanor.”

  She turns over and looks at her father, inspecting him for any sign of recognition.

  Nothing.

  “I want you to meet them,” Eleanor says.

  “Bring them,” her father answers.

  “No,” Eleanor says. “They are very happy there. But we could go to them.”