Eleanor: A Novel

by Jason Gurley

  Her heart aches as she watches them go.

  “I’m glad you came with me,” the stranger says. “I thought you were going to leave me here.”

  The keeper steps back from the woman, having almost forgotten she was there.

  “I should have,” she says, but she lacks conviction. More confusing to her is the beach itself, the pier, that any of this is here at all. “Where are we?”

  The woman says, “You know where we are.”

  The keeper turns to look at her, and something twists inside her.

  “Do I know you?” she asks. “Why are you here?”

  The woman nods her head slowly. “You know me,” she says.

  “What is your name?”

  “You know my name, but you do not know me by that name,” the woman says.

  The keeper turns away angrily and begins to walk up the pier, her feet smacking against the wet planks. “Don’t play games with me!” she snaps over her shoulder.

  She walks a few feet, but does not hear the woman follow her. She turns around, and the woman is gone.

  “I—” she starts, confused.

  She turns in a circle, looking for her, and then she sees the stranger. The woman is on the beach. She is wearing a flannel housecoat, and as the keeper watches, the woman releases the sash and steps out of her clothing and walks naked toward the water.

  The woman wades for a bit, then dives into the sea and begins to swim, slicing through the water with sure, powerful strokes. The keeper goes to the pier’s railing and grips it and watches as the stranger swims right past her, following the beasts into the open water. If she is trying to catch up with the creatures, she will certainly fail—their wake is violent, and huge swells lift the woman up and throw her backward, reversing her progress.

  Something knocks against the wood of the pier.

  The keeper leans over the rail and sees the bobbing thing she had spied from the sky.

  A rowboat.

  She draws the oars, pushes them forward, draws them back again. The huge waves throw the boat around, but she fights, and gains a little ground. The boat is as old as the pier, its bottom full of water, the oarlocks rotted and soft. When she pulls again on the oars, the locks crumble, and the oars fall out of her hands. The boat is caught up by the waves, and she watches as the stranger swims farther away, rapidly becoming a tiny speck between the enormous swells.

  The keeper abandons the boat, and begins to swim after her, not knowing why.

  “I hoped you would come,” the stranger says, surfacing in the trough of a wave, just beside the keeper.

  The keeper starts in fear, and then a new wave slams down upon them, and they both go under. When she comes up, the stranger is there, smiling at her, shaking, laughing through the rain and the pounding surf.

  The keeper says, “You’re a crazy person!”

  The woman shrugs, her shoulders lifting above the water, and the two women fight another wave. When they come up again, the stranger says, “I want to give you your name now.”

  The keeper spits salt water out of her mouth and shouts, “I don’t need a name!”

  The sky turns black, and a blue dash of lightning illuminates the sea around them. The beach has disappeared entirely. The beasts are nowhere to be found. The women are alone in the sea, which rumbles hungrily, and bats them around like toys.

  “Everyone needs a name,” the stranger shouts. “Don’t you want one, too?”

  Another crashing wave, this one harder than the rest, and when the keeper surfaces, she is alone for a long, terrible minute. Then the woman appears again, coughing, and the keeper takes pity on her and shouts, “Fine! What is my name?”

  The next wave comes down hard, and shoves them deep beneath the sea, but not before the keeper hears the woman’s faint voice shout over the storm.

  Agnes.

  I’ve made up my mind.

  Oh? What about?

  I’m going swimming with you today.

  Is that so?

  Yes, that’s so. I’m going swimming in the ocean with you.

  Look outside, little girl. What about that?

  Oh. It’s raining.

  That’s right. What does that mean?

  It means I’m not allowed.

  That’s right.

  I have an idea!

  What’s your idea?

  I’ll just swim under the water instead.

  There you go. It’s all just water.

  It’s all just water.

  The memories would drown her if the sea wasn’t already trying.

  The breakfast nook her father built for her mother.

  Cinnamon toast on the bench beside her, while the rain beat on the windows.

  Her mother and father leaving her with the neighbor, and going to the beach for her mother’s daily swim.

  Her mother’s contented sigh when she came home again.

  Memories give rise to other memories, ones that would blind her if the dark sea had not already stolen her sight.

  The ringing telephone.

  Her father’s frightened voice.

  The crowd of people who gathered on the lawn to listen to the sheriff give them directions, her father a weakened wreck on the porch.

  The sense that everything would turn out okay, that her mother had only gone out for groceries and stayed away too long.

  The horrible certainty that her mother was gone.

  The television news, the interview with the man in the baseball cap.

  She just took everything off and walked right into the ocean and started swimming.

  The lifeless house.

  Her father’s guttural sobs every night, his red eyes and stunned, slowed movements.

  The memorial service, people in black, standing on the beach.

  Her mother, gone, forever gone.

  Her mother.

  Eleanor.

  Something grips Agnes’s hand in the dark depths. Her eyes fly open, salt stabbing them deeply, and she can see a shadow in the water before her. It comes closer, pushing right up to her face, and in the dimness beneath the sea she recognizes the other woman’s face.

  Eleanor’s face.

  Her mother’s face.

  If the sea that swallowed them both did not exist, Agnes would weep and invent it.

  Her mother takes both of her hands and squeezes them tightly. Her eyes are bright in the dark. Her mouth opens, and she says something, her voice muffled by the sea.

  But Agnes recognizes the words.

  It’s all just water.

  Then Eleanor pulls Agnes close and presses her lips to her ear.

  “I made a mistake,” she whispers fiercely. “For a thousand years I’ve lived with it. I never should have left you.”

  Agnes chokes back a small cry. “Mom,” she manages.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Eleanor says. She wraps her arms around Agnes. “Don’t be afraid. I love you. I love you.”

  And together they sink, daughter and mother, clutching each other tightly, into the deep, silent, dark sea.

  The end of the world sounds like water.

  Eleanor and Esmerelda stop trudging through the sea. The horizon, so far away for so long, has drawn closer.

  Is that the edge of the world?

  Eleanor cranes her enormous neck. The ocean spills over the edge of her mother’s dream world. There is only darkness beyond, starless and full.

  I think it’s more than that, Eleanor says. Look.

  Together the twins watch as the darkness presses forward, chewing at the boundaries of the world. The sea churns and boils. They turn and look around them, and see the darkness marching inward from all directions. Far behind them, the beach of Anchor Bend crumples in gouts of sand and rock and spray.

  It’s happening, Esmerelda says. The reset.

  Eleanor searches for Agnes and her grandmother, but does not see them.

  They’re gone, she says. Where did they go?

  Esmerelda looks at her sister. Swimming
. Together.

  It dawns on Eleanor, then. She understands.

  Swimming, she says. This feels… right. Doesn’t it?

  Esmerelda nods her dented head and says nothing.

  They watch the dark walls of nothing as they squeeze like a hand around the sea. Geysers of water shoot into the sky, punching through the dark clouds, and for a faint moment, the absent sun can be seen once more, gray and ghostlike, before the darkness collides with it from above.

  What will happen? Eleanor asks.

  I don’t know.

  Will we wake up?

  I don’t know. Maybe.

  When will it be? Will we remember?

  Esmerelda just looks at Eleanor. I missed you, she says.

  Eleanor stretches her neck out, winding it around Esmerelda’s. She presses her scaly head against her sister’s.

  I missed you forever, Eleanor says.

  The sound of the collapsing world fills their ears, thrums in their chests and hearts and necks. It is deafening. Eleanor feels as if her heart will explode from the drumbeat. The sea around her warms, and she closes her eyes and imagines the inflatable pool. Two giant monsters, stomping about.

  I love you, Esmerelda, she says suddenly.

  Esmerelda’s dark, reptilian eyes shine.

  Will it hurt? Eleanor asks.

  I don’t know. Maybe.

  I don’t care if it does, Eleanor says.

  Neither do I.

  The darkness falls over them like a blanket, conjuring memories of the forts the sisters once built between their bedposts in the middle of the night, and beneath it, Eleanor and Esmerelda stand close.

  Tell me it will be okay, Eleanor whispers into Esmerelda’s ear.

  It will be okay, Esmerelda answers.

  Eleanor closes her eyes.

  It will be okay, she thinks.

  And for the first time in a very long time, it is.

  Gerry shakes the rain from her umbrella, coughing, then goes into the office, dropping the umbrella into a bucket and letting the glass door fall shut behind her.

  “It’s a mess out there,” she says loudly.

  She turns and looks through the door at the street. Water has gathered in the gutters and sweeps over the sidewalk. A green Oldsmobile glides by, sending up a gray fan of water that arcs over the walkway and drops just short of the office windows.

  “My,” Gerry says. Then, a little louder, “It really is a mess out there.”

  The light is on in Paul’s office, but after Gerry squeaks across the floor, she discovers that Paul isn’t there at all. The desk is covered with paperwork and file folders grown dusty.

  “Huh,” Gerry says. She flips the light switch. “Why are you on?”

  She makes coffee, enough for two people, though she is no longer certain she’ll see Paul today. He comes to the office less often now, and when he does, he calls home every hour to ask the hospice nurse how Agnes is doing. Gerry has told him to go home many times, to be close to his wife, who needs him more than the town’s few homebuyers.

  “I’m almost done with the licensing exams,” she told him the last time. “In a month you can just turn the keys over to me.”

  Paul hadn’t laughed at her joke. Instead, he had wrapped her up in the tightest hug, and thanked her, and swept out the door.

  The coffee pot beeps, and Gerry pours a cup, and mixes in cream and a little sugar, and then stands in the middle of the room, watching the rain. It seems to fall harder now than it did just a few minutes before. She crosses to the window and tilts her head at the sky, which can only be described as utterly black. A wrinkle of lightning ricochets about without leaving the clouds, and a moment later the thunderclap rattles the windows so violently that she jumps and spills her coffee.

  “Oh, darn it, darn it,” she says, and goes for napkins.

  Another clap of thunder, angry enough to take the lights out, and Gerry stops where she is.

  The air is electric, and fairly hums. The hairs on her arm stand up.

  “What the—” she says.

  She turns around and looks at the windows, and her lips part. Across the street, beyond the storefronts, the sky seems to be falling upon the earth, a heavy soot curtain. She can feel the ground trembling beneath her, and everything on her desk begins to vibrate. The beige telephone clatters to the floor, its bell ringing out at the impact. A cup full of pencils.

  A photograph topples onto the floor and skids to a stop at her feet. Even in the darkness she knows what it is. She keeps only one photograph on her desk. Gerry lets the coffee cup fall out of her hand, and bends over to pick up the frame. The loose glass pricks her finger, but she doesn’t feel it.

  The air is so charged with electricity that tiny blue sparks pop around her, all over the office.

  In the flashes of blue, she sees her two uniformed boys staring up at her through the shattered glass. She feels her heart swell, feels a tingle of anticipation that she does not understand.

  “My boys,” Gerry whispers. “My sweet boys, I’m—”

  Reset.

  The box is marked Attic junk.

  Paul sighs and shakes his head. “Aggie.”

  He sinks to the garage floor, crosses his legs, pulls the box into his lap. It is dusty, the corners crumpled, the cardboard softened with age. It is long and wide, and the tape across its mouth has lost its tack. Some of the dust on the flaps has been smudged away, as though the box was opened recently.

  Paul turns the flaps back and peers inside. He exhales softly.

  The little model house is fractured on its foundation, thrown carelessly into the box. Some of the trees sprinkled on the fake grass have snapped. The mailbox at the end of the sidewalk is broken in half. He expected as much when he saw Agnes’s scrawl on the box flaps. She had never truly understood his passion for the models. But she’d never resented it. The houses are broken because she resented him.

  She still does, as far as he knows.

  He stares at the broken house, and the memories swim up like dust motes. He closes his eyes and lets himself remember, something he doesn’t allow often. Rainy afternoons; the cool, musty attic smell. Eleanor sitting on the stool beside him, kicking her small feet. Esmerelda somewhere else in the house, singing. Agnes—somewhere.

  A knot rises in his throat, and he tries to swallow a faint sob.

  How different his life has turned out than he expected. He is still a young man, he knows. If he opened the garage door now and walked out into the street and never looked back—if he walked away like Aggie’s mother had done, except up the street instead of into the sea—he could start over. He could buy a small house in a small town, disappear into the world, stop picking at the scabs, wait for his scars to fade.

  Would they? Would they fade?

  His daughters are gone, one long in the ground, the other—the other—

  He fumbles in his pocket, takes out a piece of paper. It is the same one he found on the chair in the living room. The one he had folded carefully. The one that was unfolded when he came back to the house later. Was it Eleanor? Was it Agnes?

  He sets the note aside and stares down into the box.

  Outside, a gust of wind batters the garage door, slinging rain against it in a wave. He stares at the windows in the garage door, startled by how dark it is. The wind is strong—how had he failed to notice it before?—and the garage door seems to bend inward the tiniest bit.

  He gets up and presses a button on the wall, and the door starts to slide upward. He can see it clearly now—the door is bending, bending so much that it slips the chain and jams. There are two or three feet of space between the door and the concrete floor, and rain whips through the gap like a firehose, surprising him. He presses the button again, but the door groans and doesn’t budge.

  Wind roars through the gap, and the box of house parts inches backward, just a little. The paper note catches the gust and lifts into the air, and Paul reaches for it. He misses, and for a moment the paper seems to hang
in the air, and his heart nearly stops.

  The words on the paper are not his own.

  The words are Eleanor’s, penned in her careful, precise hand.

  Time is a river, and it flows in a circle. I love you.

  Tears spring to his eyes, and he flails about, snatching at the note, and then by some miracle he grabs it out of the air, and he turns it over and holds it up, and Eleanor’s words are not there at all, the writing is his, and all it says is Don’t go.

  But she did go.

  “Where?” he cries, and kicks the cardboard box. It splits open like a sack of groceries, spilling tiny broken balsa twigs and green tree stems on the floor. “Where did you go?”

  The wind sweeps through the model parts, scattering building materials and glue and pipe cleaners and cellophane around. There are four tiny figures in the box that he had forgotten about—a grown man and woman, and two smaller figures whose hair he had delicately painted red—and the wind lifts them from the pile and into the air, and he stares at them as they seem to hover, just like the note.

  And he hears it then, in the strange quiet of that moment.

  Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee—

  “Aggie,” he whispers, and he runs.

  She is dead when he enters the room. The hospice nurse is not here today, and the respirator beside the bed is still, and the little machine on the wheeled cart blinks red lights and beeps in a single unwavering pitch.

  Paul stands at the foot of the bed, the bed he once slept in, the same bed where his daughters were conceived a thousand lifetimes ago, and stares at the small, frail body of his wife. Agnes is curled into a ball, and her arms are wrapped around her pillow, and to his amazement, her lips are curled up in the slightest smile.

  He forgets the years in that moment. The accusations and the blame and the bottles and the fights. He forgets the torment of it all, forgets even about his daughters, just for a second, and steps out of his shoes and climbs onto the bed. He lies down beside Agnes, not touching her, and just looks at her, taking her in. Her eyes are open but unfocused, her cheeks rose-colored, the way they haven’t been in so long. Her hair is splayed across the pillow in a cloud, like a mermaid’s in a gentle current.