by Russell Moon
But weirdly, right. My head on Eleanor’s shoulder, her hand patting my back, tapping a Morse code everything’s going to be okay. Right.
“Eleanor,” I say, remembering the weight of what I’m telling her, and what I’m not, “can I buy you a drink?”
She pauses to push me away but continues holding me by the shoulders. She looks at the clock on top of the oven. It’s ten thirty-five A.M.
“I think you’d just better,” she says.
We move to the living room and spend a while staring sympathetically at each other from either end of the tatty couch. Every thirty seconds or so, one of us takes a sip of mildly vodka-spiked grapefruit juice. Then, every minute or so, she climbs down to my end of the couch, gives me a brave little hug, and scampers back down to her end to moon-eye me some more.
“Oh, Marcus,” she says, over and over. “Oh, Marcus. Are you okay? Are you going to be okay?”
“I’m going to be okay, El,” I say. “I’m not sure when I’m going to be okay….”
And that is the least true thing I could possibly say, followed by the truest thing I have said in quite some time. I can’t see any end in sight for the confusion and scariness of it all. Who is this guy, really? Could he really be my dad, like he says, despite the terror he has caused me and seen me through? Is he the one I should be cozying up to or the one I should be fleeing from to the ends of the earth?
I know what Eleanor would say, if I gave her the chance. She’d say he’s a bastard and a freak and an abandoner. She’d say remember. She’d say remember that you cannot even remember him. She’d say do not forget he left the two of us, and she’d say don’t trust him as far as you can throw him, and if you can throw him, do. That is, more or less, what she would say, judging by our few conversations about him.
“You’ve had a few calls this morning,” Eleanor says, taking our glasses to the sideboard and making us some more liberally spiced greyhounds.
“Hmm,” I say, and hmmm, I think, because I know instinctively what calls she means. I’d almost managed to forget them in light of bigger, scarier things. Almost. But there’s no sense even thinking that in being preoccupied by one, I’m going to somehow lose the attention of the other bunch—the coven, the gaggle of witches who are supposed to be, like, my peer group. I’m stuck in a witch sandwich between him and them, not knowing, really, what one side has to do with the other. After going back to Port Cal, finding out what I found out, dealing with … what the hell do I even call him?
“Father will do,” his voice says in my head.
Father will do? Father will do what? Dump me at birth? Terrify me out of my wits on the few occasions I see him? Strangle me? Come along and maul my whole life, which had been running along unspectacularly but happily enough for seventeen years with the one exception of, oh, being dumped by my father? Is that what Father will do? “Shut up,” I say.
“Excuse me?” Eleanor says.
“Sorry, nothing. Just talking to myself.”
She is shaking her head as she finishes mixing the drinks.
What do I know? About him, about them? About anything? One thing is certain: there is no certainty.
Who’s good? Who’s bad? Is any one of them good? From what I can tell, that’s unlikely. Align with nobody is the best policy. Keep to yourself, and wait and see. For now, assume everybody is bad, assume everybody sucks, and you won’t go too far wrong.
“You don’t care?” Eleanor asks, as she slips my highball glass into my hand and herself into her bentwood rocker.
“Of course I care,” I say definitively. “About what?”
“About who called?”
“Right.” I take a huge long pull on my drink. I find myself monitoring it on its way down, past the tongue and throat, into the empty cavern of my belly. It feels nice. It feels nicer than most things I’m likely to feel today or any time soon. I can’t wait till it reaches my head. “Who called?”
“Eartha,” we both say at the same time.
“Yes,” she says. “Well, she was very concerned about you. I told her you would get in touch with her after you called me—like you said you would in your note.”
“Sorry,” I say.
There is a protracted, awkward silence between us, which is uncommon. We’re fine at silence, me and Eleanor, great at silence. We can do silences sometimes that can be big, fat, hours long, and not be bothered a lick. It’s the awkward part that’s uncommon. This is not the quiet, comfortable communion we would normally be sharing at a time like this.
Precisely because there has never been a time like this.
“Jules is dead,” she says.
I can’t say it anymore. I can’t say anything about it, anymore. Awkward or not, I’m afraid there are going to have to be some silences endured around here in the coming days.
I nod. Squeeze my eyes shut. Open them. She is still there. Still watching over me, still aching for me in case I can’t do it all myself. Which I probably can’t.
I drain my glass, put it down on the coffee table, and then just sort of tip over onto the couch. I tuck my hands angel-like under my cheek and pull my legs up under my butt, and start to allow myself to fade.
Chuck ambles on into the room, drops himself like a drooly, sweaty rug beside me. I am not surprised to see him, though the last time I did he was in a patch of woods hundreds of miles from here.
Eleanor scootches her chair up alongside me too.
“Isn’t it really hot?” I say. “Unbelievably hot today.”
I feel Chuck’s panting gently rocking the whole couch.
“It is,” Eleanor says, and rests the condensation-wet heel of her glass against my fevered temple. “You rest. Later, when you’re better, we’ll talk. About, you know, everything.”
Oh, right. Everything. Almost forgot about everything for a second there.
I sleep the sleep of the dead. I think. For a while.
When I wake up my head is rocking, my brain banging on the walls to get out. I sit up, rub my head over and over. I hear the water running outside. It’s nice—familiar and comforting and as it should be.
“Chuck,” I call, but there is no sign of him.
“Eleanor?” Nothing. Nobody.
Not quite.
“Hi, Marcus.”
She is right there, has been right there … for how long? How did I not notice?
“Hi, Eartha,” I say.
She looks all serene, sitting where Eleanor was sitting at the far end of the couch. Wearing cut-off white denim shorts and a cropped T-shirt that says bitchin’ across the front in glitter. Her hands are folded in her lap.
I look away, look around.
“Eleanor,” I call again.
“She’s not here,” Eartha says.
“Where is she?”
“Don’t know.”
“Who let you in?”
“I let me in.”
I feel very groggy. My head is swimming. I don’t want to talk. I don’t want company that has fewer than four legs or isn’t my mother.
“I’m sorry, Marcus,” she says.
“Why? What’d you do now?”
“About your girlfriend. I’m sorry about what happened.”
For some reason, this bites through me. Not just for the regular reasons, the obvious reasons of sadness and guilt and grief. There is more. For even though Eartha looks truly, effectively sincere and sympathetic, there is something that bothers me so, so much, about her merely mentioning my Jules, and what happened to my Jules. She is, in a smaller but similar way, just as responsible as my father for all that’s been happening—however responsible that is. In my mind, in my heart, I am bothered, worried, scared, and angered by her very presence in my life and her very reference to the life that was Jules’s.
Even if some might say I have a nerve myself. My Jules. Since I killed my Jules.
“How do you know about what happened to Jules? How do you know anything?”
“I’m sorry,” she says again
.
“That’s not an answer,” I say.
I glower at her, figuring maybe my glower could possibly have an effect. It doesn’t, of course, but as I stare, I become aware of something.
Eartha is no longer Jules. I mean, she still resembles her—the same long, dark hair, the same wide-set hazel eyes—but she is not her. I would never again, not for an instant, confuse Eartha with Jules, because something there has been lost. It could be that there is no Jules essence left roaming this earth since I put what was left into the ground. Could be I will not see her anywhere anymore.
“You don’t see her anymore,” Eartha says.
“What?”
“You don’t see Jules in me anymore, do you?”
“Don’t say her name, all right?” I snap.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
I jump up, over the back of the couch, and stamp over to the French doors to the porch over the stream. “And stop saying you’re sorry. You’re not sorry. Nobody is sorry. Except me. I’m sorry—very, very, very goddamn sorry—for everything. Sorry I was born and for every single thing that followed.”
I throw open the doors and step onto the saggy, wobbly porch. I lean on the badly propped-up railing, even though I know it’s not good for much.
He’s out there.
I go so weak at the mere sight of him. Standing between me and my soothing, babbling water. I feel so pursued, so harried, so whipped.
Go to hell, I think, knowing he can hear.
He just stands there, ankle deep in the water, like he’s waiting for me. Like we have an appointment of some kind. We have no appointment. Of any kind.
“Marcus,” Eartha calls at my back.
I go. I slam the doors behind me and hop once more over the back of the couch to take up residence in my new permanent spot.
“Chuck,” I call.
“He’s not here,” Eartha says. “We’re alone.”
She is so calm. “Why are you so calm?” I demand. “Stop being so calm. I hate this. I hate everything. I feel like a fox with a hundred baying, frothing dogs after me all the time, and I hate you being so calm.”
“I’m sorry,” she says again.
“Stop it,” I say.
When I look at her now, she smiles at me.
And removes her T-shirt.
“Put that back on,” I say, closing my eyes and holding my hand up, stop-sign fashion.
“Trust us, Marcus,” she says. I can feel her breath on my cheek.
“Us?” I say. “Us?” I open my eyes and turn to face her full on. I look her up and down, fully naked now. I look at her shirt and shorts on the floor. And I rant.
“Who’s ‘us’? How many people you got in there, Eartha? That’s quite a trick.”
“Marcus,” she says, still damnably calm.
“What?” I say.
“What I meant was, trust me.”
She has me cornered on my sad little couch-end cushion.
“Why should I trust you?”
She is with me once again. Right with me.
“Lots of reasons,” she says, leaning hard against me, rubbing me, kissing the side of my face while I stare into space. If I were a better guy, I would hate this. If I were a smarter guy, a stronger guy.
“I can t,” I say.
“You can,” she says.
Suddenly I find myself tipped over. She is tipped over too. She is on top of me.
“I don’t think I can,” I say, as she lightly licks my top lip.
“I think you can.”
I am starting to move into her as she moves into me. I am starting to stop resisting the way I should be resisting, the way I want to be resisting. I am starting to agree with her that maybe I can.
“Marcus,” Eleanor calls. “Marcus, Marcus.”
I shout a little shout of terror.
“Wake up,” she says, shaking and shaking me.
“Jesus,” I say, sitting up extremely quickly and making a brisk little show of trying to make myself cool. I smooth down my hair and the front of my pants. I am swimming in perspiration. “Jesus, what’s happening?” I ask. “Where have you been? Have you been here long? Where’s Chuck?”
At the sound of his name, Chuck straightens up from his rug position, where he was last time I laid eyes on him.
“I had to wake you,” Eleanor says apologetically. “You seemed to be struggling. You were dreaming, thrashing around, making a lot of noise. I thought you were going to hurt yourself.”
What am I supposed to say to that? To my mother?
“Thanks,” I say, and find myself rubbing my head again, hot and hurt again, if not still.
“I made some real lemonade,” she says. “I bet you could go for a tall, icy glass of lemonade.”
“Oh god, yes,” I say.
She heads off to the kitchen, and I look at Chuck.
“How bad was I?” I ask him. “Was I, like, obvious? Like, y’know …”
He hangs his head, dog-vulture style.
“Damn,” I say.
Eleanor returns, and I feel so weird and dirty I want to ask her to leave. But she is so sunshiny and pleased to give me her creation that I can’t feel strange for long.
“Try it,” she says. “It’s from a New York Times recipe.”
I take a long, frosty gulp.
“Eleanor,” I say, wiping my mouth on the back of my hand, “it’s crammed with vodka.”
She smiles sheepishly and shrugs.
“We can’t keep this up,” I say. “Can we?”
She shrugs again.
“What were you dreaming about?” she asks. “It must have been pretty intense.”
Thank god she wasn’t watching the festivities as closely as Chuck.
Perv Chuck. I throw him a look.
“Y’know,” I say, “I don’t even remember.”
It would be hard to tell a more thorough lie, since I am reliving parts of the dream right now. And loathing myself for dreaming such stuff, with Jules … so soon after….
“Well, Eartha called again. I didn’t want to wake you. She said to say she was sorry about having to back out on you. Said you’d make another date as soon as you felt up to it. You had a date, Marcus?”
The witch.
“No, Eleanor. I don’t know what she’s talking about. She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”
It was a dream, wasn’t it? Can they be dreams, if these people—Should I even call them people?—already know about them? Was she really here? Is it all just movies in my head, projected there by whoever’s controlling me this time? Does it matter?
Eleanor finishes her drink, looks at the glass, then comes over to get mine, to freshen it.
“Mine’s fresh enough, thanks,” I say, covering the mouth with my hand. “And I better go easy, or I’ll just keel over again. I’m still not quite my best, yet, you know?”
“I’ll get you some lunch, and you’ll feel better,” she says, and spins off to the kitchen to fix me something that I probably won’t be able to eat yet but that will make us both feel better just because of it’s being there, and that will make Chuck happy when he gets to snarf it.
“Should I be worried about our intake?” I ask Chuck, waving my glass in front of him for specificity.
He does the dog-vulture thing again.
“Stop saying that,” I say.
I finish my drink in heroically quick fashion and feel remarkably better than I did just a few minutes earlier.
And then another, hopeful, thought occurs to me. Was he a dream?
I go to the French doors, give them a good feeling-up with my fingertips to see if they are real or if I’m just hologramming everything I see. They are real. As are my still-mangled knuckles and my torn fingernail. So it’s not all illusion. Unfortunately.
I throw the doors open once more.
And there he is.
“What am I going to do with you?” I call down. It’s as feasible that he will have the right answer as that I
will, at this point.
“Trust me,” he says in a voice that sounds to me like the voice of a reptile.
This is getting to be a pretty funny theme from where I stand. I’ve never before come across such a breed of slithery, suspicious characters, and they’re all sliding around saying trust me, trust me.
I’m trying to think of how to explain this in two words or less, when I edge right up to the railing and lean way over for emphasis.
And it gives, breaking away completely.
I crash through and thud to the ground, hitting the high, grassy, mossy bank and rolling, tumbling, and flailing my way down the hill until I roll up to him and right down into the running waters.
“Hi,” he says.
I stand up, wet. I’m not experiencing the same waterproof protection he offered me last time. Though he himself looks fairly cool and dry.
“Why won’t you leave me alone?” I ask, and start marching downstream without waiting for a reply. “Why won’t all of you just leave me alone for good?”
“There are two different answers there. I won’t leave you alone because I can’t. We need each other. They won’t leave you alone because they want to destroy you.”
I could be shocked by this assertion or more scared than I already am, but I’m not. Mainly because there is no reason to believe anything he says. And also because I am already on top of fearing the coven and their motivations, whatever those may be. I keep walking.
He is actually sort of floating along beside me now, trying to keep up with me. And I have to admit, though it seems effortless on his part, he is still chasing after me, and I kind of like it. I pick up the pace, making nice, dramatic splashes with every step I take.
“Oh yeah? Well that’s not a big surprise. You’re all destroying me,” I say. “It doesn’t much matter to me who wins.”
“Marcus,” he says. “Wait.”
I make like I’m not heeding, but I let him catch up. He walks in stride with me now, leaning in close to me.
“Hey,” he says, scowling, scrunching his nose, and pulling back. “Have you been drinking?”
