Eleanor Read online

  Then it does. The strut gives a terrible cry, and breaks into several pieces. The cargo door falls open, swinging low. Eleanor can feel the entire plane shudder.

  It begins to spin.

  Another crate pulls free, and banks off of yet another, and suddenly the three loose crates are not just sliding, but are flung about like toys. One of them splinters open, and Eleanor watches in horror as huge burlap sacks full of—what?—are flung around the cargo hold. The other two crates collide with more jump seats, and Eleanor screams. The soldiers in those seats sag limply, and the plane’s strange new gravity yanks at their slack bodies so that it appears they are standing straight up with their arms outstretched.

  Their broken, misshapen arms.

  For the first time then it occurs to her that she has not grabbed onto anything, and yet the wind has not touched her. She looks down at herself. Her T-shirt and shorts are unruffled by the steep draft. She grabs her hair and holds it away from her face and lets go, and it falls back into place.

  There are five soldiers left in the jump seats. Two are unconscious and battered. The other three look absolutely terrified. Eleanor takes a careful step forward. Her footing is sure, so she takes another, and another, until she is next to the first jump seat. The boy sitting there—for that is all he is, just a boy a few years older than Eleanor—is crossing himself and crying, because that’s what a boy does when he is faced with death.

  And that is surely what is happening here, she realizes.

  The plane is all wrong. The angles inside the cargo space are not straight. They are curved, as if the plane has been wrenched out of the sky and twisted. The clouds outside the open door are turned the wrong way, and then the right way, and then the wrong way again. She can see a pale blue Earth sprawled high above them—instead of where it should be, far below the clouds.

  The boy screams, and she hears the boy next to him say something about Jesus, and Eleanor looks at all three of the boys carefully.

  She recognizes two of them.

  A loud crack sounds behind her, and Eleanor looks back to see the entire wall of crates shift and tear free of their straps. She instinctively flinches, but the crates pass directly through her. They collide with every square inch of the cargo hold, hurled to the ceiling and the walls and the floors as the plane spirals out of control. Eleanor watches helplessly as a crate smashes directly into the jump seats, tearing them free of the wall.

  Two of the boys are torn from the plane, still buckled into their bent seats, both dead or unconscious and unable to scream.

  Then there is only one boy, and Eleanor turns and looks at him.

  He has somehow found a strap to clutch, and he hangs on, desperately trying to wind it around his hand. His bladder has released, staining his uniform, and he is too frightened to cry any longer. Eleanor has enough time to look in his eyes.

  He sees her.

  He tries to say something, to talk to this red-haired girl who stands untouched by the destruction around her, but then, just like that, he is gone, ripped from the airplane like the burlap sacks that preceded him. He crashes into the flapping cargo door and sails out into the sky, completely limp, and continues his long fall to—to the sea below, Eleanor realizes, seeing the vast blue ocean rising up so far beneath the plane.

  She stands there, rooted in place by the realization that bloomed in the boy’s eyes when he saw her.

  Saw her.

  She hears his voice in her head as clearly as she heard it all those years ago.

  You’ll be a good girl, right?

  Then the plane begins to break apart.

  The keeper rocks slowly in her chair. Her eyes are closed, and she listens to the rain. It drips from the edges of the porch roof. The earth around the cabin swells with water. Bits of grass and pine needles and fallen leaves float on the surface. The water has been rising again, she knows. It must be four, five inches now.

  The sky is a sullen gray, and the clouds have grown darker these past few days. The cabin door stands open, and the interior glows orange. There are several leaks in the cabin’s roof now. The keeper has scattered iron pots around to catch the water. They demand to be emptied three or four times a day. They’re freshly emptied now, and the keeper can hear the ringing tap of water on the cast iron even from the porch, and she hums a song, using the tapping as a metronome.

  Her humming almost obscures the rumble, but her shadow hears it, and separates from her.

  She stops humming. “Where are you going?”

  The shadow pauses at the stairs, tightening itself into a dark, flat circle.

  Then she hears it.

  At first, she thinks it is thunder, but there hasn’t been any lightning in some time, so that can’t be it.

  The shadow is unnerved by the sound, whatever it is. And that bothers her, because in her valley, she is the keeper of the rain, the keeper of the trees, the keeper of every sound. Nothing happens in the valley without her knowing.

  And yet.

  She gets out of her chair and goes to her shadow and stomps on it, affixing it to her feet again. It cowers beneath her, and she leans on the porch post and stares out at her land, made hazy by the rain and rising mists.

  The rumble comes again, and she follows the sound of it. It is high, very high, far above her. She looks at the clouds, the churning, slow, black billow of them, and sees nothing out of the ordinary—

  Then an airplane tears through the clouds, ripping a hole in the sky.

  She is speechless at the sight of it, so foreign is such a thing to her valley.

  The plane is very far away, but she can see that it is an immense hunk of shrapnel. Its shape is unnatural. She thinks she can make out ragged holes in the fuselage, a giant sheet of steel flapping open like the thorny jaw of an angler fish. She can hear its distant whine, the engines like a ghostly shriek. A funnel of black smoke corkscrews behind the thing as it plummets from her sky.

  “It won’t land,” she says to her shadow, which cowers beneath her. “Look at it.”

  She is right. The plane spins like the blades of a windmill, its wings boring into the sky like an auger.

  “This is her doing,” she says, softly. “Our interloper.”

  Far away, the mountains and the pines climb up and obscure the falling aircraft’s last seconds, and then a spray of dirt and stone fans high into the sky, visible even from here. A moment later an orange fist punches skyward, then folds over, becoming a charcoal cloud that looms large over the mountain range.

  The keeper falls against the post in disbelief. The porch shudders a little.

  The rain will put out the fire, she knows, but her valley has suffered another attack. She will hike to the crash site, but in this weather, and across her swollen lake of a meadow, the hike will take two days at least. Longer, if the storm worsens. And she knows what she will find: a terrible wound in the side of her mountain, wreckage strewn over hundreds of yards, trees shattered into splinters.

  “This must end,” the keeper hisses. She looks down at her shadow. It draws itself together, growing large with her anger. “Do you understand?”

  The shadow understands.

  The keeper looks again at the fat column of smoke pinwheeling up into the far-off sky.

  “It is settled, then,” the keeper says. “We will stop her.”

  At the head of Pier C in Anchor Bend stands a great white shark. The statue is a curiosity, but it is an impressive one. The body is hammered bronze, and the shark is threatening, the way a great white should appear. Its body is arched dramatically, its jaws wide and layered with rows of teeth, its eyes beady and absent any personality. It is a near-perfect representation of a living killing machine, but the story of how the statue came to be is much less fantastic. It was inspired by the only such beast ever spotted in Anchor Bend’s waters, a shark that was, truth be told, only half-spotted at that.

  A fishing trawler had reported the shark’s appearance in the early ’60s. None of the ship’s c
rew had seen the shark’s body, only its tall fin. And most of them dismissed the sighting, certain they had seen a whale, or a lost dolphin. But one fisherman had come home quite excited by the event, and at Wharfman’s Pub had spun the tale into a full-fledged shark attack. A local artist, himself a fisherman, had commemorated the story with the great white sculpture, and his brother-in-law, a city councilman, had persuaded the city to mount the sculpture near the water. The statue drew tourists, and raised Anchor Bend’s air of mystique, and most had no idea that the story was a fabrication, or at least a fallacy. It was widely believed, in fact, that the artist—who had long since fled Anchor Bend, amid scandalous rumors about his interest in another city official’s wife—had never sobered up enough to verify the fisherman’s tale.

  The tourists love to pose with the statue, however, and often gather around it and take turns sticking their head into the bronze mouth.

  Which is how so many people came to witness Eleanor’s reappearance.

  Not one of them could explain where the red-haired girl came from, just that she was suddenly there, prone in the shadow of the great white, splayed out on the wet sidewalk. Someone says, “Oh, my god,” and another person says, “Is she okay? Did she fall?” The crowd of tourists becomes a knot, tangled tightly around the unconscious girl. A third person says, “Did anybody call an ambulance?”

  A tall anesthesiologist from Denmark takes charge of the scene and kneels over Eleanor, quickly taking the girl’s pulse and turning her onto her side. The woman looks up to urge the other tourists to back away, and catches several of them staring at her cleavage.

  “Back!” the Danish woman snaps, and the crowd obeys.

  The woman turns back to Eleanor, snaps her fingers, then lightly pats Eleanor’s damp cheek. She is startled to feel how cold the girl’s skin is.

  “Come on, come on,” the woman says. She claps her hands, loudly, and that seems to do the trick. Eleanor flinches, and then blinks, and then squints up at the blond woman hovering above her, at the rain falling down like beads into her eyes.

  “Hello,” Eleanor says, her voice sleepy. “Who are you?”

  The anesthesiologist from Denmark says, “My name is Cecilie. What’s your name?”

  “I’m Eleanor,” says Eleanor. She blinks. “Where am I?”

  “You are at the piers,” says Cecilie. “Are you from here? Do you know where you are?”

  Eleanor sees the shark overhead. “Hello, shark,” she says.

  “Tell me how you feel,” Cecilie says.

  A darkness passes across Eleanor’s face. “I had a dream,” she says. “It was—it was very sad.”

  “Do you live here?” Cecilie asks. “Are you visiting?”

  Eleanor sits up and bumps her head on the shark’s tail fin. “Ouch,” she says, rubbing her head. “I—my father. He works just over there.”

  She points up the road at her father’s office, and the crowd of tourists begins to break up as it becomes clear that Eleanor, while disoriented, is generally okay. Cecilie helps Eleanor to her feet, drawing her away from the statue, and says, “You are okay?”

  “I’m okay,” Eleanor says. “Just—tired.”

  “Can you walk?”

  “I think so,” Eleanor says.

  She allows Cecilie to guide her, and together they cross the waterfront lawn to the sidewalk, and turn in the direction of Paul Witt Realty. They walk slowly, and Eleanor tries to shuffle her thoughts into order.

  “What is today?” she asks Cecilie.

  “Saturday.”

  “Saturday,” Eleanor says. “The same Saturday?”

  Cecilie looks confused. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “The—whales. Were there whales in the harbor?” Eleanor asks. “Were there whales there today?”

  Cecilie says, “I did not see them, but I heard their spouts.”

  Eleanor frowns. “So it’s the same Saturday? It’s not the next one?”

  “You sound like you might want to see a doctor,” Cecilie says. “You sound—hmm. Addled. Are you sure you’re okay?”

  Eleanor looks around at the damp streets and the soft rain tumbling down.

  “There was a storm,” she says. “It was worse than this.” And then she adds, “I’m not addled.”

  “It’s been raining since yesterday,” Cecilie says. “Not a very nice day for the water, I’m afraid.”

  “Raining just like this?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then it can’t be the same Saturday,” Eleanor says. “The storm was—it was huge.”

  “Do you know what happened? Did you faint? I did not even see you—”

  Eleanor puts one hand up, and Cecilie almost walks into it.

  “What—” Cecilie starts, and then she stops, following Eleanor’s gaze.

  A few blocks ahead, a police car and an ambulance are stopped on the opposite side of the road. Their lights wink and swirl, and a few people have gathered around to eyeball the disturbance.

  “Dad,” Eleanor says. “That’s my father’s office.”

  “Here,” Cecilie says. “Hold my hand, and we will try to go faster.”

  “I’m fine,” Eleanor says, breaking into an unsteady run. She darts across the glistening street without looking.

  “Are you sure?” Cecilie the anesthesiologist calls after her.

  But Eleanor doesn’t answer her.

  Paul Witt Realty is in chaos, or as much chaos as three worried people can generate. Eleanor stops on the sidewalk, just short of the police car. A tanned officer in short black sleeves sees her and says, “Wait—you. Come with me.”

  Eleanor steps back, but the officer takes her by the elbow and leads her past the car and the flashing lights.

  “Hey,” she says. “Let go of me, please. What are you doing?”

  The officer waves another officer over, a woman with a tight, dark ponytail. “Sheila,” he says. “Is this the girl?”

  Sheila takes two steps in Eleanor’s direction, then stops. “Hey,” she says.

  “Let go of me,” Eleanor says again.

  The officer named Sheila steps through the office door, and a moment later comes outside with Paul Witt, who says, “I don’t under—” Then he sees Eleanor and he runs to her—runs, as she has almost never seen her father do before—and then the first officer is letting her go, and her father’s arms go around her, tightly, as if he is cinching her in half. Words come out of him in a rush: “Ellie, my god, where—how did you—I was so—are you okay? Goddammit, where—Ellie, you’re safe, you’re okay, you’re—”

  “This is your daughter?” the first officer asks.

  Paul nods without letting go of Eleanor.

  “Dad,” Eleanor says, confused. “What’s going on?”

  The officer named Sheila tells Eleanor’s father that she’s going to stick around to take down some information for her report, but the tanned officer leaves in the squad car. Eleanor asks about the ambulance.

  “Come inside,” her father says. He starts walking toward the door, but Eleanor stops short.

  Paul turns back. “Ellie,” he says. “Come inside.”

  She shakes her head, staring past him at the glass doors.

  Paul follows her gaze to the doors, then turns back to her. “What’s wrong?”

  “I—want to stay out here,” Eleanor says. She feels a tremor in her throat, but can’t tell if it’s fear or if she’s about to burst into tears. “Can I stay out here?”

  Paul looks at Officer Sheila, who shrugs. “I guess so. Everyone’s inside, though. Ellie, what’s going on?”

  Through the doors, Eleanor can see Jack inside, and he sees her, and he claps his hands to his head and then runs through the doors. “Ellie,” he says, and she is surprised to see that his eyes are red from crying. “Ellie, Ellie.”

  He just says her name again and again, and Eleanor looks at her father, and then at Jack, and she says again, “What’s going on?”

  Officer Sheila says
, “We were told you were missing. Do you want to tell me where you’ve been this morning?”

  Eleanor blinks. “This morning? Only this morning?”

  Jack’s eyes fill up with tears. “You just disappeared,” he whispers.

  “Gerry,” Eleanor says. “Where’s Gerry?”

  Eleanor goes inside. Walking through the door is terrifying, and at first she cannot do it. She puts her hands on either side of the open doorway and pushes herself away from it. Her father says, “Ellie,” and the note of tension in his voice upsets her, because that means everything is back to the way it was, because she was gone and now she’s home and he is already parenting her, but then Jack is next to her, and he says, quietly, “It’s okay. Everything is going to be okay.”

  His voice is gentle, and Eleanor takes a deep breath, and that’s when she realizes that she doesn’t feel any of it—doesn’t feel the charge in the air, doesn’t feel something pulling at her.

  She goes through the doorway with her eyes closed, and when she opens them again, she’s in the lobby of her father’s real estate office, and everything is quite normal, except for Gerry lying on the couch with an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth, except for the paramedic kneeling beside her, capping a syringe and depositing it into a biohazard bucket.

  Eleanor turns to her father and says, “What happened?”

  But Jack says, “He didn’t see. I did, though.”

  “What happened?” she says again.

  Her father and Officer Sheila tower over her as she stares at Gerry, who is breathing, but not well.

  “Ellie,” Jack says. “You—it sounds crazy, but you—you disappeared. And it scared her. And me,” he adds.

  “She fainted,” Officer Sheila says. “Or something.”