Eleanor: A Novel Page 4

  It’s a strange town for a realtor. Nobody at Paul’s annual conference can tell him how to sell a home in a town where empty houses lie discarded on the side of the road like crushed cans.

  Anchor Bend is no short distance from the Portland airport, where Paul’s plane has arrived unexpectedly early. The flight knocked him around like a tennis shoe in a dryer. Putting the plane on the ground safely was a terrific feat, and when Paul bumps into the pilot in the terminal, he surprises himself by congratulating the man.

  “You have no idea how close we came,” the captain whispers, his white cap tucked under one arm, his collar loose. He shakes his head and grins. “Kidding, of course. Bit rough back in coach, I imagine.”

  Paul looks at his watch. “I’ve got some time to kill,” he says. “Can I buy you a drink?”

  They enjoy a couple of beers in an airport pub that fancies itself an old English drinking hole. It’s called the Peat & Pear, though there’s nothing earthy or particularly fruity about the place. Its walls are covered with illustrations of biplanes turning lazy circles over black-and-white meadows. The pub is little more than a hollowed-out nook in the concourse, with a few sticky tables and a short bar lined with bolted-on stools.

  The captain’s name is Mark, and he regales Paul with stories of troublemaker passengers and bad-weather landings, and when the two men finish their first beer, Paul glances at the clock over the bar. It’s still early yet—his flight had been scheduled to land at four, and it’s now ten minutes till. Agnes and the girls should be here by four-fifteen. Time enough for a second beer.

  At twenty minutes past, Paul and Captain Mark abandon their stools and walk slowly to the arrivals ramp. The sidewalk zone in front of the airport is strangely empty, and Agnes’s Subaru is nowhere to be seen. Paul leans out and watches the horizon, but the car doesn’t materialize. Agnes is not driving in slow circles around the airport waiting for him.

  “Wife late?” Captain Mark asks.

  “Little bit,” Paul says. He turns and looks back, spies a clock over the United desk. Four twenty-five now.

  “Probably traffic,” says the captain. “Saw lots of it on approach.”

  Outside, the world is gray and opaque. The large windows welcoming travelers into the airport are beginning to fog over, and water trickles down them in long, slow streams. He can barely make out planes on the distant runway, lining up, awaiting their turn to leave the Earth.

  Paul nods. “Yeah. You’re probably right.”

  But his world sways a little on its axis.

  “Can we stop?” Esmerelda asks from the back seat.

  Eleanor doesn’t glance up. The scenery rushes by, wet and gray and chalky, and she hardly notices. She bites her lip as she draws, carefully threading a single gray line down the sheet of paper, then pairing another beside it. The entry tunnel. She pauses, studying it, seeing something taking shape on the page that nobody else would see if they were to look. She erases bits of pencil, making little notches in the pair of lines, unevenly spaced. Then she draws little angled lines forking away from the first two, flanking each of the gaps. Secondary tunnels.

  This continues for a time as she builds the spine of her underground bunker. The primary tunnel is wider than the others, and will carve deeply into the graphite earth around it. This tunnel will be a distraction, a red herring. It will appear to be the important corridor, will appear to lead to the secret stash she’ll bury somewhere in the map, but in truth, one of the dozen forked paths will be the truly meaningful hallway.

  “Can we stop?” Esmerelda asks again.

  Eleanor looks up and sees the fog beginning to swamp the highway ahead of them. The trees become thin and faded, the fog tangled high in their branches, like some ghostly predator caught up in a green net.

  “I like the fog,” she says to nobody in particular.

  “Nobody cares,” Esmerelda retorts. “Mo-oomm, can we stop? I have to pee.”

  “We’re almost through,” Agnes replies. Her hands are pale on the wheel. There hasn’t been a moment of sunlight during the drive; this is the first respite from the rain. “Let’s get to the airport and you can go there.”

  “It’s so far,” Esmerelda complains.

  Eleanor sighs at her sister’s childishness. “Grow up, Esme.”

  “We’re the same age, dummy,” Esmerelda snaps. “You grow up.”

  There’s a metallic snick as Esmerelda unfastens her seat belt and scoots to the middle. A moment later she pops up between the two front seats like a Jack-in-the-box, clutching at her mother’s sleeve.

  “I really, really have to pee,” she moans.

  Eleanor elbows Esmerelda in the shoulder. “Get out of the way!”

  “You get out of the way,” Esmerelda retorts.

  Which infuriates Eleanor, because how could she be in the way? She’s the one sitting in her seat, buckled up, exactly where she’s supposed to be. Esmerelda is the one tumbling around in the car like an escaped hedgehog.

  “Sit down,” Agnes barks, and both girls recognize the fractured timbre of her voice. This is Agnes when the world seems to be closing in around her. Eleanor doesn’t know the word stress just yet, but if she did, she would recognize that her mother is very, very stressed out.

  Esmerelda sits back, sullen. “If I pee the seat, it’s not my fault,” she mutters, but such is the mood in the car now that nobody replies.

  Eleanor casts a furtive glance at her mother. Agnes’s jaw is clenched as tightly as her hands on the wheel, and it makes Eleanor think that driving must be very hard, because her mother looks as if she’s being crushed into a tiny ball.

  In the back seat, Esmerelda crosses her arms and pouts. Eleanor turns around, leaning against her own seat belt, and says, “You’re gonna pee yourself.”

  “You’re gonna pee yourself,” Esmerelda retorts. “You pee yourself all day every day. You’re peeing yourself right now.”

  “Both of you,” Agnes says through gritted teeth. “Stop. Now.”

  The fog crashes in like a wave then, and Eleanor returns to her map as the Subaru becomes a spaceship in some pale cosmic ocean.

  Highway 26 curves inland from the Oregon coast, a narrow ribbon that winds through miles of tall trees and more miles of golden fields that roll away toward the mountains. It is, on its best days, a beautiful, scenic route—and on days like this, it is a tightrope strung into nothingness. Agnes feels like a circus performer on that rope, barely able to see the wire at her feet, two unruly monkeys perched on her shoulders.

  Her hands are beginning to ache, so she opens them with her palms against the wheel. Her fingers crack like ice in warm water, which makes her feel a little better.

  “Seriously,” Esmerelda says again.

  Agnes takes a long, slow breath and lets it out before she responds. “You really can’t hold it?”

  “I really, really can’t,” comes the reply.

  Agnes glances up at the rearview mirror, then tilts it with one hand so she can see her daughter. Esmerelda’s knees are tucked up to her chin, arms tightly cinched around her legs.

  “We’ve already passed most of the stops,” Agnes says. “Can you hold it? I’ll stop first place at the bottom of the hill.”

  “Mom!” Eleanor shouts from the passenger seat, and Agnes feels a spike of fear in her heart and whips her attention back to the highway.

  There’s nothing worth shouting about. The cars ahead of the Subaru are braking, a little river of red lights rising out of the fog. After a moment of deep breaths to calm back down, Agnes sees why.

  The fog begins to shred, torn into floating gobs of cotton by the rain, which starts again in earnest. It’s as if a dam somewhere has given way. The water comes down in heavy sheets. The Subaru’s hood and roof thrum angrily beneath the downpour.

  “Don’t do that,” Agnes says, feeling the rush of alarm and adrenaline fade. “You could make me have an accident.”

  The rain robs her of sight once more. It’s impenetrable,
and she loses the shape of the cars ahead. She can see the taillights of the one just before her, but little past that.

  “Mom, I really have to—”

  “Shut up,” Agnes says, her voice hard and heavy, and the girls both lapse into an aching silence.

  Highway 26 weaves through Hillsboro and Beaverton on its path to Portland, eventually diving down a steep, winding grade, then finally pushing its way through a mountain tunnel. The grade is often jammed with drivers who seem unnerved by the sweeping curves, possibly confused by the trifecta of exits, by the enormous yellow sign that reads SLOW, festooned with blinking amber lights. In the lane beside the Subaru, a steady stream of vehicles drives by much too quickly. Their drivers seem oblivious to the signs that order them to remain in their designated lanes—No passing for next 1 mile—and this drives Agnes’s heart rate up considerably. She can hear the blood pounding in her ears, overtaking the sounds of the world, overtaking the angry march of the rain on the shell of the car.

  Agnes guides the Subaru into the far left lane, which hugs a concrete barrier, and slows the car to almost nothing at all. She worries about the brakes on the grade—they’re wet, and they’ve been a little creaky lately, regardless—but finds herself distracted, a little, by the driver to her right. The woman is stunningly old, her skin a crumpled brown paper bag, her hair a pale robin’s nest. She drives a twenty-year-old Volvo and is riding her brakes, which Agnes can hear even above the rain. The Subaru’s own brakes may be in bad shape, but the Volvo’s sound like rusted nails on metal. The driver hugs the steering wheel to her chest. She’s so small she might not even be in her seat anymore. Agnes can almost imagine the woman standing in front of the wheel, both feet jammed forward on the brakes, so far from her that she can barely peer over the dashboard—

  “MOM,” Eleanor says.

  The car directly in front of them has corkscrewed to a stop, its rear end angled from a skid. Agnes lays into the brakes with everything she has. For the first time ever, they lock, and the Subaru slides down the steep road like a sled on ice.

  “No,” Agnes says, her voice calmer than she might have expected. “No, no, no.”

  She throws an arm out instinctively, pinning Eleanor to her seat. In the back of the car, Esmerelda makes a sound like a quiet owl, a long, low whistle.

  Agnes has enough time to see the old woman in the Volvo notice what’s happening beside her. The old woman’s eyes widen, and Agnes has enough time to think, rather selfishly, that this should be happening to the Volvo, not the Subaru, to the old woman who has lived a thousand years, not to this young family of hers.

  And then, like a break in a hurricane, everything is okay.

  The Subaru’s tires catch gravel, and that’s enough to right the skid. The car grips the road again, lurching sideways just a bit, correcting its misdirected slide. If not for that almost balletic turn, they might have rear-ended the car ahead—a pickup with one of those gaudy roll bars in the bed and big spotlights mounted at the corners—but instead the Subaru skids to a stop, its nose tucking tightly, almost perfectly, into the narrow space between the truck’s bed and the concrete highway divider.

  “Shit,” Eleanor says, her voice tiny and mouselike.

  Agnes turns to look at her daughter, perhaps to correct her, but there’s no time. She lowers her arm, releasing Eleanor. Agnes can feel her heart threatening to punch right through her chest, can taste again the bitter smart of adrenaline on her tongue. She says, “Are you okay?” and Eleanor nods slowly, and Agnes turns to the back seat to ask Esmerelda the same question, and the words catch in her throat, because she sees the moving van and there’s not even time to say, “No,” not even time for Esmerelda to turn and see it coming, there is only time for Agnes to want to do those things, and then it happens, and it cannot be undone.

  Eleanor sees the moving van reflected in the side mirror. It surges out of the mist like a breaching whale, thin foggy tendrils curling quickly away from the hulking machine. Its windshield is a dusty gray color, and the Subaru is a dark reflection in the glass, and in that dark space Eleanor can almost see the man inside the U-Haul. This moment feels very slow to her, but it happens faster than Eleanor can blink.

  The van hits the Subaru with terrific force, and the sound of exploding glass fills the car. The station wagon lunges forward against its will, pistoning deeper into the tapering space between the pickup truck and the concrete highway divider, and then, with nowhere left to go, the transferred momentum of the collision lifts the Subaru’s backside into the air. The moving van, moving too fast to stop, plows beneath the car, and its own windshield spiderwebs.

  Eleanor is pitched forward as if she weighs nothing at all, and the dashboard of the Subaru rises up to meet her, and then she is asleep, tossed into a sea of darkness that closes over her in an instant.

  It happens so quickly, and is over so abruptly, that for a moment traffic soldiers on, pouring down the steep hill, the other drivers only dimly aware that something has gone wrong.

  The pickup driver is the first to respond. His door barely opens at all. The Subaru’s crushed front end is only a few inches away, tilted down at the ground. The driver is too large to squeeze through the space. He crawls over the stick shift and his briefcase and climbs out of his truck through the passenger door and tumbles onto the asphalt. The impact of the Subaru has pushed the truck forward and sideways, and its damaged bed now hangs into traffic like a broken limb.

  Agnes is dimly aware of these things, and can see the man heaving himself into the bed of his pickup. He’s dressed like an engineer, in khakis and a short-sleeved white shirt buttoned to the throat, but he becomes a gorilla. He steps up onto the rim of the pickup’s bed, then hops onto the hood of the Subaru. The hood is mangled and covered in broken glass and bits of concrete, but the man hurries across it and drops into the tight gap between the station wagon and the broken highway divider, and then he is there at Agnes’s window.

  The glass is splintered but intact, and Agnes wants to understand why, but then the man is shouting at her. She can’t understand him—the world sounds muffled and distant to her—and then he repeats himself loudly, waving his hand, and she sees that he’s trying to tell her to lean back. He scuffles with the door, but it isn’t opening, and he acts without thinking, caught up in the rush of what has just happened, and he puts his elbow through the window. It doesn’t shatter, just sort of buckles, so he does it again, then again, and Agnes flinches with every impact. The man seems unaware that he has cut himself—his forearm is smeared with blood now—and then the glass creaks and comes apart.

  “Cover your face,” he says from his faraway place, and Agnes’s hands feel as if they weigh hundreds of pounds, but she puts them over her face. She can hear the man striking the glass out of the door frame, and then he says, “Okay, are you all right? Lady?” and Agnes takes her hands down to see that his face is right there, that he’s leaning into the car.

  She shakes her head, disoriented, and then the man’s eyes focus past her and he says, “Oh, Jesus,” and Agnes is confused, but then she follows the man’s gaze and sees Eleanor there, leaning forward, supported by a drawn-tight seatbelt. Eleanor’s bright red hair has fallen over her face, and her head dangles forward, and Agnes feels something sharp chew its way through her belly and right into her heart.

  “Little girl!” the driver says, reaching through the window and toward Eleanor. He can’t quite reach her—his fingers stop short of her shoulder—and he waves them comically in the air. “Can you hear me? Are you okay?”

  A rush of heat subsumes Agnes, and she breaks out in a sweat. She grabs Eleanor’s hand, roughly.

  “Eleanor, Eleanor,” she says, shaking her daughter’s arm like a rubber band.

  “Careful, lady,” the driver says, still wearing his look of horror. “Careful, she could be—”

  “Eleanor!” Agnes shouts. She slaps the back of her daughter’s hand, and then bursts into tears when Eleanor stirs.

 
; Eleanor lifts her head and her hair falls away from her face, and it’s immediately obvious that her nose is broken. Her lips and chin are red with blood, and her eyes are foggy, but she’s alive.

  “Ellie,” Agnes says, her voice choked.

  Eleanor just blinks at her, then leans forward again and vomits on the floor. When she’s finished, she coughs and heaves, and then she closes her eyes and relaxes against the seat belt again.

  “Ezzz,” Eleanor croaks.

  “Eleanor, sweetie,” Agnes pleads, squeezing her daughter’s hand. “Come on, Ellie. Wake up. Wake up, Ellie.”

  “We have to get an ambulance,” the pickup driver says. He extricates himself from the Subaru’s window and looks around wildly. The driver of the U-Haul hasn’t emerged, so there’s no telling if he’s alive or even okay. The rear end of the Subaru obscures the pickup driver’s view. A woman peeks around the back corner of the moving van then, and the pickup driver almost jumps in place. He waves his hand next to his ear like a telephone and shouts, “We need an ambulance, call an ambulance!”

  Agnes turns and looks at the pickup driver and tries to ask him how anybody will call for an ambulance, but the words come out funny, and she doesn’t know what she has actually asked him.

  “There’s a call box just up the hill,” he says.

  So she must have made sense.

  The driver leans back into the car and looks closely at Eleanor, who appears to be unconscious again. “She okay?” he asks, and Agnes turns to look at Eleanor, then back at the driver.

  “I’m unsure,” she says, the first clear words she’s spoken since the collision. They feel strange in her mouth, oddly formal.

  “A woman went back to call,” the man says, but then he trails off, distracted again.

  It’s getting difficult to hold herself upright. Gravity pulls at her, trying to draw her forward, toward the steering wheel. Agnes can’t figure out why. In the rearview mirror, she sees a tilted world—the rear window, glass cracked and buckled inward, the top of the moving van, dense fog beyond, the ghostly shapes of trees along the edge of the highway.