Eleanor: A Novel Read online

  “I’m going,” Eleanor calls quietly into the house, but of course there is no answer, and she closes the door gently, aware that more than a gentle snick will wake her mother with a pounding hangover headache.

  Jack has already retrieved Eleanor’s bike from the garage. It leans against the mailbox, which used to read WITT 1881 COVE but now reads WIT 1881 CO E.

  “Did you put the—”

  “—key back?” Jack finishes. “Yes, I did.”

  He’s eating a banana in giant bites, even the mushy brown parts that make Eleanor wrinkle her nose. He holds it out to her now, offering a bit, but she shakes her head. There isn’t much left, and she isn’t very hungry.

  “You’re supposed to eat breakfast,” he says. “Most important meal of the day.”

  “I do eat breakfast,” she says.

  “You’re a terrible liar.”

  “I’m not lying.”

  Jack finishes the banana and twirls its empty skin like a floppy nunchuk. “What did you have?”

  “Cinnamon toast,” Eleanor answers, too quickly.

  Jack crosses his arms. “I don’t believe you.”

  “You’re just going to have to,” she says. “We’re late.”

  “We’re not late,” Jack says. He looks down at his bare wrist. “Wait, what time is it?”

  “It’s almost eight.”

  “We’re late,” Jack says. “Do we care?”

  Eleanor frowns at him. “Just because it’s the last week of school doesn’t mean we get lazy.”

  “You sound like Mrs. Hicks,” he says.

  “Mrs. Hicks doesn’t want you to lop your finger off with a table saw,” Eleanor says. “Lazy means different things in shop.”

  “I guess.” Jack brightens. “Hey, want to go the back way today?”

  Eleanor looks at her watch. “It’s not shorter.”

  “I know, but it’s not really much longer.”

  “We’re late,” she says again, but she knows she’ll give in. The back way will carry them down Piper Road, a long, subtle grade that comes down out of the hills. It’s a truck route directly into Anchor Bend, but these days it’s barely traveled. The road falls aways steeply into the woods on either side, and the last time Eleanor and Jack biked there, they came across a fallen tree near the bottom of the hill, and skidded to an almost-disastrous stop. They climbed over the dead tree one by one, Jack passing the bicycles over to Eleanor. She wonders now if the tree has been cleared.

  Jack seems to read her mind. “I was up there last weekend,” he says. “Clean ride.”

  She sighs. “Okay. But we have to be fast. I don’t want to be late to class.”

  “You said we’re already late.”

  “I don’t want to be more late.”

  “I believe it’s more later,” Jack corrects, laughing.

  She takes a playful swing at him, then climbs aboard her bike and follows him up Cove Street. He weaves across the street in wide arcs. There are blue wheeled trash containers parked at the end of every driveway, and Jack swings close to one of them and somehow manages to flip the lid open and deposit his banana peel inside in a fluid motion.

  “Crap,” Eleanor says. “Jack, wait.”

  He turns a lazy circle back to where Eleanor has stopped on the road.

  “I forgot to take out the trash,” Eleanor says.

  “Well, hurry up,” Jack says. “If we’re going to take the back way.”

  Eleanor sighs. “I didn’t even gather it all up yet,” she says. “It’ll take too long. You should go ahead and go the back way without me.”

  Jack looks at her sternly. “We leave no man behind,” he says in a deep voice. “No little girls, either.”

  Eleanor walks her bicycle back to the driveway and rests it against the mailbox post again. “Go on,” she says over her shoulder. “It’s going to take at least ten minutes. It’s glass day, too.”

  Jack climbs off his bike and leans it against Eleanor’s. “Shit,” he says. “Okay. I’ll help.”

  “Jack—”

  “No,” he says. “Really. I can be quiet. I know how this part goes. Let me help.”

  Eleanor pauses at the doorway to the living room. She can feel Jack come up behind her, and without turning she says, “She’s snoring.”

  Agnes rests under a blanket on the blue corduroy chair. The chair’s ribbed covering has worn smooth in places, almost shiny from years of use. Agnes is small, nearly invisible, beneath the blanket. It rises and falls imperceptibly with each of her breaths.

  On the table beside her is an empty bottle of Absolut and a mostly empty bottle of Knob Creek.

  “Glass day,” Jack says. “Let me do that part.”

  Eleanor looks back at him. “You have to be very, very quiet,” she admonishes.

  “I know,” he says, then he looks down. “I’ve done this for my dad for years.”

  Eleanor softens a bit. “I’m sorry.”

  Jack shrugs. “You and me, we have to be the grownups, right?”

  “Grownups,” Eleanor agrees in a whisper. “Okay. You get the glass. There’s a bin under the sink.”

  She goes upstairs, taking each step quietly, moving left and right to avoid the creaky spots. She gathers the small bags from her bathroom and bedroom trash cans, then goes into her mother’s room. Eleanor usually skips it, but today when she peeks into the connected bathroom she sees the trash can overflowing onto the floor. She goes to collect the fallen bits, then stops, recognizing them as the photos and other memories that her mother had been sifting through in the attic the night before.

  “Oh, Esme,” Eleanor says, softly.

  She drops to her knees on the tile floor and starts to gather the crumpled papers. The small trash bags forgotten, Eleanor presses smooth every photograph. The wrinkles and folds are permanent, though. Esmerelda playing with her plastic pony on the fence in the front yard. Esmerelda stretched out on the floor as a little girl, her feet propped on the fireplace hearth, an encyclopedia open on her tummy. Eleanor tries her best to save the photos, but most have been crushed with such force that the thin emulsion layer flakes away at the creases, leaving white scars stitched across the image.

  She presses the photographs to her chest and closes her eyes, the memories rushing in. For once, she doesn’t push them back. She lets them come.

  1984.

  The summer before the world would end.

  They were five, almost six. The heat had stormed the coast that year, melting the clouds away, the sun an incandescent marble that never seemed to drop out of sight. The house was intolerably warm, and Eleanor remembers her mother begging for air conditioning, and her father complaining about money. The windows stayed open, curtains fluttering in the ponderous hot breeze. Her father propped a box fan in the front doorway and left the door ajar, claiming that this would stir the currents inside.

  It did little good. The days were long, the nights sticky. Agnes was too exhausted to cook, and it was too hot for that sort of thing anyway. So they ate microwavable dinners, or peanut butter sandwiches. Ice was a precious commodity. The girls would hold a cube on their tongues to see whose melted the fastest.

  In the heavy evening, ushered off to bed while their parents watched the news and then the late shows, Eleanor and Esmerelda lay on the beds in their room, blankets thrown back, arguing about who was more affected by the heat.

  “I’m so hot my tongue dried up,” Esmerelda would say.

  “Well, I’m so hot that I’m turning to ash,” Eleanor would retort.

  “I’m so hot that I just set the house on fire.”

  “Pshfhh. I’m so hot I just set the whole town on fire.”

  They took cold baths together, flagged down the ice cream truck together, and ran around most of the time in nothing more than T-shirts and underpants.

  Then one day Esmerelda chased Eleanor through the house, and Eleanor stopped short.

  “Do you hear that?” she asked. “What’s that sound?”


  The twins stood still in the kitchen, heads cocked, listening.

  Splashing.

  Laughter.

  That’s what Eleanor remembers most now: the sound of her mother’s laughter.

  A rare thing, like a black dove.

  Eleanor followed Esme through the kitchen to the sliding patio door. In the back yard sat something marvelous.

  A yellow inflatable swimming pool.

  Her father sat in it, splayed out, shirtless. The girls watched as he yanked their mother onto his lap, and Agnes squealed in delight, kicking the water with her feet. She wasn’t dressed for a pool. She was in a sundress, wearing her gardening hat and gloves.

  Eleanor looked at Esmerelda.

  “That’s our pool,” Esmerelda said.

  Eleanor nodded.

  The girls ran outside, shrieking, and chased their parents out of the pool, and stomped and splashed like monsters towering over a tiny sea.

  The memory seems to unwind, and Eleanor’s chest caves in, the absence of her sister like a great dark world, crushing her beneath its inescapable weight.

  “Hey,” Jack says from the doorway.

  Eleanor jumps, and thumps her head on the bottom of the porcelain sink. She ignores the pain and realizes that she’s crying. The impact of the sink has caused the tears to spill out of her eyes, hot on her face, and she can’t hide them when she looks up at Jack.

  “Whoa,” he says, crouching beside her. “You okay? What happened?”

  Eleanor shakes her head, and though she doesn’t want to cry in front of Jack, his simple question flushes her skin with warmth, and she remembers what it’s like, distantly, for someone to care what she is thinking, how she is feeling. This notion lodges itself in her throat, and she suddenly finds it difficult to breathe, and puts one hand to her chest and opens her mouth and an embarrassing honking sound comes out.

  “Hey, hey,” Jack says, putting his arm around her. “Hey, now.”

  She does not want to cry in front of him, especially like this, especially when controlling her emotions is this impossible. She honks and gasps in big lungfuls of air, which only make her chest hitch more, and when she finally is able to let the air back out, she sobs on his shoulder.

  She doesn’t see the photos still in the trash can—more crushed pictures of her sister, but among them a photograph of the two girls together, torn in half, Eleanor’s side of the photo ripped into even smaller bits.

  Eleanor lets Jack hold her for a moment, and then, certain that she has embarrassed herself enough, she presses the heel of her palm into her eyes, roughly brushing away the tears, and then she says, “This stuff isn’t trash. I’ll save it all later. We’re late.”

  Jack regards her curiously. “Maybe you should play hooky today,” he says.

  Eleanor shakes her head firmly. “I want to go now. Please.”

  He gets to his feet, then offers her his hand, and she can feel the wiry cord of his muscles as he draws her up from the floor. She gives him a sheepish grin and wipes more of the tears from her face and says, “I still have to get the kitchen trash.”

  “I already got it all,” he says. “Your, uh—your mother…”

  Eleanor looks up at him and waits. “My mother what?”

  Jack averts his eyes. “Those bottles… that’s from, like, a month, right?”

  “No,” Eleanor says, squeezing past him. “That’s from this week.”

  He follows, still keeping his voice low. “It’s so much,” he says.

  “I know.”

  “She shouldn’t drink so much.”

  “I know.”

  “Seriously, Eleanor. It’s going to kill her. Where does she even get—”

  “I know,” Eleanor says. She stops and whirls around to face him, and Jack almost collides with her. “You think I don’t know, Jack? I know.”

  He works his jaw but can’t find the right words, and so instead he says nothing at all. Eleanor stares at him, hard, and after a very long moment, she turns around sharply and goes down the stairs. She no longer cares about being quiet, and hits every creaky step on the way down. She glances in at her mother as she passes the living room doorway, but Agnes hasn’t stirred.

  Eleanor goes out the front door with a bang, and a moment later Jack follows, holding the plastic bags that Eleanor had forgotten upstairs. She straddles her bicycle and watches as Jack quietly puts the bags into the blue can, then wheels it out to the curb. He goes back inside, emerges a moment later with the glass bin, and carries that to the curb as well. The dozen or so empty bottles inside clink like wind chimes.

  When he’s finished, Eleanor pedals away without waiting, without asking if Jack has locked the front door. He catches up with her, rides silently a few feet behind. He doesn’t say anything when she bypasses the turn that would take them to Piper Road, and when they arrive at the school fifteen minutes later, not having spoken a word, Eleanor drops her bike on the front lawn and goes inside.

  Jack patiently picks up her bike and pushes it to the rack. He threads his chain lock through both front tires and around the gray metal tube of the rack, and then he goes into the school, too.

  The next time Eleanor sees Jack is during lunch. She’s angry at him for telling her what she already knows about her mother, but more than that, angry by what his comment—and her mother’s behavior the night before, and the bottles, and the crumpled photos—has reminded her: that her mother does not care for her, that her mother resents her, that her mother is selfish and would rather drink herself to death than spend one minute longer than necessary with her one surviving child.

  Drink herself to death.

  She stands gloomily in the serving line for a few minutes, holding her wet plastic tray, waiting to reach the front, where the old women in the hairnets and the sauce-stained white aprons wait to spoon pasty mashed potatoes and undercooked peas onto the tray, and Eleanor’s stomach turns. She leaves the line and puts her tray back on the stack.

  Jack and her other friend, Stacy, have already secured their usual shared table. They have spotted Eleanor leaving the line, and she can feel them staring at her. She steers wide around their table, refusing to meet their curious stares, and heads for the double doors. Posted at the door is Mrs. McDearmon, on lunch duty for the day, and she looks at Eleanor and opens her mouth to ask a question.

  “I need to visit the principal’s office,” Eleanor lies, feeling the same tension in her chest that she felt in her mother’s bathroom earlier that morning. She wants to escape the cafeteria and the prying eyes of her friends and the suspicious gaze of the teachers before she starts to cry again.

  Mrs. McDearmon nods and says, “There and back, and hurry,” and allows Eleanor to pass, because what child would willingly visit the principal’s office who didn’t have a reason to?

  Eleanor nods gratefully and lowers her head to hide her damp eyes. She wishes that her hair were long enough to fall over her face the way it did when she was a child, and then she wishes something more, something bigger—that she was still a child, that her father had never traveled to Florida, that her mother had never loaded the girls into the car on that stupid, foggy, rainy day—and then Eleanor passes through the cafeteria doors and everything changes, forever, just like that.

  Her name is Mea.

  It wasn’t always her name, but it is the name that was given to her—after.

  She lives in the dark, in a world of vivid shadow. Her world reminds her of a fishbowl filled with black water. Most of the time, Mea is deep in the center of that bowl, but from time to time, she drifts up against the glass, and the black water parts, and she can see beyond her world and into others. The glass that separates her from those other worlds, though, is malleable. It is warm, and hums like music, and reminds her of a woman hanging sweet-smelling laundry on a line in a green yard beneath a blue sky, a woman who sings a song within her chest, wordless and soft.

  Mea likes the sound of it, the feel of it. The boundary between Mea’s world and
the ones beyond is not glass, of course, but it is there all the same, a sort of fine membrane. It is firm enough to support her boundlessness if she rests herself against it. It reshapes itself to her form, like a hammock, like a glove. Mea finds this interesting, because she has no idea what her form is. She knows that she had one, once, but it no longer hems her in. Here in the darkness, Mea has no edges. She simply breathes the dark. The dark is a part of her. In a sense, she is the darkness.

  She likes it. The darkness itself is older than anything, Mea has learned. It speaks to her without words, teaching her of its birth and the visions that it has witnessed over the eons. The darkness remembers when time started. Time is a river, and it flows in a circle. Time is a current in the darkness. The darkness is the great river of memory and being, and all things float within it. Every birth and death. Every sunset, every falling leaf. Every extinction event, and every tiny jostle of the atoms of a cloud.

  Time is only one such current. There are many others, and Mea is still learning about them all.

  Time is genuinely of no consequence to Mea. In the darkness, she can redirect it, as a child redirects a trickle of water in dirt. She can immerse herself in its steady pull, and swim upstream, visiting the memories that the darkness has collected over the millions and millions of years it has been here. She absorbs everything she can, feels the loves and ambitions of every living thing flow over her like water, feels them slip into her midst and become a part of her, as if she carries those memories herself now in veins she cannot see, through organs she no longer possesses.

  In the dark, Mea comes across a story that feels familiar to her. This startles her as much as she is capable of being startled, for Mea does not know her own origin. Mea simply is, as all the currents in this dark stream simply are, as all the changes of the seasons forever will be. So many stories seem the same to her—memories of a bird who falls from its nest and starves while its mother stares down at it; memories of a planet that forms from the dust of a long-dead star and flowers in the deepest, quietest night, then one day withers away, unnoticed by the universe; memories of a mountain that grows out of deep unrest, and rises powerfully into a violet sky, and is then overtaken by ice and snow until it is immobilized—and when she discovers this new story, it disturbs her.