Eleanor (10 page)

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.