Eleanor (14 page)

Her brain relaxes. Surely this explanation is logical enough.
 

But it doesn’t explain her missing clothes.
 

Or her hair, which has grown ten inches in a day.
 

“They’re going to lock me up,” she says to herself.

But she pushes the thought away and turns her attention to the problem of escaping the school. She has seen the large chains and padlocks that bind the doors shut. In the morning she often arrives early to school and has to wait outside for one of the faculty members to unlock those chains.
 

She wanders the halls, stopping at every exterior set of doors, but they are all indeed chained shut. She feels a little bit like a ghost, and perhaps she is one. Perhaps she died when she passed through the magical cafeteria doors, like a video game character who attempts to pass through a sparking electrical field, and now Eleanor is doomed to wander and haunt the school forever.
 

This concept tumbles around in her mind as she makes her way around the outer hall, pausing to test more doors, and she wonders what sorts of things a ghost might do to occupy itself in a dark and empty school for decades and decades. She could leave messages on blackboards to frighten students, she thinks with a small smile. She could scratch creepy messages into the mirrors—maybe a retort to the
whores
commentary upstairs—or she could rain basketballs across the gymnasium floor during assembly. But that sort of thing would only be entertaining for so long, and eventually, she worries, she would get bored, and then what? More than that, schools eventually are torn down, and where would she go then? Would she haunt the empty grounds? Haunt the strip mall that would inevitably spring up in its place? Or would she perish with the building, her ectoplasmic self dissipated into nothing?
 

None of the doors are unlocked.
 

She finishes her perimeter check at the front of the school. Through the doors she can see the shadowy parking lot, empty of vehicles, and the bus loop, also empty. For the first time it occurs to her that she may be trapped here all night long, and what will she do tomorrow when the students and teachers arrive and she’s here with strange long hair, barefoot, like some Robinson Crusoe washed up on a tile beach, living feral in the janitor’s closet?
 

The janitors.

As if she has conjured them with her thoughts, a small caravan of little white cars and a white panel van appear, their headlights blinding her as the vehicles turn into the school’s parking lot. Eleanor watches as five people climb out of the cars and go to the van and start unloading equipment: vacuum cleaners and mops and what looks like a giant sander.
 

The cleaning crew talk amongst themselves, laughing at some joke. They gather around the front doors and wait, chuckling, while their leader unlocks a faculty access door in the side of the building. He goes inside, and a moment later appears at the front doors, unlocks the chain, and pushes one of the doors open. The crew starts to filter in, dragging their cleaning supplies behind them on casters and in buckets, and before the door closes, Eleanor darts out from behind the front hall trophy case and runs through the front door and into the cold evening.
 

The very, very cold evening.
 

She turns around and runs back through the door. The five cleaners stand frozen in the hall, staring at her.
 

“I got locked in,” she says to the startled men and women. “Can someone give me a quarter for the pay phone?”

Her father’s Buick is warm. The stereo is on, and her father’s favorite band, Bread, is singing her father’s favorite song. The singer’s voice is warm, too—comforting, Eleanor thinks, almost a bit like warm bread itself. The song triggers an old memory—a fragment of a memory, really—of Eleanor and Esmerelda zipped into the snugglebun: a strange, sleeping-bag-like construct with flaps that fold over the occupant’s shoulders and snap into place like oversized sleeves. The girls are perhaps five years old, and small enough to lie side by side in the snugglebun. They’re stretched out on the floor in front of the fireplace. A fire crackles. Eleanor’s father reads
National Geographic
and sips his coffee. Her mother knits in the rocking chair, moving slowly back and forth. The only sound in the room comes from her father’s record player.
 

Eleanor can’t remember what happened next, but it doesn’t matter. The moment is as warm as her father’s car right now, and as perfect a memory as she could hope to conjure. She has not thought of that moment in a very long time. Maybe since it happened.
 

“Want to tell me what happened?”
 

Eleanor watches the streetlights slowly pass over the windshield, their reflections distorted into long, shining bars. There are few cars on the street, and fewer shops open. Anchor Bend rolls up the sidewalks early, which means it has to be at least seven o’clock.
 

“What time is it?” she asks.

Her father pushes a button on the console. On the stereo face, the luminous blue
Cassette
is replaced with a digital readout.
 

“Seven forty,” he says. “So? How does my smart girl manage to get locked up in the school?”

Eleanor looks out the window so she doesn’t have to lie to her father’s kind face. “I went to the nurse’s office,” she says. “I wasn’t feeling well.”

“How do you feel now?”
 

“Okay,” she says with a shrug. “I guess I fell asleep there.”

“Nobody checked on you?” Paul thumps the steering wheel. “Irresponsible sons of—I’ll call the school tomorrow and give them a piece of my mind.”

“Dad, it’s okay,” she says. “It was probably just an accident.”

“Okay?” he asks. “You think it’s okay for the adults in charge to just forget about a student? To lock her in the school overnight?”

“It wasn’t overnight.”

“It could have been, though,” he says. “That’s the point here. It’s irresponsible behavior.”

Eleanor sighs. “Okay.”

“What?” her father asks, noticing her dissatisfaction. “It’s uncool for a father to worry about his daughter?”

“It’s fine, Dad,” she says.
 

“Maybe it is uncool. But I’m uncool, so it works out.”

“You’re fishing, Dad,” Eleanor says.
 

“Hey, what’s going on with your hair?” he asks, reaching across the seat and taking one long lock in his fingers. “How did I not notice you were growing it out?”

She feels a pang of alarm. She has forgotten to tie her hair back so that he won’t notice the difference.
 

“Um,” she says, and then the stoplight ahead of them abruptly turns red.
 

“Crap,” her father mutters. He holds his arm out in front of her like a turnstile and brakes hard. “Sorry.”

“It’s fine,” she says, grateful for the distraction. “Thanks for coming to get me.”

“Yeah, well,” he says. “That’s what
good
parents do.”

Eleanor chooses not to comment on her father’s disparagement of her mother, but she knows that this won’t matter, and it doesn’t.

“Did your mother even pick up the phone?” he asks. Then he answers his own question. “I’ll bet she didn’t.”

“I called you, Dad.”

Paul nods and flips the blinker, and takes a slow right. “Yeah, but you did that for a reason, didn’t you,” he says. “You knew I’d answer. You knew that
I
would be there for you.”

“Dad,” Eleanor cautions.
 

“No, Eleanor, come on, now,” he says. “What if something had happened and I wasn’t around? What would you have done?”

Eleanor shrugs lightly. “I don’t know, Dad,” she says dismissively.

“Well,” he says, talking almost to himself now, “I know your mother wouldn’t have been there for you. Maybe you could have called Jack, if he was old enough to drive, but you know how his father is.” He turns to Eleanor sharply. “Don’t you ever get in a car with Jack’s dad, do you hear me?”

Eleanor nods and looks away. “I know, Dad.”

Paul sighs. “I know you know. We’ve talked about it a hundred times. I know. I just worry. I don’t like not being there for you every day.”

Eleanor frowns. “We’ve talked about this, too.”

“I just don’t see why you couldn’t have come to live with me,” Paul says, and Eleanor detects the familiar tones of hurt and disappointment in her father’s voice. She can hear the unspoken question:
Wasn’t I good enough for you?

“Mom needs me,” Eleanor says. “You know it wasn’t personal.”

“Listen to you,” Paul says. “You sound like such an adult. Grown-up women say that a lot, you know.
Nothing personal
. The context is usually very different, but the words sound so mature when you say them.
You
sound mature. You’re not growing up too fast, are you?”

“Dad,” Eleanor groans.
 

“Your mother doesn’t need you,” Paul says. Then he pauses, as if he can hear Eleanor’s jaw fall open. “Wait, I didn’t mean it like that. Came out wrong. What I mean is, your mother needs
someone
. She needs—I don’t know. A caregiver. Actually, no, what your mother needs is a detox tank.”

“Dad, stop it.”

“I just don’t—”

“Stop it. I’ll get out and walk.”

Paul falls silent, and Eleanor folds her arms.
 

“I’m sorry,” he says. “It isn’t your fault that you love your mother. It isn’t your fault that she’s—”

“Dad—”

“—the drunk that she is,” he finishes.
 

Eleanor unbuckles her belt and a small red square lights up on the dashboard in front of her father and a chime sounds.
 

“Let me out,” she says.
 

“Eleanor, buckle your seatbelt.”

“Let me out right here or I’ll jump out,” she says.

“Buckle up and don’t be a child,” her father says. “We’re almost there anyway. I promise I won’t say anything more about your mother.”

Eleanor snaps her belt buckle and crosses her arms and picks her knees up and rests her feet on the seat. For the remaining few turns, neither she nor her father says anything at all. There is only the sound of the tires grasping the asphalt and releasing it, the hum of the heater and rush of the blower, the dulcet sounds of another Bread song, and then the car thumps up onto the inclined driveway.
 

Eleanor unbuckles her belt and grumbles, “Thanks for the ride,” and before she closes the door she can hear her father say, “Bet she won’t even answer the door for you,” and Eleanor knows he’s right, that Agnes is probably somewhere in the dark womb of the house, passed out as usual, unaware that her daughter has been missing for hours—and the worst part of all is really so much worse: that even if she knew, she probably wouldn’t care very much. She probably wouldn’t care very much at all.

Eleanor scoops the extra key out of the planter beside the door, shakes off the handful of dry potting soil and little styrofoam beads, and waves the key at her father. She can see him nod and wave back, and then the car vibrates in reverse out of the driveway. The frame sags a bit as it meets the road, and then the car rolls away, and Paul waves again as Eleanor unlocks the door and slips into the dark house.

The red-haired girl is different.

Mea watches her as she circumnavigates the high school, poking at doors and peeking through windows, and she can see the differences clearly. The girl isn’t dressed in the same attire as she was before. More than that, her red hair is much, much longer than it was. Mea fixates on the hair for a time, watching as it sways across the girl’s back as she walks. It’s beautiful, but it is also very, very familiar.
 

Familiarity is a foreign concept here in the dark. It haunts her, has haunted her since she discovered the red-haired girl in the stream of memories.
 

She knows her.
 

Mea does not understand this, or how it is possible. Mea is one with the darkness, with the ancient, forever black. She is unlike the memories that swim past her. She has never existed outside of the dark. But somehow she knows this red-haired child. Somehow the child is familiar to her.