Eleanor (19 page)

The keeper’s view of the sky is obscured by ragged clouds. They are more dense than the average cloud, and sometimes the keeper imagines that they are simply the bottom of a great column of thunderheads that stretches high into the atmosphere, impenetrable to the sun. They might well be, for the keeper has never seen the sun, or very much of its light.

It rains in her valley, often for months on end. The water pools in the meadow, turning it to a soggy marsh, and on her walks she rolls her pants to her knees and squishes through the wetlands. During the worst storms, the entire valley becomes a bowl, and the puddles become small ponds, and the ponds become a lake, and the earth is swallowed up by dark water. She knows that there are lakes high in the mountains that contribute to this, spilling down the craggy slopes in great gushes when the rain causes them to swell. When this happens, the keeper retreats into the highest foothills. There is a shallow cave at the base of one of the mountains, and she lives by the light of a small fire and waits out the storm. Her patience is great, and the floodwaters always recede. They always have. She has had to rebuild her cabin several times before, and is certain that she will have to rebuild it many more.
 

She loves living in the meadow too much to trade it for a cabin in the hills.
 

She built the most recent incarnation of the cabin three or four years ago. It is small and tidy, outfitted with only the things she needs. In addition to the fireplace, she owns a table and a single-person bed—hardly a bed, more of a cot—and a few pots and utensils. She makes her own clothes from a stash of fiber and thread and material that never seems to diminish. She makes only what she needs.
 

Her shadow is her only company, except when the seasons change and the cabin darkens in the shadow of the great passing beasts. The thin glass in the cabin windows trembles with the beasts’ heavy steps, and sawdust drifts down from the raw pine ceiling. She often stands on the porch with a cup of hot tea, cradling the mug in her hands as the beasts pass her by. They are as tall as the mountains, their bodies like mountains themselves, and they walk on long, spindly legs that seem to descend from the clouds. Their shadows might stretch for miles if there were much sunlight, but instead their shadows are murky and shapeless, for their bodies blot out most of the sky itself.
 

The keeper once thought to name the beasts, but she never has. They arrived in the valley as a pair. The first is almost beautiful in its immensity, with a long neck that vanishes into the clouds. Its steps are proud and sure and full of purpose, and when its feet thud against the earth, the keeper hears music, a long, low, resounding tone. She is not certain that the beast is female, but its movements do suggest to her a certain femininity.

The second beast is heavier, bulkier. It is not as tall, and its steps are far less delicate. During the beasts’ last migration it seemed that the second beast might be sick. It had stumbled often, and a rumbling groan had issued from its body with each ponderous step. The keeper could see huge divots carved into the earth where the beast had dragged one weak leg. Once she saw it totter, as if it had lost all sense of balance, and she had been afraid that it would crash down upon her and her cabin. It had righted itself, but only by throwing one leg out blindly. That immense leg had sheared an entire hillside clean off the map, uprooting hundreds of trees, exposing rich dark soil and slants of buried granite. The shock had rippled across the meadow, buckling one of the struts that held up the keeper’s porch and nearly causing the entire overhang to collapse.

The migration of the beasts echoes the subtle change of the seasons, and the keeper knows that as the beasts vanish into the mountains miles and miles to the north, she can expect snow soon after. It will fall gray and poisonous, carpeting the valley floor like soot.

There is nothing elegant about winter in the valley.

Winter is the only season during which the keeper forgoes her patrol of the meadow. She hibernates in the cabin until the beasts return and the snow turns to gray rain again.

This morning, she stands on the porch, cradling her tea, buried in her old shawl. Her feet are chilled even in her heavy boots, but she pays her body’s aches and pains no mind. She can smell the impending snowfall in the air—can in fact see the smudge of it in the distance, already falling onto the farthest peaks, as if one of the clouds has scraped its belly open on the jagged mountain and is spilling its toxic bile onto the earth.
 

The snow is coming early this year, and the keeper has not seen the beasts in quite some time. She does not know where they go, or where they came from before they entered her valley. She knows the meadow and the peaks and forests well, but she has never found the place where the beasts bed down or graze, if such things are a part of their routine. They are a mystery to her, refugees who have claimed asylum in her valley.
 

She turns her attention to the south again, to the gaping wound in the treeline, and thinks of the pale intruder. The child’s arrival has changed the land, both visibly and spiritually. The keeper can feel a twinge in the air that was not there before. She knows the seasons and the secrets and the ghosts of her valley. But something strange and new has affected her home, and for a moment—just a moment—she feels a tiny spark of fear inside her.
 

And then it is gone.

The keeper sips her tea, then looks down at her shadow huddled beneath her.
 

“She’ll be back, I think,” the keeper says. “You be ready.”

Her shadow flattens out, changing its shape beneath her, as if gathering itself for battle.
 

“You be ready,” the keeper repeats.

Eleanor will have to make up her missed finals in the summer, the school district tells her mother in a crisp letter, but otherwise her sudden absence from school should not present too great a problem.
We are happy that Miss Witt is home safely
, the letter reads. Eleanor folds it and puts it back into the envelope addressed to Agnes, then drops it in the trash can.
 

Her mother takes only a few days to return to her habits, the fright of Eleanor’s disappearance not a powerful enough catalyst to disrupt the routine. She curls up in the blue corduroy chair with a scowl that lingers on her face long after she has passed out. Eleanor’s father stops by the house every day after work. He parks his Buick in the driveway and sits there, engine idling, until Eleanor comes out.
 

“Come inside,” she tells him each night. “I’ll make hot chocolate with marshmallows.”

But each night he declines, and after a while, when he is certain that whatever happened to Eleanor will not happen again, and when she no longer has to wear the cumbersome neck brace, and the visible signs of her injuries have passed, her father calls Eleanor before he leaves the office, and if all is well, he simply goes to his own apartment.
All is well
occurs enough consecutive times that eventually her father doesn’t feel the need to call, and soon Eleanor sees him only on visitation weekends.
 

Eventually, all things return to normal. Spring becomes summer, and summer is uncharacteristically hot and bright in Anchor Bend this year. Eleanor and Jack bike around town almost daily, sharing a packed lunch among the tourists on the waterfront, parking their bikes at the Safeway and darting inside to score a jawbreaker from one of the nickel machines. Jack asks a few times what happened to her, but Eleanor never quite puts the right words together to tell him about her theory, about the portal to places like Iowa and the gray forest, and so she doesn’t tell him anything except that she’s okay.
 

At night she climbs the attic stairs. She sweeps the hardwood floor and tidies up the clutter from her mother’s last visit. She misses the sprawling acreage of the models her father built, the magnifying lamp that revealed their tiny flaws and her father’s signature. She stretches out on the floor with a stack of notebook paper and a pencil, and she draws what she remembers of Iowa, of the ash forest, and in her drawings, Eleanor is always a small and startled figure, overcome by the strangeness of all that surrounds her.

For months and months, Mea quivers in the darkness. New emotions charge through her like electricity, and the sensation of each is uncomfortable. The darkness says nothing to her, and she does not ask, but she feels—
feels!
—as if she has done something very, very wrong. Mea has never encountered another being in the dark, none like her, and yet she believes that if she had, they might be appalled by her.
 

Or perhaps they wouldn’t, because they would not be infected with these feelings, these emotions.
 

She worries over the red-haired girl. One of Mea’s peculiar new feelings is guilt. She feels responsible, horribly and directly responsible, for the girl’s accident. She watched the girl appear from nowhere, as if the charged air inside her house had simply conjured her and fired her like a cannonball at her bedroom wall. Mea does not know pain in the way the red-haired girl knows pain, but she knows she cannot put the girl through such things any longer.
 

Whatever Mea has hoped to achieve from this—this
experiment
—must be forgotten.
 

So for months and months—months and months that pass in the red-haired girl’s world but which unfold like eons in Mea’s dark river—Mea allows the blackness to close over her like water, to swallow her into its dark belly. She lingers there, suspended in a state of shame, and does not think of the red-haired girl.
 

The darkness allows this, for a time.

And then, when Mea has wallowed for long enough, it tells her its secrets.

August arrives with a storm.
 

Eleanor and Jack are on the pier, perched on the tall base of a lamppost, looking for whales. Word had spread through town that morning that a pod of grays was resting in the harbor, just beyond the marina. The pier is clogged with tourists and locals alike, men and women in shorts and tank tops and flip-flops. The tourists are pink and rosy, scorched by a sun they hadn’t planned to encounter above the Oregon coast. This is a mistake Eleanor and Jack giggle at. You can always spot the tourists, the locals say, by their lobster-like faces.
 

But today the rain comes from nowhere, and the tourists scatter, leaving mostly locals behind. Eleanor and Jack climb down from the lamppost and fill in the gaps that the tourists have left. They lean on the railing, squinting through the powerful downpour.
 

“I don’t think they’re really here,” a woman to Eleanor’s left says.
 

“Hush,” the man beside her says. “They’re waiting for the looky-loos to clear out.”

Jack elbows Eleanor, and they both grin behind their hands.
 

Eleanor hasn’t thought about her accident in weeks. Her neck has healed; for a long time it hurt to look in any direction, and then one day the pain was gone, and she just didn’t think about it anymore. She finished her makeup classes by the end of July, and since then has spent her days on her bicycle, patrolling the town with Jack. Today their plan had been to bike to Rock, a little town just down the coast from Anchor Bend. There isn’t anything to see or do in Rock, but Jack had told her that the journey was adventure enough, and she had agreed. Then they heard about the whales sunning themselves in the harbor, and left their bicycles chained to a street sign, their plans forgotten.