Eleanor (20 page)

“I don’t see them,” the woman says again.

“Wait,” the man says. “Be quiet.”

Jack and Eleanor lean over the rail as far as they can, fifteen or twenty feet above the gray sea, and watch the rain spatter on the surface. Seagulls bob on the slow waves, flapping their wings in place. Now and then one lifts off and noisily relocates itself some distance away from the others; and then a few seconds later, the others follow, and the cycle begins again.

The whales surprise Eleanor. She has fixed her gaze on the water just short of the horizon, expecting tiny whale bodies to bump to the surface, spout a tiny jet of salt water into the sky, and dive deep again. But they appear no more than twenty yards from the pier, three of them, a clear family unit. One whale is as large as the pier is long, and Eleanor gasps.
 

“There!” the man cries.
 

“Where?” the woman asks. “Where are they—”

The man grabs the woman’s head in both of his hands and turns her face in the direction of the beasts.
 

“
Ohhhhh
,” she sighs. “They’re so
big
.”

A medium-sized whale is a few yards away from the largest one, and between them a small one floats, turning over once, then again.
 

“It’s a family,” the woman says. “That’s the baby.”

Jack shakes his head and whispers in Eleanor’s ear. “I’d call them tourists, but they actually live near me,” he says.

Eleanor watches the whales drift by. They seem to be in no particular hurry. The rain patters on their bodies. Their flukes are the size of a car.
 

“Pretty big,” Jack says.
 

Eleanor doesn’t answer.
 

“Hey,” he says. “You okay?”

Eleanor cocks her head without taking her eyes from the whales. “What?”
 

“You all right?” he asks again.

A fourth whale surfaces, smaller than even the baby. It swims hard to catch up to the rest of the little pod, though they aren’t moving quickly. Eleanor watches it carefully, and feels a sudden urge to scoop it out of the water in a net—a very large net—and take it home and put it in her bathtub, and keep it warm and pat its back, and laugh when it spouts water all over the bathroom.
 

“Eleanor,” Jack says. He touches her shoulder, and it breaks the spell, and Eleanor looks at him.

“What?” she says.
 

“You’re spacing out.”

She looks down at the whales again. The medium-sized one dips below the surface, then the baby sinks, too. The littlest one isn’t far behind.

“Wait, wait,” the woman beside Eleanor says. “They didn’t sneeze yet! They have to sneeze, I have the camera out!”

“It’s not called sneezing,” the man chides.
 

The largest whale slowly turns over, its enormous flukes churning the water like the paddle wheel on an old-fashioned riverboat, and then it, too, goes below. Eleanor watches until the whales descend too deep, their shapes fading from view, and then her vision refocuses on the slapping waves left behind on the surface.
 

“God
damn
it,” the woman says. “I wanted to do the one-hour photo and go show Charles.”

“We can wait,” the man says. “They’ll come back up.”

But the skies really open up then, as if the ocean itself is falling from the clouds, and in an instant the people on the pier are drenched. The downpour is loud and drowns out the woman’s shout. She and the man run for the parking lot.
 

Eleanor stares at the place where the whales were. The rain churns the sea until it seems to boil.
 

“Hey,” Jack says, putting his hand on her shoulder. “I don’t know if you noticed, but it’s really raining now.”

Eleanor looks up at him.
 

“You okay?” he asks again.
 

Her red hair is dark with rain and plastered to her face. It has grown long over the summer, framing her face in a way that Jack has noticed. Eleanor has only been half aware of the way he looks at her. She understands that he is attracted to her now, like boys are to girls, but for most of the year she has been distracted, for obvious and mysterious reasons.
 

He raises his hand as if he might brush the wet hair from her face, and there’s a strange nervous twinge inside her chest. She feels it take her breath from her, and she looks away from him at the same instant, and the moment is severed as cleanly as a thin wire clipped by a cutting tool. She looks up at the rain and closes her eyes. It falls so hard that it stings and leaves red welts on her skin.
 

“We should get inside,” Jack says.
 

Eleanor squints at him. If he is aware of the moment that almost was, he doesn’t show it, and she is strangely grateful for this discretion, if that’s what it is at all. She nods her head. “Dad’s office,” she says.

Jack says, “Good idea.”

They leave their bikes chained on the street and run instead, their feet smacking against the wet road and splashing in deep puddles that weren’t there just a few minutes before. The waterfront road is empty of people, and Eleanor glances to her left and sees that every shop is filled with wet people, some of them pressed to the windows, forlorn and disappointed by this turn of the weather.

For nine years, Eleanor has walked into her father’s little real estate office and been met by Geraldine’s wide, buoyant smile. Gerry mans the reception desk as if it is a great ship, and she is its captain. Eleanor has always thought of Gerry as the captain of her father’s entire office. She has worked for Paul Witt Realty through two divorces—the first ended shortly after she was hired, when she returned home for her lunch break and discovered her husband in bed with a woman she didn’t recognize; the second fell apart when her new husband decided that
he
would like to be a
she
—and through the loss of her two sons. Gerry’s boys were much older than Eleanor, but she had suffered plenty of hair-touslings from them when they had visited their mother at work.
 

Eleanor remembers the last time she saw them. It was after Esmerelda died, so she must have been eight or nine years old. She was flattened on the green sofa in her father’s office, drawing pictures on his stationery while Paul sat behind his desk—an uneven skyline of manila folders and property listings and property restriction books. Had her father worked for anyone but himself at the time, he probably would have lost his job for all the time he spent behind that cluttered desk, staring blankly through the blinds at the sea.
 

It had been raining that day, Eleanor thinks, though she cannot be certain. It was the sort of day that a storm might attend to. Those were gray months, a year or two into what Eleanor has always thought of as the dim years.
 

Geraldine had tapped on Paul’s office door, nudging it open slightly. Eleanor looked up at Gerry, who smiled kindly in her direction, then turned to Paul and said, “Mr. Witt, the boys are due on the bus in a few minutes. They just wanted to say thanks.”

“Yes, all right,” Paul said. He got to his feet slowly. His face was pale and grayish. He moved like someone thirty years older. He reached out his hand to Eleanor, who took it and walked beside him into the lobby.

Gerry’s sons were there, dressed in khaki uniforms and squashed, short-billed caps. Their last name was stitched onto the breasts of their jackets:
Rydell.
Eleanor looked up at her father. Paul smiled, though nobody in the room was convinced by it, and held his hand out. The boys, Joshua and Charles, the former tanned from too much time in the sharp summer sun, the latter pale and red-haired like Eleanor herself, shook his hand in earnest.
 

“We just wanted to say how much—”

“It’s not much,” Paul interrupted. “But you’re welcome.”

“They’ll eat like kings,” Gerry said. “Not every boy goes overseas with such nice care packages.”

“If Josh doesn’t eat it all on the plane,” Charles said with a grin.
 

But Paul had only nodded. His plastic smile weakened. Eleanor and Geraldine both noticed, but the boys seemed oblivious.
 

“All right, all right,” Gerry said, flapping her hands at her sons. “Let’s get moving. You don’t want to be marked AWOL before you even get to boot camp.”

Joshua nodded at Paul and stuck his hand out again. “Thank you very much, sir,” he said, stiffly.
 

Charles bent down and looked Eleanor in the eye. “Your dad’s a pretty good man,” he said. “You’ll be a good girl, right?”

Eleanor felt her eyes well up. She didn’t understand why. She just began crying.
 

Charles stood up and looked at Paul, and then his mother. “I didn’t say anything,” he said.

“Go, go,” Gerry said, folding her boys into one big hug. “She’ll be all right.”

Eleanor pressed her face into her father’s stomach. He put his hand on her head, but it didn’t comfort her the way she so deeply wanted to be comforted. His hand rested there like a weight, as if she was nothing more than an armrest. She had stopped crying. What was the point if nobody was going to tell her that things would be okay?

“I have a bad feeling about this,” he said, watching Gerry usher the boys out onto the sidewalk.
 

Eleanor didn’t know what he meant, but she shared the sentiment. She had only bad feelings about everything in those days.

Geraldine eventually came back inside, her eyes shining and damp. She took up her position behind the desk again, and shooed Paul and Eleanor back into his office, and things returned, for better or worse, to normal. Eleanor returned to her drawings, and Paul returned to his lonely desk, and Geraldine’s sons flew first to boot camp, and then, weeks and weeks later, to their post in Europe.
 

They never returned, and they never arrived. Geraldine appeared at work one morning with the same blank stare that Paul so often wore, and her grief shook him out of his own, at least enough that he inquired about the boys, and she told him about the officer who had come to her door. The boys’ transport plane had gone dark somewhere over the Atlantic, and it hadn’t been found. It had been wiped away like a smudge on a window, vanishing clean out of the sky as if it had never been there at all.

Paul tried to send her home, but she wouldn’t go. She remained at her desk, captain of the ship, and continued to care for Paul and Agnes and Eleanor during their own dark days. She would bring casseroles and potato salad and pot roasts from home and send them with Paul. Eleanor ate many of Gerry’s meals in those days. Her own mother had already learned to drink, and was going outside less and less.
 

In a way, Geraldine Rydell had mothered Eleanor.
 

Eleanor and Jack can see Gerry inside the realty office. The rain hammers the road around them, and Jack runs for the door.
 

“Wait,” Eleanor says, but Jack has already gone inside.
 

She can see Gerry jump up from the desk and go to Jack. She exclaims over his condition, like a very animated mime, and Jack turns and points outside. Points at Eleanor. Gerry looks past Jack and sees Eleanor standing on the opposite sidewalk, and goes to the office door and opens it and yells across the street.
 

“Ellie, for Pete’s sake, come inside! You’ll catch cold!”
 

Eleanor can feel the warmth radiating from Gerry even all the way over here, across the street. The office is lit up, gold against the darkening gray sky. Her father’s blinds are pulled, but she knows he is in there, too. His Buick is parked at the curb. She can go inside and stand on a mat and maybe drip-dry. At least inside it’s sure to be warm. The temperature outside has plummeted, and Eleanor feels a shiver course through her body.
 

But she hesitates.
 

Her father’s words come back to her.
 

I have a bad feeling about this
.

And Eleanor does, too.
 

The sudden summer storm. The whales.
 

It has been an unusual day.

A bad feeling
.

“Ellie,” Gerry calls again. “Dear sweet Lord, come in! What’s wrong?”

Eleanor pushes the worry away. She can practically smell Geraldine’s perfume, and suddenly the only thing in the world she wants is to feel that woman draw her in close for a big, strong hug.
 

Gerry waves at her.

Eleanor forgets to look both ways as she steps into the street, but it doesn’t matter. There’s no traffic. The sound of the rain on the asphalt becomes a sort of chant. Eleanor crosses the street and stops just outside the door.
 

“Girl, you’re drenched,” Gerry says. She steps back into the office, but leans into the doorway, holding the glass door wide for Eleanor. Jack stands dripping in the lobby, watching Eleanor inquisitively.
 

A bad, bad feeling
.