Eleanor (22 page)

“Go away,” Gerry breathes again, and Eleanor realizes what is happening.

She had convinced herself that it would not happen again. That, whatever it was, it was some sort of delusion. Maybe she’d eaten something bad, and gotten sick, and her brain had turned feverish. Maybe she had wandered off.
 

All the way to a farm? Into the mountains?
her mind had insisted.
 

But here it was, happening again. And this time she wasn’t lost in a cornfield in Iowa someplace, watching herself as a child. She wasn’t burying herself in mud in some faraway mountain range. This time she was in her friend Gerry’s house, six or seven years in the past, watching the worst moment of Gerry’s life play itself out in front of her.
 

A bad, bad feeling.

Eleanor feels a wave of nausea overwhelm her, and she wants to vomit, and opens her mouth, but nothing comes out. Her belly and her throat burn as if stomach acid has worked its way up, but there is nothing there. Nothing happens at all.
 

Outside, the two men have made their way up the walk to the front door.
 

“Go away!” Gerry shouts, without opening the door.

One of the men knocks firmly.

Eleanor hears the front door open, and quickly goes into the hallway.
 

“No,” Gerry says.
 

The two Army men stand on Gerry’s doorstep, hats beneath their arms, resigned expressions on their faces. The younger man says, “Ma’am, are you Mrs.—”

“Don’t you tell me that!”
Gerry cries, and she reaches for the door to swing it closed, but she misses, and Eleanor puts a hand to her mouth as she watches Gerry almost fall over. The poor woman doubles over, and Eleanor can hear Gerry gasping for air like a fish, except no air comes back out. Eleanor reaches for the woman, then remembers the fire and the ice, and, ashamed, pulls her hand back. Then Gerry bellows a teeth-rattling wail that sounds as if it comes from the soles of her feet, and her knees buckle, and she stumbles forward. Both men immediately drop their hats and go for Gerry’s arms, and scoop her up between them.
 

Eleanor feels hot tears trace down her cheeks. She wipes them away with the heel of her palm.
 

The Army men help Gerry past Eleanor—Eleanor steps back quickly to avoid them—and take her to the loveseat in the living room.
 

“Mrs. Rydell,” the young man says. “Mrs. Rydell, can you hear me?”

Eleanor doesn’t want to watch this. Gerry is slack in their arms, and they place her on the loveseat as if positioning a cloth doll. The older man reaches into his pocket and comes out with a small white packet, and deftly cracks it open beneath Gerry’s nose. He waves it about, and Gerry’s eyes begin to flutter, and Eleanor turns away.
 

She feels as if she is being visited by the ghosts of Christmas.

Something catches her ear, then—voices, distant and small—and she turns around, but there is nobody there. She walks past the open front door. A few leaves have blown in and snagged on the rug. The room opposite the living room is a dining room, with a small circular table in the center. It is draped with rose-colored lace, decorated with a vase of clean, bright lilies.
 

Eleanor passes the dining room by, listening for the voices. She follows them down the hallway, passing closed doors along the way, and she opens each one to peek inside. She finds closets and bedrooms and the kitchen and a bathroom, and then she comes to the last door. It is at the end of the hallway, down three steps.
 

The voices are louder now, but they’re muffled by something. White noise. A rushing sound. She presses her ear to the door, but can’t make out the voices clearly. The rushing noise is very loud and unnatural.

Behind her she can hear the faint sounds of Gerry waking up, and she does not want to hear the words that Gerry will say, or the words the Army men will say. So she opens the door at the bottom of the stairs, and a hurricane rushes in.

The wind is fierce and angry, and it tears the hallway to pieces behind her. Eleanor claps her hands over her ears, but it doesn’t diminish the howling current. She turns away from it, and she sees the house coming apart. The walls flex and bend and then fold and crumple and collapse as if the entire house were made from balsa wood and papier-mâché. Framed pictures fly off the wall and collide in the air. Glass flies everywhere, embedding itself in the tumbling walls. The wood planks in the floor separate from each other and become weightless.
 

Eleanor’s hair rests straight and smooth on her shoulders, but she doesn’t notice.

She is afraid for Gerry and the two Army men, so she turns and steps through the door. It slams behind her.

Her first thought is that she is in Gerry’s garage, and the big door is open, because the room is flooded with pale light. It’s so bright that it makes her eyes hurt.
 

The wind swirls around her, loud as a banshee.

Her eyes adjust and she is dumbstruck.

The room is not a garage at all, but the cargo hold of an aircraft, and the scene is chaotic. There are large green crates strapped down, and beyond them, the floor is covered with hundreds of little rollers. The crates are all marked
U.S. Army
. As she looks, one of the crates breaks free of its straps, and skids down the carpet of rollers, sliding into a row of jump seats that are mounted to the walls. This has happened before—many of the seats have already snapped free. In the few that still hang on, Eleanor sees terrified soldiers, plastic masks over their faces.
 

At the far end of the cargo hold is nothing but blue sky and white clouds. The door is open, and the stiff cold winds at thirty thousand feet chew at the inside of the plane. The door looks broken—one end lists to the side, and she sees that the giant hydraulic strut that controls the door is twisted. The other strut still holds, but she can hear it whining in the wind, a terrible, shrill mechanical cry that can only mean something very bad is about to happen.
 

Then it does. The strut gives a terrible cry, and breaks into several pieces. The cargo door falls open, swinging low. Eleanor can feel the entire plane shudder.
 

It begins to spin.
 

Another crate pulls free, and banks off of yet another, and suddenly the three loose crates are not just sliding, but are flung about like toys. One of them splinters open, and Eleanor watches in horror as huge burlap sacks full of—what?—are flung around the cargo hold. The other two crates collide with more jump seats, and Eleanor screams. The soldiers in those seats sag limply, and the plane’s strange new gravity yanks at their slack bodies so that it appears they are standing straight up with their arms outstretched.
 

Their broken, misshapen arms.
 

For the first time then it occurs to her that she has not grabbed onto anything, and yet the wind has not touched her. She looks down at herself. Her T-shirt and shorts are unruffled by the steep draft. She grabs her hair and holds it away from her face and lets go, and it falls back into place.
 

There are five soldiers left in the jump seats. Two are unconscious and battered. The other three look absolutely terrified. Eleanor takes a careful step forward. Her footing is sure, so she takes another, and another, until she is next to the first jump seat. The boy sitting there—for that is all he is, just a boy a few years older than Eleanor—is crossing himself and crying, because that’s what a boy does when he is faced with death.
 

And that is surely what is happening here, she realizes.
 

The plane is all wrong. The angles inside the cargo space are not straight. They are curved, as if the plane has been wrenched out of the sky and twisted. The clouds outside the open door are turned the wrong way, and then the right way, and then the wrong way again. She can see a pale blue Earth sprawled high above them—instead of where it should be, far below the clouds.
 

The boy screams, and she hears the boy next to him say something about Jesus, and Eleanor looks at all three of the boys carefully.
 

She recognizes two of them.
 

A loud crack sounds behind her, and Eleanor looks back to see the entire wall of crates shift and tear free of their straps. She instinctively flinches, but the crates pass directly through her. They collide with every square inch of the cargo hold, hurled to the ceiling and the walls and the floors as the plane spirals out of control. Eleanor watches helplessly as a crate smashes directly into the jump seats, tearing them free of the wall.
 

Two of the boys are torn from the plane, still buckled into their bent seats, both dead or unconscious and unable to scream.
 

Then there is only one boy, and Eleanor turns and looks at him.
 

He has somehow found a strap to clutch, and he hangs on, desperately trying to wind it around his hand. His bladder has released, staining his uniform, and he is too frightened to cry any longer. Eleanor has enough time to look in his eyes.

He sees her.

He tries to say something, to talk to this red-haired girl who stands untouched by the destruction around her, but then, just like that, he is gone, ripped from the airplane like the burlap sacks that preceded him. He crashes into the flapping cargo door and sails out into the sky, completely limp, and continues his long fall to—to the sea below, Eleanor realizes, seeing the vast blue ocean rising up so far beneath the plane.
 

She stands there, rooted in place by the realization that bloomed in the boy’s eyes when he saw her.
 

Saw her
.

She hears his voice in her head as clearly as she heard it all those years ago.
 

You’ll be a good girl, right?

Then the plane begins to break apart.

The keeper rocks slowly in her chair. Her eyes are closed, and she listens to the rain. It drips from the edges of the porch roof. The earth around the cabin swells with water. Bits of grass and pine needles and fallen leaves float on the surface. The water has been rising again, she knows. It must be four, five inches now.
 

The sky is a sullen gray, and the clouds have grown darker these past few days. The cabin door stands open, and the interior glows orange. There are several leaks in the cabin’s roof now. The keeper has scattered iron pots around to catch the water. They demand to be emptied three or four times a day. They’re freshly emptied now, and the keeper can hear the ringing tap of water on the cast iron even from the porch, and she hums a song, using the tapping as a metronome.
 

Her humming almost obscures the rumble, but her shadow hears it, and separates from her.
 

She stops humming. “Where are you going?”

The shadow pauses at the stairs, tightening itself into a dark, flat circle.