Eleanor (24 page)

Through the doors, Eleanor can see Jack inside, and he sees her, and he claps his hands to his head and then runs through the doors. “Ellie,” he says, and she is surprised to see that his eyes are red from crying. “Ellie, Ellie.”

He just says her name again and again, and Eleanor looks at her father, and then at Jack, and she says again, “What’s going on?”

Officer Sheila says, “We were told you were missing. Do you want to tell me where you’ve been this morning?”

Eleanor blinks. “This morning? Only this morning?”

Jack’s eyes fill up with tears. “You just
disappeared
,” he whispers.
 

“Gerry,” Eleanor says. “Where’s Gerry?”

Eleanor goes inside. Walking through the door is terrifying, and at first she cannot do it. She puts her hands on either side of the open doorway and pushes herself away from it. Her father says, “Ellie,” and the note of tension in his voice upsets her, because that means everything is back to the way it was, because she was gone and now she’s home and he is already
parenting
her, but then Jack is next to her, and he says, quietly, “It’s okay. Everything is going to be okay.”

His voice is gentle, and Eleanor takes a deep breath, and that’s when she realizes that she doesn’t feel any of it—doesn’t feel the charge in the air, doesn’t feel something pulling at her.
 

She goes through the doorway with her eyes closed, and when she opens them again, she’s in the lobby of her father’s real estate office, and everything is quite normal, except for Gerry lying on the couch with an oxygen mask over her nose and mouth, except for the paramedic kneeling beside her, capping a syringe and depositing it into a biohazard bucket.
 

Eleanor turns to her father and says, “What happened?”

But Jack says, “He didn’t see. I did, though.”

“What happened?” she says again.
 

Her father and Officer Sheila tower over her as she stares at Gerry, who is breathing, but not well.
 

“Ellie,” Jack says. “You—it sounds crazy, but you—you
disappeared
. And it scared her. And me,” he adds.

“She fainted,” Officer Sheila says. “Or something.”

“She’s getting older,” Paul says. “She’s got high blood pressure. And diabetes, I think.”

Eleanor begins to cry, and her father puts his hand on her shoulder, and Officer Sheila turns away, but Jack steps closer to her and puts his arms around her. His arms are warm and alive and Eleanor cries, and somewhere inside her she allows herself to enjoy this feeling, this feeling of being held, of being enfolded by another person, because even with everything that has gone wrong now, it is still the first time in so very long that she has felt anything like that at all.

In the quiet, then, she hears Gerry’s soft, labored breathing, and that feeling goes away.

Eleanor sits on the couch in her father’s office. The paramedic has given her a blanket. It’s rough, and folds around her like—
like burlap
, she thinks regretfully. But it warms her. She didn’t know that she was cold until the paramedic wrapped it around her.
 

The sounds of the office are unnatural today. Gerry’s rattling breath. The paramedic’s equipment scraping and knocking around. Jack, pacing. Eleanor feels small and responsible, somehow, for the
wrongness
of the world. That’s what it is:
wrong
. She struggles with her thoughts, but they don’t make any sense. She feels displaced, as if the world she inhabits has shifted, has become foreign to her.
 

She doesn’t even know if it’s really the same Saturday.

A blur in her vision distracts her. She looks up to see her father standing at his office window, his hands locked behind his back. He stares through the window at the sea wall. The shark statue is visible in the distance, and she wonders if he saw her there before. The sun is going down, and the statue flares gold as the light seeps away. Her father is a dark silhouette, pink around the edges.
 

He sighs heavily, and Eleanor can almost feel it in her bones. Her father doesn’t look well, and that is surprising to her, because just yesterday—was it yesterday?—he was fine. Just yesterday the world was righted upon its axis, and all was well. The summer had been pleasant, even easy. But now her father looks as if he has endured a battle. He is tired—she can see it in the slump of his shoulders, the curve of his spine. He hasn’t shaved. His face is prickly under a few days of stubble. His clothes are wrinkled.
 

Were his clothes wrinkled like that earlier in the day, when she and Jack had stopped by to steal bottles of orange juice from the office refrigerator? Eleanor can’t remember.
 

She thinks of her mother, then, because her father’s condition is not unlike Agnes’s. Her mother, who isn’t here. Who is probably at home, as usual, tucked into her chair, fingers curled around a bottle of
something
. For a moment, Eleanor hates her, but this is nothing new. There have been many such moments during the past seven years. There will be many more. This is what it is like when a child must raise herself
and
her parent.
 

Eleanor doesn’t fool herself anymore. She knows that her mother doesn’t care about her. Suspects, sometimes, that her mother even
hates
her. She can see the pain and anger in Agnes’s eyes when she is somewhat lucid. She knows that her mother blames her—irrationally, but that doesn’t matter—for Esmerelda’s death. Hates her for being the one who lived.
 

Did Agnes even love them when they were alive? Eleanor wonders this often. Her sister seems to have taken on a new shape in death, a regal shape, as Agnes has built up Esmerelda’s memory into a towering figure in their dark home.
 

Eleanor sighs now, too.

In the lobby, Jack sits behind Gerry’s desk, turning idly this way and that in the chair. He looks forlorn and helpless, and stares down at his hands. He notices Eleanor watching him, and glances up, then away. He looks at her again, then mouths something—
Come here
, perhaps?—and jerks his head toward the little kitchen behind him.

Eleanor gets up. The couch creaks, but her father doesn’t notice, and again she feels like something critical has changed. When she was small and tripped and bumped her head and cried, he would scoop her up and lock her in his arms and press his cheek to hers and whisper in her ear.
You’re okay
, he would say.
I’m right here. I love you.

And that would make everything better.

Her father sighs again.

Eleanor leaves the room and follows Jack into the kitchen. She doesn’t look at Geraldine, still laid out on the sofa, still rattling like a loose gutter.

Jack pulls open the refrigerator and takes out a box of cranberry juice. He holds it up questioningly. Eleanor shakes her head, and he takes the box for himself, puncturing the foil cover with the straw and bumping the refrigerator door closed with his hip.

“Is your dad okay?” Jack asks.
 

Eleanor shrugs. “I don’t know. He will be.”

“He was really upset,” Jack says.
 

“Gerry—”

Jack nods. “She just—she just went empty,” he says. He wrinkles his nose. “Not empty. But—do you know? She just fell down.”

Eleanor looks at her feet. “Did you—never mind.”

Jack says, “You’re going to tell me what happened now, right?”

“Jack,” she says. “I don’t know what happened.”

“No,” he says. “I think you do. I think you have an idea, even if you don’t really know.”

She’s quiet, and then she says, “I really don’t know.”

“But
something
happened,” he says. “Don’t lie to me. And it happened before. Didn’t it?”

Eleanor takes a slow breath, then looks at Jack solemnly. “Yes.”

“What did it feel like?” he asks.
 

He pulls out a chair for her, and she sinks into it, bundled in her scratchy blanket. He pulls out another for himself, and sits next to her, facing her, the juice box cupped in his hands.
 

“I don’t think I can explain it,” she says.
 

Jack doesn’t look away.

“Try,” he says.

So she does.
 

In the little kitchen in her father’s office, while her father stands like a frozen statue at the window in the next room, while his receptionist lies damaged on the sofa nearby, Eleanor tries to put into words what is happening to her, and discovers that she has plenty of words, indeed.

Three days, not two.
 

It takes that long to reach the foothills below the crash site. Three days of slogging through the muck and rising water. The keeper’s valley is slowly filling like a bowl, the first time in what must be a hundred years. She walks, gripping a long stick in one hand, and her shadow flits on the surface of the water beside her. The water is cold, bitterly cold, but the keeper barely feels it. If she wanted to, she could warm the water to a boil with a thought.
 

But she doesn’t want to.
 

She looks up at the mountain above, at the great pines that stretch into the sky. Beyond their crowns she can see smoke. It has thinned to small curls, and twists up from the crash site.
 

“Just another few hours,” she says to her shadow. “We’re almost there.”

The higher she climbs, the warmer the ground becomes. She can smell the acrid, scorched tang of burned fuel. The bed of pine needles at her feet is blackened. A faint mist swims up in the darkness, and within a few minutes, the ground is obscured. With each step, the keeper’s feet stir the mist, and she catches a glimpse of her boots, slick and glommy with muck. The laces have gone black, saturated with muddy water.
 

This forest has burned and regrown twice since the keeper arrived in the valley so long ago. The earth here has never forgotten its pain. It cradles the heat of its own death, always just beneath the surface, as though releasing the memory would be to forget it forever, to risk succumbing to the fresh hell of fire again and again. But the forest burns, and always will burn, and it will always return. It is the way of the trees. There will always be strange things crashing from the sky to set the woods alight.