Eleanor (29 page)

Eleanor considers it. “Sure.”
 

Paul is surprised. “Really?”

“It couldn’t be any weirder than what’s already happening,” she says.
 

He nods. “Okay.”

Eleanor unbuckles the lap belt and it retracts noisily. “Help me up,” she says.

Her father nods again, but he’s elsewhere now, lost in thought.
 

He says, “Your mother hates seeing me. She was so angry the last time I was here.”

“Dad,” Eleanor says. “I need your help. You have to come in.”

He looks at her and seems to snap out of it.
 

“Right,” he says. “Right. Okay.”

You have weakened her
.

The darkness is right, Mea knows. She can see it now in the way the girl shuffles across the driveway. Her father supports her carefully. Her steps are uncertain and shaky, and she is bent over like an old person. The blanket wrapped around her reinforces the illusion.

You observe too much
, the darkness suggests.
 

Mea does not acknowledge the darkness, and it withdraws. For the first time in the
rift
, as the darkness had named it, Mea feels
cold
.
 

She watches the girl, and wishes that she could slide between the two worlds herself, and touch her.
 

Instead, she waits.
 

The days must pass.
 

The girl must heal.
 

Again.

Eleanor and her father creep up the walk like two invalids.
 

Jack is on the porch, standing in the shadows cast by the late afternoon sun. “I don’t want to scare you,” he says.
 

Eleanor looks up, and she can tell by Jack’s reaction that
she
has scared
him
. She knows what she looks like, with her bandages and her blood-filled eye and her bruises and scrapes and stitches. She knows that the brace is visible beneath her T-shirt, a knobby shelf below her breasts. Her shoulders are stooped, her knees weak. Her father’s hands are below her elbows, guiding and supporting her.
 

“What happened?” Jack asks, his eyes wide. He claps his hands to his head and pulls his hair. “Are you okay?”

Eleanor smiles weakly at him. “Hi, Jack.”

“Hi, hi, yes,” he blurts. “
What happened?
”

Paul gives Jack the door key, and the boy stares dumbly at it.
 

“I don’t want to let go of her,” Paul says.
 

Jack notices Paul’s hands on Eleanor’s arms for the first time, then nods.

“Don’t tell your mother I kept a key,” Paul says to Eleanor.
 

Jack pushes the door open, then steps back. Paul and Eleanor walk awkwardly through the door—no static charge here, Eleanor notices with relief—and Jack says, “Ellie, damn it, what happened?”

“I don’t know,” she says.
 

“It happened again,” he says, and Eleanor shoots him a stern look.

Paul stops. “Jack knows,” he says, looking at Eleanor.

Eleanor looks away, then nods. “Yes.”

Paul sets his jaw. “Jack, don’t you tell a soul until we know what’s happening,” he says. “Do you understand?”

Jack nods emphatically, then says, “I think I should sleep over.”

Eleanor can’t help but smile. “It’s fine,” she says. “Dad’s here.”

Paul flips the hallway switch, and light flares like a torch struck in a cave. “Hello?” he calls. “Aggie?”

Jack says, “I should still stay over and help.”
 

“That’s sweet,” Eleanor says. “But it’s fine.”

“TV’s on,” her father says.

He’s right. Though every room is filled with dusky shadows, Eleanor can hear thin strains of laughter from another room.
 

“Mom doesn’t really watch TV anymore,” she says.
 

Paul steps inside, then turns and helps Eleanor take the step up into the entry. Jack stands outside, hesitant until Paul waves him in, then closes the door behind them. Deep in the house, the television’s laughter grows louder, and then there’s singing, and Eleanor looks up to see her father go very still.
 

"Dad?" she asks.
 

He looks down at her, and she can see that his eyes are full of tears again.
 

"What’s wrong?" she says.
 

"I know those sounds," he answers. "Don’t you?"

Eleanor listens, then shakes her head. It just sounds like television noise to her.
 

Paul tilts his head, listening to the sing-song voices, then joins in, lightly, anticipating the next lyrics. He sighs, then says, "You girls always loved ‘Billie Jean.’”
 

And that’s exactly what it is. With that frame of reference, Eleanor knows exactly what her mother must be watching. It isn’t television at all. It’s old home movies. It is, quite specifically, the last Fourth of July they celebrated together. There was a backyard barbecue, a picnic table, a dozen people, streamers.
 

"We were six," Eleanor says.
 

"Your mom invited her gardening friends," Paul says. His eyes are closed, and he sways a little. “I overcooked the burgers, and Jim took over.”
 

Jack stands back and just watches the two of them.

"You made us perform for everyone," Eleanor remembers. "Like little dancing bears."

"No," Paul says. "It was your mother. She loved it when you both sang."

"She loved it when Esme sang," Eleanor corrects. "I wasn’t good at all."

"You were both lovely."

The sounds are tired and old, the quality degraded after years of lying in a box somewhere. There are gaps in the video, garbled bursts of noise between segments. 'Billie Jean' abruptly ends in a fit of laughter, and then there’s a noisy, staticky break, and then a soft voice, speaking all alone from the past.
 

Esmerelda.

Paul makes a choking sound, and says, “Esme,” and plunges headlong into the shadows, looking for the source of the sounds. Eleanor starts to follow, and almost falls over. Jack is there, and puts his hands beneath her elbows just the way her father had done, and she gives him a grateful smile.
 

“It’s nice having him home,” Eleanor says, quietly. “Even like this.”

They walk into the living room together. The blue corduroy chair is empty, but the side table isn’t. A single bottle of Jameson, empty, glints in the last hints of rose-colored sunset. If Jack notices it, he doesn’t say so, and Eleanor is relieved.
 

She and Jack follow Paul through the living room to the stairs. Her father takes the steps one at a time, slowly, almost dazed. She worries for him. She knows what’s on this part of the tape, even if he can’t exactly remember. They were little thieves, she and Esmerelda. They found her father’s old video camera in the closet one afternoon, and spent hours running around the house together, filming fake news reports and pretending to be burglars, creeping through the house, shooting every object and musing aloud about its value.
 

When they got tired of the game, Eleanor went to her bedroom to read, but was distracted by Esme’s voice coming through the wall. Eleanor walked lightly to her bedroom door and peeked out. Esme was at the opposite end of the hallway, facing the antique table next to their parents' room. The video camera was resting on the table, and Esme was performing for it, only a little bit self-conscious.
 

Jack helps her climb the staircase now. Paul stands at the top of it, listening.
 

“Mom?” Eleanor calls, at the same time that he says, “Aggie?”

There’s no answer. They follow the sounds into the bedroom that Eleanor’s parents once shared, but which now belongs only to Agnes. The bed inside is carefully made. Agnes simply falls asleep wherever she happens to pass out these days, and only rarely is that on her own bed. Eleanor doesn’t mind this. She worries about her mother when she climbs the stairs. She has nightmares, now and then, about Agnes stumbling drunkenly up an endless staircase. The dreams always end with her mother tumbling, head over heels, down a thousand steps.
 

The old tube television that used to be in the living room now sits on the dresser. It faces the bed, spilling light into the dark room. The VCR beside it blinks
12:00
. Paul puts his hand over his mouth when he sees what’s on the television’s milky screen. He sinks onto the bed and stares, and Jack helps Eleanor onto the bed beside him. Then Jack stands there, uncertain of his proper place.
 

Eleanor is transfixed by her sister, who is framed in the center of the screen. She recognizes the Disney T-shirt that Esmerelda wears. Printed on the front are Mickey and Donald and Goofy, following a silly mule down a steep path. A beautiful pink vista spreads out behind them, and printed in wooden letters are the words
The Grand Canyon
. It’s the strangest shirt, but Esmerelda had loved it dearly.
 

Eleanor still has the shirt, folded carefully in her dresser drawer.
 

"What do you mean, she broke it?" Esmerelda protests on screen.
 

Eleanor laughs, startling Jack and her father. She had forgotten about this, about Esmerelda’s habit of affecting an awful, stodgy British accent. If ever a person’s voice could sound
fat
, this accent certainly did. Esme seems to transform before their eyes into a small, old, overweight British socialite.
 

"Well, that’s
un
acceptable," Esme continues, a hand to her throat in shock. "Do you hear me, Jarshmerschar? She must pay for it. You will not allow her to leave until she does. That lamp cost six dollars!”

"
Jarshmerschar?
" Paul blurts. He bursts into laughter and tears at the same time.

Eleanor laughs until she, too, is crying. On the screen, Esme stages an entire soap opera as a one-girl show, playing the parts of the socialite and her butler—who is apparently named Jarshmerschar—and the offending guest, a bratty child with an overpronounced Southern twang. It’s entertaining on its own, simply for what it is, but it’s more than that.
 

It’s a shower after seven years lost in the woods. It’s the first glimmer of sunlight after the rainy season. It’s a fresh breath of air drawn into lungs after a decade of life in a cave.
 

Eleanor looks up at her father. He looks down at her.
 

"I miss her," Paul confesses, and he weeps.

Eleanor cries, too, and Jack eases slowly out of the room.

But then he spots Agnes.

Agnes is on the floor, almost hidden behind the bed. She’s been there for a while, and she isn’t a pretty sight. Her bare feet are the only part of her visible from the doorway, and that’s the only reason that Jack or Eleanor or Paul even knows she’s there.
 

Jack shouts, and Eleanor jumps—her ribs scream in pain—and Paul almost falls off the bed, so rudely is the moment interrupted.