Eleanor (3 page)

“I can come back,” Eleanor protested.

“Summer Games are in two years,” her coach said. “You won’t be ready by then. So—what? You train for the next one, in ’68? That’s six years, Eleanor. How old will you be then?”

Eleanor looked away and didn’t answer.
 

“Twenty-eight? Twenty-nine?”

“Thirty,” she answered.
 

The coach sighed. “Thirty. Well, that’s that, then.”

Driving home, Eleanor mourned her past life. She pulled the car onto the side of the state highway, and as trucks and buses and station wagons roared by, she put her hands over her eyes and cried.
 

But after her good cry, Hob convinced her that she wasn’t through yet.
 

“So you’re too old to swim,” he pointed out. “Are you too old to dive?”

Eleanor leans into each stroke. The waves diminish as she puts distance between herself and the mainland. She can’t hear the horns bellowing in the port lanes anymore. The sound of the water in her ears is too close, too loud. She loves the sound of it. It’s almost a part of her, her momentum stripping molecules of water from the ocean. The water clings to her skin. Her arms break the surface. She turns her head, sucks in a breath, drops her face into the sea again.
 

Hob rows a safe distance away, giving the oars a long, lazy pull now and then, matching Eleanor’s pace.
 

He loves her. She knows that he’s different. She can’t think of a single man in her life who ever demonstrated an interest in a woman’s dreams. In her cooking, yes. In her figure, of course. But what man would insert himself into a woman’s heart and embrace the things that moved her most deeply? Hob is unique, and she supposes this is why she loves him.
 

But here, in the ocean, the water sluicing over her face, the scent of the sea filling her nose, she imagines what it might be like to return to a distant time, to the days before she met Hob. Knowing what she knows now—knowing his love, and the sparkle of her daughter’s eyes—would Eleanor make the same decisions? Would she allow herself to fall in love?

As she swims she glances in Hob’s direction. He’s a good man: quiet and patient and gentle.
 

She dives beneath the surface for a few strokes, kicking to a depth at which she knows she cannot be seen. And only there, where the sunlight begins to dim and the warmer surface water turns abruptly cold, does she permit herself to answer the question.

No. Of course she wouldn’t choose this life.
 

Who would?

Eleanor is not a natural diver. She learned this early, standing atop the island cliff for the first time. The fifty-foot drop was significantly higher than any competitive diving platform. Until her first visit to the island, she had only ever dived from the three-foot board at the municipal pool. The island, called Huffnagle, was, on all sides but one, a disaster zone, its shallows a minefield of broken rock. But if a girl was to go ashore, and if she were to discover the gnarled path that led to the top of the island, she might find that the side of the island that faced the Pacific horizon also overlooked a deep blue cove mostly free of skull-shattering rocks.
 

That first day, Hob had rowed the little boat into the cove and drawn close to the cliff, where he waited, craning his neck to see her high above. It had taken her almost an hour to gather her courage and actually dive, and when she did, her dive was formless, like a crumpled origami pattern, and she had hit the water like a child pushed down a flight of stairs.
 

“You were never a gymnast,” her coach had cautioned when Eleanor asked about diving. “Swimmers don’t make good divers. Gymnasts and ballerinas, surprisingly enough,
do
. And you have a swimmer’s build, Eleanor. Do not get your hopes up. Please.”

But now, a full season later, her dives are precise and fluid. She is no longer rattled by the height, but craves the moment of flight before gravity snatches her out of the sky. She practices for as long as her body can stand it, fancifully throwing herself from the cliff time and time again. After each dive, she swims around the island to the nearest beach, then goes ashore, climbs the path, and repeats the routine. On a good afternoon, when it isn’t too cold, when the water isn’t too hard, she might dive a dozen times.

Hob has learned to keep his mouth shut. The first few times, he would give her feedback when she surfaced. “You weren’t keeping your knees together,” he would say. “Your shoulders aren’t square to the water.”

But now he just waits in the boat, reading a book or his newspaper, as though he’s a parent waiting patiently for his daughter to wear herself out on the playground equipment. He has found the right spot to hover in the boat, where the slow ocean swells keep him pinned to the cliff wall. He can turn his pages without worrying that he’ll drift away.
 

This day the rain has made reading difficult, so Hob waits beneath his umbrella, watching Eleanor’s dives more carefully than usual. Her first dive is graceful—maybe the best yet. He has advised her that learning to dive from non-regulation height might work against her—after all, a fifty-foot dive provides a woman with more opportunity to adjust her form—but Eleanor has only ignored his comments, so he keeps them to himself.
 

He huddles in the boat, beneath his raincoat, enjoying the damp smell of the cliff beside him, watching the occasional fish break the surface. A quarter mile out, seven or eight seagulls bob on the water, unconcerned about the rain.
 

Eleanor dives again, then smiles at him before swimming around the rocks. It usually takes about seven or eight minutes for her to go ashore and reach the top of the cliff, so this time, when more than ten minutes go by, he feels the first twinge of worry. He tilts his head back and looks up at the cliff, but he can’t see her there. He calls her name, and she answers—but her voice is smaller than it should be.
 

Hob grabs the oars and begins to row.

Eleanor sits in the breakfast nook and watches the rain fall. The tree that Hob and Agnes planted two summers ago bends sideways with the wind. Even from here Eleanor can see the earth around its base beginning to pucker. If the storm gets much worse, the tree won’t survive.
 

She can hear the rain lashing against the house with each gust of wind. Up above, the attic moans like a Coke bottle as the wind whistles through the rafters.

“No swimming today,” Eleanor says aloud.
 

She’s surprised to have spoken the words, but more surprised that they crossed her mind at all. She and Hob haven’t gone to the ocean since the accident, which was minor enough. A misstep on the island path, a twisted ankle. Normally that sort of thing would have kept her out of the water for a couple of days, no more.
 

But Eleanor had turned up pregnant again. And that, according to her doctor, made swimming in the ocean a no-no.
 

“And no throwing yourself off cliffs, either,” he advised, upon learning why Eleanor was swimming in the first place. “I’m surprised you’re
still
pregnant, to be quite honest. That kind of physical abuse can terminate a pregnancy in a heartbeat.”

Hob had babbled on the way home about having a son, but Eleanor barely heard him.
 

Pregnant.
 

Again
.

As if Eleanor didn’t already feel that her life was being written by someone else’s hand.

She sips her tea now and sighs. She sighs an awful lot now, the air pushed out of her lungs by the weight of her thoughts. Dark, awful thoughts. A few nights before, she dreamed about a man who bothered her at the grocery store. He had been holding a clipboard and a pen, and instinctively she had tried to step past him. He’d said, “I’ll see you on the way out,” and let her pass, and she had forgotten about him. But he was there when she finished shopping, and this time as she tried to slide by, he said, “Vote for Eleanor,” and she stopped.
 

“Excuse me?” the dream version of herself asked.
 

“Eleanor,” the man repeated. “The town is voting on her issue.”

“What issue?” Eleanor asked.
 

“It’s simple,” the man said, folding back one of the pages on the clipboard and holding it up for her to see. There were two big words on the page:
Yes
and
No
. Below each word was a list of names, some scrawled illegibly, some in neat cursive. “Either Eleanor can start over, or Eleanor can stay in prison.”

“In prison?”
 

“Right,” the man said, without explaining further.
 

“I’m Eleanor,” Eleanor said.
 

“Oh!” the man said. “Well, then you definitely should consider voting. Right now it’s a tie. You’ll be the tiebreaker!”

“Isn’t voting a private affair? This looks like a petition to me.”

“Not at all,” the man said. “But bananas eat for free on Thursday afternoons.”

“What?” Eleanor asked.

“I said, you better hurry and vote, because I think you’re about to wake up.”

But she had woken from the dream before she’d had time to cast her vote. The dream has remained with her since, her brain working on the question of her vote—while she makes dinner for Hob and Agnes, while she washes dishes, while she sits in the bathtub, the deepest water she’s been in for months.
 

What vote would she have cast?

Eleanor rubs her belly idly as the storm worsens. She’s showing now—not much, but enough that strangers have begun complimenting her when she goes to town. She and Hob haven’t made love since they found out. She hasn’t been in the mood, and he’s been worried about hurting the baby, something she thought he’d figured out during her first pregnancy.
 

She’s grateful that this new baby seems to have distracted him from his worries, though.

At least one of them is excited.