Eleanor (44 page)

Eleanor
, Mea says.
 

The colors grow still, and Eleanor turns over in the black tide. Mea is close to her, nearer than before. Eleanor can feel her sister’s presence, as if a field around her own body is slightly disturbed by another. She and Esmerelda, two disembodied minds, two magnets drawn together.

Eleanor
, Mea repeats.
You returned for a reason. Do you wish to know what it is?
 

“You already told me,” Eleanor says, distracted. “It’s about healing our family.”

Do you wish to know how?

“Tell me what it was like,” Eleanor says.
 

Mea is confused.
What do you mean?

“Did you see us? Were you looking down on us? Did you see yourself?”

When I died
.

“Right,” Eleanor says. “What was it like when you showed up here? Did you know what it was all about? Did someone explain it to you like you did for me?”

You want to talk about this?
Mea asks.

Eleanor nods, and a slow wash of orange bleeds into the darkness. “I want to know what you felt,” she says. “Don’t you want to know what I felt?”

I saw you
, Mea answers.
I understand how you felt. You were sad.

Eleanor takes this in. “That’s all?”

What else is there?

“It was the worst thing that ever happened in my life,” Eleanor says. “And now I’m here, and we’re together again. I just—I want to catch up.”

But we have something very important to do.

“Yeah, I know, but—we’re not in a hurry, right? You can go anywhere in time, you said you could. So we could talk for a million years, and still go right back to where we started. Couldn’t we?”

Yes.

“I missed you.”

I know.
 

“You must have missed me,” Eleanor says. “Or Mom or Dad.”

It is not the same for me
, Mea says.
I do not feel these things as you do.

“Oh.” Eleanor is quiet for a moment. “Then why did you bring me here?”

So we can set things right,
Mea says.
And then all will be right again.

“That’s all,” Eleanor says.

Yes.

“You didn’t miss me, even a little?”

It would hurt your feelings if I answered truthfully.

“You didn’t miss me,” Eleanor says. “I don’t know what to think about that.”

I am not Esmerelda,
Mea says.
Not the way you remember her. This is why I have taken a new name.
 

The darkness suddenly feels cavernous and empty to Eleanor. “This isn’t what I expected. Why does it matter to you that things are fucked up back home with Mom and Dad, with me? Why do you even care? You don’t have any feelings.”

You are upset.

“I’m heartbroken,” Eleanor says.

These things matter because I am here,
Mea says.
I am here because things are not right.

“It’s all about what’s best for you, then.”

What is best for me is also infinitely better for you.

Eleanor doesn’t say anything for a long time. She hangs in the dark, and thinks about standing astride her bicycle on the corner of her mother’s street. She wishes she had gone inside.
 

“Okay,” she says at last. “What are we supposed to do?”

For Eleanor’s sake, Mea tries very hard to remember her previous life. She has seen it many times over, has returned to the moment her life ended, observed it carefully. She has memorized the tiny events that contributed to it, the threads that tangle up in that knotted, violent second of human history.
 

Her father travels to the real estate convention because a man named Richard—who sometimes helped her father sell houses in the early days—goes hunting with his brother-in-law, stumbles into a ravine, and breaks his ankle. Richard was to attend the convention, but with his injury, Paul transfers the flight into his own name.
 

This is the single event that creates the accident in the timeline.

A broken ankle.
 

Paul goes away for a few days then. Logistics dictate almost everything else. The Witts have only one car. Had Paul driven it himself, the car would have remained in airport parking for days, useless to Agnes and the girls. A taxi is too expensive, so the whole family drives to Portland to see Paul off. Goodbyes said, hugs hugged.
 

Because the taxi is so expensive, Agnes and the twins return a few days later to retrieve Paul from the airport. This puts them on Highway 26, speeding through the rain and fog to meet Esmerelda’s—
Mea’s
—fate.

There are very few people in history like you,
Mea says to Eleanor.
Like you, and like—me.

Eleanor is quiet; she listens as Mea spins her tale.
 

The average human being lives its life in one direction—forward. It is born, it experiences the sum of all things that happen to it, and when it comes to its end, it dies
, Mea explains.
But for a few people—for you and for me—there are other possibilities.

“What do you mean?” Eleanor asks. “Like—we can time-travel?”

Yes
.

Eleanor is excited, as any human might be, but Mea hears the darkness whisper in her ear:
Caution. There are risks. There are rules.

Mea says as much.
 

“Rules?” Eleanor asks.

You and I, we are the same,
Mea says.
Except I am no longer human. I am no longer alive. When a—soul—has unfinished business, when it waits in the rift for passage into the after, it cannot control its fate.
 

“That sounds like hell,” Eleanor says. “Why would anyone want to do that?”

Most souls wait for a very long time. In the end, the peace they seek is usually within themselves, not within the confines of the world they left
.

“They have to forgive themselves?”

Or accept that they cannot change the past.

“But you’re different,” Eleanor says. “Why?”

Because of you,
Mea says.
Because we are the same. Because we are connected.
 

“Because we’re twins?” Eleanor asks. “That seems—I don’t get it.”

Do you remember when you were a child? When you and Esmerelda would—

“—finish each other’s thoughts,” Eleanor interrupts. “I had forgotten it until just now.”

The connection transcends death
.
I linger here because you live. And while you live—

Eleanor hangs in the darkness, and Mea moves closer, creating heavy black ripples edged with light. Eleanor bobs in the nothingness like a sprite of flotsam in the sea.
 

The connection cannot be broken by time, or by death
, Mea explains.
And when one of the souls is alive, and one is not, the connection—

“—is like a tunnel between two worlds,” Eleanor finishes. “Right?”

That’s correct,
Mea says.
It explains why you can enter the rift. Why I was able to bring you here.

“So—you can come back to the world with me?” Eleanor asks. “Is it dangerous?”

I do not know. I have never tried such things. I suspect it is, yes. Very. I suspect there are limitations.

“What are they?”

I cannot physically go with you,
Mea says,
for I have no body. But through you, I think, I can manipulate things. Time. Events. In a way. I have had much time to think about this. I think that it can be so.
 

Eleanor seems to consider this while Mea watches her. “What does that mean?”

It means
, Mea says,
that we can start over.

Mea’s words rattle her, and if she could, she would cry. She feels the familiar surge of warmth that precedes her tears, and a surge of color, like bubbles on a river’s surface, wash out from her into the dark. Mea is close now, and the colors collide with her in little spitfire flashes.
 

“We can go back,” Eleanor says. “How far?”

As far as you might wish.
 

“To that day? To the day you—”

Yes.
 

“You’ll be—”

Alive. Yes.

“What happens then?”

Mea says,
I do not know. I suspect that I will be expelled from the rift. After all, I will not be dead, then.

“And then what? The crash happens all over again? I feel that hurt all over again? Watch you—watch you—”

She cannot finish the thought.
 

Time will begin to move forward for us,
Mea says.
But I do not think that it will be predestined. I think that we will be able to change it.

“We can prevent the crash,” Eleanor says.
 

I am not certain. But I think that we can.

“We’ll be six years old again.”

Yes.

“How do little girls stop something like that? How do we stop a car crash?”

We will have to devise a way.

Eleanor is filled with fear and wonder. “We’ll have to relive everything. All those years of school, of—”

Yes. Is that undesirable?

Eleanor laughs. “Are you kidding? I won’t be alone this time!” Then she pauses. “Wait. Will—will we remember?’

I do not know.
 

Eleanor turns in a circle, and laughs again. “Esme,” she says, “you’ll be alive! We’ll grow up together! Can you imagine? All the things we’ll share?” Eleanor stops, and faces Mea in the darkness. “Maybe this time you won’t be such a little shit,” she says, pointedly.

Mea does not answer.

“Hey,” Eleanor says. “I was only kidding. I’m sorry, it was tasteless, it—”

There are other things you must know.

Eleanor feels a strangeness—a coldness that charges her heart with fear. Then a warm swell—almost as if the sea has licked at her toes. “Someone else is here,” she says. “Who is here?”

No answer comes.

“Mea,” Eleanor says. “Are we alone? Are there other—dead people here?”

The rift holds all the souls of people who wait
, Mea says.
But we are mostly alone.

“Mostly?”
 

The darkness is here.

“What do you mean? It’s dark. It’s been dark the whole time.”

The darkness knows you. The darkness knows all. The darkness is time, it is life, it is death.

Eleanor feels a tingle of fear, and then the darkness speaks, and the darkness turns to light.