Eleanor (46 page)

Eleanor creeps into the kitchen, then stops. She crosses the room to the sink, and opens the cabinet beneath it. The red plastic bin inside is empty, and she breathes a sigh. Her father is doing something right. Her mother isn’t drinking.
 

Or maybe her father just isn’t finding the bottles.
 

She leans against the doorframe and peeks out into the hall, then across to the living room. The moon washes the room in dim gray light, enough that Eleanor can see that it is empty. Her mother’s chair is unoccupied. The blanket she used to drape over her mother is folded carefully on the footstool. The side table is free of bottles.
 

She steps carefully across the hall, then stops dead in the doorway of the living room.

Her father is sitting upright on the couch in the dark.

Eleanor’s breath catches.

She can’t seem to move her feet.

Then her father snores—faintly, but enough that she can hear it. She exhales softly, then tiptoes into the room and heads for the stairs. The floor creaks beneath her feet, and her father startles awake. She can hear the thin click of his lips parting, and her skin prickles when he says her name.

Mea takes her then.
 

The space between the world and the rift is uneven, and Eleanor feels the air spark and hum around her. Her father’s voice stretches and wavers, her name on his lips turned to taffy.
 

“Ellllllllllllllllaaaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnahhhhhhh—”

It is the first time she is aware of her passage between worlds, and she is determined to understand it, to remember it. For a moment, as the air shimmers, she sees a cloud of black tar. It begins as a tiny jet, a crystal of ink, and then unfolds like a flower, expanding, crackling. She can
hear
it, reaches her arms forward. The rift is blacker than black, its edges spreading wide to take her in.
 

It sings to her.
 

She had imagined it differently. She had thought of the rift as a perfect, rectangular door, a black window that she could step through, and a tiny, traversable chasm between her world and the rift itself—the chasm that would lead to the world of dreams, into her ash forest and the farm on another planet.

But that isn’t how it happens at all.
 

She feels a coldness in the space before her—not from the rift, but from something in front of it—and as she steps forward, the cold seems to grip her like a thousand hands, and she feels herself crushed between them, the weight of a million Earths on all sides, and the world she can see—the living room, the smoky, undulating rift—folds up like a box, and Eleanor becomes nothing at all.

Mea presses herself against the portal.

The darkness looms behind her, a great ocean.
 

She is gone
, Mea says.

Eleanor falls like a tiny ember into that ocean, and they watch her as she is carried far, far away.

For the first time, Mea has a strange feeling.

What is it?
the darkness asks.

I felt—something
.

What did you feel?

Water
, Mea says. She hesitates, then says,
Are we alone?

The darkness does not answer.

Which is an answer all its own.

The first thing she notices is that she is not naked.
 

Her body is wrapped in some sort of animal hide. The clothing is the color of death, a peculiar and lifeless blue, unlike the hide of any animal she has ever seen before. Her feet are wrapped in the same hide, and taut, sinewy cords wind around it, turning it into something like boots.

The second thing she notices is the fire, and the fire shows her everything else.

It flickers in a small, round pit, circled by stones. Its light reveals cold black soil, smoothed of life. A floor. There are bits of furniture—a chair made of cut tree limbs is held together with thin ropes, maybe the same as what binds the hide to her feet.
 

She can dimly make out the walls of a structure around her. They flap and billow softly, and she realizes they’re not solid. They’re hide as well, tanned and tethered to slim poles, and lashed to the ground to keep out the—

Snow.
 

Some of it has crept into the tent structure anyway. She sees it collecting around the base of the animal-skin walls, mixed with dirt, as if it has been shoveled back, or kicked back by someone’s foot.
 

There’s little else in the tent with her. Some rudimentary utensils on a stump beside the fire. A metal cup, some flint.
 

She tries to sit up, but pitches to one side. Her body throbs and aches, as if she has been thrown from a car. She’s colder than she has ever felt.
 

“Hello?” she says to the empty tent, but nobody answers.

The tent walls flap angrily, and snow rushes in beneath one end. It melts quickly, warmed by the fire, and sinks into the dark soil.

She puts her feet on the ground and stands up. Her legs are numb and heavy, and her first step closer to the fire is a bad one, and she falls like a titan, crashing into the tree-branch chair.

When she wakes up she grimaces. Her legs are made of concrete; there is dirt in her mouth. The earth is cold, an ancient cold that swims up from the permafrost and fills her lungs with ice. The fire—so close to her face, she notices, and realizes how close she must have come to burning herself to death—has dwindled, a small orange blanket that chews on ash-crusted wood.

A flap opens in the tent and snow whips in, stinging Eleanor’s skin. She puts an arm over her eyes. The whiteness beyond the tent blinds her.
 

A dark figure stomps its feet, snow flying everywhere, and drops a bundle of cut wood on the ground. Eleanor is afraid, suddenly, and drags herself away from the fire with her feeble arms.
 

The figure stands still, watching her, bundled in heavy furs. The stranger’s face is dark in shadow, the fire too weak to light it.
 

Eleanor’s body feels like lead, and she collapses to the ground after only a few inches.
 

“Leave me alone,” Eleanor whispers, panicked. Her lips are cracked and cold.
 

The figure bends and scoops up a few pieces of wood, and lumbers close to the pit. The stranger brushes back the charred bits of used-up trees, carefully arranges the fresh pieces in the center. Eleanor watches as the person removes one brown, furry glove, then leans close to the tiny flame, cupping a palm around it and softly breathing life into its belly.
 

It takes time, but the fire warms the icy chunks of new wood, and tiny veins of the new stuff flare and smolder and smoke, and then the wood begins to glow orange. Eleanor rolls onto her back and stares up at the ceiling of the tent, and notices for the first time the hole above her. Smoke twists up like licorice and passes through the hole and into the dark, cold world beyond.
 

The stranger walks to Eleanor and goes to one knee. Eleanor is too exhausted and cold and defeated to protest. She looks up and sees that the person’s face is wrapped in dark cloth. The stranger peels it back, and Eleanor wishes she could fall again, fall straight through the Earth and come out again someplace else. She is afraid of her mother’s dream world, and what her mother might do to her in it.
 

She feels helpless, paralyzed.

Then the mask falls away, and her father smiles down at her.
 

Eleanor begins to cry, and her father lifts her into his arms. She buries her face in the wet fur of his strange cloak, grateful that he exists in her mother’s dreams. Maybe her father can help her save her mother. Maybe she won’t have to do this alone.

His voice is crisp and joyful in her ear.
 

“My Esmerelda,” he whispers. “You’ve come back to me.”

And Eleanor realizes that this isn’t her mother’s dream at all.

Paul is hunched over the fire when Eleanor wakes many hours later. She watches him from a pallet of animal skins and furs. He stirs something in a pot that hangs from a tripod over the flames. She sniffs the air, and he hears her, and turns.
 

“Awake,” he says.
 

She nods.

“I’ve made something for you,” he says, nodding at the pot.
 

She nods again. “Okay.”

He turns back to it, dips a ladle into the mix, and lifts it to his lips and slurps loudly.
 

“Not ready yet,” he apologizes.

“Okay.”

She remains beneath the heavy furs and flexes her toes. Unlike the day before, she can feel them, though they burn and ache. She can feel the muscles in her calves tense, too. A good sign, she thinks.
 

“Dad,” she says. “What happened to my legs?”

He settles back into the wooden chair and surprises her by lighting a long, slim pipe. Her father has never smoked.
 

“Found you,” he says.
 

“Found me?”

“In the crick,” he answers.
 

“I don’t remember,” Eleanor says.