Eleanor (7 page)

She throws an arm out instinctively, pinning Eleanor to her seat. In the back of the car, Esmerelda makes a sound like a quiet owl, a long, low whistle.
 

Agnes has enough time to see the old woman in the Volvo notice what’s happening beside her. The old woman’s eyes widen, and Agnes has enough time to think, rather selfishly, that this should be happening to the Volvo, not the Subaru, to the old woman who has lived a thousand years, not to this young family of hers.
 

And then, like a break in a hurricane, everything is okay.
 

The Subaru’s tires catch gravel, and that’s enough to right the skid. The car grips the road again, lurching sideways just a bit, correcting its misdirected slide. If not for that almost balletic turn, they might have rear-ended the car ahead—a pickup with one of those gaudy roll bars in the bed and big spotlights mounted at the corners—but instead the Subaru skids to a stop, its nose tucking tightly, almost perfectly, into the narrow space between the truck’s bed and the concrete highway divider.

“Shit,” Eleanor says, her voice tiny and mouselike.

Agnes turns to look at her daughter, perhaps to correct her, but there’s no time. She lowers her arm, releasing Eleanor. Agnes can feel her heart threatening to punch right through her chest, can taste again the bitter smart of adrenaline on her tongue. She says, “Are you okay?” and Eleanor nods slowly, and Agnes turns to the back seat to ask Esmerelda the same question, and the words catch in her throat, because she sees the moving van and there’s not even time to say, “No,” not even time for Esmerelda to turn and see it coming, there is only time for Agnes to
want
to do those things, and then it happens, and it cannot be undone.

Eleanor sees the moving van reflected in the side mirror. It surges out of the mist like a breaching whale, thin foggy tendrils curling quickly away from the hulking machine. Its windshield is a dusty gray color, and the Subaru is a dark reflection in the glass, and in that dark space Eleanor can almost see the man inside the U-Haul. This moment feels very slow to her, but it happens faster than Eleanor can blink.

The van hits the Subaru with terrific force, and the sound of exploding glass fills the car. The station wagon lunges forward against its will, pistoning deeper into the tapering space between the pickup truck and the concrete highway divider, and then, with nowhere left to go, the transferred momentum of the collision lifts the Subaru’s backside into the air. The moving van, moving too fast to stop, plows beneath the car, and its own windshield spiderwebs.

Eleanor is pitched forward as if she weighs nothing at all, and the dashboard of the Subaru rises up to meet her, and then she is asleep, tossed into a sea of darkness that closes over her in an instant.

It happens so quickly, and is over so abruptly, that for a moment traffic soldiers on, pouring down the steep hill, the other drivers only dimly aware that something has gone wrong.

The pickup driver is the first to respond. His door barely opens at all. The Subaru’s crushed front end is only a few inches away, tilted down at the ground. The driver is too large to squeeze through the space. He crawls over the stick shift and his briefcase and climbs out of his truck through the passenger door and tumbles onto the asphalt. The impact of the Subaru has pushed the truck forward and sideways, and its damaged bed now hangs into traffic like a broken limb.
 

Agnes is dimly aware of these things, and can see the man heaving himself into the bed of his pickup. He’s dressed like an engineer, in khakis and a short-sleeved white shirt buttoned to the throat, but he becomes a gorilla. He steps up onto the rim of the pickup’s bed, then hops onto the hood of the Subaru. The hood is mangled and covered in broken glass and bits of concrete, but the man hurries across it and drops into the tight gap between the station wagon and the broken highway divider, and then he is there at Agnes’s window.

The glass is splintered but intact, and Agnes wants to understand why, but then the man is shouting at her. She can’t understand him—the world sounds muffled and distant to her—and then he repeats himself loudly, waving his hand, and she sees that he’s trying to tell her to lean back. He scuffles with the door, but it isn’t opening, and he acts without thinking, caught up in the rush of what has just happened, and he puts his elbow through the window. It doesn’t shatter, just sort of buckles, so he does it again, then again, and Agnes flinches with every impact. The man seems unaware that he has cut himself—his forearm is smeared with blood now—and then the glass creaks and comes apart.
 

“Cover your face,” he says from his faraway place, and Agnes’s hands feel as if they weigh hundreds of pounds, but she puts them over her face. She can hear the man striking the glass out of the door frame, and then he says, “Okay, are you all right? Lady?” and Agnes takes her hands down to see that his face is
right there
, that he’s leaning into the car.
 

She shakes her head, disoriented, and then the man’s eyes focus past her and he says, “Oh, Jesus,” and Agnes is confused, but then she follows the man’s gaze and sees Eleanor there, leaning forward, supported by a drawn-tight seatbelt. Eleanor’s bright red hair has fallen over her face, and her head dangles forward, and Agnes feels something sharp chew its way through her belly and right into her heart.
 

“Little girl!” the driver says, reaching through the window and toward Eleanor. He can’t quite reach her—his fingers stop short of her shoulder—and he waves them comically in the air. “Can you hear me? Are you okay?”

A rush of heat subsumes Agnes, and she breaks out in a sweat. She grabs Eleanor’s hand, roughly.
 

“Eleanor, Eleanor,” she says, shaking her daughter’s arm like a rubber band.

“Careful, lady,” the driver says, still wearing his look of horror. “Careful, she could be—”

“Eleanor!” Agnes shouts. She slaps the back of her daughter’s hand, and then bursts into tears when Eleanor stirs.
 

Eleanor lifts her head and her hair falls away from her face, and it’s immediately obvious that her nose is broken. Her lips and chin are red with blood, and her eyes are foggy, but she’s alive.
 

“Ellie,” Agnes says, her voice choked.

Eleanor just blinks at her, then leans forward again and vomits on the floor. When she’s finished, she coughs and heaves, and then she closes her eyes and relaxes against the seat belt again.

“Ezzz,” Eleanor croaks.
 

“Eleanor, sweetie,” Agnes pleads, squeezing her daughter’s hand. “Come on, Ellie. Wake up. Wake up, Ellie.”

“We have to get an ambulance,” the pickup driver says. He extricates himself from the Subaru’s window and looks around wildly. The driver of the U-Haul hasn’t emerged, so there’s no telling if he’s alive or even okay. The rear end of the Subaru obscures the pickup driver’s view. A woman peeks around the back corner of the moving van then, and the pickup driver almost jumps in place. He waves his hand next to his ear like a telephone and shouts, “We need an ambulance, call an ambulance!”

Agnes turns and looks at the pickup driver and tries to ask him how anybody will call for an ambulance, but the words come out funny, and she doesn’t know what she has actually asked him.

“There’s a call box just up the hill,” he says.

So she must have made sense.
 

The driver leans back into the car and looks closely at Eleanor, who appears to be unconscious again. “She okay?” he asks, and Agnes turns to look at Eleanor, then back at the driver.
 

“I’m unsure,” she says, the first clear words she’s spoken since the collision. They feel strange in her mouth, oddly formal.
 

“A woman went back to call,” the man says, but then he trails off, distracted again.
 

It’s getting difficult to hold herself upright. Gravity pulls at her, trying to draw her forward, toward the steering wheel. Agnes can’t figure out why. In the rearview mirror, she sees a tilted world—the rear window, glass cracked and buckled inward, the top of the moving van, dense fog beyond, the ghostly shapes of trees along the edge of the highway.
 

“Lady,” the pickup driver says, his voice wary.

Agnes turns in her seat and looks toward the rear window. She doesn’t understand the angle of things. “Tilted?” she asks. “Are we tilted?”

“Lady,” the driver says again.

Agnes turns to the driver and sees him staring at the windshield, and so she looks at the windshield, too, and sees the gaping hole there, the broken safety glass scattered across the dashboard and the hood beyond, and then something moves and she sees a matted hank of red hair snagged in the broken glass, a few errant strands fluttering wet and heavy in the breeze. Blood clogs the hair like paint in the bristles of a brush, is streaked across the hood of the car, thinning in the rain.

She stares at this for a long time, and then looks at Eleanor, who is stirring again, coughing, and then she looks at the driver, who says, “Lady, was there someone else—” and Agnes turns and looks at the empty back seat of the Subaru and feels that chewing sensation inside her turn ravenous, chasing the terrible wail out of her mouth and into the air where it hangs and haunts her dreams forever.

Captain Mark finally and somewhat reluctantly pushes back from the bar. He’s flying deadhead back to Boston, he explains, and doesn’t have the luxury of an unexpected overnight stay in Portland, and so must get back into the sky. He shakes Paul’s hand, then warmly says, “I’m sure everything will be just fine. Things usually are.”

Paul nods and smiles and raises his glass in a small gesture of thanks, but when Captain Mark disappears around the corner, he turns back to his glass and downs the last bit of warmed-over beer and exhales in a rush. He climbs down from the stool, perfectly steady, and grabs his bag.
 

“Thanks,” the airport bartender says, cheerless in his green vest and golden bow tie.
 

Paul nods and falls into the throng of arriving passengers on the concourse. By now Agnes and the girls are more than an hour late. He’s called the house and gotten the machine—“Hey, it’s the Witts, leave us a message,” followed by the girls singing in unison, “So we can delete it!”—and his several trips to the window looking out upon the arrivals ramp have been fruitless. No sign of the car, no sign of the girls. No Agnes.
 

He was angry at first. He’s tired, it’s been a long trip. There’s a two-hour drive ahead. All he wants to do is fall asleep early in the bed he and Agnes share, then maybe wake up in the middle of the night, when everyone else is asleep, and work a little on his latest model, or maybe nudge Agnes into a bit of sleepy sex.
 

But he isn’t angry anymore. He’s worried, and thinking about the hours ahead. They won’t involve retiring early, or making love to his wife, or working in the attic. The world has tilted underneath him. Even if everything is fine—even if it
is
just traffic—he’s too unnerved by his worries to even think of relaxing.