Eleanor (12 page)

When she looks up, it is because she hears voices. They are small and very, very distant, but she can hear people all the same.
 

“Hey!” she shouts.
 

The voices do not seem to have heard her at all.
 

She starts walking again, this time toward the voices, which seem to be to her right, away from the white house. Her feet find a mostly overgrown road, one that hasn’t been used in probably ten or twenty years. Two deep furrows in the ground, set apart at a distance not unlike the distance between a truck’s tires, have sprouted vivid pink and yellow flowers. She bends over and looks at them closely.
 

They look like flowers from Earth.
 

“Definitely not Venus,” she mutters again.
 

Despite herself, she finds herself slowing to a stroll. The sun warms her skin, and she discovers that she likes the sensation of being nearly naked under a thin dress. The breeze that cools her shoulders also flutters the hem of the dress, tickling her pale thighs. She closes her eyes as she walks. Her breath comes and goes in deep, fluid swallows, and her heart rate slows. She enjoys the feeling of the long hair on her neck, a little, but then it reminds her of the accident all over again, of Esmerelda’s hair caught in broken glass, and Eleanor pushes the thought away, unwilling to spoil this strange new experience with the worst of her memories.
 

Her mind drifts to how she arrived here, but the results are inconclusive. She was in the cafeteria, and then she wasn’t. She had told Mrs. McDearmon that she was going to the principal’s office—though that wasn’t her intention at all—and then she had walked through the door while Jack was calling her name, and there had been that strange suffusion of static or magnetism or whatever that was—

And then she had found herself here, in Iowa or something.
 

The voices are louder now, and she can tell that they aren’t directly ahead, but off to the side of the road. The grass is very tall there, and slim white trees form a thatched wall, and she can see no way around them but straight through, so that’s where she goes.

It can hardly be called a forest. A woods? A grove? If the trees were fruit-bearing, she might call it an orchard, but they seem like a smaller cousin of the birch tree, their branches deep green with leaves that haven’t yet begun to turn with the seasons. Which means that here it’s summer, wherever
here
is. The ground is different here, littered with old dry branches like bones, the grass fading, replaced with cool, peaty earth. It’s soft and refreshing beneath her feet, except for when she steps absently on one of the old branches.
 

The voices grow stronger as she makes her way through the grove. The trees become more interesting, distracting her from her quest. She comes upon one that has been carved with a knife, its narrow trunk scarred with words that have healed just past the point of readability. But there are more, she notices; now that she has spied the first carving, they seem to be everywhere. They are clearly the work of children. One reads
boogerman getcha
, and she cannot tell if that is a misspelling, or a sincere threat made by a man constructed of boogers. There are more—
sleep with your eyes open
, reads another;
dont tell your mom im gonna getcha
—and Eleanor is amused by them.
 

Then she comes across one that is fresher, and with a different tone altogether.
 

J loves E 4ever

The tree is too narrow for the words to be wrapped in a heart, so a smaller heart has been carved beneath the words.
 

She stares at it for a moment, and the carving speaks to her, or seems to, but she cannot understand what it might be saying. She touches it with her fingertip. The exposed inner wood is damp and smells of green. Eleanor looks down and sees curls of bark at the bottom of the tree. She bends over and picks them up, feels their softness. The carving is fresh, maybe only a few minutes old.

She turns in a circle, studying her surroundings, but she cannot see anybody else around.
 

Instead, she spies a treehouse, small and well constructed. It rests in the lower branches of a short tree, its doorway reachable from the ground. It is painted yellow, like her unfamiliar sundress, and it has a tiny roof and a tiny window that look like they were borrowed from a real house—wood shingles, blue shutters. Beneath the doorway is a three-step ladder, and Eleanor smiles at this.
 

It’s a treehouse for children.
 

She walks over to it, sidestepping more dead branches, and peeks inside. The wooden floor is dusty, and it appears that no one has been inside for a very long time. A bench has been built from two-by-fours and is attached to one of the walls. Stacked on the bench are books—Hardy Boys mysteries, plastic binders open to reveal transparent pages full of baseball cards, Archie comics. There is a dartboard on one wall, but the treehouse is far too small to enable accurate throws. She can see a cardboard box labeled
Club Secrets
, and she steps up one more rung on the ladder to peer inside it. There’s a plastic spatula, a tin flute, and a baseball.
 

The voices are a bit louder now, and have clearly separated into a boy’s voice and a girl’s voice. Eleanor climbs down the ladder and looks through the trees. She can’t see anybody yet, but the edge of the grove is near. She picks her way through the trees and comes to the edge of the grove and a scruffy wall of azalea bushes. The bushes are pink and flowering, and bees and hummingbirds float around their blooms.
 

Eleanor frowns, and looks for a way through without being stung.
 

She spots a gap between two bushes and heads for it, ducking low to avoid a bulbous bee the size of her big toe. She plunges through the bushes and emerges into a beautiful meadow, surrounded on all sides by the narrow white trees. It is as private a place as one might hope to find in the middle of farm country, Eleanor thinks, and as perfect a place as one might long to ever find anywhere.
 

There is a black pond in the middle of the open space, and even from the edge of the meadow she can see dragonflies flitting over the water and cattails bending inward. Someone has built a small footbridge over the water, arching from one side to the other. There’s an umbrella post in the center of the bridge, and a huge yellow parasol stands in it, casting a wide shadow over the water.
 

Beyond the pond she can see short grass, well cared for, and benches, and a makeshift baseball diamond with lovely white chalk lines and a bright, clean home plate. She hears the voices, closer now, and suddenly two children burst out of a thatch of shrubs on the first base line, and Eleanor steps back into the azaleas without thinking. She stands there, bees buzzing around her, and watches.
 

They are young—no more than eight, and perhaps even younger. The boy is rambunctious and silly, and has a full head of unruly brown hair. He is shirtless and tanned, and while not yet gangly, full of that promise. He will be tall and lanky by thirteen, and grow into his frame by seventeen, and in his twenties he will be well-built and make men in their forties wish they still had his metabolism.
 

The girl twirls along the line between the pitcher’s mound and second base, her red braids spinning like propellers, and—
Jesus
, Eleanor thinks.
The girl is me.

Which very obviously makes the boy Jack.

She stares at the children from the privacy of the bushes. Her legs feel weak, but if she sits down she won’t be able to see the children clearly, and she is captivated and horrified by their very existence. She can feel her stomach turn, and a cool sweat breaks out on her arms and neck, and she cannot put into words how she feels.
 

Except she thinks this might be Venus after all.
 

The boy—Jack—explodes into motion, running the bases once, then twice, then making it a third time around second base before taking a spill and sending up a cloud of red-brown dust. He laughs and laughs, and the little red-haired girl—Eleanor—runs to him and slides to her knees. Even from the edge of the meadow Eleanor can see the grass stains that appear on her young doppelganger’s dress.
 

The children laugh. Eleanor cannot hear their words, but she recognizes the shout of excitement from Jack, and the squeal from little Eleanor, and then the two of them are running in crazy loops around the field, Jack trying to tag Eleanor, Eleanor barely escaping. They collapse into the grass and pull up big handfuls of it, and Jack finds a honeysuckle bush, and they pop the blossoms off and suck at them.
 

Eleanor walks out into the field. She cannot help herself. She is entranced—fearful, but compelled to see her younger self up close, to inspect her like a captured moth. She is quiet, afraid she might startle the children, but they don’t seem to notice her at all. She watches them drop the honeysuckle blossoms and practice somersaults and handstands in the grass, their clothes growing progressively more and more stained.
 

“Hello,” she says when she reaches the edge of the baseball diamond.

The children do not acknowledge her, and for the first time, Eleanor wonders if they can see her at all. So she walks into the field, inserting herself into the middle of their gymnastics routines, and little Jack tumbles right past Eleanor’s feet without spying her.
 

“Hello,” she says, looking down at him.

He doesn’t answer, and Eleanor decides that this is a dream. Then she laughs at herself softly for not realizing that sooner. One doesn’t simply bump into one’s child doppelgänger without some serious dream action taking place.
 

She pauses. What does that mean for her body back in the cafeteria? Did she fall asleep mid-step? Face-plant onto the tile floor?
 

She certainly hopes not. She doesn’t want to wake up in the hospital or in the nurse’s office with a broken nose.
 

Eleanor sinks to the ground and watches the children play. She remembers days something like this. She and Esmerelda and their mother would meet Jack and his mother at Franklin Park, and while the children would scamper over playground equipment and dig in the sandboxes, their mothers would chat happily over a thermos of coffee.
 

She looks around now, but though there are benches, there are no mothers, no coffee, no playground equipment.
 

Above her, the sun has moved on, and the rich blue sky has become a watery pink. Eleanor cannot see as clearly, and squints at the children as they run to a duffel bag on the ground. Little Jack comes out of the bag with a handful of slim gray sticks, and Eleanor wonders what they might be. Jack produces a lighter—Eleanor looks around, wondering why she doesn’t see any adult supervision, and then remembers for the hundredth time that this is a dream, and relaxes her guard—and touches it to one of the sticks. The tiny stem bursts into staticky orange light, and Jack hands the sparkler to little Eleanor.

They dance around the meadow, painting elegant curls and spirals in the dusk with their sparklers, and Eleanor smiles to herself. There was a time, in the years before the accident, when she and her sister and their parents would spend the evening in the yard, watching the sun fall behind Anchor Bend and into the sea, sometimes landing right behind Huffnagle Island, silhouetting its outcropping of rock as it fell. They would wait for the fireflies to come out, then the girls would run around the yard with bottles, trying to capture the insects before bedtime was declared.
 

She sighs, calmed by the memory.
 

In the falling dark, the sparklers finally run out of light, and Eleanor watches as her tiny self takes Jack’s hand, and the two children vanish through the bushes from which they had emerged hours and hours ago.