Eleanor (17 page)

The shadow understands why it did not find the intruder sooner. It is only by accident that it stumbles across the intruder now. The shadow has taken shelter beneath a redwood to rest, tired from its dogged search. The woods around it are quiet except for the
plip
of water falling from the pine needles onto the forest floor. The rain has stopped, for now.

The girl comes out of a hole in the ground some forty yards away. The shadow almost doesn’t see her, but the girl coughs, and though the shadow does not possess ears, it detects the tiny fluttering vibration in the air, and turns and discovers her. The girl is caked with mud and needles and small stones and bits of tree bark. She coughs again and stands upright and stretches uncomfortably, then looks down at herself and begins to scrape the packed mud from her skin.

The keeper rocks in a handmade chair on her porch. Another black cigarette rests between her fingers, lit and burning toward her knuckles. She has been thinking of building a new cabin, not a replacement for this one but a second one, at the northernmost end of the valley, so that she has a place to rest her feet during her long walks. The valley stretches for miles, and she often is too worn out from the journey to make it back to this home.
 

A dash of cigarette ash falls onto her burlap pants and she brushes it away.
 

She can see her shadow approaching across the field, the low afternoon mist parting around it. It moves stealthily, as if it is playing a game with her, but the keeper is never fooled. The shadow moves closer and closer until it slips over the porch and reattaches itself to her feet.
 

“You’re back,” the keeper says. “What did you find?”

Her shadow does not speak, but she can feel its memories pass into her, icy cold. She takes them into herself, absorbing them into her own collection of thoughts. She reviews them quietly, eyes closed, and nods to herself. She sees the gash in the treeline from the shadow’s vantage point, as if a wrecking ball has dropped into the middle of her forest. She sees the lumbering clouds, the rich wet soil. She sees everything that her shadow saw, and—

The shadow found the intruder.
 

The keeper was right.
 

A naked, pale-skinned girl with soaking wet hair—dark brown, or maybe red—stands in the clearing, not far from the ruined trees. She is smeared with clay and mud. Her face and arms are scratched.
 

“There you are,” the keeper says. “You’re only a child. An amateur. What are you doing here?”

The keeper examines the shadow’s memory more closely, settling on the girl’s frightened green eyes.
 

“Where are you from, little girl?” the keeper muses.
 

There is of course no answer.
 

The keeper sighs. “We don’t like interlopers here,” she says. “Do we?”

Beneath the chair, the keeper’s shadow ripples its agreement.
 

“Begone, little thing,” the keeper says. She waves her hand in a slow sideways arc, as if sweeping a table of crumbs. Her hand passes through the air with a crackle, almost as though she has charged the air with electricity. To the south, she can see a dark flash in the forest, like a mirror has been aimed briefly at the cabin and then turned away.
 

The keeper relaxes, then takes a long drag on the black cigarette. The girl will be gone now, ushered out of the valley and back to wherever she has come from.
 

“Well,” she says, exhaling charcoal-colored smoke. “If she comes back, we’ll know. Won’t we?”

She gets to her feet, pulling her shawl tightly around her shoulders, then looks down at her shadow. It follows her every move, firmly reattached to her shoes. She can feel it agree with her silently, mute but not deaf.

“Come along,” she says, and she steps down off the porch and into the tall grass. She turns to the east and picks up her walking stick, and strolls quietly through her meadow.

Mea struggles against the darkness. For the first time that she can remember, she fights against the surge of the river and the memories that it carries. She expects resistance, but the darkness separates, abruptly revealing the membrane again. Beyond the clear boundary she can see the red-haired girl’s bedroom and the hallway outside, and the beginning of the stairs.
 

She doesn’t see the girl.
 

Mea is well versed in patience. She lingers at the membrane, spreading herself out against it, embracing the view as widely as she can. The house is bright and orange. Tiny dust specks float in a shaft of sunlight. Time has passed since the red-haired girl vanished. Mea can see the glint of things in the girl’s bedroom: the plastic shine of the clock radio’s face; the dull golden base of the bedside lamp; the sharper, crisper gleam of glass in a frame. Beneath the glass is a photograph of the red-haired girl, and standing next to the girl is another girl. An identical girl.

Mea leans into the membrane, trying to inspect the photograph more closely, but then she feels a tremor in the gap between her world and the one that belongs to the girl. She looks down and sees the small red orb from before, moving quickly, growing larger, and she realizes that it is the red-haired girl herself, returning from wherever she has been, but she is moving rocket-fast, and that seems like a bad thing. Mea reaches for the girl, and the orb takes the girl’s form again, and suddenly the girl is ejected from that strange
other
realm, and she is moving too fast for Mea to intervene, and Mea watches—and feels something quite like horror, another new sensation for her—as the red-haired girl explodes out of nowhere and flies across her bedroom as if thrown, and crashes into the wall with such force that Mea is afraid the girl will just burst through it, just sail right through the wall and into the air outside.

But the girl hits the wall like a bird hits a window, and falls to the bedroom floor, and is still.

Everything hurts.
 

Everything.

Eleanor opens her eyes reluctantly. The pain lifts her out of sleep, or wherever she has been, and for a long moment she is confused by what she sees. Her vision is weak, splintered with light. Everything is too bright, and she closes her eyes. Her eyelids are bright red from the inside. Even protected, the light makes her eyes ache and her head throb.
 

“Turn off the light,” an unfamiliar voice says, and then Eleanor’s eyelids turn almost black again, and she sighs with relief. She hears a shuffling sound, and then the bed shifts under some weight—
bed?
—and the voice says, “Eleanor. Do you hear me?”

The strange voice frightens her. Her ears are full of sound—a white blur of noise that she doesn’t understand—but that sound is not the trickle of water or the groan of a swaying tree or rain misting light and airy. Therefore she is not in the woods, which is the last thing she remembers—climbing out of a hole, slick with mud, naked, damp dirt in every crevice of her body, in her hair. So where is she?
 

“Ellie,” comes her father’s voice. “Sweetie, can you hear us?”

She opens her mouth to answer him, but her lips are chapped and her mouth is dry.
 

“It’s okay,” says the strange voice again. “Don’t try to talk just yet. Just breathe, okay? Listen to me. In… out. In… out.”

Eleanor focuses on the stranger’s voice and tries to manage her breathing. She takes in a deep breath, and almost coughs it right back out, but she suppresses the instinct and instead lets it out slowly.
 

“Good,” says the stranger. “Now, when you’re ready, try to open your eyes. Slowly, okay? We’re not going anywhere.”

Eleanor lets out another breath, then opens her eyes.
 

“Give them a moment to adjust,” says the stranger, and Eleanor can see her, sort of, a brownish blur in an otherwise blurry room. Her vision very slowly fine-tunes itself, and the stranger comes into muddled focus. She is a tall, slender woman in pastel blue scrubs. She has a paper mask tied over her mouth, but her eyes are dark and kind.
 

“Hi there,” the nurse says, and holds up a finger. “I want you to follow my finger with your eyes, okay? Nothing hard, just want to make sure you’re okay.”

Eleanor nods, and a spike of pain rips through her skull. She gasps and squeezes her eyes shut, and little red-and-gold fireworks dance over her eyelids.

“Careful,” the nurse says. “I want you to stay as still as you can. Try not to move your head right now. Okay? Now open your eyes.”

Eleanor winces, but opens her eyes.
 

The nurse holds up a finger and slowly moves it across Eleanor’s field of vision. Eleanor watches it carefully as it moves left, then right, then left again, but then she is distracted by movement beyond the finger, and she looks toward the foot of the bed again. Her father stands there, wide-eyed and worried, hands clasped to his chest as if in prayer.

“Dad,” she says, and she feels her panic well up inside, and her eyes fill with tears.

“It’s okay, Ellie,” he says. “It’s okay, it’s okay. Just breathe.”

The nurse says, “Ellie, my name is Shelley. Hey, that’s kind of funny, isn’t it? Ellie, Shelley. Ellie, Shelley. Kind of want to say that five times fast, don’t you?”

Eleanor stares at her uncomprehendingly. The nurse’s eyes crinkle in a smile.
 

“Eleanor, you’re in a hospital room right now,” she says. “Do you know how you got here?”

Eleanor shakes her head, frightened, and her tears spill over onto her cheeks. She glances at her father, who appears to be on the verge of tears as well, and has to look away from him.
 

“Ellie,” Shelley says, calmly. “Can you tell me when you were born?”

“D-December,” Eleanor says.
 

“December what? Slow breaths, okay? In… out. In… out.”

Eleanor takes a long, shaky breath.

“Good. Okay. December what?”

“E-Eleventh,” Eleanor says, trying to steady her voice.
 

“Good,” Shelley says brightly. “Very good. Do you remember what year?”

Eleanor closes her eyes, then opens them. “Nineteen seventy-eight,” she says, after a moment.
 

“Very good,” Shelley says. “And who is the man here with me?”

“My d-dad,” Eleanor says, fighting back a sob. “He’s my dad.”

“Good,” Shelley says again. “Now—Eleanor, I have to ask you this, and no matter what you’re feeling, I want you to tell me the absolute truth, okay?”

Eleanor looks at Shelley strangely, then nods.
 

“I want you to remember that this is a safe place, and that nothing bad will happen to you here,” Shelley says. “Do you understand?”

Eleanor nods again. Her father stands at the foot of the bed, and his own tears begin streaming down his face.
 

“Do you know why you’re here?” Shelley asks. “Can you tell me what happened to you?”

Eleanor’s eyes flick in her father’s direction, then to the ceiling, then back to Shelley.