Eleanor (18 page)

“No,” she says, and she begins to shake her head from side to side, but the fresh heat of pain she felt earlier lingers at the corners of her consciousness, threatening to return.
 

Shelley looks at Paul, then back at Eleanor. “Okay. It’s okay. We’re going to keep you here for a little while, okay? Just to make sure you’re doing okay, and to give you a little space to maybe remember some things. Is that okay?”

Eleanor nods.
 

Shelley steps back. “Okay. Your father’s here now. I’m going to be right outside. If there’s anything you need, or you’re in pain, or you remember something and just need to talk, I want you to press the button on that little remote control next to you. See it?”

Eleanor glances down and sees a beige-colored box with a blue button on it, an attached cable running off the bed and out of sight. She nods again.

“Okay. You’re going to feel pretty tired here in a few minutes,” Shelley adds. “Don’t fight that. Sleep as much as you can. Your body is still trying to recover from—from things.”

Shelley leaves the room, and Paul comes to Eleanor’s bedside, and Eleanor looks up at her father, keeping her neck as rigid as she can, and she sees his tears, and she begins to cry again.

Paul is not by Eleanor’s bed when she wakes. The room is dim, and she realizes that it is very early in the morning. A window opposite her bed is pink with the sunrise, made gauzy by thin linen curtains pulled mostly shut. She flicks her eyes this way and that, remembering the stark pain that chewed at her skull when she moved her head, and takes in the details of her room. There isn’t much to observe. She’s in a hospital room. There’s an empty second bed to her left, a yellow hard plastic chair to her right. A framed piece of art, dusky pink flowers in a white vase, hangs over the chair.
 

Eleanor hears the muffled sound of a toilet flushing, then the hiss of running water. The door in the corner opens and her father steps out of a small bathroom and sees that Eleanor is awake.

“Private bathroom,” he says, gesturing at it with his thumb. “Nice digs you’ve got here, Ellie.”

But his smile is weak. She sees his worry printed on his face.
 

“What happened?” she asks.

Paul sighs and sits down in the yellow chair, then shrugs. “I’m really not sure,” he says. “Your mother is the one who found you.”

“Mom?” Eleanor asks, dubiously. She cannot imagine her mother getting out of the blue chair for any reason at all.
 

“She said she heard a loud noise and went upstairs,” Paul says. “She found you on the floor of your bedroom, just lying there. She said the wall was—she said it looked like it had been punched in.”

Eleanor can hardly process this detail. “You and Mom—talked?”

Paul nods, then leans forward. “Ellie, do you know what today is?”

She thinks about this. “Yesterday was Monday,” she says. “So today is Tuesday. It’s the last week of school.”

Paul’s lip trembles. She almost doesn’t notice.
 

“What?” she asks slowly.
 

“It’s Saturday,” Paul says.
 

Eleanor blinks. Her father holds her gaze, but she looks away, confused.
 

“You missed the last week of school,” he says, taking her hand in his. “Ellie, we didn’t know where you were.”

Eleanor frowns. “That’s not right,” she says. “That isn’t possible. It’s Tuesday.”

“Jack is the one who noticed,” Paul says. “He was worried when you didn’t answer the door on Tuesday morning for school. He rode his bicycle over to my apartment, and I called your mother.”

“And she
answered?
” Eleanor asks. “She doesn’t even hear the phone.”

“She heard it, and I asked her to check on you, and she said that you weren’t in your room.”

Eleanor can feel her hand shaking, just a little. Her father squeezes it harder.
 

“Ellie,” he says, softly. “She said your clothes were just—they were just in a pile upstairs. I came over and I looked through the whole house with your mother, and you weren’t there. We were so scared—”

“I don’t believe that,” Eleanor says. “I don’t believe she was scared.”

“She was terrified,” he says. “Your mother was terrified. She kept talking about your grandmother.”

Eleanor turns her head at this, and grunts at the burst of pain in her neck. “Grandma Eleanor? She never talks about her.”

“I’ve told you the story,” Paul says.
 

“She disappeared, right. I know,” Eleanor says. “But why—”

“Your mother was afraid that you had—had gone away, too,” Paul says. “You know she’s always felt like it was her fault. I think—I think maybe she felt guilty. For—well, you know. Maybe she had a moment of clarity.” He takes a long breath and Eleanor can hear it rattle in his lungs. “I think she was worried that she had put too much on you, and you’d run away, too.”

“But—Grandma Eleanor didn’t run away,” Eleanor says. “ She—she committed—I would never even think about that.”

“I know,” Paul says. “And, technically, I don’t think anybody knows if she… killed herself. Someone saw her swim out to sea, and nobody saw her come back. That’s not really the same thing.”

Eleanor levels her eyes at her father. “Dad,” she says. “That doesn’t happen for real. She would have drowned.”

“Probably true,” he says. “But you never know.”

Eleanor doesn’t argue with him. She knows the story of her grandmother’s disappearance because her Grandpa Hob often told it during his later years, his voice thick with sadness and regret as he talked about her and the child that would have been named Patrick, or Patricia. She knows that Grandma Eleanor had been pregnant, and that her own mother had been younger than the twins were when Esmerelda died, and she knows that Grandpa Hob blamed himself, and that her mother blames herself. Nearly thirty years after her grandmother’s suicide, the consequences of her final swim still reverberate through everyone’s lives.
 

“Ellie,” her father says, softly. “Where were you all week?”
 

She doesn’t know what her father is talking about—there’s no way that she’s been away for most of a week. But she sees the pain on his face, and realizes the worry that he’s been carrying on his shoulders, and she aches, knowing she is the reason for this. Since Esmerelda’s death, Eleanor has been careful to tread lightly through her parents’ lives. The last thing she ever wanted was to give them a reason to fear for her. It hasn’t changed things very much, though. Her father left her mother after a few terrible, grief-stricken months. Eleanor remembers the fights, the awful words that her father said to her mother—
It’s your fault she’s dead—
and she remembers her mother’s horrible words to Eleanor herself:
Why were you the one who lived?
Her parents took their grief out on each other, and on Eleanor herself, in a way.
 

Esmerelda’s death split their family as finely as an atom, and the resulting detonation blinded them all.

When Eleanor wakes again, her father is asleep in the yellow chair. He has scooted it up against the wall. His shoes are beside the chair, his socks stuffed inside. He looks uncomfortable, his neck turned at an angle and his chin resting on his shoulder. It’s late afternoon, and the sun is on its way down again, bathing the room in gold, and it occurs to Eleanor that several days of her life have disappeared. Four sunrises and sunsets, at least. This thought tumbles around in her mind, and then it lodges in her throat, and she feels a sense of regret—as though something has been taken from her, and her body wants to mourn that loss.
 

She concentrates instead on Monday, remembering the things that she doesn’t want to tell her father or Shelley the nurse about. She’s afraid that saying the words out loud will somehow make her worst fears real—that she has lost some piece of her mind somehow. She has never heard of children vanishing through doorways that make their hair stand on end and suck at them like an undertow. The very idea reminds her of something from one of Esmerelda’s science fiction novels.
 

But she believes that it was real.
 

She has stepped foot on strange earth, has buried her body in the mud, has felt cold and heat.
 

When she found herself in the third-story bathroom at school, she was wearing the yellow sundress from Iowa. Her hair was long. Whatever has happened to her is
real
. She has brought pieces of these—whatever they are—daydreams? nightmares?—back with her.
 

Which means that her mother probably discovered her naked and streaked with mud on her bedroom floor.

She longs for Esmerelda’s company. She needs someone to talk to who won’t think she’s insane. She wishes her mother were—no. Her mother was never that sort of mother. There was only Esmerelda, who would slip out of her own bed and climb into Eleanor’s and whisper, “Backs,” which was Eleanor’s cue to turn over. Esme would turn the opposite way, and the twins would scoot together until their backs touched. Eleanor would say, “What’s wrong?” and Esmerelda, facing into the dark but warmed by her sister, would say, “I broke the lamp in the attic,” and then Eleanor would confess something.
 

She cannot remember how old they were, but one night Eleanor climbed into Esme’s bed. “Backs,” she whispered, and then, when she felt the heat of her sister’s body, Eleanor said, “I found a picture of Grandma Eleanor.”
 

“Where?” Esmerelda asked.
 

“A box in the garage,” Eleanor answered. “There were a lot of things in there. Grandpa’s stuff.”
 

“What was she like? Was she beautiful?”

“I guess,” Eleanor confessed. “She didn’t look like Mom. Not much.”

“I bet she was beautiful in person.”

“Why doesn’t Mom ever talk about her?”

The conversation had ended there—maybe the bedroom door had opened. Eleanor couldn’t remember why.

More than anything, she wishes now she could snuggle up to her sister.
 

“Backs,” she whispers, alone in her hospital bed.
 

But Esmerelda is dead, and so there is really only Jack, and Jack wouldn’t understand.
 

Jack. Eleanor feels a pang in her chest. He must be worried sick about her. She’ll ask her father when he wakes if he’ll call Jack and tell him that she’s okay. But that’s not really true. She isn’t okay. She hasn’t asked her father about the pain in her neck, but she knows that Shelley the nurse will probably tell her about it sooner or later. Eleanor can’t see any casts on her arms or legs, but her upper body feels as if it has been squeezed in a vise. She simply
aches
.

She thinks again about the strange sensation that she felt at the door, and decides to accept it. What’s the most outlandish possibility she can dream up? Maybe she’s built up static electricity somehow, and the doors have zapped her. But her bedroom door was open and made of wood, so that seems unlikely. Her mind turns over ridiculous scenarios, but it stops on one of them, and Eleanor thinks about it for a long time, for hours while her father sleeps, and she cannot find a reason to discard this hypothesis.
 

Twice in the recent past, Eleanor has walked through a doorway that leads to somewhere visible, and she has instead found herself in an unfamiliar place. If she grants the premise that something unnatural—that something
supernatural
—is happening to her, then it makes sense: for reasons she cannot understand, doors are turning into portals to other
somewheres
.

Somewhere over the rainbow
, she thinks.
Through the looking glass. Down the rabbit hole. Into the wardrobe.

“Nonsense,” she mumbles to herself.
 

Sleep overtakes her soon after. The sun falls out of sight and the hospital room sinks into shadow, and as Eleanor drifts into the dark, she dreams of other worlds and magical doorways and fairy tales.