Eleanor (48 page)

“No,” Eleanor says. “They are very happy there. But we could go to them.”

Her father looks around. “This is home.”

“No. Home is you and me.”

“We don’t need them.”

Eleanor sighs. “I want to be with them. Don’t you want me to be happy?”

Her father looks pained. “Yes. But—”

She waits, but he doesn’t finish.
 

“Think about it,” she says. “That’s all.”

He rolls onto his back wordlessly, and Eleanor goes to sleep.

Her father’s bedroll is gone when she wakes up. The grass, matted flat beneath him during the night, is already beginning to stand up again. She sits up and looks around and calls his name, but he doesn’t answer.
 

She sits where she is for hours. There is nowhere for her to go. She thinks that she could walk to the horizon in any direction, and then the world might simply fall away into nothingness, or disintegrate, or slip into fog. What would have happened if she and her father had begun walking toward Anchor Bend? It’s his world. Would it have borders for him? Would his sleeping brain fill in the blanks? Would it even matter in which direction they walked?

He comes over the hill when the sun is high above.
 

“We go,” he says.
 

He has fashioned a tall pack from animal hide, and filled it with things they will need. Bladders of water hang from his hips. The metal cook pot dangles from a looped string, bouncing against the pack as he walks.
 

Eleanor sits up. “Anchor Bend?”

“What my Esmerelda asks, my Esmerelda shall have,” he answers.

He begins to walk, and Eleanor follows.

They walk for miles and miles, and the horizon only recedes. The world does not crumble into the void, as Eleanor had feared it might. She sees no steaming craters, no oceans of dark matter. There are only more green hills, more spreading forests, more branching rivers and clouds and lush mountains. There are animals, too. Though most of her father’s possessions seem to have been made from the husks of dead creatures, Eleanor had, before now, seen none herself. But now there are flocks of great-winged birds, with wingspans dozens of feet long, rising from the treetops as she and her father pass by. As they crest a field speckled with wildflowers, Eleanor can see a herd of something—elk? buffalo? she can’t tell—lazily milling about, the big dark shadows of idle clouds drifting over them.

She and her father do not talk much. He seems content with this, as if it hasn’t occurred to him to ask why she went away, or why she came back. As they walk, Eleanor glances at him surreptitiously, his face golden in the sun, his hair turned the color of pale yellow silk by the light. He stares confidently and happily ahead, often closing his eyes and turning his head toward the warmth above. He looks younger, and Eleanor realizes that he
is
younger—the nicks on his face have disappeared, his beard has faded, his skin has flushed with color. The crow’s-feet around his eyes have softened, and then a few hours later, they are gone.
 

Before long he looks the way she remembers him from her childhood.
 

Specifically, he looks the way he did in the months before Esmerelda died.

“Dad,” Eleanor says, wanting to call his attention to the change that has overtaken him. But when he looks down at her, so young and alive, not much more than a kid himself, her breath is caught, and she can’t say a thing.

He just smiles, and they continue walking.
 

“Look,” he says, as they emerge from a grove of tall oak trees. Before them is a new forest, one made of sunflowers that have grown impossibly tall, that have flushed with colors other than gold. There are rose-colored sunflowers, there are rich plum hues in others.
 

Eleanor has no words.
 

Her father’s dreamscape is a beautiful fantasyland.

They sleep for many nights beneath a perfect hooked moon, listening to the calls of nightbirds and the symphonies of crickets and frogs. They sleep at the bottom of a small mountain one night, and in the morning they climb it, her father’s hands looped in the straps of his animal-hide pack, Eleanor walking with a sturdy stick that she found on a leafy path. The mountain is soft beneath her feet, the ground spongy and inviting like spring tundra. They climb for hours and hours, and when they reach the top, a flat shelf of rock, they sit and eat bits of dried meat that her father has carried along.
 

Far below them a valley spreads wide like a bowl. It is carpeted with tall, waving grasses, and a stream winds through it like a shoelace.
 

Eleanor feels a tingle at the base of her neck.

“It’s beautiful,” her father says, happily munching on a handful of nuts.
 

But Eleanor is not so sure. He’s right, of course, and the valley is quite stunning to look at, but Eleanor feels as if she’s looking backward in time. The view below chews at her. She knows this place, but she doesn’t know why.

“That’s quite nice,” her father says, pointing.

Far away—miles, perhaps—there is a structure in the middle of the valley. She recognizes it, too. It’s a cabin, one that her father built long ago in his workshop in the attic. If they walk far enough, Eleanor thinks, maybe they will stumble upon the other houses that her father created. Maybe one of them will have a broken mailbox.

But this cabin worries her. It is too perfect, too lovely.
 

A tuft of clouds passes overhead, throwing tiny, pale shadows onto the meadows below, and Eleanor jerks. Her mind fills with images of the ash forest—that poisonous, tumultuous place she visited before, that dark and otherworldly place. She stares down at the valley, and the sense of something looming in the paradise below only grows.
 

She turns to her father, and she knows what she has to do.

“Anchor Bend is not far away,” she tells him. She points at the far rim of the valley, where the grasses give way to dense forests and march up into the mountains again. “Over there, past those mountains.”

“We should go!” he chirps, gathering the remnants of his lunch.

But Eleanor puts her hand on his and shakes her head.
 

“They’re very shy,” she says, hoping he won’t press her. “I think I should go and tell them we’re coming, so that they have time to prepare for us. It would be the polite thing to do.”

He considers this, and then acquiesces. “I’ll sleep here,” he says, patting the rock, then sweeps his hand across the panorama below. “I’ll wake to this.”

She tells him she will return in a few days, and they’ll go to Anchor Bend then, together. He offers his pack, but she doesn’t want the weight. He gives her a folded package and tells her to eat, and to keep up her strength, and then Eleanor kisses his youthful cheek, and she sets off down the mountainside alone.
 

He does not tell her to take care, for what harm can come to her in this perfect world he has created?
 

Eleanor sidesteps down the mountain, her feeling of dread growing, and when she finally comes to the trees and steps into their thicket of shade and rich green smells, she falls through the world and disappears.

The darkness seems to swirl around Mea.
 

Look
, it says.

Mea sees the tiny, sparking flame growing larger in the distance.
 

The child returns
, the darkness says.
 

Mea says nothing.

Eleanor wakes up on the floor of the garage. Her arm is stained black from the old oil spot. She is naked. Sun shines through the dirty windows in the garage door. She gets up and pads across the concrete to the large door, and stands on her toes and peeks outside. Her father’s car is not in the driveway. It’s late morning, as best she can tell. She watches a mother walk by, holding a toddler with one hand, a collie’s leash with the other.
 

Her father must be at work.
 

She is as quiet as can be when she slips into the house. For a long time she stands in the hall, listening—for the sound of her mother moving about, for anything unexpected. But the house is silent.
 

A terrible thought occurs to her—what if her latest vacation from reality has lasted for years yet again? What if she has lost the opportunity to save her mother? What if the house is this quiet because Agnes has already died of her cancer?
 

She goes to the downstairs bathroom and turns on the light. There are fancy soaps in a dish, a bit dusty from disuse. A towel hangs on a bar. She looks at herself in the mirror, and recognizes the shape of her face and body. If she has aged, it cannot be by more than a few days, maybe a few weeks.
 

Through the kitchen and dining room and into the living room, where her father had been asleep on the couch during her home invasion. The curtains are drawn, the room tidy. A pair of glasses rests on the side table, and she picks them up. They’re reading glasses, masculine in form. She feels an ache inside—her father has aged since her last disappearance. She wonders how he is coping now, a grieving father caring for a dying woman who despises him.