Eleanor (57 page)

Something grips Agnes’s hand in the dark depths. Her eyes fly open, salt stabbing them deeply, and she can see a shadow in the water before her. It comes closer, pushing right up to her face, and in the dimness beneath the sea she recognizes the other woman’s face.
 

Eleanor’s face.
 

Her mother’s face.
 

If the sea that swallowed them both did not exist, Agnes would weep and invent it.
 

Her mother takes both of her hands and squeezes them tightly. Her eyes are bright in the dark. Her mouth opens, and she says something, her voice muffled by the sea.

But Agnes recognizes the words.
 

It’s all just water.

Then Eleanor pulls Agnes close and presses her lips to her ear.

“I made a mistake,” she whispers fiercely. “For a thousand years I’ve lived with it.
I never should have left you.”

Agnes chokes back a small cry. “Mom,” she manages.

“Don’t be afraid,” Eleanor says. She wraps her arms around Agnes. “Don’t be afraid. I love you.
I love you
.”

And together they sink, daughter and mother, clutching each other tightly, into the deep, silent, dark sea.

The end of the world sounds like water.

Eleanor and Esmerelda stop trudging through the sea. The horizon, so far away for so long, has drawn closer.
 

Is that the edge of the world?
 

Eleanor cranes her enormous neck. The ocean spills over the edge of her mother’s dream world. There is only darkness beyond, starless and full.
 

I think it’s more than that
, Eleanor says.
Look
.

Together the twins watch as the darkness presses forward, chewing at the boundaries of the world. The sea churns and boils. They turn and look around them, and see the darkness marching inward from all directions. Far behind them, the beach of Anchor Bend crumples in gouts of sand and rock and spray.
 

It’s happening,
Esmerelda says.
The reset.
 

Eleanor searches for Agnes and her grandmother, but does not see them.
 

They’re gone
, she says.
Where did they go?

Esmerelda looks at her sister.
Swimming. Together.
 

It dawns on Eleanor, then. She understands.

Swimming
, she says.
This feels… right. Doesn’t it?

Esmerelda nods her dented head and says nothing.

They watch the dark walls of nothing as they squeeze like a hand around the sea. Geysers of water shoot into the sky, punching through the dark clouds, and for a faint moment, the absent sun can be seen once more, gray and ghostlike, before the darkness collides with it from above.
 

What will happen?
Eleanor asks.
 

I don’t know.

Will we wake up?

I don’t know. Maybe.
 

When will it be? Will we remember?
 

Esmerelda just looks at Eleanor.
I missed you
, she says.

Eleanor stretches her neck out, winding it around Esmerelda’s. She presses her scaly head against her sister’s.

I missed you forever
, Eleanor says.
 

The sound of the collapsing world fills their ears, thrums in their chests and hearts and necks. It is deafening. Eleanor feels as if her heart will explode from the drumbeat. The sea around her warms, and she closes her eyes and imagines the inflatable pool. Two giant monsters, stomping about.
 

I love you, Esmerelda
, she says suddenly.
 

Esmerelda’s dark, reptilian eyes shine.
 

Will it hurt?
Eleanor asks.
 

I don’t know. Maybe.
 

I don’t care if it does,
Eleanor says.
 

Neither do I.

The darkness falls over them like a blanket, conjuring memories of the forts the sisters once built between their bedposts in the middle of the night, and beneath it, Eleanor and Esmerelda stand close.
 

Tell me it will be okay
, Eleanor whispers into Esmerelda’s ear.
 

It will be okay,
Esmerelda answers.

Eleanor closes her eyes.

It will be okay
, she thinks.
 

And for the first time in a very long time, it is.

Gerry shakes the rain from her umbrella, coughing, then goes into the office, dropping the umbrella into a bucket and letting the glass door fall shut behind her.
 

“It’s a mess out there,” she says loudly.
 

She turns and looks through the door at the street. Water has gathered in the gutters and sweeps over the sidewalk. A green Oldsmobile glides by, sending up a gray fan of water that arcs over the walkway and drops just short of the office windows.
 

“My,” Gerry says. Then, a little louder, “It really is a mess out there.”

The light is on in Paul’s office, but after Gerry squeaks across the floor, she discovers that Paul isn’t there at all. The desk is covered with paperwork and file folders grown dusty.
 

“Huh,” Gerry says. She flips the light switch. “Why are you on?”

She makes coffee, enough for two people, though she is no longer certain she’ll see Paul today. He comes to the office less often now, and when he does, he calls home every hour to ask the hospice nurse how Agnes is doing. Gerry has told him to go home many times, to be close to his wife, who needs him more than the town’s few homebuyers.

“I’m almost done with the licensing exams,” she told him the last time. “In a month you can just turn the keys over to me.”

Paul hadn’t laughed at her joke. Instead, he had wrapped her up in the tightest hug, and thanked her, and swept out the door.
 

The coffee pot beeps, and Gerry pours a cup, and mixes in cream and a little sugar, and then stands in the middle of the room, watching the rain. It seems to fall harder now than it did just a few minutes before. She crosses to the window and tilts her head at the sky, which can only be described as utterly black. A wrinkle of lightning ricochets about without leaving the clouds, and a moment later the thunderclap rattles the windows so violently that she jumps and spills her coffee.
 

“Oh, darn it, darn it,” she says, and goes for napkins.
 

Another clap of thunder, angry enough to take the lights out, and Gerry stops where she is.
 

The air is electric, and fairly hums. The hairs on her arm stand up.
 

“What the—” she says.

She turns around and looks at the windows, and her lips part. Across the street, beyond the storefronts, the sky seems to be falling upon the earth, a heavy soot curtain. She can feel the ground trembling beneath her, and everything on her desk begins to vibrate. The beige telephone clatters to the floor, its bell ringing out at the impact. A cup full of pencils.
 

A photograph topples onto the floor and skids to a stop at her feet. Even in the darkness she knows what it is. She keeps only one photograph on her desk. Gerry lets the coffee cup fall out of her hand, and bends over to pick up the frame. The loose glass pricks her finger, but she doesn’t feel it.
 

The air is so charged with electricity that tiny blue sparks pop around her, all over the office.
 

In the flashes of blue, she sees her two uniformed boys staring up at her through the shattered glass. She feels her heart swell, feels a tingle of anticipation that she does not understand.

“My boys,” Gerry whispers. “My sweet boys, I’m—”

Reset.

The box is marked
Attic junk
.
 

Paul sighs and shakes his head. “Aggie.”
 

He sinks to the garage floor, crosses his legs, pulls the box into his lap. It is dusty, the corners crumpled, the cardboard softened with age. It is long and wide, and the tape across its mouth has lost its tack. Some of the dust on the flaps has been smudged away, as though the box was opened recently.

Paul turns the flaps back and peers inside. He exhales softly.
 

The little model house is fractured on its foundation, thrown carelessly into the box. Some of the trees sprinkled on the fake grass have snapped. The mailbox at the end of the sidewalk is broken in half. He expected as much when he saw Agnes’s scrawl on the box flaps. She had never truly understood his passion for the models. But she’d never resented it. The houses are broken because she resented
him
.
 

She still does, as far as he knows.
 

He stares at the broken house, and the memories swim up like dust motes. He closes his eyes and lets himself remember, something he doesn’t allow often. Rainy afternoons; the cool, musty attic smell. Eleanor sitting on the stool beside him, kicking her small feet. Esmerelda somewhere else in the house, singing. Agnes—somewhere.
 

A knot rises in his throat, and he tries to swallow a faint sob.
 

How different his life has turned out than he expected. He is still a young man, he knows. If he opened the garage door now and walked out into the street and never looked back—if he walked away like Aggie’s mother had done, except up the street instead of into the sea—he could start over. He could buy a small house in a small town, disappear into the world, stop picking at the scabs, wait for his scars to fade.
 

Would they? Would they fade?
 

His daughters are gone, one long in the ground, the other—the other—

He fumbles in his pocket, takes out a piece of paper. It is the same one he found on the chair in the living room. The one he had folded carefully. The one that was unfolded when he came back to the house later. Was it Eleanor? Was it Agnes?