Eleanor (9 page)

“Mom?” Eleanor asks. “What are you doing?”

Agnes turns, startled by Eleanor’s sudden appearance. Eleanor is startled, too, by the bright bloom of red in her mother’s face, the delicate latticework of broken blood vessels in her cheeks and on the slope of her nose. Agnes’s brown hair is beginning to lighten and turn gray—something Eleanor is surprised she hasn’t noticed before. Her mother’s eyes are ringed with deep, dark circles, like bruises. Her skin is oily and marked with clogged pores.
 

Agnes doesn’t answer.
 

The attic floor creaks beneath Eleanor’s feet as she joins her mother. There is a cardboard carton on the floor in front of Agnes, one of only a few objects left in the attic since her father cleared out years ago. Eleanor recognizes the box immediately, and reaches for the lid to seal it up again.

“No,” Agnes snaps, her voice thick and indistinct. “Don’t you dare.”

“You shouldn’t be going through her stuff,” Eleanor says.
 

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

Agnes takes another sip from the bottle, and the liquor glistens on her lips, which are otherwise dry. Eleanor has a sudden urge to grab her mother beneath her arms and drag her down the stairs and into her bedroom, to strip her and throw her into the shower, to scrub her clean, to prop her on the bed and brush her hair until it shines again, to rub cream into her face and press a tube of balm to her lips, to restore her mother to the woman she once was.
 

But then her mother says, “You’re just a—”
 

Flecks of spittle land on Eleanor’s bare legs. “Ungrateful,” she finishes. “You’re ungrateful.”

Eleanor just stares at her mother. “I’m not, either,” she says, finally.

Agnes shakes her head. “
She
should be here.”

“Her name is Esmerelda,” Eleanor says.
 

“
Don’t you say her name to me
,” Agnes hisses.
 

“She’s my sister,” Eleanor says. “My twin! Do you think you’re the only one who misses her? Do you think you’re the only one who feels guilty?”

Agnes wilts. “I was driving,” she moans.
 

Eleanor sinks to her knees beside her mother. She touches her mother’s hands. “You aren’t responsible,” she says quietly. “How could you blame yourself for this?”

Agnes hides behind her limp hair, sobbing.
 

“It’s not your fault,” Eleanor says again. She tries to pull her mother close, but Agnes stiffens and stops crying.
 

Her mother glares up at her through a curtain of hair. “
You
chose the front seat,” she accuses.
 

Eleanor opens her mouth, but cannot think of anything to say.
 

“Don’t want to hear
that
, do you?” Agnes says.

Eleanor recoils from her mother. “Don’t say—”

“What? That it’s your fault?
Yours?
That I wish you were dead, too—”

“
Mom
,” Eleanor gasps.
 

“—so that I wouldn’t have to see her poor face
every time
I look at
you?
”

Eleanor goes, leaving her mother in the attic with the box of Esmerelda’s baby clothes and stuffed animals and the little white card from the hospital with her inky small footprints and the taped-down tiny lock of red hair and the small square packet with her first lost tooth. She takes the stairs carefully, wondering what would happen if she should trip and break her neck and leave her mother alone. Maybe it would serve her right. Would she even grieve? Or would she feel released from the awful bonds of motherhood?
 

“That’s right,” her mother calls down the stairs after her. “That’s right, you should run away! Run out of here, go somewhere far away!”

Eleanor decides as she pushes the attic door closed that she will never have a daughter. Mothers and daughters are horrible, horrible to each other.

In the morning, Jack is waiting at the end of the driveway, standing astride his bicycle. His skinny legs are capped with small and tasteful sneakers, the sort that the kids at school like to mock because the shoes are absent any swoosh or trifecta of stripes. Jack barely seems to notice this—in fact does
not
notice that his classmates chuckle behind their hands at his clothing, at his jeans with the worn-out knees, his backpack that frays around the straps, even at his hair, which he demonstrates little talent for styling.

These are all things that Eleanor likes very much about him.
 

“I’m going,” Eleanor calls quietly into the house, but of course there is no answer, and she closes the door gently, aware that more than a gentle
snick
will wake her mother with a pounding hangover headache.
 

Jack has already retrieved Eleanor’s bike from the garage. It leans against the mailbox, which used to read
WITT 1881 COVE
but now reads
WIT 1881 CO E
.
 

“Did you put the—”
 

“—key back?” Jack finishes. “Yes, I did.”

He’s eating a banana in giant bites, even the mushy brown parts that make Eleanor wrinkle her nose. He holds it out to her now, offering a bit, but she shakes her head. There isn’t much left, and she isn’t very hungry.
 

“You’re supposed to eat breakfast,” he says. “Most important meal of the day.”

“I do eat breakfast,” she says.
 

“You’re a terrible liar.”

“I’m not lying.”

Jack finishes the banana and twirls its empty skin like a floppy nunchuk. “What did you have?”

“Cinnamon toast,” Eleanor answers, too quickly.

Jack crosses his arms. “I don’t believe you.”

“You’re just going to have to,” she says. “We’re late.”

“We’re not late,” Jack says. He looks down at his bare wrist. “Wait, what time is it?”

“It’s almost eight.”

“We’re late,” Jack says. “Do we care?”

Eleanor frowns at him. “Just because it’s the last week of school doesn’t mean we get lazy.”

“You sound like Mrs. Hicks,” he says.
 

“Mrs. Hicks doesn’t want you to lop your finger off with a table saw,” Eleanor says. “Lazy means different things in shop.”

“I guess.” Jack brightens. “Hey, want to go the back way today?”

Eleanor looks at her watch. “It’s not shorter.”

“I know, but it’s not really much longer.”

“We’re late,” she says again, but she knows she’ll give in. The back way will carry them down Piper Road, a long, subtle grade that comes down out of the hills. It’s a truck route directly into Anchor Bend, but these days it’s barely traveled. The road falls aways steeply into the woods on either side, and the last time Eleanor and Jack biked there, they came across a fallen tree near the bottom of the hill, and skidded to an almost-disastrous stop. They climbed over the dead tree one by one, Jack passing the bicycles over to Eleanor. She wonders now if the tree has been cleared.

Jack seems to read her mind. “I was up there last weekend,” he says. “Clean ride.”

She sighs. “Okay. But we have to be fast. I don’t want to be late to class.”

“You said we’re already late.”

“I don’t want to be
more
late.”

“I believe it’s
more later
,” Jack corrects, laughing.

She takes a playful swing at him, then climbs aboard her bike and follows him up Cove Street. He weaves across the street in wide arcs. There are blue wheeled trash containers parked at the end of every driveway, and Jack swings close to one of them and somehow manages to flip the lid open and deposit his banana peel inside in a fluid motion.
 

“Crap,” Eleanor says. “Jack, wait.”

He turns a lazy circle back to where Eleanor has stopped on the road.
 

“I forgot to take out the trash,” Eleanor says.

“Well, hurry up,” Jack says. “If we’re going to take the back way.”

Eleanor sighs. “I didn’t even gather it all up yet,” she says. “It’ll take too long. You should go ahead and go the back way without me.”

Jack looks at her sternly. “We leave no man behind,” he says in a deep voice. “No little girls, either.”

Eleanor walks her bicycle back to the driveway and rests it against the mailbox post again. “Go on,” she says over her shoulder. “It’s going to take at least ten minutes. It’s glass day, too.”

Jack climbs off his bike and leans it against Eleanor’s. “Shit,” he says. “Okay. I’ll help.”

“Jack—”

“No,” he says. “Really. I can be quiet. I know how this part goes. Let me help.”

Eleanor pauses at the doorway to the living room. She can feel Jack come up behind her, and without turning she says, “She’s snoring.”

Agnes rests under a blanket on the blue corduroy chair. The chair’s ribbed covering has worn smooth in places, almost shiny from years of use. Agnes is small, nearly invisible, beneath the blanket. It rises and falls imperceptibly with each of her breaths.
 

On the table beside her is an empty bottle of Absolut and a mostly empty bottle of Knob Creek.
 

“Glass day,” Jack says. “Let me do that part.”

Eleanor looks back at him. “You have to be very, very quiet,” she admonishes.
 

“I know,” he says, then he looks down. “I’ve done this for my dad for years.”

Eleanor softens a bit. “I’m sorry.”

Jack shrugs. “You and me, we have to be the grownups, right?”

“Grownups,” Eleanor agrees in a whisper. “Okay. You get the glass. There’s a bin under the sink.”

She goes upstairs, taking each step quietly, moving left and right to avoid the creaky spots. She gathers the small bags from her bathroom and bedroom trash cans, then goes into her mother’s room. Eleanor usually skips it, but today when she peeks into the connected bathroom she sees the trash can overflowing onto the floor. She goes to collect the fallen bits, then stops, recognizing them as the photos and other memories that her mother had been sifting through in the attic the night before.
 

“Oh, Esme,” Eleanor says, softly.
 

She drops to her knees on the tile floor and starts to gather the crumpled papers. The small trash bags forgotten, Eleanor presses smooth every photograph. The wrinkles and folds are permanent, though. Esmerelda playing with her plastic pony on the fence in the front yard. Esmerelda stretched out on the floor as a little girl, her feet propped on the fireplace hearth, an encyclopedia open on her tummy. Eleanor tries her best to save the photos, but most have been crushed with such force that the thin emulsion layer flakes away at the creases, leaving white scars stitched across the image.
 

She presses the photographs to her chest and closes her eyes, the memories rushing in. For once, she doesn’t push them back. She lets them come.

1984.

The summer before the world would end.

They were five, almost six. The heat had stormed the coast that year, melting the clouds away, the sun an incandescent marble that never seemed to drop out of sight. The house was intolerably warm, and Eleanor remembers her mother begging for air conditioning, and her father complaining about money. The windows stayed open, curtains fluttering in the ponderous hot breeze. Her father propped a box fan in the front doorway and left the door ajar, claiming that this would stir the currents inside.