Eleanor (15 page)

She must talk to the child. She must communicate with her.
 

Mea feels another thing, another new sensation. Her shape has grown more rigid since her discovery of the girl, as if she is being bottled herself, her own inky form taking the shape of a container, of a cell that binds her. She feels panic, and worry, and—stress.
 

The girl will have the answer for her.
 

Mea watches and waits for the right moment to reach for the girl again.

Agnes stands in a pale rectangle of light. Around her the house is dark. The refrigerator door is open, but she doesn’t remember opening it. There’s food inside that she doesn’t remember buying. Milk and eggs and a loaf of bread. Some packaged meat. A plastic blue container with a yellow sticky note affixed to it.
 

She leans over. The note reads:
Mom
.
Egg salad.

There’s a small heart scrawled beneath the words.
 

And a letter
E
.
 

This is how it happens. She forgets, almost every time. She sees a note like this, sees the letter E. She forgets—just for a moment—that Esmerelda has been gone all these years. She mistakes the note for Esmerelda’s, a kind message to her mother.
 

The note is Eleanor’s, of course.
 

Esmerelda has been gone for nearly eight years, but Agnes sees her every time she opens her eyes. She told Eleanor to put away the family photos years ago, but it is as if they still stand on the mantel, still hang on the walls. The empty spaces they once occupied still appear full to Agnes, with Esme’s small round angel face staring back at her.
 

Agnes takes the blue container out and peels the note off and crumples it on the counter. The refrigerator thumps closed beside her. She pries open the lid and looks inside. Chopped egg whites, yellow paste of yolk and mayonnaise and pickles. She wants to eat it, knows that she should eat it, or anything, but she can’t. The smell turns her stomach, activates her gag reflex, and she barely makes it to the sink. What comes up is mostly liquid, cheap bourbon and vodka. She isn’t sure when she last ate, but her stomach tells her it probably wasn’t in the last couple of days.
 

She runs the faucet, then sinks to her knees and rests her forehead against the cool metal of the refrigerator door.
 

The worst of it is Eleanor.
 

Agnes sees her living daughter through a haze. Now and then Agnes will awake in the chair and find Eleanor drawing a blanket over her, and she’ll say, “Esme, oh dear—” and then Eleanor’s mouth will open and speak in Eleanor’s voice, shattering the illusion. It isn’t Eleanor’s fault that she has her sister’s face, that she is a walking reminder of all the years Esmerelda will never live.
 

But Agnes cannot look at her.
 

She stands up shakily, knowing she should eat something, at least drink some water, but instead she goes to the china cabinet in the dining room and kneels down and opens the lowest door. She knows the arrangement of the tall serving platters by heart, the wide rectangles of bone china that stand on little pedestals, and she finds the bottle-shaped thing behind one, and takes it out. She barely glances at the label. She knows it is whiskey by its shape, knows by its weight that it contains enough to sink her again into the dark long before Eleanor gets up for school.
 

She carries the bottle through the hall, and her reflection appears in the window, and Agnes stops and looks at herself. In the thin glare of moonlight she can see her face, almost gaunt beneath her unhealthy hair. She cannot see her mother in her own appearance. She barely remembers what her mother looked like. But she sees her father there, a little, and that reminds her of her mother, and Agnes thinks that if she hadn’t thrown up, if she were still buzzed on the liquor in her stomach, she might have pitched the bottle through the window.
 

She is young, but does not look it. She feels like a woman who has lived through the Depression, a woman who has watched her babies die, who is beaten down by circumstance and who succumbs to it, who doesn’t fight back, because why fight back, why would you ever fight back when it hurts so much less to just lie down?

Agnes settles in the chair and opens the bottle, and for just a moment doesn’t drink. The whiskey smell calms her, eases her nerves just enough to make her think to herself, in one small moment of clarity,
All isn’t lost, I still have Eleanor
—and then the moment dissipates, because thinking of Eleanor means that she thinks of Eleanor’s smiling green eyes, matched so cleanly to her red hair, and then she can only see Esmerelda’s red hair, shreds of it caught in the broken windshield, blood streaked on metal and vinyl, the smell of gasoline and exhaust, the tang of adrenaline, the coppery charge of blood on her teeth, and the moment becomes a monster, becomes Agnes’s demon.

There are so many demons.
 

Agnes tips the bottle back and her eyes flutter closed, and she swallows, and swallows again, and the burn of it tells her it will be okay, that everything will be just fine, because the burn is always followed by the dark, and the dark is followed by—

Peace. Or something very much like it.
 

She drinks, and eventually her grip loosens on the bottle, and she slips into that dark where Esmerelda, where Eleanor, where nobody else is permitted.

Eleanor’s mother is asleep in the blue corduroy chair. She is shivering and dressed only in a thin T-shirt and underwear. An open bottle is slanted against her hip, and one of Agnes’s hands is curled loosely around the neck.

Eleanor studies her mother for a long moment. The woman before her is delicate, with bones that show through her skin in strange places. Her mother’s collarbone is pronounced, her skin wrapped around it like a leather grip on a piece of bone knife. There are deep hollows above and below the bone. Agnes’s chest looks almost concave to Eleanor.
 

Eleanor thinks back to the memory of the fireplace and tries to picture her mother as she was then: her face fuller, with round and bright cheeks, and eyes that caught the orange light and internalized it until she almost seemed to glow. Her mother was never heavy, but there had been a roundness to her that Eleanor loved. Her mother’s hugs had been soft and encompassing where her father’s were firm.
 

The woman before her looks nothing like the woman of the memory.
 

The woman before her barely eats, even when Eleanor prepares a meal for the two of them. She hardly leaves the house, though she must leave sometimes, because mysterious new bottles of liquor appear in places where there were none previously. Eleanor hates to think about these daytime excursions to the liquor store. Her mother is almost never sober, and it seems inevitable that one day she will put her car into a building, or sail through a busy intersection without stopping.
 

Eleanor exhales slowly. “Mom?”

Agnes doesn’t stir.
 

Carefully, Eleanor extricates the bottle from her mother’s grip. Agnes’s fingers fall limp against her body. Eleanor collects the smaller bottles from the side table, too, the glass loudly clinking as the bottles knock together, but her mother doesn’t notice. Eleanor carries the bottles into the kitchen and considers upending them all into the sink, but then she thinks about her mother getting behind the wheel of the Honda in their garage, intent on restocking the vanished supply, and so she sets the bottles aside instead.
 

The blanket that she usually draws across her mother is on the floor in a heap beside the chair, and for the briefest moment, Eleanor almost hates her mother for lying there, paralyzed and freezing cold, with the warm blanket only a foot away from her. Then she thinks of her father and the way he talks about Agnes, and she relents.
 

“There should be someone in the world who loves you despite you,” she whispers to her mother.

She unfolds the blanket and spreads it over her mother’s sleeping form, tucks it tightly beneath her weight. She goes to the thermostat and adjusts it upward a few degrees, then stands there until she hears the deep hammer of the heating system coming to life. The floor vents push warm air out in a rush, and Eleanor sighs, aware in that moment that her entire existence—at least since the accident—is one enormous sigh, made up of a thousand smaller sighs, and at this thought she sighs again.
 

Then she goes upstairs, and too late, she feels the hum of static embrace her as she steps through her bedroom door.

The sight of the woman in the chair unnerves Mea. The woman appears to be little more than a shell: alive, but for no visible purpose. Mea watches the red-haired girl care for the woman, giving her warmth, and something strange and foreign flares inside Mea; she feels something very much like compassion. For the shell-woman, for the red-haired girl—a deep heat saddled with sadness.
 

The red-haired girl goes away and climbs some stairs, and Mea cannot resist any longer. When the girl approaches a new doorway, Mea reaches for her, hoping to draw her into the dark, into the black, where she can sit with the girl and communicate with her and understand the importance of all that she is seeing in the girl’s world.
 

She sees the expression on the girl’s face change, as if the red-haired girl somehow knows that Mea is there. Mea pushes against the thin membrane that separates the dark from the girl’s world, and for a moment it appears that the girl will slide right through the membrane—for a moment Mea almost feels the girl’s hand stretch into the black, real and touchable and
right there
—and then the girl vanishes again, just the way she did in the high school, and Mea trembles with regret and unhappiness.

But this time she sees the girl, in a way.

The girl seems to fall into the crack between her world and Mea’s, into the tiniest of spaces between the girl’s bedroom and the slippery membrane that encases the darkness, and in that strange space—which Mea has never noticed before—the girl becomes a faint light, a tiny red orb that floats away like a bit of dandelion fluff.
 

Mea watches her, aware that she is somehow seeing through many worlds into a realm she never knew existed. She wonders what it is—
where
it is—but the darkness spills over her view again, shielding her from this new mystery, and Mea roars at the dark, demanding an answer, an explanation.

But the dark owes her nothing, and the vast stream of memories simply rushes on, leaving Mea behind in the black.