Eleanor (36 page)

She crashes into the water. It folds over her, consumes her, and it is nothing like the gentle, warm dark of the rift. The water is black and icy, and she feels it invade her open mouth, screams to keep her lungs from filling. She plunges below the surface. Her eyes are open, but she can see almost nothing. The ocean is black and blue and freezing and deep—

—and then she hits bottom.
 

She wonders at the texture beneath her feet. It is not sand or rock, but it crinkles like a skin, and she can feel something firm and unyielding beneath it, as if she is standing inside a plastic bag that rests on a spongy table.
 

It’s no use dwelling on it. She plants her feet on that firm surface beneath the plastic, and pushes off with all her might.
 

She doesn’t have much strength to spare. Her limbs feel rubbery, as if they’ve been asleep and are only just waking up. Her arms and legs feel oversized and heavy. Her head weighs her down, and she struggles to keep herself upright. She surges upward through the black sea like a dumb giant, and breaks through the surface, which is
wrong
, the surface should be farther away than this, the bottom of the sea cannot be so close to the top of the sea, not out here in the ocean—

Eleanor gasps and coughs. Her hair is wet and stuck to her skin, her face, and there is so
much
of it. She swipes at it, and blinks at the sky, and her feet find the bottom at the same time.
She does not have to tread water
. This frightens her, dislocates her. Above her there are clouds, charcoal-black.
 

Something falls over her face, and she shrieks and bats at it, but it sags over her like a blanket. She can feel something wafting around her feet, and she panics and flails about, but the thing only seems to cling to her more closely.
 

In the barest hint of light she catches a glimpse of the thing, like a glistening dark shadow swallowing her up, and she recognizes it.
 

It’s a tarpaulin.
 

A swimming pool cover.
 

Eleanor has fallen out of the sky over Huffnagle into a swimming pool in somebody’s back yard.
 

She fights the tarp back with her fists, but struggling only seems to wrap it more tightly around her.

I’m on top of it, I fell into it—

It blots out the sky, and she cannot find the tarp’s edges. Her feet tangle in it, and she loses her footing, and she sinks into the water. The bottom isn’t there—she knows it must be, and then her shoulders bump into it, and she realizes that she has no sense of direction anymore, that down has become up, and as she wrestles with the plastic sheet, she feels the little air in her lungs burn away, and then her lungs themselves burn, and she thinks to herself that she is fourteen years old and is going to die because of a piece of plastic, she thinks that this must be what a dolphin feels when it inhales a plastic six-pack ring, and then that’s all the thought she has time for, she has to breathe, she
has
to, she has to open her mouth, she can’t breathe,
she has to breathe, she can’t breathe she has to she has to to breathe breathe she to has breathe has to—

She opens her eyes in the mud. She is face-down, her cheek squelching in the muck. It gets in her eye, in her mouth. She feels it clogging her nostrils. She wants to dig the mud out of her nose, wipe it out of her eye, but there’s something else not right, something—

Something grabs her and flips her over, and she can feel the mud like a swamp beneath her head, and her eyes flutter, and she sees raindrops spiking down at her from the darkness above.
 

Something immensely heavy falls on her chest, and she thinks, dimly,
I should push that off there
, but she can’t seem to work her body just yet. She feels like a piece of driftwood that someone is about to whittle into a totem. The pressure on her chest recedes, but comes back immediately, harder, and she feels like her sternum is going to splinter, like her lungs will be pulped, her heart crushed into mulch, and then her eyes fly open wide, and she feels the sea rising within her, angry, violent, and she snaps forward at the waist, and the water explodes from her mouth, and then she can take a breath, so she does, but the breath only stirs more of the ocean inside her lungs, and she vomits, twice, three times, and then she sags forward, coughing, and someone is there, supporting her, holding her up. A strong hand pounds on her back, right between her shoulder blades.
 

A voice says, “Oh, thank god, thank god.”

A different one—a man, his voice right beside her ear—says, “You’re all right, you’re okay. Take it easy. Just breathe. One, two. One, two.”

The man’s cheek is scratchy, and his voice is throaty and old, and she leans against him, no strength in her limbs.
 

Her hair falls in knotted wet ropes down her back. It’s heavy, and tugs at her head, and she can feel the ends of her hair slap against the small of her back. She becomes aware that she is naked and barefoot. Rain falls on her—bitterly cold rain—and she shivers. The rain smacks against the plastic tarp that almost did her in. It’s crumpled on the ground beside her, one half drifting lazily on the surface of the pool.
 

“You called nine-one-one,” the man says to someone else.
 

A woman’s voice, behind him: “Edna did.”

Farther away, a second woman: “I did, they’re coming.”

The man holding her wears striped pajama pants that cling to him. He is shirtless, and rain collects in the gray hair on his chest.
 

“Where—” Eleanor says, and then she coughs again, and more water comes up.

“Easy,” the man says, thumping her soundly on the back again. “You’re safe. You’re okay.”

She coughs and coughs, and when she can breathe again, her lungs feel as if they’ve been scoured with steel wool. Her throat is raw. Her chest aches with each breath, and she wonders if the man broke her ribs while trying to save her.
 

“Where am I?” she rasps.
 

The first woman comes closer, holding a housecoat close to her throat, as if to ward off the rain. “You fell into our pool,” she says. “How did that happen?”

Eleanor coughs again, and shakes her head.
 

“Get her a towel or something, will you?” the old man chides. “Thing’s shivering like a banshee.”

He’s right. Her body is waking up, and every sense comes into sharp focus. The rain is a thousand little needles jabbing at her skin. Her eyes burn from the chlorine in the pool. She can smell the man’s aftershave, and it almost makes her sick.
 

She leans forward again, and he pats the back of her head. He reminds her of her Grandpa Hob, a little. She rests her cheek on his shoulder and closes her eyes. The calm sea of the rift feels unreal now, a dream that happened a billion years ago and has worn thin. She feels a little like something that it coughed up. She feels like she has just been born.

The woman bundles Eleanor up in a bathrobe, and she and the old man help her to her feet. Her knees are weak, and her legs tingle as her nerve endings spark to life. Each step is rubbery, and she does not trust her feet. They are cold, and in the porch light she thinks they look almost blue. They seem to bow away from her each time she sinks her weight onto them. The old man and the old woman bear most of her weight, and she fumbles weakly at the earth with her toes.
 

“Careful,” the old man cautions, helping her up the porch steps.
 

She begins to shake.
 

Lightning scratches across the clouds, and a moment later thunder booms overhead.
 

“Just in time,” the woman says. “You don’t want to be in the pool when that happens.”

At the top of the steps, the man passes Eleanor over to the woman and says, “I’m going to take care of that tarp,” and then he’s back out in the dark.
 

The woman closes the porch door behind him.
 

“I’ve got some of our granddaughter’s clothes in the bathroom,” she says. “What are you doing, running around naked at three in the morning in December? You’re apt to kill yourself that way.”

“December?” Eleanor asks.

Eleanor comes alive in the shower. She stands beneath the water for half an hour, steam rising around her as her pale white skin slowly turns pink again. The bar of green soap smells like fertilizer, but gets most of the mud off. The old woman sits on the toilet lid on the other side of the shower curtain, humming a song that Eleanor doesn’t recognize. She can tell that the old woman would like to talk, and she knows that when she finishes in the shower there will probably be questions, and it will be worse when the paramedics arrive.
 

But for the moment, Eleanor has questions of her own.
 

Her body feels strange and different. She could swear that she is taller—not just a little taller, but two inches, maybe more. Her hair rattles her—it is longer than she has ever worn it, hanging almost to her bottom. Her hips are different—flared, somehow—and her breasts are larger, and—and there’s an awful lot of unexpected hair beneath her arms, and down
there
. Her legs are fuzzy.