Eleanor (4 page)

She slips out of the house before Hob or Agnes wake. The sky is dim but growing lighter. She sits behind the wheel of the Ford and stares up at the clouds, leaning forward to see them through the windshield. They’re ominous and dark, almost black. She wonders what the view from above the clouds is like. She thinks that it’s probably all blue skies and sunshine up there, the absolute opposite of life down here in Anchor Bend.
 

The rain pounds on the Ford like a bag of rocks in a tumble dryer. Eleanor drives slowly, both hands tight on the wheel. She rolls through town, the only thing moving for miles. None of the shops are yet open. There are no pedestrians on the sidewalks. Days like this feel a bit like the end of the world. Everything is still and murky and slow.
 

She drives for a little while, eventually leaving the heart of the little town behind. Like a magnet, she is drawn to the ocean. She parks the truck in the small lot beside the beach and kills the engine and turns off the wipers. Rain courses down the windshield in waves. She can see little blips and plops on the hood, one for every drop of rain that lands on the car. In the distance she can see the shape of Huffnagle, blurred by the rain until it’s only a cottony shadow.
 

Eleanor closes her eyes and lets out another long, weary sigh. She listens to the pounding rain on the roof. Hears the slap of it against the asphalt outside. The ocean has some life today, every wave a low roar as it breaks on the beach.
 

When she opens her eyes again, she has made up her mind. She leaves the keys in the ignition, opens the door, and steps out into the rain. In an instant, she is soaking wet, her nightgown and housecoat clinging to her swollen body.
 

There is a pickup truck parked at the opposite end of the small lot. The only other person in the world arrived at the beach while Eleanor’s eyes were closed. She can see the shape of a person inside, perhaps enjoying the weather. She doesn’t wave, doesn’t care.
 

The beach stones are black and wet and shiny. Eleanor crosses them slowly, but she isn’t worried about slipping and falling down. There are two sandpipers pattering around, dipping their beaks into the sand after each receding wave. The clouds in the distance are pulling apart like taffeta, black feathery tendrils separating from their bodies. More rain. Harder rain.
 

Eleanor walks to the edge of the beach and stands there a moment in her heavy wet housecoat. The waves are needle-sharp as they smack her ankles and feet. She closes her eyes again, hands deep in her pockets, and thinks of Hob and his pleasant smile and his broad shoulders and secrets and his carefully parted slick hair and his deep, sad, true eyes. She thinks of Agnes and her knotted hair and the wrinkle lines around her little dark eyes when she smiles and her cute small earlobes and her favorite song.
 

They’ll be all right, she knows.
 

Eleanor pulls her housecoat off, sleeve by sleeve. It grabs at her skin as if resisting, but she casts it onto the beach. She bends over and grasps the hem of her nightgown, the wet flannel squishy between her fingers. She gathers it into her fists, lifts it up and over her head. Naked, she faces the ocean calmly. The rain is bitingly cold, the wind worse.
 

Behind her she hears the muffled sound of a car door opening, and then a distant male voice shouts something.
 

She doesn’t answer or look back.
 

Eleanor steps into the ocean and strides forward, the water reaching her knees, then her hips. When she’s waded in waist deep, she spreads her arms wide behind her and lunges forward into the water, and she begins to swim, and swim, and swim.

The twins are six years old—just weeks away from their shared birthday—when it happens.
 

Agnes rushes about the house, looking for her rain boots.
 

“Esme,” Agnes huffs as she climbs the stairs. “Ellie—have either of you seen my galoshes?”

“They’re called rain boots, Mom,” Esmerelda shouts. “Galoshes are the things you wear over your shoes.”

“Those are called overshoes,” Agnes says.
 

“No, they’re—”

“Just—” Agnes pauses on the landing, breathing hard. “Stop. Just stop.”

Esmerelda stands in the doorway of the girls’ bedroom. She shrugs, then squeezes past her mother and walks to the bathroom.

“Where’s your sister?” Agnes asks.
 

“Attic,” Esmerelda says, and shuts the bathroom door.
 

Agnes sighs irritably and raps on the door with her knuckle. “Make it fast in there,” she says. “Your father’s going to be waiting at the airport for us.”

“Whatever,” Esmerelda says, her voice muffled by the door.

Agnes pounds the door sharply with her fist. “Young lady, you’re too young for ‘whatever,’” she snaps. “Save it until you’re thirteen. What are you doing in there?”

Esmerelda doesn’t answer. Agnes turns and leans against the wall and presses her fists against her eyes and drops her mouth open in a hushed scream. Then she straightens up, pushes off the wall, and unclenches her hands slowly, stretching her narrow fingers wide until they tingle slightly. She takes a deep breath, exhales.
 

“One thing at a time,” she says softly. “One thing, one thing.”

She stands there for a moment, almost swaying on her feet, eyes still closed.
 

Then she opens them, and goes to the attic door and opens it.
 

“Ellie!” she shouts up the stairs. “You better be ready!”

Eleanor sits alone in her father’s workshop, studying the tiny, unfinished house. It’s dim in the attic. The rain has turned the world outside to pleasant gray. She prefers days like this to any other kind of day. There is no sunshine, just rain. At age six, her favorite word is “inclement.” She uses it whenever she can, having learned it from her first school closure of the year. Today can certainly be described as inclement.
 

But the light spilling through the circular window at the far end of the attic is too pale, too removed from the work bench, and Eleanor cannot see the details of her father’s latest project. Reluctantly, she reaches up to the lamp and snaps it on. A warm orange glow floods the workspace, and the small house before her casts a long brown shadow across the table.
 

She can see it clearly now, and can almost pick out the last part her father painted. There’s a hardened dollop of blue paint beneath one tiny windowsill. She can picture his careful, deliberate brush stroke. He would have realized that there was too much paint on the brush. Under ordinary circumstances, he would have dabbed the excess paint on the mouth of the small bottle, but he had probably been in a hurry, in which case she could imagine him stroking the exterior of the house this way, then that way, and working the extra blob of paint into the narrow crevice beneath the windowsill, where it was mostly hidden from view, a secret that only she can share with him.
 

The rest of the house is well constructed. She thinks it’s probably her father’s best work yet. The floor plan is creative, different from the houses that she draws during art hour at school. Her houses are single-room blocks with leaning doors and lumpy rooftops. Her father’s are split-level constructions, sometimes with elaborate windows that reach all the way from the floor to the ceiling of a room.
 

Her favorite days were spent in the attic with him, perched on the stool on the other side of the table. She would be careful to stay out of his light. He would pull the lamp to his eye and peer through the magnifying lens at the house, delicately pressing the skeleton bones of the structure into the styrofoam foundation with tweezers.
 

“Why do you make little houses?” she had asked him, once.
 

“Well,” he answered, slowly, drawing the words out as he fit a miniature chimney stack into place, “because I’m not a very good architect.”

“What’s an architect?”

He smiled at her without looking up. “Someone who designs buildings. They say where everything goes and what it looks like.”

“Why aren’t you a good one?”

“I’m not a very good student,” he confessed. “You have to be a good student to be a good architect.”

“Oh,” Eleanor replied. Then she said, “But you make pretty houses.”

“Well, thank you, sweetheart.”

She watched him a little longer, then asked, “What’s your work instead?”

“You know the answer to that,” he said. “What does Daddy do for a job?”

Eleanor bit her lip. “Real cheese.”

“Realty,” he corrected.

“I know,” she said, then laughed. “Real cheese is funnier.”

But she had sensed his discomfort with the topic. At six years old, she wasn’t able to parse the subtext of that conversation, but years later she would understand that her father had failed at achieving his dream, and that he comforted himself by getting as close to it as possible. Instead of designing homes, he tried to sell them. And at night and early in the mornings, he built tiny homes in the attic of their house.
 

She studies the unfinished house on the table now and marvels at the microscopic detail: the insect-sized staircase leading to the front door, the little brass knocker on the door itself. Her favorite part is the lawn and trees, something her father’s houses didn’t always include, but which this one does. The lawn spreads wide around the roofless home, rolling with little hills and small trees. The driveway is empty, but a perfect little mailbox stands at the end of it.

Down the attic stairs, the second-floor door bangs open. Eleanor jumps, jostling the little house in her hands.
 

Her mother calls upstairs. “Ellie! You better be ready!”

“I’m ready, Mom,” she shouts back.
 

“Good,” her mother answers.

Eleanor hears the door creak as Agnes begins to close it again, but then the sound stops.
 

“You shouldn’t be up there without your father,” her mother adds. “Come on down now.”