Eleanor (52 page)

Weeks later, when the girls are finally asleep at four in the morning, Paul returns to their bedroom. He stubs his toe on the cedar chest at the foot of their bed, and the jolt stirs Agnes from sleep. She blinks sleepily at him in the pale light.
 

“It’s snowing,” he says quietly. “I rocked them by the window and watched it. It’s really coming down.”

Agnes says, “It’s so early.”

“It’s a little past four,” Paul says.

“I mean it’s early for snow.”

“Oh,” he says. “Yeah. It’s early.”

He opens the curtains before he joins Agnes in the bed. He turns on his side, then scoots backward until he bumps into her.
 

“No,” she says reflexively. “I’m not ready yet.”

“Just be close,” he says. “Watch the snow with me.”

Agnes sighs, and turns over and rests her arm over Paul’s chest.
 

“I bet there’s six inches in the morning,” he speculates.

“It’s already morning.”

“You know what I mean.”

The snow drifts down like feathers, exploding into crisp diamonds in the glow of the back porch light. The house is still, the girls slumbering. Agnes can hear Paul’s breath begin to slow and grow even, and when he is asleep, she lifts her arm and turns her back to him, and pulls a pillow close to her breast. This isn’t what she expected, none of it. Her insides are knotted, her chest hollowed out. There should be room in there for her family, she knows. There should be room for herself. But the space is thunderously empty.

She lies awake for a long time, the silence around her so complete that she can almost hear the snowflakes crushing each other on the lawn below. Sleep finally overtakes her as the sun begins to rise, turning the room to rose and taffeta. Before long, Paul will wake her to tell her that it’s time to feed the twins, and Agnes will sleepwalk through her day, as she has begun to sleepwalk through every one of them.
 

In the ghostly stillness of the house, she sinks into herself and into sleep, and descends through wispy clouds into the tall, waving grasses of a beautiful valley that she has never seen before. She stands barefoot, naked, beside a creek, and marvels at the warm breeze on her skin, in her hair, at the quietude that envelops her.
 

She kneels beside the water and drags her fingers over its surface. The water beads on her skin. She looks for fish and sees a few, and plunges her hand into the water to startle them, her heart suddenly alive like a child’s. Her hand disappears into the inches-deep creek up to her wrist, then her forearm, then her elbow, and Agnes wiggles her fingers, feeling the faintest stir of electricity in a gaping void that she cannot see, but only feel.
 

She knows that she is dreaming. The world feels so real, but whatever exists below the creek—the darkness, she knows instinctively—must surround this world on all sides, unseen but present. She looks up at the clouds that she fell through, seeing them thicken and gather and darken, and wonders if the same black void exists above them, out of sight. And around her, past the mountains that seem to cup the valley in their palm. Is the darkness beyond that craggy range?
 

Birds flutter overhead, sailing low over the meadow and skidding into the water. They flap and paddle about, dipping their beaks into the stream, and Agnes smiles. She feels a bit like Eve, permitted reentry into the garden.

A tiny mewling sound comes from the tall grass on the opposite side of the creek. Agnes cocks her head and stares. The grass moves, but whatever is inside doesn’t emerge. So Agnes steps over the water, the soft valley floor spongy beneath her bare toes, and cautiously kneels before the grass. She leans forward and parts it, and looks down in surprise at a pair of lizard-like creatures, tiny and tangled together in the undergrowth. Broken bits of red shell are scattered around their damp bodies.
 

They look like dinosaurs, almost, like the pictures in the books Agnes read as a little girl.
 

One is a little larger than the other. It looks up at Agnes, its dark eyes glittering.

Then it recoils, as if it senses something
wrong
, and before Agnes can react, the little thing urges the smaller creature to its feet, and leans into it, and the two strange little beasts flee unsteadily into the grass. Agnes stands up, the wind whipping urgently through her auburn hair, and watches the grass ripple as the small creatures run like hell, putting as much ground between her and them as they can.
 

She turns and surveys the valley that unfolds behind her, around her, and is not surprised one bit to see that the sun has been chewed up by the lumbering clouds, to see the distant trees bending under the sudden winds. A single drop of water spatters on her shoulder, and she holds out her hand, and the rains begin to fall, filling her cupped palm in minutes.
 

There is nowhere to shelter herself—the treeline is easily a mile or more away, gathering at the base of the mountains like a tuft of hair. The waving grasses slant under the rain and wind, and the air takes on a chill that prickles Agnes’s skin.
 

She looks down at her body as rain sluices down it, dripping between her breasts, sliding down her belly. That her body is changed is only a mild curiosity—the marks on her abdomen are gone; her breasts are smaller, her hips narrower. Her skin is pink and alive and—

She stops. There, against her thigh, is the strangest thing.
 

She reaches down, suddenly nervous, and takes the thing in her fingertips, holds it up to the dim sky to inspect it.

A damp sliver of reddish shell, brittle and cracked.
 

Agnes drops it, and reaches between her legs and gasps.
 

Her hand comes away red with blood, speckled with shell fragments.
 

She wakes up.

Paul is shaking her. Her head pounds, her breasts throb.

“They’re hungry,” Paul says.

The girls are bawling in their cribs. Paul comes into the room with Agnes, and gently lifts Esmerelda into his arms and begins to sway. Almost immediately the little girl calms, and drifts into a momentary sleep against his chest.
 

Agnes scoops Eleanor into her hands and settles into the rocker beside the window, loosening the flap on her nightgown. Eleanor fastens to Agnes’s nipple and begins to suck, and Agnes weeps.

There is no trace of Eleanor anywhere. Mea cannot find her on Earth—she scours Paul and Agnes’s house, Jack’s house, searches for her along the coast, in the sea, in the forests. But Eleanor has disappeared from the world like a spark from a sputtering match. And the little glowing ember that Mea recognizes as Eleanor—as a sort of beacon, suggesting where Eleanor really
is
when she’s traveling through someone’s dreams—is nowhere to be found.
 

She’s gone,
Mea says.
I feel—panic.

The darkness envelops Mea and threads through her shape, weaving in and out of her until she feels as if she has become a part of something greater.

She is gone,
it agrees.

But where? What happened?

The darkness says,
I’m afraid I don’t know.
 

Something happened to her. In her mother’s dream.

I think so.

Mea seems to shiver.
She’s gone
, she repeats.
Eleanor is gone
.
Why don’t you know where she is? Why don’t you know what happened?

The darkness is calming despite its answer.

I can see into many worlds and many times
, it says slowly.
But dreams belong to their owners. I cannot intrude.

She could be hurt or trapped.

This is true.

She might be—dead
, Mea says.

I can do nothing for her until she leaves the dream.
 

Mea looks around for any sign of Eleanor in the rift, but the orange spark is long gone.

I feel helpless
, Mea says.

The darkness is quiet.

For Mea, it feels as if her own thread has snapped. The darkness of the rift has never frightened her, never seemed anything more than a comfort to her, but now it feels foreign and strange. She lingers quietly for eons, aware in some foggy way that she is experiencing something that she hasn’t experienced in the rift, ever: regret.
 

The darkness leaves her be, and she presses herself against the skin that separates the darkness from the world she once grew up in. She feels Eleanor’s absence from the world keenly, like a growing hollow within her belly. She threads her shape through the river of time, winding it back to a past that she remembers, but in an academic sense. Her past life as a child, as a sibling, as a daughter, is like a story written in a history text. She watches the past, watches the man who was her father as he twists this way and that on a rotating chair in the attic of their house, contentedly humming and painting tiny windowsills and doors. She can see her mother, and from Mea’s vantage point in the rift, Agnes’s unease with her position in the world is strikingly clear. She wonders how Paul and Eleanor and her former self failed to see it.
 

She watches Eleanor, small and pale and alive, red hair like a campfire, green eyes like new spring leaves.
 

Regret.

The river of time churns on, less one precious soul, and not at all concerned with such things.
 

Mea winds time forward like a watch, the river coursing through the events of her own history, then stops to watch Esmerelda and Eleanor dig a hole in the back yard under their father’s watchful eye. The twins clap delightedly when he lets them turn the garden hose on their excavation, transforming it into sludge that decorates their bare legs as they stomp happily in it.
 

From the darkness of the rift she sees Eleanor’s thread, fat and bright like smoke from a tall stack, and she sees her own thread, darkening and issuing into the invisible void in a cough of final days. If Agnes and Paul and Eleanor had known that Mea’s—that
Esmerelda’s
—end was so imminent, would life have been different? Would her father have stayed home from the real estate seminar that took him to Florida? Would her mother have tried harder to love her?
 

Mea skips the moment of her death. She has seen it enough times, and doesn’t want to watch it again.
 

There is nothing to be done about it.
 

Eleanor is dead.
 

All is lost.