Eleanor (8 page)

He flags a taxi outside baggage claim, looking hopefully at the ramp one last time before he tosses his bag into the back seat and climbs inside. It takes a long time to get through the city proper to Highway 26. Captain Mark was correct—there had been acres and acres of traffic, and it hadn’t broken up in the hour that they’d spent over beers. The taxi slows to a crawl, picking its way through the snarl of vehicles like a bird tiptoeing through brambles, and Paul grows more and more impatient with every moment.
 

“Can you detour me to a phone?” he asks the driver, who shrugs and works his way across three lanes to the first exit. He pulls into the parking lot of a gas station, and Paul leaps out and runs to the pay phone by the air compressor and water dispenser. He dials, covering his ear to mute the sound of the compressor, which is still rattling loudly, as if someone plugged too many quarters into the thing and it’s still happily and uselessly thrumming away. Paul dials the house again.
 

“Hey, it’s the Witts, leave us a message—so we can delete it!”

He waits for the dull beep and says, “Aggie? Esmerelda? Girls? Pick up. Pick up?”

But nobody picks up.
 

He stares out the passenger window of the taxi as the driver merges onto Highway 26. The city gives way to forest, and then the forest gives way to the flash of tunnel lights, and then the forest returns again. The hill grows steeper, and as the car climbs higher, the rain grows stronger.
 

“Where you have been?” the driver asks Paul.

“What?” Paul asks. “Sorry.”

“Where you are coming from?”
 

“Oh,” Paul says. “Florida.”

“Ah,” the driver answers. “Sunshine. Water.”

“Right,” Paul says, leaning his head against the passenger window again.

“All this beauty you have missed,” the driver says with a chuckle, raising one hand to indicate the rain and rising fog.
 

Paul doesn’t answer, just keeps staring up at the trees as they speed by. The driver is quiet until they pass a commotion on the opposite side of the freeway.
 

“Shameful,” the driver says, his somber tone suggesting a great disappointment in humanity.

Paul doesn’t look up, so he doesn’t see the now-empty family Subaru, crumpled like a ball of tinfoil in the rain. He doesn’t see the moving van wedged beneath it, or the emergency technicians working to remove the body from its front seat. Had he looked up, he would have seen a police cruiser angled sideways in the two nearest lanes, and the steady march of traffic squeezing by in the one remaining lane. He’d have seen the flashing lights of the two ambulances and the fire engine. He’d have seen the concerned pickup driver and the woman who had gone to the call box standing in the rain, drenched and wringing their hands.
 

Though it’s broken, its fragmented bits clinging to embedded rebar, the concrete divider would have prevented Paul from seeing the small white sheet on the asphalt, rippling gently under the falling rain, a still, child-sized lump beneath it.

“Shameful,” the taxi driver says again. By the time Paul realizes that the man is talking, and looks up to see what he means, the accident has fallen away behind them, and the taxi drives on, leaving rubberneck drivers in its wake, carrying Paul away from his family and to the coast, where his dark and empty home stands, waiting.

Eleanor wakes up from a dream that she is falling, not toward anything in particular, but from some indeterminate height, and without gathering much speed. In her dream she has been tumbling slowly, almost gently, through a pleasant updraft. There was no earth below her, only endless blue. She doesn’t wake from the dream because it frightens her—she dreams this dream all the time—but because the migraine that sent her to bed early the night before has returned, manifesting itself in a red pulse above and behind her left eye. She visualizes the pain in much the same way every time it returns: as a long, hollow, strong needle that slides through her eye and into her brain, and then, not content with simply invading, begins to rotate like a long spoon in a cauldron. It scrambles her thoughts and puts her pain receptors on high alert, and she starts from bed so quickly that she almost tumbles to the floor—something else that is not an uncommon occurrence.
 

The red pulse starts with pinpoint accuracy, almost a single red dot flexing and trembling, overlaying her vision, and then it broadens, as it always does, until her left eye sees the world through an alarming red haze. She focuses on each breath that she takes in and releases, visualizing the air rushing through her nose, into her lungs, and out again. She imagines that the outgoing breath carries her pain away with it.

Today it doesn’t help. She loses sight in her left eye a moment after waking, and she can tell that today is one of the worst days, because flickers of red encroach upon the sight in her remaining eye, like a filmstrip curling and melting on the reel.
 

“Mom,” Eleanor says, but her voice comes out in a whisper. Even that small sound aggravates the migraine, and the pain swells like the sea, threatening to overtake her.
 

She turns in her bed, delicately lowering her feet to the floor. Her head pounds with every tiny movement, but she doesn’t have a choice. She needs to find her mother, who will know what to do.

Except this is just an errant thought, and dimly, through the flaring pain, Eleanor knows this. Agnes will
not
know what to do. It wouldn’t matter if she did. Agnes is most likely in the same place she was when Eleanor went to bed the night before: curled into a worrisome and small ball in the blue corduroy-upholstered recliner in the den. Agnes will be lost to Eleanor, lost to the whole world around her, courtesy of the slim, tall vodka bottle that will almost certainly stand near-empty on the end table.

This realization swims up to Eleanor through the red sea around her, and she adjusts her course of action. In the bathroom, in the medicine cabinet, is a plastic bottle of migraine pills. She gets to her feet, arms extended to steady herself, and walks across the carpeted bedroom floor at a ponderous pace.
 

In the hallway, she stands on the cool hardwood floor. The smooth wood feels like a balm on her skin, rather than the painful overstimulation of the carpet, its every loop a barb in her heightened state. During the worst headaches, her every cell becomes hyper-sensitive, attuned to each air molecule that brushes against her. A mote of dust collides with her skin like a meteor. Everything hurts.
 

She can faintly hear Agnes snoring downstairs.
 

On an ordinary day she would wake a bit later, shower and dress, and prepare breakfast for herself, making a little extra for her mother. As the toast browned in the toaster, she would go to the den and wake Agnes, and make her eat something. Agnes would pick at her breakfast with trembling hands; her eyes, red and bleary, would stare through the table at nothing. Eleanor would kiss her mother’s cheek and leave her at the table, then ride her bicycle to school. Later she would return home to find her mother asleep again—sometimes in the blue corduroy recliner, sometimes on the couch, on very rare occasions in her bed upstairs. Sometimes Agnes wouldn’t have moved from the table at all. Mostly she remains confined to the ground floor, perhaps recognizing, despite her degraded condition, that stairs are a dangerous gauntlet for a woman who is almost constantly drunk.

Eleanor finds the bottle of migraine pills and takes three of them, scooping water from the bathroom tap to wash them down. She pats her hand dry on a towel and returns to her room. The clock radio beside her bed reads 7:14, and she feels a bolt of panic. When the numbers flip to 7:15, the clock radio will come alive with the loud jangles of 97.3, the sonic shrapnel of which will almost surely drop Eleanor to the floor, where the red will overtake her entirely. So she walks as quickly as she can without sending seismic waves from her feet to her brain.
 

She makes it, sliding the alarm’s switch to the off position and in the same movement softly flying into her bed, visualizing a feather wafting from the ceiling to the creaky mattress. She pulls the blankets over herself and lies very still on her back and pulls her extra pillow over her face and presses it down, down against her humming skin and eyes, feeling the surge of her heartbeat through her veins; and after a very long while, she crashes into sleep, and stays home from school with her incapacitated mother, who snores on in the blue corduroy chair downstairs.

When Eleanor wakes, her bedroom has fallen into cool gray shadow. She blinks slowly, but the red gauze has removed itself from her eyes, and she lies still for a long moment, attuned to her body’s state of being, and realizes that the migraine has gone away, leaving behind only the slightest headache. The long needle is gone; the thrum of blood pounding in her veins has receded.

She sighs, then takes in several slow breaths, releases them, and feels her muscles relax.
 

She turns onto her side and looks at the clock. 8:22. Which means she has slept for more than twelve hours. She lies there, still, shifting her attention to the sounds of the house. The faint ticking behind the wall means that the heat has recently shut off, and Eleanor reminds herself to adjust the thermostat later. Winter has long since become spring, and the house has felt uncomfortably warm lately.
 

Beyond the heating system, Eleanor hears nothing at all. She wonders if her mother has slept the entire day away, too. She dresses as though it is morning and the day lies new and glistening before her, pulling on a pair of clean shorts and a bright orange T-shirt with
Stussy
printed across the middle in aggressive script. She runs her hands through her short red hair, grateful for its abbreviated length, which means there are no painful tangles to brush out. She has kept her hair short for all the years since the accident, the memory of Esmerelda’s torn hair and bits of scalp forever seared into her mind.
 

Eleanor shakes her head to clear the memory, then opens the door to the hallway. She pauses again on the landing, cocking her head and listening for any sounds, but none come from downstairs. The ceiling above her creaks a little, and she glances up, curious, and notices that the attic door is open. A thin, dim light shines through the narrow opening.
 

Eleanor pulls the door open and looks up the stairs and sees the glow of a light. She cannot see past the half-wall at the top of the staircase, but she hears the creak again, slower and more pronounced now.

“Agnes?” Eleanor calls.
 

She climbs the stairs carefully. They’re caked with dust, but the dust is thinner in alternating patches on each step. Footprints, made by unsteady feet.

“Agnes?” she calls again.

She reaches the top of the stairs and sees that the single bulb fixed to the ceiling is alight, its weak glow barely illuminating the empty attic. Her mother sits cross-legged in the middle of the floor, her back to Eleanor. There is a bottle of Wild Turkey beside her, but no glass, and as Eleanor opens her mouth to ask Agnes what she’s doing, her mother lifts the bottle and tilts it against her lips.