Eleanor (43 page)

“We’re on the beach,” Eleanor says. “I can’t get you onto the bicycle by myself.”

“Bi-bi-bi—” he tries to say.
 

“Can you hang on while I ride?” she asks.
 

Jack can only nod, and the nod turns into a spasm, and she wraps him up in her own cold arms while he shakes and shakes.

She puts him into the bathtub and runs water over his pale skin. The house is quiet except for the rush of water and the knock of Jack’s knees against the tub. The water overtakes him. She makes sure it isn’t more than lukewarm, and watches as his body takes on the slightest tinge of pink again.
 

Jack takes long, deep breaths, and she says, “Can you sit up on your own?”

He nods.
 

“I’ll make you some warm milk,” Eleanor says. “Stay here. Don’t drown.”

She finds another of Jack’s T-shirts in his bedroom, and pulls on a pair of his shorts. They’re too big, so she rolls the waistband down until it’s thick enough to hang on her hips.
 

The kitchen looks the same as it did hours before, when they sat at the table, poring over Jack’s box of memories, drinking watery hot cocoa. Eleanor pours milk into a coffee mug, and warms it in the microwave, and while it turns and turns inside the humming box, she studies the room more carefully. It occurs to her that every object she sees has a maker, has a lifespan, has a history. Someone put it together, or pulled levers on a machine that assembled it. Someone even assembled the machine that assembled the objects, probably someone who was even long dead by now.

Time is a river
, Mea told her.
You exist outside of it.

That was how it felt, too, inside the rift. But here, on the outside again—for this is how Eleanor thinks of the world around her now—she is all too aware of the passage of time. The glowing red numbers that jitter and change on the microwave readout. The faint tick of a clock somewhere in the house. She looks at the dining table and its chairs and wonders where they will be in twenty years, or fifty. They aren’t expensive pieces of furniture, and probably won’t last that long, but they have a story all the same. She imagines the dining set changing hands at a yard sale someday, or following Jack to college, or gathering dust, left behind after Jack’s father passes away.

She looks around the house and thinks,
Time is a gift
.

The microwave chimes.

He cradles the mug in his hands. Eleanor turns off the faucet.
 

“How do you feel?” she asks, but she can already see that he is going to be okay. His eyes are lit up from the inside again, and while the redness is still terrible, it is fading even now.
 

“You rowed us b-back,” he says. “How did you do that?”

Eleanor smiles and shrugs. “
You
did it,” she says. “Can’t be all that hard.”

He tries to smile, but it comes off as a grimace.
 

She lifts his hands and the mug of milk. “Drink,” she says. “Just be still, and warm up.”

“Hypo—” he begins.

“I don’t think you have hypothermia,” she says. “Your fingers and toes looked okay to me.”

He nods, then his eyes widen again. “Where did you g-g-go?” he asks. “Did it—”

Eleanor smiles brightly. “It
worked
,” she says.
 

Jack nods once more. “G-good.”

“I know what it all means now,” Eleanor says. “Everything is going to be okay.”

She sits on the edge of his bed after tucking him in. He’s wearing sweatpants, a sweatshirt, a wool hat, socks, a fleece jacket. The tremble hasn’t gone away entirely, but it has diminished.
 

“I have to go away again,” she says. “But I told Mea to let me come back and make sure you were safe first.”

He looks confused.
 

“It’s a long story, Jack. I can’t tell you all of it right now, but I’ll tell you when I come back.”

“From wh-where?”
 

“There’s something I have to do,” Eleanor says. “I can’t explain it. It’ll sound crazy, but it’s all going to be just fine.”

She touches his cheek softly. Jack leans into her hand.

“You did a very important thing for me,” Eleanor says. “You’re the only person who could have. You might not ever know how important it is. You probably won’t even remember it later. So I want to tell you before I leave that—that you—that what you did means everything to me.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t underst-st-stand.”

“I know.” She kisses him on his pink, rough cheek. “Thank you.”

“Wait,” he says.

But Eleanor is already heading for the door.

“It’s all going to be okay,” she says, pausing in the doorway. “Every single thing is going to be okay.”

And she leaves.

She coasts down the hill on Jack’s bicycle, and winds through town, past the darkened shops and blinking neon signs. The rain has stopped, but the roads are still slick. She pedals into her mother’s neighborhood, past squishy, puddled lawns and dripping mailboxes.
 

She stops at the end of the street and leans on one foot.

Her father’s Buick is parked in the driveway. She doesn’t know how much that means now, or if it means anything at all.

She wants to go inside the house. She wants to wake them up, and throw her arms around them both, and tell them that everything is going to be fine. But leaving them again would be impossible. They wouldn’t understand, and they wouldn’t let her go.

So she turns and points the bicycle toward the shore road, and the rowboat.

Eleanor crosses the sea that her grandmother so often swam, to the island that haunted her mother’s childhood, and climbs it in the dark. She doesn’t bother to shed Jack’s clothes this time. She wonders if they will come with her, or flutter down to the ocean, empty.
 

Without hesitating, she walks to the sharp edge of the cliff, and leaps.

She plunges through the sky, then tears through it, and the warm, pleasant dark welcomes her in.
 

Mea has been waiting.
 

Hello, Eleanor
, Mea says.
 

“Hello, Esmerelda,” Eleanor answers.

Eleanor settles into the darkness for a long visit. The more time she spends tangled in the black, laughing at the fine, stringy webs of color that burble up every time she moves, the less she thinks about Anchor Bend, and Jack, and her parents. She doesn’t even think about her sister—her sister who has somehow become something new and proud and strange—until Mea speaks.