Eleanor (19 page)

Tabitha emerged from the office followed by Mr. Curtz. He held the door open for her, but his face was anything but courteous. He averted his eyes from Eleanor and officiously strolled over to Mrs. Hart's table.

David, who'd been watching Eleanor, followed Mr. Curtz with interest. The principal whispered something into the teacher's ear. Mrs. Hart shook her head, but Mr. Curtz persisted. Mrs. Hart got up, excused herself, and followed Mr. Curtz to a quiet corner by the exit.

Eleanor watched Mr. Curtz explain whatever he had to say to Mrs. Hart in the briefest terms. He held his hand over his lips as he spoke like Eleanor had seen gangsters do on television. After a couple minutes of back-and-forth, Mr. Curtz caught the teacher in his gaze and held her there until she nodded in vigorous assent. Mrs. Hart's eyes searched the room and fell on Eleanor. She calculated her teacher's expression as equal parts contempt, anger, humiliation, and fear; a soup of unsettling emotions merging into a meek, submissive countenance that Eleanor found strangely satisfying.

David glanced from Mrs. Hart to Eleanor. He smiled to her as if understanding. Eleanor held his gaze a moment too long, and his smile widened even more.

“What now, Mom?” Eleanor said.

“Ice cream?” she said.

“Aren't we going to talk to Mrs. Hart?” she asked.

“I don't think we have to. Do you?”

“I know I don't want to,” she said.

“Then, ice cream it is.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

S
unday morning before dawn, Eleanor woke up and left the house while Tabitha slept quietly. An early spring rain threatened to cover the valley with clouds and stinging drizzle for the whole day.

Eleanor swiftly navigated her way through the foggy wet streets and, before the sun was up, she slipped past half a dozen sleeping dogs and into the Venn's trailer park.

Carefully and quietly, she pried up the skirting around the base of the mobile home and crawled under it. There wasn't much room, but it was dry and she could hear inside the house from there. She closed the skirting behind her and waited for the family to wake up.

Her plan was not wholly thought out. In one iteration, she considered sneaking into their van and stowing away with them on the trip to Wild River Reservation. A more sensible one, one that she finally settled on in the cold, freezing morning rain, was to get inside the house and see David's room.

It was an impulsive plan. She didn't know what she expected to find. She knew only that she had to know more about what was happening in David's life. It woke her up in the early hours of the night, and she hadn't been able to get back to sleep.

She cared about him. She thought about him daily, dreamed of him, remembered him warmly, and then inevitably, she'd flush with shame when remembering prom night. He was one in a million, and she was a monster. But that hadn't kept her from thinking about him or from missing him. Tabitha had accused her of being stubborn, but Eleanor knew better. She was being safe. Safe keeps you alive. Stubborn keeps you alive. But now she was also curious. Curiosity, well, that can get you killed. Just ask the cat.

She wished she could ignore David, pretend he wasn't stalking her like an owl after a field mouse. But she couldn't. She knew he was. He wasn't going away. He'd figure it out. He'd discover she was a monster and that would end it there. She only had to wait. But her curiosity wouldn't let her. She had to know what David was up to, and so she lay on the dirt under his house and waited.

Eleanor couldn't help but think that his trip to the reservation was about her. It was egocentric of her, she knew, to think that their family trip was about her, but that's where her paranoia took her.

Wendy was up first and watched cartoons for an hour before anyone else roused. Karen was next and woke David up with frying bacon. He stumbled into the kitchen.

“You'll still take me, won't you, Ma?” he asked over a yawn.

“Why do you keep asking me that? It'll be fun.”

“And you're okay with letting me talk to Mr. Crow alone?”

Eleanor heard a spatula scrape on a pan.

“Mom, is it okay?” David said again.

Karen sighed. “Yeah, it's okay. Can you at least tell me what it's about?”

“I told you. It's personal,” he said.

“Is it about Eleanor Anders?” she asked.

“I told you it's personal,” he said.

“It was good to see Mrs. Anders out again at school, wasn't it? Glad she's getting better.”

“Yeah, that was nice.”

“Have you talked to Eleanor? What does she say about the cancer?”

“You know,” he said. “Not much.”

“She won't talk to him,” Wendy said.

“Shut up, big mouth.”

“David thinks she's cursed,” she said. “He's going to get a witchdoctor to save her.”

“I never said that, you little twerp. It's not what I said at all. Mind your own business.”

“So this trip is about Eleanor,” said David's mother. “You think she's cursed?”

“No. Don't be stupid.”

“But she won't talk to you?”

“Can we change the subject?”

Eleanor heard David stomp out of the kitchen and into his room. A couple of minutes later she heard Karen's footsteps follow. She knocked and went in.

“Mom, I could have been naked.”

“I've seen you naked plenty of times,” she said. “I want to talk to you about Eleanor.”

“Can't I have a personal life, Mom? What happened to privacy?”

“Of course you can, dear. I just want to say something.”

“Say it,” he said. “I have to get ready. We have to be there by ten.”

“David, I know you like the Anders girl. It was great you took her to prom. I'm sure it did her a world of good. You're a nice guy, always looking out for underdogs. That was really nice of you.”

“But?” David said.

“But, if she doesn't want to see you, maybe that's not such a bad thing. I've heard stories about her, and it might be for the best if you to keep your distance.”

“What stories? That she can change her hair color at will? Or was it that she can smell fear? Hear whispers across a grandstand? That she heals too fast? What bunk have you heard?”

“No, honey, don't get upset,” she said. “I haven't heard anything like that. There are just some people who say she's got a reputation. There was something about a trucker, and then there was whatever happened at prom.”

“Were you there?” asked David. “You know how people get a reputation? Other people talk about them. It's all gossip and slander, Mom.”

“Of course it is,” she said. “I don't say I believe it. I'm only telling you what other people think.”

“And that matters?”

“It might.”

“I've got to get ready, Mom. Can we leave soon?”

“Sure, honey,” she said and closed the door.

Eleanor listened under David's bedroom, barely able to breathe.

Half an hour later, the Venns piled into their van and drove away. Eleanor waited under the house for twenty more minutes before coming out. She looked up and down the trailers, smelled, and listened. She was alone. The rain kept everyone inside. The drizzle had changed to a downpour.

She found the key under the steps hanging on a nail. She took one more look down the rain-blown street and let herself in. She waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark. The kitchen hadn't been put away, and the smell of bacon hung heavy in the air. Wendy's toys were strewn about the couch and floor, and a half-finished glass of orange juice rested on the TV.

A black shape suddenly jumped out from behind a chair. She shrieked and stumbled backwards. A black and white cat mewed and leapt on her leg. It dug its claws into her pants and climbed up her thigh like it was a tree trunk. It complained when she plucked it off her. Then it purred as loud as an idling tractor and cried for attention. She knew this cat. It was the one-eyed cat from her neighborhood. She'd not seen it in weeks and assumed it'd died. But it hadn't. It was in David's trailer, saucy, fat, and playful. Knowing what to look for, she smelled the cat food, litter box, and dander in the air. She'd missed it for the bacon.

Carrying the purring cat, Eleanor threaded her way through the narrow trailer hall. She knew where everyone's rooms were and went into David's. She pushed the door open, and, seeing his curtains drawn, she switched on the light.

She'd never been in a boy's room before. She expected it to be wall-to-wall dirty clothes, pin-up posters, and dust, but David's room was neat and clean. It was small. His narrow bed was made and set under the window. On the opposite wall, David had a picture of himself standing beside his father in uniform in front of a military barracks. The picture was a few years old. In it, David beamed with pride, but there was something strange in his father's face. Eleanor couldn't make it out, but she thought that beneath the photo smile, there was something else. Something dark. She was paranoid, she reminded herself, and looked away.

David's school books were piled on a small desk beside a computer next to a narrow chest of drawers. David's shooting trophy stood on top of it beside the dried boutonniere he'd worn at the prom. Over the desk was a cork-board with a small printed map of Afghanistan. Eleanor identified the colored pins as showing places David's father had been or might be.

Eleanor opened David's closet and breathed in the scent. She'd not been this close to him since prom, and she drank in his smell excitedly. She poked around his shoes and looked in boxes of old toys and then came across a locked soft-sided suitcase under his bed. She pulled it out and felt the weight. It was heavy. She shook it and heard papers and books inside.

She examined the lock. It was a little three digit combination padlock on the zipper. Eleanor went to the desk, found a pen, and slipped it under the zipper where it attached at the hinge. She drew the pen along the zipper, opening the case in a few seconds. It was a trick she'd learned from her mother. Where she learned it, she never said.

Eleanor lifted the top and looked inside. She braced herself for a collection of skin magazines, but that's not what she found. She wished it was. What she found was David's research on her.

There was the forty-three dollar book by Dr. Sikring,
Skinwalkers,
that he'd bought at Bracker's Bookstore and several
secondhand paperbacks about Indian legends. There were hun
dreds of printed web pages about werewolves, doppelgängers, witches, banshees, mimics, and chameleons—monsters all. She felt sick.

David had found old school photographs of Eleanor. She looked at herself in each of her yearly class pictures and then, to her horror, found a picture of her from the summer after eighth grade pinned next to the photo of her at the beginning of eighth grade. The pictures were identical. She hadn't grown a millimeter. Her hair was exactly as it'd been before, she'd no tan, no scratches, nothing to differentiate the one self from the girl pictured ten months earlier. David had noticed it. He'd blown them up and printed them side by side from his computer.

Eleanor put everything back, ran the zipper down the side, centered the lock as she'd found it, and left.

She locked the front door behind her and replaced the key. She walked home slowly, letting the rain soak her and beat her, and wishing it would melt her away. Wasn't water supposed to do that to things like her?

Tabitha was waiting for her on the porch when she got home.

“Where were you?” she asked. “You could have left a note.”

“I was worried about David's trip to the reservation,” she said frankly. “I went over there.”

“You talked to him? You saw David?”

“No.”

“What did you do?”

“I spied on them and when they left, I snuck into David's room.”

“And you say you aren't in love,” Tabitha giggled.

“Mom, it's serious,” Eleanor said.

“At least you're not in jail,” she said.

“He thinks I'm a monster. And he's right.”

“I really hate it when you say stupid things,” Tabitha said. “What did you find?”

Eleanor gave her mother an account of the suitcase she found under David's bed. “You still think he's on our side?” she asked miserably.

“I don't know,” she said. “But he doesn't know anything yet. He's curious, that's all. He cares about you. Those books are crap, and you know it. It's all got to sound crazy, even to him.”

“What if he believes them anyway?”

“Honey, there's not even a name for you. Shapeshifter, doppelgänger, skinwalker—they're all great names, but they don't describe you.”

“They're not great names. They're evil names.”

“People are afraid of what they don't understand. David is trying to understand. He's going to do what he's going to do, think what he's going to think. He's got a lot to work with. He's got rumors, lies, books, and computers. But mostly, he has stories he's heard about you from your own mouth. You trusted him a great deal once. You don't do that often or easily. I don't think you've trusted badly. I won't lie to you and say that I'm not concerned about what he's doing, but if someone had to get on our trail, I'd rather it was him than some others. We're here now, baby. We'll get through this, whatever it is.”

“He's gone to the Indians, Mom.”

“You haven't done anything to anyone, cupcake. You've got nothing to fear.”

Though she smiled assuredly, Eleanor could see that her mother didn't believe it any more than she did.

“He has a cat,” Eleanor said thoughtfully.

“There, you see,” Tabitha said. “He can't be all bad.”