Eleanor (23 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

E
leanor sat with Tabitha all day on Good Friday and slept the night in her mother's bed. It was a tight fit, but Eleanor wouldn't think of leaving. Tabitha took pain tablets at twice the rate the doctor prescribed and was unable to get herself to the bathroom unaided. She mostly slept, waking up suddenly at times and looking around the room as if newborn and frightened. Eleanor would soothe her mother, put her arms around her until she found her bearings.

“It's such a nice day, cupcake. You should go outside and play,” she'd say before falling asleep again.

Eleanor stayed in the bed so as not to jostle Tabitha out of her fitful sleep. Her muscles stiffened and ached. She listened to her mother's labored breathing, smelled the death in it, large and certain. Color faded from her mother's hands until Eleanor thought she could see bones beneath the skin like through wax paper.

Eleanor didn't cry. She thought and worried and waited. Mostly she waited. She didn't know what she waited for—for death most likely, but also she waited because she had trust in David. He had said problems work themselves out, and not to worry. So Eleanor tried not to worry and waited instead for things to work themselves out as promised.

At dawn on Easter Sunday, Tabitha shook Eleanor awake with her cold thin hands.

“Cupcake,” she said. “Happy Easter.” Tabitha looked joyful. It made Eleanor smile, and she kissed her mother good morning.

“Happy Easter, Mom,” she said. “Should I make us some eggs?”

“No,” she said. “Open the drapes, and let's watch the sun come up.”

She got up and threw open the curtains. Tangerine light filled the room. The sky was clear and bright; azure heavens grew out of the darkness touched by the orange rays.

“It's beautiful,” Tabitha said.

She sat up in her bed and pulled Eleanor beside her. Arm in arm, they watched the Easter sunrise together.

“I feel like some ice cream,” Tabitha said. “How about you go get us some.”

“What kind?” she asked.

“Cookie dough,” she said. It was Eleanor's favorite.

“Okay,” said Eleanor. “If the grocery is closed, I'll go to the truck stop.”

“Take your time,” she said, her voice cracking with emotion. “Enjoy the day. Enjoy every day.”

Eleanor knew then.

Her insides turned inside out and emptied. The vacuum inside her gasped for air. She was suddenly cold. She stopped in the doorway and looked at her mother.

Tabitha pulled a melancholy smile across her tired lips. Her eyes glistened in the sunlight, moist and sorrowful.

“Momma?”

“Sorry, cupcake,” her mother said softly. “Go,” she said. “Get two spoons.” Then she turned to face the light and closed her eyes. She lifted her chin to feel the warmth caress her face. She turned her head as if listening to music, a slow, wandering, silent waltz.

Eleanor watched for a while then found her jacket and left.

A block away she ducked into an abandoned lot and hid behind a pile of old mattresses and tires. She fell onto her knees and covered her face. She burst into tears and sobbed until she could not breathe. Gasping and dizzy, she fell over and curled herself up as small as she could be. She cried like it was prayer, as if she could buy a favor from the universe if only she could shed enough tears. She cried like she had not cried for fifty years. She cried as she had for her lost family and tasted the same tears today as she had then, when she had lost everything but her life. It was cold comfort then and also on this day.

She lay there and cried until she could cry no more. She felt her puffy face with her fingers and imagined she looked like a raspberry. She laughed despite herself. The sun was well high when she found her feet again and staggered home.

Tabitha was dead. She lay just as Eleanor had left her, her face toward the window, her hands on her lap. She knew what had happened. Death wanted solitude. She'd seen creatures leave their dens, abandon their families, herds, or packs and crawl away wounded and bloody to find a place to die alone. It was instinct.

Eleanor sat in her mother's room all Easter and watched the sunshine move across the walls of the little room until she sat lost and alone in the darkness. She didn't cry anymore. She waited and watched the terrible stillness which had been her most cherished thing in the world. Her thoughts went to the woman who had brought her out of the wilderness, who had loved her like her own child, monster that she was.

It was not until the small hours of night, when the moonlight filled the room with blue memories of the morning's dawn, that Eleanor began to think of what to do next. She pondered the question until Monday morning when she heard the school bus pass by the house. It didn't even slow down to look for her.

At eleven o'clock, the phone rang. Eleanor knew who it would be. She answered it.

“Hello,” she said in Tabitha's raspy voice.

“This is Jamesford High School. Eleanor Anders didn't arrive at school today.”

“She's staying home,” she said. “Possibly all week. Please make a note of it.”

“Will do, Mrs. Anders. Good-bye.”

Eleanor hung up and took a shower. She smelled of tire rubber, mouse droppings, and tears. She put on heavy work clothes, the ones she used for gardening. Out back, she found a pick and shovel from the shed and opened a grave in their tomato garden. By the time school let out and Eleanor heard the bus pass going the other way, she had laid the last spadeful of earth over her beloved Tabitha.

She'd wrapped her in her bed sheets, sewed her into them as sailors did. She was shocked at how light her mother's body was. She'd carried her into their backyard and carefully placed her in the hole, bending her knees into a fetal position, which Eleanor thought was right and proper. She took a long moment to look in the shallow hole, at the strange sheeted specter within it. Then she covered it in soil.

Nothing was just going to just work out. Why did she trust so much? It was stupid, and painful, and she was a fool to keep doing it. It had cost her parents their lives, cost her this agony and uncertainty. She was stupid, and she was lost, and she was afraid.

She went into the house, numb and tired. She collapsed in a chair and fell asleep.

When she woke, the room was lit in dusk-yellow sunshine. She woke knowing instantly where she was and what had happened. And also, what she was going to do.

She took off her clothes, and after checking that all the doors were locked and lights put out, she went into the bathroom and latched the door.

She had her mother's taste in her mouth. Up in the soft palate above her throat, in a pocket that she didn't think others possessed, was the taste of her mother, a memory, a map. She absorbed it from the pocket.

A sudden jolt, like an electric shock down her throat, sent her to the floor convulsing in tremors. She screamed from the pain. Her body was on fire, the change had begun. Tabitha was taller but much lighter than Eleanor. So much to rearrange. This would not be as painful as Dwight, she thought, but it was not going to be a summer Celeste visit either. Her bones extended, broke, healed, and snapped again. She threw herself in the bathtub and ran a cool shower to absorb the heat pouring out of her body like blood from an open wound.

She jumped out once, twice, three times to use the toilet as her body excluded unnecessary mass and reshaped the rest. Her fresh young skin sloughed off in sheets like a shedding snake, and she broke it up with her toes until it could slide down the drain. The bath tub ran red and black with blood. She stifled her screams and gritted her teeth and tried to find something in her monstrous transformation to be happy about. She could not.

She tried to embrace the monster she was. She searched for someone who'd done this to her, who'd led her to believe
she could be happy, lied to her, betrayed her, abandoned her. Someone she could strike out at. But she had only herself to blame. Tabitha had been nothing but love, and stupid Eleanor, stupid whatever-her-real-name-was, had let herself be seduced by it. And now Eleanor was dead, as surely as the withered husk buried in the garden, Eleanor Anders was dead. There was no going back.

By morning, it was over. Eleanor found herself asleep under a cold shower and moved to shut off the water. Reaching across her body caused an immediate shot of pain like a wall of hot needles. Her new shape was sore and stiff. When she finally turned the water off, she sat back and waited for the pain to cease. It didn't.

She rolled out of the bathtub and on to the floor. Pain stabbed at her from the inside. She screamed. It was Tabitha's scream. It was a sound she never heard because her mother had never faced this suffering without her pills as she did now. Eleanor-become-Tabitha writhed on the floor wracked in agony, every bone, every joint, every muscle, and every organ in her body dying in a hellish cancer. She could only scream and then she laughed, catching her breath between screams—she laughed.

She was Tabitha dying of cancer. It was a new hell. She knew it would not kill her. Her cells, her monster cells, would not let it progress to that end. This could not kill her. Instead it would hold her in limbo at the very edge of destruction. It was constant, painful suffering, torment, forever teetering at the limits of endurance. Her body resetting the disease and then her healthy cells in perpetual battle every minute of her life. The only comfort she found was in thinking that this frail body would be easier to kill than her last one. Perhaps a cold could overcome her suddenly and finish her miserable life. Or maybe a terrible fall, so massive that her copy cells would not be able to save her.

She crawled to Tabitha's bedroom, her bedroom now, and found her mother's pill bottles on the nightstand. She pulled one down and looked at the label, but her eyes could not for the throbbing in her head and their long degeneration. At the end, Tabitha had been nearly blind and had kept it from Eleanor.

She concentrated. She felt her eyeballs pull and contort in her head until she could see enough to read the label and saw it was the right bottle. She took twice what was directed and pulled herself onto the bed to wait for them to work.

In thirty minutes, she could breathe normally. In an hour, she could stand. With effort, she might be able to learn to work around the illness. She'd made her eyes into something else. Tabitha couldn't see, but she'd been able to reform her eyes, if only for a while, and use them. The same thing might work on her legs. She began practicing and planning.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

I
t didn't come easy. Without a direct need, her body was content to remain as it was. Sudden emergencies could make it happen, or stress, when survival depended upon it, or when that unknowable primitive part of her took control, like at the prom or the bookstore. Five days after Tabitha died, she'd made little progress. She could walk a half-dozen steps before the pain, even through the narcotic tablets, drove her to a chair. She visualized her muscles strengthening, found she could will blood to them, make them firm up, but when she lost focus, her body snapped back to its frail copy like a released rubber band.

David called every day. Tabitha answered and told him that Eleanor was busy, and she'd call him back. When she didn't, he grew more insistent.

“Mrs. Anders, I just want to know she's okay.”

“She's fine, David. Just leave her alone.”

“Can I just say hello? I might be able to help.”

“No, David. She doesn't want to talk to anyone. Please leave her alone. You're making things worse.”

“What things?”

“Good-bye, David.”

What could she tell him? She didn't have answers. Eleanor couldn't come to the phone. It was as simple as that. Eleanor was gone.

She practiced applying makeup in the mirror until her arms shook from the strain. She was running out of pain killers and had cut back to make them stretch another week. No limit had been placed on the refills, but she didn't feel up to getting them.

On May Day, she walked to the mailbox and retrieved two weeks of bills, coupon flyers, and a pink enveloped addressed to Eleanor. She took the bills to the kitchen table and scribbled checks in her broken handwriting. The rest she threw in the garbage.

After missing two weeks of school, Mr. Curtz called personally about Eleanor.

“She's in danger of failing her classes,” he explained.

“Eleanor is out of town visiting a sick aunt,” Tabitha said. “I'm sure she can catch up.”

“She left you alone?”

“I'm feeling much better,” she said.

“That's good news.” He spoke as if he knew more about her condition than he should. She immediately suspected Stephanie Pearce, the big mouthed social worker.

“She might not be back for a while,” she said. “What are her options? Will she have to retake the grade?” It was something a mother would ask.

“No, but a semester of summer school might be needed.”

“Will that be necessary?” she asked, putting a challenge into her voice.

Mr. Curtz hesitated then said, “We'll look at it when she gets back. When will that be?”

“Soon, I hope.”

When David's calls grew more desperate, she used the same story on him. Hearing his voice upset her. She had to stay focused. So she lied to him to give herself a chance.

When Stephanie Pearce called on Monday, she did not have to lie. Pearce didn't ask about Eleanor or even about Tabitha's health. She was quick and to the point. “I'll be by on Thursday,” she said. “See you then.”

The house was neglected. Unable to move easily, she'd let it fall to pieces. It was dusty and dirty and she hadn't been up in the loft since Easter, not that there was any threat of Pearce looking up there. The kitchen smelled of canned tuna, rotten apples, and garbage. The garden was overgrown with uncut grass. The front flowerbed was untended and thick with weeds.

It was time. She was out of food anyway and nearly out of painkillers. If she didn't act now, she'd lose the opportunity. The day before Pearce's scheduled visit, Tabitha took triple pain medication, put on her best clothes and spent an hour finessing her makeup with unsteady hands. There were two driving services that operated in Jamesford during tourist season, and she called one for a ride.

She didn't know the driver, but was pleased that he knew the location of the social support building. She sat in the back seat, clutching her handbag and looking out a window. Jamesford was aglow in tulips and tree blossoms. Early vacationers rode rented horses down the dusty roads to the art galleries to show off their new Stetson hats and designer boots. The air was warm, fragrant, and clean.

She waited in the foyer of the former hardware store turned civil offices. Her visit was unscheduled. Stephanie was in the office but tied up on a conference call for another quarter hour. Tabitha told the receptionist she'd wait.

A Native American woman with a babe in her arms stared at her across the waiting room. Tabitha smiled in polite greeting, but the woman didn't react. The woman's other child, a four-year-old boy, played with blocks in the corner and ignored her.

“Mrs. Anders,” Stephanie said. “I'm surprised to see you here.”

Tabitha got up and offered Pearce her hand as she'd done countless times before. “I was in the neighborhood. I thought I could save you a visit tomorrow.”

She led Tabitha to her office and shut the door.

“How'd you get here?” the social worker asked.

“I got a ride,” she answered cheerfully. “I was out shopping.”

“Where's Eleanor?” she asked.

Tabitha knew she had to be careful.

“She's moping at home,” she said.

“Mr. Curtz said she was out of town.”

“Only for a little while,” she said. “She's back now, just not ready to go back to school. She wonders what's the point.”

“She has to go to school,” Pearce said.

“I know, but she thinks you're going to ship her off to a new one.”

Pearce sighed. “Yes, I'm afraid that's true. I have a family in Riverton who're ready to take her. I was going to tell both of you tomorrow.”

“When?”

She studied Tabitha appraisingly. “Actually, I thought you'd be anxious for the care center by now.”

“As you can see, I'm not,” she said and smiled, hoping her gums had some color in them.

“It's good to see you up and about, but we're past this,” Pearce said. “Willow Canyon has a place opening up Monday. I've already made the arrangements.”

She was shocked. “Five days?” she said.

“And the McNamara's are anxious to meet Eleanor. They have a boy just a little older than her. In fact they have three other kids. Eleanor will have a family of new siblings.”

“Same day?”

“Naturally. It's all arranged.”

“Couldn't she stay in Jamesford?” Tabitha asked. “She wants to stay here and be with her friends. She wants to attend school here. Can't she be here?”

“Honestly, Tabitha. I don't think that would be such a good idea. Eleanor needs a fresh start. She needs it emotionally and socially. This is a small town. She should get out and try new things.”

“Did you even look in Jamesford?”

“There was no need. We have no foster families here,” she said. “And if we did, I don't think they'd take Eleanor. I'm sorry, Tabitha, but Eleanor's troubled past haunts her.”

“Rumors. We're damned by rumors.” Her voice broke, and she was overcome with a coughing fit. The pills were wearing off, and she felt death in her body.

“But look at me. I'm getting around.”

Pearce was unmoved. “It's all for the best,” she said. “Don't be afraid of change.”

Tabitha laughed, a dark meaningful laugh that made Stephanie pull back in her chair.

“Put your things in order,” she said. “Don't make it harder on Eleanor. We don't need a scene.”

Tabitha cleared her throat only to bring on another fit. Stephanie got up and fetched her a cup of water. Tabitha took the cup and sipped it. When she stopped coughing, she crushed the cup and let if fall to the floor.

“Mrs. Anders,” Pearce said sympathetically.

Tabitha looked at her and shook her head. “I tried,” she said. She got up as if in a trance and walked out of the office and into the street.

Every movement hurt. Every step shot pain up her back and into her skull like a flaming rocket. The water in her stomach threatened to come up. Her eyes were blurred and she was tired enough to die.

That was it then. The last hope for Eleanor. Gone.

She passed the drug store without going inside. Her pills were waiting there, but she didn't need them anymore. She had enough for the day. That's all she'd need.

At the grocery, she loaded a cart with milk, ice cream, pork roasts, steaks, Pop-Tarts, vitamins, and the dregs of the Easter candy. She bought three gallons of stove fuel and a stove she didn't need.

At the checkout, the cashier was unable to give Tabitha the three hundred dollars she wanted to withdraw using her debit card. A sweaty manager was summoned to deal with the situation. Tabitha produced her bank card and identification. She stared them down while the manager compared the healthy face in the picture to the dreadful visage before them asking for money.

“Don't be a fool, Mr. Woods. You know that's Tabitha Anders.” It was Karen Venn. She walked from behind the customer service desk and took the cards from the manager's hands. “Sorry, Tabitha,” she said, handing them back to her.

“We don't usually allow this much,” Mr. Woods said. “Fifty is usually as high as we go.”

“I need three hundred,” Tabitha said coldly.

“I guess we can oblige,” he said. “Miss Venn, can you see to it?”

Tabitha paid for her groceries with her state food card and then followed Karen to another counter.

“Going on a trip?” she asked.

“Something like that.”

“How's Eleanor?”

“Fine,” she said curtly, making it clear she wasn't in the mood for conversation.

She counted the money for Tabitha, who scooped it into her pocket. She pulled a business card from her purse and slid it across the counter.

“Could you call this number for me?” she said. “It's a ride service.”

“Of course,” she said.

Tabitha left the card in the store. It was another thing she no longer needed.

She sat on a bench in front of the store, waiting for the car to take her home. She remembered the driver. He was a scruffy, freckled man in his late twenties, a son of the pioneers who'd run cattle here and cut the trees for the railroad. He'd be invisible in most Wyoming towns. He'd do.

She heard the patter of footsteps because she was listening. Tabitha's senses were dull from disease, but the creature that was her now needed them and so they came. If she listened, she could hear; if she looked, she would see. The first day's pain of reforming her eyes was a distant memory. When tired, unfocused, and uncaring, they'd blunt, but when alert, when hunting, she was sensitive as she'd ever been. Her body might betray her, but her senses did not.

David rounded the corner of the grocery at a sprint. He caught sight of Tabitha sitting on the bench and hurried over. The hired car pulled into the parking lot. She stood up.

“Mrs. Anders,” he said out of breath. “How are you?”

“I'm fine, David,” she said, waving for the car.

“How's Eleanor?” he said.

She looked at him, memorizing his tired, expectant face, knowing it was the last time she'd see it.

“Forget her, David,” she said. “She's a cloud.”

The car pulled in front of the store and popped the trunk.

“It's my birthday Saturday,” he said. “Mrs. Anders, all I want for my birthday is to see your daughter. Can you please get her to come?”

“Don't get your hopes up,” she said.

“I miss her,” he said miserably. “I want to see her again. It's my birthday. We're having cake and everything. Tell her to come.”

“She's gone, David.” The driver closed the groceries in the trunk and opened the door for her.

“Then bring her back,” he pleaded. “At least for my birthday.”

She got in the car and closed the door. David stared at her through the window.

“Home?” the driver asked.

“Home,” she said.