deeplyshallow // eleanor no. 35

eleanor no. 35

Eleanor drives south in the gathering dark. A low sky, gray like sluicewater, looms overhead, ripples of angry clouds pushing against the mountains. Fog tumbles down over the brush of forest, breaks against the land, spills out wide and fast until the road ahead is erased by a clouded film of white. Her headlights reflect back at her, and she slows, expecting at any moment the road before her wheels to break away and send her into some wating abyss. She thinks, wrongly, that she will never see Oregon again. She is barely seeing it now, lost as it is in the fog. No more than an hour later she escapes across the California border, and the fog shears cleanly away at the state line. Behind her Oregon is a tangible block of gray, a cross-section of cloud and fog and rain. California brings a sudden fresh wind, strong and cool, and above her the sky is revealed as if a ceiling has been peeled back. She stares at the moon and stars like a prisoner given a taste of sunlight, stares so long that she loses track of the highway, and the ridges of the asphalt shoulder thrum beneath her tires. Eleanor yanks the car back onto the road, then begins to think of stopping. A blue sign advises her that she has miles to go before she can rest, but she stops anyway. The highway has become rougher and is as empty as the land it bisects, land etched hard by moonlight, scrub brush and loose rock pale beneath the light of faraway stars. She turns the engine off and climbs out of her car, the sudden burst of cargo light startling her from her reverie. The world is quiet except for the distant hum of tires on some unseen road; the sound echoes across the land and fades, leaving behind only the sound of nothing, a discernible absence of white noise. She can hear the wind itself picking across the macadam, scratching at every buckle and defect in its surface. The moon is so large it seems to contribute its own silence to the stillness. Eleanor leans against the car and squints up at the stars. She hunts for the seas of the moon, which flares so brightly in the night that the details of its crust go white and indefinite. After a moment her eyes grow accustomed to the brightness. If she looks just to the right or left, the gray scars become somewhat more visible, appearing as soft, ashy smudges on the surface. She sighs and looks around her, at the unbearable dark, and for a moment the aloneness sucks at her, and she has a sudden and terrible urge to cry. Her eyes brim but she shakes it off; she will not be weak today. Somewhere far behind her is the house Jack owns but is not in; it is made cavernous by his absence, and Eleanor is through with feeling like a lost child in that dark, waiting as she has done for nearly a year now, time and again, for him to return and cast his light about. She has had enough of that sort of life. There is a fresh one out there, and she’s of a mind to search it out. She doesn’t much want this new life, but she has been thinking lately that it is something she needs. It will taste bad at first, but she will taste it differently after a time. It will be good for her. All of that is yet to come; for now she leans against the car in the California dark and thinks of Jack. He is on the road himself, somewhere else in this night. She plays with the idea of encountering him on this very highway, just around the bend ahead. She stops for pancakes in an all-night diner and he is there, perched at the counter, his blue pickup angled into a parking space outside. What will she say? Enough, she will say. When you go home, I will be gone. No, she thinks. He would say something like But you’re already gone, you’re right here, and her resolve will come apart and the next thing you know she’ll be trailing his square taillights back across the California border, picking those red lights out in the fog, watching them wink out as he kills the engine in their driveway. She will follow him inside and that will be that. Eleanor sighs, more tired than she has expected, and eyes the point on the horizon where the road twists up a hill and out of sight. That bend right there, that’s where she has imagined the all-night diner. Will it be there? And will he? Behind her, out of sight by a hundred miles or more, Oregon still sleeps beneath its blanket of fog. She is caught between the certainty of his absence and the possibility of his presence. She can go nowhere tonight, and drives the car a little farther off of the shoulder, and tugs a red blanket around her and tries to sleep in the back seat. Through the dusty windows she can still see the stars, and she is just thinking that they are too bright to be sleeping beneath when she disappears into sleep. When she dreams, it is of the dive from Huffnagle, except it is different: Eleanor dives off of the cliff and is carried up into the sky like a dandelion seed, the whole of the island and the sea and the world swept away from beneath her, and with it, Jack, too.