Eleanor by Jason Gurley Read Free Book Online Page B

is just traffic—he’s too unnerved by his worries to even think of relaxing.
    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