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eleanor no. 8
Eleanor began to walk in her sleep.
She couldn’t trace this back to her dreams, would sit in bed for hours after waking just thinking, trying to onion-skin this new development, see the mechanisms beneath the surface of it. Trying to explain it. She thought once that it was the equivalent of an answered phone call, only with nobody on the other end of the line. She thought maybe it was God trying to speak to her, but couldn’t reconcile this with the fact that God actually had. If he was going to again, she wanted him to speak up already; she wasn’t interested in these shifty, what-does-your-faith-tell-you episodes.
She thought of asking her father why people walked in their sleep, but lately her father wasn’t sure what to say to her, and their grand old conversations had dwindled to a few rhetorical questions and phoned-in answers. The process of being removed from the relationship with her father was one she would duplicate a thousand times before she became an adult, extracting herself from friendships and romances that supposed the other involved party understood her; Eleanor knew from the moment she awoke from the coma just how impossible it would be to share herself with anyone earthbound now, and so these (failed) loves and partnerships and acquaintanceships didn’t weigh too heavily. There was Jack, always Jack, and for his solidity Eleanor never felt the loneliness that might otherwise have crept in. At least: she never fully embraced it. A taste, now and then, and Jack was commissioned to remind her of who she was.
When she was seventeen, Eleanor walked through her neighborhood in the middle of the night, barefoot, wearing her nightgown, sleeping soundly. She went to the mother-in-law apartment that Jack lived in over his aunt’s garage, climbed through an open window, and slipped into Jack’s bed. She woke the following morning to see him sleeping there, mouth open, pillow damp with drool, and she moved close to him. Without waking, he lifted his arm and enveloped her, and his body flexed and folded until it fit her like a second skin. They slept away the morning and afternoon, and when she opened her eyes he somehow knew. A change in her breathing, perhaps, but she didn’t really believe that.
“I knew you were here,” he said, his breath against her exposed neck. “I never wanted to wake.”
She laced her fingers through his and stroked his palm with her thumb. She thought, but did not say, I know how that feels. And meant it twice. They slept again, and when Jack rolled out of bed and padded down the hall to the bathroom, Eleanor began to dream of falling again.
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