“See you next summer,” he said. “Sooner than that, actually. You’ll be back at the ranch for Thanksgiving, right?”
“Like I keep telling Eleanor,” Alice chimed in. “We’re your family now.”
“Family. Everybody’s gotta have one, right?” Matt grinned. “Even Charlie Manson knew that.”
8.
Like Someone Just Ran You Over with a Truck
She was back at school—rooming with Patty again, not that either of them felt particular affection for the other at this point.
Her period was due the week classes started, but it didn’t come. By November she knew why.
She had thought she’d never have to speak to Matt Hallinan again, but now she found his number in Patty’s address book, the frat house where he lived. Someone else picked up, a boy nicknamed Ratso, who’d changed his name from Bill after he saw some movie called Midnight Cowboy, Patty explained to her. Loud music in the background. A party going on. A minute later, Matt was on the phone.
It had taken him a minute to place her, but then he did. When she told him she was pregnant, he didn’t deny it. He just kept saying, “oh shit oh shit oh shit.”
He picked her up at school that weekend. Not on campus, obviously. Nobody could find out about this.
He’d gotten the name of a doctor from one of his fraternity brothers who’d recently had to deal with a similar problem. The doctor, who was up near Poughkeepsie, could take care of it, no questions asked. Eleanor had no way to get that kind of money without asking her father’s old law partner, Don, but Matt worked out that part, not that it wasn’t a pain.
Five hundred dollars. Fuck.
They didn’t talk in the car. Five hours. He kept the radio on. Neil Diamond. The Fifth Dimension. They must have heard “Light My Fire” six times, on the drive north, but the Doors song that got to her most was “The End.” She couldn’t get Jim Morrison’s dark, haunted voice out of her head.
The address Matt had been given turned out to be an apartment on the outskirts of town. A woman answered the door. She brought Eleanor to a room in the back where a man was waiting. He didn’t have a beard, exactly, but he needed a shave. He told her to climb up on the table.
The doctor must have had one of those operations where they take out your vocal cords. The voice that spoke to her came out of a machine.
When it was over, the woman came into the room. She gave Eleanor a very thick sanitary napkin for right away and another one for later.
Matt must have paid while she was having the procedure. They left as soon as she could stand up. He dropped her off a couple of blocks from her dormitory a little before nine thirty.
Patty was in the room, changing her nail polish.
“No offense, but you look like someone just ran you over with a truck,” she said.
Eleanor had to carry the blood-soaked pad out to the dumpster behind the dorm—that one, and the others she used over the course of the next six days—so Patty wouldn’t see and wonder. Normally, she used tampons.
At Thanksgiving—never the greatest day, even when her parents were alive—Eleanor opted to stay in the dorm, and to Alice and Jim’s frustration—though Patty’s relief, probably—she did the same at Christmas. The following summer, Eleanor was accepted into an art program in San Francisco, where she finished the drawings for the book that became Bodie Under the Sea. When her English teacher back at school saw the book, she suggested that they send the book to her editor friend at Applewood Press, and by Thanksgiving she had a contract.
Eleanor never went back to Rhode Island. When everyone else at school was visiting colleges with their parents and filling out applications, she was correcting her book galleys. Alice Hallinan offered to bring Eleanor along on a college tour with Patty, but Eleanor said no thanks. She had other plans. A girl she knew from history class had told her about a school she’d visited in upstate New York that seemed pretty and easy to get into, where they didn’t have any math or science requirements. Eleanor sent in an application and a few weeks later got the letter of acceptance.
The summer before college, with the money from the advance on her book, she rented a room in Boston. She took a class at the Museum of Fine Arts and finished another Bodie story.
That fall she went off to college, but mostly what she did there was make pictures in her notebooks and think up more stories. Near the end of sophomore year, with her grade point average hovering around 2.8 and embarrassingly large royalty checks arriving in her campus mailbox every six months, she decided she’d had enough of school. She bought the red Toyota and set out on the road to buy a house. Thirteen days later, she landed in Akersville.
9.
A Blue-Eyed Boy and a Good Dog
Eleanor made a full-price offer on the farm at the end of the dead-end road with the giant ash tree in the front yard. Ed himself even suggested she try a lower number first, see how the sellers—the various Murchisons, living far away, the children and grandchildren of the people whose names and annual heights were recorded on the pantry wall—might respond. But Eleanor saw no reason to dicker. The house was worth the price they were asking, so why not just pay it?
The day she moved in, her neighbors Walt and Edith showed up to introduce themselves. Edith looked dubious when she saw how young Eleanor was. Not Walt. “Anytime you need a little help around the place, give me a holler,” he told her.
She painted her name on the mailbox and with Walt’s help she hung a swing from one of the lower branches of the giant ash tree out front.
There was more substantial work to be done, of course, and plenty of it. Nobody had lived in the house year-round for more than fifty years, so she hired a crew to blow in insulation and install a new oil burner and water heater, new windows, new floorboards to replace the ones that were giving way. An electrician upgraded the wiring and an outdated fuse box. It turned out the septic system was failing. Until she’d bought the farm, Eleanor hadn’t known what a septic system was.
What she loved most was furnishing the place, adding to what was already there: quilts and pillows, tablecloths from the fifties, an old electric mixer, a picnic basket outfitted with tin plates and silverware with Bakelite handles—all the stuff to make a life, except the characters to populate it.
All summer, Eleanor went alone to auctions in search of treasures: an old sleigh bed for upstairs, a set of wicker furniture for the porch. At a yard sale she found an old worktable that she set up in the barn. She laid out her colored pencils and India inks then, and her drawing paper, to get to work on the new Bodie book.
Every afternoon around four o’clock she walked down to the swimming hole below the waterfall and jumped in. Sometimes there’d be a couple of teenagers sharing a beer or making out on the rocks.
(Making out. These kids were only a few years younger than she was. Still, for Eleanor now, the idea of kissing someone, feeling a pair of arms around her, hands on her body, felt as remote as the memory of her childhood home. In her mind’s eye she saw herself and Matt, that Rhode Island summer—his big sweaty hand on her breast, his other hand on her stomach and moving down. She could remember how it was, her work uniform pulled up around her waist, her thighs sticking to the vinyl seat under her, his fingers digging into her flesh.)