When Orla reached the living room, Eleanor Queen was standing in the open doorway of Shaw’s studio, one hand on the knob. Orla scurried past her, plucked the red-slathered canvas from the easel, and put it on the floor facing the wall. Reassured that the other exposed paintings weren’t too disturbing, she stood behind her daughter, hands on her narrow shoulders, and waited as Eleanor Queen glanced around the room.
“Looking for something? I’m sure Papa wouldn’t mind—maybe you want to try his guitars? When they’re not plugged in, they’re very quiet.” She tried to be as soothing as she could; Eleanor Queen knew too much, a burden no child should bear. A few days ago, a quiet instrument might have appealed to her, but she shook her head. “Then what?”
“I’m trying to figure something out.”
Hadn’t Shaw said something similar? In the days before his fear overtook him?
Orla decided then: she couldn’t let her daughter do it alone. It was time to get real, stop pretending the rules that had once governed their reality still existed. “Can we figure it out together? Can we talk about it?”
Eleanor Queen took a backward half step out of the room, then hesitated. Finally, she looked up at her mother and nodded. They settled in on the sofa, facing each other with their feet curled beneath them, bookends of mismatched size. Orla’s heart twisted and pain radiated throughout her torso; this was how she and Shaw had always sat for intimate conversations and apologies. Her eyes stung and she quickly swiped at them so no tears would fall. Eleanor Queen watched her, her mood somber and studious. She’d always been a contemplative child, but she’d changed in ways Orla still struggled to understand. Part of it might have been a cloak of sorrow at the loss of her father—but the changes preceded his death. Orla wasn’t sure how to ask the questions, how to even line up words that made sense. But she had to try; fear clung to her daughter like a second skin.
“Eleanor Queen…Bean…” She took the girl’s limp fingers and rubbed them with her thumb. “I know it’s been so hard, and I’ve made some mistakes—with your papa, and you. I didn’t understand what you were both…please know I’m trying to figure this out.”
“I believe you.”
“I thought at first…everything was just so foreign to me, and maybe I didn’t understand how this sort of land, climate…I thought it was me, unprepared—”
Eleanor Queen shook her head. “It’s not you. There’s something here.”
“You’re right. I know that now.” Orla held her breath. She curled her fingers around her daughter’s, and Eleanor Queen responded. They hung on like that, like something might pull them apart and they were ready to resist. Maybe everything about her daughter’s behavior should have worried her sooner; the girl had never had the excuse of a muse or work to do when she was distracted or distant. But Orla had been preoccupied in a silent tug-of-war with her thoughts too, inching toward the muddy impossible, falling back on reason, desperate to understand why nothing felt quite right.
A shiver crept across Orla’s shoulder blades. “Do you know what It is? What It wants?”
Eleanor Queen’s face went blank again. She turned her head, looking, listening. She sighed with the same frustration Orla saw in her when she couldn’t figure out a math problem.
“It’s something…I don’t know, I keep trying…it’s here, but I can’t…it’s trying, and I feel it—just sometimes, at first. But now more and more and I don’t know what it is.”
Orla hadn’t wanted to influence Eleanor Queen’s impressions, but maybe it would help her if she knew about the local history and its intersection with their land. “Do you sense…there were people here. Women, near here, a long time ago. And they came to get better from a disease that didn’t have a cure then. Tuberculosis. It affected the lungs. Your papa found…we considered that it might be part of what’s happening now. The restless souls who died here. Do you sense anything like that?”
Eleanor Queen took her words very seriously and concentrated even harder, squinting her eyes, even closing them. But she shook her head. “I try to ask it questions. I try so hard!”
Orla scooted closer to her, but Eleanor Queen didn’t want to be held.
“Mama, you don’t understand!” She got to her feet and angrily pulled back the curtains, made all the living-room windows squares of glass that looked out to the foreboding night, the foreboding land Orla had been desperate to make disappear. “It’s out there.”
“What is—”
“I don’t know what it is! It’s not…it’s not weather. It’s not snow, it’s not…it’s more than that. But it shows us what we know, or what it knows, or…but it’s not shaped like a person or a thing.” She nearly screamed in frustration. “It’s trying to understand us, me, so we can…” She stood at the window nearest the wood-burning stove, lingered there, her eyes fixed on something beyond the pane.
“Is it something bad? Eleanor Queen, does it want to hurt us?” Orla again took up a position behind her daughter, but this time didn’t try to distract her with physical affection. She tried to see what her daughter felt out there in the antipodal world of white snow, black trees.
“I don’t think it’s…it doesn’t think about bad, good. It thinks about…living.”
Orla could relate to that. Though maybe, until recently, she hadn’t thought about it in stark or practical terms, the imperative of staying alive when doing so felt more and more perilous.
“Are we just in the way, then? Of…something? Would it happen anyway, even if we weren’t here?” But Shaw was summoned. She was thinking aloud, still in search of a solid thing that made sense, a rock climber looking for a handhold or a place to set her foot that wouldn’t crumble.
The nonreligious part of her still struggled with the concept of an aware greater force, an intentional greater force. A god that demanded weekly attendance or daily utterance of its name seemed like a trickster to her. Surely something of infinite power possessed a consciousness bigger than one moment in one mortal creature’s life. She didn’t, in any way, want what was happening to be personal, a thing being done to them. Because that might mean It had wanted Shaw dead—and wanted Orla to kill him—and she’d never come to terms with being a pawn on some omniscient monster’s board game.
“We’re…we’re part of why it’s happening,” said Eleanor Queen. “It wanted us here; I feel something wanting us. But I don’t understand…”
It was not what Orla wanted to hear.
“Does It…” She turned Eleanor Queen away from the window but resisted the impulse to restore the curtain. “It had a connection with Papa, and you—”
“It likes that we were aware, could sense it. But…I felt it growing unhappy with Papa.” Eleanor Queen held her hand out toward the stove, but nothing was burning within. She trailed a finger along the cast-iron surface. Orla saw it in her face, her daughter’s search for the right words, her desire to find the explanation. “I think, Mama…I feel a sense of wanting…of hoping that I’ll understand it. Better than Papa did. And I’m trying, I’m trying so hard. But then I messed up with what it was saying about Papa—” She burst into tears and clutched her mother around the waist.
“No, no love, remember what I told you? You are innocent in this. None of this is your fault.”
“But I feel it trying and wanting, and if I’d understood—”
“No.” She held her daughter’s head against her chest, kissing her hair. “It was my fault, for getting out the gun. And Papa’s fault, for having the gun. And no one’s fault because none of us knew…we didn’t know this would happen.”
But.
It would never be Eleanor Queen’s fault, but maybe she was the key to understanding. As much as Orla would prefer to protect her from the mess they were in, maybe she needed Eleanor Queen’s insight to get them all out. “I’m going to help you, okay?” She pulled away from the tight embrace and dried her daughter’s tears.
“How?”
“When you sense something, don’t be scared—tell me. Tell me, and try to describe it, so I can help you figure it out. It’s like it’s a language, but you don’t speak the same way. But we need to learn. You’re not alone. I’m here, and I believe you. And we’ll figure this out. It doesn’t want us to leave, right?” Eleanor Queen nodded. “So we’ll figure it out together. Okay?”
Hope blossomed on the girl’s face for the first time all day. She tightened her arms around Orla again.
“I love you, Mama.”
“I love you more than anything. And we’re gonna be okay now.”
Later, as her sleeping children lay beside her, warm bundles and throaty, open-mouthed breaths, Orla whispered aloud to the only spirit she could name.
“Shaw?” It didn’t matter what other people called their God. Jesus or Buddha or Allah. Gaia or Mary or Isis. There was only one spirit out there in the universe who really mattered to her. “Look after us? If you can?”
It was a comfort to think of him here, everywhere, watching them. And for a moment she understood faith in a way she never had. Hope lived on an invisible plane that radiated outward from the person who needed it. Maybe, after all, it wasn’t so very strange to give it a name.
Weariness dragged her down into a darkness that flickered with stars.