The flat, late August plains were hidden behind miles of head-high corn stalks. The little Honda sped along the highway on its newly oiled four cylinders. The windows were rolled down, and David fished through the radio channels for something that wasn’t country or didn’t yell scriptures over his speakers. He finally plugged in his iPod transmitter and tuned the car to a blank station.
Familiar lyrics began. He turned it up.
“Angels made these arms and legs, take me as I am. This is how the world has made me, love me as I am.’”
“Our song,” he said.
Eleanor smiled and sang along.
David’s plan was simple, elegant, and relied so heavily on extortion as to make it borderline psychotic. The primary victim of his blackmail was Karen Venn.
David called her from the hospital with eight stitches in the thumb. He’d nearly lost it. Once in the car, he gave her the ultimatum. “Eleanor has returned,” he said. “I’m going to run away with her unless you help her.”
He looked at with her with his bandaged face and steel eyes and, as he later recounted to Eleanor, he “pulled at every heartstring” he could find.
In the morning, he’d had no sleep, and Karen called in sick. After Wendy was dropped off at her daycare, the two of them drove to Eleanor’s house and knocked on the door.
Eleanor answered. She wore a skirt, the only one she owned, light makeup and clean skin.
“She’ll do it,” David said.
“I said I’d try,” responded Karen.
They got in Karen’s van and drove to the Jamesford Social Services Building.
While they waited to see Stephanie Pearce, Sheriff Hannon came through the door. The receptionist had tipped him off. Eleanor heard her make the call from the bathroom on her cell phone.
“Miss Anders, I have a few questions,” he said.
“You can talk to me with Stephanie,” she said matter-of-factly, but kept glancing at a nearby window.
“I think you should come down to the station,” he said.
“Let’s try it her way,” said Karen. “It might make things easier.”
He looked at the three of them and shrugged.
“Okay,” he said.
In Stephanie Pearce’s cramped office, Eleanor told the story. After the mean Stephanie Pearce told her that the state was going to break up her family and ship them away from their friends and support in Jamesford to Riverton, Eleanor had run away. Her mother apparently told people that she was visiting an aunt. There was no aunt. Pearce knew this from her files. Tabitha thought that she’d come back and so tried to buy time.
Eleanor came home at Easter, hungry and tired. That night, promising Eleanor that everything would work out, she died. Eleanor panicked and buried her mother in the yard. She was scared, lonely, and confused.
She got David’s birthday invitation and planned to leave after wishing her best friend a happy sixteenth birthday. She kept low before then so no one would make her go to school and draw out the terrible farewells longer than she could endure.
After David’s party, she saw the police at her house and ran away again. She didn’t want to live with strangers in Riverton. Miss Pearce was so mean.
David convinced her to come back. Karen Venn had offered to be her guardian until she was eighteen. They could use the extra income. It was a perfect solution.
Karen Venn smiled and agreed, but no one took her to be overly enthusiastic.
That was David’s plan. When she was done telling her story of woe and misfortune at the hands of the heartless social worker, she cuddled up to Karen, who did her best to welcome her.
“Tabitha visited me a week ago,” she said. “She was very much alive.”
Eleanor shook her head. “That’s impossible.” Looking at the sheriff, she said, “What does this mean?”
His look was skeptical and reserved. He hadn’t spoken since he sat down. He cleared his throat before saying, “It’s a mystery. I don’t know what it means.”
“Am I under arrest? Do you really think I would kill my own mother?” She made herself cry. It wasn’t hard.
“No,” he said. “I need to get an official statement, but forensics puts the time of death in late April, over a month ago. She died from cancer. It fits with your story.”
“What about adoption?” interjected David. “Can she live with us? There’s no need to make her life more miserable, is there?”
Pearce’s face was red. She’d been painted as a complete villain in Eleanor’s tale, and her only defense was that a ghost had visited her begging for mercy.
“It’s not my decision,” she said. “I’ll need to talk to people.”
“But you’ll recommend it, won’t you?” said David. “Please?”
“We’ll need to look at your living conditions,” she said. “There are many factors—”
“I could live at home,” said Eleanor. “My home.” She’d gone off script then, and David shot her an ugly look.
“I only need a guardian. I can still live in my house. I’ve practically lived alone for years,” she said. “I do all the cleaning, cooking, banking, everything. You can ask around.”
“That’s a bit much,” she said.
“Why?” said Karen hopefully. She hadn’t been pleased with the idea of her son and his girlfriend living under the same roof. “It’s a great idea. We’re practically neighbors.”
“That’s a stretch,” said Hannon.
“You know I’m self-sufficient,” said Eleanor. “You know I can handle it.”
“I do think you can handle it,” the sheriff said. “But it’s not my call.”
“You can ask Principal Curtz,” Eleanor said, playing every card she had. “I bet he’d back me up. Tell him it was my idea.”
And he had.
The case was not concluded, but until it was, Karen was given temporary guardianship over Eleanor. And though the court didn’t explicitly approve it, she remained at her old house and slept in the loft.
David had sworn to his mother, on pain of everything that she could think of, to be a gentleman.
“As long as I’m your mother, and you’re under eighteen, you two are brother and sister. Do you understand?”
They did, and they promised to behave.
“My life is hard enough,” she said, driving back from the police station that night. “Please, don’t make it any harder.”
“I’ll try not to,” Eleanor said.
Wendy was ecstatic at having a new sister. Eleanor would sleep over at the Venn’s on occasion, taking the couch against Karen’s offers of letting her sleep in her bed or making a bed in Wendy’s room. In the morning, she’d wake them with a big breakfast of eggs and fresh tomatoes.
When Pearce visited that summer, she’d be pleased to find that Eleanor had completed her classwork and wouldn’t be held back a year. She didn’t ask to see where Eleanor slept in the little trailer; the whole town knew Eleanor lived alone in the little house on Cedar Street. She cautioned them many times that they were on a limb, that the state was watching them and it wouldn’t take much for them to step in and remove Eleanor to another home. She made it clear that except for Karen’s offer, there wasn’t a parent in Jamesford who’d touch her with a stick, and the Riverton family, after reading about the police search for her and the body in her yard, had also declined to take her. The chances of finding a willing foster family this side of Cheyenne was bleak.
They took the threat to heart, and David and Eleanor were perfect citizens. Whenever they went out together, to a movie or to get an ice cream, they took Wendy along as chaperone. When Eleanor went to her home, David accompanied her, but did not step inside. They’d give no one the opportunity to gossip.
By August, they felt the town had reluctantly accepted the situation. It helped that there’d been three months without drama. David hadn’t pressed charges against Russell, which made the Sheriff both surprised and relieved. A knife attack would make the papers, and without a doubt, Eleanor’s name would be brought into it and that would stir up the school lunch poisoning thing again, and the dead woman buried in the yard. The town wouldn’t like that. It needed tourists, not the FBI.
Barbara visited David a couple of times during the summer. Eleanor did her best to be polite, but when Barbara pressed her chest into David’s arm, Eleanor felt a phantom cord in her hand and went inside. David would follow shortly after, flushed and apologetic.
“It’s not me doing it,” he said.
“I know, Brother,” she said.
“Thanks, Sis.”
David accompanied Eleanor on her necessary Nebraska trip. Karen wasn’t pleased to have them go on a vacation together, but David promised up and down that they’d behave. Eleanor was going to go regardless, and he might as well go to look after her. Karen didn’t understand why, but she sensed the stubborn determination they both possessed to make the trip. In the end, there was nothing to do. She gave them a hundred fifty dollars and made them promise to call her every night. They snuck out quietly at night so no one would see them.
David traded the Mercedes for a little Honda and presented a check for the difference to his mom. When David’s father called in July, he would not tell his wife where he’d gotten the money for it. Karen took the call in her bedroom, but Eleanor could hear the conversation over Wendy’s cartoons. He was calling from Afghanistan, but when she pressed him about the money, he grew angry and nearly hung up the phone. Karen backed down. Eleanor noted that she did not tell him what David had done with the car.
“The Honda is a better car,” David said. “This one I can afford to drive. Even to fix. Much better, don’t you think?”
“Much,” she said.
They limited themselves to one kiss a week. When the time came, they would catch each other’s eye. They’d find a secret place and touch their lips, just a peck, a caress. Just enough to be sure that it was still there, to feel that electrical bolt surge through them again, reaffirming the connection, renewing an unspoken vow.
Eleanor pointed to the road that led to the Batton farm. He slowed to look.
“How far’s the house?”
“About a quarter mile up the road,” she said. “You can park over there. No one would see you on that side road.”
“Is she there? Maybe I should drive up and make sure someone’s home.”
“Maybe,” she said.
“I want to see it anyway.”
“Let me get out,” she said. “They can’t see me.”
“They won’t see you,” he said.
“I can’t take the chance.”
He stopped the car and let her out.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll be back here in five minutes.”
“I’ll be in the corn,” she said.
He drove up the lonely road as Eleanor ducked down the embankment and into the corn rows.
She found a sunny place where a tractor had missed its planting and laid down to watch the clouds. Big, fluffy, white ones floated across the bluest sky she had ever seen. She remembered her mothers, all three of them now. She’d been ready to run for months, ever vigilant for the sound of doom, the voice that would crumble the illusion of her life with the Venns. She’d not been more than a pace away from a door or a window since Karen picked her up that fateful morning. Today she allowed herself to relax and absorb the smell of growing crops.
She wondered how Celeste would look tonight. Had she grown her hair out long? Had she colored it? Had she grown fat or thin? How had the year treated her? It was like the day before Christmas, and she was excited to see what she’d get.