Eleanor sat with Tabitha all day on Good Friday and slept the night in her mother’s bed. It was a tight fit, but Eleanor wouldn’t think of leaving. Tabitha took pain tablets at twice the rate the doctor prescribed and was unable to get herself to the bathroom unaided. She mostly slept, waking up suddenly at times and looking around the room as if newborn and frightened. Eleanor would soothe her mother, put her arms around her until she found her bearings.
“It’s such a nice day, cupcake. You should go outside and play,” she’d say before falling asleep again.
Eleanor stayed in the bed so as not to jostle Tabitha out of her fitful sleep. Her muscles stiffened and ached. She listened to her mother’s labored breathing, smelled the death in it, large and certain. Color faded from her mother’s hands until Eleanor thought she could see bones beneath the skin like through wax paper.
Eleanor didn’t cry. She thought and worried and waited. Mostly she waited. She didn’t know what she waited for—for death most likely, but also she waited because she had trust in David. He had said problems work themselves out, and not to worry. So Eleanor tried not to worry and waited instead for things to work themselves out as promised.
At dawn on Easter Sunday, Tabitha shook Eleanor awake with her cold thin hands.
“Cupcake,” she said. “Happy Easter.” Tabitha looked joyful. It made Eleanor smile, and she kissed her mother good morning.
“Happy Easter, Mom,” she said. “Should I make us some eggs?”
“No,” she said. “Open the drapes, and let’s watch the sun come up.”
She got up and threw open the curtains. Tangerine light filled the room. The sky was clear and bright; azure heavens grew out of the darkness touched by the orange rays.
“It’s beautiful,” Tabitha said.
She sat up in her bed and pulled Eleanor beside her. Arm in arm, they watched the Easter sunrise together.
“I feel like some ice cream,” Tabitha said. “How about you go get us some.”
“What kind?” she asked.
“Cookie dough,” she said. It was Eleanor’s favorite.
“Okay,” said Eleanor. “If the grocery is closed, I’ll go to the truck stop.”
“Take your time,” she said, her voice cracking with emotion. “Enjoy the day. Enjoy every day.”
Eleanor knew then.
Her insides turned inside out and emptied. The vacuum inside her gasped for air. She was suddenly cold. She stopped in the doorway and looked at her mother.
Tabitha pulled a melancholy smile across her tired lips. Her eyes glistened in the sunlight, moist and sorrowful.
“Momma?”
“Sorry, cupcake,” her mother said softly. “Go,” she said. “Get two spoons.” Then she turned to face the light and closed her eyes. She lifted her chin to feel the warmth caress her face. She turned her head as if listening to music, a slow, wandering, silent waltz.
Eleanor watched for a while then found her jacket and left.
A block away she ducked into an abandoned lot and hid behind a pile of old mattresses and tires. She fell onto her knees and covered her face. She burst into tears and sobbed until she could not breathe. Gasping and dizzy, she fell over and curled herself up as small as she could be. She cried like it was prayer, as if she could buy a favor from the universe if only she could shed enough tears. She cried like she had not cried for fifty years. She cried as she had for her lost family and tasted the same tears today as she had then, when she had lost everything but her life. It was cold comfort then and also on this day.
She lay there and cried until she could cry no more. She felt her puffy face with her fingers and imagined she looked like a raspberry. She laughed despite herself. The sun was well high when she found her feet again and staggered home.
Tabitha was dead. She lay just as Eleanor had left her, her face toward the window, her hands on her lap. She knew what had happened. Death wanted solitude. She’d seen creatures leave their dens, abandon their families, herds, or packs and crawl away wounded and bloody to find a place to die alone. It was instinct.
Eleanor sat in her mother’s room all Easter and watched the sunshine move across the walls of the little room until she sat lost and alone in the darkness. She didn’t cry anymore. She waited and watched the terrible stillness which had been her most cherished thing in the world. Her thoughts went to the woman who had brought her out of the wilderness, who had loved her like her own child, monster that she was.
It was not until the small hours of night, when the moonlight filled the room with blue memories of the morning’s dawn, that Eleanor began to think of what to do next. She pondered the question until Monday morning when she heard the school bus pass by the house. It didn’t even slow down to look for her.
At eleven o’clock, the phone rang. Eleanor knew who it would be. She answered it.
“Hello,” she said in Tabitha’s raspy voice.
“This is Jamesford High School. Eleanor Anders didn’t arrive at school today.”
“She’s staying home,” she said. “Possibly all week. Please make a note of it.”
“Will do, Mrs. Anders. Good-bye.”
Eleanor hung up and took a shower. She smelled of tire rubber, mouse droppings, and tears. She put on heavy work clothes, the ones she used for gardening. Out back, she found a pick and shovel from the shed and opened a grave in their tomato garden. By the time school let out and Eleanor heard the bus pass going the other way, she had laid the last spadeful of earth over her beloved Tabitha.
She’d wrapped her in her bed sheets, sewed her into them as sailors did. She was shocked at how light her mother’s body was. She’d carried her into their backyard and carefully placed her in the hole, bending her knees into a fetal position, which Eleanor thought was right and proper. She took a long moment to look in the shallow hole, at the strange sheeted specter within it. Then she covered it in soil.
Nothing was just going to just work out. Why did she trust so much? It was stupid, and painful, and she was a fool to keep doing it. It had cost her parents their lives, cost her this agony and uncertainty. She was stupid, and she was lost, and she was afraid.
She went into the house, numb and tired. She collapsed in a chair and fell asleep.
When she woke, the room was lit in dusk-yellow sunshine. She woke knowing instantly where she was and what had happened. And also, what she was going to do.
She took off her clothes, and after checking that all the doors were locked and lights put out, she went into the bathroom and latched the door.
She had her mother’s taste in her mouth. Up in the soft palate above her throat, in a pocket that she didn’t think others possessed, was the taste of her mother, a memory, a map. She absorbed it from the pocket.
A sudden jolt, like an electric shock down her throat, sent her to the floor convulsing in tremors. She screamed from the pain. Her body was on fire, the change had begun. Tabitha was taller but much lighter than Eleanor. So much to rearrange. This would not be as painful as Dwight, she thought, but it was not going to be a summer Celeste visit either. Her bones extended, broke, healed, and snapped again. She threw herself in the bathtub and ran a cool shower to absorb the heat pouring out of her body like blood from an open wound.
She jumped out once, twice, three times to use the toilet as her body excluded unnecessary mass and reshaped the rest. Her fresh young skin sloughed off in sheets like a shedding snake, and she broke it up with her toes until it could slide down the drain. The bath tub ran red and black with blood. She stifled her screams and gritted her teeth and tried to find something in her monstrous transformation to be happy about. She could not.
She tried to embrace the monster she was. She searched for someone who’d done this to her, who’d led her to believe she could be happy, lied to her, betrayed her, abandoned her. Someone she could strike out at. But she had only herself to blame. Tabitha had been nothing but love, and stupid Eleanor, stupid whatever-her-real-name-was, had let herself be seduced by it. And now Eleanor was dead, as surely as the withered husk buried in the garden, Eleanor Anders was dead. There was no going back.
By morning, it was over. Eleanor found herself asleep under a cold shower and moved to shut off the water. Reaching across her body caused an immediate shot of pain like a wall of hot needles. Her new shape was sore and stiff. When she finally turned the water off, she sat back and waited for the pain to cease. It didn’t.
She rolled out of the bathtub and on to the floor. Pain stabbed at her from the inside. She screamed. It was Tabitha’s scream. It was a sound she never heard because her mother had never faced this suffering without her pills as she did now. Eleanor-become-Tabitha writhed on the floor wracked in agony, every bone, every joint, every muscle, and every organ in her body dying in a hellish cancer. She could only scream and then she laughed, catching her breath between screams—she laughed.
She was Tabitha dying of cancer. It was a new hell. She knew it would not kill her. Her cells, her monster cells, would not let it progress to that end. This could not kill her. Instead it would hold her in limbo at the very edge of destruction. It was constant, painful suffering, torment, forever teetering at the limits of endurance. Her body resetting the disease and then her healthy cells in perpetual battle every minute of her life. The only comfort she found was in thinking that this frail body would be easier to kill than her last one. Perhaps a cold could overcome her suddenly and finish her miserable life. Or maybe a terrible fall, so massive that her copy cells would not be able to save her.
She crawled to Tabitha’s bedroom, her bedroom now, and found her mother’s pill bottles on the nightstand. She pulled one down and looked at the label, but her eyes could not for the throbbing in her head and their long degeneration. At the end, Tabitha had been nearly blind and had kept it from Eleanor.
She concentrated. She felt her eyeballs pull and contort in her head until she could see enough to read the label and saw it was the right bottle. She took twice what was directed and pulled herself onto the bed to wait for them to work.
In thirty minutes, she could breathe normally. In an hour, she could stand. With effort, she might be able to learn to work around the illness. She’d made her eyes into something else. Tabitha couldn’t see, but she’d been able to reform her eyes, if only for a while, and use them. The same thing might work on her legs. She began practicing and planning.