The First of First Chapters.
I will just be writing first chapters now. Who needs the whole book anyway.
Elinor had been witness to death before. She lay on the bed looking at her grandmother’s profile. The hair on her face, probably soft and velvety in her youth, was now course and prickly. Elinor closed her eyes, curled her body into her grandmother’s shoulder, and imagined her grandmother as a toddler. Curled up just like this into her own mother’s body as she slept. Her great-grandmother gently smoothing her daughter’s hair and running her fingers over her face. Her fingerprints trying to absorb one last wisp of sun on her toddler’s head as she lay dreaming of her morning’s adventures out in the park. Now here was Elinor on the other end of her grandmother’s life. Curling into her grandmother’s body, stroking the fragile skin on her warped aged hands; trying to absorb every last drop of her scent and person-hood as her body made its way into the entrance of what comes next after one’s body stops breathing.
Elinor knew it wouldn’t be long. She’d known death too many times before. In her own mother as she lay sick and feeble. Dying of some unknown malady that slowly sucked away her laughter and light. In her own father who’d not last much longer without his wife. He’d gone away after Elinor’s mother had passed. Grandmama told her he went away for work, but Elinor was a sharp little child and upon being pressed, Grandmama had told her that his heart had broken when her mother had died. And when we are broken or sick, we need rest and sometimes we need to be tidied away from those we care about the most.
Elinor had seen her father a few times after his retreat. Each time he had brought her and her siblings a small trinket of where he had been. A Russian Nesting doll that now was missing one and a half of the dolls after so much play. A necklace made of seashells that still hung from the corner of her desk chair with only a few missing or cracked shells. A book of fairy tales she’d read and read until the pages were smudged and the edges dry. Her father had come less and less as Grandmama took over complete care and provision for Elinor and her siblings. Her father had become a character in one of the fairy tales in the book he’d gifted her years ago.
Then one day he showed up on Grandmama’s doorstep. “Nowhere to go,” he said. “No one to love,” he said. And Elinor remembered that there, standing in the marble doorway of her Grandmama’s house, he shook so violently and so long with years of grief, that the rain he had been soaked with trembled away until it was all a puddle by his feet. He didn’t stay long after that. He left. Silently in the night. Elinor was the one to walk in on his body whose soul had been building the arched doorway into whatever happens next in the years since her mother’s death. It was built with the pieces of his heart as the stone, and the drink he’d been filling his emptiness with as the mortar.
Since then, Elinor had lost a sibling. Her sister. To cholera. A friend from college to a car accident. A few too many cats and ferrets and frogs and dogs that she’d taken in as companions. Only to find that the life they have to offer doesn’t last long.
Elinor rolled over and looked at the ceiling as she stayed by her Grandmama’s side. Touching the soft skin that toiled to live as it made work of building the doorway she would flow through.
She was young when she lost her parents, but those memories never fade. She traced the outline of cracks in the ceiling winding like a web of time and wondered if this memory of death would stick like the others too. Was there enough space for it in between the others and all the scientific knowledge she had gained since then too? She wondered what Grandmama was remembering as her memories softly and gently pushed her down into her floating craft on the river Styx. Was Grandmama remembering her mother? Was her mother waiting? Would they both take a moment to pause and look at Elinor before her mother guided her grandmother to peace on other shores?
She heard her Grandmama’s breath change. It startled her because she was adjusting to the slowing down of her breath as life dwindled out of her chest. But suddenly the rate of intake increased, and she felt her grandmother’s feeble handle tense. Not by much but just enough for Elinor to feel. She opened her eyes as she propped her own body up on its shoulder and hip to see what had caused this change.
Grandmama’s eyes were open and were pointed towards wardrobe placed against the wall at the end of her bed. The hand Elinor had not been holding reaching out ever so slightly.
Elinor was startled. Grandmama hadn’t been responsive for days. The nurse had made it clear that it would be very soon and that her Grandmama would no longer be responsive.
She started upright while she called quietly to her grandmama, “Bertie? Bertie? It’s me Ellie.” Grandmama had always hated the name Elinor. She believed it was an old lady’s name. She had refused to ever call her Elinor, even when she’d been naughty. It was always Ellie to Grandmama. No one else called her that. Even her siblings who Grandmama had not had the passion or taken the time to rename.
This all coming from a woman named Beatrice. The double standard always made Elinor chuckle many times over her lifespan. Elinor had always liked her name. She believed it sounded distinguished. It always did lead to the same conversation at school when names like Brooke and Jenna were being called out for roll call. Professors always expected a recently retired senior who was auditing classes to kill time before time killed them.
Grandmama had always called her Ellie and she’d always called her Grandmama Bertie. The enduring “Grandmama” was reserved for when Elinor was having a moment that she needed a mom. Bertie would always know when she had to switch from being a cantankerous woman who was educating four misfits to a gentle grandmother who needed to shyly sooth a flustered young woman. She’d played both rolls so well and now Elinor knew she’d never see either side of her Grandmama again.
“The wardrobe Ellie! The wardrobe,” Bertie’s wavering voice aggressively spilled out.
Bertie’s voice had an urgency that made her seem stronger than her body actually was.
Elinor walked over to the wardrobe and looked behind her at her Grandmama whose hand had settle back into the comforter. Elinor opened the wide double doors of the wardrobe. She’d always loved this wardrobe and it’s beautiful carvings of acorns and vines. If you looked closely enough you could find little naked fairies twisted up in the foliage. Hiding and peeking out as if they were little voyeurs to all that occurred both inside and out of the great wooden wardrobe whose presence demanded notice.
Elinor sifted through the flowered nightgowns of her Grandmama’s. A stark contrast to the thick canvas and Cotton slacks and denim that she always donned on her adventures, travels, and the survivalist camping trips she always made Elinor and her siblings go on well into their teens. She’d missed her senior homecoming dance for one of them. Grandmama had purchased tickets to Alaska months prior to the date of the homecoming being released by the high school council. But no matter where they traveled, Alaska, the Amazon, the back alleys in London, Grandmama had always slipped into one of her soft nightgowns each night whether they were tucking in during a snowstorm in the mountains or a fancy hotel in Paris.
Elinor’s hands slid across the rough tweed of her grandfather’s jackets. Each one with patches on the elbows that made his memory even more cliche’. He’d been a professor of history. Specifically of boarders and spaces. To this day, even as an adjunct professor herself, she had no idea what a history professor of “boarders and spaces” was.
She’d known her Granddad only for a few short years before he disappeared. Well, she was sure he had just died, but as a young child, it seemed to her that he’d just disappeared. One day he’d walked into his office and the next just not come back out. As a curious 6 year old she’d gone into his office a few times looking for him. Wondering where he’d slunk off too. Had he been eaten up by one of his large leather books? Had he slunk out the lead lined windows to escape one of Bertie’s terrible dinners?
Once, after hearing her grandmother whisper into the phone, that she was angry at him for going before her; Elinor searched his office for a secret trap door sure he’d sneaked away. For weeks she ran her hand over the dark wood shelves with similar carvings as the wardrobe she now was facing into. Her finger tips searching for a button or knob that would magically make a bookshelf shift and creak open into some other mystical world or dark damp hallway. A few months later after Granddad’s disappearance and after life had returned to a new rhythm, Elinor had come to accept that Granddad had probably just passed away and her young mind couldn’t remember the usual things like a funeral, or a casket, or a wake that death usually came with.
It didn’t help that he didn’t have a gravestone. Just a bench in the East Garden facing the sunrise. Grandmama started all her days there. Slinking out the kitchen down in her flowered nightgown and robe, throwing on her boots half hazard if there had been a fresh falling of snow; she’d sit there with her palms up in her lap and eyes closed as if she was praying. Though Grandmama didn’t have an ounce of faith in anything but herself and science. Before she’d come in the house to prepare morning tea, she’d run her hand over the inscription on the bench. Years of her hand rubbing those words left that portion of the cement bench darker than the rest. “Remember when the sun sets that I’ll meet you again on the first breath of the sunrise.”
Elinor figured it was some lover’s quip between her Grandmama and Granddad that lasted on after his sun had set.
Now with her hand on her grandfather’s jackets, her memory snapped forward to the present and she turned back towards her Grandmama who was looking at her. Elinor didn’t know what she was looking for. She stood back up and looked towards Bertie. Bertie had somehow managed to pull her shoulders and head up off the pillow and was faultily trying to unleash a chain from her neck.
Elinor knew the one. She’d never seen her Grandmama without it. Honestly, she’d only seen hints of it around her neck. The rest hidden from her. Always tucked under her shirt or blouse with just the links showing above her collar. When she was younger, she had been motivated to find out what was on the end tucked down, but over time, the chain became a comfort object. More like a birth mark or a freckle that was just part of her Grandmama’s skin. Now as she saw Bertie weakly fumbling for it, the original intrigue peaked in Elinor once again.
Somehow, with the usual tenacity she’d climbed mountains and haggled with locals at markets, Bertie managed to pull it out of her nightgown by the time Elinor had moved over to assist. Bertie took the item at the end of the chain and pushed it into Elinor’s palm just hard enough to leave an imprint.
“The key” she managed to push out of her throat. “Use the key.” She spoke hoarsely as she again pointed at the wardrobe. Elinor, forgetting her nursemaid duties and the impending passing of her Grandmama slid across the bed again back toward the large wooden beast. Her hands immediately combing the wood grain just like she’d done years before in her Granddad’s office. She didn’t imagine that if there was a space for a key, it would be high up so she began on the bottom. It would be logical to put a key lock in the bottom middle like most music boxes, but no matter how she rubbed, pushed, squinted, scratched… she could not find anything that resembled a keyhole.
“Great,” she thought. “This is going to be just like Granddad’s library shelves all over again. She looked back at Bertie who was still, but alert. “Come on ol’ Bert. Give me another hint,” Elinor whispered to herself, as she began to stand back up. As she was moving towards standing arching her back, she grabbed the edge of the wardrobe, looked up towards it’s top. There. There at the top that she had so quickly dismissed, she noticed a disturbance in the patterns of acorns, ivy, and naked fairies. Fairies that now seemed to be giggling at her in their frozen state as if mocking her search. There. Two suns placed in each corner of the wardrobe. One the setting sun… the other seemed to be rising. She quickly remembered the bench inscription, ““Remember when the sun sets that I’ll meet you again on the first breath of the sunrise.”
Elinor whipped her head around to Bertie who had noticed Elinor’s body stiffen with delight. Elinor, not wanting to expend any more of Bertie’s energy, pointed up towards the sun on the right side of the wardrobe… the rising sun in the east. Bertie’s head moved just enough to qualify as a nod. Elinor looked around vivaciously. She jogged across the small room in three steps to Bertie’s small writing desk. She grabbed the solid wooden chair and dragged it across the floor to the wardrobe. Only then did she notice two lines worn into the wooden floor as if this wasn’t a chair at all, but a ladder used quite frequently for the task she was about to set to. The chair fit just between the bed and the wardrobe. Just enough that if Elinor lost her balance, she knew she’d land softly right next to Grandmama.
She climbed aloft the seat of the chair and was just able to reach up to the sun. To her frustration, she did not see any sort of key. She looked around the side of the wardrobe and her fingertips were met with the grainy smoothness of oak. She felt around up top only to discover some left over spider webs and a large Daddy Long Legs. A cold shiver ran down her spine. In all her adventures, one of the few fears she had never conquered was the chill and queasiness upon seeing or feeling a spider gave her. She let out a sigh as her shoulders slumped down. She looked back at Bertie who was giving no other indications of helping. Elinor crossed her arms with the key dangling from one hand. The chain tapping against her hip as its perpetual motion continued.
She starred at the sun. She felt it was staring back at her. She remembered the time that Bertie had taken her and her siblings to Texas, a state Bertie was clearly not fond of, but felt the lesson she’d had up her sleeve worthy of enduring the heat, the spiders, and the people. “The people were more bothersome than the spiders and snakes” Bertie had said. Bertie was a straight shooter. She liked it when people were up front with her. She didn’t like small talk. She wanted the facts in as few syllables as possible. Bertie made it clear she did not like Texans because their slow southern drawl was filled with smooth talkin’ lies that hid the stinger of the bee behind the honey. But Texas was the best place that year to see the full solar eclipse and Bertie said they could kill two birds with one stone while there. #1: See the full solar eclipse and trace its arc towards treasure. (The treasure part turned out to be a tall tale to spice up what could be considered some sort of homeschooling that Bertie was the headmaster of.) #2: So that Elinor and her siblings could learn to listen not just to what people were saying, but what they meant. While there was no treasure to be found on the arc of the solar eclipse, the lesson about listening for the sting behind the honey was something Elinor thought about almost daily.
Elinor blinked when she realized she’d been starring right at the sun. Thankfully, this sun posed no danger to her losing her eyesight. Though she figured she might lose it by the time she figured out where this keyhole was.
Suddenly, while Elinor was letting her mind slip back into the past again, she noticed that the grain above the sun was lighter than the rest of the surrounding wood. At first, she thought that was just part of the natural teak of the wood or 100-year-old stain revealing it’s age. Yet, above the orb portion of the sun, there clearly were lines traced in symmetry. You could only notice that it wasn’t supposed to be like that unless you were very close… like if you were standing on top of a chair. Elinor reached her hand up and grasped the sun’s orb in her fingertips. She pushed it up firmly and felt the sun move as if it were on a hinge. It stopped as the top of the orb pushed against the wooden rays of light basking upwards towards the ceiling.
The sun did not have to move far for Elinor to see the dark glint of aged bronze forming a small key hold right beneath where the sun’s orb had been. The sun had risen and now so had Elinor’s hopes. She took a long slow breath in. She steadied her feet on the solid seat of the chair. She looked at Bertie whose eyes were either gleaming with anticipation or weeping from the cataracts that annoyed her vision. Elinor thought to believe the first option. She winked at Bertie, and she thought she saw a tear well up in one of her Grandmama’s eyes. Curious as to why this mystery could make her Grandmama get emotional enough to rouse up the energy to cry, Elinor scrunched up her face. Her hand slowly felt around the edges of the bronze to find where the key fit. She was still slightly lower than she needed to be to see the sun eye to eye, so she raised her other hand up to help guide the key into the right space. She felt the key jerk into the slot it was intended for.
“YEARS” she thought,” YEARS I have wanted to know what was on that necklace. YEARS I have walked by and opened this wardrobe hoping it contained such a secret as Narnia. YEARS I have sat on this bed reading stories and planning out our next adventures. Only to find that there was a story being written right underneath my own nose.”
“Huh,” she said out loud and with a firm flick of her wrist, she turned the key. At the same moment she felt resistance traveling up the key from the innards of the lock, she heard a distinct “click” from below her feet. She quickly dismounted from her sturdy chariot and pushed it backwards towards the window. She was too excited to look back at her Grandmama to see her reaction. She quickly fell to her knees, so her eyes were level with the bottom of the wardrobe. There. Not on the outside or underneath, but inside, the floor of the wardrobe had popped up. Just enough for a thin black line to whisper to Elinor that within its darkness, a secret was being kept. Elinor raised her hand to lift the piece of wood that was angled up. Her hands shaking far more than her Grandmama’s when she went to take a sip of tea. She touched the edges of the board and was about to lift it when a loud thunk hit the floor next to the bed.