Eleanora's Name

6

I leap into Dad's arms like I did when I was little.

“Uh-oh,” he says, lifting me easily even though I’m such a big kid. “I’m happy to see you, Minnow. Why are you upset?”

“Aunt Cathy doesn’t know my real name and she says I’m the one who doesn’t know it and she yelled at me for trying to change it but I didn’t change anything!”

“Well, your name is a bit complicated,” Dad says. His voice is gentle and even. He's supposed to yell at Aunt Cathy for yelling at me.

I hear Aunt Cathy’s steps on the deck as she approaches our open door. My cousin Trinity babbles in her arms. I press my eyes to Dad’s shoulder so I don’t have to look at her.

Her voice has the same strain it held ever since my midafternoon snack. Wherever Mywit’s End is, she keeps saying she’s there. “Rosalind, you left your backpack in my car. I’ve got to manage the baby. You’re old enough to bring your own stuff in.”

“Rosalind is my first middle name!”

Dad says, “It’s okay to be upset but it is not okay to shout in someone’s ear.”

“Sorry, Dad.”

He says, “I’m going to put you down in a moment. I’d like you to thank Aunt Cathy for having a nice day with you. Then put your backpack away and wash up for dinner.”

“It wasn’t a nice day,” I tell Dad’s shoulder.

“I’m sure your conflict was upsetting, but it doesn’t erase any of the fun activities you had beforehand, or how nice it was for Aunt Cathy to watch you for a whole day when your usual babysitter was sick. Crying is optional. Being polite is required.”

He gives me the kind of squeeze that lets me know I am safe, kisses my forehead, and lowers me.

“Thank you, Aunt Cathy. Bye, Baby Trinity. You’re so cute and I love you.” I accept my backpack from Aunt Cathy and bring it to my room. Their voices come up the stairs after me.

“Thanks, Cat. You and Jeff are life-savers.”

Aunt Cathy makes an annoyed noise. “Your brother didn’t do spit. He left at eleven ‘to get McDonald’s for lunch,’ and came back at three, high as a kite with a bag full of wrappers. Roland, I’m a bit worried about that girl. She told me a really morbid story.”

“About that,” Dad says. His voice drops a little here.

I toss my backpack on my floor and creep to the landing at the top of the stairs. Auntie Nora comes up the stairs in perfect silence and sits beside me.

I miss some of what Dad says, but I hear Aunt Cathy’s reply. “Seriously? That is flocked up!”

“I don’t know what else we could have done.” He sounds sad. “I don’t know if we would have made any other choice, anyway.”

“You cursed that girl,” Aunt Cathy says. “Naming a baby after a sewer slide? You’re begging for trouble there.”

“It wasn’t a curse,” Dad said in that sharp, deep tone that meant he was trying not to be too angry. “It's a tribute to a beautiful person who was loved very much.”

“You knew it was weird,” Aunt Cathy insisted. “You named your kid after a sewer slide, then lied about her first name to family. Now you still call her by that babyish nickname.”

“She wants to be called Minnow.”

“She’ll outgrow that eventually. Then she’ll have to choose between going by a ‘first middle name,’ because you saddled her with two of those, or by her real first name, which is heavy spit.”

They stop talking for a moment.

I turn to Auntie Nora and whisper, “What’s a sewer slide?” I suspect the answer is very smelly.

Auntie Nora shakes her head. Pure white waves of hair bounce on either side of her movie-star-pretty face.

“Well,” Dad says. “I guess you can see why the nickname Minnow stuck so hard.”

“No no no no,” Trinity agrees.

I lean against the wall and hug my knees. I wish Auntie Nora would wrap her arms around me like Dad does.

Dad and Aunt Cathy say a few more things, like, “Yeah, anytime,” and “Please, child care is work. You earned every penny.” I squeeze my eyes shut and try not to cry again. I didn’t want to be cursed.

Aunt Cathy calls up the stairs, “Love you, Minnow. Have a nice night with Daddy.”

“Mmmm no-no bye-bye!” Trinity calls out.

This makes me smile. I whisper to Auntie Nora, “Trinity is learning my name. She calls me No-no.”

Auntie Nora beams at me. Then she looks towards the bathroom, back to me, and tilts her head in that direction. She’s reminding me to wash up for dinner.

I nod and wash up.

12

Dad says, “Middle school is hard” and “Hormones” and “This is temporary. We will get through it.”

He doesn’t know that I brought a paring knife with me into the bathroom.

The bath is full of nice, warm water. I leave the knife on the sink and soak in lavender-scented bubbles. If I really need to, I can get out of the water, pick up the blade, and then settle back in the tub.

I relax in the bath. Auntie Nora sits on the floor, unobtrusively keeping me company. I rinse off the suds with a quick shower. I dry myself, put on pajamas, and sneak the knife back into place in the kitchen.

18

I have never heard the house so loud, so late. How can Trinity and Nevaeh sleep through it? The thirteen- and ten-year-old are sharing my comfortable bed. I just had to be the Nice Older Cousin and volunteer for a sleeping bag on the floor.

Uncle Jeff and Aunt Cathy are both snoring in the spare bedroom. The walls are so thin that I can even tell which chainsaw is who.

Maybe I can drown it out.

It’s worse in the hall. Uncle Jeff and Aunt Cathy are just as bad through a closed door as they were through a thin wall. Uncle Perry Senior and Aunt Leanne left the door to my dad’s room open, and one of them is snoring, too.

I can hear two televisions blaring downstairs. One is an old musical about frontierswomen who are kidnapped by, and then married to, a bunch of antisocial brothers. Now I’ll have songs from it stuck in my head for a week. That love story did not age well, but “Bless Your Beautiful Hide” has a catchy melody. The other TV plays an infomercial for fitness equipment.

My steps make the stairs creak, disrupting absolutely no one. I pass through the dining room. The table is still covered in photographs of various ages. Relatives from six states and five generations have flooded the tri-county area for Great Grandpa and Great Grandma Mariner’s sixtieth wedding anniversary. Every branch of the family tree contributed to the photo album we are going to give them.

What a logistical nightmare. I was exhausted from cleaning up after other people's messes. I’d had to help plan out transportation between two hotels, four hosting houses, and the venue for tomorrow’s big party. I'd almost managed to decompress with a private half-hour of reading in the garage. Then I learned the very unsettling lesson that shared genetics didn’t make me safe from boys I don’t know well.

Now, I just want to sleep!

I retrieve my MP3 player and headphones from the cluttered side table I’d left them on and immediately let Amy Lee sing my thoughts away.

I head to the kitchen for a glass of water. The noise of the infomercial gets louder, but my music makes it easier to ignore. One peek into Dad’s office and I see him deep asleep in his couch, TV remote still in his hand.

A gasp behind me throws my heart into my throat for a second. I spin around and see Perry Jr as startled as I am. I recover faster and pull off my headphones. “What?” I demand.

“Minnow. How did you do it?” he asks. “I can’t sleep for ten seconds together.”

“Guilty conscience?” I scoff.

“I made one mistake. Are you ever going to let that go?”

“Your ‘one mistake’ was pulling out your junk and trying to get yourself off in front of your cousin without her consent. And that wasn’t even six hours ago.”

“Shh! Our family will flip out if they hear about this. Also, you’re my second cousin,” Junior insists. “And in this state, first cousin marriage is legal, so...”

“I feel sick.”

“That weird psychological torture is sick,” Junior hisses. “Looking all black-and-white, shaking me awake, glaring daggers. How did you do it? The hair must be some glowing wig or something. But how did you manage that transparency?”

I freeze in place as my heart turns cartwheels.

The ghost of Eleanora Hope Mariner is in some in-between plane of existence made of wishful thinking, collective grief, and a running joke. Dad and Uncle Jeff say their little sister is “visiting” them when old wiring makes lights flicker. They blame her when small objects are hard to find. They talk as if she is always nearby but never visible.

“Is this part of the head game, too?” Junior demands. “Staring off into space, pretending I’m not here?”

“I wish you weren’t here,” I tell him absently. I look around the kitchen and through the open doors. I feel Auntie Nora’s gaze on us.

Junior looks around, too. He’s jittery.

“This is nuts,” I say. “I’ve literally never heard anyone else say they could see Nora.”

He crosses his arms. “Seriously, Minnow? I know you got your panties in a twist about me but it’s messed up to joke about Nora .”

“It’s messed up to sexually harass people,” I snap back.

“It’s not like I hurt you,” Junior snarls. He steps too close to me, shoulders back. Something deep inside my body prepares me to run for safety. “Guys are bigger and stronger than girls, and the ones who are actually bad use that advantage. Violently. You should be grateful I don’t do much worse. Keep messing around with this ghost crap and maybe I will.”

“I’m not joking or messing around.” My voice sounds much more calm than I feel. “Nora is here and you pissed her off.”

His eyes narrow angrily at me. He starts to speak; I think the word “maybe.” Then something over my right shoulder catches his eye and the sound changes to a short, strangled bleat.

I turn, convinced I’ll see Aunt Nora baring her teeth, protecting me with ghoulish intimidation.

The cabinet behind me is still open. I see my own distorted reflection in the neat rows of drinking glasses. There’s nothing else.

Junior is gone. A dribbled line of urine leads from the spot he was standing, down the hall, and out the front door.

I mop up the mess and close the door. I shut off Dad’s TV before Billy Mays can convince me to buy stain remover. I step over the sleeping bags full of Junior’s little siblings. Mountain men are singing about “Sobbin’ Women” when I shut off that TV.

Snores still drift down the stairs, but now there’s an empty couch in a quiet living room. I move Junior’s blanket and pillow to the kitchen floor—I definitely don’t need to lie down on his body odor. I settle down on the couch with an old quilt and Evanescence's album Fallen.

24

“Oh, no.”

Those two syllables snap me out of my comfortable, tired stupor. Alert now, I peer out the windshield and the passenger window, trying to spot what’s wrong in the thick evening fog.

Terry keeps driving at the same speed, so I figure he didn’t see a road hazard or anything too important.

“What’s up?” I ask. “Did you forget your phone back at my dad’s house or something?”

“No,” he says sheepishly. “Just. Um.”

His silent flatulence hits me. Disgust and hilarity make me gag and crack up at the same time. I roll my window down. “Get the others down too,” I say between giggles.

He presses the buttons and the car starts to air out. “I didn’t know what would be worse—getting cold or smelling it.”

“I can survive being cold for a bit,” I joke.

“I’m so sorry. I thought I’d taken enough lactase pills to be okay. I should have known that cheesecake was tempting fate.”

“Nevaeh’s been making that cheesecake every Thanksgiving since she was eleven. No one can resist it.”

“Seriously. How is she not five hundred pounds?”

“She does some sportball thing,” I say. The cool, clammy air clears out the stench relatively quickly. I’m still chuckling. “I thought First Family Holiday would be enough of a relationship test for one weekend. Apparently we’re also crossing First Gastric Distress off the list.”

“I am sorry to inform you, but this is the least lactose intolerance can do.”

“Some vegan cheeses are actually quite tasty,” I tell him. “I’ve already cut out meat. It wouldn’t be the worst thing to reduce animal products even more.”

“I guess so,” Terry says. “Just don’t take parmesan from me completely. And next year, I’ll just bring enough lactase to combat the cheesecake.”

I’m grinning.

He glances my way, then focuses on the foggy road, also smiling. “I love that grin. What’s it for this time?”

“You like me,” I say. “You want to be my partner all year.”

“At least a year,” he says, beaming. “I mean, it’s too soon for words like ‘forever’ and ‘ring shopping,’ but I think things are going well here.”

“We’re off to a great start,” I agree. “Especially since you survived a holiday with the Mariners.”

I’m starting to get cold. Terry closes the windows before I mention it. He asks, “Why does everyone call you Minnow? Should I switch from Eleanora to Minnow? How about a nickname that actually comes from your name, like Ellie or Nora?”

“I have kind of a weird relationship with my name,” I answer. “Eleanora was my dad’s little sister. I have two middle names, Rosalind Margaret, because my mom's name was Margery Rose. My aunt went by Nora, but she hanged herself about two months before her high school graduation.”

“Shit,” Terry said.

“Yeah. I was born literally nine months later. So, at least my parents could comfort each other?”

“Grief-banging is normal,” Terry says. “When losing a loved one, a lot of people feel a strong instinctive inclination to, you know, do the activity that makes a replacement.”

“People don’t talk about that much when discussing the so-called ‘stages of grief,’” I say. “Well, Mom and Dad wanted to honor Nora, so they gave me her name. But they didn’t want other people to treat me like some sort of replacement-Nora, so they basically lied to everyone they knew for the first year of my life.”

“Wait, what?”

“Seriously,” I said. “I still have distant relatives who call me Rosalind because it never really sank in for them that my parents actually did name me Eleanora.”

“Okay. I get why you don’t go by Nora. But how did you get your fishy nickname?”

I shrug. “It wasn’t really enough to have people call me Rosalind. Losing Nora was still such a fresh wound, and I guess the family resemblance is strong.”

“Oh!” Terry interrupted. “That portrait in the hallway. I asked your uncle when you had your hair in that style, and all he said was, ‘That isn’t Minnow,’ and walked away.”

“That’s Nora's senior portrait,” I say, nodding. “People called me Mini-Nora. MIN-ee-NO-rah. Min-no.”

“Yikes.”

“Yep.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

“It’s what I’ve been called for as long as I can remember. It’s way too weird to hear my dad introduce me as ‘his daughter, Eleanora.’ Like, who? No. I am Minnow.”

“Hm.”

A moment passes without either of us speaking. I say, “It isn’t too late to bail. If my family stuff is too heavy for you, I get it.”

“Nah,” Terry says. “I’d stay, even if your cousin stopped making cheesecake.”

30

Benjamin is ten weeks old. He’s got a full belly and a clean diaper—exactly the best time for cuddling up with Grandpa Roland. They’re on the easy chair. Terry’s sitting at one end of the couch and I’m sprawled over the rest of it with my head in his lap. I’ll probably nap soon.

Nora stands beside my dad, staring at Benjamin. She’s both grinning and wiping away intangible tears. She looks so young.

Has she really spent thirty years wearing matching jeans and denim jacket, never leaving the house, never speaking? Do I have a chemical imbalance that makes me perceive a person who isn’t real? She’s the only ghost I’ve ever seen. Am I psychic, or suffering psychosis?

It doesn’t feel like suffering. It just feels like having an aunt I can love but never hug. Well, it used to feel like that. Nora looks so young.

36

Benny doesn’t see her. I don’t know why I expected him to.