If Oscar ever found the person that had given Eleanor grapes with seeds in the middle, he was going to make them clean up this mess and then kill them viciously. It had gone this way with peaches, when someone had given her one with a pit still inside. A nasty patient had whispered to Eleanor where eggs came from, and now eggs couldn’t be served when Eleanor was in the dining room. This was Oscar’s third year volunteering here, and he had seen Eleanor’s dietary restrictions slowly constrict until she barely ate anything.Before now, grapes had always been safe. Oscar didn’t even know where to find grapes with seeds still inside—every grocery store he’d ever known had sold them seedless. So when he’d received a phone call this morning, with a high-school-aged volunteer on the other end frantically whispering that Eleanor was in a panic and Oscar was needed here, stat, he’d expected a repeat of the peach incident. Instead he’d found the girl of twenty-two with a pile of grapes in front of her, keening.
Nobody could scream quite like Eleanor. When she put her mind to it, she could keep at it for hours, rarely pausing for breath and maintaining a volume and pitch that couldn’t be matched. It was eerie, disconcerting, and most people didn’t know what to do with themselves when she started. If the expression of the receptionist was any indication—harried, and a bit like she felt like crying—Eleanor had been at it for quite some time when Oscar arrived. Luckily, he’d taken a crash-course in Eleanor.
When Oscar had first started volunteering here, Eleanor had just come in. He was assigned to her case, really acting more the nurse than companion. At nineteen, a year younger than Oscar himself, she was a docile little thing, just recovering from the head wound that had left her unable to securely grasp what was going on around her. He had to make sure she was getting her medicine, helping her to drink the liquid medicine that the nurses delivered in little cups, stopping her from spitting it out or dropping it on the floor.
Then there had been the first incident, this one with an apple. Oscar had cut it in half, trying to show her the way the seeds in the middle formed a pentagon, or a star. That had been a mistake. The moment she’d seen the seeds there in the middle of the fruit, Eleanor had gone into a frenzy. She had started crying and digging through the flesh of the fruit with her fingernails, tearing it into bits until she was absolutely certain that the little pile of seeds in front of her was all that the apple had to give. Then she’d swept them into cupped hands and crooned over them: “Babies, babies, babies…” And the seeds had been swept into a little cup, marking the start of Eleanor’s collection.
He’d never made the mistake of giving her an apple again, and Eleanor returned to her sweet self, only getting even the slightest touch of rebellion when she had to take her revolting medicine. It was when there was the peach incident, and another screeching and crying—“Babies, babies!—that Oscar put things together and ordered the nursing staff to not give Eleanor anything with seeds in it. And for a while, her collection had only consisted of ten seeds and one large peach pit.
Then, when Eleanor was twenty, the nurses had decided to give her pills instead of the liquid medicine—it was just so hard getting her to take it, when Oscar was on vacation. He’d come back to the report that Eleanor was silently crying every day. The nurses assumed this was just a physical reaction, her body’s way of coping with the change in medication. When Oscar had tried to comb her hair (nobody had bothered in his absence), little blue pills rained down from her matted auburn locks. She’d been keeping them tucked in her bun.
“Babies,” she’d explained to him matter-of-factly, only getting upset when he tried to take them from her. Ultimately, fourteen blue babies made their way into Eleanor’s collection.
Oscar wished above anything that he knew what had happened to Eleanor, what had prompted her to “fall”—only a select circle knew that it was likely she’d jumped—down a flight of concrete stairs, damaging her brain so badly that the only thing she could quite understand was her fixation with babies. He had theories, of course: a miscarriage, a pregnancy scare, an abortion. But Eleanor’s medical record was sparse from before her accident, and her only family was a gaggle of brothers and sisters with high-profile careers that kept them from much knowing their youngest sister. They visited now that she was all but dead, but never had before.
And so, now, with a pile of grapes ahead of him and Eleanor smashing them each methodically, Oscar knew all he could do (now that Eleanor had been calmed down and the idiot who’d tried to take the grapes from her had returned them) was begin to take the squished fruit from her blankets and hair, and let her pick out the seeds. With a damp cloth, he wiped the splatter from the pictures that Eleanor had drawn on good days, with sentences on them in the writing of a kindergartner: My nam is Eleanor. I lik babys. I like submarines.
This last one had been written after a TV special, and Oscar had been thrilled—this was the one time she’d spoken with any sense about anything besides babies. He’d thought it had shown progress, but today’s episode proved him wrong.
Eleanor giggled happily, pushing the last slops of fruit onto the floor with one careless sweep of her hand. She cared for naught except the small pile of seeds in front of her, which she dropped into her cup one by one. When she caught Oscar looking at her, she grinned a grin with the red gums of the barely nourished. She would eat nothing.
“Look, Oscar!” she exclaimed excitedly. “Babies!”
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