There is a graveyard behind the old church on the corner of Sycamore Road and Main Street where a little girl loved to dance. Her name was Eleanor, and although she was only ten, she was very mature for her age. Her Aunt Bella and Uncle Lyle trusted her to walk home from ballet class all by herself, but Eleanor was a wanderer. She lived with Aunt Bella and Uncle Lyle, and while they were not her mom and dad, she loved them in the quiet way a shy child does, and they loved her as dearly as if she were their own. Before you go questioning their parenting skills, know that it is a small town housing this graveyard, and everybody knew each other. Lonecrest’s crime rate would have been zero, if not for the time Eddie Byers tried to rob the corner shop of a pack of cigarettes when he was twelve. But that was many years ago now, and Eddie Byers still feels guilty about that. Lonecrest is a safe town, and the townspeople all watched over Eleanor.

Mr. Jeffers was one of the locals who watched over Eleanor the most. He, a distinguished fellow of seventy-seven years, was the security guard for the local cemetery from Sunday to Sunday, sun up to sun down. He considered this position highly important, and he liked being near his wife and the church that cast cool shadows over his favorite bench. The hourly church bells reminded Mr. Jeffers of childhood, and of home.

His father, Father Eli, was the pastor of Our Lady of Sorrows for many years. Mr. Jeffers used to sit in the very front pew in his Sunday best, swinging his legs back and forth as his daddy delivered what young Mr. Jeffers believed to be a very long, very boring speech. If he was a good boy and kept quiet for the whole ceremony, though, his father would give him a lemon drop wrapped in wax paper. Mr. Jeffers loved lemon drops. He would count down the time between the beginning of service and the sacrament of sweet yellow candy with the ringing of the church bells. It was always worth the wait.

But this story is not just about Mr. Jeffers. This story also is about Eleanor, who Mr. Jeffers often saw trespassing in the graveyard he loved so dearly. The little girl, with a flash of pale pink tutu, would hop over the white picket fence and land neatly upon the gravestone of Heather Trinkett. Mr. Jeffers, who knew Heather, was not a fan of Eleanor's landing site. But he also knew that Heather wouldn’t mind—she was unperturbed by such things, even when she’d been alive. Heather had attended church there when Mr. Jeffers was small, and she happened to be buried in just the right spot to cushion Eleanor’s entry. 

Eleanor was also an easy child to forgive, despite her poor graveyard etiquette. She could charm most people with a shy smile, especially in her pale pink tutu, with a little auburn ballerina bun piled atop her head. When tying up Eleanor’s hair, Aunt Bella always pulled out the wispy red curls that framed Eleanor’s face, even though this was not regulation at Starlight Dance Academy. Eleanor’s curls reminded Bella of her sister, Leah. Eleanor’s hair was a dead ringer for her mother’s, and Bella—who did not share her sister’s red hair—wanted to see her older sister in everything. It is hard to be born the youngest, and become the oldest. 

Aunt Bella never wanted to be a mother. She met her kind and gentle husband, Lyle, when she was just seventeen years old. Even then, she had warned him that she didn’t want children. Children seemed too fragile, too easily scarred, and she did not want the pressure of raising a tiny human in a world that would always, inevitably, hurt them. Lyle was not passionate about whether or not he had children, but he was passionate about Bella, so the subject was never a point of contention. Bella’s sister had always wanted children, and Bella was content to let Leah carry on the family legacy. Leah met her own husband—Eleanor’s father, David—at Bella and Lyle’s wedding. They fell very much in love, and married in Our Lady of Sorrows Church not six months later. It was the talk of Lonecrest for six months after that. Entwining your life with somebody else’s was a big commitment, after all, and to make that promise to the son of Lonecrest’s oldest generation—after less than half a calendar year—was to swear to stay there forever. 

When Leah and David had their daughter, Eleanor, Bella became Aunt Bella. She was overjoyed to hold her niece and listen to her sweet baby gurgles, and ooh and ahh when the infant—her head covered in soft red down even then—grabbed Bella’s finger with her tiny baby hands. Bella especially loved that she could return Eleanor to her parents whenever she was crying.

The first time that Bella could not return Eleanor to her parents, after Leah and David died, Bella learned that her fears about having a child were correct. Here was this beautiful baby girl, no more than three years old, begging for a mommy and daddy who would never come back. The world had lashed out, and Bella could not fix it.

When Eddie Byers was seen stealing one pack of cigarettes and two chocolate bars, he ran into the street without looking both ways. He was afraid of getting caught. David, who was driving his wife to church at the time—Bella watching Eleanor back at home, for she’d never been one for Sunday worship—had been afraid of killing the boy. David swerved his car out of the way, and crashed into Lover’s Lake instead. Bella couldn’t drive down Main Street after that, couldn’t bear witness to the water where her sister died. It’s why she let Eleanor walk back from dance—Lover’s Lake was on the way home. It is also why Aunt Bella told Eleanor that they were moving soon, to somewhere at least ten towns over, a few years later. 

After the accident, Bella’s fear of raising children did not go away, but it did not matter anymore. Aunt Bella didn’t think twice before taking in her niece. She did not want to be a mother, but there are moments in life when you do not get to choose who you become. Lyle was not passionate about raising Eleanor, but he was passionate about Bella, so Eleanor became his, too. 

Bathed in all the love her Aunt Bella and Uncle Lyle offered, Eleanor still wouldn’t let Uncle Lyle sing bedtime songs to her, because that was daddy’s job. And Eleanor loved her Aunt Bella, but Eleanor did not need her in the way that a little girl needs her mother. Aunt Bella was lost at sea, though she had never even seen the ocean—how could she help Eleanor, when the only person Eleanor wanted was her mom? Aunt Bella turned over every object in Leah and David’s house on Sycamore Road, looking for answers. 

She found them in the form of Leah’s messy script in the margins of a paperback. With help from the annotated parenting book found on Leah’s desk—a bookmark in chapter seven forever marking her unfinished place—Aunt Bella decided to sign Eleanor up for two things: ballet—which Leah had written in the text with a purple marker—and counseling.

Mr. Jeffers, then, knew that Eleanor had been dancing for a long time, more than half of her life, and he always looked forward to her visits. He didn’t know, however, that Eleanor was saying goodbye. She and Aunt Bella and Uncle Lyle were all packed up, but Eleanor couldn’t bear to leave her parents behind without one final dance. 

Eleanor’s pink ballet slippers landed softly upon Heather’s grave, then tiptoed across the dewy grass with silence and precision. Mr. Jeffers, sitting on his favorite bench, was waiting for her performance to start. 

He kept a record player in the security outpost next to his bench—a guilty pleasure, and the comfort of a living voice amongst the home of the dead—and when Eleanor landed on Heather, he knew it was time to lay the needle down. He only had one record, so the sound was always the same, but no one seemed to mind.

Soft, scratchy notes of classical music filled the graveyard. Eleanor never questioned where the music came from, and she never noticed Mr. Jeffers. He didn’t think Eleanor ever heard the music, even though it always matched her pace. Eleanor was always too busy getting into fifth position at the foot of her mother and father’s headstones. She rarely spoke to her parents, but she did want to thank her mother for the gift of dance one last time.

Prim and proper, head held high, Eleanor waited for her cue. As the violin surged, she swept across the graveyard that made up her stage. Her body a pen, and the grassy spaces between the graves her paper, she wrote a love letter to her parents. Sunlight glinting off her flyaway auburn curls, she leapt and whirled, a flower bending and twisting in the wind. Eleanor felt tears start to slide down her cheeks, unbidden. She did not want to leave Lonecrest. She was not ready to say goodbye.

She closed her eyes and felt the song of the world through her whole body, crickets chirping and cars passing by creating a melody, a greenhouse for her grief. Eleanor’s pink tutu swirled around her like the essence of being loved, soft and lovely. After so many years of dancing there, she knew the cemetery like she knew her aunt and uncle’s house. It would be familiar to her even in the dark.

Eleanor did not dance for an audience. Her motions were not always beautiful. Sometimes, while the town surged onward in the background, Eleanor’s dancing turned fast and angry. She let the fury of longing for a home that is not there to go back to take over her limbs, clawing at the air as if she could tear her loved ones out of Heaven and pull them back to her. As if she could keep the only little town she had even known. Eleanor had lost her mom and dad, and she had lost her home and had to find it all over again. Now, everything was changing when she had finally started to feel normal. She wanted to pirouette with such fury that time would spin backwards and start her life all over again.

Eleanor lost steam after a few minutes of spinning and stomping. Her rhythm melted back into a sweet, loping melody of loss. Eleanor did not want to admit it, but she knew it to be true: the change would be good for her. Being surrounded by a town that shared her grief kept Eleanor trapped inside of the loss. Everybody was always watching her.

Mr. Jeffers found this performance particularly heartbreaking; he hurt for Eleanor, and he could not comfort her. Leah and David were some of his favorite tenants in the graveyard. He spoke to them every afternoon while they waited for their daughter to visit after lessons. He loved to watch the two of them together, Leah’s auburn hair a pop of color against David’s black shirt. Leah would sit cross-legged on her headstone, blouse still shining with the memory of blood from her accident, and hold David in her arms as he wept. David held her in return, steadied in the storm of his grief, and traced small circles across her back with his fingertips until he could breathe again. Often, comforting strangers will empathize about how difficult it is to lose someone you love, but more rarely do the living consider how difficult it is to become lost.

Sometimes, to help distract Leah from the pain of it all, Mr. Jeffers asked her and David to tell him about what had been happening in Lonecrest before they died. Mr. Jeffers didn’t get out much these days—he was always at the cemetery, ever since his wife had died. She was home to him, so home was there, with her.

But Mr. Jeffers quickly learned Leah and David were bad at telling stories about Lonecrest, because in their eyes, Eleanor was the whole story. Her life was the web that connected everything and everyone. Funny, how children bring people together, and funnier how people don’t seem to realize that children notice. 

Eleanor did not know it, but she had an audience. You could not see her audience, or feel it—a lot like love, you just have to know that it was there. All of them, in the graveyard, perched on their headstones while clad in the last outfits of their life, their generations marked by petticoats and pantsuits and pajama bottoms. Father Eli (the first), Mr. Jeffers’ father, beheld Eleanor with a smile on his lips and a pocket full of lemon drops. He wished he could give one to her, and another to his son. Heather clapped when Eleanor leapt three times in a row, because even though that girl stepped on her gravestone three times a week, Heather forgave her. Heather got into some trouble of her own back in the day—after all, she was the one who broke the cemetery fence so many decades ago. 

Eleanor glided through the air, and generations of Lonecrest cheered and wept for her, a little girl held precious in the eyes of the dead. She reminded them that there was still life outside of the cemetery, and that the heart of Lonecrest had not gone silent when their own stopped beating. Eleanor danced, and she promised them that the world continued on without them, and they were comforted. And Eleanor felt comforted surrounded by all the graves that kept her parents in good company, forever. She was leaving, but she knew they were not alone.

Most of all, Leah and David were so full of love for their little girl, who was growing up with them and without them. She always came back to show them the skills she was most proud of, and they treasured each performance. They hoped she wouldn't keep coming back to them forever, but they hoped she kept coming back to them until she was ready to let go. The sadness in her face was inevitable, and Leah and David had an inkling that Eleanor was leaving soon. They knew their daughter, even from the limited time that they had together. They recognized the loss she felt in the wrinkle of her brow, the redness in her eyes. And they knew, painful as it was to see Eleanor move on and move away, that she would be okay. Of course she would; Eleanor was their little girl.

Mr. Jeffers held his late wife’s hand as they sat on his favorite bench and admired Eleanor’s last recital for Lonecrest.

The music ended with a gentle crackle, and Eleanor held her skirt and curtsied, breathing hard. Her silent audience was the whisper of the wind, the gentle swish of Lover’s Lake. And as quickly as Eleanor arrived, she left again. Aunt Bella and Uncle Lyle were waiting for her, and the townspeople of Lonecrest would worry if she wasn’t walking down Main Street at exactly the same time as usual. Eleanor knew a lot of things for her age, but she especially understood the importance of being home on time, and being able to say goodbye. 

She pressed her fingertips to the stone on which her parents sat, beaming. Leah kissed her forehead, and David smoothed her stray auburn curls. Eleanor smiled, tears in her eyes.

She had a feeling that they saw her. They were her parents, after all, and they always knew her best. Eleanor tiptoed back through the old cemetery, jumped over the broken fence by Heather’s grave, and was gone. 

The cemetery sighed, silent and motionless once more. Mr. Jeffers squeezed his wife’s hand, and they smiled at each other. Watching Eleanor dance, Mr. Jeffers—who had not left the graveyard since he’d been buried there a century before—felt alive again, just for a moment. 

At Leah’s mournful smile, and David’s tears, Mr. Jeffers understood that Eleanor was leaving. He would miss the sunshine she brought to the cemetery, but he, too, was grateful that Eleanor was moving forward. 

What a relief it was to be reminded that life carried on, in the smallest and most wonderful of ways.