Invisible Ellen

by Shari Shattuck

  “The money is under the mat!” Ellen responded, pulling the blankets up under her chin. Sitting up had dislodged Mouse from his spot between her calves. He shook himself and mewed an annoyed objection at the air. The boxed groceries were dropped next to the door and she heard the envelope with the exact change, plus a two-dollar tip, being opened and then the receding footfalls of the deliveryman as he went back down the stairs and drove away.

  Ellen opened the door and dragged in the box. She put the milk and the ice cream away and left the rest of it to be unpacked later.

  As she let herself fall heavily onto her mattress in the corner of the one-room apartment, she looked again at the card. What would happen if she called? she wondered. Probably Temerity wasn’t even there now. Probably she had a day job, like most people, though she wouldn’t care what time of day it was. It’s all midnight to me, she’d said. Ellen smiled. She liked that. She liked the cavalier way the girl had said it and she wanted to hear her say it again. She got up and Mouse hissed lazily, then lowered his head, exhausted by the effort, and let his eyes close to slits.

  Clutching the phone tightly, Ellen dialed the number. It rang twice and then she heard “Yo, waz up?”

  “Uhm, hello?” Ellen ventured. “Is this Temerity?”

  “Is, and am.” The ironic laugh confirmed that it was indeed the blind girl.

  “This is, uh, Ellen. We, uh, met last night. I don’t know if you remember me.”

  “If I remember you? Two muggers attacked me, stole my bag, you Jackie-Channed the mofos and returned my stuff. I’m blind—I don’t have amnesia. That kind of thing sticks with you.”

  “Oh.” Ellen couldn’t think of what else to say.

  “So, can you come over tonight? I’m making pasta sauce, so it’s a good night if you eat pasta. You said you don’t go to restaurants, but you didn’t specifically rule out Italian.”

  “I eat pasta,” Ellen said, pressing her tongue against her teeth at the mouthwatering prospect of lasagna, one of her favorite frozen foods. Her number one favorite food, of course, being bacon.

  “Great. You have a working knowledge of the alley where I live. My door is the third one on the left, just ring the buzzer marked ‘Bauer’ and I’ll let you up. You work tonight?”

  “Yes, but not until ten.”

  “Then I’ll see you at seven.” There was a brief pause, then a blast of laughter. “I love saying that. Okay, I won’t see you at seven, but I’ll hear you.” There was a click on the line. “Got another call. Later, babe.” She hung up.

  Ellen stared at the phone in her hand, befuddled and uncertain if someone had actually just referred to her as “babe.”

  Returning to the mattress, she found that she was too nervous and something else—was it excited?—to sleep. She twisted and turned so often that Mouse gave up and thumped with annoyed muttering to the sofa, where he curled up into a ball roughly the size of a trussed turkey and began to snore. Lulled by the rhythm of it, Ellen drifted off.

  She awoke with a start to find that it was already five o’clock. Rising, she took a quick shower in the stand-up stall that had been designed for a race of people far smaller and more compact than her own. Going through her usual contortions, she wet, lathered, and rinsed the considerable surface area of her skin, even washing her hair, though she had already done it twice this week.

  It was as she was unpacking the rest of her groceries that she found the letter. It wasn’t addressed to her by name, rather to one Cindy Carpenter, but it had Ellen’s unit number on it, written in a beautiful longhand. She turned it over and studied it curiously. Her mailbox, at the base of her stairs, occasionally yielded grocery store promotions or the few bills she paid each month, but a personally addressed letter was unique. The mailbox latch was broken and sometimes a renegade envelope would fall out onto the stairs. The deliveryman must have picked up this letter and tossed it into the box with the groceries.

  Should she open it? Return it? Could she live with not knowing what was inside? Did the fact that it had her apartment number on it—slightly smudged—make it her business? It was a quandary. Even as she held it, Ellen could feel its contents buzzing inside as though the white paper were stuffed with electricity.

  She could write “no such person at this address” on it and leave it to be picked up by the man in gray, but what if it was for one of the other residents and they didn’t get it? Cindy Carpenter. Could that be the person who lived here before her? But she had been here for six years. Maybe Cindy Carpenter was the elderly lady who lived in the unit downstairs from Ellen, the only one with proper curtains. The most intriguing question of course was, what was inside?

  Ellen opened the package of Oreos she’d brought home last night and started feeding them into her mouth like quarters into a slot machine, washing them down with a creamy mug of half-and-half. The letter lay on the abbreviated kitchen countertop, and Ellen could almost hear the low hum of high voltage whirring frenetically inside the white envelope. She ate a third of the cookies, then picked up the envelope and a knife.

  Sliding the blade under the flap, she worked it back and forth, tearing it only slightly. When she finally had it open, Ellen unfolded the single sheet of paper. In the same formal script used to address it, it read:

  Dear Cindy,

  I’m not sure how to begin this letter, so I’ll start by introducing myself. My name is Janelle Beaufort. You’ve never met me, but you knew my brother, Sam—he talked about you in his letters home. I’m sorry that it took so long for me to get in touch with you, but all I knew was that you lived in Morningside and that you worked at the Milan Grill. When I went there, they said you had left. It wasn’t until I found the strength a week ago to go through his army duffel bag that I found your full name and address. As you might imagine, our family has been thrown into a state of shock and sorrow over Sam’s death, so the delay in writing to you is, I hope, forgivable.

  So Cindy is Heidi, Ellen thought, remembering Heidi telling the shark couple that the baby’s father had died in Afghanistan. She went back to reading.

  I understand that you didn’t know my brother for very long, but I also know that he had real feelings for you and was hoping to pick up your relationship when he finished his tour of duty. Perhaps it is an imposition to contact you now. You don’t know me, and maybe you don’t want to, but I would like to meet you. If you had genuine feelings for Sam, which I believe you did, based on your letters (I apologize for reading them), then I’m sure you have also been thrown by his death and perhaps we can find some comfort in meeting and remembering my brother.

  That’s all I will say for now. I’ve included my phone numbers, both work and home, and address so that you can contact me if you choose. Please don’t feel pressured. I am the manager of the furniture department at the downtown Macy’s. My husband, Jimmy, and I live in Englewood Estates.

  It was signed “Janelle” and, sure enough, the phone numbers and home address were included.

  Ellen wiped a few Oreo crumbs from the counter and laid the letter down carefully. She looked again at the address, wondering, if this Sam had written to Heidi—now Cindy; that threw her slightly—then why was the apartment number wrong? Ellen was in 2B and Heidi-Cindy was in 1B. Peering at the number-letter combo more closely, Ellen saw that what looked like a 2 could possibly have been a fancy 1, the way it was written in the fading art of longhand. It could have been read either way, which produced yet another new idea in Ellen, bringing the total for the last twenty-four hours to a dizzying total of three. And the third new idea was this: it was almost as though fate had wanted her, Ellen, to get this letter. Her mission, however, if she chose to accept that there was one, was unclear.

  Ellen looked out the window down at Heidi’s apartment. The mournful wailing had stopped while she slept, but she could see Heidi-slash-Cindy slumped in a kitchen chair, her shirt pulled up over her bulbous stomach
, tears dripping onto the stretched skin and dribbling down the sides, raining on what must surely be the dead Sam’s baby.

  Turning to the clock, she saw that it was almost six, which sent a jolt of panic into her. Could she really go to dinner with a blind girl? Or anyone, for that matter? Her life, both simple and redundant, allowed her to avoid being confronted with many choices, and now she found herself faced with two decidedly difficult decisions: whether to go meet with Temerity, and what to do with the letter. Maybe it would be better for Cindy never to read it now that she’d made up her mind to give the baby away. On the other hand, she didn’t really look very happy about it. Not knowing why she cared, and unaccustomed to the phenomenon, Ellen moved restlessly around her small domicile, feeling the same desperate, trapped panic as the one time she’d been unable to escape dodgeball at school. Horrified at both the attention and almost feral cruelty on the faces of her classmates, she had curled into a ball on the ground, only to be stung by balls and taunts until the class was called in and she’d snuck, unnoticed and unmissed, to hide in the janitor’s closet until the final bell.

  But Temerity’s confident laugh rang out suddenly in her memory and stopped her in her tracks. Ellen had a new thought, not an idea exactly, which would have brought the day’s grand total to an unprecedented four, but almost.

  Maybe if she made one decision, it would also solve the other. With a tremor of apprehension, Ellen mostly made up her mind to go meet Temerity. She would tell her about the letter and seek her advice on what to do with it. For the possessor of such a valiant laugh, directing a single piece of paper to its proper place—no matter the mayhem in its message—would be Twinkie cake.

  Ellen stood outside the huge metal door of Temerity’s fourth-floor walk-up and changed her mind for the tenth time. Deciding, definitively, that closed doors should stay that way, she began to slink away, feeling relief and something else, something hollow. . . .

  A heavy latch grated and Ellen spun back in alarm as the door swung partially open. “Welcome to the hangar,” Temerity proclaimed.

  Still huffing from the climb, Ellen did not answer, focusing instead on bracing herself to run. But she didn’t. In a strange stupor, perhaps brought on by oxygen deprivation, she watched herself raise a foot to step through the door, and froze, her foot suspended in midair as Temerity stood back and revealed the space beyond. Compared to her own cramped room, the loft in which Temerity lived seemed a wide-open prairie over which hawks circled in a cloudless sky, making Ellen feel like a field mouse on a platter. It was relatively free of furniture, which made sense, Ellen supposed, though the presence of a television in a seating area confused her. Maybe she just listened to it. There were large windows across the entire far side of the loft, hung with sheer white drapes, thin enough to allow the light but opaque enough to preserve the privacy of its occupant from the prying, seeing eyes of anyone in the facing apartment building across the street. Underneath those windows sat an elegant grand piano and two chairs.

  “You have curtains,” Ellen said lamely.

  “Yep. I might not have eyes, but I have a body, and men will be boys, as I’m sure you know.”

  Temerity was wearing jeans and a sweater, both dark blue. Her dark hair was pulled loosely back in a ponytail and she wore no shoes, only socks; one was pink and the other green, but the thickness, Ellen supposed, was about the same. As she crossed back over to a kitchen area, separated from the rest of the loft by nothing but a graceful L of granite counters with a row of stools on the outside, Temerity called out, “Well don’t just stand there, come on in. You want a glass of something?”

  Ellen wondered how Temerity knew where she was, but when she started hesitantly after her hostess, stooping defensively against the imagined raptors circling above, even she could hear the squeak of her rubber soles, one muted by duct tape, against the polished wood floor. “Water, I guess.”

  Temerity opened a cabinet and pulled down a glass from a neatly organized row. She filled it from a purified water faucet by the sink and held it across the counter. “Come and get it!” she called. Ellen shuffled over. Reaching across, she took the glass and then sat tentatively on one of the stools facing the kitchen. The smell of Italian sausage in rich tomato sauce made her knees weak. “Sure you don’t want a shot of scotch or something in there? I’m having wine.”

  “No, thanks,” Ellen said. She had tried getting drunk once, on some sweet liquor swiped from the return bin at work. After an hour or so of feeling dizzy, she had vomited copiously while sweat seeped profusely from every pore of her body. Poisoned, she had been sure she would shrivel and die. It had not been a fun night, and she had woken the next day feeling as dehydrated as salted jerky on asphalt.

  “So, Ellen, I know that you work at Costco, and that you’re a major badass. But that’s it. What about family? A boyfriend, husband, kids?”

  “No.”

  Temerity pulled a pasta pot from below the counter and began to fill it with tap water, using one finger to measure the depth. “No to which? Husband? Kids? Family?”

  “No . . . all,” Ellen responded.

  Temerity’s brow furrowed. “You have no family at all?”

  “Only child, orphaned.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Hold on a sec while I pull this foot out of my mouth.”

  Ellen was surprised at the pathos in the girl’s voice. “It’s okay. I don’t really remember much about my mother.” She stopped, then mumbled, “And what I do, I wish I could forget.”

  “So you grew up, where, in foster homes?”

  “Mostly a group home. Until I could get out on my own when I was seventeen.”

  “What was that like?”

  Ellen shivered. She’d worked so hard to block it out. “Not good,” she finally said.

  “From what I’ve heard about the foster care system, you’re not the only one glad to leave it behind you,” said Temerity.

  “What about you?” Ellen asked. The interest in her own life was making breathing difficult, like a wet blanket thrown over her face.

  “Oh, me.” Turning her back on Ellen to face the stove, Temerity patted the counter next to it until she located a bottle of olive oil. She screwed off the top, sniffed it, and then poured a dose into the pot. She repeated the procedure with salt. “Let’s see. I was born here, my parents live out in the suburbs, about an hour away. I have a brother who lives with me, and I have a dog.”

  At the mention of the words “brother” and “lives with,” Ellen shot up from her stool.

  Misinterpreting the scrape of wood against the floor, Temerity asked, “Are you afraid of dogs? You don’t have to worry about Runt. He’s a bah lamb, and he’s not here right now, my brother took him out for a walk.”

  “He’s . . . he’s coming here? Tonight?”

  Temerity put her hands on her hips. “If you’re really that freaked out, we can put him in the bedroom.”

  “No, not the dog, the brother.”

  “Mmm. I could put my brother in the bedroom.” Temerity tapped her short fingernails on the granite countertop. “But I’m not sure he would stay.”

  “I thought . . . thought it would just be us,” Ellen sputtered, her panic rising as she plotted her escape. She could say she left her stove on, that she had to work early, that she was due to be abducted by aliens, anything.

  “He lives here. Is there a problem? Is this like the restaurant thing?” She put a lid on the pot and came to stand across the counter from Ellen. “Okay, maybe you’d just better tell me what to avoid so I don’t have to try to figure it out with my keen sense of observation.” She snorted a little and then slid her hand across the smooth surface until she located her glass of wine marooned on the smooth stretch of granite between them. “Maybe this will help,” she mumbled and took a sip.

  Ellen felt strangled by her utter absence of conversational skills. “I . . . uhm, I�
��m not very good at talking, explaining. I . . .”

  “Why not?” Temerity asked, swirling the ruby liquid and burying her nose in the wide glass to breathe in the scent.

  Ellen shrugged, a lost gesture. “I guess because I don’t do it very often. Well, ever, really.”

  Temerity looked thoughtful. “Okay, let me get this straight. You don’t talk very often.”

  “Not usually.” Ellen knew her voice sounded high and unsure. She cleared her throat, but it only made it feel tighter.

  “Why not?”

  The deep breath Ellen tried to take shuddered in her clenched chest.

  “What was that?” Temerity demanded. “Why are you afraid?”

  “I’m not,” Ellen lied. “I mean, I don’t really want to talk to anyone, so I don’t, but that’s not . . . that’s not why I don’t.”

  “Okay then.” Temerity shifted impatiently from pink sock to green sock. “Come on, help me out here.” She pointed to her eyes, the irises were so dark brown that it was hard to see if there were pupils there. “I can’t read your expressions. You have to broadcast them. Think of it as subtitles for the deaf.”

  “That’s just it,” Ellen managed to squeak out. “No one can read my expressions.”

  “Okay. Why not?”

  Ellen prepared to go, with a leaden heart. She hadn’t realized how much she’d invested in this little visit. Disappointment seeped up through her feet and legs, saturating her body with a flood of heaviness. Strangely, though, she wanted, she needed, to tell this girl the truth. So she broadcast it. “Because no one can see me. I’m invisible.” She braced herself to be asked to leave, told she was crazy, laughed at—always, she’d been laughed at.

  But a strange light was stealing across the pretty girl’s face. She sipped her wine again, thoughtfully, her brow twisted in concentration, as though deciphering an unfamiliar language. Finally, she spoke. “I think I understand,” she said, and then with delight dribbling off of the words, she added, “How marvelous.”