Invisible Ellen

by Shari Shattuck

  Mortified, she rolled off of Temerity, who took two deep breaths and sat up.

  “Where did he go?” she asked, scrambling easily to her feet, apparently fully recovered and unconcerned that she had been slammed to the ground and rolled over like biscuit dough.

  Ellen was so startled by the man’s direct charge that she felt as though the breath had been knocked out of her as well, but she tried to explain. “He’s . . .” She wasn’t sure. She paused, listening.

  But Temerity was better at that than she was. “He’s on the roof!” she exclaimed. “He’s running around to the other side.”

  It was true. Even as Ellen collected her scattered wits, she could see the man rounding the center section of the building and then stooping low, making his way across the flat roof on the far side. He took refuge behind one of the many protrusions jutting from the tarred roof, an air vent, Ellen thought. He was apparently listening to the commotion below. The cops were shouting, their guns were drawn, but they could not see the young man from their grounded positions.

  “He’s hiding,” Ellen whispered. “On the roof across from us. No, wait.” She pulled the binoculars from the hook and focused in on the shadowy silhouette. As she watched, he ducked down and his shape twisted strangely. Then, with a run and a leap, arms waving for balance, he flew off the roof, leaping to the one-story building next door. “He jumped! He’s on the next building.” They waited as the cops circled the building, but within a few minutes, they had returned to their patrol car.

  The two women listened, both of them with their ears pressed to the screen. One of the cops said, “He’s gone, over the roof. I’ll put out an alert.” The radio sputtered and then they heard the door to the apartment downstairs open.

  “Did you get him?” The elderly voice was like glass riddled with spidery cracks, but plenty loud, and Ellen recognized it as the woman who owned the little dog. “I heard the shot. I’m the one who called. That man is trouble. I knew it, the people who show up here, day and night, I knew there’d be trouble.”

  So curtain lady had called the police, probably when she’d heard the same shot as Temerity, who punched a fist in the air triumphantly, then winced and rubbed her rib cage as she said, “I told you I heard gunfire.”

  “I know,” Ellen said, massaging her backside and hoping Temerity hadn’t been hurt too badly when she’d landed on her, “but that guy was running because he just bought a big bag of drugs, he had it when he climbed up.”

  As if the gates had been opened to admit the general public, a crowd was venturing down the alley to see the attraction, gathering in little cliques. They expressed resentment when the police tried to deter them. This street was their theater, and they were not going to leave without seeing the finale. Cindy’s face appeared at her window, roused by the commotion, but she did not come out.

  “All right, everyone stay back.” The cops, arms extended, restrained the rowdy audience, who booed and shouted insults to express how they felt about their fun being interrupted by anything as petty as law or civilized behavior. Once the small crowd was contained, the officers returned to the old woman, who was standing on her landing, directly below Ellen and Temerity. Out of sight, but they could hear the conversation perfectly. “You said the shots came from that apartment? We’ll check it out.”

  “It won’t be good,” the quavering voice said from below. “I told him he’d come to a bad end. But would he listen? No.”

  “Yes, ma’am, we’ve run across that same problem,” one of the officers said dryly. “It might be better if you wait inside.”

  “Like that’s gonna happen.” Temerity snorted under her breath. “Snoop lady is jonesing for an action fix.”

  The cops approached T-bone’s door with practiced stealth and knocked. There was no answer. “Police,” they called out loudly, standing to either side of the door, guns drawn. No reply. Ellen could see T-bone in his chair through the window. “He’s not getting up,” she whispered to Temerity.

  One of the officers turned and peeked cautiously around the edge of the windowsill. From that viewpoint, he could see the man inside at a profile, slumped in the chair. He motioned to his partner, who risked a glance as well. “Sir?” the first officer tapped on the glass with the muzzle of the gun. “Sir!” he shouted.

  No response. “We have a possible casualty,” one officer said into his radio. “We are going in.” Stepping back to the door, the officer smashed two slats of the door and reached in to turn the lock while the other one kept watch on the inert figure through the window.

  They both entered with their guns raised. Searching the small apartment was the work of a few seconds, then they went to T-bone.

  Within a minute Ellen heard the static of a radio and heard the words “We have a victim down with a gunshot to the chest,” but she couldn’t make out what else was said because one of the impatient crowd yelled, “There’s a dead body in there! This is scary!” This observation was greeted with a rousing, if somewhat slurred, flurry of enthusiastic comments from his fellow penny-ticket holders.

  “Oh my God,” Temerity said. “He’s been shot!”

  Ellen couldn’t respond. She felt like her insides had been vacuumed of everything familiar. Her personal menagerie had just become a very public zoo, and that was not okay.

  Backing away from the window, she slumped down on the kitchen’s only stool. “They’ll come here,” she said, horrified by the certainty. “They’ll ask questions.”

  “Probably,” Temerity said, her voice tentative, as though she detected Ellen’s panic and was trying to decide how best to keep her calm. “A man has been shot. Are you afraid?”

  “Yes,” Ellen whispered. “I don’t want . . . I can’t talk to them.”

  “But they’re the police, and someone’s been shot.”

  “I can’t! Don’t ask me to, please. I . . . just . . . can’t.” A strange, fuzzy blank spot in her past threatened to take shape, and she shoved it away. Though she couldn’t have recalled the incident specifically to save her life, the memory still cast a wavering shadow. In one of her early foster “homes,” the father, an alcoholic police officer, had amused himself by tying a six-year-old Ellen to a chair and scratching her arm with a sharp pin to see how long she could go without crying out. When a teacher had asked how she had acquired the network of long, scabbed scratches, Ellen had covered the wounds and shaken her head, pressing her lips together. As a matter of routine, Ellen was taken to the school office and visited by a police officer. At the sight of the uniform, Ellen had retreated into a corner, sobbing, choking back the sounds, rocking and refusing to speak. She’d effectively blocked those memories, but the shadow lingered, making her skin crawl whenever she ventured too close to a dark blue uniform.

  The thought of anyone staring at her, that look on their face that too closely resembled nausea, was enough to stop her breathing, but that memory she’d packed away stung Ellen from the inside. Partial images of a uniform and a sharp implement dive-bombed her consciousness, then retreated into darkness. A small whimper escaped her as she brushed at her upper arm as though to wipe away a wasp.

  “Okay, okay. Tell you what. Tell me what you saw, everything. I’ll pretend to be you and answer their questions.”

  Stunned at the grasp and generosity of this woman, Ellen gasped. “You would do that?”

  Temerity’s face twisted into a scowl, as if she were impatient with Ellen’s doubt. “Of course I will. You can’t, because . . . well, because you can’t. How are they supposed to talk to someone they can’t see? That would freak them out, don’t you think? And besides, I heard most of it. That’s almost as good.”

  “We could pretend we weren’t here,” Ellen suggested weakly.

  “Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to work.” Temerity frowned, thinking. “What’s happening now?”

  Ellen twisted so that she could see out
her kitchen window. “One of the cops is trying to help T-bone, the other one is keeping people from getting too close. Wait!” She noticed something. In the window next door, Cindy had spotted the envelope and was stooping down to pick it up. She turned it over in her hand, reading the handwritten line on the outside before letting it drop again as though it had burned her.

  “Cindy found the letter,” Ellen whispered, breathless.

  “What’s she doing?”

  “She looked at it and then dropped it, and now she’s picking it up again. She turned on the light and she’s opening it. She’s reading it.”

  “How does she look?”

  Ellen studied what she could make out of the girl’s face. She fumbled the binoculars up to her eyes and the face leapt toward her, startling in its intimate detail. “She looks really scared,” Ellen said. “She put one hand over her mouth, tight, like she doesn’t want to scream. She’s staring at it—her hands are shaking.”

  Confusion was heaped on commotion as an ambulance and two more patrol cars raced into the alley, bringing with them a demented carnival atmosphere of spinning lights and discordant sirens. The paramedics were directed into the apartment with their trauma kits, and after a hurried conference with the original officers on the scene, the other uniforms took over crowd control and began questioning everyone in it. One of the officers knocked on Cindy’s door. She started, as though it were her first indication of the hubbub outside, clutching the letter to her chest. “Police. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  “The police are going to talk to her,” Ellen said, her fingers itching to reach for her notebook, but she didn’t. Temerity drew in a quick breath. It came to Ellen that what two days ago she would have written in her journal, she was now orally chronicling for Temerity. Instead of simply recording facts, she was communicating a story and getting a response. Her ledger had come alive.

  “She’s right next door,” Temerity said softly, leaning in to listen, but the ambient noise from the radios and the gathering crowd was blocking out individual voices. “She must have heard the shot. There’s only a wall between them, right?”

  “True,” Ellen said. “But maybe she thought it was the TV or something, or like me, that it was just another drunk firing off a round for fun. I don’t really pay much attention to them anymore.”

  “Could be. Did she know him?” Temerity asked. “I hope she’s not too upset.”

  Ellen thought about it. She’d seen them exchange a few words, but never anything more, so she doubted there would be much personal trauma over his injury or demise. “Kind of. I mean, they said hello and stuff like that, but I think she was a little afraid of him, of everyone really. Mostly she avoided him.”

  “Can’t say I blame her. The guy’s a drug dealer who must have some dubious visitors. She probably just wanted to steer clear of him. What else?”

  Ellen dutifully narrated what she could see of the action below. The police officer went into Cindy’s kitchen and stood with his notepad open, taking a statement, no doubt. Cindy did look somewhat horrified, but then, as Ellen told Temerity, that had pretty much been her expression for the past eight months or so.

  “Does she still have the letter?”

  “Yes. But she put it back in the envelope. Now she’s kind of doubling over. The cop has pulled a chair over for her. He is leaning over her, he put his hand on her shoulder, I think she might be upset, no, wait . . .”

  Ellen pressed the binoculars to the screen, watching as best she could as Cindy folded forward as if trying to see over her stomach to between her legs. She could hear Temerity’s quick breaths near her ear. And then Ellen saw it too, a dark, wet stain spreading between Cindy’s legs on her light-colored sweatpants. She related this with alarm, confusion, and embarrassment to Temerity, who simply patted her shoulder and summed it up in three words.

  “Her water broke.”

  Temerity explained to Ellen that, unlike on TV, there was no mad rush to get to the hospital just because the amniotic fluid sac had burst. The doctors did like the mother to deliver the baby within twenty-four hours so as not to put it through undue stress, but Cindy might not even be feeling the labor yet. She also said something about the girl’s pelvic bones having to rotate so that she would “dilate” and the baby’s head could get through, but the image of pain that summoned was too medieval for Ellen to even consider.

  While they planned what to tell the police, who would certainly come knocking soon, they kept an eye below. T-bone was put on a stretcher and half wheeled, half carried across the uneven surface of the courtyard. Cindy changed, packed a small bag, and made a phone call. But the call coincided with a round of hooting and cheering from the delighted vagrants as the ambulance, now loaded with T-bone, pulled out, siren wailing, making it impossible to hear any of it. All Ellen could report was that Cindy had read the phone number off of a business card. The letter was left, forgotten, on the counter.

  “So she probably called the legal pair,” Temerity surmised as Cindy was helped into one of the police cars, which left with her in it, presumably to take her to the hospital. “What was their name, the baby buyers?”

  “The Newlands.”

  “So they’ll meet her at the hospital.” Temerity sighed. “Now I feel bad for Janelle. I mean, she’s not even going to know her brother had a son or daughter.” She pressed one hand against her mouth, then let it drop. “How sad. If it was Justice’s, and I’d lost him, I’d really want to know that kid. I’d feel better about it if Cindy had had at least a couple of minutes to think it over.” She sighed again. “But we did our part. She read Janelle’s letter. Now it’s up to the pregnant one.” Temerity stood listening to the hubbub, considering. And then she said, “Did they seem nice? The Newlands? Like they’d be good parents?”

  Ellen thought about the way the man had casually bullied Cindy to agree to their terms. “No,” she said. “Not that I know anything about good parents.”

  Temerity reached up for Ellen’s shoulder. She missed slightly and her fingers accidentally brushed Ellen’s left cheek. The contact made Ellen jerk away. Temerity’s hand hovered uncertainly for a moment, then found its goal. She squeezed Ellen’s shoulder gently. “I’m really sorry you had to grow up without anyone to support you. That must be very painful and very lonely.”

  For a second, Ellen was confused. Her life had been hard sometimes, that’s just the way it was. This was the first time anyone had said they were sorry for what she’d been through, and Ellen couldn’t make sense of it. The concept that Temerity felt pain for her, or that she should feel badly for herself, floored Ellen. Deep in the moldy basement of her subconscious, something else stirred and struggled to find breath and express itself, to escape the bonds that Ellen had unknowingly imposed.

  “I’m really sorry,” Temerity repeated softly. Ellen heard the click of some internal latch being released, and suddenly she was floundering. Overwhelmed by a force that instantly engulfed her with sensations she could not even comprehend, she shut her eyes in a desperate bid to avoid it.

  But she couldn’t stop it from hurling her backward. She was five, on the day her mother walked out. The door closed behind the woman, and Ellen, tiny and malnourished, pressed her ear to the door. When the footsteps blended into the chaotic noise that was the building’s constant soundtrack, Ellen went to the pile of blankets where she slept and wound into a ball. She lay there wondering if her mother would ever return, and what she would do if she didn’t. A search of the room turned up nothing more than cigarette butts and empty liquor bottles. The gnawing hunger in her stomach grew over the next hours until she was weeping with emptiness, but she muffled the sounds. Tears, she had learned, brought only retribution. Ellen moved her blankets to the floor by the door and lay with her back curled against it, listening to people come and go, babies wailing, voices raised in drunken argument, sirens, and the occasional gunshot. Finally,
the pain in her stomach grew stronger than her fear, and the next time she heard footsteps, she cracked open the door to see a wheezing man on the stairs, cigarette dangling from his mouth. He turned to look at her, grimacing at the sight of the scabs covering part of her face. She had whispered, “I’m hungry.” Muttering in disgust, he reached into a bag he was carrying and pulled out a packaged cinnamon bun. He threw it to her like she was a dog, shook his head, and shuffled on.

  Ellen wiped her face angrily to wring out the memory. She was bewildered to find Temerity’s image blurring before her as tears squeezed from her eyes. She knew, of course, that her life had been hard, bad, lonely, but she’d known nothing else and she’d been kept busy surviving it. But now Temerity had identified the pain, named it, and all at once the buried effects of her past began to pulse, the sides of the locked compartment that held it bulging as it strained to escape its containment. Ellen gritted her teeth. “No big deal,” she muttered.

  Temerity squeezed harder. “Really? Because I think it is a big deal. I think it sucks. But we can talk about that some other time.” She removed her hand.

  “We don’t need to,” Ellen said, swallowing hard and trying to still the tremor inside. “I’m okay with it, really.”

  “Right.” Temerity raised her hand again but held it tentatively in the space between them. “I don’t want to take a liberty, but . . .” She reached out, quickly brushed her fingers down Ellen’s left cheek. “. . . what is this?”

  “It’s a scar.” Ellen had jerked back convulsively at the touch, and she could feel her face flushing. She raised one hand and placed it firmly over the ravaged skin that began at her eye and extended in a wide swath to her jaw.

  “From?”

  “Something that happened a long time ago. Never mind. I’m glad you don’t have to see it, that most people don’t. I’m sorry that Justice did.” She whispered the last sentence, burning with shame that her disfigurement had been revealed.