Ellen in Pieces

by Caroline Adderson

  Eli calls and Mom helps him down the ladder.

  Nonny’s a fish sucking the air. Short, short, short, long, sucky-mouth sounds, then she stops. Everybody holds their breath with her. Her foot feels cold through the sheet. Eli lifts it to look. Her foot is blue.

  Nonny’s sister sings the coat-and-hat song, the sunny street song so quietly. The part about the dog, she sings over and over. This Rover, cross over. Everybody sings with her. Everybody tells Nonny to go. Cross over, Ellen. Cross over, Mom. Except Auntie Mimi can’t say it. So Mom hugs her and strokes her hair the way she does for Eli. She rocks her like she rocks Fern when Fern’s messing everything up and can’t stop. Fern only stops when Mom’s I love you, I love you, I love you gets too strong for her to fight. Now Mom’s saying, she loves you, she loves you, and finally, after forever, Auntie Mimi gives up and tells Nonny okay. Go.

  Right away Nonny starts gurgling. She wants to cross over, but can’t. She can’t because Eli’s still holding her foot.

  Gold dust at my feet, Nonny’s sister sings.

  And Eli lets go.

  HE’S in outer space, except the stars are so weak. That’s messed up. He must be on earth, otherwise he would be absent, right? The medicine’s working. On Cordova Island the stars are bright explosions, but he’s in Nonny’s loft, staring up through the skylight, Mom asleep beside him.

  He peeps over the edge. Everybody’s lying around like dead soldiers, Grandpa with Nonny in the hospital bed. Nonny’s sister on the couch. Auntie Mimi on the floor curled up in a ball. And he remembers the sign on the door nobody turned to SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED.

  Where are you going, Eli?

  Nonny said when she was gone she would still be there, looking down at him. She would be present when she was absent. But how could she be, if she doesn’t have epilepsy? Also, it’s messed up, the way Eli’s looking down at her. Looking down at Nonny standing at the bottom of the ladder. It’s Nonny even though Nonny’s in the bed with Grandpa. Even though the sheet’s over her head the way she made a tent to read them stories in bed. Like she’s dressed up for Halloween.

  “I want to change the hands on the clock. So you’ll come back sooner. Fern messed it up.”

  Eli, no. She lifts the sheet now so he sees her face. No oxygen tubes, just Nonny’s smile. She’s blocking the ladder. Eli. You stay right there.

  12

  ELLEN IN PIECES

  The yawning beigeness of the room. Beige walls, beige booths, beige floors. Matt is so head-bobbingly tired his chin keeps sinking to his chest. Every time, he remembers more.

  How, for instance, he smelled smoke a moment before the detector did. Before it started shrieking, so inhumanly and at so piercing a decibel that the smoke became secondary to the sound. He staggered out of the bedroom holding his hands over his ears like in that Munch painting, wide-eyed, the detector screaming for him, thinking, this is it, this is the end.

  EVERY time the number on the pixel board changes—Beep!—it startles Matt, who jerks upright in his chair. The same coarse beep as in that Operation game he played as a kid, trying to tweeze out the dude’s broken heart and accidentally touching the metal rim. He looks blearily around the room, wishing stupidly for a certain, familiar face.

  CONFUSED by the alarm, alarmed by it, he did a dumb-ass thing. He opened the oven door and looked inside so that the clothes smouldering there received a sudden, nourishing dose of oxygen. Shorts, a couple of stinky tees, grass-stained ball of tube socks all ignited in a whoosh. Hot fingers of flame reached for him, grazed his shirt front.

  He was lucky to leap back in time.

  TWO seats over a young woman in red leggings and a short flowery dress wrests papers from her Ziploc bag. Smooths them in her lap. Her number flutters down, alights under her chair.

  So he ran for it, burst into the hall where the a cappella shrieking of the smoke detectors had tripped the sprinklers. One glance back through rain and thickening smoke. The last thing Matt saw of the life he’d lived with Nicole, which had started out so promisingly but had steadily sickened, was the frozen pizza on the counter, soon to be unwrapped by fire and consumed whole.

  Across the hall, a stout, grey woman was backing out of her apartment. Lottman was the name on her mailbox, but she was crying, “Mr. Muldoon! Mr. Mul-doon!” Matt remembered her with a cane and rushed to hold the door, saw the tabby writhing in her arms.

  He ended up walking the whole cacophonic length of the hall beside the old woman and her cat. He bent lower than the smoke and got her to too. Someone from their floor with bushy, ironic sideburns banged on doors. “Fire! Fire!” Laptop clutched to his chest, he streaked right past them.

  It took longer to evacuate with an unsteady elder and a terrified cat drawing angry red lines on her arms and neck. When they finally stepped outside, both of them were hacking. Between her convulsions, the old lady shot Matt a look of undying gratitude he truly did not deserve as the person who’d set fire to the building.

  HE picks the number off the floor—A058. Glances around the room again. At breakfast in the hotel restaurant, he’d done the same thing, studied everyone in line at the buffet.

  What would Ellen be doing at a downtown hotel at seven in the morning?

  THE tenants assembled on the sidewalk in front of the apartment, two storeys of faux Spanish with wrought-iron railings. They were a miscellaneous, dampened lot, all of them coughing up smoke—Matt and Mrs. and Mr. Muldoon, the Quebeçois couple from the first floor, mountain bikers who rinsed their armour in the laundry room sink and left it full of grit and leaves like the bottom of a tea leaf reader’s cup. The sideburn dude with the laptop was talking on the phone. “As we speak. Smoke billowing out.” The woman who’d escaped last was the wettest, seaweed hair hanging down, a candy-floss kind of dog shivering in her arms. It was a no-pets building. Love had outed two tenants; Matt had nothing to save.

  “They always say ‘billow,’” said the sideburned irony-meister. “Or ‘belch.’” He broke off coughing.

  Closer, the shrill proclamation of sirens. Then the trucks arrived, firefighters spilling out, tromping everywhere in their yellow coats and heavy gear. One cumbersomely directed them to move across the street, where a crowd had formed, neighbours and passersby, people interested in tragedy or mesmerized by it, on this warm August evening.

  “You’re getting scratched up pretty bad there, ma’am. Can you drop the cat?”

  “No!”

  Matt was helping her hold it, one arm around the old woman’s shoulder, the other hand on the cat’s rumbling back. Under all its fur, it felt half the size it looked.

  “She should sit down. She walks with a cane.”

  “You saved me,” she told Matt just before a paramedic led her away.

  The firefighter in charge of wrangling the tenants questioned Matt. How many apartments, how many people accounted for? Eight or ten apartments, Matt said, coughing raggedly into his fist. He didn’t know anyone in the building except by sight. Vancouver was beautiful but she had a cold shoulder. Matt had lived here almost a year and had only made one friend, Ellen. Through the summer he’d worked in lawn maintenance, had beers after work a few times with the crew, but he wouldn’t call them friends. He looked around for neighbours, pointed out the Quebeçois couple sitting under a tree. At the same time he wondered, dully, if he would have to pay for all this.

  “There’s Nicole,” he said.

  Running toward him on her toes like a ballet dancer, purple yoga mat rolled under her arm, her shocked expression directed not at Matt, but at the balcony of their apartment from which flames were now earnestly shooting.

  BEEP! He starts, rubs his face. Glances over and reads the name the red-legged woman two seats over is writing on her form.

  “OH my God,” Nicole said, breathless from running. “I saw the smoke. My laptop’s in there. My thesis.”

  Matt said, “I hope you backed it up.”

  He probably sounded callous when really he was in shock. Shoc
ked and afraid that he would be held responsible. It didn’t occur to him to blame Nicole for stuffing his clothes in the oven. He should have known to check before he turned it on. His fault, then. But here was the really irritating thing: when Matt did clean—which he did, a lot, way more than if he’d lived alone—she never seemed to notice. Matt would say, “I cleaned the bathroom,” to let her know he was, in fact, doing his fair share. And she would reply, “What do you want? A medal?”

  Now she was crying. Matt hugged her, but she made herself stiff and unreciprocal. The rolled-up foam mat was between them.

  “I thought you were at the university,” Matt said.

  “I went to yoga.” She shoved him back, brandishing the mat. The twist on her face wrung out its prettiness. “Who is E. McGinty?”

  Matt said, “What?”

  “Who is this E. McGinty you made fifty calls to this month? I saw it on your phone.”

  His phone that was inside, melting.

  Matt bent over and coughed till he nearly puked.

  BEEP! The numbers keep changing without getting any nearer to Matt’s A067. And the woman’s name elongates letter by letter. Matt sits up straighter.

  M–C–G–I–N–T–Y S–I–L–V–

  THE fire seemed to be squatting on Matt and Nicole’s balcony now, a zoo animal behind bars, raging against the tormenting hoses, smoke amassing above it. A city bus turned onto their street, which seemed apocalyptic too. When had that ever happened?

  The firefighter returned and directed them to the bus. The others filed toward it, the play-by-play of the irony-meister adding to the surreality of the scene. “Now they’re asking us to get on a bus. I don’t know why.” The Quebeçois couple, the woman with the dog, a bearded man in sandals with fletched arrows of celery jutting from his Whole Foods bag. He must have come home from the store to find the building on fire. Mr. and Mrs. Muldoon were either on the bus already or in the ambulance.

  Nicole was still weeping quietly next to Matt, rejecting his comfort. She asked him straight out, “How long have you been seeing her?”

  And Matt walked away. Away from the fire and Nicole’s question, the first of many he would be obliged to answer if he stayed. Every one would hurt her. He bumped through the crowd of gawkers and, feeling the propulsion of a release, broke into a run. For so long he’d dreaded Nicole finding out about Ellen that now all he felt was freedom from that dread, at least until he reached Ellen’s studio five blocks away and saw the sign on the door. SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED.

  He knocked with his knuckles, then his whole fist.

  Ellen’s dog barked.

  Matt made blinkers with his hands to see past the window where her pots were, hoping for a gap in the white-curtained backdrop. He tried the door. He coughed and coughed.

  “Ellen!” he called through the mail slot. “Ellen! I have to talk to you!”

  The dog commenced howling.

  Ellen’s neighbour opened his door and leaned out, his earlobes aquiver with rings. Normally, Gerhard smirked or was flirtatious with Matt, but now he was clearly telling him to fuck off, making broad, shooing motions with hands like those of a merciless giant.

  IT takes a moment. He looks at the pixel board again while his subconscious sorts the clues. McGinty-Silver Michelle.

  HE had no phone. Even if he found a pay phone, he had no money. He skulked back to Fourth Avenue and stood on the corner until a pair of teenage girls came along. “Hey. Can I use your phone?”

  The girls stopped. Dusk was hanging on, splashing their faces with pink light. One said, “Sure!” and took it from the little purse that hung across her shoulder on a long buckled strap. The other twirled her hair, shifting from flip-flop to flip-flop.

  Matt turned to face the wall. “Ellen, it’s me. Maybe you didn’t recognize the number, but it’s me. Please pick up. Something’s happened.”

  Could she even interrupt a message on the phone she had? Yes, it was an actual machine. She was wacky like that. She had a cassette player, too, and an old dentist’s chair to read in.

  He hung up and called again. “Ellen, it’s Matt. Can I come over?”

  She could be out. She didn’t have a cell phone. Who didn’t have a cell phone?

  “Are you there?” he asked the third time.

  The bolder girl whose phone it was said, “Isn’t she answering?”

  “I’ll wait five minutes.”

  “But, like, I’m going to need my phone back.”

  MATT turns his head, openly stares.

  Ellen had talked a lot about her daughter. The daughter she was always worried about. She had two and one was good, the other bad. She didn’t phrase it that way, but that was what she meant.

  FOR hours he walked around feeling like his whole life had gone up in flames, which it had. Like his heart was fixed on the outside of his chest with its claws stuck in, which it was. It freaked people out the way he was carrying his heart on the outside, so that hardly anyone he stopped would make eye contact with him, much less let him use their phone. Night came and he was still wandering past Ellen’s studio in widening loops, pressing his heart—which was smaller than he had thought. There was something wrong with it, not just its bizarre external placement, but in the way it was beating, syncopated at first, then the stronger beats weakening too, until he realized the strength of the second beat corresponded to how close or far he was from Ellen’s studio.

  His heartbeat was a form of radar, guiding him back to Ellen.

  THE pixel sign is flashing Mimi’s number in all three slots—

  A058!

  A058!

  A058!

  —and beeping like a heart monitor during a cardiac arrest. She only notices now. She was thinking about the play, how nervous she is.

  Onto the empty seat beside her, Mimi dumps her documents and paperwork. Madly, she sifts through it, yanks her handbag off the floor, burrows down, searching for the flimsy tab. Beep! Beep! Beep! goes the sign.

  “Oh. Is this yours?”

  She looks up. The guy the next seat over, about her age in a grey Hugo Boss jacket and black Nikes, holds out a paper number.

  “Thank you,” she says, plucking it back. “You saved my life.”

  He laughs, first a whoop of surprise, then a quieter, private chuckle, which makes her suspect that he was holding onto her number the whole time. Quickly her fingers find her cross. Think kinder thoughts.

  All the way to the counter she keeps fingering it, and while the poker-faced clerk questions her, too, flipping through the old passport to compare who she is today to how she appears in the five-year-old shot—not so different on the outside—and finally, finally bringing down his rubber stamp.

  Though his number was called after hers, Mimi and the guy in the grey jacket end up walking out of the passport office at almost the same time. Mimi senses his steps quickening behind her. By the elevator, she reaches back and flaps the hem of her dress as though it’s stuck in her crack, just to show she knows he’s staring. The elevator doors slide open.

  “Mimi?”

  She swings around making teeny-mouth, which is another thing she’s trying to let go. “First you had my number, now you know my name!”

  “I read it on your form.”

  Now and then people pop up from Mimi’s unsavoury teen years, probably more than she knows because there’s a lot she simply can’t remember from that time. These are the very people she should reach out to, but it’s hard. This guy doesn’t seem like one. He smells of an MBA, splashed on after he shaves, but with a sweetness in his hazel eyes so that when he points and starts for the stairwell, Mimi hesitates only briefly, then jerks forward, as though they’re connected by a string.

  “I was there for almost two hours!” she complains on the way down. “Then I get the third degree. Do I look like a terrorist?”

  It’s a beautiful stairwell, with oak banisters and placid cherub faces looking out from sculpted balustrades. Angels are everywhere. Open your eyes. Going
down, Mimi brushes her hand across one, says her silent prayer. Thank you that I might get through this day without being a bitch.

  “Where are you going?” he asks.

  “On a cruise.”

  “Where to?”

  “I’m not sure yet. It’s a job. I got hired as a dancer.”

  Matt opens the door to the main lobby.

  “What about you?” Mimi asks. “Where are you going?”

  “Back to Korea. I’ve been teaching there the last two years.”

  “Korea?” She stops. “I heard about this place. The penis park.”

  “Haesindang Park. I’ve been there.”

  “Oh my God,” Mimi buckles, laughing. “I thought he was making it up! Well, have a great trip.”

  “You look like a dancer,” he says.

  She laughs again, then kicks one black flat in the air behind her before skipping off, dodging the people coming into the Sinclair Centre, giving him the slip.

  Gerhard was the one who told her about the park. There was some sad story connected to it. A drowned virgin. Mimi’s forgotten. She and Gerhard lived together for a year, while Ellen was dying and afterward. Then her childhood friend Jacob came home from Montreal and she moved in with him. Less cramped. Mimikins, Jacob calls her. My little Mimikins, when are you going to be finished in the bathroom? She’ll see them both tonight, see everybody, at the play.

  Mimi stops then. She’s supposed to live for these moments, these insights and openings. But truthfully, she hates them. She hates having to go back and figure out the right thing to do. The right thing is always the hardest thing. (It’s never going home and taking a bath.) If she ignores the feeling, it just builds and builds.

  She walks the half-block back to the Sinclair Centre. And he’s still there, standing on the stone steps, looking lost. “Who are you?” Mimi asks.