Ellen in Pieces

by Caroline Adderson

  When he turns, something happens on his face. A lifting-off of some burden. Mimi doesn’t know what yet, but she knows she’s done the right thing, returning. Her bag is weighing down one shoulder, the way a bird feigns a broken wing. She hoists it and says, “I didn’t write Mimi on the form. I wrote Michelle.”

  “I knew your mother, I think.”

  HIS name is Matt. He walks her to the SeaBus terminal, buys her a tea in the café there.

  “I can’t believe it,” Mimi tells him when they’re seated across from each other. She blots her diluting mascara with a napkin, feels for the silver cross. “It’s amazing.”

  “It is,” Matt agrees. “I was just thinking about her in the passport office.”

  “How long are you here for? Do you have plans?”

  “I have a thing I have to go to in a few hours.” He takes out his phone to check the time, leaves it face down on the table. “Less than that, actually.”

  “Tonight?”

  “I’m pretty bagged, to tell you the truth. And I fly out tomorrow morning.”

  “Back to Korea?”

  “No. I’d need the passport for that. I’m going to visit my folks for a few weeks. In Alberta.”

  “How are you getting your passport then?”

  “They’ll courier it.”

  Mimi performs a delicate hand-dance, prying the lid from her cup, extracting the tea bag with the stir-stick, plopping it on the inverted lid. A wraith of steam rises from the paper cup. The bag bleeds. A woman, fiftyish with red hair, sweeps past their table. They both glance at her, as though they’re looking for the same person.

  Mimi is tormented by these vague resemblances. At least once a week she sees Ellen. The other day, at the grocery store, she turned a corner with her basket, froze. Froze because, there, mid-aisle, was Ellen, her back to Mimi, in adamant conversation with some other shopper about Shredded Wheat. Suspended in the moment, Mimi ran through the possible explanations for Ellen’s cruelty, prepared her accusations according to their old pattern—we had a funeral! what were you thinking!—until the woman who was decidedly not Ellen, who looked nothing like her in fact, turned. Her scarf had deceived Mimi, or her too-loud laugh. And Mimi crumpled there by the instant oatmeal and the breakfast bars, crumpled inside, then moved brokenly past the imposter of grief.

  (Only in dreams is it really Ellen, plopping down next to Mimi on the bus, crowding her out with a surfeit of shopping bags. Mimi glares out the window, refusing eye contact, until Ellen’s humming clues her in.

  Weak with wonder, Mimi turns. “Mom?”

  Ellen laughs and pulls the cord.

  “I’ll get off with you. We can walk together.”

  “Sweetheart,” Ellen says. “This isn’t your stop.”)

  Mimi asks Matt, “How did you meet my mom?”

  He runs a hand through his hair. Longer, it would probably break out in curls. He’s quite cute, Mimi decides. Soft featured. Much cuter than in the passport office, where he seemed a bit of a stalker. Now a nervous edginess has infected him.

  “We were neighbours, sort of,” Matt tells her.

  “Do you know Gerhard?”

  He blanks, then says, “Next door? Sure. It’s funny.”

  “What?”

  “How I met her. I was standing in front of her in a line. She tucked in my shirt tag. I’d only been living in Vancouver a few months. It was the first nice thing anyone had done for me. Then I walked past her studio. Same thing again. She was friendly.”

  “Sounds like her. Not great at boundaries or personal space. I used to hate that. How she’d talk to strangers as if they were intimate friends. Give them advice. Oh, cringe.”

  Matt lifts his coffee, sips, then sets down the cup as though it’s too bitter. “How is she?”

  “Who?”

  “Ellen.”

  Mimi pulls back.

  “What?” Matt asks.

  “She died.”

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry! I assumed you knew.” Mimi reaches across the table for his hand, but he snatches it back.

  “When?”

  “Almost two years ago. I’m sorry. I feel terrible.”

  For a moment neither speaks. Matt gazes at the table between them while the outrage slowly fades.

  “I thought you knew,” Mimi says.

  “How?” he asks the table.

  “Breast cancer. It’s awful not to have a mother anymore. I can’t tell you how lost you feel.”

  She watches his face, which seems almost childlike now. When her nephew Eli puzzles over something, it plays out across his features like this.

  Abruptly Matt snaps to, pockets the phone, stands. “I’m sorry. Sorry for your loss. I’ve got to go. Nice meeting you.”

  “Sure,” she says.

  He leaves her sitting there, wanders across the marbled expanse of the station on what seem like semi-drunken steps. Stops and checks for something in his pocket.

  When Mimi finishes her tea, she’ll get on the SeaBus and go home. Get ready for tonight. Except she’s rattled by what’s just happened and, now, jealous too. All this time Ellen was alive for Matt. She only just died. For two years Mimi’s been staunching her severed umbilical cord. But see how she broke the news? How she said, “She died” for the first time without tearing up?

  She remembers her newborn nephew, the thick black rind at his navel. Eventually the scab fell off. He didn’t even feel it.

  MIMI spots him on the corner of Hastings and Seymour. Pedestrians cluster, waiting for the light to change. What to say? What would Ellen say? How she yearns for that advice, craves it, when she once rejected out of principle all motherly guidance.

  “Matt?”

  He turns and sees the scrap of paper she’s holding out.

  “My number. My dad has a play. It opens tonight. I thought you might want to go.”

  Matt takes her number without looking at her, stuffs it in his jeans pocket. This seems to remind him of something, because he pulls an open envelope from his jacket, removes the folded pages, the top sheet a flowery piece of stationery, handwritten. He shuffles through them.

  “Heatley Avenue? Know where that is?”

  “Chinatown, I think.” Mimi points east. “So, will you come?” Then, because he looks to be swaying, “Are you okay?”

  “I’m on Korean time. There’s a seventeen-hour difference. It’s tomorrow there. Ellen. I can’t get my head around it.”

  Mimi sees the City of Vancouver letterhead. “What’s happening on Heatley Avenue?”

  “I’m not even sure. I got this letter.” He waves the pages in his hand. “In Seoul, forwarded by my dad. From the daughter of this old lady who used to live across from me. Thanking me for saving her mother.”

  “You saved someone’s life?” Mimi asks.

  A woman in an electric wheelchair forces Matt to step aside so she can motor down the cutaway curb. One of her legs is elevated. Footless. Matt does a double take and, for a second, Mimi thinks he’s going to cry.

  “No. Long story. But I needed to come back to renew my passport anyway so I thought, okay. I’d do the passport in Vancouver. Get that lady off my back. But last night?”

  He stuffs the papers back in the envelope, jams it in the side pocket of his jacket.

  “In the hotel? I couldn’t sleep, right? I’m all fucked up with the time change. I thought, maybe tomorrow I’ll give Ellen a call. Or just go to her studio. Why are you smiling?”

  “Sorry,” Mimi says, covering her mouth.

  Across the street, the little white man signals he can cross. Matt steps into the intersection, Mimi too, keeping pace with his angry strides.

  “I wasn’t smiling because it’s funny. I was smiling because it’s amazing, don’t you think? That we ran into each other? Why do you think we did?”

  Mimi stays stubbornly by his side. She knocks shoulders with a texting passerby, manages to dodge the next person.

  Finally, he shoots her a sidelong lo
ok. “I’m just heading to this thing now, okay? Take care. Your mother was a wonderful person.”

  “She was and she wasn’t. Like anybody,” Mimi says as they pass the grim sameness of a car rental agency. “We found it hard to love each other. I wish more than anything we hadn’t.”

  A Starbucks, then an alley. Why are alleys so sad?

  “Can I tell you about my dad’s play? First you have to know that he basically abandoned us. My mom, my sister, me. He married again. Twice.”

  Her fingers discover that the fastener on her chain has migrated around to meet the cross. She makes two sharp, throat-slashing movements to send it back.

  “But when my mom got sick? He just rose to the occasion. He ran around and did every little thing for her right until the end. And she let him. She let him come back and do the first unselfish thing he probably ever did in his whole life.”

  They’ve reached the next intersection. There’s an old brick pub on the other side, the walls on street level painted red. A vortex of pigeons swirls above it.

  “All those years, whenever he saw my mother, the next day he would write something. But none of these things ever fit together, so he put them in a folder. Then, when she was dying?”

  “Please,” Matt says.

  “People wrote messages and put them in the window of her studio. Get well or I love you.” (Also I still have your anus, Ellen. I keep it on my desk. She doesn’t tell him this.) “Memories they had of her. I kept them. And the speeches from the memorial. I gave them to my dad. And one day, maybe six months later, he sat down. From all those pieces, he wrote this play.”

  “I can’t!”

  Mimi raises her hands in surrender. “Okay. I know it’s hard.”

  “What’s hard?”

  “Doing the thing you’re meant to do.”

  He turns on her. “Why would I be meant to go to your father’s play?”

  “He says it’s not just about Ellen. It’s about how every person who comes into your life gives you a piece of themselves. And vice versa. I still forget she’s dead. But soon I won’t. Then how will I keep her in my life?”

  “How do you think I feel?” Matt says.

  Mimi stares. “I have no idea. I just met you. You’re acting like more than a neighbour, if you don’t mind my saying.”

  Matt swings around. With the pedestrian light going his way, he charges across, leaving Mimi standing on the corner.

  “You’ve got my number if you change your mind,” she calls.

  THAT night, almost three years ago, Matt circled Ellen’s studio. Darkness had tucked the city in long since. Finally, a light.

  A man answered his knock. He was shorter than Matt, with greying waves of hair and glasses he peered over. Briefly Matt was surprised, then he disregarded him and craned to see inside. Only the floor lamp next to Ellen’s dentist’s chair was on, the working space in the far corner where she carved her pots shrouded. The dog came to life on the couch, lifting its black snout in the air. He must have smelled Matt, because he wagged.

  “What?” the man asked.

  “Is Ellen here?”

  “She’s busy.”

  “I need to see her.”

  “Like I said.”

  The door began to close. Matt, who was wearing Tevas, reacted with his foot. “Ow! Ellen! Ow!”

  “Stop that right now!”

  The man raised his hand as though to clap it over Matt’s mouth. Matt stopped yelling and the man shut his eyes instead and pinched the bridge of his nose above the glasses. He had to be her ex. Ellen had talked about him. She had grandchildren, too, but that seemed impossible. Really, they’d talked so little.

  Ellen appeared, coming up behind the man who was probably Larry. “What’s going on?” Seeing Matt at her door where he had stood so many times, on the verge of tears now, she put a hand on Larry’s shoulder. “It’s okay.”

  She stepped outside, closed the door and leaned against it, a woman wide of hip with shoulder-length hair dyed a reddish shade, breasts large and relaxed, a woman too old for Matt who had nonetheless welcomed him into her life. Something was wrong. Her face was puffy, like she’d been crying. And a memory loosened in Matt—a day in his childhood when he came home from school and found his mother like this. Because her mother, Matt’s grandmother, had died.

  “What happened?” Matt asked, thinking of the daughter. The daughter she was worried about.

  “Listen, Matt,” Ellen said, reaching for his hand. She kissed the back of it, turned it over and kissed his palm. With her head bowed, he could see the lighter line of her greying part. “Thank you. Thank you for everything. But something’s come up for me. I’m sorry.”

  “Did somebody die?” he asked.

  She did the same thing Larry had done, closed her eyes, so Matt recognized the totality of their mutual exhaustion. “Nobody died,” she said.

  “Is that Larry?” he asked.

  “Yes. You have to leave, Matt. This is a bad time.”

  He stepped back. “Can I phone you?”

  “Yes, phone. Give me a couple of days and then we’ll talk. And take care, Matt. You’re a wonderful, wonderful young person. I wish you could see that in yourself.”

  “Why do you think I can’t see that?” he asked.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Goodbye.”

  She let go of his hand and went back inside, shutting the door behind her.

  AND now Matt knows the something that came up for Ellen, the unthinkable something that had been circling her all that time.

  IN her letters, Cindy Tomchuk (née Lottman) had written that the ceremony was really for her mother, not Matt, who was obviously “an extremely modest person.” All Mrs. Lottman wanted was for him to receive the recognition he deserved. On behalf of her mother, Cindy had nominated Matt for the award. The whole family was thrilled. Thrilled.

  Matt spots Cindy puffing at the regulation distance from the front entrance, eyeing his approach, while nearby a cherry tree releases its nostalgic perfume. There’s no place with springier air than Vancouver. It’s been connecting Matt to these memories of Ellen ever since he flew in the night before.

  Cindy bustles over. “You’re not Matthias, are you?”

  In admitting that he is, Matt’s chance to escape is annulled in her fleshy embrace. Finally, she releases him, drops the butt. Her nicotine-tempered laugh devolves into a cough.

  “How are you?”

  “Okay. Jet-lagged.” Devastated, actually.

  Cindy leads him by the arm—tightly—into the firehall and to an auditorium-like room half filled with people. There’s a carpeted platform up front, and a podium flanked by flags. The civic coat of arms hangs on the wall behind it, the heroic lumberjack and brave fisherman. By land and sea we prosper. The stage faces a bank of windows that looks out to where Matt was lurking a minute ago. Across the street, a dreary mildew-streaked social housing complex.

  “Don’t be alarmed if she starts talking about dying. She doesn’t mean it.”

  The old lady is sitting in the front row of plastic chairs. Mrs. Lottman, not Mrs. Muldoon, so much older Matt is shocked. White and dwarfen and wearing what seems like a pyjama top to which a corsage is pinned, a walker parked in front of her.

  “Here he is, Ma. At long last. I found him outside standing all by his lonesome.” Cindy laughs, coughs.

  The old lady looks up blankly, also expecting to see the old Matt, not his slick, shorn man-self in a Hugo Boss jacket, purchased at the Dongdaemun Market at 3 a.m. The way he expected to see his old neighbour who once cruised the halls planting her cane.

  “I cut my hair,” Matt says. “It was longer before.”

  With surprising quickness, she snatches his hand.

  “Sit beside her,” Cindy says. “I want a picture.”

  “How are you?” he asks Mrs. Lottman. “How’s Mr. Muldoon?”

  “She’s in a home now,” Cindy answers. “I’m stuck with the cat.”

  Cindy pulls a camera
from the purse on the chair next to her mother, takes a few shots with a flash, then asks them to stay right there while she rounds up the rest of the family, who are the majority in the room besides the firefighters standing around in chummy circles talking shop—relatives of Mrs. Lottman. Many relatives of all ages, teenaged and middle-aged, a few younger kids, all dressed in Winners finery, including a little girl in a tiara and a party dress made of shiny pink material. These people, maybe a dozen of them, start coming at Matt, introducing themselves or being introduced by Cindy, wanting to shake his hand and thank him.

  “This is Rod, my husband,” Cindy says, pulling forward a bald man broadly noosed in a striped tie. “Carrie, our granddaughter.” The princess.

  “Beth,” says a Chinese woman with feather earrings.

  Another woman shakes his hand, younger, about Matt’s age, in a denim skirt. A reporter, she says. She picks up Cindy’s purse, drops it one seat over, settles beside Matt. “I already spoke to Mrs. Lottman. Can I ask you a few questions? What made you decide to stop and help Mrs. Lottman?”

  Meanwhile people are gathering at the podium, checking that the mike works.

  “What made me decide?” Matt rubs his face. “I didn’t. I just. I stopped. Who wouldn’t?”

  A Lottman who looks like a construction foreman or a prison guard, Mrs. Lottman’s son, he guesses, Cindy’s brother—they all have the same wide-set eyes—says, “One guy ran past. Right, Ma?”

  Mrs. Lottman leans close to Matt. She’s going to speak. Though Matt just met these people clustered around him, he’s already figured out Mrs. Lottman is their revered matriarch. They shush each other to hear what she’s going to say. The little girl in the tiara pushes through until she’s right in front of Mrs. Lottman, staring at her great-grandmother with oceanic eyes.

  “I just wanted your address. To send you a card. Cindy gets her hands on things. Always, it’s a big production.”

  Some Lottmans laugh. Several object. “He saved your life, Grandma!”

  “He came all the way from Korea!”

  “I had other things to do too,” Matt says, meaning the passport, which reminds him of Mimi. He glances around, having briefly forgotten her while the whole walk here he couldn’t shake the feeling that she was following him. He kept seeing the red of her leggings in the corner of his eye, like a raging sty. Only vaguely does she resemble Ellen. Ellen’s eyes were blue. Mimi’s hair is darker, too, feathery and cropped short. A long neck and pronounced collarbones where Ellen had been soft, body and heart.