Ellen in Pieces (27 page)

Now Eli, Dad, and Fern sleep at a hotel with a drink machine on every floor. Eli’s allowed a Coke if he swallows the pill. Fern’s allowed to make the ice clatter out of the machine beside it. They ride the elevator up and down ten times to outer space and back, then take the bus to Nonny’s. You can pull the cord as many times as you want, but the stop bell will only ring once. Fern doesn’t get it and cries.

Because of Fern, Dad doesn’t hang around too long at Nonny’s. He asks if Eli wants to stay or go with them.

“Can we go to a skate park?”

“We could watch. You can play with your Tech Decks.”

Mostly Eli stays because he can be a skateboarding soldier at Nonny’s. Mom says no, but Nonny lifts one finger, which means:
let him.
He’s even allowed to make machine-gun sounds going up the half-pipe with the new black Zero Cole Tech Deck with the cobra logo. The half-pipe is Nonny’s foot under the sheet.

Nonny has a sign on her door with C
OME IN, WE’RE OPEN
on one side and S
ORRY, WE’RE CLOSED
on the other. There’s a clock, too, to show when Nonny W
ILL RETURN.
The sign’s for Nonny’s pots that she sold before she got sick. Dad lifts Fern up when they leave and she twirls the clock hands to a messed-up time.

Now Nonny’s pots are gone. Instead there’s a TV in the window playing a movie of Nonny. Her hair is to her shoulders, redbrown except for the silver hairs she used to pay Eli ten cents each to pluck out. He plucked and Nonny ouched and Fern laughed. In the movie Nonny’s doing ordinary things like making her pots and sometimes holding out her hand to say stop filming, except there’s no sound. Her face says stop.

She wants the sign left to O
PEN.
“If you’re not too tired,” Mom says.

Everybody who visits writes a message to Nonny on coloured squares. Auntie Mimi puts them in the window with the TV playing the movie of Nonny. At night, she reads them out.

“‘I love and admire you.’”

“‘God, that time on the ferry? Do you remember how we laughed?’”

“‘Ellen, you sat on my guitar. I was angry. I’m not anymore.’”

The next-door neighbour from the other side brings Nonny’s dog, Tony. The neighbour is Tilda. “Tilda and Tony have the same
hair,” Mom whispers to Eli. Tony whines until Tilda lifts him up to lick Nonny’s face. Then his tail slashes around and he goes crazy kissing Nonny. The nurse says not to let him, his claws might scratch her, so next time Tilda brings a Tony that she knitted with his fur mixed in. The knitted Tony isn’t sad.

“Two days? A week?” the doctor tells Mom.

“A week what?” Eli asks, and Mom shushes him.

In a week the messages on coloured paper will overflow the window. They’ll fill up the studio like water in the bathtub and drown everybody visiting Nonny, drown them in goodbye.

Eli can’t even take a bath himself.

He can’t ever be alone.

A woman sits by Nonny’s bed. She has a frog face except with teeth. She talks and talks to Nonny until Auntie Mimi says, “I think she needs to sleep. Mom? Are you tired?”

Nonny nods. She wrinkles her nose at Eli while the frog woman kisses her hand.

“May I?” Frog Woman says, and snatches a tissue from the box to dry her bulgy frog eyes.

After she leaves, Nonny laughs. “I did some work for her. She never paid me. We’d see each other at events and she’d snub me.”

“Her number was in your book!” Auntie Mimi says.

“She hates me,” Nonny says.

Eli asks, “Do you hate her, Nonny?”

“No, no. What would be the point? Come here.”

Nonny folds Eli in her sharp arms that seem weak, but are really strong. Nonny is powerful in her electric bed. She doesn’t need guns to make her enemies bow down.

Auntie Mimi is mad she phoned the frog woman because that’s the last time Nonny really talks. Auntie Mimi says the frog woman stole from Nonny again, stole her energy. But if that’s true, it was Eli who stole it. Eli was the last person she hugged.

Because after the frog woman leaves, Nonny sleeps for a long, long time, not waking up until they turn her in the bed. Then all she wants is for them to leave the sign at O
PEN.
Grandpa tries to feed her ice chips. Her lips pull in.

Mom calls the care team. They bring an oxygen tank, attach the tubes with a strap around Nonny’s head. Eli doesn’t like the feeling of anything but a finger up his nose. He inspects the tank next to the pee bag. Today Nonny’s little bit of pee looks brown.

The nurse says nothing hurts Nonny now.

Grandpa lies on his stomach on the floor and asks Eli to walk on his back. Nothing hurts Nonny, but everything hurts Grandpa. His bones say ouch.

That night, when Dad brings Fern, Mom says to say goodbye. Dad lifts Fern up to kiss Nonny.

“Bye-bye, Nonny,” Fern chirps, because she doesn’t get it.

Eli does; he’s a skateboarding soldier and he says he’s not going back to the hotel.

Dad starts to cry. He passes Fern to Mom and bows over Nonny with his head on her chest. “Ellen,” he says. “Ellen, you saved my life.”

“How did Nonny save your life?” Eli asks when Dad finally lets go of Nonny.

“Shh,” he says. He takes off his toque, dries his eyes with it, kisses Mom when she hands Fern back. “I’ll tell you another time. Be brave, buddy.”

While Dad’s hugging him, Fern kicks Eli in the head.

One nurse is Nonny’s sister, which Eli only finds out now. She sings to Nonny about getting a coat and a hat. She sings
tisket
and
tasket. Tomayto, tomahto.
“Do you remember?” she asks Nonny. “Do you remember Mom singing?”

Nonny’s breath stops and Auntie Mimi throws a fit.
No, no, no!
Nonny hears and sighs and the air moves back in.

“Don’t,” Nonny’s sister says. “Let her go.”

“Who are you to tell me that?” Auntie Mimi yells. “After how you treated her?”

“After how
I
treated her?”

“What are you even
doing
here?”

Mom and Grandpa take Auntie Mimi to the backyard for a timeout. Eli can still hear her crying and Grandpa saying, “Stop it, stop it right now.” Next door Tony barks and barks.

Nonny’s sister lets go of Nonny’s hand, tells her, “Please wait.” She goes outside to calm everybody with soft words Eli can’t hear. This is how they all miss the very last thing that Nonny says and does on earth.

There’s a knock. Nonny’s eyes open and her head lifts off the pillow. Her hair looks like Eli’s did with glue stuck in it. “She’s here,” she says.

The door opens. Next-door Gerhard steps inside. He’s a giant with a baby’s bald head and earrings. Gerhard’s crying like a baby, too, his face squinched and wet.

“Ellen? What’s happening? How can I help?”

“Oh, it’s you,” Nonny says, and her head falls back.

M
OM
takes Eli up the ladder to bed. He sleeps, and when he wakes he sees night through the skylight. Weak stars mean it’s
not late. Something stinks. He peers over the edge. Down below, they’re changing the sheets. Nonny made stinky-butt in the bed. She groans when they roll her onto her side to pull away the dirty sheet.

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.

H
E’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 S
ORRY
, W
E’RE
C
LOSED.

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.

T
he 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
.

E
VERY
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.

C
ONFUSED
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.

T
WO
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.

H
E
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?

T
HE
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.

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

“O
H
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. Shocked 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.

B
EEP!
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–

T
HE
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. S
ORRY, 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.

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

H
E
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.”

M
ATT
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.

F
OR
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.

T
HE
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.