Invisible Ellen

by Shari Shattuck

  “Good thing too!” Temerity exclaimed. “’Cause I can run like the wind, but solid objects happen.” They both laughed, said good-bye, and Temerity reversed her way back toward Ellen, who slipped up beside her in the mattress section.

  “How’d she look?” Temerity asked.

  “Good, she seemed nice.” Ellen paused and then added, “Strong, if you know what I mean.”

  “I do. You mean strong enough to lend strength to someone else.” She sighed. “Not everyone is, you know. I like her,” Temerity said with finality, and Ellen could not disagree. “I say we pass on the letter. How about you?”

  Like a hamster in a clear ball, Ellen preferred to be protected and distanced from the world around her as she rolled steadily along, and she wasn’t sure she wanted it to matter what she thought. But Temerity had been the kick that sent her spinning, and, even as dizzy as she was, Ellen knew that Temerity was right, and she instinctively liked Janelle.

  “Okay,” she breathed, and with an effort she started forward in her little plastic shell, only now, Temerity was along for the ride.

  Or maybe, and Ellen suspected that this was more likely, it was the other way around.

  Temerity insisted on coming along to give Cindy the letter. This was the equivalent of injecting a massive overdose of concentrated liquid panic directly into Ellen’s aortic compound. Alarms sounded and defense teams rushed about, arming themselves with riot gear while heavy metal doors slammed shut, sealing off the perimeter, but the heart palpitations subsided somewhat when Ellen realized that Temerity wouldn’t actually see her apartment. The thought of another human in the sanctity of her safe house required her to remain on high alert, but the security rating downgraded to code yellow. Repeat, code yellow, this is not a drill. Ellen gritted her teeth and told herself it wouldn’t be long until the breach was closed and she could rearm the force fields.

  As she opened the door, Ellen took a self-conscious look around, noticing acutely the musty odor of the closed-in space and the constant din from the nearby busy intersection. She squirmed, realizing that Temerity’s heightened senses must certainly be experiencing a full-frontal assault verging on violation equal to her own. She barely noticed the noise or the smell anymore, but imagining the jarring decibels through Temerity’s sensitive ears and the vague but persistent putrid smell of discarded garbage from the street made her cringe with shame.

  “This it? I love what you’ve done with the place!” Temerity gushed as she crossed the threshold. “Fabulous!”

  Ellen stopped and looked at her. “Really?”

  “It’s cozy, and you know me, I’m all about cozy.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I can tell from the way my voice bounces that this first room is small.”

  Ellen blushed. “It’s only one room. Well, and a sort of kitchen.”

  “And that’s all anybody really needs,” Temerity declared. “A girly den, I like it. So, show me where you watch the fun?”

  After checking to make sure that the floor was clear through to the back window, Ellen told Temerity to just walk straight. She tapped her way to the back, felt the lay of the land and, finding the slatted window on the door, she cranked it open a bit and listened to the muffled music coming from across the small space.

  “Is that Guns N’ Roses coming from her apartment?” Temerity asked.

  “No, that’s music and marijuana,” Ellen told her as she came up behind her. “It’s coming from the guy who lives next to her.” The man himself was sitting in his easy chair, a joint in one hand and a beer in the other. With his dirty, torn jeans and greasy hair falling into his gaunt face, he vaguely resembled a degenerate Raggedy Andy doll.

  “He smokes some good weed,” Temerity commented, sniffing at the aroma rising from below without apparent judgment. “Not that I’m an expert.”

  “He sells it,” Ellen told her. “Have you . . . tried it?” she asked, curious.

  “Oh yeah, couple of times. Well, a few times. Several. Okay, not more than once a week. Justice loves the stuff, but only when he’s got nothing else to do. You should hear him go off about its cultural significance. It’s great for relaxing, but I wouldn’t want to have to function on it.”

  “I thought most musicians, uh, did drugs,” Ellen said.

  “Good lord, no,” Temerity said. It’s not mandatory, unless they play jazz and dubstep.”

  A large thump told them that Mouse had risen from his holding spot on the sofa and impacted the floor. He meowed loudly.

  “Ah, the Mouse,” Temerity said. Squatting down, she held out her hand and made a little kissing noise repeatedly. To Ellen’s surprise, the cat trotted over, stomach fat flopping from side to side as he came. He thrust his giant head against Temerity’s fingers and was soon purring loudly as she scratched the backs of his ear and a half.

  Ellen watched this unlikely scene as though it were sideways. This was the first time she’d had another person in her apartment and it made the familiar seem foreign. In a moment of clarity she saw her cramped room as a larger version of the closets where she had taken refuge as a child, reading in the light coming from the crack under the door. Then she thought of Temerity’s wide-open loft; it was a space big enough to hold the hugeness of the music she made and the life she lived. Temerity needed space to soar—some people did, she guessed. Then Ellen realized that she had just thought of someone as a friend, and all at once the space in which she lived seemed a size too small. Too tight to hold Temerity’s bulging energy, so that Ellen, for the first time, wished it were larger.

  There was a noise from the courtyard and Ellen sidled past Temerity and Mouse, a tight squeeze in the narrow kitchen space, to look out through the slats, down into the dark courtyard. Through T-bone’s window she could see him get up from his threadbare easy chair and stand swaying in the middle of the room. The sound came again, and Ellen could see the silhouette of a man standing in the dark outside his back door, knocking urgently. The fixture over the door, originally intended to light up the landing, had been knocked askew and the small, feeble circle of light it threw was like a dying flashlight beam focused on the door’s small window. The man lifted his hand into the forty-watt glow to knock again, and Ellen clearly saw the diamond pattern of scars encircling the wrist where it extended from his jacket sleeve.

  “Who is it?” she heard T-bone shout above the music, but she could not make out the response. He turned down the volume and moved slowly to the door, leaving Ellen’s eyeline of him through the window.

  “What going on?” Temerity asked. She had left off scratching Mouse, who now circled her ankles hopefully, and was standing just behind Ellen.

  “It’s the guy next to Cindy. I call him T-bone. Somebody is at his door,” Ellen told her.

  “Oh, company.”

  “More likely a customer.”

  Temerity shifted from side to side, swaying for what looked like the sheer pleasure of the movement. “You’ve got a good view of these people?”

  “Well, there’s not much else to look at from here.” Ellen felt slightly embarrassed.

  “Okay, give me the basic layout.”

  So Ellen explained. Five of the studio units had back doors that faced the courtyard of the U-shaped building. This central space might, in another, less paranoid age, have been meant as a small garden, but building and safety had nixed that long before Ellen’s arrival, requiring its use as a fire escape access. The awkwardly placed wooden stairs to each back door had clearly not been part of the original design. A narrow alley ran the length of the block along the rear of the building where the courtyard’s crumbling gravel spilled onto its cracked asphalt. The woman’s door below her, in the apartment with matching curtains, she could not see. The upstairs apartment directly across from hers had blocked the windows. Ellen was the only one on her side on top. On what was the front of the building, to her
right, only one apartment, the lower one, accessed the courtyard, and that was occupied by a shut-in who was visited by health-care workers twice a week. Ellen called him Badger. But other than “Badger gets a sponge bath from the nurse,” she had very little to report about him in her chronicles. He never went out.

  “Anyway,” Ellen concluded, “it’s hard not to see T-bone and Cindy, and it’s not like I bother them. They don’t even know I’m here. I don’t interfere.” She thought of the letter in her bag. “Well, I mean, I never have before, but you know, I mean, I didn’t ask for that letter.”

  “Speaking of,” Temerity said. “What are we going to do? Are you going to take it down there and give it to her?”

  “Me?” The panic in Ellen’s voice made it squeaky. “No, no, I was thinking I’d maybe leave it in her mailbox when she goes out or something.”

  Temerity shook her head ruefully. “I’m sorry, that won’t do. You’ll need to think again.”

  “What?”

  “Ellen, seriously. Are we delivering dry cleaner flyers or possibly doing something that could help this woman change her life and her luck?” Temerity asked. “We want to see what happens when she reads it, right? Plus, you said she almost never goes out now. So, tell you what. How about if we take it down there? We can leave it on the stoop, then knock and run away.” Her face screwed up thoughtfully. “Well, maybe not run exactly, but we could sort of speed walk.”

  Ellen was shaking her head forcefully, though it was another lost gesture. She said, “I can’t do that.”

  “Go down there, speed walk, or knock on the door?”

  “Both—I mean, uh, all of them.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just . . . I could never.”

  “Like you could never stop a purse snatcher?” Temerity clicked her tongue impatiently. “You clocked that scumbag! Never could knock on a door, my butt. I’m not saying you should hang around after we do it, just ring and run.”

  Ellen said nothing.

  Temerity hummed dubiously and seemed to be thinking it through. “Okay, fine. No running, no knocking. Let’s compromise,” she said. “Where is she now?”

  Ellen checked. She couldn’t see Cindy through the window, but the lights on the far side of the main room were on and she thought she saw the blue flicker of the television screen across the darker kitchen floor. “I think she’s watching TV,” Ellen said.

  “Perfect. Okay, we go down, slip the envelope under her back door, maybe you write on it, something like, ‘Sorry, this was delivered to the wrong apartment by mistake.’ Then we come back up here and wait for her to get herself a snack and find it. It’ll take, like, one minute.”

  “I guess we could do that,” Ellen said, though without Temerity, it was a minute she wouldn’t have considered in a thousand years. The word “snack” made Ellen’s stomach clench and gurgle. To distract herself, she watched out the window. T-bone finally opened the door. The nervous man bumped fists with him, glanced back at the deserted courtyard, and was admitted.

  “Is it all clear?” Temerity asked, having heard the door open and close.

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay, get the letter.”

  Ellen did as Temerity directed her, in a kind of stupor. Her back door had never been opened, not as long as Ellen had been there anyway, and when they tried, it stuck so tightly that they decided to go out the front and around the building. In two minutes they were creeping slowly down her front stairs, Ellen leading and Temerity behind with one hand clamped onto Ellen’s shoulder. To her mild surprise, the undertaking of what, to Ellen, was an inconceivable action, unfolded without the world bursting in a fiery apocalypse. In fact, it was disconcertingly chilly.

  They had just reached the sidewalk and started toward the back alley when Temerity raised her head sharply and her fingers tightened. “What was that?” she asked.

  Ellen looked around. It was rush hour and nothing but the sidewalk separated her building from the busy street. On the corner, several vagrants stood holding tallboys swathed in brown paper bags, and a confused argument was in progress. Random barking dogs, cars, shouts and stereos filled the air with a density of noise thicker than bad smells in an overstuffed laundry hamper.

  “What was what?” Ellen asked. “Specifically?”

  “I thought I heard a gunshot,” she said. “Could have been a car backfire, I guess.”

  “Could have been a gunshot,” Ellen said without emotion. “They’re pretty common around here. People get drunk and fire weapons, in the air or at each other, a lot.”

  “Spunky neighborhood,” Temerity said, urging Ellen on with a little push from the contact point of hand on shoulder. “I wonder if Destinations magazine has ever done a feature on it. The title could be something like ‘Risk a trip to Morningside, where the days are dodgy and the nights are downright dangerous.’ They could do a four-star taco-cart review and rate which corners sell the best crack.”

  Having never heard of this particular magazine and wondering who would read an article about crack, Ellen started forward again. They came to the end of the building and turned right, into the narrow alley, passing the windows of the apartment below Ellen’s, the one with curtains. Ellen knew very little about its occupant, except that she was elderly and had that small, arthritic dog that she let out into the courtyard to relieve itself, its tiny excrements gradually drying to a hard white that disappeared into the bleached gravel.

  They came to the opening of the courtyard and Ellen paused. From this angle she could see all five back doors, including her own. From the corner of her eye she detected movement in the curtain lady’s back window, a shiver of the fabric being dropped back into place. Instinctively drawing back, she waited, shushing Temerity who made to speak. The curtain did not move again.

  She realized that she had never looked at this familiar scene from this perspective before, and she found it disorienting. It was peculiar, like the eerie, unnatural darkness of a daytime eclipse or hearing a familiar movie scene dubbed into an unfamiliar, more aggressive, language. She shuddered slightly.

  “You okay?” Temerity asked, feeling the shiver. “Are we there?”

  “We are in the opening to the back,” Ellen told her in a whisper. “Okay, stay here, I’ll slip the letter under her door.”

  Clutching the missive tightly, Ellen started across the gravel to the low landing, painfully aware that she had all the silent stealth of a hippo walking on bags of extra-crispy potato chips. As she placed her weight on the first of the two wooden stairs, it objected with a loud creak. Wincing, she leaned forward across the shallow landing and slid the letter easily through the wide gap under the door.

  All at once, on her immediate right, the door to T-bone’s apartment opened partway, and Ellen had a clear view of his visitor as the man peered out past her. Ellen, crouching in the darkness, could also see past him into the apartment. T-bone was slumped in his chair, staring straight ahead. Stoned out of his mind, Ellen thought. The man in the doorway, not much more than a teenager, was holding two parcels: a large grocery bag tucked under one arm and a smaller brown paper bag under the other. Looking right over Ellen’s crouching bulk, he spotted Temerity standing in the dim light at the edge of the building and retreated back inside, closing the door with a muffled slam.

  Straightening up, Ellen hurried back to Temerity. They retraced their steps and went immediately through to her kitchen, eager to see what would happen next. It was only a few moments until something did. Not Ellen’s anticipated apocalypse, but something equally alarming.

  T-bone’s door opened again, just a crack this time. Ellen could still see T-bone in his chair through the window, and so assumed it was the young man, checking to make sure the way was clear before he exited with his contraband. Everything was relatively quiet now that T-bone’s music had stopped. There was no light, except the TV, in the apartment a
nd all Ellen could make out was the shape of the man as he came out and closed the door behind him. He took two cautious steps to the edge of the landing and paused.

  As though from the ether, a police car flew down the alley and screeched to a stop, its searchlight exposing the courtyard with sudden and chaotic clarity. The man froze like a trapped rabbit, then spun back toward the door, but it had locked behind him. The siren beeped a sharp warning, ricocheting the glaring sound against the walls, and the officers began to get out of the car. “Stop right there!” one of them shouted. “Hands in the air, stay where you are.”

  The man spun in place, scanning desperately for an escape route, but he was hemmed in on three sides by the building and the cops blocked the only exit.

  “What’s going on?” Temerity whispered. “Tell me!”

  Ellen tried to follow the action as best she could. “The police are after the guy who went to T-bone’s. He just bought drugs, I think. He’s . . . he’s coming this way!” To her horror, in two gazelle-like leaps, the young man was at the base of her stairs—in four, he was up them and at her back door. His face loomed large in her window, inches away, and Ellen launched herself backward, knocking Temerity to the floor as she fell. The door rattled as he shook the knob and threw his weight against it, trying to force it open.

  From the floor, Ellen watched the man’s head swivel as he desperately looked around for escape. Then the police shouted from below, and she heard a furious scrambling. As best she could tell from within the limitations of the tiny window and in her near hysterical state, he was climbing. His silhouette moved, blocking the window, as he climbed up onto the stair railing, and she could hear the complaint of the aging metal as he grabbed on to the gutter and heaved himself up. The toe of one sneaker smacked hard against the bars over her window as he pushed off, and his body disappeared from sight.

  Before she could recover, Ellen heard a high-pitched wheezing voice from beneath her. “Ahhck . . . squished,” it said.