Invisible Ellen

by Shari Shattuck

  From standing back and watching it, she’d always known it was a crazy world, but it was a whole different crazy when you wandered out into its churning eddies. Persuading herself that she could retreat at any time, Ellen got dressed.

  When she headed out to work, it was dark and the sky overhead had filled with clouds that bounced back the light from the city, casting a pewter sheen on the streets. It was like slipping into an illustrated world, and Ellen felt more than usually unnerved.

  Trucks were stacked up three deep at the loading dock, and it was swarming with drivers and loaders, hindering her sneak entry. She was early as usual, so Ellen walked along in the shadow of the building to wait for a lull in the activity. Several large dumpsters were lined up against the wall, green for garbage and blue for recycling, filled to overflowing with broken-down boxes. The excess cardboard was stacked in neat piles in between them. Ellen sat down on a comfortable pile and took out her notebook.

  In the light from the gargantuan parking lot fixtures, she read back what she’d written on the bus ride over.

  One line read, “A woman with an expensive handbag slapped her child for playing with it. The child did not understand. The woman should have explained, or given him something else to occupy his time.” And another, “Scowling, mean man is rude to a woman with groceries. She asks him if he’s having a bad day, and he says yes. They talk for a while, then he helps her carry her groceries off the bus. Both are smiling.” There were several others, all of them supplemented with comments.

  They were different from the lists of misdemeanors and petty behavioral crimes that were only a page or two back in the notebook. Leaning her head against the brick, she thought about this. What she was recording wasn’t different. They were still just small observations, written snapshots of moments; what was different was how she was documenting them. She wasn’t sure if it was because she was looking at people more closely or that she had taken a step back and was slightly farther away, but the result was that she could see more of the picture. She smiled. Imagining what caused people to behave the way they did was growing on her, it added to the story. Because, Ellen saw now, there was always more to the story. She thought about the woman with the grocery bags. Instead of immediately taking offense at the man’s frustration, the way most people would, and snapping back at him, she had made the unusual choice to ask gently if there was a reason for the man’s mood. Of course, the man could have chosen to continue being impolite and mired in his misery, but something as simple as a question instead of a retort had drawn him out and paid off for both of them.

  Her musing was interrupted by the sound of footsteps. Someone was walking toward her hidden nook with deliberate, heavy steps. Instinctively, Ellen leaned into the shadows.

  But whoever it was had stopped on the other side of the recycling container. She heard the flick of an old-fashioned lighter and smelled the taint of unusually harsh cigarette smoke. A low, tubercular cough, from deep in a tortured chest, accompanied the odor.

  After a short wait, more footsteps approached. These were quicker and clicked along at a pace that said their maker was in a hurry.

  Someone barked, “Get out of sight of the dock.”

  Ellen tensed, recognizing the Boss’s oily voice.

  “Nobody will see me,” said a husky voice, definitely the smoker’s voice, she thought. It had the rasp of a Slavic accent, though his English seemed confident. “Okay, I’m here. You got my money?”

  “There’s going to be a delay on that.” The Boss sounded nervous. He quickly added, “And anyway, I have a proposition that will make your half of a cell phone chump change.”

  “I’m listening.” The fruity cough was followed by the sound of spitting. Gross, thought Ellen. “I’m interested,” the smoker said, and then he coughed again. It sounded like infected thunder, rumbling and soggy in the distance.

  “I have to know you’re in. I’m not telling you the plan unless you’re in.”

  The smoker laughed. “How much?”

  “Fifty thousand, at least.” The Boss boasted like a kid who’d cheated on a geography test and gotten away with it.

  “Tasty. What do I have to do?”

  “Create a diversion, enough to distract everyone there, take care of one security guard, if necessary.”

  “You want me to kill somebody? That’s extra.”

  “No, I don’t want you to kill the damn security guard. Just . . . distract him. Jesus, try not to maim anybody. That’s all I need. One of the guards is my wife’s uncle. He’s seventy, for God’s sake.”

  “Relax. When?”

  “Saturday evening, that’s our biggest day, and we empty the cash from the registers right after ten p.m.” The Boss laughed nervously. “I’ll take care of that side. You need to make a big noise at exactly ten fifteen, and when the guard comes to investigate, I need him occupied for maybe five minutes, then I’ll meet you at the usual place and you’ll have more cash than you can fit in your saddlebags.”

  Saddlebags? Ellen looked around for a horse, not that she really expected to see one. She didn’t, but she did see a motorcycle, parked in a shadowy corner at the far end of the huge, mostly deserted, side lot.

  The scratchy voice said, “No problem. I’ll let you know when I’m ready.”

  Ellen could imagine the Boss puffing up. She’d seen it a thousand times when one of his employees dared to presume to be his equal. “Remember, I’m in charge here,” he said.

  The laugh came again, triggering a coughing fit. When he recovered, the man said, “You’re the boss. Oh, and just in case you were thinking of showing up next time without the cash . . .”

  A paper rustled, and the Boss said, “What is this?” There was a frightened intake of breath as he answered his own question. “This is the route my kids walk to school.”

  “Yeah, I know. Cute kids.”

  “How do you kno—? You stay away from my children.” The Boss’s voice rose to a squeak from the real fear in it. So, Ellen thought, he does care about something.

  “Up to you.” There was the sound of footsteps, retreating this time, and Ellen watched the back of a huge man in a black leather jacket and boots as he crossed a football field of asphalt toward the bike, lighting another cigarette and hacking as he inhaled.

  A few seconds later, the Boss made his way back toward the docks. Ellen waited for a full five minutes, spending the first two of them recording what she had heard, before heading in after him.

  It was 9:45, so Ellen quickly changed and then did something she had never dared before. She went out onto the sales floor before the store was closed. The lines at the checkout were long, and the checkers were working furiously to get out on time. Ellen found a spot near the registers, a camping display, where she could sit on a foldable chair between large, stacked boxes of portable barbecues and watch.

  As the last of the customers were herded through the wide lanes, the cashiers began to count out the drawers, making bundles of the various bills and writing the totals on a daily record. Then the manager came to collect it into a heavy canvas bag. It was the tall, balding manager with the sparse half circle of thin red hair. He carried the bag to the front office, opened the door with a key card he wore on a retractable extender attached to his belt, and went in. The door closed behind him, locking securely. One of the cashiers, who was lagging behind the others with her totals, knocked on the closed door, and it opened. They began a casual conversation, the checker leaning a hip against the office door to hold it ajar. Through it, Ellen watched the manager add her rubber-banded cash to the canvas bag and then drop the bag into the safe as he chatted with her. Then he began to record the totals from the cashiers’ slips, and the cashier said good night and let the door fall closed. The bag was never reopened and the cash never recounted between the cashiers and the safe.

  Interesting, Ellen thought.

 
The single security guard who had stood near the office door for the transfer of the money now left that post, and he and the rest of the security staff made their evening pass through the store, starting at the back and sweeping toward the front to make sure that the customers had all found their way out. Ellen sat very still, and the elderly man in the gray uniform walked past the boxes without any recognition that she was seated between them. As soon as he was gone, she got up and went back to collect her supplies.

  As she opened the door, cautiously as usual, to the acrid atmosphere of the storeroom, she heard the sound of singing in a strange language from among the shelving. Ellen fetched her cart, topped off her cleaning fluids, and waited. In a minute, Irena came from around the back. Her earbuds were around her neck but not in her ears. Good choice, Ellen thought. Out on the floor, it would be safe to wear them, but not here, where someone could slip up behind you, as Irena had learned the hard way. Ellen turned her back and the woman walked past her, stopping at the door to peer out, checking, no doubt, for the lascivious Boss. The hallway was empty, so she crossed herself, muttered something in Russian, and went on her way, humming.

  So, Ellen thought, things were looking up for the battered cleaner. Ellen felt a warm sensation in her chest and laid a hand flat on it. She didn’t feel sick, but she wondered if the heat meant she was coming down with something. She’d check for a fever when she got home. She gathered the last of her things and was out on the floor working before she realized that she had forgotten to eat dinner.

  The realization panicked her with a sensation that the floor had dropped out from below her, but a quick check told her that, though she was hungry, she was neither on the brink of death nor in immediate danger of starvation. In fact, she felt better rather than worse. Stranger and stranger, this changing of routine.

  The work-task sheet told her that tonight she’d been assigned to the fresh food section first, and then the dry goods. As she wiped down the signs and cleaned up the free fruit samples smashed into the floor, some still skewered with toothpicks, Ellen eyed the piles of red and green apples. She’d never found fruit very appealing—it just wasn’t substantial enough—but she pushed a few from the edge of the pile into her dusting rag and slipped them into her apron pocket, and when her break came, she took them, along with a family pack of fried chocolate pies, into the bathroom.

  The first bite of the red apple was crisp and chewy and crunched satisfyingly. The juice dripped down one side of her mouth and Ellen felt the fresh, sweet taste explode on her tongue. Once, long ago, she’d been given half an apple by a school nurse and she remembered its firm, sugary snap now. But the apples she’d received at school lunches or at the group home had been tasteless mush in comparison. She devoured four apples, liking the sour tang of the green almost as much as the sweetness of the red, and then found she could eat only one of the single-serving pies. To her surprise, she drank less than a third of the large coffee with the hazelnut creamer she had brought in from the break room. It tasted . . . fake with the apples. The artificial flavoring coated her mouth and clashed with the authentic sweetness of the fruit. I must be coming down with something, Ellen thought. Possibly the stomach flu.

  She was back on the floor when she heard an announcement over the PA. “Irena, please come to the office.”

  That couldn’t be good. The only encouraging sign was that the voice was not that of the Boss but of Thelma, one of the stock managers. Ellen wasn’t sure but she thought Thelma was Produce; at any rate, she always saw the woman counting boxes filled with leaves of unidentified plant life.

  Three minutes went by before the PA clicked on again. “Irena Medvedkov, you have an emergency phone call. Come to the office.”

  Ellen looked around. She did not know where Irena was working tonight, but she had a good idea why the woman wasn’t responding. Taking a duster, Ellen started along the row of aisles. She spotted the American hopeful in the toy section.

  Her ears were plugged with the tiny speakers that led by a twisted cord to the scratched and dented portable CD player on her cart. She was humming as she pulled down packs of toys, scrubbed off the shelves, and then replaced them.

  The problem was how to pass on the message without having to reveal herself, but Ellen needn’t have worried. She’d forgotten the Crows. A public announcement of some kind of personal emergency ruffled their black feathers like a strong wind rich with the scent of sloppy picnickers. Within seconds the two women, one tall and scrawny, the other short and thick, came hurrying around the end of the aisle. Kiki’s long strides providing a slower backbeat to the rapid pattering of Rosa’s hurried, short, clipped steps.

  “Irena!” Kiki shouted, tugging at the woman’s sleeve so that she spun in alarm. “Take those off!”

  “There is problem?” Irena asked, the fear making her voice quaver.

  “The office has been paging you,” Rosa said, more gently. “There’s an emergency phone call for you.”

  “I don’t want to go,” Irena said, physically cringing.

  Kiki sniffed and squared her bony shoulders. “I’ll go with you. I don’t want you to be alone if this is bad news.”

  Ellen snorted. The Crow meant, of course, that she didn’t want to miss being the bearer of Irena’s private misfortune to the masses. She’d be back to broadcast the bad news quicker than live TV. Rosa looked disappointed. “I’ll come too,” she said, but Kiki wouldn’t hear of it, and Rosa, a sour scowl puckering her already pickled countenance, was relegated to waiting.

  So as Kiki got a talon gripped on Irena’s wrist and propelled her toward the back offices, Ellen decided her best bet was to stay near Rosa, who sulked her way to the frozen foods and pretended to dust while she kept one eye fixed on the doorway that led to the management offices.

  It was only a matter of minutes before the door opened again and Kiki rushed out. Rosa met her halfway across the floor. “The baby is sick,” she reported breathlessly. “Thelma is going to take Irena to the hospital. The kid is there already.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  Kiki shrugged. “I couldn’t find out, something about a cough and a fever. She was yammering in Russian and that’s all I could get out of her. We’ll go in the morning, take some flowers to the poor girl. We’ll find out the rest then.”

  “Yes. She must be frightened. Poor girl,” Rosa echoed. “What hospital?”

  “Saint Vincent’s, of course. You don’t think they’d take an immigrant with no insurance to a private hospital.”

  Rosa crinkled her nose. “Rough place.”

  “I offered to go with her,” Kiki said grandly, “but the Boss said no, only Irena and Thelma could go. He looked pretty satisfied with himself about it.”

  Rosa’s eyes glittered. “Getting back at her for not putting out?”

  “Of course.” She sniffed. “Men. Can’t live with ’em, can’t shoot ’em.”

  Rosa ignored the comment and said, “I hate Saint Vincent’s, so run-down and depressing. They took my nephew there when he was accidentally shot by a drunken friend.”

  “Well, that’s just not fair.”

  “I know, he spent two weeks in the hospital and has a hell of a scar.”

  Kiki’s beady eyes narrowed with happy malice. “I don’t mean it’s not fair that he was shot. I mean it’s not fair that they can shoot each other. We should get a turn too.”

  The two women laughed and moved away, bellyaching ferociously, all their “concern” for Irena easily relegated to the back of their minds.

  Ellen returned to work. Was Irena’s life, she wondered, a journey over stormy seas that she had to successfully negotiate before eventually winning through? Or was she doomed to spend her life bailing seawater out of a leaky boat?

  Now that Temerity had pointed out certain things on the horizon, Ellen was finding it hard to pretend she didn’t see the woman drowning. />
  Ellen Homes wouldn’t have put it this way, but Temerity’s promptings had roused her, stirred her to lift her head so that maybe she could see just a little bit farther out into that uncertain ocean. And she found that she wasn’t as eager to turn away as she had been.

  Because she had a feeling that, far out, past the storms and waves, the sunlight on the water must be lovely.

  J.B. is no spunkier, so we’re giving blood,” Temerity said instead of “hello” when Ellen woke up and dialed her number before even getting out of bed. Ellen looked at the receiver. It was unnerving the way she knew it was her, even if there was a supposedly logical explanation. But the girl went on without waiting for a response. “Or, I am anyway, and you’re going with me. We’ll tell the hospital it’s for J.B. from an anonymous donor.”

  This confused Ellen. How would Temerity know J.B.’s blood—what was that word? Kind? Sort? Her drowsy brain wouldn’t let it through. It was funny how you could forget a simple word sometimes. She knew, of course, that not all blood was the same, she’d read about it in at least two books. One was a medical thriller, and the other was a book that claimed vampires were real, which she hadn’t finished. Ellen thought that vampires were silly things to believe in, because she’d never seen one and she worked nights.