Ellen in Pieces

by Caroline Adderson

  Because the fetus was dead.

  She didn’t say that, though. She called it blighted.

  Later, on the phone, Carol had advised Ellen that she could wait until she miscarried naturally, or she could have a D&C. Really, Ellen shouldn’t have cared. She’d been ambivalent anyway. Yet after the procedure, after Georgia drove her home from the hospital, Ellen had made Mimi and Yo peanut butter sandwiches and an enormous bowl of cheese popcorn. She set a travel clock on the TV and started the cartoons blasting.

  “When the alarm rings, come and get me. But don’t come until it rings. No matter what.”

  “What if we’re hungry?” Mimi asked.

  “Eat something.”

  “What if we’re thirsty?”

  “You know how to turn on a tap.”

  “What if the house catches fire?”

  “Run out the back. Don’t worry about me.”

  She shut herself in her bedroom and sobbed until, hours and hours later, four hours to be exact, Mimi and Yolanda crept in and woke her up.

  “Mama,” they whimpered. “We thought it wasn’t ever going to ring.”

  Somehow Ellen had managed to put that grief away. For a decade she’d forgotten it completely. She’d also taken measures to ensure she would never feel it again.

  And she hadn’t. Until now, with the cold comfort of the cloth across her forehead and the tissue box on her belly, weightless as the very thing her body would never again contain.

  THE next time Ellen went, the boy remembered her.

  “Last week.”

  “No,” said Ellen.

  It was actually just four days ago. Yolanda had an exam today and Ellen had offered to drive her. She had to drop off some posters anyway. She wanted to take another look. Birthmarks, eye colour, et cetera. Things she hadn’t looked for the first time, when she’d been merely curious.

  So there wouldn’t be any surprises.

  So she would know what to expect.

  “Do you want something from me?” Sean asked.

  “Absolutely not!” Ellen said.

  “But you gave me a twenty last week too.”

  “I must have a doppelgänger. This tall? Big hips? A lot of money to throw around? I’m taking it back.”

  She retrieved the twenty, and when she straightened he was laughing. The chair pushed out in his chest, scraping his lungs, yet the balls didn’t fall, or even slow or falter. She was impressed. Quite won over. She noted blue eyes. Larry’s eyes, nearly black, had trumped hers. Larry had blotted the blue right out of his daughters. But this grandchild of hers? It had a chance.

  “What else could I do for twenty dollars?” he asked.

  Ellen, normally unfazable, drew back.

  “I give a good back rub. Or I could teach you to juggle.”

  It would seem Oedipal if he touched her, even if by “back rub” he actually meant rubbing her back. Juggling? Ha!

  They went for a walk.

  “How does your meter work?” Ellen asked. “Am I paying by the minute, or the mile?”

  “I’m easy,” he said.

  A nearly eight-hundred-hectare forest grew right up against the university. In Ellen’s day, when she was an English major here, it had a different name. Barely anything on campus was recognizable. Over there, a familiar building—Chemistry?—but it lacked all context. What context! She’d met Larry here, got pregnant, dropped out, ran off to Cordova Island.

  They turned onto Westbrook Mall, Sean clacking beside her on the board, clacking and coughing. The hospital looked the same but the old frat houses had been torn down and replaced by frat condos.

  When they reached the forest, Sean stashed his skateboard in a tree. It was easy to get him talking then. His whole story he offered up, how he’d got pneumonia while tree planting and ended up in hospital. Afterward, he didn’t want to go back home.

  “Where’s home?” Ellen asked.

  “Back east. My brother’s there but he doesn’t give a shit about me.”

  Orphan, Ellen noted with a pang. Also, weak in the lungs. “Are you living on campus?”

  He flipped back the dull ropes of his hair and smiled. “For now. I was staying with friends, but they went planting again and sublet their place. What about you? Where do you live?”

  “The North Shore.”

  “Mountains. Awesome. Here. Let’s go this way. I want to show you something.”

  He tried to take her hand, but she plucked it back. Had he led Yolanda off the marked trail like this, into the thick of the green where no one would hear them? Ellen followed, freshly appalled at Yolanda’s stupidity. Yet moments later here was Ellen with no idea where she was. She stepped over logs, kicked through salal. The ground, wet and humusy, sponged underfoot. Eventually they came to an enormous cedar, its limbs shagged with moss. Great hanks hung all over it like green tangled hair. What interested Sean was how the tree had grown over a fallen log, its roots partially above ground, elongated, like a pair of straddling legs.

  “Doesn’t that look alive?” he asked.

  “It is alive.”

  “I mean, doesn’t it look like it could walk and talk? It’s the fucking Lord of the Rings in here. There’s nothing like this in Sudbury. I can tell you that much.”

  All around, ferns clumped, their outrageous crowns like giant Copacabana headdresses. Ellen turned over a frond and saw the tiny regular circles roughing up its underside. They were pale green now, but as the spores matured they would darken to a powdery brown.

  “So sperms and eggs are, like, floating all around us?” Sean asked when she explained it.

  “Yes.”

  He gazed up, squinting, and the dreadlocks slid heavily down his back. Ellen looked up too, at the light penetrating the canopy of branches. Something moved. A very fine filament, a silken tail, tracing an otherwise invisible trajectory. Then the molecular burst of connection.

  Probably a spiderweb. Probably a water droplet snagged on the afternoon.

  Sean said, “Awesome.”

  And it was. It filled her with awe until she remembered that she’d only paid the parking meter for an hour.

  “This way,” Sean said, striking off ahead of her. “It’s faster.”

  “Would you say you’re generally a happy person?” Ellen asked.

  “I’m really happy,” he said, coughing.

  “That’s so comforting to know. One of my daughters gets low. Because of her father. Of course she blames me. Takes it out on me.”

  He pointed deeper into the trees where he had rigged up a tarp, green to camouflage it. “There’s my pad.”

  “Can I?” she asked, and he gestured for her to go ahead.

  Ellen bent and peered inside the plastic shelter where Yolanda had probably lost her virginity and gained more experience than she’d counted on. Butane camping stove, sleeping bag, mildewed paperbacks. Some things in garbage bags—but the rest damp looking and not very clean.

  “Cozy,” she said, though already she was fretting about his cough. This was a rain forest. What he really needed was to dry out. And the other thing—she’d been avoiding thinking about it, trying not to notice how often he wormed a finger through the dreadlocks to scratch his scalp.

  As he sauntered ahead of her in the tree-dappled light, a song came to her. A song about a forest boy with shy, sad eyes. An enchanted boy. Her mother used to sing it when Ellen was a little girl.

  “Is there a place you can shower?” she asked.

  Nature Boy.

  “The pool’s too expensive,” he told her. “I found a shower in one of the science buildings. Then, last time? I got caught.”

  He lifted one arm and sniffed. “Sorry.”

  SOME people have it figured out, but there’s no shortage of schlemiels either. Back at the car, a sixty-dollar parking ticket decorated Ellen’s windshield. Plus twenty for Sean.

  “You don’t have to pay me,” he said. “You’re letting me use your shower.”

  She stuffed the bill into t
he pocket of his T-shirt, over one weak, rattling lung. “We have to stop for some bananas on the way.”

  “No problemo.”

  You can never go back home. Well, she wasn’t. So it wouldn’t be the same story twice. Different people, different story. Maybe a happier ending this time. Maybe a perfect one.

  What would Yolanda say when she got back from her exam? Ellen would deal with that after she made some calls. She was going to phone a few old friends and see if anyone had an empty cabin. He could chop wood, do some construction. He was probably strong when he wasn’t sick. Or he could teach juggling at the Waldorf School. Almost everyone had a cabin out back on Cordova Island, or a shack they’d lived in while they built their permanent place.

  A lot of people still owed Ellen. They owed her for the oats they let Larry sprinkle in their beds.

  2

  POPPYCOCK

  Now Ellen was alone in the North Vancouver house, blessedly alone at first, then lonely. Yolanda and Sean and little Eli, Ellen’s grandson, had been living on Cordova Island for the past four years. Ellen, a grandmother to a five-year-old? Maybe she’d dreamed it.

  Once a month now, instead of every six weeks, she made her pilgrimage to Tony’s salon so he could camouflage the years.

  Briefly, Mimi had moved back in, making teeny-mouth all day long, that sour, lip-pursing expression that drove Ellen mad. In fact, mother and daughter so irritated each other that in the end Mimi had packed herself off to Toronto, which was, she claimed, “As far away as I can get.”

  “There’s Antarctica,” Ellen had muttered, only to be ambushed by guilt.

  Alone again.

  So Ellen decided to sell the house. Sell just as soon as she unloaded her twenty-plus years of crap. Already she’d given up on boxes and garbage bags, the pretense of logical sorting. The morning her father called, she was ruthlessly heaping everything to one side of the rec room, as though to douse it all with kerosene. Her wedding pictures, for example. Into the pile they went.

  The phone rang and Ellen emerged from the crawl space like a miner from an underground shaft and ran for it.

  “It’s me, your father.”

  She blinked, the cordless in her hand. The voice was not so much older as entirely unfamiliar. Sort of tremulous.

  “Are you there?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I’m coming to see you.”

  “Really?” Ellen said.

  “Tomorrow. Monday.”

  “What? Okay. Would you like me to pick you up?”

  “I was hoping.”

  “All right,” Ellen said and, still stunned, she wrote the flight time and number on a box flap and ripped it off. “Where are you staying?”

  A long silence unfolded between them, though not as long as the last one, which had gone on close to twenty-three years. This time Ellen cut it short.

  “Okay,” she said.

  WESTJET from Calgary, direct. Ellen waited empty-handed in the terminal. She’d considered bringing something welcoming, but what? All she could think of was that sickening candy in a cardboard can with some kind of flower in its name. The whole long drive from North Vancouver, across the Lions Gate Bridge, through downtown, over the Burrard Street Bridge, along fifty car-clotted blocks of Granville Street, then over the Arthur Laing Bridge to Richmond where the airport was, she’d alternated between her mantra, Driving sucks, and trying to remember the name of that caramel-popcorn-and-nut confection. Her mother used to buy it for him every Christmas. Even as its flowery name eluded her, Ellen could picture the cylindrical outline in the stocking, a blockage. Passengers trickled, then surged into the baggage claim area and the luggage carousel jerked to life. Ellen stalled on petunia.

  Eventually the area around the carousel cleared, just a few unclaimed bags going around for the ride. She wondered if she’d got the time wrong, but had left the box flap with the details in the car. Then it occurred to her that her father must have walked right past her. They hadn’t even recognized each other. People change. She’d changed.

  Well, there was an understatement.

  She checked the taxi stand outside. From the matte and colour-less sky, planes kept sinking down, one after another with just a couple of breaths between, each a surprise. The last time she saw her father, she’d been a slip of a girl. No. She’d actually been enormously pregnant with Yolanda. In fact, Yolanda was almost the same age Ellen had been at Jack McGinty’s fiftieth birthday party.

  Back inside, by the carousel, where those same few bags were going nowhere fast, a uniformed woman came pushing a man in a wheelchair.

  “Excuse me?” Ellen said. “I’m looking for the WestJet counter.”

  “Ellen,” croaked the man.

  Wide panicked eyes under outrageous brows. The jaw working, working, blood all down his chin.

  Poppycock.

  THE next seven hours blurred by. Jack McGinty barely spoke. Not in the car bleeding and tremoring all the way to the hospital, not in the limbo of the waiting room. In the plane somewhere over the Purcell Mountains he’d bitten his tongue and it just wouldn’t stop bleeding. Apart from that, he refused to explain his deterioration, or why he’d come. Ellen kept thrusting tissues at him, which he lifted in a wad to his mouth. The tremors were so bad they did the daubing for him.

  They’d been waiting three hours when the nurse finally called, “Jack McGinty?”

  He took a typed note from his breast pocket and handed it to Ellen, which was when she noticed the mechanical pencils. Her whole childhood he’d carried those pencils in that pocket, up against his mathematical heart. Now they made her tear up.

  I am sorry. Love, Dad, the note read.

  “What’s this?” Ellen asked.

  He looked at the note and, frowning with his bloodied mouth, took a second slip of paper from his pocket, which he traded for the first. The tremors made him seem impatient.

  It was a list of medications, also typed. Many medications. Ellen was alarmed by how many there were.

  “Give it to them,” he said.

  Four hours after that, Ellen drove the car into the garage at home and parked. Jaw clenched, she helped her father out. Anger, her default emotion, not always appropriately. For example, when her mother died. Later she’d felt all kinds of things, but right off the top of any given situation, she was usually blistering.

  “This is a nice place,” Jack remarked, as though Emergency had never happened and they’d come directly from the airport.

  Ellen turned her exhausted eyes to him. “I’m selling it.”

  She led her spasming father inside, snapping on lights as they went. Usually she left one on; she hated arriving to darkness. “I made up the room downstairs,” she said, because, with him in this condition, she wasn’t sure if he could handle stairs.

  “Downstairs is fine. It’s a very nice home, Ellen.”

  Arm in arm they reached the bottom, he clutching the paper bag containing the Senokot they’d stopped for. The spare room was off the rec room, which was half heaped with the past she planned on disposing of. He didn’t even see the mess. His eyes were fixed straight ahead on the open bedroom door, as though with sufficient intensity of gaze he might transport the twitching mass of his body as far as the bed, visible there with its fresh linens and cascade of little pillows.

  After running every conceivable test, extracting his fluids, X-raying every inch of him, tapping his juddering body with their rubber hammers, the doctor had clipped the X-ray to a square of light on the wall.

  “This is how far the stool is backed up.”

  “He’s shaking and champing because he’s constipated?” Ellen had asked.

  Or he had Parkinson’s disease, but that was beyond the purview of Emergency. So with a referral to a geriatric specialist and a list of laxatives in hand, Ellen, seething, had brought her father home.

  THAT first night she couldn’t sleep for the downstairs toilet flushing, the French doors rattling, Jack going out in the cold Octob
er night, and coming back. She wasn’t angry anymore, only worried. Parkinson’s? She’d have to look it up.

  Flush!

  With her father in the house, her teenage self came sneaking back, long-forgotten and reckless, a leggy force. That Ellen used to lie in bed like this, but with her nightie over her clothes until she was sure her father and her older sister, Moira, were asleep. Then, joyfully, she would fling the nightie off and escape the stifling house. Some boyfriend would be waiting in his truck halfway down the street. Bush parties were the thing. Bonfires in the country, girls swilling pink gin then puking in the woods.

  This must have been when her mother was in the hospital. Ellen distinctly recalled asking if she was going to be all right and her father saying, “She’ll be fine.” It was a lie.

  One night Ellen crept back in reekingly drunk. Caught! Her dad and Moira were up. The hospital had phoned. Her mother had died.

  Ellen was furious, of course.

  Nothing was the same with the heart ripped out of their family. Moira stepped into their mother’s shoes for a few years, but she hadn’t been able to control Ellen. And every time they fought, Moira renewed her disavowal of Ellen. Because she hadn’t been there the night their mother died. Hadn’t Ellen been punished enough, losing her only true ally? Her father was around, but he always seemed so stiff and remote, like he only knew how to love one person, the one who used to sing “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” and “Embraceable You.” The one who sang “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” for Ellen to fall asleep to.

  After she died, Jack never seemed to say a word.

  AT five the next morning, Jack McGinty was flushing the toilet again. Then a series of mysterious whirrings and buzzings started, which Ellen listened to forever, curled resentfully in her bed with the pillow over her head, teeth gritted, thinking he’d better explain himself. He’d better explain what he meant by coming here. By the time she’d identified the sounds—electric shaver, electric toothbrush—she was too angry to fall back to sleep.