Ellen in Pieces (3 page)

She found parking just off campus, then asked directions to the liquor store. Right next door was a café. “You call it Tall,” Ellen told the girl behind the counter, “but it’s actually Short. It’s Small, yet you call it Tall.”

The girl sighed.

“I’m just saying,” Ellen muttered. “Some people have it figured out.”

She took her coffee outside and, at one of the metal tables, pretended to read
Pride and Prejudice
, holding it upside down for fun. He wasn’t there. Yolanda had said he always was. After a few minutes she turned the book the right way up and that was it. Completely absorbed by the Bennet family’s delightful problems, she forgot the stakeout.

In the middle of Chapter Three, a sound like a train clacking over the rails returned her to her proper task. Him for sure, pirouetting to a stop. The skateboard took flight, its coloured underside flashing. He caught it in one hand. Tan dreadlocks, dirty jeans barely clinging to his hips, a bad cough. His name, Yolanda had said, was Sean.

From behind
Pride and Prejudice
, Ellen watched. He rooted through his backpack. Out came crocheted juggling balls, a cigar box. To warm up, he flipped two balls in each hand and coughed. A university liquor store was not the most lucrative place to ply his trade. While his coloured balls orbited, frat boys went in and out for beer, ignoring him. “Hi!” he kept saying. “Hi!” The cough sounded like a chair being pushed out, scraping the floor.

Occasionally he’d cajole someone into tossing him a set of keys, or an apple, for a few turns with the balls. Or he’d look at his watch without altering his rhythm. “These balls have been in the air for thirteen minutes. Only your generous donation can keep them going.”

Yolanda must have donated. Ellen pictured her scooting past, hurling change in the Romeo y Julieta box. The bus stop where she always waited was just across the street. When you see a person every day, you start to feel connected. You start to worry when they’re not there, or when their cough won’t go away.

Ellen gave him a twenty, which was stupid, because he watched it flutter down on the mosaic of pennies and dimes in the bottom of the box, then looked at her, amazed. And smiled. Very boyishly. All the while the balls kept circling. Blushing, her cover blown, Ellen slunk off.

“Hey, awesome! Thanks! Good karma to you, lady! That lady just gave me twenty. I didn’t put it in myself—”

He broke off hacking.

L
ATER
that night, delivering rotten bananas to Yolanda at her desk, Ellen noticed she was highlighting every word in
What to Expect When You’re Expecting.

So, she thought. So.

She made no comment.

But then
the feelings
jackbooted in and they were not at all what Ellen had expected. Almost faint with them, she took to her bed with a cold cloth over her forehead and a box of tissues balanced on her stomach. She wasn’t angry. She wasn’t even relieved that Yolanda had finally made up her mind.

Back then—ten years ago, when Ellen had been pregnant for the third time by Larry—she’d been all business. She’d had no time to feel anything but nausea. She’d taken on extra contracts, written grant proposals for arts organizations too, just to earn enough money to get them through the year after the baby was born.

Ironically, it made her an even worse mother. Where once she’d rationed the TV—thirty minutes a day, no more—now it babysat Mimi and Yo. Or she farmed them out shamelessly to Georgia and picked them up late. No time to patiently comb every strand. Off to her hairdresser they went, the girls bawling in side-by-side chairs while Tony, making a face, lopped off their infested ponytails and tossed them on the floor.

“Remember?” he told Ellen. “I did that to
you
when you came over here from that”—he flapped his little hands—”that
island
where you never bathed.”

Even lopped, Mimi’s and Yo’s hair still grazed their indignant shoulders. Not good enough. “Mia Farrow in
Rosemary’s Baby
,” Ellen told him. “As short as that.”

Afterward Mimi had said, “Mama? I’ll hate you forever and ever now.”

Little did Ellen know she would hear those words so often they would eventually have no effect, but that was the first time and they felt like a wrecking ball to the chest. Back then, in the
sunshiny world of childhood, where forgiveness was dispensed like lollipops, she made everything right just by taking them to get their ears pierced.

At twelve weeks, Carol sent Ellen for an ultrasound. Ellen shuddered, remembering how the technician had buried the transducer so deep into Ellen’s fat that it hurt. She suggested a transvaginal scan instead. For this Ellen had to clamber off the table, dress, and go empty her bladder, which she’d painstakingly filled on Carol’s orders.

“Well, that was a relief,” she told the technician after she had dumped all those cups of tea. “This? Not so much.” She meant being penetrated with a cold, K-Y Jelly–slathered rod. What could you do at a time like this but crack a joke or fake an orgasm? Except the technician seemed humourless.

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.

T
HE
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.”

S
OME
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 the 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.

N
ow 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.

W
EST
J
ET
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.

T
HE
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.

T
HAT
first night she couldn’t sleep for the downstairs toilet flushing, the French doors rattling, Jack going out in the cold October 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.

A
T
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.

She found him in the kitchen, dressed and brushed, with the pencils lined up in his pocket, swaying like a man standing in a canoe. “Good morning,” he said, and a bit of pink showed in the corners of his mouth.

Poof! Un-angry.

“How’s the tongue?” Ellen asked. He stuck it out, hideous and inflamed, a purple crescent at the end where his teeth had cut through. She shuddered. “What do you want for breakfast? Cereal, toast, eggs?”

“Don’t go to any trouble.”

“I won’t. Just tell me what you want.”

“Cereal’s fine.”

“It’s fine or it’s what you want?”

He said he wanted it, but who could tell? Maybe he wanted Oysters Rockefeller. Why couldn’t people just say what they meant? This was Ellen’s downfall. She said what she meant (thereby offending nearly everyone) and assumed everyone else did too, assumed that “She’ll be fine” signified she would in fact be fine.

In the hopes that at future 5 a.m.s her father might take the initiative to feed himself, Ellen directed him to the cereal cupboard and went to dress.

He was tissuing orange juice off the seat of the chair when she returned. So much for sitting him down for a talk. She hurried over with the cloth. “There. Sit, Dad.”

Dad.
After twenty-three years, her mouth had formed the word.

He obeyed, staring wistfully at the cereal box until Ellen filled his bowl for him. She watched him eat, saw how most of the cereal never completed the trip to his mouth on the wildly shaking spoon. Pity wrung her out the way she’d wrung out the sticky cloth a moment ago.

“I heard you up in the night,” she said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. Can’t you sleep? What about your pills? Wasn’t Zopiclone on that list? It’s for sleeping. Does Moira know about the pills?”

She hadn’t meant to bring up her sister, Moira, but she was, after all, a nurse. Presumably they were in touch. Presumably. How did she know?

He burst out, “All of this is Charles’s fault! She should never have listened to him!”

Charles, Moira’s husband. Ellen’s brother-in-law. Ellen took a backward step, wondering if Jack meant
her
and Charles. Also, Jack McGinty was not a yeller. He was, practically speaking, a Trappist.

And now that he had humiliated himself enough with the Shreddies, he thanked her for breakfast and went downstairs to rest.

“You do that, Dad. I’ll see you later.”

Ellen still didn’t know why he’d come.

S
HE
phoned the geriatric place. It had a two-week waiting list. She called her own doctor, but hard-line Carol did not accept out-of-province patients.

Then her realtor called. “Ellen? Brad Wheeler.”

It was a strain for Ellen not to reply, “Brad Wheeler-Dealer?”

Brad was ramped up and ready to roll.

“Ready to roll up the ramp?” Ellen asked.

“You bet,” he said. So Ellen’s news could only disappoint. “How long’s he staying for?”

“I wish I knew. I’ll call you.”

“It’s a seller’s market, Ellen. Don’t put it off too long.”

Downstairs, Ellen peeked in the bedroom to see if her father was awake. He was, sort of, lying on his back masticating at the ceiling, hands going
abracadabra abracadabra
against the bedspread. “Are you all right, Dad?” she asked.

“Fine! Fine!”

For Christ’s sake, this was
not
fine. It was alarming and weird. “I’m just going out to the store. Do you want anything?”

“All-Bran!”

“Okay. Anything else?”

“Regular All-Bran, not the flakes.”

“Okay. I’ll be back shortly.”

“Fine!”

She ran upstairs to google Parkinson’s disease.
Diagnosis depends on the presence of one or more of the four most common motor symptoms: resting tremor, rigidity, postural instability, and bradykinesia.
Bradykinesia? Google said:
Slowing of movements, short shuffling steps, sudden stopping of an ongoing movement
.

As in the empty spoon at breakfast, poised in mid-air, and Jack staring at it in complete bewilderment.

She phoned again. “I talked to you about a half-hour ago? About my father? Jack McGinty.”

“Oh, yes.”

“He’s got Parkinson’s. For sure he’s got Parkinson’s. He shuffles. He sways. He’s got bradykinesia. Now he’s just lying there convulsing.”

“Convulsing?” the receptionist squeaked.

“Pretty much. The thing is, we can’t wait two weeks. Can’t, can’t, can’t.”

People said Ellen was pushy. All those years as a publicist, “pushy” was what she heard. That she knew how to get what she wanted. As if
not
knowing how to get what you wanted was better. Besides, had she really gotten what she wanted? What
did
she want?

She could hear the woman clicking the computer keys, checking the schedule one more time. “I’ll squeeze you in next Wednesday morning at eight,” she said.