Ellen in Pieces Page 17

  “That was the only time you ever gave me your undivided attention,” Mimi said. “Your fingers in my hair? I needed that.”

  Of course Ellen didn’t remember it the same way, but at least she remembered. “You screamed bloody murder all the way through it.”

  And they both turned to Kevin so he could choose between their contradictory recollections, Kevin who was praying hard that they could just get through the hour.

  “Is attention the same thing as love?” Ellen had asked him. “Because I loved her so much. I do. But I had to earn a living. I didn’t always have time to spend with her.”

  “You had boyfriend time,” Mimi had said with a triumphant glance at Kevin.

  Anyway, Ellen had sent something Mimi didn’t have, a sensor to Velcro onto her running shoe. The tape had been peeled off the hard plastic case the iPod came in; Ellen had already opened it. And charged the iPod, Mimi saw when she lifted it out, shiny and metallic green. And downloaded two dozen songs. Billie Holiday. Ella Fitzgerald. Louis Armstrong. Charles Aznavour. The corny music Ellen loved.

  Mimi twiddled to the bottom of the list.

  “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You.”

  THE next day she showed up at Mr. D’Huet’s early. While she waited for him to get to the door, she checked the pedometer. One thousand and forty-three steps.

  “Hello! Thanks for coming!” He waved her in. Foam tracked one side of his wobbly face. He was shirtless today, too, dressed in sport socks and slippers and khaki shorts that grazed his hairy knees.

  “Should I continue with those boxes in the kitchen, Mr. D’Huet?”

  “Start anywhere you want. There’s so much to do. I’ll be down in a few minutes.” He clutched the banister.

  Mimi waited, watching him ascend the white-carpeted stairs, an ancient trudging up Everest, until he safely reached the summit.

  The first box was stuffed with opera and theatre programs, another with old phone bills. She dumped it all into a plastic garbage bag.

  Mr. D’Huet reappeared. “What am I supposed to do with the bags?” she asked. “There’s a garbage strike.”

  “Really?” Mr. D’Huet said. “This is the first I’ve heard of it.”

  When the doorbell rang, Mimi volunteered to get it because Mr. D’Huet was just taking a loaf out of the old-fashioned bread-box and searching for a clean knife.

  Glenna jittered on the front steps. Cut-offs and toffee pigtails. Her gapped, complicit smile.

  “He doesn’t want you anymore,” Mimi said.

  Laughing, Glenna stepped forward. Mimi slammed the door and locked it. Glenna rang again.

  “You’re fired,” Mimi whispered through the mail slot.

  “Fuck you!”

  While Glenna pounded, Mimi limped off as fast as she could in case Glenna snuck around and tried to insinuate herself in the back door.

  Mr. D’Huet was sitting at the kitchen table with his bread and peanut butter, bobbing a teabag in a mug. “What was that all about?”

  “UNICEF.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Too bad. I’d like to get in touch with them.”

  Mimi dragged the garbage bag filled with opera programs through the French doors, kicked it down the deck stairs with her good leg, then limped to the far railing, where she peered along the side of the house. No Glenna. She waited a few minutes just in case, staring out at the overgrown back garden.

  Mr. D’Huet was paying a breeder to develop a rose in honour of his late wife. He told Mimi this when she came back inside and complimented him on his roses, roses being the only flower she could identify in his garden other than dandelions. Later, she found the file of correspondence with the breeder. Also the resumés, hers and Glenna’s, on a pile of grocery delivery forms.

  Mimi got through twelve boxes that second day. The most interesting contained old black-and-white erotic postcards. She kept those but chucked the takeout menus. A few times Mr. D’Huet wandered in to talk, out of loneliness or because he wanted to check on what she was throwing out. Personal questions she deflected with questions right back.

  “So what are you going to call the rose?”

  As she was leaving, Mr. D’Huet counting the bills into her hand, she said, “You keep your doors locked, don’t you? Because you should if you’ve got cash lying around.”

  “It’s not lying around. It’s in my desk drawer.”

  She couldn’t believe he’d told her that.

  Then he asked something weird. “Are you a churchgoer?”

  “What? No. Why?”

  “You’re always humming. It sounds like a hymn.”

  “I don’t know any hymns,” Mimi said.

  “It’s quite pretty, whatever it is. Mabel was Anglican. I went along for the ride. Are you coming back tomorrow? Good. Good. I wonder what happened to the other girl.”

  He tipped her a ten because she’d worked so hard.

  On the steps, Mimi turned on the pedometer. Two blocks away, she checked that it was counting. Fifty-two slow steps.

  Somewhere in the trees the telephone bird sang, the one whose call sounded like a ringing phone. She remembered hearing it at Mr. D’Huet’s throughout the morning, but now it dawned on her that it hadn’t been the bird. It was the upstairs phone. Yesterday Glenna had turned off the ringer in the kitchen. If Mimi went back to tell Mr. D’Huet, it would mess up the pedometer. Also her leg hurt. She could feel it stiffening as the fluid built up.

  She limped on, humming “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You.”

  As soon as she heard herself, she made teeny-mouth and picked up her pace.

  Sweetheart, I meant nothing by it. I just remembered you were so crazy about Bryan Adams. Remember how you taped pictures of him all over your room? I put it on for fun. I’m sorry. Take it off. Just delete it. How’s the new job?

  Mom

  “Mr. Clark was like the sun to you,” Kevin had said during rehab. “All you kids were the planets moving around him. Did you see him as a father figure? Your own father had just left you. He was absent most of your life. Then he came back, only to leave again.”

  “Haven’t you been listening to a single word I’ve said?” Mimi replied. “I loved him. I wanted to get married to him.”

  But how had a song by Bryan Adams attached itself to Mr. Clark? Mr. Clark who liked opera? Mimi had attached it. A child’s soundtrack is different from an adult’s; adult motives obscure, their movements uninterpretable. She didn’t know that at ten. For a long time Mimi actually believed the teachers slept at the school. She couldn’t fathom that they had a life outside of teaching her.

  She deleted the song from the iPod, but she couldn’t clear it from her head. When you delete files, they’re still there, the same way the past is always there. In rehab, under Kevin’s patient guidance, Mimi had figured out Mr. Clark was the real reason she started using percs. Kevin helped her get over the pain of what had happened, but he hadn’t deleted Mr. Clark.

  Now she was humming the song all the time.

  The next day, Wednesday, she was okay. She focused on the sealed envelope in the soap box, how she had resisted it. She kept on resisting until Thursday afternoon when she came to Mr. D’Huet with a question.

  The owl folder in her hand, Mimi knocked on the open door. Mr. D’Huet looked up from his desk, vaguely owlish himself in his glasses. He was writing to the United Nations and the Red Cross and any other humanitarian agency he could find the address for. Could Mimi help with that too? Could she drive? Since they’d revoked his licence, getting to the library was so difficult.

  “Don’t you have Internet?” Mimi asked.

  “I don’t believe I do.”

  She asked about the owls.

  “The name D’Huet derives from chouette, which is French for ‘owlet.’ No, keep this. It’s interesting.” He bent over the old manual typewriter again and continued two-fingering his peanut butter testimony, showing Mimi the feathery hairs on his back. Then, as she turned to go, he asked, “Do you want
to look at Mabel’s things? In case there’s anything you fancy?”

  Mimi heard the whoosh whoosh whoosh of air through feathers. Her resistance growing wings and flapping off.

  She dropped the file on the stairs, stepped up with the good leg, straightening it to lift the other, until she reached the top. The bedrooms were on the upper floor, three of them as unlived-in as museum displays. The exception was the small plaid room that must have been Mr. D’Huet’s, the twin bed tousled, stuff piled everywhere. A nozzled machine sat on the bedside table. Yesterday Mr. D’Huet had refused to part with an article on how playing the didgeridoo reduced the symptoms of sleep apnea. Mimi pictured him in the bed gasping for breath in the middle of the night, the mask and nozzle attached to his face, a shrivelled old elephant god.

  In the bathroom at the end of the hall syringes and swabs in plastic packaging cluttered the counter. She moved on to the master bedroom, where dark furniture stood around on a soundless white carpet, a carpet like snow with a perfect set of tracks leading to the ensuite bathroom. A wintery stillness filled this room, a palpable sense of expectation coming from furniture kept behind heavy drapes. The furniture was waiting for something to happen and now, finally, something did.

  Mimi followed Glenna’s tracks. When she opened the medicine cabinet, bottles and bottles rolled out and tumbled into the sink, their clattery warning drowning out her curses.

  “DID you find something you liked?” Mr. D’Huet asked.

  She patted where it hung by her hip. An Indian shoulder bag embroidered with little mirrors, the pill bottle in it.

  “Oh,” Mr. D’Huet said, peering. “Was that Mabel’s?”

  “It was in the closet.”

  “I guess it was, then. I’m glad you found something. Let me get your money. Will I see you tomorrow?”

  Outside, the bag’s tiny stitched-on mirrors ignited in the sun. Mimi dragged her stiff leg along, making resolute fists. People had started leaving their garbage where there were city bins, creating these impromptu mini dumps. Passing the one in front of the Old Mill station, she held her breath.

  Down on the platform, a just-departed car inspired her. Mimi twirled, then collapsed against a pillar like some martyr in a painting. A man jogged down the tiled stairs and leered. Her button had come undone. Mimi covered the tattoo—the outline of a hand with the lines of significance drawn in. She’d found the picture in a book in the spirituality section at BioLife, torn it out, and brought it to be needled onto her chest. Her real hand pressed the tattooed hand and the subway screeched in.

  The things Mimi used to do! Back then, if a man had leered then followed her into a subway car? Come along! she’d have sung.

  She got off a few stops before hers and so did he. She felt him tailing her. When she emerged into the sticky, sour air of Bloor Street, she swung around. “Do you see zeros in my eyes?”

  He wore hipster glasses and an untucked dress shirt over shorts. Maybe he wasn’t the same guy from the Old Mill station. “Um. I do not see any zeros, no.”

  “Good.” She limped off, energy pulsing from the Indian bag like it was decorated with little windows, sparks shooting out.

  Don’t take it, sweetheart. Don’t give in.

  The hipster had let her get ahead. He was half a block behind her now, not within speaking range. Yet she’d heard those words.

  A bar. Brown tables, brown carpet, brown walls. Brown coffee that the bartender set in front of where Mimi perched on a stool. Mimi was the only one breathing the brown air, except for the bartender, a lady-wrestler type with long grey hair, rolling coins from the till.

  “What’s that look for?” she asked.

  “I just heard my mother talking to me. I swear I heard her like she was right there.”

  “Is she dead?”

  “What?”

  “Is she dead?”

  “No, she’s alive and still trying to control every move I make.”

  The bartender gave a meaty chuckle. “She’s your mother. That’s her job.” She poked a few more dimes in the paper tube, folded the ends, bemusement softening her hard-living face. “My mom used to visit me in my dreams.”

  “Is she dead?”

  “Oh, yeah. This is, like, a hundred years back.”

  “What did she say?” Mimi asked.

  “The usual. Lottery numbers. My bra didn’t fit right. After a couple of years, she stopped. I miss her like hell.” The woman flicked back her long hair, first the one side, then the other, a curiously feminine gesture that made her seem like a cross-dresser.

  Maybe Ellen had just been hit by a car in Vancouver. Mimi deleted the thought. “You probably had a good relationship.”

  “Not particularly.”

  Mimi lifted the Indian bag onto the bar and sifted for the bottle. Mabel D’Huet, she read. It even sounded like a rose. At home, Mimi’s prescription was hidden in a box that incidentally smelled of roses. How far she’d come from that frenzied girl who could cry on command in any doctor’s office, who’d stolen her sister’s health card and impersonated her—six times! But at what cost, this long journey? Her whole life had been folded up small enough to fit into a soap box.

  “I have a terrible relationship with my mom,” she told the bartender. “She was never there for me when I was a kid.”

  “Where was your dad?”

  “Pfft.”

  The bartender snugged another roll in a compartment in the till. “So it’s all your mother’s fault? What did she do that was so awful?”

  “Slept with my favourite teacher.”

  The woman’s eyes widened, then she laughed with her big shoulders.

  Mimi bristled. “I was madly in love with him. Like, crazy in love. I spent all my time planning our wedding. Drawing pictures of the dress. Then one night I hear noises in her room and I go and find him in her bed.”

  The bartender refilled Mimi’s cup with the burnt stuff, tsked. Mimi felt belittled and turned away. Outside the window, eighteen garbage bags were piled up on the sidewalk. She counted them.

  “And you would trace it all back to that moment?” Kevin had asked her.

  “Yes,” she’d said, but really Kevin had given her the story of Mr. Clark.

  I should have a better reason, she’d thought. They would run out of things to talk about if she admitted, “Actually, this is just the way I am. It’s how I was born. A not very nice person.”

  The true part of the story was that Ellen had bedded Mr. Clark. After Mimi’s dad left, a line had practically formed at Ellen’s bedroom door. She must have snared Mr. Clark on Parent–Teacher Night. Mimi knew she was seeing him. Ellen had told Mimi, “Guess who I’m having dinner with?” and Mimi had approved. She’d imagined Mr. Clark in a candlelit restaurant, holding hands with Ellen across the table, murmuring, “Mimi, Mimi, Mimi” adoringly.

  Now, so many years later, if she closed her eyes on the eighteen lumpy bags on the sidewalk outside, she could still see Mr. Clark’s skinny body. How purple his prick had looked when she’d snapped on Ellen’s light. Like a giant, disgusting crayon. Mimi snapped off the light again. She really did not want to marry him after that.

  She’d shuffled back to her room and lain in the dark. A bustling came from the hall, Mr. Clark hurriedly leaving. Then Ellen had stood for a few minutes in Mimi’s doorway with the hall light on, trying to figure out if Mimi was awake. She was just a black shape, a mother outline that Mimi saw in reverse when she closed her eyes.

  After that, Mr. Clark’s favours left her cold. She had scribbled a big purple X across his face.

  The bartender palmed open a jar of olives, held it out. Mimi declined. “What did your mother die of?” she asked.

  “Cigarettes.”

  Maybe Mabel D’Huet had too. There were empty ashtrays all over the house.

  Mimi closed her hand around the pill bottle, but it felt charge-less, as though the mention of disease had neutralized it. She dropped it back in the Indian bag, saw her tiny, not-nice self ma
king teeny-mouth in one of the miniature mirrors. She leaned closer and closer, her own brown eye swallowing her.

  Can you phone me when you get in tonight?

  M

  Ellen didn’t and Mimi freaked out. She e-mailed Yolanda, but Yolanda had two kids and routinely took a month to answer. So Mimi had to phone her, which she hated to do because one of her brats was always howling in the background.

  “I don’t know where she is,” Yolanda told Mimi.

  “It’s weird. Normally she answers right away. I’m worried.”

  “You’re worried?”

  The computer pinged and Mimi said, “Never mind.”

  It’s too late to call you now, sweetheart. Can we talk tomorrow?

  MR. D’Huet shuffled into the dining room with an offering of bread and peanut butter on a cutting board. This was the next day, Friday, when the gears of Mimi’s life, stuck for so long, finally began to turn.

  The front door opened and a man Mimi had never seen before walked in. The suit, his tone, his recently cut hair—everything about him, angular, sharp. “I’ve been phoning and phoning! Why aren’t you answering?”

  Mr. D’Huet set the cutting board on a box so he could grip the back of the chair with both hands. Mimi had just accepted a piece of bread. She licked the peanut butter off her fingers.

  “People kept calling about the job so we turned the ringer off. I meant to turn it back on.”

  “What the fuck is going on, Dad? The stuff’s still here. All of it.”

  “No,” Mimi said as Mr. D’Huet limped from chair to door frame to kitchen. “The bags are out back. We’ve got through quite a bit, but there are things he wants to keep.”

  Brent. Brent D’Huet. Mimi had read it on a third-place science fair certificate.

  He faced her now, made a sweeping motion toward the front door. “That’s it. That’s all we need you for.”

  “Goodbye, Mr. D’Huet,” Mimi called in the direction of the kitchen.

  “Thanks for coming!” he called back.

  “You have to pay me,” she told the Brent person.