Ellen in Pieces Read online

  He reached in close to his heart, where his wallet lived, unfattened it more than he needed to. It was a stupid thing to do, to show how much money you routinely carried around and act like an asshole, waving it.

  As soon as the door closed behind her, Mimi took out her iPod. She ducked around the side of the house, keeping low. By the stairs that led up to the deck, close to the open kitchen door, she crouched, listening to everything Brent D’Huet yelled at his dad.

  On the walk to the subway, the iPod helped with the rage. She’d downloaded her own songs by then, but in shuffle mode sometimes Ellen’s songs played. One did now and Mimi tried to name what she felt. Some unfamiliar feeling on the sunny end of the spectrum. Did a memory of Ellen singing the song trigger the feeling, or the song itself?

  At home she recorded her steps in a little notebook she’d bought especially for that purpose.

  JULY 6 4,219 STEPS

  JULY 7 5,122 STEPS

  JULY 8 7,340 STEPS

  JULY 9 9,105 STEPS

  JULY 10 11,654 STEPS

  She did a little Googling, then dug up Glenna’s resumé.

  “How did you even get my number?” Machinery sounded in the background. Something grinding. “I should hang up after what you did. I’m hanging up.”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  “Fuck you, goody two-shoes. Kiss my ass.”

  Mimi made teeny-mouth at the phone. She almost hung up herself, but didn’t, luckily.

  Because, if she had, then what eventually happened wouldn’t have happened, and who knew where she would have ended up? Because your future isn’t written on the palm of your hand. It comes at you in crots and snippets, in words printed on signs. You have to be ready for it. You have to open your ears and eyes.

  “Mr. D’Huet’s son wants the house cleaned out because he’s going to sell it. Right out from under Mr. D’Huet. You know he doesn’t want to go.”

  “So what?”

  “I met the son. He’s an asshole.”

  Brent had power; he was in finance, she’d found out just by typing in his name. But Mimi had powers too. Well, not Mimi per se, not anymore. But Glenna did. And if Mimi could unleash Glenna? She could probably change the world.

  She was completely honest: pills, a prescription, money.

  “How much?”

  “Five hundred and you’ll be able to get a lot more from Brent.”

  “Who?”

  “Brent D’Huet.”

  “The old dude?”

  “No, his son. I know where he works. I looked it up.”

  Glenna yawned on her end of the line. That’s what happened when you came down—the yawn-fest. Soon what Mimi was proposing would seem like relief.

  Mimi threw in her health card.

  “Really?” Glenna said. “Sweet.”

  SHE’D unleashed Glenna, but Mimi had no idea what this Glenna would do, not even on Sunday night when she found herself waiting in the dark outside the Old Mill station, listening to the rustling around the garbage bags. They reeked so badly now that Mimi, resorting to mouth-breathing, could taste the smell. Toronto was turning toxic. It was not a good place to be anymore.

  Just as she was thinking this, Mr. D’Huet’s big bashed-in Cadillac pulled up across the street with Brent in the driver’s seat. She probably wouldn’t have recognized him out of the suit, in a yellow golf shirt.

  She crossed over and looked in the car. Glenna was in the passenger seat. She twisted around with a grin as Mimi squeezed in the back with all the garbage bags. These ones didn’t smell. They were the parts of Mr. D’Huet’s life that Mimi herself had readied for disposal.

  “This is Mimi,” Glenna said as Brent pulled out. “You met already, right? My crippled friend?”

  Brent squinted in the rear-view mirror. He probably wouldn’t have placed her either if Glenna hadn’t told him. Now he wondered what was going on, the same way Mimi did. She saw it in his glower.

  Mimi asked, “Where are we going?”

  “Brent has a cottage. He invited us.”

  “Us?”

  “I suggested two girls and he liked that better.”

  “Oh,” Mimi said to the back of this Brent person’s head, the keen line at the nape, the crisp hair lying flat. She couldn’t even think of him as related to Mr. D’Huet. How had he turned out like that? “Where is this cottage?”

  Glenna answered, “Owen Sound.”

  Mimi didn’t know Ontario very well, but it sounded far. Farther even than Scarborough. Already the city was sliding away outside her window, faster and faster once they turned off Bloor and onto the highway. She watched it go with a curious dispassion, as though she already knew she would never return. But how could she have known that then? All her stuff was still at the co-op.

  Brent who preferred two girls was staring in the rear-view mirror. “So you work together?”

  “We have,” Glenna said, with a smirk back at Mimi. She feigned a long stretch and, while her arms were spread, brushed her fingers along the shaved back of Brent’s neck.

  He jerked away. “Not while I’m driving.”

  Signs flashed past; they were heading in the direction of the airport. The highway was wide here—Mimi counted fourteen lanes—trucks and cars streaming both ways.

  She considered the possible scenarios. One was when they got to Owen Sound, wherever that was, they’d toss the bags and, during the party, Mimi would slip away. In the other, the one where Glenna aligned herself with Brent because Mimi had crossed her once before, Mimi was in trouble.

  Out the window she saw, fleetingly, a green patch bounded by the highway and an overpass. And gravestones. At least they looked like gravestones, but they’d passed in a blink, so maybe they weren’t.

  At that moment, so late, so long past the appropriate time, Mimi gagged on the garbage taste at the back of her throat. Weird that she hadn’t felt afraid sliding into a stranger’s back seat. Didn’t her mother warn her about that? Never, ever get in a car with a stranger? Yes. Yes, she had. So why had Mimi come?

  (Later, telling the story, she would say that she’d felt compelled to, that she’d reached a point in her life where staying was not an option. She would say she’d been called to get in.)

  A big car. They would have to stop for gas. So she had an out. Knowing that helped her relax. Also, if she was destined to die in some drugged-out sex nightmare, wouldn’t it have already happened?

  So many clues thrown at her! Like that very morning, waking to realize her knee bent without pain, just a rusty stiffness. The first thing she did was get on the yellow bicycle and ride to Riverdale Park, where a long grassy hill fell away from Broadview. Feet off the pedals, her short hair fluttering, she hurtled straight down and when she reached the bottom of the ravine without crashing, she remembered something—watching The Sound of Music on TV as a child. Because of Julie Andrews running down the grassy hill, which triggered another forgotten memory regarding the bike and its previous owner—like Julia Andrews in the movie, she was a nun.

  And then the most amazing thing happened. Glenna flicked on the radio and twiddled the dial until she landed on a pop station. “(Everything I Do) I Do It for You” was playing.

  They had merged onto a smaller highway with only four lanes and less illumination. The moon and a few stray stars hung above the circuit board of subdivisions on either side. As they sped away from her old life to some ambiguous destination, Mimi listened. Mr. D’Huet was right. The song was so generic, so inexplicit, it really could have been a hymn.

  Or a mother singing to her child.

  And the snippets, which seemed so random, began to adhere and form a whole. The song. Ellen’s fingers moving through Mimi’s hair, strand by strand. Mimi tallying her steps in her notebook that morning and noticing what she herself had written on the first page: Who’s Counting?

  Glenna belted out the song. Now Mimi began in a quieter voice, testing out how it felt—until Brent snapped the radio off.

  Bu
t the feeling stayed.

  “Tell me about that feeling,” Kevin had asked. “Not the powers. What you feel inside when you take the drug.”

  “I feel like there’s something in me to love,” Mimi had said.

  She unrolled the window. That was neat—a car with a window you had to unroll. Like turning the crank on the orrery. She saw the moon, the faint stars vying for attention against the glare of human habitation. Pluto was up there somewhere, that small cold outcast planet far away. But there were people who still believed in it, people who wished it well.

  8

  POEM

  Somewhere Mimi was walking, Ellen’s troubled and troubling daughter, placing one foot in front of the other on the tarry side of a six-lane highway. She must be hot. Her feet must hurt. No, let it be some safer road, a rural one, where out of a scrubby ditch a blackbird’s sarcastic trill rises. Not that trucker’s whistle, the one who ogled her at the rest stop half an hour earlier and was now pulling to the side of the highway, waiting for Mimi to catch up.

  Yet even as Ellen fretted over this scenario, a mother’s worst nightmare, she sensed that Mimi would be okay. Because if Mimi was on the highway with July’s eye glaring down on her, slogging through a miasma of humidity and exhaust fumes, aiming her sore feet straight for Vancouver, thousands of kilometres beyond that eighteen-wheeler just ahead? If she was about to meet that trucker?

  No one knew as well as Ellen. He’d better watch out.

  MATT asked, “What are you thinking about?”

  They were spooning together in her afternoon-hot loft, Matt’s cheek stuck to her shoulder with the glue of their combined sweat. Sunshine mocked Ellen through the skylight—her loose belly exposed, breasts flopping bedward—while Matt’s young arm, tanned and firm as a mannequin’s, circled her waist. She reached with her foot for the tangled sheet and, failing to catch it between her toes, suffered there undraped.

  “My daughter’s coming home,” she said. “The one who lives in Toronto? She’s walking back.”

  “The piece of work?”

  “Is that how I described her?”

  Probably. In Ellen’s imagination the scene on the highway was still playing out, the unsuspecting trucker leering as Mimi approached, all shimmery with heat haze. He couldn’t guess at her awfulness, could only see the blackening clouds she trailed.

  Mimi had phoned last night, past midnight her time, to inform Ellen of her plan. She was going to walk all the way to Vancouver, or try to, a benign goal for a girl who formerly went in for darker pastimes. Tongue piercing. Shoplifting. Torturing her mother. It would end badly, this cross-country amble, like everything else the girl touched.

  Girl? She was twenty-seven. Ellen hoped she hadn’t mentioned that to Matt, who quite possibly was younger.

  “She called last night from Barrie, of all places. I’ve no idea what she was doing there. I said, ‘Walk to the airport. Fly home.’”

  Mimi had hung up. Anyway, Ellen hadn’t meant it. If she were honest, she’d ignore the guilt boring into her and admit that she didn’t particularly want Mimi back.

  About the walking, Matt expressed neither interest nor surprise. He jiggled and squeezed Ellen’s right breast, made it stand up and quack, But where’s she going to stay?

  And Ellen said, “Ouch.”

  LATER, they went outside where it was cooler, to the triplex’s communal backyard—a rectangle of lawn hedged by straggly forsythia. A pair of weathered Muskoka chairs faced each other. In the shade of one of Ellen’s half-barrel planters, where she was growing lettuce, Tony flopped down and resumed his nap.

  Matt was complaining about his girlfriend again. In the beginning, he never used to mention her, but these last few weeks she kept coming up like acid reflux. Ellen listened, sipping her ice water, touching her breast—the talking one—discreetly through her sundress. It felt a little tender, like it had been overhandled.

  “If I leave my clothes on the floor, she puts them in the oven,” Matt said.

  “That’s risky.”

  The downside of a callow lover: obtuseness. The two Muskoka chairs stood so close together that Matt’s and Ellen’s knees touched, Matt with his forearms on his thighs, looking not at Ellen, but into her lap, as though presenting for her viewing pleasure his shirtless, muscled back. In a small way it compensated her. And the sun, already slapping its hot hands against his shoulders, pinkening them, offered Ellen a small revenge.

  This particular issue, the housework issue, so boring to Ellen who lived alone, was at least less painful than Matt’s gripe a few days before. “When I open the fridge, or as I call it, ‘the condiment cupboard,’ and see that big bottle of cranberry cocktail? That’s the sign.”

  The poor girl suffered chronic bladder infections. Meaning no sex. Did Ellen need to know that? Why had he told her? Even ‘condiment cupboard’ hurt. Every couple, no matter how miserable, spoke its own private dialect. But for Ellen and Matt there was only body language.

  Eventually Matt ran out of domestic grievances to air, as well as other subjects for over-sharing. He went home to Nicole, whose name he only ever uttered by mistake.

  Ellen moved inside and ran a lukewarm bath. Just as she lay back, Tony burst in, sprang onto the toilet lid, and stepped daintily across to the tub’s ledge. Like an agitated sentry, he paced back and forth, licking his black lips. He hated water, hated to see her in it. When she bathed him, he shivered uncontrollably.

  Her own complaints Ellen addressed to her dog. “I told him about Mimi. He wasn’t interested. He only cared that she wouldn’t get in the way. So you see how it is, Tone? He can moan about his girlfriend, but when I moan, he changes the subject.”

  Tony tilted his black head. Pathos bulged in his eyes.

  “Why does he keep telling me these things? It’s not as though he’s going to leave her and move in with me.”

  Tony tilted the other way.

  “What?” Ellen asked, and when the dog whimpered, she lifted her breast out of the water, imitating Matt. “I wish you could talk,” she made it say.

  That was when she noticed the bruise and how, compared with the other breast, the right one seemed slightly swollen. She climbed out of the tub, dried her top half with the towel. With her arm raised in the mirror, she leaned in to examine the discoloured patch in a better light. Meanwhile, Tony commenced his relieved devotions, licking the water off her calves.

  CAROL, her doctor, said, “Do you have a boyfriend, Ellen?”

  Ellen sighed. “Long story.”

  “But someone’s been squeezing you pretty hard?”

  “The brute.”

  Carol probed Ellen’s breasts with her long fingers, but couldn’t feel any lump. She flicked through Ellen’s file, commenting acidly on her dismal record of responding to mammogram requests. “They’re not invitations to some party you can blow off.”

  “I know that,” Ellen said, shrinking down.

  “I’ll send you in, just in case.”

  “In case of what?” Ellen asked, but Carol had already swivelled in her chair to face the computer screen.

  “How are the girls?” she asked.

  “Oh God,” Ellen said. “You will not believe Mimi’s latest.”

  Carol inquired no further. She was probably just distracting Ellen, whose suspicions were now fully aroused. Except that Carol had been short with her, sarcastic, and that sarcasm reassured Ellen.

  Because really, if Ellen had cancer? Would Carol be so mean?

  ON Thursday Ellen found herself in the waiting room of the X-ray clinic, gowned in blue, her purse and everything she’d taken off—blouse, amber beads, bra—in the stackable red plastic shopping basket with metal handles that folded down. Most of the chairs were occupied. The woman beside Ellen looked Arab or Persian with rippling hair and a Nefertiti nose. Another was quite old, or entirely grey at any rate. Worry defaced her.

  Ellen probably looked worried. Mentally she put the worry in her basket, but this only made the weight i
n her lap too much to bear. Yet two of the women, the two who were flipping blasély through magazines, didn’t appear worried at all.

  Good idea. Ellen reached for a Bon Appétit in the pile on the table. She tried flipping, but couldn’t keep it up even to convince herself. Someone’s name was called. The grey-haired one stood and followed a technician down a hall, toting her basket. Another woman arrived, almost as though to take her place, selected a gown from the pile, and went to change.

  Eventually, Ellen fell into thinking. Mimi had phoned again the night before from a motel near Goderich.

  “Isn’t that on one of the Great Lakes?” Ellen had asked.

  Mimi had said she didn’t know, she’d arrived in darkness, that she guessed she’d find out in the morning.

  “Why are you doing this, honey?” Ellen had asked.

  “I’m trying to figure that out.”

  Though Mimi had sounded more cryptic than anything, Ellen couldn’t help hearing malice in her daughter’s voice, unfairly maybe, because other than hanging up on Ellen that first time, Mimi was being perfectly, uncharacteristically civil. She was probably too exhausted at the end of her day-long walks to rouse her inner mother-tormentor.

  Ellen, so familiar with her daughter’s dark side, so long-accepting of her own victimhood, pictured Mimi through her mother-eye again. Mother-eye—the curse cast on every birthing woman, the hex of self-sacrificing empathy. I will see your pain, but you will never see mine. Through her mother-eye Ellen imagined the stale motel room halfway across the country, vaguely at first, then distinctly enough to make out Mimi by the window, her dancer’s body lithe and tall, her dark hair cropped. Pursed-lipped, Mimi tugged aside the stiff curtain and looked across the near-empty motel parking lot, across the lonely, unseen highway, to where the lake would be.

  And Ellen’s mother-eye saw what Mimi saw: an appalling blackness, a true void. In her bitterness, Ellen had forgotten to give her daughter stars.

  “Ellen McGinty?” someone called.

  Ellen rose. A technician led her to a small, dim room with an examining table. “Aren’t I here for a mammogram?” Ellen asked.