Ellen in Pieces Read online

  “What does she want?” Mom asks, all watery, like she’s drowning. “Eli, please. Just give it to her.”

  And he looks in his hand and sees it, the black Zero Cole Tech Deck with the cobra logo. He has no idea how it got there.

  “WHEN I call you, buddy, you come, right? Supper’s ready. How did you get wet?”

  He’s playing down by the water, turning over the stones. Living under each stone are mini camo crabs. Crabs have outside skeletons, like armour. They’re soldiers and each is a different camo colour. If you take a mini camo crab from under one rock and drop it in a tide pool with a bunch of mini camo crabs from under different rocks, they battle. Eli’s not allowed guns. “What’s the worst thing in the world,” he asked his dad. “War,” Dad said, but Mom said, “Cancer.”

  Now his dad’s here telling Eli he called and called, but Eli heard nothing over the sound of the mini camo crabs in the tide pool blowing each other up with the bomb-stones Eli threw in.

  “You’re all wet and there’s mud on your face. Eli, buddy. We’re about to eat.”

  First he was kneeling beside the tide pool, then he was lying beside it with his face on the barnaclely rocks.

  “Your cheek’s bleeding,” Dad says.

  Eli wipes the side of his face with his palm, proud to see red smears. He didn’t even cry, just like a real skateboarding soldier wouldn’t.

  He walks with Dad up the path to the cabin, his rubber boot making sucky sounds because it’s full of water and trying to pull off his sock. They stop outside at the hose for Eli to wash.

  “Mom’s not feeling so great today. Let’s try not to upset her even more.”

  “Is she sick?”

  “No, she’s sad about Nonny Ellen.”

  Last time Eli saw Nonny was at Christmas. Her hair was different, wispy like Fern’s when she finally stopped being bald. She didn’t smell like Nonny anymore.

  “Come on, buddy. Don’t just stand there.”

  “I’m sad about Nonny too,” Eli says.

  AT supper he announces he’s not going to school anymore. “Everybody calls me alien.”

  “Cool,” Dad says.

  “What do they mean, alien?” Mom asks. “Does Lindy know?”

  Fern keeps spitting out her tofu and squawking like a crow.

  “And today? Tru stole my black Zero Cole Tech Deck with the cobra logo.”

  Eli’s in the middle of telling them how they played together before school, sharing their Tech Decks, but then Tru took the black Zero Cole. Tru said if Eli was Nyjah Huston then he couldn’t ride a Chris Cole deck, that was the rule. Tru has a real Tech Deck case with a see-through lid and Eli saw through it. Eli keeps his decks in an old Toy Story lunch box he got at the Free Store. They rattle and tangle. Tru’s don’t, they snap in.

  Dad’s shaking his arm. “Buddy! Buddy!”

  “What’s happening, Eli? What’s wrong with you? What’s wrong?”

  They’re on either side of him, grabbing him, and Mom’s crying again, but probably about Nonny, he knows now.

  AND the next day he doesn’t have to go to school! Easy-peasy! He makes a skate park on the examination table with some Dixie cups and the thing that’s for looking in ears. The tongue thing is the rail. The paper crackles when he ollies and grinds.

  “Mid-sentence he stops and sort of stiffens, staring into space. He was holding his fork so tightly I couldn’t pull it out of his hand.”

  “How long did this go on for?”

  “Forever! We yelled at him, but he wouldn’t snap out of it. Finally, he did.”

  “And then?”

  “Nothing. He just seemed confused.”

  Only when the doctor says, “Eli, do you remember Mommy and Daddy shouting yesterday?” does he realize that Mom’s talking about him.

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know why they were shouting at you? Do you remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m an alien.”

  But that’s not what Eli thinks about himself. He thinks he’s a soldier who really can backside three-sixty kick flip.

  THEY take the ferry to Vancouver Island, where a machine is going to draw pictures of what’s happening in Eli’s brain. There are waves in your brain like the waves the ferry rides on. He counts twenty-six seals on the trip. Their heads pop up, black and shiny, then duck under again. Under the waves. Seizures are when it gets so wavy inside your brain it messes you up.

  Fern makes stinky-butt on the trip. Dad decides to wait till they dock to change her because the bathroom’s too small on the boat. Everybody jokes about it. They say Fern’s cute but she stinks, and she laughs because she doesn’t get it the way Eli gets that alien is mean. It stinks so bad by the time they dock Eli wants to throw up.

  “Honey, are you okay? Honey?” Mom asks.

  They find the car. It’s Mom’s friend Amber’s car that she leaves parked at the ferry. Amber used to live with Grandpa. But now Grandpa lives with Nonny. Dad changes Fern on the hood and poop gets on it.

  They drive Amber’s poopy car to the hospital. “Are you scared?” Dad asks.

  He didn’t know there was a reason to be, but now he does. “Will it hurt?”

  “Eli? Are you scared, buddy?”

  Didn’t he already say?

  “WHAT grade are you in, Eli?”

  “Two.”

  “Lie down. Nice. Do you see these wires? And this is glue. I’m going to stick these wires all over your head. Isn’t that funny? Yoo-hoo, Eli?”

  “What?”

  “Isn’t that funny? Are you ready?”

  Mom stays with him while Dad takes Fern for a walk around the hospital. Mom promised that after they finish they can go to a restaurant and Eli can have meat like a real skateboarding soldier. While Eli lies there deciding what kind of meat, the nurse fixes the wires to his head. The machine takes forever and the whole time Mom watches and cries. She’s vegetarian. It must be drawing a hamburger, Eli thinks.

  When they pull the wires off, his hair is full of goop.

  Dad and Fern go into a room with Mom, but Eli has to wait outside. They let him buy a drink. The machine’s claw hand shows Eli the can, then drops it. Thunk!

  There aren’t any drink machines on Cordova Island.

  Mom and Dad and Fern are in the room forever. Eli’s almost finished the Coke when they come out. He’s burped nine times. Mom’s crying harder and Dad’s hugging her and carrying Fern.

  “I want bacon,” Eli says.

  Dad high-fives him.

  “WHERE do you go?” Nonny asks him when he and Mom get back from Children’s Hospital.

  She’s in her new bed with buttons. No more old-fashioned dentist’s chair. Eli loved playing with the levers on the chair, but the bed’s better, it’s electric.

  Eli pushes a button and Nonny on her bed rises up, up toward the ceiling. “We went to the children’s hospital. They put me in a machine. Boing, boing, boing! I had to wear earplugs. I have more than one hundred seizures a day.”

  “When you have the seizures where do you go?” Nonny asks. “I can see on your face that you’re not here.”

  “Really?” Eli says. Then he knows where he must be. “I go to outer space. It’s where I’m from.”

  Nonny laughs and laughs.

  “I’m bringing you back to earth now, Nonny.” He pushes the button to lower the bed and only then does he get it. They’re called absent seizures, the doctor told him. Absent means you’re not there. He’s absent from school. Yay! When he has a seizure, he’s present and absent at the same time.

  “It was nice up there,” Nonny tells him. “Looking down on you. When I’m not here, that’s what I’ll be doing.”

  “You’re not going anywhere, Nonny. You can hardly get out of bed.”

  Nonny pees in a bag now. Eli doesn’t know how, but the bag’s hanging on a hook at the side of the bed. Lines on the bag measure the pee. Every time Eli checks, there’s more yellow. A
nd she has a tube in her arm. Grandpa puts a needle in the tube and squirts in her medicine. That way it doesn’t hurt.

  They’re staying with Nonny while they go to the appointments. Mom is happy to be closer to Nonny, happy that they’ve found out what’s wrong with Eli. He could’ve had a tumour in his brain, but he doesn’t. Tumours kill you so epilepsy’s better. They sleep in the little room under Nonny’s ceiling that they climb the ladder to. Grandpa has the couch. Auntie Mimi’s here too, helping Nonny, but she sleeps next door where the man who made the movie of Nonny lives. Gerhard. He wears earrings.

  Appointment, appointment, then Toys “R” Us. Eli picks the exact same pack so he owns two black Zero Cole Tech Decks with the cobra logo that he won’t ever let Tru touch.

  One hundred seizures means one hundred times a day Eli shoots into outer space. He’s an alien. The thing about being an alien? Whenever you’re on earth, you can’t remember anything about being in outer space.

  He tells Mom and Grandpa and Auntie Mimi this at supper in Nonny’s studio. Nonny’s not at the table. She’s lying in the hospital bed watching them.

  “There,” Mom says. “You just had one. I can tell now. It’s so obvious once you know.”

  “I did?” Eli says. “I just flew to outer space and back?”

  Everybody laughs. Then Grandpa sees Nonny’s awake. He goes over to hold her hand. “Ellen? Do you need anything, babe? Are you in pain?”

  “No,” Nonny says. “What would I need? We’re finally all together.”

  “Dad’s not here,” Eli tells Nonny. “Fern’s not here.”

  “Well, they should come,” Nonny says. “They should come.”

  After supper, Mom and Auntie Mimi wash the dishes. Auntie Mimi says, “She’s been talking to her mother.”

  “To her mother?”

  “Who’s Nonny’s mother?” Eli asks.

  “Someone who died a long time ago.”

  “Then how does Nonny talk to her?”

  “Shh,” Mom says.

  But Auntie Mimi says, “She talks to her on the phone.”

  “What?” Mom says.

  “That’s what she told me. I asked if her father phoned too. And she said no. She said he never phoned. She would have to phone him.”

  Because Nonny’s dead mom phoned, Auntie Mimi starts calling all Nonny’s friends so that they can say goodbye. And Mom phones Dad and Fern.

  ELI isn’t ever allowed to be alone, not until they know the medicine works. The medicine’s pills you have to be a skateboarding soldier to swallow.

  “Remember how I found you playing in the bay?” Dad told him. “You were wet. You cut your cheek on the rocks. You’re lucky you didn’t fall face first in the water. Because if that happened while you were having a seizure, you would drown.”

  There are so many things he’s not allowed to do now, like ride a bike or skateboard or go down the slide. Not the slide because to go down, first he has to go up. If he has a seizure on the ladder, he could fall and bust his head.

  It takes Eli forever to swallow the pill. He gags and gags. When the cats get sick, Dad holds their sharp mouths open and Mom pokes the pill down. “I’ll do it myself!” he yells.

  Now Eli, Dad, and Fern sleep at a hotel with a drink machine on every floor. Eli’s allowed a Coke if he swallows the pill. Fern’s allowed to make the ice clatter out of the machine beside it. They ride the elevator up and down ten times to outer space and back, then take the bus to Nonny’s. You can pull the cord as many times as you want, but the stop bell will only ring once. Fern doesn’t get it and cries.

  Because of Fern, Dad doesn’t hang around too long at Nonny’s. He asks if Eli wants to stay or go with them.

  “Can we go to a skate park?”

  “We could watch. You can play with your Tech Decks.”

  Mostly Eli stays because he can be a skateboarding soldier at Nonny’s. Mom says no, but Nonny lifts one finger, which means: let him. He’s even allowed to make machine-gun sounds going up the half-pipe with the new black Zero Cole Tech Deck with the cobra logo. The half-pipe is Nonny’s foot under the sheet.

  Nonny has a sign on her door with COME IN, WE’RE OPEN on one side and SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED on the other. There’s a clock, too, to show when Nonny WILL RETURN. The sign’s for Nonny’s pots that she sold before she got sick. Dad lifts Fern up when they leave and she twirls the clock hands to a messed-up time.

  Now Nonny’s pots are gone. Instead there’s a TV in the window playing a movie of Nonny. Her hair is to her shoulders, redbrown except for the silver hairs she used to pay Eli ten cents each to pluck out. He plucked and Nonny ouched and Fern laughed. In the movie Nonny’s doing ordinary things like making her pots and sometimes holding out her hand to say stop filming, except there’s no sound. Her face says stop.

  She wants the sign left to OPEN. “If you’re not too tired,” Mom says.

  Everybody who visits writes a message to Nonny on coloured squares. Auntie Mimi puts them in the window with the TV playing the movie of Nonny. At night, she reads them out.

  “‘I love and admire you.’”

  “‘God, that time on the ferry? Do you remember how we laughed?’”

  “‘Ellen, you sat on my guitar. I was angry. I’m not anymore.’”

  The next-door neighbour from the other side brings Nonny’s dog, Tony. The neighbour is Tilda. “Tilda and Tony have the same hair,” Mom whispers to Eli. Tony whines until Tilda lifts him up to lick Nonny’s face. Then his tail slashes around and he goes crazy kissing Nonny. The nurse says not to let him, his claws might scratch her, so next time Tilda brings a Tony that she knitted with his fur mixed in. The knitted Tony isn’t sad.

  “Two days? A week?” the doctor tells Mom.

  “A week what?” Eli asks, and Mom shushes him.

  In a week the messages on coloured paper will overflow the window. They’ll fill up the studio like water in the bathtub and drown everybody visiting Nonny, drown them in goodbye.

  Eli can’t even take a bath himself.

  He can’t ever be alone.

  A woman sits by Nonny’s bed. She has a frog face except with teeth. She talks and talks to Nonny until Auntie Mimi says, “I think she needs to sleep. Mom? Are you tired?”

  Nonny nods. She wrinkles her nose at Eli while the frog woman kisses her hand.

  “May I?” Frog Woman says, and snatches a tissue from the box to dry her bulgy frog eyes.

  After she leaves, Nonny laughs. “I did some work for her. She never paid me. We’d see each other at events and she’d snub me.”

  “Her number was in your book!” Auntie Mimi says.

  “She hates me,” Nonny says.

  Eli asks, “Do you hate her, Nonny?”

  “No, no. What would be the point? Come here.”

  Nonny folds Eli in her sharp arms that seem weak, but are really strong. Nonny is powerful in her electric bed. She doesn’t need guns to make her enemies bow down.

  Auntie Mimi is mad she phoned the frog woman because that’s the last time Nonny really talks. Auntie Mimi says the frog woman stole from Nonny again, stole her energy. But if that’s true, it was Eli who stole it. Eli was the last person she hugged.

  Because after the frog woman leaves, Nonny sleeps for a long, long time, not waking up until they turn her in the bed. Then all she wants is for them to leave the sign at OPEN. Grandpa tries to feed her ice chips. Her lips pull in.

  Mom calls the care team. They bring an oxygen tank, attach the tubes with a strap around Nonny’s head. Eli doesn’t like the feeling of anything but a finger up his nose. He inspects the tank next to the pee bag. Today Nonny’s little bit of pee looks brown.

  The nurse says nothing hurts Nonny now.

  Grandpa lies on his stomach on the floor and asks Eli to walk on his back. Nothing hurts Nonny, but everything hurts Grandpa. His bones say ouch.

  That night, when Dad brings Fern, Mom says to say goodbye. Dad lifts Fern up to kiss Nonny.

  “Bye-bye,
Nonny,” Fern chirps, because she doesn’t get it.

  Eli does; he’s a skateboarding soldier and he says he’s not going back to the hotel.

  Dad starts to cry. He passes Fern to Mom and bows over Nonny with his head on her chest. “Ellen,” he says. “Ellen, you saved my life.”

  “How did Nonny save your life?” Eli asks when Dad finally lets go of Nonny.

  “Shh,” he says. He takes off his toque, dries his eyes with it, kisses Mom when she hands Fern back. “I’ll tell you another time. Be brave, buddy.”

  While Dad’s hugging him, Fern kicks Eli in the head.

  One nurse is Nonny’s sister, which Eli only finds out now. She sings to Nonny about getting a coat and a hat. She sings tisket and tasket. Tomayto, tomahto. “Do you remember?” she asks Nonny. “Do you remember Mom singing?”

  Nonny’s breath stops and Auntie Mimi throws a fit. No, no, no! Nonny hears and sighs and the air moves back in.

  “Don’t,” Nonny’s sister says. “Let her go.”

  “Who are you to tell me that?” Auntie Mimi yells. “After how you treated her?”

  “After how I treated her?”

  “What are you even doing here?”

  Mom and Grandpa take Auntie Mimi to the backyard for a timeout. Eli can still hear her crying and Grandpa saying, “Stop it, stop it right now.” Next door Tony barks and barks.

  Nonny’s sister lets go of Nonny’s hand, tells her, “Please wait.” She goes outside to calm everybody with soft words Eli can’t hear. This is how they all miss the very last thing that Nonny says and does on earth.

  There’s a knock. Nonny’s eyes open and her head lifts off the pillow. Her hair looks like Eli’s did with glue stuck in it. “She’s here,” she says.

  The door opens. Next-door Gerhard steps inside. He’s a giant with a baby’s bald head and earrings. Gerhard’s crying like a baby, too, his face squinched and wet.

  “Ellen? What’s happening? How can I help?”

  “Oh, it’s you,” Nonny says, and her head falls back.

  MOM takes Eli up the ladder to bed. He sleeps, and when he wakes he sees night through the skylight. Weak stars mean it’s not late. Something stinks. He peers over the edge. Down below, they’re changing the sheets. Nonny made stinky-butt in the bed. She groans when they roll her onto her side to pull away the dirty sheet.