Ellen in Pieces (29 page)

“Is that Larry?” he asked.

“Yes. You have to leave, Matt. This is a bad time.”

He stepped back. “Can I phone you?”

“Yes, phone. Give me a couple of days and then we’ll talk. And take care, Matt. You’re a wonderful, wonderful young person. I wish you could see that in yourself.”

“Why do you think I can’t see that?” he asked.

“Thank you,” she said. “Goodbye.”

She let go of his hand and went back inside, shutting the door behind her.

A
ND
now Matt knows the something that came up for Ellen, the unthinkable something that had been circling her all that time.

I
N
her letters, Cindy Tomchuk (née Lottman) had written that the ceremony was really for her mother, not Matt, who was obviously “an extremely modest person.” All Mrs. Lottman wanted was for him to receive the recognition he deserved. On behalf of her mother, Cindy had nominated Matt for the award. The whole family was thrilled. Thrilled.

Matt spots Cindy puffing at the regulation distance from the front entrance, eyeing his approach, while nearby a cherry tree releases its nostalgic perfume. There’s no place with springier air than Vancouver. It’s been connecting Matt to these memories of Ellen ever since he flew in the night before.

Cindy bustles over. “You’re not Matthias, are you?”

In admitting that he is, Matt’s chance to escape is annulled in her fleshy embrace. Finally, she releases him, drops the butt. Her nicotine-tempered laugh devolves into a cough.

“How are you?”

“Okay. Jet-lagged.” Devastated, actually.

Cindy leads him by the arm—tightly—into the firehall and to an auditorium-like room half filled with people. There’s a carpeted platform up front, and a podium flanked by flags. The civic coat of arms hangs on the wall behind it, the heroic lumberjack and brave fisherman.
By land and sea we prosper.
The stage faces a bank of windows that looks out to where Matt was lurking a minute ago. Across the street, a dreary mildew-streaked social housing complex.

“Don’t be alarmed if she starts talking about dying. She doesn’t mean it.”

The old lady is sitting in the front row of plastic chairs. Mrs. Lottman, not Mrs. Muldoon, so much older Matt is shocked. White and dwarfen and wearing what seems like a pyjama top to which a corsage is pinned, a walker parked in front of her.

“Here he is, Ma. At long last. I found him outside standing all by his lonesome.” Cindy laughs, coughs.

The old lady looks up blankly, also expecting to see the old Matt, not his slick, shorn man-self in a Hugo Boss jacket, purchased at the Dongdaemun Market at 3 a.m. The way he expected to see his old neighbour who once cruised the halls planting her cane.

“I cut my hair,” Matt says. “It was longer before.”

With surprising quickness, she snatches his hand.

“Sit beside her,” Cindy says. “I want a picture.”

“How are you?” he asks Mrs. Lottman. “How’s Mr. Muldoon?”

“She’s in a home now,” Cindy answers. “I’m stuck with the cat.”

Cindy pulls a camera from the purse on the chair next to her mother, takes a few shots with a flash, then asks them to stay right there while she rounds up the rest of the family, who are the majority in the room besides the firefighters standing around in chummy circles talking shop—relatives of Mrs. Lottman. Many relatives of all ages, teenaged and middle-aged, a few younger kids, all dressed in Winners finery, including a little girl in a tiara and a party dress made of shiny pink material. These people, maybe a dozen of them, start coming at Matt, introducing themselves or being introduced by Cindy, wanting to shake his hand and thank him.

“This is Rod, my husband,” Cindy says, pulling forward a bald man broadly noosed in a striped tie. “Carrie, our granddaughter.” The princess.

“Beth,” says a Chinese woman with feather earrings.

Another woman shakes his hand, younger, about Matt’s age, in a denim skirt. A reporter, she says. She picks up Cindy’s purse, drops it one seat over, settles beside Matt. “I already spoke to Mrs. Lottman. Can I ask you a few questions? What made you decide to stop and help Mrs. Lottman?”

Meanwhile people are gathering at the podium, checking that the mike works.

“What made me decide?” Matt rubs his face. “I didn’t. I just. I stopped. Who wouldn’t?”

A Lottman who looks like a construction foreman or a prison guard, Mrs. Lottman’s son, he guesses, Cindy’s brother—they all have the same wide-set eyes—says, “One guy ran past. Right, Ma?”

Mrs. Lottman leans close to Matt. She’s going to speak. Though Matt just met these people clustered around him, he’s already figured out Mrs. Lottman is their revered matriarch. They shush each other to hear what she’s going to say. The little girl in the tiara pushes through until she’s right in front of Mrs. Lottman, staring at her great-grandmother with oceanic eyes.

“I just wanted your address. To send you a card. Cindy gets her hands on things. Always, it’s a big production.”

Some Lottmans laugh. Several object. “He saved your life, Grandma!”

“He came all the way from Korea!”

“I had other things to do too,” Matt says, meaning the passport, which reminds him of Mimi. He glances around, having briefly forgotten her while the whole walk here he couldn’t shake the feeling that she was following him. He kept seeing the red of her leggings in the corner of his eye, like a raging sty. Only vaguely does she resemble Ellen. Ellen’s eyes were blue. Mimi’s hair is darker, too, feathery and cropped short. A long neck and pronounced collarbones where Ellen had been soft, body and heart.

Had been.

“Thank you,” Mrs. Lottman says with dignity. She puts her hand over Matt’s. “Can we go now?”

First there is the ceremony to get through for both Matt and Mrs. Lottman, whose fates intertwined the day of the fire when they had remained separate for all the months they’d been across-the-hall neighbours. The last day Matt saw Ellen. Because when he did call Ellen two days later, like she asked? Over and over? Ellen didn’t pick up. He never spoke to her again.

And all this time he’s been furious. Hurt. In a serious, fucking funk over how Ellen had wrung out his heart. Ellen, who, in hindsight, was completely unsuitable. Too far ahead of him in life.

Matt got on with it, his life. Got on really well, actually, both financially and in the way Korean women are nuts for every
weiguk-in.

The fire chief penetrates the scrum of Lottmans and suggests they start. Most of the plastic chairs get sat on, even by a few people unrelated to the Lottmans. They aren’t dressed up. People, Matt supposes, who came from across the street for the free coffee and Chips Ahoy! laid out on a table at the back.

Speeches: a city councillor, the fire chief. Then Matt is called to the front of the room to receive his plaque. His stomach twists. What would they say if they knew he was the one who started the fire?

Close by, a seismic rumble sounds, deep enough to cause the floor to shake. It’s one of the trucks. A couple of the firefighters leave the room and Matt turns to face his mostly adoring Lottman audience.

It’s obvious what they would say. So you messed up? Who cares? It’s not as important as what you do to set things right. And here he is, doing just that.

He’ll never see these people again. Before today, he didn’t know most of them existed. Not even Mrs. Lottman has earned more than a walk-through in his memory. Still, every person who comes into your life gives you a piece of themselves. And vice versa. Well, here’s proof of that.

What did Ellen give him? What gifts has he denied receiving since she closed her door to him that night? Can he even count them? Her kindness and her time. Her cool fingers at his nape, tucking in his tag. Food, advice, languid, secret afternoons. What did he offer Ellen in return? He looks around the room still hoping she’ll be here. Hoping that’s her in the chair close to the window, backlit, an aura around her. Her hand lifts discreetly, just a jiggle to say,
here I am.

An empty chair.

When the plaque is in Matt’s grasp, when the little tiara girl dashes up to present him with a Bristol board card she made—it’s almost as big as her and all the Lottmans have signed it—when she says, loudly, her obviously rehearsed sentence, “You’re my hero,” and hugs him around his waist, everyone claps, even Mrs. Lottman with a weary expression on her face. Some of his grogginess lifts and he feels something like a reprieve. And more.

He actually feels the thing they’ve asked him to come here to feel.

Because of those times he left Ellen in her loft—sated with their lovemaking and calling down to him, “Thank you! Thank you for being born!”—and paraded his aliveness down the hill, the view opening up to him. If it was evening, he saw the city’s illumined parts—the lights of West Vancouver concentrating near the shore, gold and amber in the bay, an aquatic aurora borealis, the freighters waiting at anchor with their decks lit up. He couldn’t stop smiling
and everyone smiled back. It spread around in his peacocking wake, from person to person.
Behold the mighty pleasure-giver, the bold lover, the hero of the loft.
A slam-dunk at the bus shelter; he hung onto the roof, swung to and fro, startling everyone waiting for the bus.

Thank you, thank you.

When the Lottmans find out he’s in a hotel, that he’s alone, they’re incensed. He must come with Cindy and Rod at least for supper.

“I’m not alone, actually.” He checks his pocket. A scrunch of paper.

The curious thing is, Mimi doesn’t seem the dark person Ellen talked about. Strange and intense, yes. Even a bit wacky, like Ellen. Was Ellen jealous?

Matt glances across the room, feels the plastic ache of two dozen empty chairs.

Amazing that he and Mimi ran into each other. (
Why do you think we did?
)

“I can’t,” Matt tells them. “I’m sorry. I’m meeting someone. We’re going to a play.”

Shaena Lambert

Patrick Crean   Jackie Kaiser   Franny Brafman

Chris Casuccio   Ingrid MacDonald   Dan Wells

John Metcalf   Richmond Public Library

Douglas Glover   Kathy Hunt   Jacquie Harrison

Dr. Jane Donaldson   Dr. Kong Khoo

Kim Jernigan   Lynn Coady

Curtis Gillespie   Bruce Sweeney

Patrick Sweeney

I give you stars.

CAROLINE ADDERSON
is the author of three previous novels,
A History of Forgetting, Sitting Practice
, and
The Sky Is Falling
, two collections of short stories,
Bad Imaginings
and
Pleased to Meet You
, as well as books for young readers. Her work has been nominated for the
Sunday Times
EFG Short Story Award, the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, two Commonwealth Writers’ Prizes, the Scotiabank Giller Prize (longlist), the Governor General’s Literary Award, and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. The winner of two Ethel Wilson Fiction Prizes and three CBC Literary Prizes, Caroline was also the recipient of the 2006 Marian Engel Award for mid-career achievement. She lives in Vancouver.

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“Ellen-Celine, Celine-Ellen”
WINNER:
Gold Medal for Fiction, National Magazine Awards

“I Feel Lousy”
WINNER:
Gold Medal for Fiction, Alberta Magazine Showcase Awards

“Erection Man”
LONGLISTED:
Sunday Times
EFG Short Story Award

“Just when you think Caroline Adderson has crafted the perfect comic set piece, she breaks your heart with a moment of pure human pathos. Rarely has a literary character been brought to life with such funny and passionate exuberance.”

–
LYNN COADY
, author of
Hellgoing

“Sexy, searing, and very, very funny. How is middle age funny? I don’t know, but in Caroline Adderson’s world, the big, bawdy joy of life conquers sickness and pain and loss. Fierce and masterful.”

–
ANNABEL LYON
, author of
The Sweet Girl

“Ellen in Pieces is a sumptuous book, urgent with created life. It is crowded with characters, sparkling with writerly intelligence, driving forward with relentless verve, and flashed through with Addersonian humour, which has glinted in earlier work but is here unrestrained, unrefined. I loved Ellen in Pieces. It’s the rare sort of book that makes other writers feel there ought to be a law against it.”

–
JOHN METCALF
, author of
An Aesthetic Underground
and
Standing Stones

COVER PHOTO:
Don Farrall, Getty Images
COVER DESIGN:
Michel Vrana

Ellen in Pieces
Copyright © 2014 by Caroline Adderson

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EPUB Edition July 2014 ISBN 9781443426800

A Patrick Crean Edition published by HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

FIRST EDITION

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ISBN
978-1-44342-678-7

RRD
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1