Invisible Ellen (11 page)

T
emerity explained to Ellen that, unlike on TV, there was no mad rush to get to the hospital just because the amniotic fluid sac had burst. The doctors did like the mother to deliver the baby within twenty-four hours so as not to put it through undue stress, but Cindy might not even be feeling the labor yet. She also said something about the girl's pelvic bones having to rotate so that she would “dilate” and the baby's head could get through, but the image of pain that summoned was too medieval for Ellen to even consider.

While they planned what to tell the police, who would certainly come knocking soon, they kept an eye below. T-bone was put on a stretcher and half wheeled, half carried across the uneven surface of the courtyard. Cindy changed, packed a small bag, and made a phone call. But the call coincided with a round of hooting and cheering from the delighted vagrants as the ambulance, now loaded with T-bone, pulled out, siren wailing, making it impossible to hear any of it. All Ellen could report was that Cindy had read the phone number off of a business card. The letter was left, forgotten, on the counter.

“So she probably called the legal pair,” Temerity surmised as Cindy was helped into one of the police cars, which left with her in it, presumably to take her to the hospital. “What was their name, the baby buyers?”

“The Newlands.”

“So they'll meet her at the hospital.” Temerity sighed. “Now I feel bad for Janelle. I mean, she's not even going to know her brother had a son or daughter.” She pressed one hand against her mouth, then let it drop. “How sad. If it was Justice's, and I'd lost him, I'd really want to know that kid. I'd feel better about it if Cindy had had at least a couple of minutes to think it over.” She sighed again. “But we did our part. She read Janelle's letter. Now it's up to the pregnant one.” Temerity stood listening to the hubbub, considering. And then she said, “Did they seem nice? The Newlands? Like they'd be good parents?”

Ellen thought about the way the man had casually bullied Cindy to agree to their terms. “No,” she said. “Not that I know anything about good parents.”

Temerity reached up for Ellen's shoulder. She missed slightly and her fingers accidentally brushed Ellen's left cheek. The contact made Ellen jerk away. Temerity's hand hovered uncertainly for a moment, then found its goal. She squeezed Ellen's shoulder gently. “I'm really sorry you had to grow up without anyone to support you. That must be very painful and very lonely.”

For a second, Ellen was confused. Her life had been hard sometimes, that's just the way it was. This was the first time anyone had said they were sorry for what she'd been through, and Ellen couldn't make sense of it. The concept that Temerity felt pain for her, or that she should feel badly for herself, floored Ellen. Deep in the moldy
basement of her subconscious, something else stirred and struggled to find breath and express itself, to escape the bonds that Ellen had unknowingly imposed.

“I'm really sorry,” Temerity repeated softly. Ellen heard the click of some internal latch being released, and suddenly she was floundering. Overwhelmed by a force that instantly engulfed her with sensations she could not even comprehend, she shut her eyes in a desperate bid to avoid it.

But she couldn't stop it from hurling her backward. She was five, on the day her mother walked out. The door closed behind the woman, and Ellen, tiny and malnourished, pressed her ear to the door. When the footsteps blended into the chaotic noise that was the building's constant soundtrack, Ellen went to the pile of blankets where she slept and wound into a ball. She lay there wondering if her mother would ever return, and what she would do if she didn't. A search of the room turned up nothing more than cigarette butts and empty liquor bottles. The gnawing hunger in her stomach grew over the next hours until she was weeping with emptiness, but she muffled the sounds. Tears, she had learned, brought only retribution. Ellen moved her blankets to the floor by the door and lay with her back curled against it, listening to people come and go, babies wailing, voices raised in drunken argument, sirens, and the occasional gunshot. Finally, the pain in her stomach grew stronger than her fear, and the next time she heard footsteps, she cracked open the door to see a wheezing man on the stairs, cigarette dangling from his mouth. He turned to look at her, grimacing at the sight of the scabs covering part of her face. She had whispered, “I'm hungry.” Muttering in disgust, he reached into a bag he was carrying and pulled out a packaged cinnamon bun. He threw it to her like she was a dog, shook his head, and shuffled on.

Ellen wiped her face angrily to wring out the memory. She was bewildered to find Temerity's image blurring before her as tears squeezed from her eyes. She knew, of course, that her life had been hard, bad, lonely, but she'd known nothing else and she'd been kept busy surviving it. But now Temerity had identified the pain, named it, and all at once the buried effects of her past began to pulse, the sides of the locked compartment that held it bulging as it strained to escape its containment. Ellen gritted her teeth. “No big deal,” she muttered.

Temerity squeezed harder. “Really? Because I think it
is
a big deal. I think it sucks. But we can talk about that some other time.” She removed her hand.

“We don't need to,” Ellen said, swallowing hard and trying to still the tremor inside. “I'm okay with it, really.”

“Right.” Temerity raised her hand again but held it tentatively in the space between them. “I don't want to take a liberty, but . . .” She reached out, quickly brushed her fingers down Ellen's left cheek. “. . . what is this?”

“It's a scar.” Ellen had jerked back convulsively at the touch, and she could feel her face flushing. She raised one hand and placed it firmly over the ravaged skin that began at her eye and extended in a wide swath to her jaw.

“From?”

“Something that happened a long time ago. Never mind. I'm glad you don't have to see it, that most people don't. I'm sorry that Justice did.” She whispered the last sentence, burning with shame that her disfigurement had been revealed.

“Justice wouldn't care,” Temerity said with a dismissive wave. “And if you think he does, you're not giving him enough credit. Ellen, my new friend, you have to have a little bit more confidence in people.”

“Like strangers?” Ellen asked, knowing that Temerity would pick up on the attempted humor in her voice.

“Strangers? Hell no! But there are people worth letting in, a few anyway.” She paused and then said, “Speaking of which, thanks for sharing this with me. It's been quite an adventure. Honestly, T-bone's physical assault excluded, it's the most fun I've had in a long time. I just hope that he's okay.”

There was a knock on the door, and they both jumped, then giggled behind their hands. “Cops,” Temerity whispered. “Let's do this.”

She fixed her sunglasses on her face and went confidently to answer the door. Ellen stayed in the kitchen, smushed in behind the refrigerator.

“About time!” Temerity said as she opened the door to the stocky man in blue. “How's T-bone?”

“Excuse me?” The officer was taken aback.

“My neighbor who was shot. I don't know his name, so I call him T-bone.”

“I see. And you are?”

“Ellen Homes. Nice to meet you, Officer—”

“Ricco. Officer Ricco. Can you tell me if you saw or heard anything?”

“Sure. I thought I heard a gunshot, but that's not unusual around this place. You should be here on Cinco de Mayo, it's like the O.K. Corral. Then I saw a guy at T-bone's back door. You guys rode up, guns blazing, and he freaked. He ran up my back stairs and climbed onto the roof. He ran around to the far side, then jumped down onto the next building.”

“Did you get a look at him?”

“Well, I'll tell you.” In an attempt at what she must have assumed would be a casual stance, Temerity crossed one foot over the other and reached a hand out to lean against the doorjamb. She miscalculated its location by a couple of inches, lost her balance, but recovered and propped herself up, attaining an awkward, unnatural pose. Between the sunglasses at night and the unsteady movements, the officer probably thought she was drunk, at least. “It's dark, and I wasn't really paying attention at first. But, best guess, he was young, I'd say about seventeen, eighteen, shortish, about my height, shaved head, jeans and a white T-shirt, white sneakers, light gray jacket, oh, and scars, a bracelet of burn scars around his right wrist.”

The cop had been fiddling with his pad, listening with skeptical disinterest, but now he looked up sharply. “Scars?”

“Yep, a bracelet, in a pattern, you know, like connected triangles, diamonds. Here,” she pulled a paper from her pocket, a small sketch that Ellen had made, and held it out, slightly off to one side. “I drew it for you, so you'd have it.” Ellen saw the officer narrow his eyes at the paper, but he took it and studied it. “That's about it. I'm afraid I didn't get a good look at his face, so . . .” She threw her hands out to illustrate their emptiness, smacking her knuckles against the door with the gesture. “Ouch, I have
got
to switch to light beer.” She smiled angelically in Officer Ricco's general direction.

The officer grumbled and glared down at the sketch. “We've seen this before; it's a kind of gang marking.” His deep sigh said all he could have about what their chances were of catching the guy. He pulled a card from his pocket and held it out. “If you think of anything else, can you give us a call? This is the supervising detective's number.”

Temerity hesitated, and Ellen realized she had no idea where
the card might be floating in front of her. Pawing repeatedly at thin air would be a definite giveaway. But showing her capacity to
find a way
, as she had put it, she stuck her hand out, palm up, the way she had with Janelle, and the officer placed the card in it. “Sure thing. You didn't say if my neighbor is going to be all right,” she pushed.

“I'm afraid I don't have that information,” he evaded.

“And how about Cindy?” The cop looked slightly confused and didn't answer. “You know, the pregnant one. She okay?”

“She's fine. One of our officers took her to Saint Vincent's.”

“Oh, great. Good hospital. I'll have to drop in on her, maybe tomorrow, take her a basket of baby . . . uh . . . stuff, you know. Blankies and diapies and whatnot.”

“Sure.” The officer was ready to go now. Ellen could see him close his pad and shift impatiently. “Well, thank you. Good night.”

“You take care now!” Temerity called after him as he went down the stairs. It took her three tries to find the door and shut it, but fortunately Officer Ricco did not look back.

Ellen came out. “That was awesome!” she said.

“I was good, wasn't I?” Temerity seemed surprised and proud as well: she was trembling from the excitement. “Whew, thought we were toast there for a minute when he offered me that card. It could have been a bad Marco Polo moment.”

Ellen thought back. She had heard of this Marco Polo guy as some kind of trader, but maybe he was also blind or had trouble finding things. Before Ellen had time to ask why this moment would have anything to do with him, Temerity went on.

“And guess what else?” Temerity said, doing a little dance in place. She sang the answer to her own question in a playground taunt that Ellen had to disassociate from her own torturous
memories. “We know where they took Cin-dy. We can go check out the New-lands.”

“Oh no.” Ellen's heart sank, and she followed it onto the sofa with the rest of her body. “We're going to the hospital?”

“You bet we are. But not tonight, she'll need some time to have that baby. I'm guessing we can meet there tomorrow morning. No, darn it! I have rehearsal at eleven.”

“Then let's go at nine.” Ellen was shocked by the finality of the decision, and even more stunned to realize it had come from her own mouth.

She walked Temerity to the bus stop and waited with her. It would have been insanity to leave her. The drunks, deprived of their diverting drama by police barricades, were staggering about in wobbly, circular patterns of increasing radius looking for something new to occupy their polluted double vision. She wasn't sure how it had happened, but Ellen felt a strange sense of protectiveness for this woman who had meant nothing to her two days ago.

She got back to her apartment, watched the police team taping off doorways and collecting evidence, and wrote furiously in her notebook until she was groggy enough to try to sleep.

Though Ellen wasn't aware that she was doing it, she replayed what had happened outside to distract from the festering poison that had bubbled up within. And in that rushing montage of everything she had witnessed, one image kept on repeating itself in her mind's eye, a picture stuck on instant replay.