Ellen in Pieces (19 page)

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 making teeny-mouth in one of the miniature mirrors. She leaned closer and closer, her own brown eye swallowing her.

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.”

M
R.
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.

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.

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.”

S
HE’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.