Invisible Ellen (13 page)

“That's weird.”

“Not really. Gangs are savvy these days. And most of these guys have spent their lives figuring out how to get away with shit. They're good at it, and they always have an alibi. He claims he was helping his grandmother make tamales. A real model citizen.”

“And she backed up his story.” It wasn't a question. As an urban doctor, he seemed to know the drill. Through the glass, in the hall behind them, Ellen saw the orderly with the gurney, empty now, emerge from a room and start toward them.

The detective heaved a long sigh and then said, “They always do. Unless we can find some other way to tie him to the shooting, he'll walk. In fact, I'll have to let him go tomorrow.”

The doctor shook his head, as though to rid it of disgust. “All I can tell you is that we'll know more tomorrow, day after by the latest.” The orderly reached the double doors, a whack, a swoosh, and he started to push the gurney through, only to be stopped and quizzed by a nurse. They stood there comparing notes, the doors automatically remaining open. The noise from the frantic activity in the ICU wiped out any further eavesdropping.

A young man with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up was seated with his back to them. As the detective and doctor drifted closer to him, he stood up and glanced around furtively. Ellen recognized it as the action of someone who did not want to be noticed, which caught her attention. As she watched, the young man glanced first toward the detective, tugging his hood farther down as he did, and then he turned in her direction, his eyes sweeping the room as if checking for danger.

He was Hispanic, like half the people in the hospital, so that was not exceptional, but in the split second he was facing Ellen, she saw that his eyebrow was pierced and the point of entry was red and swollen, as though it had been done at home and was infected. She took in a sharp breath. But he was already moving quickly away down the hall.

Ellen watched as the detective and the doctor shook hands, turned in opposite directions, and went back to serve and protect a largely
ungrateful public, leaving only the muffled beeps of a hundred monitors blended into a wall of background sound, like the falling of electronic raindrops.

Temerity was the first to speak. “Poor guy,” she said. “I don't suppose we can do anything to help him, not now.”

Ellen wasn't so sure. But her newfound courage, still a small and shaky thing, had spent itself and needed to retreat for the time being, so she said nothing. Maybe T-bone would be okay, maybe he could ID the shooter, maybe the teenager was not the same one who had been with T-bone's attacker. Ellen could not recall him as well as the shooter, whose face, inches away from hers in her kitchen-door window, she would never forget, but the very idea of making that known sent the tiny bit of fluff that was her bravery scuttling back into its dark hole.

O
n the way out of the hospital, Temerity pressed a button on her watch and it told her the time. “Oh my gosh, I've got to get to rehearsal!”

She pulled a cell phone from a zippered pocket. “Justice? Hey, can you drive me to rehearsal? Great. Pick me up in front of Saint Vincent's on Seventh, see you in fifteen? I'll tell you when I see you. By the way, I've got Ellen with me. Okay. I'll tell her. Perfect.”

As soon as Ellen heard Temerity include her in the conversation, she had instinctively tried to retreat, but Temerity had anticipated this and, after only a slight flail, snatched her sleeve, holding on tight. When she ended the call, she said, “I want you to come with me. Justice said he'll hang out with you while I'm rehearsing. I won't be long. It's a run-through for a performance.”

“I don't think that's a very good idea.”

Temerity smiled. “That would be an accurate assessment of absolutely everything we've done in the last couple of days, but we did it anyway and I don't see any reason to quit now. Besides, Justice has been asking about you. You can fill him in on all our adventures. There's a nice park in front of the music hall and you guys can have a picnic or something.”

Food sounded good, crucial in fact after the last strenuous hour, but she didn't think that Temerity had any idea of how much, and she certainly wasn't going to let Justice watch her eat the amount she required. That kind of commitment called for privacy. The Snickers bars' protective effect had worn off, and she felt drained and raw.

Ellen's knees wobbled at the thought of the lunch Temerity and Justice would consider a good meal. Probably salad. She shuddered. The strangely emotional morning had left her light-headed and shaky. Her interior fortifications craved caloric sustenance to thicken their worn walls, and a lot of it.

Normally, by this time in the a.m., she would have consumed several times the recommended daily allowance of carbohydrates as determined by the, in her opinion, far too fervent Food and Drug Administration, whose tidings of gloom were constantly being broadcast on her little radio. She'd listened with lukewarm interest to their warnings about calories per day, fat percentages, and fiber intake and had been left with a sense of indifferent futility. Those limitations seemed more fantastical than the thrift-store paperbacks with the long-haired, half-naked supermodel pirates on the cover. Neither the novels nor the labels on her food interested her, and they struck her as equally absurd. Who could adhere to those calorie counts? Who wanted to do the math? For that matter, who could sail a ship through a storm without a shirt or a hair tie? Sure, it looked good, but the windburn would sting like the dickens and it would be next to impossible to get the tangles out, was the way she saw it.

“I . . . need to go home first,” Ellen fumbled. “I have to, uh, feed Mouse.”

“And we don't want the fragile little darling to waste away, so okay. We'll run you by there. Good?”

“I don't want Justice to see—” Ellen could hear the panic in her
own voice, and Temerity's exceptional hearing had certainly not missed it. Hell, that girl's ears could probably pick up her inner monologue.

She was right. “We won't go up. We'll wait in the car.” Temerity sat down, signifying that it was a done deal.

So Ellen sat with Temerity, restraining her preferred impulse to flee into the nearby planters, dig a hole and cover herself with compost. As she waited, she repeatedly reached up and finger-combed her hair down over the left side of her face. Not that it would hide her ravaged cheek from Justice's perceptive gray eyes. But she consoled herself with the memory of how indifferent he'd been to her appearance the first time he had been able to see her. For a brief moment, she indulged herself by imagining that, if she tried, she might be able to not only be invisible, but to control her appearance when she chose to be seen. The fantasy didn't last. Double the miracles seemed highly improbable.

Every time her fingers accidentally brushed against the rutted, poreless scar tissue, she flinched. Not from pain, but from the hated images it recalled to her mind—flashes of her early life with the woman who, impossibly, had been her mother, the constant hungry burn in her stomach, sleeping on the cold floor at night, curling into a ball until the hitting stopped. And, worst of all, she could feel her mother's fist twisting her hair, holding her while she struggled, see the red glow of the electric hot plate coming closer and closer, the heat searing even before her skin reached it. The smell of . . . no. Ellen snorted to clear her nose of the phantom stench of liquor and burnt meat. She would not think of it. It was over, gone, dead, and she would not resurrect it, or her. It didn't matter anymore, anyway, no one could see the mutilation. She was spared the dull stab of
seeing the revulsion in their eyes before they could avert their gaze, or worse, the staring and jeering that had been her youth. The relief of invisibility was profound.

“Here he comes,” Temerity said, rousing Ellen from her murky thoughts. She looked up in surprise to see a black BMW rounding the drop-off circle of the hospital, engine purring so softly that Ellen's inferior ears could barely hear it when it stopped right in front of them.

The driver's door opened and Justice got out, he was dressed in a corduroy jacket and jeans, more formal than the first time she'd seen him, and Ellen looked down, humiliated by her worn clothes. But once again, Justice didn't even seem to notice as he rounded the front of the expensive auto.

“Your carriage awaits, ladies,” he said with a smile and little comic bow. “Hey, Ellen,” he added in a secretive undertone as he opened the back door for her.

“Yeah, hi,” mumbled Ellen, keeping her face down. It was a bit of a squeeze, but once inside, Ellen sat in awe. She was afraid to touch anything in the cream leather interior at first, but she could not stop her fingers from running back and forth on the supple seat cushion. She had seen this kind of car by the thousands, but she had never imagined that she would be granted access to such a luxurious ride. In spite of her fear and embarrassment, she couldn't keep one side of her mouth from grinning.

She told him which way to go and blushed profusely when they pulled up in front of the run-down building. She had never looked at it as anything but a hiding place before, but seeing it through his eyes made her burn with shame when she thought of their beautiful, stylish apartment.

But Justice turned to her with a smile and jerked a finger toward his sister. “We'll wait for you. Hurry back. We've got to get Ms. Mole here to her rehearsal.”

“I wish you wouldn't call me that,” Temerity said. “It makes me feel like an informant.”

“I'm so sorry,” Justice chided her in a baby voice. “I meant the furry little blind rodent.”

“Oh, that's much better,” Temerity said with droll sarcasm. She crossed her arms and withdrew, pouting.

Ellen got out and hurried as best she could up the rickety wooden stairs to her front door. She went straight to the kitchen, pulled out a loaf of white bread and ate four slices by rolling them into doughy, chewy balls and eating them whole. She followed this with several large handfuls of dry Cap'n Crunch cereal and a few cookies.

Still chewing, she turned to look out the back window, though she didn't expect to see much with both of her pets in the hospital.

But she was wrong. An initial sweeping glance of the courtyard revealed nothing but police tape and the balding toy poodle squatting arthritically in the gravel. As he eased his backside stiffly into position, he tilted his little head upward. Then suddenly, he began to bark in a high-pitched, furious stream, his original business forgotten.

Ellen looked up to the roof across the courtyard to see what was upsetting the little canine, and spotted him. A boy was looking down from the flat roof, crouching low. Ellen leaned forward and stared, but she knew immediately it was not the same young man as the night before. This was little more than a child, maybe twelve years old, and the skin on his wrists was clean and unscarred. He hissed at the dog to shut up, and then searched around him. He picked up a small rock and threw it at the animal, hitting him on the rump, which sent him into a spasm of spinning and indignant yapping.
Then the kid froze, dropping his body to the rough tarred surface below the two-foot raised edging. But too late.

“I see you, you!” Ellen heard the dog's mistress shout in her crackly voice, outraged that he had attacked her beloved dog. She must have been standing directly below Ellen, because she couldn't see her, but the volume of the old woman's voice was every bit as strong as before, and Ellen could hear her perfectly. “I've already called the police, you little shit! They'll be here in one minute. You leave my dog alone!”

But the kid was gone before she'd finished the sentence, running and dropping off the far side of the roof like Spider-Man's scrawny, brown, inner-city nephew.

Ellen exhaled, unaware that she had been holding her breath. She felt a huge wave of relief. It was not the first time she'd seen kids on the roof. Because only three apartments were on the second story, the flat roofs of the lower story gave perfect access to the exposed walls, and the local gangs had pissed their marks there for more than a decade. The window over Ellen's kitchen sink, striped with wrought-iron bars, led onto this roof; it was from the broken slat at the bottom of that window that Mouse had first crept into her life. She had to wonder if the boy was a coincidence or a messenger. It was unusual for one of these kids to be up there in broad daylight, but in view of the onslaught of strange events in the last few days, this rated low on the list.

Because on that list was the strangest thing of all: Ellen had a friend. Well, an acquaintance with mutual interests, and she supposed, having no point of reference, that it amounted to the same thing. That was the most peculiar thing that had ever happened to her, even considering that the last few days had been some of the oddest ever.

Back in the car, Justice glanced back at her before asking, “So, you want to tell me what you two have been up to?”

Ellen couldn't see Temerity's face in the front seat, but her shoulders did a little dance of anticipation. She had a story to tell. “Visiting neighbors of Ellen's. There was a little incident at her apartment building last night. You want to tell him?”

She didn't, but Temerity had offered like it was some kind of treat. “Some guy got shot.”

“Oh good,” Justice said dryly. “Glad to know you girls are staying out of trouble.”

“
We
didn't shoot him!” Temerity said. “But Ellen saw the guy who did.”

“Not really, it was dark,” Ellen filled in hastily.

“And,” Temerity rushed on, “Cindy went into labor, so we went to the hospital, just to check up on how they were doing.”

In the rearview mirror, Ellen could see Justice's brow furrow as he shook his head with resigned acceptance. “I knew I should have come home last night,” he said.

“Oh, that reminds me, how was your date?” his sister asked.

He grinned. “I didn't come home last night.”

“Excellent,” Temerity said, and held up one hand to be slapped by her brother. “So you like her?”

“She's pretty cool, actually. Smart. But back to you two meddlers.”

“Meddlers?” Temerity turned her body toward him so that Ellen could see the determined set of her mouth in profile. “I seem to remember you talking about ‘fate' and ‘charity.' You said we should help.”

“Help does not include gunfire or any other exchange of deadly force. How is the guy doing?”

Temerity sighed. “Not great. It'll be a couple of days before they can even say if he'll make it.”

“How about the girl . . . Cindy? Did she have the baby?”

“Healthy baby girl. Not quite the color the would-be adoptive parents had ordered, apparently. There was a good bit of discussion about returning it to sender.”

Justice glanced back at Ellen and asked, “And how, exactly, do you know all of this?”

Temerity held up one fist. “I'm blind and she's invisible. It's a powerful combination when it comes to gathering information.”

A long, tortured sigh came from Justice. “Great,” he said, but it came out more like
Blast
.

“And anyway, Mr. Anthropologist, you're the one who's always saying that gathering is an important part of our human history and development, especially for women. Men were the hunters, women were the gatherers, that's what you said.”

“Gatherers of nuts and berries, not other people's business. I was talking about traits that affected certain evolutionary changes in society and physiology. And that's Dr. Anthropologist to you.”

“Some doctor. Everybody likes to gather information, in other words, ‘other people's business.' Hell, in some places it's hard currency, just ask the CIA or the folks at JPMorgan Chase. Oh, and I talked to Cindy.”