Invisible Ellen (14 page)

“You did what?” He braked hard for no apparent reason and Ellen felt the seat belt, already maxed out, tighten across her chest.

Temerity used one of her fingers to respond before she spoke. “If you would have heard the sound she was making, there's no way you would have walked away, so don't even.”

They were pulling up to the artists' entrance at the music center
and Justice reached over the back of the seat to get the violin case from the floor. His fingers brushed Ellen's knee. “Sorry,” he said, as though it were nothing, and found the case. He lifted it over the seat and set it in his sister's lap. “You're probably right. I have to admit the whole situation with the girl is culturally pretty fascinating. Sad but fascinating. How did she react when you told her about the letter?”

Temerity didn't answer, so as they came to a stop, Justice turned to Ellen for an explanation.

“We didn't tell her,” Ellen muttered. “I mean, we gave her the letter, but she didn't know it was us, and then she went into labor, so, well . . . I mean, it's not like she had any time to think, or, you know, do anything about it, uh, you know . . .” She trailed off.

“And she's not adjusting very well, I take it? Emotionally, I mean.” Justice sounded resigned, as if it were a foregone conclusion.

Temerity said brightly, “Let's review. She's all alone, doesn't talk to her family, if she even has one, she met a guy, fell in love, allowed herself to hope, he left to go to war, she found out she was pregnant, he died, she has nobody to help her, and no way to take care of a baby in a harsh world.”

“So . . . not great.”

“Not great,” Temerity agreed, dropping the false cheer and unfolding her stick. “Okay, I've got to get in there. Pick me up in an hour and a half?”

They watched until she was through the door. The second she disappeared, Ellen became hyperconscious of the fact that she was now alone with Justice in a car. Every nerve in her body was on high alert, and her brain was screaming,
Get out! Run!
But before she had time to act, Justice thumped the steering wheel and asked jovially, “Hungry?”

He couldn't have said anything else better designed to put Ellen's fears back to their “standby” position.
Always,
she thought, but what she said was, “Sort of.”

“Cool. You like Italian sausage, with pasta anyway, I know. There's this amazing food truck that parks nearby that makes the best sausage subs on warm Italian loaf. I say we pick up a couple of foot-longs with onions, peppers, cheese—the works—a couple of iced teas, eat until we can't, and soak up some sunshine.”

She wasn't sure about the sunshine part, but the rest of the plan sounded like something perched on billowing clouds behind pearly gates. “Sure,” she said. And then she added two words she couldn't remember ever using as a stand-alone pair before. “Why not?”

I
t was hard for Ellen to believe that someone as slim as Justice could actually finish a sandwich that was larger than his own head, but he did. Ellen savored hers, finishing it, but only just. When they'd balled up the white paper wrappings and crushed the iced tea cans, they lay back on the grass and made satisfied noises.

The early-spring wind was still refreshingly cool and the feel of the sun heating the dark clothes she always wore was actually welcome, nothing like the usual sweltering broiler heat she usually associated with a sunny day. The pleasant fullness of a satisfying meal and the fact that Justice was with her in the middle of a large field of grass insulated Ellen from her usual state of high alert when she had to be outside in any kind of sunlight. The novelty made her sleepy and contented.

“Mmm.” She made the noise without realizing she'd done it. It came from her chest, like a purr.

“My sentiment, precisely,” said Justice. They lay there for a few minutes, sluglike, until Justice rolled up on one elbow with a groan of effort. Immediately self-conscious, Ellen sat up, crossing her legs and flattening her hair down over her cheek.

But he wasn't looking at her. He was watching the people enjoying
the sunshine and the fountain in the plaza in front of the music hall. “Aren't they fascinating?” he asked.

Ellen followed his gaze and noticed several vignettes, a family with small children who had “accidentally” gotten wet in the fountain and were now sporting their parents' jackets and shivering in the light wind, a young couple making out against the ticket booth wall, an elderly group of men playing chess. “Who?” Ellen asked him.

Raising the hand not supporting his head, he waved it grandly. “All of them! I mean, look at them. Look at what we've built: high-rises and electronics and space rockets. The things we can choose to do every day: music, art, sports. We even have leisure time! We can eat tacos or spaghetti or hamburgers or sushi for lunch and something else for dinner. It's unprecedented, what humans can do in our age, yet so many of us are still so unhappy.”

She watched the men at the chess table argue about a move, but the altercation passed quickly. She'd never really thought about people on the whole as being unhappy, though she had seen and recorded hundreds of individual moments. Come to think of it, she never thought of people as a whole, except possibly as the faceless mass outside of her safety zone. “Why do you think that?” she ventured to ask.

“Me?” He puffed out his cheeks and let out an audible breath. “I think it's because we've forgotten the important things.”

Ellen snuck a peek at his serious face. Unused as she was to pursuing a conversation of any kind, she found that she really wanted to know what he thought. “Like . . . what things?”

He turned as though remembering to whom he was speaking and sat up. “Our place in the world, for starters. By that I mean humans as part of a living organism, the planet. Think about it. We're part of a huge, balanced biology that's being messed up. That's the first
thing. The second thing we've forgotten about is the human need to connect. We were meant to function together to be whole; without that, we feel fundamentally incomplete.”

Ellen must have looked as lost as she felt, because he clapped his hands together and said, “Okay, look at it this way. Human beings developed as tribes, each member had his or her role and was necessary for the survival and well-being of the whole. That is how we managed to evolve so far. But we don't give much thought to the common good anymore. It's every man for himself, and on a really basic survival level, that's unnatural. Therefore, people feel unfulfilled, but they don't know why.”

Ellen knew that last part, about every man for himself, was mostly true from her years of observing people's behavior toward each other. She wasn't sure she understood the rest of what he was talking about—“common good” was a phrase that escaped her—but she liked listening to Justice talk. She liked the way his eyes got brighter and his face lit up when he was explaining. “But we
are
alone,” she said to keep him going. “I mean, aren't we?”

Justice smiled. “We are individuals,” he said, “unique even, but that's not the same thing as what I'm talking about. It's an occupational hazard. Anthropologists see people, and their behavior, not just as individuals, but as part of a larger whole.”

“But most people just live their lives and don't see past their own . . . you know . . . stuff.”

Justice's eyebrows went up and he nodded approvingly. “Exactly.” Then he laughed and added, “That's why there are anthropologists. It's our job to point out to everyone else on the planet where they went wrong. It's very big of us.” He waved like a prince in a parade.

For Ellen, who was not comfortable having an exchange with
a single human, the state of the planet and all its occupants was beyond contemplation. A gust of wind lifted the hair veiling her face, and her hand flew up to cover her rutted cheek. She shifted her eyes and knew that Justice had seen it, but there was no trace of repulsion in his expression.

“It's just different,” Justice said softly. “Everyone is unique. You know, there are societies where they deliberately scar their faces for beauty.”

Ellen bit her lip. It sounded unlikely. “Not here,” she whispered.

He shook his head. “The truth is, the standard of beauty is variable. Americans, as a social group, pride themselves on being individual, yet most of us are so isolated inside”—he pointed to his chest—“that we try to bond through uniformity outside.” He gestured to a group of four teenage girls, each of them wearing tight jeans, tank tops of similar colors, and those slipper boots that were so popular. They wore the same makeup and hairstyles, but for all their efforts at uniformity, they were each distinctly different.

Ellen thought of the young man with the bracelet of scars and the officer saying,
It's a kind of gang marking
. So that too was a bid to connect, if she understood Justice correctly. It was all very weird and it took so much effort to try and make sense of it. Ellen's brain felt full of dust, but dust with rays of sunlight streaming in through a small, grimy window.

“And you can't agree that something is more attractive without also agreeing that something is less attractive. To make themselves feel better, an unfulfilled person puts other people down.” He shrugged. “The human ego is a greedy beast.” Justice laughed and shook his head. “I'm sorry. I get carried away, but I know you like to study the way people act too, so I hope you don't mind.” He
grimaced apologetically, which bewildered Ellen. She might not understand everything he was saying, but she loved listening to it.

“Come on,” he said, looking at his watch. “I've got a treat for you.” He stood up and offered his hand. Ellen pretended not to see it. Talking was one thing, touching, another. Also, she was afraid her larger weight might pull him to the ground instead of being helped up, so she kept her eyes down and pushed herself awkwardly to her feet instead. They threw away their trash and walked across the field to the music hall. At the artists' door, Justice stuck his head in. “Okay, all clear. Come on,” he beckoned to her with smiling eyes.

Ellen followed him down a long hall, past dressing rooms and rehearsal spaces, through piles of cables and light fixtures neatly stacked, walls of switches and tied-off cables, until they came to a stop.

They were standing in the wings of the stage. To Ellen's right the thick velvet of a massive curtain rose until it disappeared into the darkness above. Only a few work lights illuminated the stage ahead of them. Ellen could see the backs of a row of musicians, some seated, some standing near percussion instruments, all of them focused forward on a man she could not see but whom she could hear.

Justice tilted his head and moved around the very edge of the curtain. She followed, pushing aside the voluminous fabric, and found herself facing the empty house. Rows of upholstered seats rose in a graceful swoop up to the first balcony, and above that, another level, perched in the dim heights. She caught her breath at the scope of it, both awed and frightened, but Justice took her arm and led her down a short flight of black steps and then up the long, carpeted aisle along the wall, ascending until they reached the very back row of the first level. The exit doors were closed and it was dark. Turning
sideways, they moved along the last row until they were almost at the center aisle and then Justice motioned that they should sit.

On the stage below them, bathed in soft light, the orchestra members sat in an expanding semicircle on the polished wood of the wide stage. Far above them, a massive chandelier hung. Its bulbs were dark, but its crystals reflected the lights from the stage far below, the thousands of tiny glints hinting at its grandeur. Ellen had never been in such a splendid place in her life. But what fascinated her most was the fact that, even from this distance, with his back to them, she could hear everything the man on the stage said as though he were standing just in front of her.

Justice smiled at her obvious amazement. “Acoustics,” he whispered. “Amazing, huh?”

The man, who must, of course, be the conductor, was saying, “. . . allegretto beginning in the fourth bar of the second movement, and building until the crescendo. The first movement, with the duet, must be piano, piano. We do not want to overwhelm the cello and the violin. They must play softly for this piece. Okay? Here we go.” He tapped a long, narrow stick on the stand in front of him and raised both arms.

Now Ellen noticed that two chairs had been placed out in front of the others and in one of them was the unmistakable form of Temerity. Next to her was a red-faced man not one iota less circular than Ellen herself, and wedged between his thick thighs was a cello. The idea that someone as big as her could be sitting up there, in front of this many people when the hall was filled, was hard for Ellen to even assimilate, much less accept.

“. . . three, four . . . and . . .” The stick swished and, like the sun rising, the violin and the cello began to play.

The two instruments combined in this space had a quality of
sound that she had never heard but that she instinctively recognized. It had the same timbre as something she'd felt inside herself all her life but never named. The music pulled at that part of her with an ebb and flow that called it out, and she had to put both hands over her mouth to keep from sobbing out loud.

She clamped back her tears and tried to shush the voices inside as the sound outside multiplied, the orchestra coming in, blending and mixing, until something entirely new was created.
Just like the tribes Justice was talking about,
Ellen thought. Each member was unique, but they all needed one another to make this. She felt oddly proud of the comparison, which only strengthened the tide inside her until her shoulders shook with the effort of containing it.

When it ended, Ellen realized that Justice's arm was resting softly across her shoulders, and she did not move away.

“Very nice.” The conductor's voice broke through the ringing stillness. “See you all tomorrow.”

There was the rustle of sheet music and a murmur of activity, starting low and then breaking out into laughter and conversation. But still Ellen cradled her face in her hands and would not look up.

“I'll go get Tem,” Justice whispered. “Wait here.”

Ellen was happy to do so. She stayed, inert, feeling
deconstructed,
as though she'd been sucked down through a sieve into a muddy bog. This thing, this having experiences, was every bit as exhausting as she had always feared it would be; that didn't surprise her. What she had not anticipated was the inexplicable combination of fatigue
and
exhilaration. The thing she hadn't known, had never dreamt, was that she was capable of feeling so much, and, far more astounding than that, that it could be worth it.

Then she heard the tapping of Temerity's approach, felt her arm
slide around her shoulders and squeeze, felt her seat rock as Justice sat down on the other side of her.

Still hiding from everything, Ellen mumbled, “I'm sorry.”

Temerity's hand patted Ellen's hair as she whispered, “Don't be. Are you sad?”

Nodding her face and hands as a unit, Ellen said, “And happy. I'm not used to these . . . feelings. It's like a . . . one of those . . . horrible carnival rides I've seen, that go up and down and spin and jerk, and, well, usually I'm so . . . on the ground. I'm not sure I can take it.”

“You're just a little overwhelmed,” Temerity said, “and that happens to everyone sometimes. You know what helps? Thinking about someone else. That takes the pressure off of you. Trust me.”

The suggestion was like a light in a distant window, a path through the fog that Ellen could follow out of this mire.
Someone else
,
she thought vaguely. Yes, it would be a relief to look away. She raised her face slowly from her hands, took a deep breath, looked from sister to brother, and said, “Then I think I know what to do.”