Invisible Ellen (9 page)

T
emerity insisted on coming along to give Cindy the letter. This was the equivalent of injecting a massive overdose of concentrated liquid panic directly into Ellen's aortic compound. Alarms sounded and defense teams rushed about, arming themselves with riot gear while heavy metal doors slammed shut, sealing off the perimeter, but the heart palpitations subsided somewhat when Ellen realized that Temerity wouldn't actually see her apartment. The thought of another human in the sanctity of her safe house required her to remain on high alert, but the security rating downgraded to code yellow.
Repeat, code yellow, this is not a drill.
Ellen gritted her teeth and told herself it wouldn't be long until the breach was closed and she could rearm the force fields.

As she opened the door, Ellen took a self-conscious look around, noticing acutely the musty odor of the closed-in space and the constant din from the nearby busy intersection. She squirmed, realizing that Temerity's heightened senses must certainly be experiencing a full-frontal assault verging on violation equal to her own. She barely noticed the noise or the smell anymore, but imagining the jarring decibels through Temerity's sensitive ears and the vague but
persistent putrid smell of discarded garbage from the street made her cringe with shame.

“This it? I love what you've done with the place!” Temerity gushed as she crossed the threshold. “Fabulous!”

Ellen stopped and looked at her. “Really?”

“It's cozy, and you know me, I'm all about cozy.”

“How do you know?”

“I can tell from the way my voice bounces that this first room is small.”

Ellen blushed. “It's only one room. Well, and a sort of kitchen.”

“And that's all anybody really needs,” Temerity declared. “A girly den, I like it. So, show me where you watch the fun?”

After checking to make sure that the floor was clear through to the back window, Ellen told Temerity to just walk straight. She tapped her way to the back, felt the lay of the land and, finding the slatted window on the door, she cranked it open a bit and listened to the muffled music coming from across the small space.

“Is that Guns N' Roses coming from her apartment?” Temerity asked.

“No, that's music and marijuana,” Ellen told her as she came up behind her. “It's coming from the guy who lives next to her.” The man himself was sitting in his easy chair, a joint in one hand and a beer in the other. With his dirty, torn jeans and greasy hair falling into his gaunt face, he vaguely resembled a degenerate Raggedy Andy doll.

“He smokes some good weed,” Temerity commented, sniffing at the aroma rising from below without apparent judgment. “Not that I'm an expert.”

“He sells it,” Ellen told her. “Have you . . . tried it?” she asked, curious.

“Oh yeah, couple of times. Well, a few times. Several. Okay, not more than once a week. Justice loves the stuff, but only when he's got nothing else to do. You should hear him go off about its cultural significance. It's great for relaxing, but I wouldn't want to have to function on it.”

“I thought most musicians, uh, did drugs,” Ellen said.

“Good lord, no,” Temerity said. It's not mandatory, unless they play jazz and dubstep.”

A large thump told them that Mouse had risen from his holding spot on the sofa and impacted the floor. He meowed loudly.

“Ah, the Mouse,” Temerity said. Squatting down, she held out her hand and made a little kissing noise repeatedly. To Ellen's surprise, the cat trotted over, stomach fat flopping from side to side as he came. He thrust his giant head against Temerity's fingers and was soon purring loudly as she scratched the backs of his ear and a half.

Ellen watched this unlikely scene as though it were sideways. This was the first time she'd had another person in her apartment and it made the familiar seem foreign. In a moment of clarity she saw her cramped room as a larger version of the closets where she had taken refuge as a child, reading in the light coming from the crack under the door. Then she thought of Temerity's wide-open loft; it was a space big enough to hold the hugeness of the music she made and the life she lived. Temerity needed space to soar—some people did, she guessed. Then Ellen realized that she had just thought of someone as a friend, and all at once the space in which she lived seemed a size too small. Too tight to hold Temerity's bulging energy, so that Ellen, for the first time, wished it were larger.

There was a noise from the courtyard and Ellen sidled past Temerity and Mouse, a tight squeeze in the narrow kitchen space, to look out through the slats, down into the dark courtyard. Through
T-bone's window she could see him get up from his threadbare easy chair and stand swaying in the middle of the room. The sound came again, and Ellen could see the silhouette of a man standing in the dark outside his back door, knocking urgently. The fixture over the door, originally intended to light up the landing, had been knocked askew and the small, feeble circle of light it threw was like a dying flashlight beam focused on the door's small window. The man lifted his hand into the forty-watt glow to knock again, and Ellen clearly saw the diamond pattern of scars encircling the wrist where it extended from his jacket sleeve.

“Who is it?” she heard T-bone shout above the music, but she could not make out the response. He turned down the volume and moved slowly to the door, leaving Ellen's eyeline of him through the window.

“What going on?” Temerity asked. She had left off scratching Mouse, who now circled her ankles hopefully, and was standing just behind Ellen.

“It's the guy next to Cindy. I call him T-bone. Somebody is at his door,” Ellen told her.

“Oh, company.”

“More likely a customer.”

Temerity shifted from side to side, swaying for what looked like the sheer pleasure of the movement. “You've got a good view of these people?”

“Well, there's not much else to look at from here.” Ellen felt slightly embarrassed.

“Okay, give me the basic layout.”

So Ellen explained. Five of the studio units had back doors that faced the courtyard of the U-shaped building. This central space might, in another, less paranoid age, have been meant as a small
garden, but building and safety had nixed that long before Ellen's arrival, requiring its use as a fire escape access. The awkwardly placed wooden stairs to each back door had clearly not been part of the original design. A narrow alley ran the length of the block along the rear of the building where the courtyard's crumbling gravel spilled onto its cracked asphalt. The woman's door below her, in the apartment with matching curtains, she could not see. The upstairs apartment directly across from hers had blocked the windows. Ellen was the only one on her side on top. On what was the front of the building, to her right, only one apartment, the lower one, accessed the courtyard, and that was occupied by a shut-in who was visited by health-care workers twice a week. Ellen called him Badger. But other than “Badger gets a sponge bath from the nurse,” she had very little to report about him in her chronicles. He never went out.

“Anyway,” Ellen concluded, “it's hard not to see T-bone and Cindy, and it's not like I bother them. They don't even know I'm here. I don't interfere.” She thought of the letter in her bag. “Well, I mean, I never have before, but you know, I mean, I didn't ask for that letter.”

“Speaking of,” Temerity said. “What are we going to do? Are you going to take it down there and give it to her?”

“Me?” The panic in Ellen's voice made it squeaky. “No, no, I was thinking I'd maybe leave it in her mailbox when she goes out or something.”

Temerity shook her head ruefully. “I'm sorry, that won't do. You'll need to think again.”

“What?”

“Ellen, seriously. Are we delivering dry cleaner flyers or possibly doing something that could help this woman change her life and her luck?” Temerity asked. “We want to see what happens when she
reads it, right? Plus, you said she almost never goes out now. So, tell you what. How about if
we
take it down there? We can leave it on the stoop, then knock and run away.” Her face screwed up thoughtfully. “Well, maybe not run exactly, but we could sort of speed walk.”

Ellen was shaking her head forcefully, though it was another lost gesture. She said, “I can't do that.”

“Go down there, speed walk, or knock on the door?”

“Both—I mean, uh, all of them.”

“Why not?”

“I just . . . I could never.”

“Like you could never stop a purse snatcher?” Temerity clicked her tongue impatiently. “You clocked that scumbag! Never could knock on a door, my butt. I'm not saying you should hang around after we do it, just ring and run.”

Ellen said nothing.

Temerity hummed dubiously and seemed to be thinking it through. “Okay, fine. No running, no knocking. Let's compromise,” she said. “Where is she now?”

Ellen checked. She couldn't see Cindy through the window, but the lights on the far side of the main room were on and she thought she saw the blue flicker of the television screen across the darker kitchen floor. “I think she's watching TV,” Ellen said.

“Perfect. Okay, we go down, slip the envelope under her back door, maybe you write on it, something like, ‘Sorry, this was delivered to the wrong apartment by mistake.' Then we come back up here and wait for her to get herself a snack and find it. It'll take, like, one minute.”

“I guess we could do that,” Ellen said, though without Temerity, it was a minute she wouldn't have considered in a thousand
years. The word “snack” made Ellen's stomach clench and gurgle. To distract herself, she watched out the window. T-bone finally opened the door. The nervous man bumped fists with him, glanced back at the deserted courtyard, and was admitted.

“Is it all clear?” Temerity asked, having heard the door open and close.

“Yeah.”

“Okay, get the letter.”

Ellen did as Temerity directed her, in a kind of stupor. Her back door had never been opened, not as long as Ellen had been there anyway, and when they tried, it stuck so tightly that they decided to go out the front and around the building. In two minutes they were creeping slowly down her front stairs, Ellen leading and Temerity behind with one hand clamped onto Ellen's shoulder. To her mild surprise, the undertaking of what, to Ellen, was an inconceivable action, unfolded without the world bursting in a fiery apocalypse. In fact, it was disconcertingly chilly.

They had just reached the sidewalk and started toward the back alley when Temerity raised her head sharply and her fingers tightened. “What was that?” she asked.

Ellen looked around. It was rush hour and nothing but the sidewalk separated her building from the busy street. On the corner, several vagrants stood holding tallboys swathed in brown paper bags, and a confused argument was in progress. Random barking dogs, cars, shouts and stereos filled the air with a density of noise thicker than bad smells in an overstuffed laundry hamper.

“What was what?” Ellen asked. “Specifically?”

“I thought I heard a gunshot,” she said. “Could have been a car backfire, I guess.”

“Could have been a gunshot,” Ellen said without emotion. “They're pretty common around here. People get drunk and fire weapons, in the air or at each other, a lot.”

“Spunky neighborhood,” Temerity said, urging Ellen on with a little push from the contact point of hand on shoulder. “I wonder if
Destinations
magazine has ever done a feature on it. The title could be something like ‘Risk a trip to Morningside, where the days are dodgy and the nights are downright dangerous.' They could do a four-star taco-cart review and rate which corners sell the best crack.”

Having never heard of this particular magazine and wondering who would read an article about crack, Ellen started forward again. They came to the end of the building and turned right, into the narrow alley, passing the windows of the apartment below Ellen's, the one with curtains. Ellen knew very little about its occupant, except that she was elderly and had that small, arthritic dog that she let out into the courtyard to relieve itself, its tiny excrements gradually drying to a hard white that disappeared into the bleached gravel.

They came to the opening of the courtyard and Ellen paused. From this angle she could see all five back doors, including her own. From the corner of her eye she detected movement in the curtain lady's back window, a shiver of the fabric being dropped back into place. Instinctively drawing back, she waited, shushing Temerity who made to speak. The curtain did not move again.

She realized that she had never looked at this familiar scene from this perspective before, and she found it disorienting. It was peculiar, like the eerie, unnatural darkness of a daytime eclipse or hearing a familiar movie scene dubbed into an unfamiliar, more aggressive, language. She shuddered slightly.