Ellen in Pieces Read Online Free PDF

father.”
    She blinked, the cordless in her hand. The voice was not so much older as entirely unfamiliar. Sort of tremulous.
    “Are you there?”
    “Yes,” she said.
    “I’m coming to see you.”
    “Really?” Ellen said.
    “Tomorrow. Monday.”
    “What? Okay. Would you like me to pick you up?”
    “I was hoping.”
    “All right,” Ellen said and, still stunned, she wrote the flight time and number on a box flap and ripped it off. “Where are you staying?”
    A long silence unfolded between them, though not as long as the last one, which had gone on close to twenty-three years. This time Ellen cut it short.
    “Okay,” she said.
    W EST J ET from Calgary, direct. Ellen waited empty-handed in the terminal. She’d considered bringing something welcoming, but what? All she could think of was that sickening candy in a cardboard can with some kind of flower in its name. The whole long drive from North Vancouver, across the Lions Gate Bridge, through downtown, over the Burrard Street Bridge, along fifty car-clottedblocks of Granville Street, then over the Arthur Laing Bridge to Richmond where the airport was, she’d alternated between her mantra,
Driving sucks
, and trying to remember the name of that caramel-popcorn-and-nut confection. Her mother used to buy it for him every Christmas. Even as its flowery name eluded her, Ellen could picture the cylindrical outline in the stocking, a blockage. Passengers trickled, then surged into the baggage claim area and the luggage carousel jerked to life. Ellen stalled on
petunia.
    Eventually the area around the carousel cleared, just a few unclaimed bags going around for the ride. She wondered if she’d got the time wrong, but had left the box flap with the details in the car. Then it occurred to her that her father must have walked right past her. They hadn’t even recognized each other. People change. She’d changed.
    Well, there was an understatement.
    She checked the taxi stand outside. From the matte and colour-less sky, planes kept sinking down, one after another with just a couple of breaths between, each a surprise. The last time she saw her father, she’d been a slip of a girl. No. She’d actually been enormously pregnant with Yolanda. In fact, Yolanda was almost the same age Ellen had been at Jack McGinty’s fiftieth birthday party.
    Back inside, by the carousel, where those same few bags were going nowhere fast, a uniformed woman came pushing a man in a wheelchair.
    “Excuse me?” Ellen said. “I’m looking for the WestJet counter.”
    “Ellen,” croaked the man.
    Wide panicked eyes under outrageous brows. The jaw working, working, blood all down his chin.
    Poppycock.
    T HE next seven hours blurred by. Jack McGinty barely spoke. Not in the car bleeding and tremoring all the way to the hospital, not in the limbo of the waiting room. In the plane somewhere over the Purcell Mountains he’d bitten his tongue and it just wouldn’t stop bleeding. Apart from that, he refused to explain his deterioration, or why he’d come. Ellen kept thrusting tissues at him, which he lifted in a wad to his mouth. The tremors were so bad they did the daubing for him.
    They’d been waiting three hours when the nurse finally called, “Jack McGinty?”
    He took a typed note from his breast pocket and handed it to Ellen, which was when she noticed the mechanical pencils. Her whole childhood he’d carried those pencils in that pocket, up against his mathematical heart. Now they made her tear up.
    I am sorry. Love, Dad,
the note read.
    “What’s this?” Ellen asked.
    He looked at the note and, frowning with his bloodied mouth, took a second slip of paper from his pocket, which he traded for the first. The tremors made him seem impatient.
    It was a list of medications, also typed. Many medications. Ellen was alarmed by how many there were.
    “Give it to them,” he said.
    Four hours after that, Ellen drove the car into the garage at home and parked. Jaw clenched, she helped