Ellen in Pieces Read Online Free PDF Page B

her father out. Anger, her default emotion, not always appropriately. For example, when her mother died. Later she’d felt all kinds of things, but right off the top of any given situation, she was usually blistering.
    “This is a nice place,” Jack remarked, as though Emergency had never happened and they’d come directly from the airport.
    Ellen turned her exhausted eyes to him. “I’m selling it.”
    She led her spasming father inside, snapping on lights as they went. Usually she left one on; she hated arriving to darkness. “I made up the room downstairs,” she said, because, with him in this condition, she wasn’t sure if he could handle stairs.
    “Downstairs is fine. It’s a very nice home, Ellen.”
    Arm in arm they reached the bottom, he clutching the paper bag containing the Senokot they’d stopped for. The spare room was off the rec room, which was half heaped with the past she planned on disposing of. He didn’t even see the mess. His eyes were fixed straight ahead on the open bedroom door, as though with sufficient intensity of gaze he might transport the twitching mass of his body as far as the bed, visible there with its fresh linens and cascade of little pillows.
    After running every conceivable test, extracting his fluids, X-raying every inch of him, tapping his juddering body with their rubber hammers, the doctor had clipped the X-ray to a square of light on the wall.
    “This is how far the stool is backed up.”
    “He’s shaking and champing because he’s
constipated
?” Ellen had asked.
    Or he had Parkinson’s disease, but that was beyond the purview of Emergency. So with a referral to a geriatric specialist and a list of laxatives in hand, Ellen, seething, had brought her father home.
    T HAT first night she couldn’t sleep for the downstairs toilet flushing, the French doors rattling, Jack going out in the cold October night, and coming back. She wasn’t angry anymore, only worried. Parkinson’s? She’d have to look it up.
    Flush!
    With her father in the house, her teenage self came sneaking back, long-forgotten and reckless, a leggy force.
That
Ellen used to lie in bed like this, but with her nightie over her clothes until she was sure her father and her older sister, Moira, were asleep. Then, joyfully, she would fling the nightie off and escape the stifling house. Some boyfriend would be waiting in his truck halfway down the street. Bush parties were the thing. Bonfires in the country, girls swilling pink gin then puking in the woods.
    This must have been when her mother was in the hospital. Ellen distinctly recalled asking if she was going to be all right and her father saying, “She’ll be fine.” It was a lie.
    One night Ellen crept back in reekingly drunk. Caught! Her dad and Moira were up. The hospital had phoned. Her mother had
died.
    Ellen was furious, of course.
    Nothing was the same with the heart ripped out of their family. Moira stepped into their mother’s shoes for a few years, but she hadn’t been able to control Ellen. And every time they fought, Moira renewed her disavowal of Ellen. Because she hadn’t been there the night their mother died. Hadn’t Ellen been punished enough, losing her only true ally? Her father was around, but he always seemed so stiff and remote, like he only knew how to love one person, the one who used to sing “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” and “Embraceable You.” The one who sang “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off” for Ellen to fall asleep to.
    After she died, Jack never seemed to say a word.
    A T five the next morning, Jack McGinty was flushing the toilet again. Then a series of mysterious whirrings and buzzings started,which Ellen listened to forever, curled resentfully in her bed with the pillow over her head, teeth gritted, thinking he’d better explain himself. He’d better explain what he meant by coming here. By the time she’d identified the sounds—electric shaver, electric toothbrush—she was too angry to