Ellen in Pieces by Caroline Adderson

all happened so long ago—did it even matter?
    “How are you holding up with him?” Moira asked. “Is he driving you crazy?”
    “Does he drive you crazy?” Ellen asked.
    “Of course! He never talks. You never know what he’s thinking. Mom did all the talking. Remember?”
    “Yes,” Ellen said, suddenly tearing up. “I do.”
    The night before Jack was supposed to fly back to Calgary, Moira said over the phone, “Ellen? I always thought Larry was a jerk. You did everything for him, but what did he ever do for you? We watched that program of his. It wasn’t even funny. We didn’t get it at all.”
    “Thank you,” Ellen said.
    The next morning, since Ellen and her father were both up anyway and it was unexpectedly clear and sunny, she suggested that they leave for the airport early and take a walk on the jetty. Jack attended fully to the drive, seeing the city for the first time in his seven-week stay, the city herself finally showing all her coloured feathers. The mountains were two-toned with snow, the fields around the runways a shimmery green. When Ellen asked him what he thought of it, he said, “It’s fine.”
    They parked. For five kilometres the jetty stretched out into the ocean, an elevated road to nowhere, banked with boulders. Under it a pipe led from the sewage treatment plant. Jack had sure put that pipe to the test.
    High above them a plane traced a U before landing. Jack watched, then did the same, took Ellen’s arm and turned back toward the beach. At the water’s reedy edge the sand was flecked with broken shells and glass and plastic. He managed an unsteady squat then, placing both hands in the icy water, waved them, like he was Moses trying to coax the sea apart.
    “There,” he said, once she got him standing again. “Now let’s go.”
    His bags were half stuffed with Poppycock. She helped checkthem in, then he insisted that she leave. He was fine. He would get a cup of coffee. He would have his seashore-besmirched shoes shined.
    “What was the name of the place you just took me to?”
    “The Iona Jetty,” Ellen said.
    She was meeting Brad Wheeler-Dealer back at the house, so she said goodbye. She hugged her father and he actually told her, maybe for the first time in her life, “I love you, Ellen.”
    When she looked back, he was still standing in front of the taxi stand, watching her walk toward the parkade. Like in that poem, not drowning, but waving. She smiled and waved back.
    But during the long drive home, as she strained to remember the name of the poet, the lines came back to her.
    I was much too far out all my life / And not waving but drowning.
    She’d misremembered it. She only realized what it meant later, when she and Brad sat down at her kitchen table.
    Because the first thing she saw was her father moving his hands in the water, testing the temperature, and the typed note on top of all the papers.
    I am sorry.
    “What’s the matter, Ellen?” Brad asked. “What’s this all about?”

3
ELLEN-CELINE, CELINE-ELLEN
    S o Ellen had found herself alone with a two-year-old in a near-empty, perpetually cloud-scarved house halfway up the North Shore mountains, eight months pregnant with her second child. All those years ago.
    Only twenty-two and already divorcing.
    As desperate as she’d been to leave Cordova Island, population 357 born-again hippies, aging draft dodgers and sundry arty types, now Ellen missed it. Ellen and Larry had been passionate members of that close community (Larry too passionate, it turned out), contributors to its potlucks and Friday-night jams in the tiny island hall, users of its Free Store and babysitting co-op. If you met somebody on the road on Cordova Island, you stopped and talked for half an hour about your garlic crop and your aura. That’s the kind of place it was.
    But now when Ellen took Mimi to the park, she felt she was from a far-off country, a land of long-tressed, naked-faced women and bearded, huggy men, she a resident alien