“Whoa!” Bess said when she saw what Ellie had been building. “Looks like we’ve got a budding Gaudi here.”
I have to confess I didn’t know what she was talking about. I knew she’d been taking artsy courses so I assumed he was a sculptor of weirdly shaped objects, because Ellie’s construction was very weird. Disturbingly so.
I’d called Bess last night and told her not to go to the hospital because Ellie was already gone. So she’d arrived at the apartment where we watched Ellie begin her “shelter.” She’d barely spoken while she worked at attaching her found objects to the wall, so Bess finally returned to her dorm.
Normally I wouldn’t let one of my daughters get away with that sort of rude behavior, but Ellie was not herself. Nor was I, not really. She’d been through a horrible ordeal and I wasn’t about to start an argument. For the time being she had carte blanche.
On the way home from the hospital we’d made a couple of stops to pick up the hammer, nails, screws, drill, glue, soldering iron, and protractor she claimed she needed. I’d been too happy to see her up and about to argue or question, I just paid for it all.
As soon as we reached the apartment she went to work, attaching her junk to the wall. I could see the wall was going to need a lot of repairs to bring it back to its original state but, again, I didn’t argue or protest. Anyway, she seemed so driven, I didn’t think I’d have any influence.
When she ran out of junk, she’d go out searching for more. I’d trail along because I was afraid of letting her out alone at night. Midtown was pretty safe, but she was a distracted teenage girl, not exactly tuned in to her surroundings. My presence worked out to her advantage though, because she used me as a pack mule.
Wood, metal, plastic straws, Styrofoam, flattened aluminum cans, paper towel tubes, doweling, wire coat hangers, pens, pencils, the broken neck of an old guitar, anything that caught her eye. Then back to the apartment again to affix it to her construction.
We did this all night, back and forth, in and out. At times she had me help her—hold something just so while she glued or screwed or soldered it in place. I’d started off thinking this was just some hodgepodge conglomeration of junk—one of those “street art” constructions that found their way into museums now and then.
“Do you have any idea about what this is going to look like when you’re through?” I asked her when it had reached halfway up the wall.
“I don’t have just ‘any’ idea, Mother, I have an exact idea about what it’s going to look like—what it must look like when I’m through.”
I didn’t see how that was possible, considering the random way she seemed to be throwing all the trash together. Well, it looked random, but as it grew, and as I saw how precise she was with the placement of her pieces of junk, I began to think she might have a plan. When she had me hold a piece in place while she affixed it to the whole, I had to hold it just so. Many times she’d use a protractor to get an angle exactly right.
Gradually, as we worked through the night—sleep was not an option—it began to take shape. Exactly what sort of shape I’m not sure, but a shape of some sort. In the base was an arched opening, maybe two feet high and two-and-a-half feet wide, but only a foot deep where it dead-ended at the outer wall of her room. If Ellie was constructing this to be a “shelter”—whatever that was supposed to mean—I could see no way she’d fit in there.
At sunrise she was still at it, though running out of trash. Only a few random pieces left. I was drained and sleep deprived and prayed she wouldn’t want to make another foraging trip.
Maybe she sensed my exhaustion.
“Almost finished, Mother. Just these last pieces to fix in place and I’ll be done. But they’ve got to go in exactly the right spot at exactly the right angle, so bear with me.”
…in exactly the right spot at exactly the right angle…
She had to be joking. The shelter, the construction, the thing was a totally random, asymmetrical, eight-foot pile of junk stretching from floor to ceiling. Further proof that this was no longer my Ellie. My Ellie wouldn’t make something like this. My Ellie liked order, not chaos. This was pure chaos.
I slumped on the bed and watched her standing on a chair while she worked with her protractor on those last pieces.
Almost finished…then what?
I decided to ask: “So Ellie, what are you going to do with this when you finish it?”
Her response came out garbled because she had her protractor clamped between her teeth while she held something in place, but it sounded like she was going to take shelter.
“Shelter from what?”
Garbled again, but I thought she said so she could be by herself.
I looked askance at the little arched space at floor level and said, “But how are you going to be—?”
And just then Bess rang from the downstairs vestibule and I buzzed her in. When she arrived she froze in the doorway to Ellie’s room. She hovered there and stared for what seemed like a long time, then stepped inside, still staring.
She made that Gaudi remark, then said, “No, not Gaudi, more like objet trouvé.”
“Could you speak English?” I said, more sharply that I intended. I was so tired.
Bess seemed not to notice. She kept staring. “It means ‘found object’—it’s an art form. Yo, Sis. Where’d you ever learn to do something like this?”
“In my coma,” Ellie said, still standing on the chair. “I learned that the angles have to be just right. I learned a lot in my coma. Like how to heal my burns and how to build a shelter, and all about what’s coming.”
“Heal your burns?” I said. “What does that mean?”
Instead of answering, Ellie hopped off her chair and pulled it aside, then stepped back to appraise her work, cocking her head this way and that.
“Uh-huh,” she said, nodding with satisfaction. “I think I’ve got it right.”
Bess gave a soft laugh. “How on Earth would you know if you got it wrong?”
Bess had a point. Ellie’s objet trouvé had no symmetry, no rhyme or reason. It crumbled over the arched base, then undulated up the wall, widening here, narrowing there, shooting branches left toward the window, then right toward the room’s corner, back and forth until it stopped at the ceiling.
“We’ll know in a few minutes,” Ellie said.
As I tried to fathom what she meant, I noticed a tube of glue on the bed. I didn’t want it to leak on the spread, so I bent to pick it up…and as I did—
One of the branches disappeared.
I gave a little gasp and straightened, and suddenly the branch was there again.
“You okay, Mom?” Bess said.
I didn’t reply. Instead, keeping my eye on the branch, I bent again and…slowly it faded from view.
“Oh, dear God! Something’s wrong with that thing!”
Bess stepped to my side.
“What do you—holy shit!” Obviously she’d seen it too. She stepped back. “Ohmigod, the whole top just disappeared. Ellie, do you see this?”
“Uh, huh. It’s all a matter of getting the geometry just right.”
Bess moved again. “Now the top’s back but the whole left side is gone! Ellie, what the fuck!”
“Bess!” I said, but I knew how she felt. What the fuck indeed.
“Nothing’s actually gone,” Ellie said, keeping her eyes fixed on the lower part of the construction. “It simply angles into another place.”
“‘Another place’?” Bess’s eyes were wide. “What does that even mean? Another plane of existence, another dimension, the other side of the wall, what?”
Ellie shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. Sort of.”
“‘Sort of’? Wh-wh-wh-wh—” Bess sounded like a stuck record.
And then I felt a warm breeze against my shins. It flowed from under the bed. No, it came from the pile, from the arch at its base, and flowed under the bed.
And the arch…the opening was dark now. Where I used to be able to see the floor molding and some of the bedroom wall…only blackness now.
“Oh, excellent!” Ellie said. “I did get it right.”
Get what right? I wanted to say, but couldn’t take my eyes off that dark space.
Ellie dropped to her hands and knees. “Okay, I’m going in.”
“Going in where?” Bess said with a laugh. “There’s no place to go.”
“Sure there is. See you later.”
With that she crawled through the arch and disappeared inside.
“Ellie!” I cried. “Ellie, don’t.”
Her voice, strangely distorted, echoed back about being by herself.
Bess wasn’t laughing anymore. “That’s impossible! Mom, she can’t—don’t let her go!” She dropped to her knees beside the arch and reached inside to grab Ellie’s foot or leg but came away with nothing. “Mom, she’s gone! But she can’t be gone! It’s not possible!”
My brain was numb but I knew what she meant.
Ellie’s construction lay against an outside wall. A hole in the wall could lead only to empty outside air. Yet Ellie had crawled all the way through and beyond. I rushed to the window and looked out. The outer wall was unmarred. Nothing extended beyond it.
I dropped beside Bess and stuck my head inside. Warm, odorless air flowed against my face.
“Ellie? Ellie! You come back here! You come back here this instant!”
Faintly, as if from a great distance, I heard, “…fine…little while…myself.”
Bess fumbled with her key chain and came up with a pen light. Aimed through the arch, its bright beam lit up a long, narrow passage with rippled-ribbed walls of gleaming black. Bright as it was, the beam didn’t reach the end.
“Oh, God,” I said, and it came out a moan. “This isn’t right, it isn’t possible.”
I so wanted it to be an optical illusion, but I could feel the air flow, so I knew I wasn’t just seeing things.
“Mom,” Bess said, “we can’t both be in the same nightmare, can we? I mean, this stuff doesn’t happen in real—”
“I’m going in,” I said, but Bess pulled me back as I started to crawl forward.
“Are you crazy? With your back?”
“I can’t leave her in there!”
“She wants to be in there.”
“She says she wants to be by herself but I’ve got to know if she’s all right.”
“What if your back goes out?”
“It won’t go out.”
“But you know what happens when it does. You’ll be stuck.”
I knew she was right, but…
“That’s Ellie in there, Bess. Your little sister. My little girl. I can’t just let her disappear into God knows where!”
She did her patented eye roll. “All right, I’ll go in, okay?”
I could tell she was afraid—who wouldn’t be?—but she’d never admit it. She might aspire to a bohemian life but she’d grown up with that Midwestern hold-my-beer approach to challenges.
With her penlight pointed ahead of her, Bess crawled through the arch on her elbows and knees and disappeared into the tunnel. I crouched at the opening and watched her slowly dwindling silhouette. I estimated she was about fifty feet away when she stopped.
Faintly I heard Ellie’s voice say, “Hello, Bess,” followed by Bess’s scream. And then Bess was frantically crawling backward on her hands and knees, making terrified, high-pitched mewling noises as her shoes scrabbled toward me.
I ducked to the side as she emerged, feet and butt first, almost knocking me over. But she didn’t stop. She kept up the panicked backward crawl, kept making those terrified noises as she reverse-scuttled across the room until she ran out of floor. It might have been comical were it not for the look of abject horror twisting her face. With her back pressed against the wall, she slid upright, slipped and fell, then regained her feet and stumbled-ran from the bedroom.
I hurried after her and found her at the apartment’s front door, her back pressed against it, blinking, cringing, shuddering as she reached for me with a trembling hand.
“M-m-mom!” she panted in a breathless voice. “You’ve got to get out of here!”
“What’s wrong? What happened?”
“You can’t stay here! You can crash in my dorm! Lena won’t mind!”
“That’s crazy talk. I’m not going anywhere while Ellie—”
“That’s not Ellie in there!”
Bess had just voiced my greatest suspicion, my worst fear. I felt my knees soften, ready to give way, but I forced them straight and locked them. I wouldn’t, couldn’t acknowledge it.
“Don’t be silly. I—”
“I am not being silly! You can’t stay here!”
“I can and I will and I don’t want to hear any more of this. Now come into the kitchen and I’ll make you—”
She grabbed the door handle. “No. No way. I can’t force you to leave, but me, I’m outa here. You know where my dorm is. You can come any time.”
“Bess, please. Get hold of yourself.”
She opened the door and slipped through, then turned and looked at me through the narrowing opening.
“You don’t get it, Mom. You said she went in there to be by herself. You got it wrong.” A sob escaped her. “She went in there to be herself.”
And then she slammed the door.
I stood there, gaping in shock. Bess…Too-Cool-for-School Bess, the unflappable Boho who took everything in stride…I’d never seen her like this, never imagined she could be like this. So terrified…
What had she seen?
My mind reeling, I wandered back to Ellie’s bedroom where I stared at the darkness within that low arch. I knew I’d have to go in there.