Ivory Apples

by Lisa Goldstein

  “Well, what I mean to say is that I just can’t figure it out,” she went on. “I’m at my wits’ end here. I haven’t slept at all for—it’s been three nights now.”

  “Why don’t I come back with you, take a look at your basement?” Philip said. “Maybe it’s your house settling, something like that.”

  She looked at him gratefully. “That’s very kind of you.”

  All my old suspicions surfaced again. What did she want from him? Was she trying to get him alone, away from us kids, and then seduce him?

  “I left my notebook at River’s,” I said quickly. “Maybe I could go with you, stop by her house and pick it up.”

  She scowled at me. She really did, I wasn’t making it up. There was something she wanted to do with Philip, and I would get in the way.

  He turned to Ms. Burden. “Where do you live?”

  She gave him her address, but he didn’t know the street. “You’ll have to show me. And where does River live?”

  He’d only dropped me off there about a hundred times. “McMillan Street.”

  “All right, then. Come on.”

  “I want to go too!” Beatriz said.

  “Someone has to stay here, make sure Amaranth and Semiramis get to bed,” Philip said.

  “Esperanza can do it,” Beatriz said. She ran to the kitchen to ask her.

  “That’s not fair!” Amaranth said. “Why can’t I go with you?”

  “Because it’s your bedtime,” Philip said. “You and Semiramis are going to bed, right this minute.”

  “Esperanza says she can stay,” Beatriz said as she came back, sounding gleeful. “What’s your house like? Is it big?”

  “Well, you’ll see it when we get there,” Ms. Burden said. She stood, as if to urge the rest of us to start moving, and we got our coats and left.

  Nobody said much on the drive over. It was dark, and rain hit the car with the sound of fingernails tapping. Every so often we plowed through pools of water, and fountains shot up around the car. Philip turned on the heater but I still felt cold, and my coat did little to warm me.

  I didn’t pay much attention to our surroundings, though. I was puzzling over the fact that Ms. Burden had never told us she had a house, had never once invited us over. And I didn’t know a lot about finances, but I wondered how someone without a job could afford to buy a house.

  We parked at River’s house and I got out of the car. Of course I hadn’t left my notebook there—that was just an excuse so I could go with them. But they were watching me, so I knocked at the door and talked to River’s mother when she looked out.

  “It isn’t there,” I said when I came back to the car.

  Then it was Ms. Burden’s turn to give directions. We drove for a while and came to a neighborhood I’d never seen before, with an auto painting shop and a mini-storage and other businesses, all of them closed and dark. We were near the Rose Garden, I knew, where we’d gone several times with Philip. I wondered why Ms. Burden spent so much time at our park when this one was much closer.

  Finally we turned down a street of small, rundown houses. Ms. Burden pointed out the window, and Philip pulled over to the curb.

  Weeds had taken over the front lawn, urged on by all the rain that winter, and our feet squished through mud as we went up to the door. The paint on the walls—once white, now a sort of gray—had started to peel.

  We went inside. The living room had almost no furniture, just two folding chairs, a television on a small table, and some bookcases stuffed with books. The place was freezing, the cold gusting in through cracks somewhere, and it smelled of books and stale grease.

  I felt a profound disappointment. I had been expecting something dark and glittery, a pirate’s cave filled with treasure. Even if that had been an impossibly romantic vision, she should have had more than this bare room: wonderful old toys and Photoshopped artwork, maybe; shelves of leather-bound books with gold-stamped titles shining in the firelight; colorful hangings and patterned rugs and rare plants.

  The bookcase seemed to be the only interesting thing there. I scanned the shelves and saw a few editions of Ivory Apples before Ms. Burden called to us to follow her. I turned and caught a glimpse of a book called Games and Pastimes for Young Children.

  I looked around for Beatriz, wanting to show her what I’d found, but Ms. Burden was hurrying everyone into the kitchen. It was as stark as the living room, just a stove and refrigerator and sink, and a Mac set up on a small table. There was nothing on the Formica counters, no toaster or microwave or coffee maker, and no dishes in the sink or any traces that she had ever eaten a meal here. I had the sudden thought that if I looked in the cupboards they would be empty.

  She went over to a small door closed by a padlock and used a key to open it. “Down here,” she said.

  I peered inside and saw a narrow wooden staircase. One side stood against the wall, but the other opened out into space, with no railing or handhold. Halfway down, the light ended and the stairs disappeared into shadow, a darkness that seemed to move, to billow, like a pool of black water or a vast sea creature.

  “Get away from there, Ivy—it isn’t safe,” Ms. Burden said. I moved back and Philip went to stand at the head of the stairs. “The cord for the lightbulb is down there at the bottom, unfortunately. I don’t know why they couldn’t have put a switch up here—it would have made it so much easier.”

  She was chattering, talking quickly but not saying anything. I had never seen her like that, and I wondered if she felt nervous about letting us into her house.

  She handed Philip a flashlight and he started down, moving carefully. I watched him go, watched as he passed from light into shadow. The sound of his footsteps faded, as though the darkness had soaked them up.

  Something howled. The howl wavered up and down the scale, eerie and infinitely sad. I felt hairs rising up on the back of my neck, as if I had hackles.

  There was a long, loud, dull noise, and then a shout: “No!” or “Oh!” Then a thud, and a trailing arc of light.

  “Philip!” I yelled. “Dad!”

  Beatriz came over and stood behind me. I didn’t see Ms. Burden anywhere. Where had she gone?

  Beatriz and I shouted Philip’s name again. “What on earth has happened?” Ms. Burden asked, coming in from the living room.

  “He—I think he fell,” Beatriz said. “He isn’t answering.”

  Ms. Burden looked around the kitchen. “Oh, dear,” she said. “I don’t—I’m not sure what to do here. I gave him the only flashlight.”

  I started down the stairs. “No!” Ms. Burden said, sounding more confident now. She grabbed the back of my shirt to stop me.

  “Let go of me!” I said. I tried to turn around, to face her. “Right now, or I’ll—”

  I didn’t know what I would do. She could tell that I meant it, though, because she let go. “You’re not going into the basement, not after what happened,” she said. “I’m calling 911.”

  “No, he’s down there, he needs our help . . .”

  “You can’t do anything for him. We have to call an ambulance, the EMTs. You can’t carry him out by yourself.”

  She was right, unfortunately. She left the kitchen, and I climbed back up the stairs and stood next to Beatriz, saying nothing. Beatriz reached out and took my hand.

  What was I thinking, in the long minutes before the ambulance came? I think now that the answer is nothing, that my mind had become a complete blank. I couldn’t wonder what had happened to him, because the answer might be too terrible, and I couldn’t concentrate on anything else.

  The EMTs came inside, and the small kitchen was suddenly full of people. What sounded like dozens of voices bounced and boomed off the flat sterile surfaces, EMTs calling to each other and talking into their radios. A man went down the stairs and turned on the light at the bottom.

  “What is it?” someone called into the stairwell.

  “We’re gonna need the stretcher.”

  “What happened?”
I asked.

  No one answered. Some of the EMTs went outside and came back with the stretcher. They maneuvered it into the small space and headed down.

  “Could you move your kids into another room, ma’am?” a woman called up.

  “Sure,” Ms. Burden said. “Come on, Ivy, Beatriz.”

  I stood where I was, still holding Beatriz’s hand. Ms. Burden broke us apart—she was surprisingly strong—and pulled us after her into the living room.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  “We have to stay out of the way, let them do their jobs,” Ms. Burden said.

  “We weren’t in the way,” Beatriz said.

  We looked at each other. I watched as she turned pale as paper, as the same thought occurred to each of us. Why wouldn’t they let us see him?

  I couldn’t think about that just now. “We aren’t your kids,” I said to Ms. Burden.

  “What?” she said.

  “That woman called us ‘your kids.’ You should have told her we aren’t related.”

  “Oh, Ivy. They’re busy doing their jobs—I can’t bother them with something so trivial.”

  It didn’t seem trivial to me. I was going to say so, but just then the EMTs came through the living room with the stretcher. I tried to get a glimpse of Philip but they blocked my view—on purpose, I think now.

  They fit the stretcher through the door. Then I heard them slide it into the ambulance, heard the doors close and the ambulance drive off. There was something strange about all of this, something missing, and after a while I realized that they hadn’t put the siren on.

  One of the EMTs came back into the house. “Hi, I’m Marla,” she said. “Why don’t we sit down?”

  “Come on, Beatriz, Ivy,” Ms. Burden said.

  Beatriz and I sat on the flimsy chairs, leaving Marla and Ms. Burden standing. “Well,” Marla said. “It’s bad news, I’m afraid. Your husband—”

  “He isn’t her husband!” I said.

  She looked confused for a moment. “Well, I’m sorry to tell you that he died. He—”

  “No!” Beatriz said. “No, that isn’t true!”

  “I’m afraid it is. We’ll have a better picture later, but for now we think he fell down the stairs.”

  My face felt wet. I put my hand up to my cheek and realized that I was crying.

  “What’s your name?” Marla asked me.

  “Ivy.”

  “And your father—was he your father?” I nodded. “What was his name?”

  “Philip Quinn.”

  “Do you have any tissues?” she asked Ms. Burden.

  “Sure. Just a moment.”

  She got up and came back with some paper towels. Beatriz had started to cry now too, and I handed her a few.

  “And are you—his girlfriend?” Marla asked Ms. Burden.

  “No, she’s—”

  Ms. Burden interrupted me. “No, I’m just a friend of the family.”

  “Do they—can we call their mother?”

  “Their mother is dead, unfortunately.”

  Marla’s expression, already sad, deepened into pity. And immediately I understood that we would see this for the rest of our lives, that everyone we met from now on would feel sorry for the poor orphan children. That they would all think they knew us, based on that one thing, and they would know nothing about us at all.

  “Well, who can we call?” She turned to me. “Did your father ever talk about, well, what would happen if he died?”

  I remembered a talk we’d had, a long time ago. “Yeah,” I said, shredding a paper towel. “He said we’d go to his brother’s family, in Indiana.”

  “Okay, good. Do you know the brother’s phone number?”

  I shook my head. I’d met him a long time ago, but I didn’t remember him very well. Leonard, his name was, a duller, drabber version of Philip. Would we have to move out to Indiana, live with a bunch of strangers?

  Marla suggested that we should go to our house, see if we could find some information somewhere. We went outside and headed for Philip’s car. Ms. Burden went toward the driver’s seat, but Marla reached it first. She opened the door with Philip’s keys and we drove off.

  When we got home, Ms. Burden went into the kitchen and talked to Esperanza in a low voice. I followed her, in time to hear Esperanza say something, sounding shocked.

  “Shhh,” Ms. Burden said to her. “We can’t wake Rantha and Ramis. They’ll have a hard enough time of it tomorrow.”

  They still hadn’t heard, I realized. He was still alive for them. At that moment I envied them more than anyone in the world.

  Ms. Burden headed to the shelf of cookbooks, which was where we kept the phone book. How did she know that, though? Even worse, I suddenly remembered that Maeve’s phone number had been in there. She’d told Philip to take it out, but had he?

  “Let me look,” I said, grabbing the book before she could look through it.

  “What are you doing, Ivy?” she said. She pulled it toward her and turned away from me.

  “I’m the one who should go through it. It isn’t yours, it’s ours.”

  “Let her look, Ivy,” Marla said. “She’ll know better what to look for.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  No one answered. A long time passed, with just the sound of flipping pages. “Here’s something, someone’s name and then the word ‘Lawyer,’” Ms. Burden said “Do you know this name, Ivy? Nate McLaren?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, let’s call him.” She looked at the clock over the stove. “Good Lord, it’s after midnight. Look, I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you and Esperanza go home”—this was to Marla—“and I’ll stay here with the family? I can call the lawyer in the morning.”

  I didn’t want her to stay over; she’d already intruded enough into our life. “Good idea,” Marla said. She looked exhausted.

  She headed for the door. “Call me if you have any questions,” she said as she left. “Or even if you just want to talk. Bye now.”

  Esperanza came in from the dining room. She put her arms around us, and I started to cry again.

  “Pobrecitas,” she said. She stepped away to look at us, and I saw she’d been crying as well. “If you need me, you call me, okay? And I come here tomorrow, see how you are.”

  I nodded, and she followed Marla out the door.

  “Where should I sleep?” Ms. Burden asked, yawning.

  “Not in Philip’s room,” I said.

  I expected Beatriz to object, but she’d caught the yawn from Ms. Burden and couldn’t say anything. “No, of course not,” Ms. Burden said.

  We didn’t have any more rooms, though. Beatriz and I shared one, and Amaranth and Semiramis another, and Philip used the third as his bedroom and office. “On the couch?” I asked.

  “All right,” she said. “Do you have a linen closet?”

  A linen closet? A moment later I worked out that she meant a place for sheets and pillowcases, and I showed her where it was.

  Then we went to bed. I couldn’t sleep, though. Instead, I tossed and turned and thought about everything that had happened, over and over again.

  CHAPTER 8

  “IVY, GET UP,” someone said. “We have to get going.”

  Who was that? I was home, in my own bed, but the person speaking wasn’t anyone who lived here.

  I opened my eyes. Ms. Burden stood over me. And then, like a great gust of wind sweeping through me, I remembered that my father was dead.

  I wanted to curl up and go to sleep, to burrow back into that warm cocoon of unknowing. “Get up, Ivy, please. We don’t want to be late.”

  “Late for what?”

  “I called the lawyer. He wants to meet us at his office. He says he has Philip’s will.”

  “Oh.” I looked over at Beatriz’s bed, but it was empty. “Don’t come into my room.”

  She laughed. “Really? Beatriz doesn’t mind.”

  “Well, stay on her side, then.”

  “Come on,
Ivy, we shouldn’t fight, especially now. We have to stick together, help each other out.”

  Why? I thought. But I threw the covers off and sat up.

  “Oh, and I told Rantha and Ramis about your father,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I said—”

  “I should have been the one to tell them. They’re my sisters, after all. How are they doing?”

  “I don’t know. I think they might be too young to understand.”

  I wasn’t sure about that. Amaranth, especially, was starting to figure out what had happened to Jane.

  I got ready and headed downstairs. My sisters were already at the table, eating breakfast.

  Ms. Burden paced back and forth across the dining room, stopping every so often to look at her watch. “We have to get there by ten o’clock,” she said. “Beatriz, wipe your face—you have jam on it. And Ivy—oh, dear. Is that what you’re going to wear?”

  I’d grabbed the first things I saw, some jeans and a Ducks sweatshirt. “Yeah, why not?”

  “Well, you know, a lawyer is a very—a dignified kind of person. We have to show him some respect.”

  “Why? We’ll never see him after today.”

  “There are conventions, rules. Ways of doing things that people have agreed to.”

  “So? I never agreed to them.”

  She sighed. “Could you please just put on a skirt? For me?”

  “I didn’t shave my legs.”

  That sounded like Piper, not me; he was the one who made personal, vaguely embarrassing comments. I realized I hadn’t felt Piper since . . . since Philip had died. That made sense, though—Piper didn’t like sadness, didn’t seem to understand it.

  Well, that would be a way of keeping him away. Of course I’d have to feel this unhappy, this empty, for the rest of my life. Still, right now I couldn’t imagine anything else. How were you supposed to keep going when your life had broken in two?

  I went upstairs and changed my clothes.

  When we got to the car Ms. Burden took the driver’s seat, Philip’s seat. It seemed wrong to me, a usurper on the king’s throne, but I told myself not to be so melodramatic.

  Ms. Burden drove downtown and then parked and led us into a four-story office building. We took the elevator to the lawyer’s office, and a woman at a desk waved us into the next room.