The twins glanced at each other, then down and away.
“I mean, don’t be too eager to please. Sometimes I feel like, if you’re just trying to do what everybody expects of you, you miss out. Maybe you end up over here”—she jabbed her hand toward the fireplace—“when you would’ve been a lot happier out there.” She pointed out at the patio. “I don’t know.”
“So you’re saying we should let our freak flag fly?” Sydney said, licking her spoon.
“You do you?” Shelby contributed.
“Right. You do you.” It occurred to Mary Ellen that this conversation was ridiculous; her daughters’ generation considered self-expression and rugged individualism to be their God-given right. They didn’t need to be told not to let someone else order their steak. As far as she could tell, they didn’t need much of anything—from her, anyway.
“Excuse me, I have to…” She got up and found her way to the bathroom. There was a small love seat in an alcove beside the sinks; she sank down and rested her forehead on one hand. She was remembering more now, not just the bloody steak but the rest—the way Daddy had brought up the cost of tuition. The way he’d warned her against wastefulness. Time, money, connections in Philadelphia… They were all precious, and not hers to squander. “You can draw pictures any time. You don’t need a college education for that,” he’d said. “Put your creativity into something more useful.”
Which was exactly what she’d done. Mary Ellen used her creativity every single day: convening focus groups to study the difference between the words safety and trust. Drafting a two-million-dollar budget for the point-of-sale rebrand. Assembling PowerPoints. Tallying travel expenses. Spinning tales about her emergence from childhood into this glorious grown-up life.
She leaned her head against the wall and tried to take some deep breaths. These kinds of thoughts had been coming to her more and more since her father’s death, and they felt like a terrible betrayal. It was as if something inside her had been set loose, something blackhearted and selfish. If this was the way she grieved, she wanted no part of it.
Of course everyone had regrets; everyone wondered who they’d be if they’d taken the other job, married the other guy, boarded the next train. But there wasn’t anything you could do about it—life traveled in one direction. If Daddy were here, he’d tell her to stop her navel-gazing and try taking up tennis. It was unconscionable to use his death as an excuse to wallow in self-pity.
She closed her eyes and pictured her parents in their inflatable easy chairs, spinning slowly across the pool in their modestly landscaped yard on the Main Line, fingers loosely intertwined, navels safely tucked away. If they ever complained about anything, it was swaddled in a thick blanket of tipsy humor. “It was so funny,” her mother would chortle, “the way that radiologist was staring at my blouse. The last thing he needed was a new X-ray machine!” Mary Ellen grew up understanding that “so funny” was usually code for something unsavory, but the code protected them, insulating them from prickly revelations that might puncture those floating chairs.
And the truth was, Mary Ellen loved her parents’ equanimity; it was something she’d cultivated in herself. Why make life harder than it already was, they’d always said, and they were right. When something had happened with her father’s secretary—what, exactly, Mary Ellen would never know—there had been a few evenings without happy hour, when her mother had locked herself in her bedroom and refused to make dinner. But eventually, she’d pulled herself together, and to Daddy’s and Mary Ellen’s great relief, things quickly returned to normal. In fact, happy hour wasn’t just reinstated; it began earlier and lasted longer.
Mary Ellen stood up and looked in the mirror, smoothing her hair and running her fingers lightly under her eyes. The secretary situation had happened during her freshman year of high school, which meant she was now the exact age her father had been at the time. The incident had never been spoken of and was never, as far as she knew, repeated. Always an enthusiastic collector of Audubon prints, Daddy had suddenly decided to take his hobby to a new level, traveling to auctions and visiting dealers every weekend, causing small wrinkles to appear between Mommy’s eyebrows when she reviewed the checkbook register. “It’s his stress relief,” she would sigh, and it was only now that Mary Ellen recognized that some sort of silent bargain had been struck.
It seemed to work; they were happy together for many years. Then Mommy died of a heart attack in her sleep, leaving Daddy alone with his Audubon prints for nearly a decade. He’d seemed content; Mary Ellen had visited him several times a week at first, then on occasional weekends. Things had been so busy around the time of his accident that she hadn’t been to the house in nearly a month. The neighbors had called the police when they noticed the newspapers piling up.
Mary Ellen shook her head and washed her hands thoroughly, with lots of soap, and held them under the dryer until her skin began to burn. Don’t dwell on it, she told herself for the thousandth time. You’ll ruin everything.
She returned to the table, where Sydney and Shelby were engrossed in their phones. She refrained from making a comment about devices at the table, knowing what the answer would be—what it always was. Muddy sneakers in the living room? “Dad lets us.” Going to school in pajama pants? “Dad lets us.” Oh sure, she’d taken a stand a few times, on the big issues (boys sleeping over, underage drinking), but on the whole, Matt made the rules while Mary Ellen was at the office.
“It’s going to be strange when you’re gone,” she mused, resting her cheek on her fist. “Just me and Dad in that big, old house.”
“Less laundry,” Shelby pointed out.
“Dad’s probably going to try to get you to take up squash or something, so he has someone to coach,” said Sydney.
“Ha,” Mary Ellen half laughed. “No chance.” She picked up a butter knife and polished it with her napkin. “I’ve been thinking, actually, that I need to do something artistic. Seeing those studios today, I don’t know. It brought back a lot of memories.”
“Like painting?”
“Maybe.” Mary Ellen frowned. “Or photography? There’s a class at UArts I’ve been thinking about.” She’d received a brochure about the class a few weeks ago, and after a brief fantasy about becoming one of those artsy continuing education types, she’d tossed it into the recycling. Now, though, it occurred to her that it might be helpful to have a distraction—something tidier than painting, perhaps, but still creative. A chance to reconnect with that long-haired girl she hadn’t thought of in so many years.
The twins nodded, then their eyes wandered back to their screens. Mary Ellen sat watching them—the way Shelby’s eyebrows pinched together in a way that reminded her of her mother; the way Sydney’s cheekbones were beginning to emerge from her face’s girlish softness. They seemed so much older than she’d been at this age, so much more complete. Maybe they weren’t the exact people she’d expected to end up with, but they were their own people, after all. The best thing she could do for them was to just stay out of their way.
“Will there be anything else?” asked the waiter. The girls looked up from their screens, faces blank. “Dessert?” They shook their heads.
“Thanks,” Mary Ellen said, “but I think we’re all done.”
3
The graduation tassel, Ivy noticed, was hanging at a crazy angle from the rearview mirror, pointing toward the car’s back window instead of the floor, like in one of those optical illusion rooms at the carnival. She wasn’t sure how the car was managing to hang on to the side of the ravine at this angle, but she figured her only way out of this was to take her foot off the brake and stomp on the gas and hope like hell the car could pull itself back up onto the road.
Ivy sucked in her breath and lifted her foot, but before she could stomp on the gas, the car began to roll, fast, like she was being sucked down the throat of the forest, into its cracking, roaring guts. The back of
the car caught on something, but the front insisted on continuing, turning the car across the slope, which, in gravity’s view of things, was an inefficient way down. So with a groan, the car heaved onto its side, throwing Ivy onto the driver’s side door, dollar-store cookies raining on top of her, and then the roof creased inward as something reached up out of the mountain and put a stop to the slide.
“FUUUCCCKKK.” She was curled up on a bed of broken glass, the door handle digging into her hip, her head pushed forward by the bent-up roof. The car made no sense—windows where seats should be, the dashboard sideways, the steering wheel pressing into her thigh. Ivy turned her head slowly, experimentally, and saw red leaves and scraps of white sky through the passenger window. “Fuck,” she whimpered, hiccupping with a sort of gasp-sob combination. She pulled her arm out of the glass crumbs and grabbed the steering wheel, hoisting herself into a crouch. The motor was still running, so she found the keys and switched it off. She reached up to the passenger door and pulled on the handle, but she was too far away to push the door up. Lowering one of the armrests in the middle of the seat and bracing her knee against it, she pushed herself upward against the door, which was as heavy as a drunk. She lowered her head and pushed with her upper back, unfolding her body as the door heaved upward into the sky.
Ivy swayed there like a jack-in-the-box for a moment, trying to sort up from down. The car was mashed against a large tree. She couldn’t see the road at the top of the brambly slope. The only sound was the rushing water about ten yards below her. No sirens, no shouts, no dogs. Ivy crouched on the remains of the driver’s side window and picked some cookies out of the mess, shoving them into her hoodie pocket under her jacket. She found her wallet between the driver’s seat and the window. The soda bottle was behind the driver’s seat, but she couldn’t get her arm past the crumpled roof and couldn’t move the seat because the lever was crushed against the door. She tried the passenger seat and managed to get it pushed forward enough to allow her to squeeze her arm into the back of the car and snag the bottle with her fingertips.
Pulling herself out of the car, she dropped to the ground beside its weirdly upturned belly. She sidestepped down the slope to the creek, which was busying itself among some boulders, oblivious to Ivy’s noisy arrival. The water was clear and fast moving; she wondered if it was okay to drink it. She cupped her hands and slurped a little. It didn’t taste like mud, so she drank some more. The taste was sharp, metallic. It scraped the sugar from her mouth and chilled her insides. Ivy lifted handful after handful to her mouth until her stomach felt like a balloon. Then she emptied the orange soda bottle, rinsed it, and filled it with more water.
She looked up toward the dirt road, craning her neck to see some sort of break in the slope. It was so steep even the trees couldn’t hang on; they were lying all over the place in various states of rot. In some spots, the ground wasn’t even the ground. It was more of a wall, stripped free of ferns and leaves, like a freshly scraped knee, roots snaking out of the raw-looking dirt.
She couldn’t see the road, but she knew it was up there somewhere, and that it was her only hope of finding her way out of these woods. She wasn’t sure what she’d do once she got there, though. Hitchhike to a bus station? Steal another car? The gaping uncertainty—combined with the thought of climbing the steep, muddy slope—wore her out. She decided to walk along the creek until the way up became more obvious.
It wasn’t easy; the creek kept eating away at the bank, forcing Ivy up the slope, her thin Converse useless against the sliding leaves and moss, the bottle of water throwing her off-balance. She considered ditching it, but she’d seen plenty of I Survived episodes about people lost in the wilderness after their car broke down or they took a wrong turn hiking. They always wished they had a bottle of water.
Climbing farther up and across the slope, she found a shallow stream sliding thinly, sluggishly toward the creek. She turned to follow the trickle upward, digging her feet into the softened banks. After she climbed for a while, her gaze caught on something silvery: the foil of a cigarette package half-buried in leaves. A little farther on, she found a matted shoelace, then a plastic grocery bag. Ivy stopped walking and looked up the slope. A colorful smear of beer bottles, soup cans, broken toys, batteries, and tampon boxes stretched up the mountainside to the edge of the dirt road. Here and there, trash bags slumped against tree trunks. A few yards from where she stood, facedown in the trickling stream, lay a bloated diaper scrawled with pastel-colored teddy bears, its edges tinged greenish-brown.
“Christ.” Ivy gave her water bottle a disgusted look, then dropped it among the trash—happy to be relieved of its weight but not its comfort—and picked her way upstream. A raindrop struck her cheek and slid down, cooler and brighter than a tear; then, a few more tapped lightly on her hoodie. The forest began to tick like a clock, leaves nodding and trembling as water drops struck and rolled their way down.
Where the rise met the road, Ivy had to seek out thick-stemmed ferns and saplings to hoist herself onto the flat track. She lay there facedown in the dirt for a minute, breathing hard, the rain beginning to soak through her jeans. She could hear something ringing out in the distance. Dogs. She raised her head, then got to her knees, but she couldn’t tell which direction the barks were coming from. They’d only be using dogs if they thought she was on foot, and they’d only know she was on foot if they’d found the car. If they’d already found the car, she was screwed—it wasn’t that far behind. But the dogs sounded so distant she couldn’t imagine they had anything to do with her. She wiped her hands on her jeans, got to her feet, and started to walk.
The barking was getting louder, but she couldn’t tell if she was closing in on the dogs or the other way around. The dirt track had left the slope’s edge to climb over the top of a rise and wind through some scrubby trees. Here and there, bright-red-and-yellow shotgun shells poked out from among the ferns.
She saw movement out of the corner of her eye, off in the tree shadows: something bigger and meatier than a falling leaf or a nodding branch. She stopped to stare into the trees, but the rain was dripping into her eyes, smudging her vision. She stood for a moment, licking water off her top lip, waiting for something more, but aside from the subtle jostling of leaves by the raindrops, the woods were still. She was seeing things.
Ivy hurried on, telling herself to stay cool. She couldn’t understand this road, its lack of purpose, its aimless wandering, but one thing was sure—it was taking her closer to the dogs. The track wandered down off the rise, then hopped another small gully and bent around to the left. Ivy slowed at the sight of a rusted-out school bus parked in the trees. The barking was coming from behind it, loud and panicky. She moved to the far edge of the road and took a half step forward to see a house farther back in the trees, behind the bus. It was small, half covered in baby-blue siding, half in pink insulation, a door and two windows punched in its front wall without much ceremony. Two black dogs were springing off the chain-link sides of a pen, raising their chins to bark toward the sky, which rained down echoes over the whole mountain.
The scene reminded her of the half-invisible people living around the edges of Good Hope, where they burned trash in shed heaters and strung up deer hides in their yards like big skin sails. There was a wildness about them that made people nervous. Ma had always warned Ivy to stay away.
Ivy backed up, putting the house out of sight again behind the bus. Moving slowly, she edged into the woods and back down toward the creek, giving a wide berth to the bus and the dogs and the general feeling of redneck meanness hanging in the air.
She was about ten yards down the hill when she heard a man’s shout, then the ring of a boot against chain link. The barking trailed off into whines. Ivy plunged straight down the hill, sliding through sodden mats of leaves and hopping over branches. When she got to the creek’s mossy bank, she forced herself to turn and look up to the road, but there was nothing to see other than
rain-darkened tree trunks and occasional leaves slapping wetly to the ground.
Ivy found a narrow spot in the creek and sidestepped the length of a fallen tree, then hopped over to a rock and a thatch of leaves, and finally just splashed the rest of the way across the creek bed. On the opposite bank, she started running, her jeans wet and heavy, her feet sinking into mud flats and wanting to leave her shoes behind. She was shivering wildly, which made her arms and legs all jerky, and she fell once, then again, her hands and knees sinking into the mush and a low howl escaping her clamped jaw. Then the bank shrank into the slope and she was forced upward once again, scrabbling along the wall of the ravine like a half-stepped-on cockroach.
Finally, she found a wider, more level area leading back to the creek side, and when she got down there, she saw flat rocks lined up in a sort of path. There were NO TRESPASSING signs nailed to trees here and there, and the stones led to the slope and began marching upward in what was definitely a rough staircase. She climbed them slowly at first, then sped up, deciding she didn’t care where they went, relieved to be walking on something hard, something regular, something that fought back against the forest’s slippery mystery with some kind of good sense.
Above her head, a building loomed out of the hillside like a shoebox about to fall off a shelf. Ivy’s eyes were streaming with rainwater, so she couldn’t make much of it. When she finally got to the top step, her breath lunging out of her throat in thick, rasping clouds, she wiped the wetness from her face and took a good look.
It wasn’t like any house she’d ever seen. It was made of huge boxes that looked like shipping containers, or Dumpsters, stacked on top of each other and wedged into the hillside. The boxes were made of rusted metal, with entire sides cut away and filled with glass. Two long boxes faced one way, and two shorter ones were set perpendicular, at the end, making an L. A wide deck of nearly black wood, no railings, stretched out from the base of the house, ending where the earth dropped away.
The Runaways Page 4