Ivy used the last strength in her trembling thighs to climb up onto the deck, then she slowly approached the glass wall of the lower story. Everything was dark and still. She cupped her hands around her face and pressed it against the cold glass. A hard-looking couch. Two armchairs. A row of low, glossy white cabinets covered with books. “What the fuck,” she muttered. This house didn’t seem to belong in these unruly, wet woods, but at least it didn’t appear to be owned by a gun-toting meth addict. Was it empty? Could she steal a few dry, protected moments on that couch?
Ivy followed the deck around to the side, hopped off, and walked up the slope to the front of the upper box, which was bordered by a leveled-off lawn that bled back into the forest a little way from the building. At one end of the main box was a glass door crowned with a rusted metal awning. There was a dirt road off to the left, maybe a driveway, slicked over with wet leaves, a few spindly baby trees poking up here and there. Not much traffic, Ivy guessed. Not lately anyway.
She turned back to the house and tried the front door. Through the glass, she could see a raincoat hanging on a hook and a row of rubber boots and clogs. She shoved the door with her shoulder, knowing it was useless, just shoving out of frustration. The day was edging toward darkness. The awning kept the rain off, but not the gloom.
It didn’t have the look of a year-round house. No grill on the deck, no chairs in the grass, no beer can set down and forgotten for a day or two. A settled feeling. Ivy felt around the top of the doorframe, checked the crannies where the awning met the wall. She found a big rock a few yards away and lifted it, pressed her fingers into the crawling dirt underneath. She thought for a moment about just heaving the rock through the glass door, then told herself to be cool, to use her brain. If it was a vacation house, there was probably a key hidden somewhere, right? You wouldn’t want to drive all the way from the city and realize you’d forgotten your key.
Ivy focused on the stacked stone foundation, following it along the house to the far corner, where it widened as the ground dipped away. A canoe was tipped against the short side of the house, no paddles anywhere around. There was a gap in the foundation at the corner, where a downspout was pouring water like a faucet. She knelt down to look underneath, but it was too dark to see. She slowly stretched her hand into the darkness, biting her lip as she patted the ground behind the stones. Her hand met something smooth, plastic. A bottle. Vitamin B12. Something metallic rattled inside.
She took out the key and tucked the bottle back where she’d found it. She ran to the door, her hands fluttering, her whole body quaking with cold and hunger and a sudden surge of fear. More than the police, more than the dogs and the shouting mountain man, she felt chased by the darkness, which was bearing down fast.
Inside, she lunged for the light switch. Her breath filled the entryway with clouds of steam. She stripped off her jean jacket and put on the coat that was hanging by the door. Featherlight and plasticky, it didn’t do much against the cold. She found a thermostat on the wall and set it to eighty; air started whistling through metal vents in the floor with a smell of burning dust.
The house was wide open and glassy, like a fish tank in the treetops. Some of the floor-to-ceiling windows were on tracks, like sliding doors, with thin, silvery cables stretched across to keep people from falling out. At one end of the L was the kitchen, all red, as slick and shiny as the maraschino cherries Agnes liked to eat out of the jar. Ivy started slamming through cabinets. Pots, pans, plates, glasses, some dried pasta, and a couple of cans. A jar with a picture of a knife spreading chocolate on a piece of white bread. Ivy opened the jar and scooped out some soft chocolate on her finger, then added a finger, digging out huge dollops of the stuff, filling her mouth with thick, sticky gobs. It was like peanut butter, only richer; it was like fur-lined mittens, swimming pools, and twenty-four-carat gold all mixed together. Ivy felt dizzy. She put the jar down and wiped her fingers on a stiff towel. She opened another cabinet and found a box of organic rice crackers, which she ripped open.
Mouth full of crackers, she went through the rest of the drawers and cabinets. There were some mini bottles of tonic, something called wheat beer, and three big bottles of fancy water. There were gadgets—blending things, chopping things, mixing things—like the place was some kind of restaurant. Heavy, rough-looking plates and bowls that didn’t stack right, cups and glasses so light and thin you could crush them in one hand. The fridge stood open, dark and silent, a box of baking soda its only inhabitant.
A long, ash-gray wooden table divided the kitchen from the living room; low backless benches ran along the sides. The living room was just as bare, with matching leather couches, like the seats of an old car, facing each other over a plain glass coffee table.
It was weird: these people had money, but no clue how to spend it. If she had the cash, she’d buy the most deliciously fluffy couch she could find, maybe one of those sectionals with the long chair at the end. A couch you could disappear into for hours, wrapped in a thick blanket, watching movie after movie on your big flat-screen.
Ivy went downstairs and rummaged through a closet, where she found life jackets, paddles, and a pair of ugly sandals with nylon straps. No sleds, gloves, goggles, or shovels, though, and no coats either, besides the rain jacket she’d found by the front door. So it was a summer place. That was good. That gave her all kinds of time.
She found her way into one of the bedrooms. The bed faced a glass wall looking into the forest. The sky had gone dark purple behind the trees, turning them into black, feathery silhouettes. Ivy flicked on the light, and the trees disappeared. The room looked a little more lived-in than the other ones: silk flip-flops by the bed, a pearly gray bathrobe hanging on the back of the door. There was a stack of books on one of the night tables, and a long row of them across the top of the white cabinets, their spines stamped with big, one-word names: Duchamp. Twombly. Pistoletto.
She flicked on the light in the bathroom and blinked at her reflection in the mirror. Her pale cheeks and neck were tentacled with wet hair, her forehead streaked with mud, her thin shoulders lost in the black raincoat. She hardly looked like a brazen car thief; more like a drowned rat. Ivy wiped her face with a towel and let the coat drop to the floor. In the bedroom, she pulled open a drawer: plain T-shirts. Another drawer: thin pajama bottoms. She changed quickly, then shrugged on the gray bathrobe.
Still shivering, she pulled the robe tight and sat on the bed, running her hand over the comforter. Like everything else in this place, it was smooth and airy—not like the gritty, pilled blanket on her bed back home. She crawled under the comforter, turning toward the stripe of light coming through the bathroom door. The pillows cradled her head lightly; the blanket settled gracefully over her bones. For a brief moment, her mind flickered with worry, but then she closed her eyes and gave the worry away.
Sometime later, Ivy jolted awake, scrambling to put things together. Her cheek was sweaty against the pillow. She sat up and saw the shape of a person vaguely outlined in the glass wall—her reflection, she realized, after a gut punch of fear. What had woken her up? She wasn’t sure if she’d heard a snapped branch or a growling dog, or both, but her pricked senses told her something was moving outside, that it was sniffing at the glass, that it was there for her.
The bathroom light was putting her at a disadvantage—she couldn’t see anything outside, while she was on full display—but darkness didn’t feel safe either. She sat frozen for a few more minutes, then reluctantly got out of bed and reached through the bathroom door to switch off the light. She crept to one corner of the window and pressed her face against the glass.
It wasn’t shadowy darkness or starry darkness or movie-theater darkness out there; it was darkness she could only describe as the end of everything. Nothing and everything compressed over millions of years into a hard chunk of coal that turned itself inside out again and again until it was gone. Ivy got back in bed and hid there, bl
anket pulled up to her eyes, ears straining and raw. The heat whistling through the floor vents made a hollow, faraway sound. Somewhere upstairs, water dripped onto metal.
Ivy’s nighttime fear was quiet, creeping, as shapeless as smoke. It didn’t howl or leer or threaten; it didn’t shoulder the front door or break bottles outside the window. There was nothing to yell at, nothing to scratch or kick or elbow in the nose. It had no name, no weight, and that made it so much worse than any other fear because it left her powerless and lost. If only she could hear Agnes breathing deeply in the bed next to her; if only Gran were down the hall. If she could just climb into bed next to Colin, tuck herself under his arm, and sway along with his deep, sleepy breathing until the fear went away.
She lay listening for what felt like hours, terror slowly congealing into boredom, then inching toward oblivion.
And then somehow, she was staring dreamily into the skinny pines, the carpet of ferns confettied with morning light. The bed was wide and warm, the room’s soft colors slowly waking up along with her. Ivy stretched under the comforter, seeking out cool spots and unclenching her joints. What had she been so scared of? Look at everything that waited for her: a shower, clean clothes, food. She could brush her teeth, pee in a toilet. Nobody knew she was here. The idea that someone or something was lurking outside the glass was crazy; she just wasn’t used to the peace and quiet of nature.
She hugged one of the pillows, a bubble of laughter rising in her throat. She’d done it. She was gone, free, nothing but a memory and a story. She imagined the buzz of excitement running through the school hallways: the oh shits and the get the fuck outs, the muffled laughter outside McFadden’s office door. Ivy could always be depended on for entertainment—jumping naked into Brick Pond, flipping off the Southside girls—but this? This would become the stuff of legend. Remember Ivy? She was bigger than this place. Other people are all talk, but Ivy was different. Crazy, sure, but you gotta hand it to her—the girl had guts.
Ivy rolled onto her stomach and spread her arms wide, embracing the firm mattress. Beyond the shower and the food lay other possibilities. She’d stay here as long as she could, letting things blow over. Then she’d hitchhike to the nearest bus station and buy a ticket to the most westward point she could afford. The car had been useful, sure, but its New York plates had become a liability, and she had a better shot at disappearing without it. She was going to need money, obviously—$52 probably wouldn’t even get her as far as Chicago. But she’d make stops along the way, working at gas stations or walking dogs or panhandling if she got desperate. She felt excitement sparking in her brain once again, the same jittery exhilaration that had come over her when she first roared out of Good Hope in McFadden’s car, leaving behind all the sickness and despair, leaping toward the life she was meant for.
She rolled over. For now, she needed to get a handle on her current accommodations. “Stickin’ your nose in,” Gran would call it when she’d catch Ivy reading a note taped to a neighbor’s car or listening out the window to an argument in the street. Ivy knew Gran hated her curiosity. “Keep to yourself and don’t borrow trouble,” she always said. But Ivy couldn’t hear sirens without looking to see which way they were going; she couldn’t sit on the bus without trying to figure out who was going to see their parole officer and who was going to family court. That tired-looking lady nodding off while a baby played with her hair—was that the ma, or the grandma? That guy sitting in a nest of empty soda bottles and plastic bags inside his car—was he living there, or just messy? And that girl with the busted-looking weave and stoned half smile—what the hell was she doing with a brand-new iPhone?
The bedroom drawers held shorts, T-shirts, and lightweight cargo pants in colors from beige to gray to off-white. Gap, Banana Republic—rich people’s bumming-around clothes, as soft as baby blankets. There weren’t any men’s clothes to be found, or kids’. The bathroom was stocked with shampoos and soaps and lotions Ivy had never heard of: Aromatherapy Almond-Sage Rinse. Sea Salt–Orange Peel Scrub. Kelp Butter. There was a guitar in the downstairs sitting room, and a basket holding a tangle of cords and adapters for charging just about any device ever made. But as far as she could tell, there was no TV. Anywhere.
It was weird—not just the absence of a TV, but the lack of anything tied to an actual person with a beating heart. Newspapers, ashtrays, embroidered pillows, grocery lists, Hallmark cards, dried-up pens, commemorative shot glasses—none of it. The place was as bare as a rock.
Even the basement was empty, except for a cabinet holding paintbrushes and tubes of paint. Leaning against the wall, under a sheet, were some small and medium-size canvases. Ivy tipped a few of them forward, browsing the pile only long enough to decide that whoever had painted them had a sick sense of humor. It was the kind of stuff Asa would probably like—crazy modern art, not even trying to be good, just trying to be as ugly and in your face as possible. A colorful fuck you to the world. She shook her head, wondering what kind of person would be so hard-edged and reserved upstairs, and so pissed off down here in the basement.
She let the sheet drop back over the paintings, then went up to the kitchen. She took all the boxes and cans of food out of the cabinets and spread them on the counter. She pushed the packages around, grouping them, thinking them over. She could probably do okay for a month, getting by on pasta and beans and a couple of crackers a day, with a little of that chocolate spread to take the edge off. There were two granola bars per packet; she could eat half a bar for breakfast every other day, and they’d last her for twenty days. Just enough time for them to call off the search.
She walked along the windows, scanning the woods in all directions. No other houses to be seen; no roads either. She went downstairs and rummaged through the clothes, pulling out the warmest outfit she could find. Everything was too big, but she rolled up the pants and tucked the shirt in the waistband. She tugged on her hoodie, then her jean jacket, still damp, on top of that. Upstairs, she put on a pair of rain boots.
Outside, she tucked her hands under her armpits and circled the house, then walked into the woods for a bit, scanning for signs of neighbors. There weren’t any other houses around, but NO TRESPASSING signs seemed to form some kind of boundary around the house. After passing the signs, she caught sight of something square, wooden, and man-made through the hemlocks. It was some kind of platform with plywood walls, nailed into the crotch of a tree. Ivy wondered if it had been put there by kids living nearby, but when she climbed into the wooden box, she found crushed beer cans, an empty shotgun-shell box, and a jerk-off magazine. Hunters.
She jumped out of the tree house and went back the way she’d come. When she got to the Dumpster house, she headed up the driveway, which switched back and forth a few times up the steep hill—long detours that Ivy avoided by cutting straight up the slope. She stopped a few times to catch her breath, looking down toward the house, which was disappearing among the pines. After twenty or thirty minutes, as she was starting to wonder how long a driveway could be before you had to just call it a road, she heard what sounded like a car. She climbed some more, and soon she was sure of the sound: tires on asphalt.
The spot where the driveway joined the road was steep and hidden in the brush. A large tree off to one side was studded with red reflectors and a house number, 1465. Ivy stepped behind the tree and peeked out at the road, which had a narrow shoulder and only one middle line. As she stood there, two pickup trucks passed. Their breeze washed over her warm face, and she felt some of the worry lift from her shoulders. This was a road that was going somewhere. It led to dollar stores and soup kitchens, to gas stations and pay phones, to a place where she could get in touch with Asa, just to let him know she was okay and find out what everyone was saying.
Ivy ran her hand over the tree trunk. It was craggier than a pine tree, the bark deeply creviced and glazed with pale-green flakes. She looked up into its branches, which bowed sturdily over her head. She was
n’t cold anymore. She reached around the trunk and grabbed a reflector, dug her fingertips under its edges, and pulled. It came out of the bark easily. She pulled the next one out, then the third, then pried away the four digits of the house number. She wound up like a pitcher, leaned back, and threw the numbers as hard as she could into the brush.
4
Mary Ellen returned to Philadelphia from UNC with a renewed passion for her work. Or if passion wasn’t the right word, determination—to make the best of the lot life had handed her, at least until her retirement funds were vested.
After a few weeks of forced enthusiasm for a logo project she knew was nothing more than a year-end budget-hedging spree, Mary Ellen’s determination began to wane. Getting out of bed in the morning felt like pulling herself out of a tar pit. She found herself putting off projects until the last minute, which was completely unlike her. On her way to her office, she would rush past her team’s cubicles, avoiding eye contact, pretending to be too busy to stop and talk. When her assistant brought her a mug of tea without being asked and awkwardly reached out to pat her hand, Mary Ellen knew something had to change.
“You need a hobby” would have been her father’s advice, so she decided to look into evening classes. The University of the Arts Continuing Ed program offered a number of photography courses, but by the time she got around to registering, there was only one class with any seats left: Agency and Intentionality in a Post-Representational World.
The class was mostly theory, with a long and intimidating reading list, but this suited Mary Ellen’s needs perfectly. She bought a pack of colorful highlighters and used them to illuminate her texts. She came to class prepared with lists of questions and did her best to apply the theory to her weekly photography assignments. Whenever the teacher mentioned an art show she liked, Mary Ellen would make a point of going to see it over the weekend.
The Runaways Page 5