The Runaways

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The Runaways Page 8

by Sonya Terjanian

Ivy peered into the car. Hanging from the rearview mirror was a delicate silver chain that ended in a crystal sphere, which caught the morning light and bounced tiny shards of it around the grimy car. “Sure.”

  The man grunted and rolled up the window, and Ivy went around to the passenger door. The car smelled like cigarette smoke and grease; there was trash everywhere. Ivy had no choice but to put her feet on a pile of newspapers and McDonald’s bags.

  “Where to?” The man coughed. The heat was blasting out of the vents, and sweat shone on his forehead.

  “Eaton?”

  “I’m going as far as Agloe. Eaton’s another thirty miles.”

  “Agloe then.” The man didn’t look at her, just started driving. Ivy pulled the socks off her hands and stuffed them in her jacket pockets. “Is there a bus station in Agloe?”

  “Nope.” He dug in his pocket, pulled out a handkerchief, and wiped his face.

  So she’d get some food and call Asa before figuring out the bus situation. She watched the crystal sway from the rearview mirror. It was a gift to Ivy’s tired mind, that kind of weird detail. She started chewing it over: maybe the necklace belonged to the guy’s granddaughter, a little girl who loved him more than anybody, who didn’t care about his cloudy eye. She gave it to him to remember her by when her parents split up and her dad took her to live with relatives in Mississippi. “Come see me, Grandpa,” she’d said when she dropped it into his calloused hand. “Come down to Mississippi.” And every day he worked hard and saved his paycheck for gas money so he could do just that.

  Or maybe this was his sister’s car, and he was borrowing it while his truck was in the shop, and she was going to kill him when she saw how dirty it had gotten. Ivy mulled over the possibilities for a while, watching the trees rush by, until finally sidewalks appeared, and then driveways and houses.

  “I can let you off at the Price Chopper, unless you need to go somewhere else.”

  “No, that’s fine.”

  They pulled into the parking lot, and Ivy began to prickle all over at the thought of buying food. “Thanks a lot,” she said, getting out. She thought about asking the old man about the crystal, but he didn’t look like he was in the mood for conversation.

  Inside, there were Christmas decorations dangling from the ceiling and bins of plastic candy canes. Ivy took a basket and wove haltingly through the aisles, looking at prices and trying to figure out how to spend the least amount of money on the largest amount of food. She picked up a box of Pop-Tarts, frosted apple caramel, and stood transfixed for a moment by the picture on the box. Crystals of sugar sparkled on top of a coffee-colored caramel shell. She put it in her basket.

  She found her way to the produce section, where there were orange slices sitting in a plastic sample bin. Ivy took one and tore the bursting flesh from its peel with her teeth. The sudden acidity burned her mouth, but then it turned sweet. She took another one, then another. After the fourth one, she looked up and saw the man with the cloudy eye watching her.

  Ivy lowered her head, wiped some juice from her chin with the back of her hand. She dropped the orange peel into the bin on the floor, then took some bananas and went to the register. Her total came to $6.56. She asked the cashier to change another dollar into quarters.

  When she got outside, the air bit at her cheeks and small, hard snowflakes were falling. She found a pay phone right outside the door, and it worked, crazily enough. Ivy dialed Asa’s cell, realizing that she didn’t even know what day of the week it was. He was probably at school, with his phone turned off. But it didn’t go straight to voicemail, and after a few rings, he picked up.

  “Asa, it’s me.”

  “Oh my God, Ivy, you crazy bitch!”

  “Hi.” A dumb smile burbled through her lips at the sound of his voice. She pictured him sitting in his Honda during lunch, joint pinched between his fat fingers, bag of burgers beside him on the passenger seat. “Miss me?”

  “Where are you?”

  “Montana.”

  “No fucking way!”

  “Not really. But I’m headed there. I think I am, anyway.”

  “Did you really steal Mrs. McFadden’s car?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You crazy bitch. Oh my God.”

  “Asa, what’s everybody saying?”

  “About what?”

  “You know…about me. What I did.”

  She heard him inhale deeply, hold it for a moment. Then his words came out in a hoarse whisper. “I don’t know. You know.”

  “What?”

  “That it’s too bad.”

  Ivy flicked the coin return flap in and out. “What’s too bad?”

  “When are you coming home?”

  “Why are they saying it’s too bad? What does that mean?”

  “You know, that you fucked up like that.”

  “I did not fuck up.”

  “Well.”

  “No, Asa. I fucked McFadden over. I did not fuck up. I’m getting out, unlike the rest of you losers.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “Sorry. Not you.”

  “Okay, okay, God. I just think everybody’s kind of bummed that you, of all people, hadda go that route. I mean, they’re going to haul you in. You know that.”

  “No they are not, Asa. I’m not getting caught, okay? I’m out of there. I’m gone. I’m not the kind of person who can stay in a place like that and take care of sick people for the rest of my life. Okay? I’m not that…that kind of person.”

  “Aww, come on. You’re—”

  “No, Asa, stop. Jesus.” Ivy tucked the phone between her shoulder and her ear and tore into a packet of Pop-Tarts, her hands stiff with cold. The crystals of sugar weren’t nearly as big or sparkly as they looked in the picture, but she broke off a piece and shoved it into her mouth, chewing furiously. “Have you talked to Agnes or Colin?”

  “Colin came over here looking for you. That was before the cops called and said you were in Pennsylvania.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I…” More inhaling. “I said I didn’t know where you were, and I was really sorry.”

  “Sorry? Asa, don’t be sorry. You should be happy for me!”

  “Well, I am sorry. I’m sorry you’re a car thief now and that you’re gonna go to juvie and have a record and everything’s going to be harder for you now.”

  “Oh, please.” Ivy pulled the socks out of her pocket and shoved her hands into them. “I told you I’m not getting caught.”

  “Everyone always said you were the smart one. The one who could actually get out and do something with your life.”

  “That’s what I’m doing, Asa. Jesus.”

  “No, like going to college and stuff.”

  Ivy held the phone out, tilted her head back, and shouted at the sky. “Oh my gawwwd.”

  “C’mon, Ivy, we’re all just worried about you.”

  “Worried?” She coughed out a hard laugh. “That’s great. How come you weren’t worried about me back in Good Hope? Don’t you know what was going to happen to me there? College or no college, I was going to end up stuck at home for the rest of my life, broke as hell, working some crap minimum-wage job, taking care of my ma and gran, changing their diapers, and by the time they died, my life would be over too. Don’t worry about me now, goddamn it! Be happy for me!”

  “But, Ivy, they’re your family. Are you at least gonna tell them where you are?”

  Ivy shook her head, feeling the familiar blackness crowd her chest. “I’m done,” she said. “It’s eat or be eaten, Asa, and I was about to be eaten alive. This is how I am, okay?”

  “No it’s not.”

  “Yes it is, Asa, fuck. Why can’t anyone just accept me the way I am? Jesus fucking Christ.”

  Some girls who were coming out of the store, the very picture of slutty Southside girls, widened t
heir eyes at Ivy’s cursing. One of them noticed the socks on her hands and nudged her friend, and they laughed. “Think this is funny, bitch?” Ivy yelled, but the girls didn’t realize this was directed at them. They laughed some more.

  “Ivy?” Asa said.

  “This? This is funny?” She held up one sock-covered hand, now balled up into a fist, feeling a delicious, comforting rush of adrenaline gallop through her veins. “Bitch? Fuck you. Yes, you. You too.”

  “Ivy!” Asa said, louder this time. “Who’re you talking to?”

  “These bitches! And you too, Asa!” she yelled, slamming down the phone, throwing down the grocery bag, and advancing on the girls with her fist slung back. The girls screamed and backed away, one of them frantically scrabbling in her bag and pulling out a phone. “I’ll fuck up your face with this, then see how funny it is, you basic bitch,” Ivy cried.

  “Call the cops!” the other girl yelled, cowering behind her friend, who was fumbling with her phone.

  “I’m trying to!” the girl with the phone whined.

  Ivy lunged forward and slammed her fist into the phone, sending it flying onto the pavement. She pulled her fist back again, and something caught hold of it from behind. She whipped her head around to find the man with the cloudy eye gripping her wrist, hard. He tipped his head in the direction of his car. “Let’s go.”

  “You’re going to pay for that!” the girl screamed, diving after her phone.

  The man swung his grocery bags into the back seat of his car, and Ivy tore off her backpack and got in the passenger seat. “Take me to Eaton,” she begged. “Please.”

  “Can’t,” the man said. “It’s an hour out of my way, and a storm’s coming. Plus, I think I got the flu.”

  “Shit.” Ivy covered her face with her hands.

  “I can take you back the way you came.”

  “I don’t want to go back the way I came.”

  “I can drop you at the edge of town, but it’s a big storm. Gonna snow all night.” He coughed wheezily, sounding like Ma.

  “Shit.”

  “Don’t you have a place to stay?”

  “I have a place to stay. I just really don’t want to go back there.”

  The man pulled out onto the road. “Well, maybe you oughta go back there, least till the storm’s over.”

  The crystal swung from the rearview mirror, but the sun had gone behind the low, gray clouds so there wasn’t much light for it to toss around. Sirens moaned in the distance, and Ivy scrunched low in her seat. “Okay.”

  She waited until he’d gone a little past the big tree at the turnoff before telling him to stop. “I can walk the rest of the way,” she said, looking around her feet. She groaned. “My Pop-Tarts! Oh my God. I left my food back there. I’m such a dumbass.” She banged her forehead against the window.

  The man reached into the back seat and rustled through his grocery bags, then brought one of them up front. “I was gonna give you this anyway. Seemed like you could use it.”

  Ivy looked inside the bag, then wound the handle around her hand, embarrassed. “You didn’t have to—”

  “It’s okay. I gotta go.”

  “Thank you.”

  She waited until his car had disappeared around the bend, then backtracked to the turnoff. It was snowing hard now. She should’ve asked him what day it was. Was it Christmas yet? She should’ve asked him for some money. She should’ve asked him what happened to his eye, and why he had that crystal hanging in his car.

  Back in the house, she opened the Price Chopper bag and spread its contents out on the counter. Most of the food was from the deli: Egg salad. Pasta salad. A loaf of bread, some slices of ham and cheese. There was a bag of chips and a bottle of store-brand soda. Looking at it all sitting there should’ve made Ivy happy, but instead, it made her heavy with some kind of sadness she didn’t understand. Nobody had ever done anything like that for her before. That man had a heart different from what you’d find in Good Hope: something that took light and threw it back at the world.

  Ivy wiped her eyes, then took a spoon and began shoveling egg salad into her mouth. She peeled some slices of ham off the butcher paper and shoved them in too. People back in Good Hope were too caught up in their own problems to help anyone out. And if they did try to help, like McFadden supposedly did, it was only to make themselves look good. “Everyone’s got an angle,” Gran always said, and she was including herself in that. When Ivy’s dad died in the plant explosion down in Big Flats, Gran moved in to help with Agnes and Colin and, three months later, baby Ivy. But she made it clear she was only doing it for the free room and board, her own husband having died of cancer a year earlier, leaving her nothing but medical bills and a scabbed-over gash of grief.

  Ivy took after Gran; that’s what everyone had always said, and it was true. In old pictures, Gran was the spitting image of Ivy, pale and thin with stringy blond hair, her squinty-eyed smile held close like a secret.

  Ivy was nine or ten when she overheard Ma telling Gran she had a black heart. They’d been fighting about money, as usual, and the money fight had turned into a fight about Ivy’s dad. Gran said, as she often did, that it was Ma’s fault he’d died, because she was the one who’d made him take that factory job.

  “You have a black heart,” Ma had answered, her voice low and shaky and full of truth.

  It had stuck with Ivy—the image of Gran’s heart like a rotten piece of fruit, oozing sticky juice, a haze of fruit flies all around it. And it was true that Gran never went out of her way to be nice to anybody, that she was tough and mean, her anger like a bird trapped in the house, hurling itself against windows and flying straight at your face if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ivy had inherited it all—the temper, the blackness.

  She cracked open the soda cap and chugged half the bottle. She crossed over to the couch and lay down, curling up on her side, watching the snow through the giant window. It didn’t fall so much as it swirled, like smoke, gusting sideways and upward and around in circles.

  Ivy had started really understanding the nature of her heart soon after Ma’s sickness got bad. An ugly mood would come over her every time Ma asked her to carry the laundry basket or get the cast-iron pan up onto the stove. Guilt would come next, and then the blame. If Ma would just get better, things could go back to normal. It wasn’t long before the whole uncomfortable swirl of feelings gathered itself into a wicked tornado. She hated Ma for moving so slow; she hated her for hacking up stuff in the bathroom every morning. She hated her for forgetting to ask about Ivy’s math test, and for falling asleep in front of the TV without coming to say good night. Most of all, she hated Ma for making her feel this way, for forcing her to see her black heart, even though seeing it—embracing it—was what had finally made it possible for Ivy to break away.

  Ivy closed her eyes, letting her tears pool between her cheek and the couch leather. It was time to get serious. She had to make herself a promise and never, ever break it, no matter what happened. She’d never go back. She wouldn’t even look back. No more calling home. No more wishing and wondering. From this point on, it was just Ivy and her dream. That was all she needed. It was all anybody needed, really, to get by in this world.

  6

  “Do you have any Numbitol on you?”

  “Yes. I already took some.”

  “You should drink a lot of water too, before you go to bed.”

  “I know. I will.” Mary Ellen cooled her forehead against the car window, trying to calm her dizziness as the lights of Girard Avenue raced by. The backs of her legs hurt. Matt seemed edgy, his jaw tight, his foot heavy on the gas and the brake.

  “I still don’t understand why you went to this thing,” he said. “Who were all those people? Did you know any of them?”

  “They’re Justine’s friends. She wanted me to meet some new people.”

  �
��Don’t you have enough friends? I mean, we’re already in dinner party debt to, like, thirty people.”

  “I know.” Mary Ellen closed her eyes. She longed to go home and go to sleep, but at the same time, she dreaded waking up the next morning for the inevitable headachy reckoning. She was sure she’d embarrassed herself in ways she wasn’t even aware of yet. It would only come to her in the cold light of morning. “I don’t think I’m going to be friends with any of those people.”

  “You smell like smoke.” Matt stopped too abruptly at a stop sign, and Mary Ellen winced as her forehead knocked against the window. “And that woman, Justine… I don’t understand what’s so great about her. She seems so full of herself.” Matt had met Justine once—once—after picking Mary Ellen up from class one night.

  “She’s smart.”

  “And proud of it.”

  “Well, anyway, I think she’s interesting, and she knows interesting people. But yeah, I was a little out of my element. And I drank too much. God.” She laughed, fogging the window. “I even told Justine I’d go stay in her mountain house for a little while…for an ‘artist retreat.’” That conversation, barely an hour old, felt as though it had happened years ago, back when she was young and stupid enough to think she could actually leap from one life into another.

  “What?”

  “I mean, I’m not going to do it.”

  “Oh. Good.” He drove silently for a moment. “Considering how busy things are for you at work—”

  “Don’t worry.” Mary Ellen knew Matt would be alarmed by the idea of her running off to the woods by herself. He hated any change in behavior or routine; he was at his happiest when everyone was playing their assigned position.

  “Go on up to bed,” he said when they got home. “I’ll bring your water upstairs.”

  “Okay,” Mary Ellen said, steadying herself on the newel post. “Sorry about all this. Thanks for coming to get me.” Matt slung his hands in the pockets of his sweatshirt and gave her a half smile. She took this as a sign that he was no longer annoyed and smiled back, a smile that she hoped held reassurance and gratitude and a measure of her own forgiveness. Then she turned and went up to bed.

 

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