She shoved the whole thing into her mouth and chewed, wishing it really did taste like cake, wishing she could be wrong about the food situation, wishing there was actually a whole loaf of bread and some packages of ham and cheese lost somewhere in the kitchen mess. What did Gran always say? If wishes were horses, something something something. If wishes were horses, she’d kill one and eat it. If wishes were horses, this house would be a hell of a lot messier than it already was. If wishes were horses, she’d race them in the Kentucky Derby and win all that money because Ivy’s wishes were bigger and stronger than anyone else’s, and maybe nobody else would bet on them, but the person who did was going to be in for one hell of a sweet surprise.
8
Mary Ellen headed north along the Schuylkill River, skirting the Main Line, then emerged from a tangle of interstates onto the straight and orderly Blue Route. Traffic was light; she passed Allentown going about eighty miles per hour. The road was pressed into the earth, land bulging up on either side of it, obscuring her view of what was beyond. There was a dusting of snow on the ground, just enough to give the dead grass a white sheen. She rounded a bend and saw, straight ahead, a mountain stretched across the turnpike. It wasn’t humped or triangular, the way she usually imagined mountains; it was more like a long wall—brown on the bottom and white on top—cutting across the landscape in a perfectly straight line as far as she could see.
Justine’s place was somewhere on the other side of that wall, in what sounded like an odd location for a vacation house: just past coal country, between the Poconos and the Catskills in an economically depressed region called the Endless Mountains. There was no tourism to speak of, which was exactly what Justine liked about it. “No Starbucks, no Holiday Inn, no water parks. Just you and the endless mountains and the woods,” she’d told Mary Ellen. Then she’d shaken her head. “Those poor woods.”
“What?”
“The hemlocks. They’re being eaten by a bug from Asia. So the entire forest is in a state of decay. A tree fell on my house last year—cost me a fortune to replace the glass. But you know, the trees deserve to strike back. We fucked them over with globalization.”
“Oh.”
“Anyway, it’s moody and interesting. I think you’ll like it. And you’re so far from everything, there’s nothing to do but work. You’ll be able to really dig in.”
Hard work was what Mary Ellen had come prepared for, the trunk of the Mini crammed with books and back issues of Artforum and of course, her journal—emergency supplies to prevent mental starvation during the long, dark January evenings. It would be strange, a whole week without electronic media, but she liked the challenge of it, like those juice cleanses her friends were always talking her into. Maybe she’d even enjoy it. Justine had told her the invitation was open-ended; she could stay longer than a week if she wanted to.
She noticed that the oil-change reminder sticker in the corner of the windshield said March 28. Matt must have taken the car in. The wipers looked new too, and the floor mats still had vacuum marks on them. It touched her, this silent undertaking of marital duties. This was what it was all about, after all—once the thrill of sex and the novelty of babies and the complexity of raising adolescents had all flared into life, then flickered out: the knowledge that when you go on a trip your husband doesn’t necessarily understand or appreciate, he will nonetheless make sure you have enough transmission fluid for the drive.
Food too. Matt had filled the back seat with grocery bags, enough supplies to last her the rest of the winter. “Are you expecting the apocalypse?” she’d asked, peering into a bag stacked with cartons of soup.
“I don’t know. It snows a lot up there; they say there might be a big storm at the end of the week. If you’re not going to take the big car, at least you’ll be prepared to sit and wait for someone to rescue you.”
“Justine has a snowplow service. But thank you, and please don’t spend the whole time worrying.” It was typical of Matt to over-prepare. He did a big shop every time snow was in the forecast, even though they lived two blocks from a perfectly good deli.
She was drawing near the long mountain, and now she could see a pair of tunnels punched into the base of it: one round and one square, with a dull cement surround that read LEHIGH TUNNEL. She plunged into the square hole and found herself in a tiled, fluorescent-lit tube reminiscent of a public bathroom. She’d never liked tunnels, and this one, in particular, was giving her that squeezed, helpless feeling of having one’s options suddenly wrenched away. Driving became falling as she sped toward a slowly widening square at the end, just like the swimming pool under a high dive, only in this case her eyes were open, and instead of a crash of water, she was met with a crash of light.
On the other side of the mountain, the landscape was completely white, no patches of dirt or grass showing. The land began to rise and fall on either side of the steady road, small ripples occasionally swelling into waves. Mary Ellen was already starting to feel the solitude—different from the brief moments she would enjoy in her parked car after a long meeting, or sitting quietly at the kitchen table before Matt and the girls got home. This was a weightless, tumbling feeling, with no horizon to fix on. The isolation would be frightening, she knew, if she thought about it too much or tried to resist. It would invite painful thoughts to take hold, thoughts she had no interest in entertaining. Her father’s accident had happened more than a year ago. It was time to move on.
Justine, of course, had insisted that the isolation would be good for her. “Artists need to quarantine themselves,” she’d said. “It’s the only way you can strip away all the bullshit and access your purest ideas.” Mary Ellen had no idea where to find her purest ideas, or how she would even know once she did locate them, but this trip was going to force her to figure it out.
Her family had been less enthusiastic about the idea of a week without internet or cell phone service. Sydney and Shelby had physically recoiled at her description of the house, and Matt had protested that it was dangerous.
“I’ll be fine,” Mary Ellen said. “People survived before cell phones, you know.”
“But, Mom,” Shelby had said, nervously fingering the zipper on her puffer vest. “No internet? I feel like you’re going to prison. Are you going to be all right?”
Mary Ellen started to wonder if she shouldn’t do this more often. Apparently, it was her steadfast reliability that had earned her family’s collective indifference. Now she had them worried and confused, which felt comforting. She remembered the way Shelby and Sydney had clung to her when they were toddlers, clamped onto each side of her torso with such strength that she didn’t even need to hold them up. Whenever Matt tried to carry one of them, the unlucky child would moan and cantilever her body into space, stretching her arms toward Mary Ellen like a flying squirrel about to take off.
She hadn’t minded the clinginess; she’d actually relished it, all those years before puberty and sports took hold. On the weekends, she would dress the girls in matching tutus and take them to dance class, or accompany them to Build-A-Bear birthday parties. Work was less intense in those days; she’d been able to take afternoons off when the preschool needed a parent chaperone for a trip to the zoo. Some days she’d pick them up at lunchtime and take them to tea at the Rittenhouse Hotel, or hair-bow shopping at the Spruce Street Bowtique. They were beautiful girls; Mary Ellen loved dressing them in elaborately accessorized outfits and French braiding their hair, and the twins blossomed in the light of her attention.
The GPS ordered her onto I-81; billboards and gas stations sprouted thickly along the roadside as she passed through Wilkes-Barre and Scranton. After a few miles, she turned onto a smaller road and found herself rolling past one-story ranch houses with long driveways and elaborate inflated Christmas decorations. The road began winding, climbing and plunging, as the houses thinned out and the scenery grew more bucolic. The area actually reminded Mary Ellen of parts
of Vermont, in a slightly scruffier, less whitewashed way. She hummed along to the radio, feeling her mood lift as the car wound its way up a boulder-studded mountain.
The GPS said she’d arrived, but she didn’t see anything. She was supposed to look for a large tree with reflectors and a house number nailed to the trunk. Mary Ellen drove slowly, scanning the trees, but they were skinny, not large, and bare of house numbers. She found a wide spot in the road and turned around. Justine had given her the exact GPS coordinates, so this had to be the place. She noticed a gap in the forest, so she stopped the car and got out to peer into the woods. There it was: a narrow dirt road, which she assumed was the driveway, zigzagging down the hill.
As she inched the Mini down the snowy slope, Mary Ellen wondered if Justine had called the snowplow company as promised. She might have forgotten; after all, Justine never came here in the winter, preferring to spend time at her cottage on Sanibel Island—one of the many spoils of her divorce. Maybe, Mary Ellen thought ruefully, Justine would offer her the beach place in August, when it was one hundred degrees and humid, or in October, during hurricane season.
The car was actually doing fine; it had decent tires, and the snow wasn’t that deep. She eased it around the final switchback and came to a stop in front of the house.
The place was pure Justine: a sophisticated sculpture of a house, clad in artfully rusted metal and vast swaths of glass. It was all edge and plane, unsentimentally intruding on the mountain’s rough form, the snow’s mounded softness, the trees’ feathery boughs.
Glancing at the paper where Justine had written her instructions, Mary Ellen walked to the far left corner of the house and gingerly felt around behind the foundation. She pulled out a vitamin B12 bottle. It was empty. She shook it, stupidly, as if this would make the key magically materialize.
Mary Ellen felt her sense of adventure curdle into annoyance. She did not want to get back in the car and drive back to Philadelphia. Nor did she feel like searching for a locksmith in the middle of nowhere. Damn it, Justine. The whole free-spirited bohemian thing was great until it was time to remember things like getting the driveway plowed and leaving the house key in its designated spot.
Mary Ellen sighed and returned the bottle to its hiding place. She straightened and crossed her arms, considering the riveted expanse of metal. Stepping over a drift of snow that had gathered on the front stoop, she tried the door handle. It opened. Mary Ellen knocked her boots against the edge of the door, then entered the house and felt a gust of warm air. The kitchen counter, at the far end of the room, looked cluttered. She drew nearer, her boots squeaking on the bamboo floor. Then her breath caught in her throat. Open cans, dirty dishes, and empty soda bottles were piled on every surface, with what appeared to be shirts and socks wadded among them. Mud and forest debris streaked the floor, and the stainless-steel restaurant-style refrigerator was dull with greasy handprints.
Mary Ellen turned slowly toward the large main room. Art books were scattered across the floor, their jackets tossed aside, and a bath towel slumped over one side of the dining table.
She backed slowly away, pulling her phone out of her coat pocket. No signal. She’d have to drive toward town until she got to the spot with cell reception, then call Justine and deliver the news that—what? A squatter was living in her country house? There was no car outside; no recent footprints that Mary Ellen had seen. Could it be that the person was long gone?
“Hello?” Mary Ellen went back to the kitchen and looked more closely at the cans. They were scraped dry; so was the spoon. A piece of deli paper was tinged blue-green with mold. She went to the long, glass wall and looked down onto the deck. The snow, fluted along the grooves of the deck boards, was uninterrupted by footprints.
Mary Ellen picked up the towel on the dining room table and held it to her cheek. Dry. Balls of tissues spilled across the sofa and onto the floor; more deli containers were stacked on the floor against one window. She heard a sound from downstairs: the sucking slide of a patio door. She went to the window and saw a girl, all flying hair and flapping shirttails, run stumblingly across the deck and into the woods.
Mary Ellen went downstairs. The den was strewn with clothes; an empty soda bottle lay on the floor. She looked out the sliding glass door at the footprints running across the deck. The girl hadn’t been wearing a coat. And—was this even possible? Mary Ellen could have sworn she wasn’t wearing any shoes.
9
The snow was fighting her, pulling down her pants, sucking off her socks. Ivy needed to get away from the snow the way you escape a dog or a bear: up a tree. She could see the little tree house, but she seemed to be in a nightmare, because it kept drawing away from her no matter how hard she ran. It couldn’t be a nightmare, though. This was the most awake she’d felt in weeks. Needles were stabbing her feet, flames licking her hands. What was happening? She couldn’t remember.
It was so hard to hold on to a thought these days, so hard to stay tethered to reality during this feverish, vomit-soaked dream. She stumbled, fell to her knees. The snow attacked her hands, and she cried out. She got up and lurched toward the tree house, clutching the waistband of her thin cotton pants. This was the one with a blanket, she was pretty sure of that. The one upstream of the Dumpster house, down the hill a bit. The one with the dirty magazines and the dirtier blanket.
She couldn’t get up the ladder. She managed to clamp her fingers around the rough wooden crosspieces, but the ground kept leaping up to grab her. She raised one foot onto the ladder, her wet sock drooping over the end of her foot. She bounced a little, then heaved her weight up and over that foot, one arm reaching up to hook an elbow around the next rung. She rested a moment but knew she had to keep moving before everything turned to spaghetti and she fell backward into the snow.
Next foot up. She couldn’t feel it touching the ladder, just a dull sort of pressure at the bottom of her leg. “Come on, Ivy,” she muttered. “Up.” Each time she got a foot onto a rung, it would take a few bounces to straighten her knee, and then she’d feel her weight sway backward and she’d have to gather every ounce of strength into her arms to pull herself back against the wood. Her breaths were coming faster and faster, her head feeling lighter and lighter.
Finally, with a squeezed kind of moan—nnnggg—she heaved her belly onto the floor of the tree house and swung a knee up behind her. After a moment, she pulled the rest of her body across the floor, sat up, tugged off her wet socks, and wrapped the stiff, dusty blanket around her legs and feet. She hugged her knees and rocked back and forth, white puffs of breath blooming from her mouth.
Stupid. Stupid. What did it matter if Agnes saw her like this, all sweaty and dull-eyed? Ivy could make her understand; she would fill her in on the plan. It was silly to hide from her. If only she’d had a chance to comb her hair, change her clothes. No more soap; the sliver had slipped down the drain. Agnes would make that face, but whatever. The important thing now was to rest, so she could get her head together when it was time to talk.
They’d talk in the morning, when light began to soak through the hem of sky above the trees. Now everything was going black. The threads of the sheets were sugared with broken glass, and something was coming in the night and cutting her hair, but if she didn’t move, she’d be safe. Safe as houses, Gran always said, safe as Dumpsters, safe as swinging crystals in filthy cars. Crystals were growing all over her body. She could feel them flowering hungrily; she could hear the tinkle and clank through the darkness. And then, without warning, everything hardened into silence.
10
Mary Ellen stepped onto the deck, holding her phone up in the air. No signal. She spun around, walked the length of the deck, waved the phone back and forth like a flag. Nothing. She stared at the path of footprints leading into the woods, her head buzzing with alarm and indecision. Part of her wanted to run to the car; part of her thought the shoeless girl must be half-frozen by now. She felt confuse
d. Who, exactly, needed saving? She jammed the phone into her coat pocket and went inside, where she fetched a long knife from the kitchen. Best to hedge her bets.
The footprints zigzagged a lot, yielding occasionally to what appeared to be hand- and knee-prints. They were easy to follow, having been punched clearly through the icy crust on top of the snow. Mary Ellen’s large, heavy boots obliterated the prints as she matched the girl’s stride, trying to imagine the story behind this barefoot flight.
The prints led to a ladder, which led to a deer blind jutted against a tree, about six feet up. Mary Ellen stopped a few yards away, watching.
“Hello?”
She coughed.
“Are you all right?”
She gripped the knife, waited a moment, drew a few steps closer.
“It’s a little cold to be out here without shoes.”
The trees were creaking; the forest sounded like an old wooden ship. Mary Ellen pulled herself up the first few rungs of the ladder so she could peek into the blind. The girl was asleep under a muddy blanket, her wet socks off to the side, her long hair covering her face.
“Excuse me?”
Mary Ellen dropped the knife in the snow, then pulled herself up farther and reached her hand in to touch the girl’s leg. She didn’t move. Mary Ellen climbed into the little structure, knelt next to the girl, and brushed her hair back.
“My God.” She pulled off a glove and pressed two fingers against the girl’s neck, but the angle was awkward, and her fingers were turning icy and insensible against the girl’s bluish skin. She shook the girl’s shoulder. “Can you hear me? Can you wake up?” She patted the girl’s cheeks, shook her again. She found the girl’s hand under the blanket and squeezed it, but it didn’t squeeze back. It felt like cold rubber. Mary Ellen sat back on her heels, breathed out a long, white cloud, then raised a hand to her mouth and closed her eyes.
The Runaways Page 10