“Sure, I guess.” Mary Ellen shrugged. “So you ran away from home?”
“Not really. I have someplace I need to be.”
“Well, how old are you?”
The girl rubbed her cheeks with both hands. “Eighteen.”
“No you’re not.”
“I am.”
“You’re too young for me to let you just wander off into the woods.” Mary Ellen sipped her coffee. “But you can’t stay here. I’m supposed to be working on my photography, not taking care of some…kid.”
Rose’s face clouded over, then she straightened up. “You’re a photographer?”
“Well…yes.”
“I could tell this was, like, an artist’s house. All the books and stuff, and the paintings,” she said.
“Right.” Mary Ellen wrapped her cold fingers around the mug. She hadn’t seen any paintings.
“I guess that pays pretty well, huh.” Rose swept her eyes to the side in a gesture that encompassed the furniture, the light fixtures, the leather sofas.
“Photography?” Mary Ellen laughed. “Not really. No.”
“So you do something else?”
Mary Ellen took her mug into the kitchen and rinsed it out. The girl’s curiosity was like a flashlight aimed straight at her face. Mary Ellen didn’t feel like going into it all—her boring job, her predictable life. She’d come here to get away from all that. “I do what most artists do,” she said, returning to the table. “Teaching…consulting. Freelance art reviews.” Her face turned warm, but there was also a pleasant flutter in her stomach, a flicker of excitement. “And I did pretty well in my divorce.” She moved her hands under the table, twisted off her wedding rings.
“Oh.” The girl nodded slowly. “No kids, I guess. I mean, it doesn’t look like a place you’d bring kids to.”
Mary Ellen shifted her weight on the hard wooden bench. Clean, uncluttered rooms…vast expanses of glass…a view uninterrupted by swing sets or soccer goals. “I prefer a more unfettered lifestyle,” she said. “Like now. This trip was very spur-of-the-moment. A gallery in Philadelphia is thinking about offering me a solo show, but they want to see some new work. So I came here to work on my portfolio. I’m playing around with some ideas about agency and intentionality.” Rose’s face screwed up in confusion, and Mary Ellen waved her hand. “Never mind, sorry. Sometimes I forget that not everyone likes to read critical theory.”
“Yeeeah.” Rose yawned and stretched her arms.
“You must be tired.”
“Kind of, yeah.”
Mary Ellen studied the girl for a moment, trying to decide what to do next. She seemed harmless enough, and Mary Ellen didn’t feel like trying to get her back into the car. “Why don’t you take a nap,” she said. “I want to go for a walk, take a few pictures. We can talk more later about what…to do.”
After Rose went downstairs, Mary Ellen dropped her rings into a zippered pocket on the side of her wallet. This didn’t feel like a betrayal any more than coming to this house felt like leaving her husband. She was just taking a break from her life, auditioning for a part. Was she credible as an artist, as the owner of this house? Could she make a place for herself in this world?
She took out her Nikon and sat at the table, wiping it carefully with a cleaning cloth, inspecting the lens for dust. She peered through the viewfinder at the treetops outside the window. The hemlock boughs bounced lazily in the breeze, releasing light puffs of snow. It was a relief, actually, knowing she could inhabit this world not as herself, but as a person who belonged here. She might even learn something—a different way of looking at the world, or a better understanding of what it all meant. Maybe, as Justine, she could even let go of the things that were weighing her down—her job, the situation with Matt and the girls, her father’s accident—and approach her photography from a place of clarity and peace.
Feeling a surge of excitement, Mary Ellen pulled on her coat, gloves, and boots, shouldered her camera, and opened the door. After pausing a moment, she turned back to pull her wallet from her purse and slide it into her pocket.
Outside, she walked around the side of the house to the back deck, still pocked with footprints from the day before. She went to the edge and looked down the slope, which was perilously steep, black rocks and fallen boughs poking up through the snow. She could barely see the creek at the bottom, just a grayish flattening of the landscape where it was frozen at the edges, a narrow black stroke down the middle. The sound it made was like a cold wind blowing through dead leaves.
Mary Ellen moved back toward the middle of the deck, wondering why there was no railing. Someone could so easily trip and fall over the edge, then plummet to the bottom. She followed the path of footprints off the side of the deck and into the woods, where the top of the snow was littered with needles and broken-off branches. All around her, trees leaned against each other like drunks at a party; some, snapped in half, bent to the ground, their upper branches held out stiffly to break the fall. Mary Ellen raised her camera a few times, but couldn’t think where to aim it, her mind still preoccupied with the strangeness of the cluttered woods, and of the girl, her unexpected companion.
She found it hard to walk and look at the same time because the ground was so uneven, the snow concealing holes, sharp sticks, and rocks. Her boots crashed noisily through the icy bracken; she stopped every few steps to reassure herself that she was alone. She came to the deer blind where she’d found Rose the day before. It was crude—just a box on legs, a flat roof raised above the box on two-by-fours, the ladder nothing more than a few crosspieces nailed across the legs on one side. Mary Ellen approached it from behind her camera, her finger resting on the shutter, unsure what to do. One corner of the blind was hammered roughly into a tree, but it was hardly camouflaged, its yellowish wood glowing against the background. She climbed inside and found the dirty blanket as they’d left it and Rose’s socks, now stiff with ice.
Mary Ellen knelt on the blanket and peeked out. She tried to imagine what Justine would make of the scene, what importance she would assign to the black branches against the white snow, the gray shreds of sky visible through feathery fronds. She turned to study the crushed beer cans, the magazine fanned open in one corner, dead leaves sprinkled over its fleshy pages. There was something sinister and depressing about the scene; it seemed like ideal subject matter. But the minute she began thinking about the ideas represented within the gloomy juxtapositions—nature and man, hunter and hunted—the ideas immediately became stale and embarrassing. She didn’t even want to try squeezing off a few shots, because doing so would be a failure—an invisible failure, yes, but one with the power to demoralize her, which would imperil her creative process.
She climbed out of the blind and walked on, keeping the ravine within sight so she could find her way back. She tentatively raised her camera a few times but never pressed the shutter, her finger paralyzed with uncertainty. She reassured herself that this was normal; it was only her first foray into the woods, and she was distracted by thoughts of the girl. There would be plenty of time to think about what kinds of pictures she was going to take.
She couldn’t remember it being that way in college, despite all the distractions of campus life. She’d spent hours in the painting studio without ever running out of ideas, probably because she didn’t know enough to understand how immature her attempts were. It had been so fun, so absorbing; she could remember losing track of time, missing meals, losing sleep, painting until her wrist ached, painting until she felt dizzy from the fumes and the colors and the exhilarating rush of creation. She’d painted almost without thinking, and that had showed, of course. The work was amateurish and boring. But that was the trade-off, wasn’t it? She was older and wiser now, with more intellectual ambitions, and so the work would have to happen more slowly. Deliberately.
She replaced the lens cap and slung the camera over her shoulder. He
r thoughts turned back to Rose. She wondered what she could be running from, and where she might be headed. It worried her, the way the girl had taken off into the snowy woods, not even saying goodbye, just fleeing like a frightened animal, like that jumpy deer outside the window that morning. The poor girl must be escaping something terrible. If Mary Ellen took her to the police, they’d probably send her right back where she came from. Maybe that wasn’t the best idea. Maybe she should back off a bit, give the girl some space, let her tell her story. Rose could probably use another day of rest, and if Mary Ellen could figure out what her situation was, it would be easier to decide what to do.
She brushed some snow from her hood and turned back toward the house. She wasn’t sure how long she’d been gone, but Rose would probably be waking up soon and wanting lunch. For such a small person, her appetite was enormous.
11
Something about this lady didn’t add up. The way her hand hesitated before she opened a drawer. The way she peered into closets. The pearls in her ears. The sweaters and corduroys a full size larger than the clothes Ivy had found in the dresser.
Ivy put an ear to her bedroom door, listening until she heard the lady come downstairs and leave through the sliding glass door. She waited a few more minutes, then went upstairs and watched the lady through the window. She seemed to be wandering aimlessly. She’d take a few steps, look around at the trees, bring her camera to her eye and then walk on, zigzagging through the snow. Ivy couldn’t imagine what her deal was, but it didn’t matter much. She’d brought tons of food, and she’d given Ivy some pills that were like a miracle drug, calming her fever, easing the piercing ache in her joints, pushing her off into a warm pool of sleep without any of those pouncing, slicing thoughts that had plagued her for what—weeks?
She’d also brought a car—a sporty little thing that looked like a toy. And a purse, which Ivy located by the front door. There was no wallet inside, though, just a phone. Ivy turned it on and examined the wallpaper: a picture of a family in front of a heavily decorated Christmas tree, Mary Ellen right there between two blond girls, wearing a bathrobe, not looking one bit divorced, just tired and kind of unsure what to do with her mouth.
So she was a liar. Maybe the cops were after her—like they were after Ivy. (Or Rose, the stupid-sounding alias she’d come up with in the nick of time, remember that the cops were probably hanging WANTED signs all over the place with her name on them.) The lady didn’t seem squirrely, though, just vague and kind of self-conscious. Maybe she was crazy; maybe she had Alzheimer’s or whatever, and she’d escaped her nursing home and come here thinking it was her house. But how could she have found the place, once Ivy had thrown away the numbers that were nailed to the tree? She must have known where it was.
Ivy shook her head and dropped the phone back in the purse, then went to the kitchen and filled some grocery bags with food. She checked all the windows, making sure the lady hadn’t circled around to the front door. She gathered the bags of food, took the car keys out of the lady’s purse, and quietly left the house. She got in the front seat of the car and, after taking a deep breath, turned the key in the ignition.
Nothing happened.
She turned it again. Nothing.
She searched around the steering wheel for the lever that would put the car in Drive, but it wasn’t there. Looking around some more, she noticed that there were too many pedals, and a knobby stick with numbers on it right in front of the parking brake.
She’d heard of this. Her cousin Thomas had one of these cars; he’d offered to teach her how to drive it, but she never took him up on it because his acne was so bad she didn’t want to be stuck in a car with it, and besides, what was the point? Ma’s Taurus was a regular kind of car.
“Fuck,” Ivy muttered, breathing on her hands, which were white with cold. Maybe the answer was in the pedals. She tried starting the car with her foot doing different combinations: pressing the left and right pedals, center and right, left and center. On this last one, the car startled awake. “All right all right all right,” Ivy said, laughing a little. The gear knob had numbers on it; “one” seemed like a good place to start. She pushed the knob in the direction of the number, and after some fiddling, it slid into place. “That’s right,” she said. “That’s right.” All she needed to do was follow her gut, and everything would work out.
It was not obvious how to get the car to actually move. Every time she let up on the left pedal, the car quit. She kept it mashed down and pressed on one of the other pedals, but this just made the engine race and howl. She stopped periodically and scanned the woods, hoping Mary Ellen wasn’t nearby. It was clearly going to take a lot of pedal-mashing and engine-racing to get this figured out.
The heat was pumping out of the vents now, and Ivy was starting to sweat. She tried different numbers on the shifter, but that always caused the car to die. She fiddled with all the buttons and knobs she could find, switching on the windshield wipers and turn signals and the radio and everything else. She tried different pedal combinations, which only made the car jolt into silence. Finally, she leaned forward and rested her forehead on the steering wheel and cried.
She just wanted to leave. She was so sick of this place, where time seemed to be frozen and you couldn’t move forward or backward or anywhere at all. She wanted to get away—from the woods, from the snow, from this weird lady she couldn’t understand or trust. And now that she had a chance, a golden ticket, she couldn’t cash it in because of Thomas and his acne. Why couldn’t he have used some motherfucking Clearasil?
She cried for a while, pounding her forehead against the leather-clad steering wheel, feeling the black rot of hopelessness creep inside the car and wedge itself between her situation and her dreams. More hitchhiking, more hunger, more cold and frustration. Was it impossible, what she was trying to do? Would Gran call her a dumbass for thinking she could make it all the way out west on her own, for imagining that someone like her could create a life out of nothing?
Ivy leaned her head back. Yes. Gran would say it was dumb, and so would everyone else, because that’s how they were in Good Hope. They couldn’t imagine anything better for themselves. Going back, giving up, accepting the life she had coming to her—that was the dumb thing to do. Ivy hit the steering wheel with her fist, doing her best to summon the energy of anger, which seemed more faded than usual, probably because of the sickness. She sighed and gathered the bags of food from the back seat. She brought everything inside, returned the groceries to the fridge and the cabinets, and dropped the keys back in the lady’s purse. She checked the windows one more time—no sign of Mary Ellen—and went downstairs.
At this point, she figured, she had two options: walk up to the road and hitchhike to the bus station, or get the lady to give her a ride. A ride was better, obviously, if she could just get Mary Ellen to drop the idea of turning her over to the cops. She couldn’t figure out an angle for doing that, though. Normally, Ivy could size up a person’s worldview and play to it pretty quickly, but Mary Ellen was a different story. She was weird, cockeyed. Ivy couldn’t tell which side to come at her from.
Ivy pushed open the lady’s bedroom door, scanning for clues. She knelt beside her suitcase, which was large and filled with basic older mom clothes, stuff McFadden would wear. Khakis and thick sweaters. High-waisted cotton underwear and flannel pajamas. Underneath it all, Ivy found a package of pads that looked like they were for your period, except the box said for moderate leakage, which she was pretty sure meant peeing.
There was also a cardboard box of boring-looking books about art and photography, and a laptop. Ivy tried going on the laptop, but it was password-protected and nothing she tried—1234, MaryEllen, crazylady—worked. She put the computer down and picked up a leather-bound journal she’d found tucked among the books. She opened it to a random page.
Today in class: Clive Bell—“Significant Form”—aesthetics cleansed of content/narra
tive. A pure experience of art that is timeless, universal, and autonomous. Purity absolves the artist of self-exposure, self-absorption…what Justine calls “the infantile inward gaze.” This week we’re supposed to focus on shape, composition, balance. Maybe I’ll do some still lifes. Too staged? It might be better to find existing compositions—less contrived. I think Justine would have a stroke if I came to class with a picture of some carefully arranged fruit. “Stop trying to make things pretty!!!”
Ivy rolled her eyes and flipped to another page.
Shelby wants to get microdermabrasion. At her age! With her perfect skin! The girls are so focused on the wrong things. At this point I don’t even know if they want to go to college. They seem so disengaged. I suppose it’s my fault, our fault, for bringing them up in this exclusive little private-school bubble.
She snorted, shaking her head.
I guess I grew up in the same bubble. It took me this long to realize I need to break out of it. I wish the girls were more open-minded. I think Sydney could be some sort of artist, a writer maybe. She has that imagination. I just wish she would listen to me… Whenever I try to encourage her or give her advice, she swats me away like I’m some kind of annoying gnat. I guess I am annoying. I just don’t want the girls to make the same mistakes I did. I want them to go to college and explore and learn and try things out until they really figure out what they love to do—and not end up stuck in some kind of meaningless corporate track.
She read a few more pages, absorbing the details of poor Mary Ellen’s horrible life, her photography class, her spoiled kids, her ramblings about art. It was starting to make sense, the way her edges seemed all blurry. It was like she’d decided she didn’t want to be Mary Ellen anymore.
Ivy slammed the journal shut and shoved it back into the box of books. The lady was crazy, all right; it was the very definition of crazy to have everything you could ever need in life—a nice car, a fancy Christmas tree, a “private-school bubble”—and feel like your life was a failure. Ivy felt the low fizz of irritation begin to spill over into anger as her thoughts turned once again to the cold walk ahead of her, the heartless road, the dodging and panhandling that lay between her and the life she longed for. Fuck that lady.
The Runaways Page 12