The Runaways

by Sonya Terjanian

  Ivy looked over to the black windows, then back at Mary Ellen. “Oh, come on,” she said. “You think we’re so interesting? Two white girls cooking chicken?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t like them knowing we’re here alone.”

  “Oh God.” Ivy laughed. She got up and went to the window, waving her arms. “Hey, rednecks, free shows nightly!”

  “Rose—”

  Ivy waggled her butt back and forth, doing a little dance, watching herself in the reflection.

  “Rose, come away from there.”

  Ivy started doing a little striptease, pulling her hoodie down slowly off her shoulders. The expression on the lady’s face, which Ivy could see in the glass, was hilarious. She dropped the hoodie to the floor and began lifting the hem of her T-shirt. Was there really someone out there watching? Ivy felt the skin on her arms prickle at the thought. She cocked one hip to the side as she slowly raised the shirt past her waist. She wasn’t wearing a bra.

  “Rose!”

  Ivy dropped her shirt, bent, and swept the hoodie off the floor. “Sorry,” she said, sitting back at the table. “I’m just kidding around. The whole time I’ve been here, I’ve never seen anyone out there. No footprints either.”

  “Still.” Mary Ellen’s nostrils were flaring. “I don’t know why you would—”

  “Sorry, sorry.” Ivy reminded herself to stay on task. The lady was looking skittish, like there were questions forming in her mind that she hadn’t bothered asking before. “Sometimes I act silly. I don’t know why,” Ivy said. “It’s like I’m making up a character or something. It’s immature, I know.”

  “Huh.” Mary Ellen took the dishes into the kitchen and came back to the table with the gin bottle. “Maybe hold off on playing that particular character while we’re in here alone, you know? Don’t borrow trouble.”

  “Okay.” Ivy twisted her fingers around themselves. “My ma says that. ‘Don’t borrow trouble.’”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah.” Ivy calmed her fingers down, cupping her hands together on the table. “She’s sick,” she said. “She’s got this, like, lung disease.” Ivy wasn’t sure how this bit of truth managed to slip through, but there it was, and there was Ma, poking at her heart.

  “Is she on oxygen?”

  “She should be, but she says she doesn’t want to drag that tank around, looking like a freak. The doctor says she’s going to end up flat on her back for the rest of her life.”

  Mary Ellen reached over and patted Ivy’s hand. “It must be hard, seeing your mom like that,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  Ivy withdrew her hand and looked down. A tear plopped on the surface of the table, and she quickly wiped it away, rubbing her hand on her jeans. The sadness-anger-guilt tornado was ramping up inside her, and she needed to shut it down before she lost her shit and blew it all.

  “Oh, honey, I’m sorry,” Mary Ellen said again. “Do you miss her?”

  Ivy shook her head.

  “It’s normal to feel a little homesick—”

  “I’m not a baby,” Ivy said sharply.

  Mary Ellen was silent.

  “I’m not the kind of person who looks back and, like, feels bad about everything, okay? If I did that, I’d never get anywhere. I’d just sit around crying all the time.”

  “But, Rose, it’s okay—”

  “No, it’s not.” Ivy squeezed her eyes shut, sending the tears back to where they came from. You’re Rose now, she reminded herself. A good girl running from an abusive father, a girl with a soft, pink heart who just needs a little cash to get where she’s going. She took a deep breath and looked Mary Ellen in the face. “Are you homesick?” she asked.

  The lady looked surprised. “Me? No. Why?”

  “I don’t know.” Ivy picked at the skin around her thumbnail. “You were really upset about that deer. I was just wondering if there was something…else.”

  “Oh, that!” Mary Ellen waved her hand. “I guess I was thinking about my father. I don’t know why. I mean, I guess because he passed away last year. And that deer, when she died, it kind of took me by surprise.”

  “How did your dad die?”

  She waved her hand again. “In his sleep.”

  “That’s a good way to go,” Ivy said. “All peaceful. You don’t know it’s coming. You just go to sleep, and…that’s it.”

  Mary Ellen nodded slowly, misery working its way across her face. She took a long drink and said, “Nobody should have to die the way that deer did. Hurting and scared. Wanting help.” Her eyes started turning pink and watery, but she shook it off. “Anyway. I’m sorry about your mom.” She gave Ivy a half smile. “I’m sure her doctor is taking good care of her.”

  “Yeah.” Ivy sucked on the side of her thumb, which had started bleeding. It tasted salty and metallic. “After I get my degree and a job, I’ll probably go back and help out.” Rose wasn’t salty on the inside; she was soft and sweet, like a cream donut.

  “Are you thinking you’ll work for a theater company? Or do you want to teach?”

  “I don’t know. I guess. All I really care about is the writing, you know? So I can put myself out there.” Ivy sat up straighter. “Isn’t that what it’s all about when you’re an artist? You say, this is who I am, this is what I’m all about, and if you don’t like it, tough sh—too bad. Right?”

  “Well, kind of, but it should really be about more than that. It should be about ideas. The concept of art as a means of self-expression is kind of…” Mary Ellen made a face and shook her head.

  “Oh.”

  “Like, for example, I’ve been reading a lot about what Michael Fried called ‘good objecthood’ and trying to find ways to bring that into my work.”

  “Objecthood?” Ivy asked, leaning her chin on her hand and widening her eyes.

  “It’s a kind of specificity, what Fried called ‘thingness,’” Mary Ellen said.

  “Thingness?”

  “I know it sounds strange. But it’s about the ontological status of the object being portrayed. See, it all started with the minimalists.” Mary Ellen brightened. She started going into a whole explanation about objects and things, and things other people thought about things, and how still other people disagreed with those people about things. It was crazy and stupid-sounding, but as Mary Ellen talked, Ivy let herself be lulled into a trance by the circular swirl of words, until she felt her sadness dip underwater once, then twice, until it finally dropped out of sight.

  14

  “I must be boring you. I’m sorry.”

  “No! I’m just sleepy.” Rose’s face had gone slack. Mary Ellen knew she was throwing too much at her at once; the girl hardly had the background to absorb so much art theory in one evening. It just felt good to talk about it. Putting the unwieldy ideas into words helped Mary Ellen feel more in control of the information.

  “Do you want to go to bed?”

  “Maybe.” Rose yawned. “Thanks for teaching me all that stuff. And how to make chicken too.”

  “Sleep well, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Mary Ellen poured herself another drink and took out her camera-cleaning supplies. Her adventures in the woods had probably caused all kinds of dirt and snow to work their way into the camera’s delicate mechanisms. She powered it on and checked the display. She was surprised to find fifty-four shots on the memory card; she couldn’t remember having taken a single one. She scrolled through them and couldn’t make out what they were. She went downstairs to get her laptop from the bedroom, then hooked up her camera to it and uploaded the pictures.

  A smear of gray sky interrupted in one corner by a bent, scrawny branch; a brown blur against white snow; a froth of pine needles filling the frame. Apparently, she’d mashed the shutter button while running away from the deer, and her camera had been in continuous shooting mode. Mary
Ellen scrolled quickly through the shots and could see her frame-by-frame progress through the undergrowth.

  She enlarged one of the pictures. There was something energetic about the way a branch slashed through the frame, a black streak against a mottled gray background. The composition, if you could call it that, was unbalanced and haphazard, making the photo feel artistic but not contrived. Actually, it was the opposite of contrived, Mary Ellen realized, the blood quickening in her chest and her head. There was no Mary Ellen–ness imposed on the picture whatsoever, no evidence of struggle, no pitiful attempt to be liked. She’d finally managed, as Justine had predicted, to “strip away all the bullshit.”

  Mary Ellen enlarged a few more of the pictures and found them equally compelling. She deleted the ones that showed a glimpse of her leg or her coat, leaving her with twenty-eight unadulterated photos. She tried cropping a few of them and tweaking the exposure, then shook her head and undid all of the changes. Purity was the idea here. She needed to just let the photos be what they wanted to be.

  She drained her glass, savoring the euphoric tingling in her extremities. The pictures were so wild, so uncontrolled. They weren’t trying too hard; they weren’t trying at all. She couldn’t wait to send them to Justine.

  She’d go to town in the morning. Justine had told her the local library had Wi-Fi, so she would go there to send the files. Then maybe she’d check her email, give Matt a call. If the library had a printer, she could bring Rose some information on scholarships.

  Of course, she’d picked up on Rose’s hint about helping a younger person trying to make it in the world. Mary Ellen actually thought it was cute, the way Rose had promised to pay it forward. “We artists have to stick together,” she’d said, and Mary Ellen supposed she had a point. If only she’d had a mentor back when she was in school—someone like Justine, who could have recognized her potential and urged her to stick with her art major. Someone who might have persuaded her to turn away her parents’ money and all its messily attached strings. A word or two of encouragement—that’s all she’d really needed.

  Her mind was whirling now; she’d had too much to drink. She decided to go to bed so she could leave early in the morning, before Rose woke up and asked to come along. She wasn’t ready to put the girl on a bus to Pittsburgh. She still had so much to tell her.

  • • •

  That night, Mary Ellen dreamed about a man who wasn’t Matt, someone with black hair and a low voice and a face always in shadow. She was in bed with him, but it wasn’t a betrayal because in her dream, there was no Matt, so there was no sense of alarm or shame the way there was sometimes in her other dreams. She and the man were both undressed, but they weren’t having sex. They were just melted together in a full-body embrace, their protrusions and recesses locked like the teeth of a zipper. Something intense was pulsing between them, passing back and forth like an alternating current—anxiety/acceptance, longing/gratification, questions/answers.

  As dawn broke and she emerged from sleep, Mary Ellen kept her eyes closed for as long as she could, savoring the dream’s vapor trail. She felt a little guilty that it wasn’t Matt in her dream; it was never Matt. These sorts of dreams were almost never about a specific person. She wasn’t fantasizing about men with broader shoulders or wider jaws or more imaginative wardrobes than her husband. It was just her subconscious conjuring an abstract “other,” a warm body with which she could pulse and thrum and experience a kind of urgent, transporting closeness that simply didn’t exist in real life.

  She opened her eyes and gasped. The deer was back, right outside her window, as if risen from the dead. She was nosing at something on the ground, lifting her head now and then to glance around, ears swiveling. She looked straight at Mary Ellen, almost boldly, her nose sugared with snow. Mary Ellen stared back. Had she dreamed the deer’s death in the woods? No, she could clearly remember the fading warmth of the flank under her hand, the seep of snow through her pants. This had to be another one. She raised herself up on one elbow, and the animal startled away. Mary Ellen smiled, reassured to see a deer looking so alive, so peaceful, so uninterested in her mistakes.

  It was early; the snow was just beginning to catch the reluctant morning light and drag it through the trees. She fell back against the pillows. Matt would like that—a deer at the foot of the bed! She’d have to tell him about it when she called him from town. She wondered what he was doing, if he was sleeping in, enjoying the quiet of the empty house. Probably not. The ability to sleep late was one of those things they were both losing in middle age, along with eyesight and an interest in new music. If she had to guess, he was probably at the diner, sitting at the counter eating pancakes with whipped cream.

  She remembered how adorable she’d found it, the first time he ordered his favorite breakfast in her company. There had been something so sweet and boyish about Matt, with his messy hair and messy apartment, a kind of jovial helplessness that stirred tender feelings in her. He’d always resisted her mothering, though. He wouldn’t let her clean his bathroom, no matter how forcefully she claimed not to mind, and he refused to let her take him shopping for clothes. To his credit, he did grow up a lot during those early years. He learned to cook and clean; he started going to an actual hairdresser. Mary Ellen understood, and loved, that he did these things to make her happy, and because he wanted a partner instead of a parent.

  He kept eating pancakes with whipped cream, though, and ice cream with sprinkles. The charm of this had long worn off—she supposed her own adorableness had faded just as much, was there any point in pretending otherwise?—but now they were bound by an intense familiarity that exerted its own gravity. No one knew her as well as Matt did. No one else could predict, even before she knew herself, what she was going to order at a restaurant. No one else could read her eyebrows, her neck tendons, her grip on a toothbrush like they were complete sentences written in his own handwriting. No one else could find that knot of nerves just behind her shoulder blade and smooth it out with a few well-placed rubs of the thumb.

  Sometimes it had a whiff of the supernatural, the way Matt knew things—felt things. Like when her father died. She’d gotten the call at the office, and just few minutes later, while she was still staring dumbfounded at her phone, Matt had appeared out of the blue with a bag from the Marathon Grill. “It feels like a soup kind of day,” he’d said before seeing her face and the terrible news written there. He’d taken charge immediately, allowing Mary Ellen to float apart into a million useless pieces while he met with the coroner, and the police, and the funeral home, and all the rest. And when it was over, he’d done exactly what she wanted, without being asked. He’d never spoken about her father or his tragic, lonesome death again.

  And now…this inability to understand the changes she was going through. His confusion hurt, because it seemed to say he’d lost interest. But wasn’t that to be expected after so many years of familiarity? Hadn’t they just lost the habit of exploring each other’s dark, mysterious corners?

  She dressed quickly, gathered her things, and went out to the car, moving quietly so as not to wake Rose. The gray sky, which she could just glimpse through the treetops, seemed to be hanging lower than usual, pressing down on the world. She got in the car and turned the key, and it lunged forward violently before stalling. She stared dumbly at all the red lights on the dashboard. It was strange; she never parked it in gear. But then, she hadn’t really been herself since coming down that snowy driveway. Mary Ellen put the car in neutral, shaking her head, then restarted it and climbed up the hill to the road.

  Justine had told her Agloe was just a few miles down the road; cell service started about halfway there. Sure enough, Mary Ellen’s phone started purring with texts as she descended the mountain. She rolled into town and pulled into the Price Chopper parking lot, where she glanced through her messages, then dialed Matt’s number.

  “Matt, it’s me. Were you asleep?”


  “No, yeah, but it’s okay.”

  “I figured you’d be up by now. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” he said. She could hear him pushing himself into a seated position against the pillows. “Everything okay?”

  She imagined him peeling off his anti-snoring nose strip and rubbing the skin underneath with his thumb and forefinger. “Everything’s great,” she said. “Sorry I haven’t called until now.”

  “That’s all right,” he muttered.

  “The house is really nice. It’s very Justine, you know? Really modern and minimal, in a very expensive way. You’d probably hate it.” She paused, fiddling with the gearshift. This was the point, of course, when a normal wife would tell her husband about the runaway she’d found hiding in the house. But it was all too hard to explain, and she knew Matt would insist on calling the police. She didn’t feel like going into the playwriting, the funeral home, the aunt in Pittsburgh. Nor did she want him calling Justine. “There’s a deer that always comes in the morning, right outside my bedroom window. When I wake up it’s always there, just a few feet from the bed. It’s so strange.”

  “Huh.”

  “Anyway,” she said, “it’s nice and quiet. No distractions. I’m taking a lot of pictures. In fact, I think I made a real breakthrough yesterday. I shot some great stuff.”

  Matt made a sinus-clearing noise.

  “Have you talked to the girls?” she asked.

  “I sure have. About that—”

  “Are they having a good trip?”

  “It’s over, Mary.”

  “What?” Her head buzzed with alarm.

  “They got sent home.”

  “Wait, what? I don’t—”

  Matt sighed heavily. “They got caught buying beer. They had fake IDs.”

  “Sydney and Shelby? Fake IDs?” Mary Ellen put a hand over her mouth, noticing, in spite of her shock, that her glove still smelled like butternut squash soup. “That can’t be. No. It must’ve been someone else.”