She slid open the back door and waded through the snow to the point where the flat, white expanse dipped softly into the woods. She strained to see beyond the light’s edge, but the darkness was absolute. Somewhere down there, she told herself, her camera was nestled safely in a fluffy white mound, maybe on a bed of ferns or fallen pine boughs. The Tamrac Ultra Pro camera bag—it was a splurge, but she’d bought it for just this kind of situation. All right, maybe not this exact situation. But it was waterproof. Shock absorbent.
She looked back at the house and aligned herself with the upstairs window, then stepped off the edge of the deck, stumbling to one side when her foot landed on something hard and slippery under the snow. She caught herself and shuffled forward, squinting to see where the ground dropped off. Her foot cracked through a nest of branches, and as she yanked it out, she lost her balance and pitched forward, her leg stretching into nothingness for a moment, her rear end finally meeting the ground almost at the exact same time as her shoulders. Mary Ellen flailed her arms, one of which managed to snag itself on a spindly bush of some kind. With lots of snapping of thin, dry branches, Mary Ellen got both hands into the bush and grasped its relatively sturdy inner stalk while she twisted around and managed to arrange herself into something like a crouch.
Snow was everywhere: in her boots, in her pants, in her mouth. She was panting, shaking her head to get the snow out of her hair, waving one of her hands around in search of a thicker trunk that could provide more upward leverage. She tried crawling on all fours, but the snow wouldn’t pack under her knees; it just fell apart beneath her, and she found herself sliding downward in terrifying spurts. Finally, she got one arm hooked around a pine tree and managed to seize a root with her other hand, and where her body had scraped the snow away, her feet were finally able to grab hold of the ground.
After struggling back to level ground and stepping back onto the deck, Mary Ellen rested for a moment with her hands on her knees. Her head was spinning. She did her best to brush the snow, dirt, and pine needles from her coat, then shuffled back inside and turned off the deck lights. Dropping her coat on the hallway floor, she went into her bedroom, locked the door, undressed, and burrowed under her comforter, dragging a pillow along with her.
Clamped hard against her face, the pillow couldn’t prevent the sobs from forming, but it absorbed them somewhat as they hurtled past her clenched teeth. The realization had torn into her like lead shot—hot and unrelenting, spraying pain in every direction.
There was nothing beautiful in this world.
• • •
When Mary Ellen woke up the next morning, bruises humming up and down her hip and thigh, she came up with a basic plan and held it tight. Dig out the car. Go into town. Call the police. She’d say the girl had shown up during the storm, and let them deal with her. Then she would drive home and resume her life, pretending this ill-advised sabbatical had never happened.
The snow had stopped falling; it was piled precariously on the pine boughs and slathered down the sides of their trunks. She thought about her camera, just another snow-covered mound. Going after it would take too much time, and navigating that slope was too risky. She could break a leg, or worse. Hunters were probably out there, ready to shoot anything that moved. And anyway, this seemed to be just the wake-up call she needed. The camera would stay behind, in this wild and implausible place, and she would return to civilized life, newly appreciative of her house and her family and the purposeful routine of her important and well-paid job.
Mary Ellen closed her eyes and tried to conjure the soothing balm of office carpeting and purring phones and her Outlook calendar neatly bricked up with meetings. It would probably take a few late nights and weekends to get her team back on track after her absence, but that was all right. Matt and the girls would understand. They always did.
Review the physician quals… Meet with the consumer solutions team… Narrow down the direct marketing tactics. She ticked through a list of tasks in her head, but around the edges of her drowsy musing came a new sensation—a feeling like tar, spreading stickily across the clear morning, making it hard to move.
She’d been lied to. Humiliated. Worse, the entire thing was her fault. She was the one who’d let the girl stay. She was the one who’d cared for her, fed her, listened to her, believed her. She’d tried to do the right thing, as if she could somehow find a glimmer of redemption in these lonely, unforgiving woods. But of course things didn’t work that way. Mary Ellen would not be let off with a few hours of community service.
She peeled off the covers and pulled her suitcase out of the closet. She began thrusting her clothes into it the way one does at the end of a trip—with sloppy ambivalence. Dig out the car. Go into town. Call the police. It was going to feel good, she promised herself, to free the car and climb out of this mess, even if she couldn’t muster much excitement about what awaited her back home. Sure, it was disappointing that her photography hadn’t worked out. And yes, she was probably giving up on it too easily. But that wasn’t entirely her fault. By tossing her six-thousand-dollar camera into the ravine, the girl had kind of made the decision for her.
Mary Ellen sat on the bed, letting herself be pulled a little further into the tarry darkness. She was always doing that, wasn’t she—letting people decide for her. What to eat, where to work, what kinds of pictures to take. “You had nothing but choices,” the girl had said, and on that point at least, she was probably right. Other people—people like Rose—faced real hardship; they hardly had any choices. And okay, maybe Rose wasn’t real, but somehow Mary Ellen couldn’t stop thinking about her imaginary struggle. Rose had chosen something better for herself, against all odds. There was no reason Mary Ellen couldn’t do the same thing.
She scrubbed her face with her hands and stood up. She went into the hall and pulled on her boots and her coat, whose folds were still wet from spending the night on the floor, the fur around the hood matted and flecked with mud. She went out the sliding door and followed the previous night’s footprints, which were slashed across the deck in a not-very-straight line, and stepped down into the trampled bracken. She scanned the slope, looking for a patch of black canvas interrupting the white expanse, but the bag wasn’t visible. She kicked at a clump of snow, but it offered no resistance, just exploded into a little white puff and quietly disappeared back into itself. She pounded the side of a tree with her fist, which hurt, and which caused freezing clumps to fall on her head and down the back of her collar. “Goddamn it.” She grimaced, pawing the snow away from the back of her neck. “Goddamn it!”
She’d spent so much time since her father’s death resenting the way he’d crushed her dreams, so much emotional energy shifting the blame away from herself. But the time for blame was long past. Wasn’t this the moment—here in these lonely woods, face-to-face with all her failings—to reclaim what was rightfully hers?
Her feet made creaking sounds as she high-stepped into the forest, but otherwise the mountain was utterly silent, more silent than usual, in that post-snowstorm way, when the whole world is wrapped in cotton batting and even children lower their voices. Her boot caught on something and she stumbled, then slipped sideways, one foot skidding straight downward and leaving her in a sort of half split. She sat back on something sharp, yelping in pain.
Matt would have a good laugh at her now, she thought furiously, shifting to one side and pulling up her knees. This was where her artistic pretensions had led her—to a desolate, frozen hillside, no galleries or museums or parties for miles around. Fine. So he’d been right to make fun of her. He’d seen through Justine’s hollow aspirations and correctly identified Mary Ellen’s fascination as a short-lived schoolgirl crush. What had he called it? “Trying on a costume.”
And what would really change once she got back home? Even if she found her camera and somehow managed to use it again, she would still be Mary Ellen and Matt would still be Matt and the girls wou
ld still be leaving home in the fall. And the two of them minus the girls would be…what?
And Mary Ellen without her father’s expectations would be…what?
She hiccupped and swallowed a sob, kicking at a mound of snow with sudden, impulsive force. The mound gave way, and she went sliding downward in a mini-avalanche, her feet pedaling frantically until they came up against a fallen tree. She sat there for a moment, catching her breath and pressing the backs of her gloves to her eyes. She sighed shakily and looked around for a sturdy trunk to grab hold of. Then she saw, off to her left, caught among the inner branches of a berry-speckled bush, her camera bag.
It took a bit of downward sliding and sideways inching, but eventually Mary Ellen managed to pull herself level with the bush, which, it turned out, was covered with thorns. She grappled briefly with the branches, which bit savagely into her coat’s nylon shell and the thin skin of her exposed wrists, finally looping her fingers around the strap and yanking the bag toward herself with an angry yelp.
She slung it over her shoulder and looked for a route back up to the level path, but here it was so steep that even the snow had lost its grip on much of the slope and there was no clear way upward. Below her, though, was a clear leveling off, and then a short descent to the wide, flat bank of the creek, where she could easily rejoin the staircase. Mary Ellen tried scooting carefully toward it on her rear end, but this quickly turned into an uncontrolled slide, and soon, she was sitting in deep snow with her feet resting on the creek’s icy crust.
Some narrow streams of water were still moving, but most of the creek had frozen mid-tumble, curling translucently over rocks and boulders, enveloping every stick and leaf in swollen, glassy bulbs. Off to her left, a fallen tree was laced to the stream with strands of ice that started off spindly but widened as they dropped, pooling voluptuously where they met the water’s surface. In another spot, a whip-thin branch had been caught in its slide over some rocks, ice bubbling and frothing aggressively over its reddish skin. And in the shallows of the creek’s edge, right at her feet, she could see silver-white pearls of air hovering patiently beneath the icy shell.
Mary Ellen sat transfixed, fingering the latches on her camera bag as she cataloged the varieties of time stoppage all around her. It was like a photograph, she thought, like the creek had made a photograph of itself, and the result somehow transcended real life, becoming simultaneously more solid and more ethereal. Justine would say it was too pretty, but was it? To Mary Ellen, there was something inexpressibly sad locked inside the scene, something dark, the way every ice cube or icicle, no matter how clear, was larded with streaks of black when you really looked at it.
As the snow slowly soaked through her pants, Mary Ellen felt another sob rising in her chest. It was just too sad, all of it: her wet pants, her scratched wrists, the indifferent passage of time. Her girls, her sweet girls, waiting for the call that never came. Her father, waiting for the daughter who wouldn’t visit because she was too busy with her job, her meaningless job that contributed exactly nothing to the world. Her father, who died waiting, naked and freezing in the bathtub that became his deathbed.
Mary Ellen scrambled to her feet and brushed the snow from her pants and the tears from her cheeks. She slung her camera bag over her shoulder, then decided to inspect her equipment before heading back up the slope. On first glance, nothing seemed to be cracked or dented. She took out her camera, stripped off her gloves, and took a few shots, checking them on the LCD. It seemed to be working fine; at least there was that. One of the pictures happened to catch the morning light coming through the ice formations on the fallen tree, and Mary Ellen was struck by its melancholy beauty. She went toward the tree and took another picture, and another, moving to catch the blue shine as it wrapped around one side of each stalk of ice.
Walking out onto the creek, it occurred to her that it was the invisible slide of water that had created these gorgeous accumulations, these slumping folds and swelling globes. Rather than freezing a single moment, the creek was actually revealing the slow drip of time. The drip of choices, the drip of silence, the drip of unasked questions and withheld answers. Mary Ellen crouched next to a tree branch that had dangled close enough to the stream to have a few of its brown leaves cocooned in ice; she started shooting some close-ups and then stopped, thinking. It was all being swept downstream, wasn’t it? Slowly, yes, too slowly to be seen with the naked eye. But from the perspective of the boulders, the tallest hemlocks, the ravine itself, the current was swift. Mary Ellen felt dwarfed, and that, somehow, was a comfort.
She resumed shooting, feeling in the rhythmic sliding and clicking a growing sense of peace. And just behind it, a small tremble of excitement—the same feeling she’d had in that sun-drenched drawing studio, back at UNC, when she’d felt herself getting close to something real, something important, something she’d been blindly chasing without knowing exactly why. She was seeing everything in sharp, miraculous detail, each ice formation a landscape unto itself. She could see into things, through things, to the knobby bark of each stick that was layered with muscles and veins of ice.
She felt herself vanishing into the pictures and, at the same time, easing fully into herself. Her head was filled with the same buzzy lightness that was usually released after the fourth or fifth swallow of gin—only this time she was completely present, and instead of being pulled into a bottomless pool, she was being propelled forward on steady feet. All of her feelings were right there, floating on the surface, clear and bright and plainly visible: her guilt and anger toward her father, her disappointment in herself, the grief of losing her children to adulthood, the sadness of a dull marriage. It was all there, caught in the ice, and it was beautiful.
The wind kicked up, and a cloud of powdery snow swirled down from the tree branches. Mary Ellen aimed her camera upward, into the glittering haze. From somewhere within the haze she heard a loud, creaking moan, and then, with a gush of cold air, the forest slammed shut on her like a book.
She was on her back. She was lying on the ice. She was also up in a tree, which didn’t make sense, but a tangle of branches was scratching at her face, and the lower part of her body seemed to be pressed against the trunk. A burst of pain stretched and cracked up and down her leg and back. She gasped and wrestled a copper-colored hemlock frond away from her face. The sky above her was like a mirror of the icy creek, grayish white, bordered by black trees and flowing toward something bigger than itself.
She cried out. Every time she moved, her left leg seemed to burst into flames. She could see where the tree trunk was lying diagonally across her thighs, but she couldn’t feel the weight of it, probably because all of her senses were overwhelmed by the scorching pain in her left leg. She tried to sit up, but the pain grew too intense, and bursts of white light began eating away at her vision. She lay back on the ice, her moans tightening into a wail, trying to understand what was happening.
She could move her right leg, just barely, raising it a few inches off the ice until it came up against the tree trunk. Her left leg, though, seemed nailed in place. A tangle of branches blocked her view, preventing her from seeing how badly crushed it was. She reached through the branches with her left hand and carefully patted around the most painful area, in the middle of her thigh. The trunk, she was surprised to discover, wasn’t touching the top of her thigh; a branch seemed to be holding it up and off her leg. Around the branch, her thigh felt warm and wet. She pulled her hand away and looked at her fingers and felt herself step out of the scene for a moment, calmly observing the smear of blood and then, exploring a little more with her hand, coming to a more precise understanding of the situation.
She plunged back into her body then, pain exploding in her thigh, a scream flying out of her mouth. A pair of crows tore themselves from a treetop and spiraled upward, following the sound of her voice into the empty sky.
19
Ivy wasn’t sure what woke her up, bu
t it had startled her enough to get her heart going. She sat up in bed and listened for a little while, wondering if it’d been a bad dream. This place was usually dead silent; she couldn’t imagine what could be loud enough to jolt her out of sleep like that.
She got up and went to the window, but there was nothing moving outside, not a squirrel or a bird or even a breeze. It was like everything had been startled into total stillness. She went down the hall and looked out at the deck, which was sloppy with footprints. The sliding door was unlocked. She hugged herself, feeling cold in the thin borrowed pajamas. She checked that Mary Ellen wasn’t in her room, then went upstairs.
She must’ve gone looking for her camera, Ivy thought, standing in the empty living room. The night before, she’d watched the lady out the window, a little worried she was going to break her leg or something, relieved to see her come back inside, then perplexed that she never came back upstairs to finish the argument. It was so weird, the way she hadn’t even looked at Ivy when it all went down, the way she’d turned all quiet and folded up. Most people would’ve at least yelled a little, or smacked her, or broken something. But the lady acted like she wasn’t even there. It was spooky. Frustrating.
Ivy went to the kitchen and made a peanut butter sandwich but didn’t eat it. She left it on the counter and went back to the window, scanning the woods. The trees had been thickened by the snow, which coated the sides of their trunks and clung to the tops of their drooping boughs, making it hard to see all the way down to the creek. She unlatched the window and slowly slid it open, the cold sucking all the air out of her lungs for a moment. The creek was silent, and even the trees seemed to be holding their breath. Somewhere down there, though, in the muffled quiet, Ivy could hear a voice. It sounded like the lady. Was she singing? Yelling? Ivy leaned forward into the cold air, turning her ear toward the woods. She couldn’t make out any words.
The Runaways Page 19