The Runaways

by Sonya Terjanian

  “What?” she shouted.

  The lady was definitely yelling. It started coming shrill and fast. Ivy heard something that sounded like please please please and suck or truck or something like that.

  “What’s wrong?” she shouted.

  “Help!”

  “What happened?”

  Then the yelling faded into babbles that didn’t sound like English. Ivy listened for a moment, then yelled, “Okay, okay!” and slammed the window shut. She put her hands to her cheeks to warm them. The lady must have fallen. Maybe she was hurt; maybe she just couldn’t figure out how to get back up the slope. Ivy went downstairs and got dressed, helping herself to a sweater and some warm socks from Mary Ellen’s suitcase. The lady had said there were no bears around here, but what if there were? What if she was being eaten? Wouldn’t the bear just turn around and eat Ivy too? She pulled on the rain boots and slowly slid open the deck door, stepping carefully into the snow. Was it a hunter? Had someone shot Mary Ellen by accident—or on purpose? She crept to the edge of the deck and looked down, but she couldn’t see anything.

  “What happened?” she called.

  “Rose! Please! Come down here!”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “A tree fell on me. I’m… Aaahhh!”

  A tree. What the fuck was wrong with these woods? These woods were a straight-up failure, shit dying and falling and trying to kill you all over the place. “Okay, I’m coming!” Ivy called. At least it wasn’t a bear.

  She found the zigzag path she’d come up on the first day, only now it was less of a path and more of an empty stretch between the trees. She could see little mini-avalanches where Mary Ellen had skipped the zigzag and gone straight down, probably on her butt. Ivy took the longer way, but she still slid a lot because the rain boots had zero traction. The air was colder than she could remember it ever being, the snow powdery soft.

  She couldn’t see Mary Ellen, but she could hear her whimpering and crying out, her voice all scratchy. She wondered how big of a tree it could be; most of them were so skinny. Ivy remembered the one that had fallen across the road, the one that made her back up and crash the car. One like that could do major damage to a person. She shuddered, not sure she wanted to see what was happening down there. What if Mary Ellen was dying? Would Ivy have to take a knife and put her out of her misery?

  “Okay, okay,” she said as she got toward the bottom and Mary Ellen’s cries got more desperate. “Where are you?” She saw the lady’s legs on the frozen creek. A tree was lying across them, a tangle of rust-colored branches hiding the rest of her from view. Ivy got closer, slipping on the ice, then stopped, seeing blood. “Are you okay? Can you move?” She skirted the bloody ice and crouched next to Mary Ellen’s head, parting some fronds to see her face, which was pale.

  “I think part of it went through my leg. It’s pinned. Can you see?”

  Ivy turned reluctantly toward Mary Ellen’s leg, lowering her head to see under the tree trunk. “Shit,” she said.

  “Oh God.” Mary Ellen started to cry.

  Ivy squeezed her eyes shut, wanting with all her heart to be somewhere else: to be sitting in math class, to be picking cans off the shelf at St. Gabriel’s, to be washing Gran’s hair in the sink—anything, anywhere, just not here next to this goddamned tree stub poked through the lady’s leg like a toothpick through a cocktail frank. She opened her eyes and swallowed hard, trying to sound all casual and normal. “It got your leg pretty good.”

  The lady started flailing her arms then, breaking off the branches around her face and grasping at the tree trunk, which she basically had no hope of moving from her angle.

  “Hold on,” Ivy said. “Calm down.” She stood up and took a good look at the tree. It was skinny, only about eight inches across, but it was long, stretching out into the middle of the stream. Sharp stubs stuck out here and there, giving it a mean, spiky look. “Should I lift it up?”

  “Yes. Yes. I mean, I think so.” Mary Ellen craned her neck, trying to see under the tree.

  “Can you, like, push yourself away? When I get it off you?”

  “I think so.”

  “Okay.” Ivy reluctantly straddled the trunk, not really wanting to do it, not really seeing another way. “Get ready.”

  “Wait!”

  “What?”

  “What if, if…” Mary Ellen stammered. She let out a sob-sigh. “What if it starts bleeding like crazy? When the branch comes out? There’s a big artery around there.”

  “I think you’re already bleeding like crazy.”

  “I am?”

  “Well…” Ivy held out her arms. “There’s blood. Like, coming out.”

  “Maybe you should just walk up to the road and flag someone down.”

  Ivy let her hands drop. She sighed and looked up at the sky. Sure. Of course. Walk up to the road, call the cops. “I think that’ll take too long,” she said. “It’s freezing. You’re lying on, like, ice.”

  “I know,” Mary Ellen wailed. “But I’m scared of what’s going to happen when you pull it out.”

  “Well, I’m not exactly excited about it either!” Ivy stamped her feet, which were going numb inside the rubber boots. “Should I go get something to bandage it with? So if it bleeds a ton, I can tie something around it?”

  “Okay, I guess, yeah.” Mary Ellen sniffed. “You’ll hurry? It’s really cold.”

  Ivy looked at the lady’s face, which was getting whiter by the minute. Her lips were the same color as her skin, making her look like some kind of statue. “Don’t worry.”

  “Come back, okay?”

  “Yeah, yeah.”

  Getting back up the hill was hard with all the snow, and Ivy’s heart was working overtime as she kept thinking about the hole in the lady’s leg and how she was going to have to deal with it after she pulled the branch out. And then what? Would Mary Ellen be able to get up the slope? Would she be able to drive her car? Pretty much every scenario ended with Ivy walking up to the road, flagging someone down, calling 911. Then she’d have to explain to the cops who she was and what she was doing here and why, exactly, this lady had gone into the ravine looking for her camera. It all ended up fine for the lady and quite shittily for Ivy.

  Back at the house, she searched the bathrooms and linen closets until she found a first aid kit under one of the sinks. It was puny, with nothing but bee sting ointment, a few squares of gauze, and a skinny roll of tape. Ivy huffed in frustration and threw the kit into the sink. She looked up, catching sight of her reflection in the mirror: snarled hair, lips bunched together, eyes wide and blinking a mile a minute. She really didn’t look like much. Just a dumb kid who didn’t know what the hell she was doing. Not somebody you’d want to trust your life with, that was for sure.

  Ivy grabbed the backpack out of her room and went upstairs. She found the lady’s purse and took out her wallet, holding it in her hand for a moment. Hitch a ride to Eaton. Hop on a bus. It wouldn’t be hard to put the lady out of her mind; they’d only known each other—what—five days? How long had it been since Mary Ellen had shown up? Since she’d pulled Ivy out of the tree house, nursed her back to health, and basically tried her damnedest to be Ivy’s mom?

  Ivy leaned against the counter and put her head in her hands. “Fuck,” she whispered.

  She left the wallet on the counter and hurried back downstairs to Mary Ellen’s room. She shoved a bunch of clothes into the backpack, then thought a minute and added some of the pads that were for pee. She went to the hall closet to get a water bottle. One of the canoe paddles fell out. She took the paddle, filled the bottle, and headed out into the cold.

  Mary Ellen looked dazed when Ivy got to her; she slowly tilted her head in her direction and gave her a sleepy smile. “You came.”

  “Drink some water.”

  Mary Ellen took the bottle from Ivy and drank, but half
the water slid down her neck. She started shaking—hard—which scared Ivy. She tried wiping the water off the lady’s neck with her hand, but most of it had already run down into her sweater.

  “Sorry,” Ivy said. “I brought some stuff to tie around your leg, all right?”

  “Okay,” Mary Ellen whispered.

  “Just get ready to scoot out of there with your good leg. I probably won’t be able to hold the tree up for long.”

  Mary Ellen blew out a few big breaths and nodded. Ivy straddled the tree trunk, carefully avoiding the lady’s leg, and wrapped her arms around it.

  “Ready?”

  “Mmm.”

  Ivy strained upward, but the tree wouldn’t move. “Motherfucker’s heavy,” she gasped.

  Mary Ellen had her hands pressed against her eyes. “Oh God.”

  “Let me try it this way.” Ivy moved to one side of the trunk and squatted next to it. She hooked her elbows under the tree, closed her eyes, and squeezed upward with her legs. “Uuunnnhhh go go go go!”

  Mary Ellen shrieked in pain as the branch lifted out of her leg. She pushed herself out of the way, and Ivy let the tree fall to the ice, keeping her eyes on Mary Ellen’s grimacing face, desperate to avoid looking at the hole for as long as possible. Mary Ellen was huffing and puffing, her eyes squeezed shut. “Rose,” she finally said, “bandage it up. Please.”

  “Ivy.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” Ivy muttered, as she opened the backpack and pulled out a pair of flannel pajama pants.

  “Try and stop the bleeding. Tie that around my thigh, tight, up here. Like a tourniquet.”

  Ivy looked where the lady was pointing, and that meant looking at the hole, which was round and jagged and black with blood. Underneath, she could see the sop of blood inside Mary Ellen’s coat and all down the back of her pants, which made Ivy’s head go feathery, but she breathed through her nose and concentrated on threading the pajama pants under the lady’s knee and tying them in a knot above the hole. “Sorry,” she said, pulling the knot tight, wincing as Mary Ellen cried out. Blood squeezed out of the hole. “Jesus,” Ivy whispered, wiping her hands on her jeans.

  “Did you find some bandages?”

  “Just these,” Ivy said, pulling out two pee pads. She peeled away their backing, sticking the adhesive onto the front of a long-sleeved T-shirt. She slid the whole thing underneath Mary Ellen’s thigh, then brought the sleeves of the shirt up and around, added a pad to the top hole and tied the T-shirt over that. Then she tied a pair of long socks around it all to keep it in place, and another pair of pajama pants around the socks for good measure. It was messy, but at least she didn’t have to look at the hole anymore, and blood wasn’t going all over the place.

  “Okay, good,” Mary Ellen whispered. “God, I’m so cold.”

  “Can you move your leg?”

  Mary Ellen bent her knee slightly, her mouth stretching into a toothy grimace. She nodded at Ivy. “Yeah. Let’s get out of here.”

  Ivy offered her the canoe paddle, but the lady shook her head. She’d gotten herself into a seated position, leaning back on her arms, and she was kind of panting and blowing air through her lips, squeezing her eyes shut and then opening them. Finally, she looked up at Ivy and said, “Some help?”

  Ivy held out a hand, which the lady didn’t take. She gave a long, heavy sigh. “You’ve got to, like, really help me.”

  Ivy held out both hands, not really sure what the lady was getting at.

  “Put your arms around me here,” Mary Ellen said, patting her sides. “Then pull me up. Watch the leg.”

  Ivy bent down and gingerly put her arms around Mary Ellen, turning her head so their cheeks wouldn’t touch, locking her hands behind the lady’s back. Mary Ellen got her good leg bent and tried rocking herself up, almost pulling Ivy down on top of her, but Ivy twisted toward the lady’s good leg and somehow they kind of spiraled upward, Mary Ellen letting out a long, squeezed cry. Ivy started to move out from under Mary Ellen’s arm, but she swayed heavily against her like she was about to slide back to the ice.

  “Dizzy,” Mary Ellen said, closing her eyes and putting her other arm around Ivy’s neck. They stood like that for a few moments, Mary Ellen taking deep breaths, which she blew out in hot clouds against Ivy’s neck. Ivy felt a powerful urge to push her away, but she clenched her teeth and took the lady’s weight.

  “Come on,” Ivy finally said, “I need to pick up the paddle. Just let me lean down a second.” She bent and grabbed the paddle, Mary Ellen holding tight to her shoulder. She rested the grip on the ice and put the paddle into Mary Ellen’s other hand.

  “My camera.”

  “Seriously?” Ivy could see the camera lying on the ice a few feet away, near the tree. “Isn’t it kind of heavy?”

  “You can put it in the backpack. Please?”

  Ivy rolled her eyes. “Jesus. Fine.” Mary Ellen managed to stay upright long enough for Ivy to retrieve the camera and shove it into the backpack. She slung it onto her shoulders and got herself situated back under Mary Ellen’s arm. Mary Ellen clutched Ivy’s neck and took a step, her full weight surging against Ivy, making her knees buckle. Mary Ellen let out a little cry as they staggered, then she got the paddle planted on the ice, and Ivy managed to straighten up in time to keep them both from falling backward. “Jesus,” she said. She couldn’t get used to the feeling of the lady pressed against her, so close and solid and real.

  They got off the ice and started following Ivy’s footprints up the zigzag path. It was narrow in some parts, forcing Ivy to turn and sidestep along with Mary Ellen, both arms wrapped around her middle. Mary Ellen was panting hard, and her face was shiny with sweat. She clutched Ivy so close that Ivy felt crushed, smothered, but she kept shuffling her feet through the snow and push-pulling the lady over each rise.

  Eventually, they made it to the deck and inside the back door. Mary Ellen got herself over to the den couch and lay down with a groan. The makeshift bandage had loosened and sagged to her knee, exposing the bloody hole. Ivy turned away from it. It was too big, too dark. She wasn’t ready to think about what it meant.

  “Water.”

  Ivy went into the bathroom, dumped her toothbrush out of the cup by the sink, and tried, with shaking hands, to scrape away some of the blobs of toothpaste that had accumulated at the bottom. Mary Ellen made another loud groaning sound, and Ivy shook her head, filled the cup with water, and rushed back to the den. Mary Ellen raised herself on one elbow and drank the whole thing. Then she dropped the cup on the floor, covered her eyes with one hand, and took a deep, snuffling breath. She started to cry.

  “No,” Ivy said, alarmed. “No, you have to tell me what to do; I don’t know what to do.”

  Mary Ellen nodded and pressed her lips together. “Change the—” She gestured toward the tangle of bloody pads and clothes.

  “Okay.” Ivy waited for more, but the lady’s eyes were closed, and she didn’t seem to have any ideas. Ivy went to Mary Ellen’s room and got another T-shirt and more pee pads, then took some towels from the linen closet. She came back to the den, where the lady was struggling to get her arms out of the coat. Ivy helped her, pulling the coat out from under her and bundling it at the end of the couch so the lady wouldn’t see how bloody it was. Then she rewrapped the leg, biting her top lip to keep herself from going all light-headed at the sight of the wet, gaping hole. Finally, she lowered Mary Ellen’s thigh onto a folded towel and carefully worked off her snowy boots.

  “Get some pillows so I can elevate it some more.”

  “Okay.” Ivy gathered some cushions and throw pillows and propped the lady’s leg up, adding another cushion under the towel so it stayed pressed against the bandage.

  “That’s good,” Mary Ellen breathed, closing her eyes. “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome,” Ivy said, feeling for the first tim
e like she might actually be able to do this. The pajama-pant tourniquet refused to stay really tight, but at least the T-shirt bandage looked neat and secure; it looked like it could hold the lady’s life inside her for a while. “You’re positive your phone doesn’t work here?” she asked.

  “I’m sure.”

  Ivy nodded, biting her lip. “Even if I got it dug out,” she said, “I can’t drive your car.” She wiped a hand over her mouth. “I tried, once.”

  The lady’s head tipped to the side so she could look at Ivy. “You did?”

  “It’s one of those foreign-type cars. With the stick. I don’t know how to work it.”

  “When was this?”

  “You were passed out.”

  The lady blew air out her nose.

  “I was trying to get the hell out of here.”

  “Leaving me behind.”

  “You were fine. All you had to do was walk up to the road and make a few calls. Your husband could’ve come to get you.”

  The lady put a hand over her eyes. “You can’t just do that,” she said finally. “You can’t just leave people like they’re, they’re nothing.”

  “Yeah, okay. So what do we do?”

  “We?” Mary Ellen snorted, wincing.

  “I told you. I can’t—”

  “You have to walk, Ivy. You have to go up to the road and get help.”

  Ivy sat down in one of the armchairs and leaned her forehead on the heel of her hand. “I don’t think I can do that.”

  “What?”

  “Sorry.” She got up and went upstairs, ignoring the lady’s weak protests. Her peanut butter sandwich was still sitting on the kitchen counter, but there was no way she could eat now, not with blood smeared on her pants and the thought of the hole in the lady’s leg. She stared out the window into the treetops, feeling her mind darken, a familiar sensation coming on like nightfall. Why couldn’t she ever seem to get out from under other people? It wasn’t fucking fair. All Ivy wanted to do—all she’d ever wanted to do—was mind her own business and do her own thing. But she kept getting dragged down by other people’s shit.