The Runaways

by Sonya Terjanian

  She slid the window open and listened to the cold air. The woods were so quiet, now that the creek had frozen over. It was like when the power went out and the fridge stopped and you realized you’d never known real silence before. There was no wind either, so the trees had stopped their creaking. Far away, in another mountain’s stone-colored sky, crows called once, twice, then stopped.

  She’d made a promise to herself: no going back. Only forward.

  Ivy thought about the man with the cloudy eye, and the swinging crystal throwing light around his dirty car. She felt some comfort knowing he was out there, and probably others like him. It made things seem a little less lonely.

  She pulled the window shut, the early-afternoon light washing the glass clean of any reflection. She went to the kitchen and filled a tumbler with water, which she brought downstairs to Mary Ellen. The lady was asleep.

  “Hey,” Ivy said, poking her shoulder. “Hey.” She was really pale; too pale, Ivy decided. She shoved the lady’s shoulder and was thinking about pouring some water in her face when her eyes finally opened. “Drink some water.”

  Mary Ellen drank slowly, weakly. Ivy checked her wrappings. The pee pads on the top were okay, but the ones underneath were soaked through. The tourniquet had come loose too. “Did you untie this?” she asked. But Mary Ellen’s eyes were rolling back, and she was groaning loudly. “What’s wrong?”

  “It hurts… Oh God, it… Ahhh!”

  “Okay, sorry.” Ivy unwrapped some fresh pads and replaced the bloody ones as quickly as she could, retying the pajama leg as tight as possible. Then she went upstairs and got the bottle of Numbitol out of Mary Ellen’s purse. She came back and put two of the little blue-and-yellow pills in the lady’s hand. Mary Ellen dropped them weakly onto her tongue, then jerked her head up and spat them out.

  “What?” Ivy said.

  “Ibuprofen,” Mary Ellen said, staring at the pills in her hand. She looked up at Ivy with wide, sad eyes. “It’s a blood thinner.”

  “Oh.” Ivy shrugged. “I guess that’s…bad?”

  Tears were sliding down Mary Ellen’s face. She threw the pills across the room; they bounced off the sliding door and fell to the floor with a light tick-tack. She drew a long breath and made a hopeless wailing sound. Ivy sat in the armchair and leaned her head back.

  “Listen to me.” The lady put her hands over her face and talked through them. “If I don’t bleed to death, I’m going to die of an infection.”

  “You’re not going to die.”

  “Yes I am.”

  “You won’t.”

  “Please, Rose.”

  “Ivy.”

  “Go get someone. I don’t want to die.”

  “Stop it,” Ivy said sharply. “Stop talking about dying. Keep your head in the game.”

  “I’ll give you my phone, okay? I’ll give you my phone, and all the money I have, and my boots and my coat and everything else. Just go up to the road and call 911.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because.” Ivy took a deep breath. “I did something bad, and they’re looking for me. The cops.”

  “What? What did you do?”

  Ivy shrugged. “I stole a car. And I wrecked it.”

  Mary Ellen had closed her eyes. Ivy wondered if she was asleep. “Hello?”

  “So you’re a car thief.”

  “I guess. Not a very good one.”

  “Mmm-hmm.” This turned into a little laugh. It was almost like the lady was drunk.

  “You know, I think you should probably stay awake,” Ivy said.

  The lady gave an exasperated sigh and opened her eyes. “Listen,” she said. “What about this? I’ll give you my car.”

  “I already told you—”

  “No, listen. I’ll teach you how to drive it. It’s not that hard. If you get me out of here, drive me to a hospital, and drop me off, you can keep the car. Plus, my phone and my credit card. It’s everything you need to get to Montana, right? I’ll even mail you the title to the car. Once I get…home.”

  “Oh, please. You’re just going to send the cops after me.”

  “No!” Mary Ellen turned her head and fixed Ivy with a significant look. “This is the deal; this is our deal. If I get to live, you get to go to Montana. That’s a promise.” She grimaced and lay her head back.

  Ivy thought this over. It probably wasn’t any riskier than heading out on foot with no money in her pocket. “It’s going to take me forever to get the car dug out,” she said.

  “I’ll wait.”

  Ivy thought for another moment, chewing the inside of her cheek. Then she picked the lady’s gloves and boots off the floor and went upstairs.

  • • •

  The forest still had that wrapped-in-cotton quietness about it, so every slap of the paddle against the snowdrift sounded sharp and clear and extra loud. Ivy stopped periodically to look at the snow-piled trees around the driveway, listening for creaks and cracks. It felt like the forest was watching her too, waiting for the moment she turned her back so it could smash her to the ground.

  She worked the paddle as fast as she could. She’d tried various techniques and decided it was best to use it as a sort of crowbar, levering chunks of snow away from the car’s tires, then scooping the paddle under the chunks and tossing them toward the woods. More often than not, though, the snow just slid off the paddle and resettled in the wells she’d already dug. It was aggravating. Ivy kept reminding herself that the car would be hers soon, provided she could get the lady into it and delivered to a hospital. It was like a test—one of those super-hard challenges you had to pass before being leveled up in the game.

  She’d been doing all right so far. She couldn’t believe she’d managed to pull the tree off the lady and get her up the hill to the house. And using the pee pads as bandages was kind of smart. She wasn’t sure if the lady could really die from a hole in the leg, but who knew—maybe Ivy would save her life. That was something she could carry in her pocket for a while: Ivy the hero. Ivy the lifesaver. Ivy the badass who stuck around and did what needed to be done.

  She took a break and leaned against the car, her damp skin meeting the cold air a little more comfortably than before, her feet and fingers finally coming to life. She hadn’t ever really thought about the tough, rescue-type stuff smoke jumpers had to do; her fantasies had mostly been about the jumping-out-of-airplanes part. But maybe she was cut out for the job in ways she hadn’t thought of, in ways that proved her heart was kind of okay after all, that it hadn’t completely rotted away.

  After digging a while longer, she went inside to wake up Mary Ellen, give her some water, and change her dressings. The bleeding was slowing down, which was good, but the pain seemed to be getting worse, judging by the lady’s shrieks whenever she moved her leg. Ivy gritted her teeth and tried to move fast, but her hands were shaking and clumsy, and she kept getting the pee pads stuck to the couch, her arm, the lady’s leg.

  Finally, she got everything back in place and tied up. “Okay, I think that’s good,” she said finally, giving the pajama pants a last tug. “I’m going back out. The tires are almost done, but I need to get to the snow under the car.”

  “Thank you.” Mary Ellen had seized her arm and was looking intensely into her eyes. “You’re doing a good thing. It’s…good, what you’re doing. I’ll never forget it.”

  “Ohhh-kay,” Ivy said, pulling her arm away. “I’m going back out there.”

  Mary Ellen was crying again. “I don’t want to die here,” she whimpered. “I need to get back to my girls. They need me.”

  “Okay, you’re not going to die. Geez.” Ivy pulled the lady’s gloves back on. “Just give me a little more time.”

  Getting the snow out from under the chassis was impossible. It was mashed down, rock solid, and the paddle could only scra
pe little shavings from the sides. Ivy decided to go the other way and build up the ground under the tires. She searched the edges of the woods for fallen sticks and branches, which she shoved under each wheel. The branches were thin, so she needed a lot of them, which meant venturing farther and farther into the woods. The light was fading, especially under the snowy treetops, and the combination of oncoming darkness and menacing trees made Ivy extra jumpy. She walked fast, freeing branches from the snow with impatient yanks.

  Eventually, she got so much stuff jammed under the wheels it was impossible to add any more. Ivy brushed her hair out of her face, pausing for a moment to admire her work, then went inside to see about getting the lady up the stairs and out the door.

  Mary Ellen was asleep again, but her color looked better and she was breathing deeply, with a faint trace of a snore, so Ivy let her be for the moment. She ate the sandwich she’d left on the kitchen counter, then gathered up Mary Ellen’s belongings and took everything out to the car. She went through the house one more time, putting useful things into the backpack: soap, toilet paper, a kitchen knife, extra socks.

  She paused at the dining room table and picked up the journal Mary Ellen had left there. She expelled a puff of air through her lips, noticing the rose on the cover for the first time. Even now, after Ivy had come clean, the lady couldn’t stop calling her Rose. She’d really fallen in love with the character. Ivy laughed a little to herself, trying to imagine soft, pink Rose dealing with this kind of situation. She wouldn’t even be able to look at the hole in the lady’s leg, much less bandage it up well enough to stop the bleeding. Ivy thrust the journal into her backpack, then took the canoe paddle and went downstairs.

  “Hey,” she said, shaking the lady’s shoulder. “Time to go.”

  Mary Ellen moaned for a while before opening her eyes, her lips working in and out. “I can’t,” she whispered.

  “Well, sorry,” Ivy said briskly. “We made a deal. You have to teach me how to drive your car.”

  “It hurts.”

  “I know. But we’ve got to get you to a hospital, remember?”

  “Mmm.”

  “Here.” Ivy shook out Mary Ellen’s coat, still soggy with blood and snow, and laid it behind the lady’s head. “Put an arm in here.” She got Mary Ellen sitting up and helped her shove one arm into the coat. She stretched the other sleeve around and got that on too. Mary Ellen was panting fast through her teeth, like people do when they’re having a baby. Ivy gently lifted her leg and pulled the cushion out from underneath it, which made the lady scream. “Jesus, not in my ear,” Ivy said. “Okay, now turn and put your feet on the floor so I can get these boots on you.” Ivy worked the rain boots onto the lady, who was huffing and wheezing and leaning over as far as she could on her good thigh.

  Getting her to stand up took a couple of tries, but eventually Mary Ellen heaved herself upward, Ivy holding her up on one side, the paddle on the other. She managed to hop weakly to the bottom of the stairs, where she halted and shook her head violently. “I can’t.”

  “Don’t chicken out on me now,” Ivy said, breathing hard under the crush of the lady’s arm.

  “I can’t put any weight on it. I’ll pass out.”

  Ivy thought a moment. “So go up on your butt.”

  Mary Ellen sighed and sagged even more heavily against Ivy. Then she slowly eased herself into a seated position on the first stair, her hurt leg stretched out straight. The dressing had loosened, but the pads seemed to be glued in place by the thick paste of drying blood. Mary Ellen used her arms and her good leg to push herself up one step, then the next, her face opening into a pained sneer each time she moved, like she had strings tied to the corners of her mouth.

  At the top, Ivy helped her stand back up and hop across the floor. “We’re almost there,” she said, feeling a surge of excitement when they reached the front door. This was happening; she was doing it. She was getting the hell out of Dodge, out into the world, on to the next thing. When she pulled the door open, the freezing air quenched her overheated skin. “Come on,” she said to Mary Ellen, who was hanging onto the doorframe, panting. “Come on!”

  The snow slowed them down, but the path to the car was pretty well mashed down, so getting there wasn’t too bad. While Mary Ellen leaned against the car, Ivy got the front passenger seat reclined all the way back. The lady was shivering pretty hard, so Ivy reached in and started the engine and got the heat going, then tossed the canoe paddle aside and helped Mary Ellen lower herself into the seat.

  “Okay,” Ivy said once she was settled in the driver’s seat. “I can’t wait to find out how to drive this damn thing.”

  Mary Ellen was still breathing hard. She put a hand on her chest, fluttering her fingers. “You’ve got three pedals. Clutch on the left, brake in the middle, gas on the right.” As she explained, she seemed to wake up more fully, exactly as Ivy would’ve expected, practically brought back from the dead by the chance to teach Ivy something. She was good at it too—patient, clear. She didn’t get rattled when Ivy stalled out on her first couple of tries.

  Ivy finally managed to get the wheels going without the engine clunking into silence, and the car backed up a couple of inches, but then it stopped. “That’s okay,” Mary Ellen said. “Try first”—Ivy grabbed the shifter, and the car promptly stalled—“pressing the clutch before you shift.”

  “Right.” Ivy tried again and got the car into first, and this time they started rolling forward. Excited, Ivy released the clutch and mashed the gas, but this, as usual, killed the engine. “Fuck’s sake.”

  “Put it back in neutral and try again.” This went on for a while, the lady repeating everything a million times, Ivy eventually getting it, the car crunching forward a few feet, then backward, but after a while, it stopped and wouldn’t go forward any more, no matter how perfectly Ivy did the gas-clutch dance.

  Head buzzing with impatience, she got out of the car to see what was going on. The tires had cleared the branches and were back in deep snow, which came all the way up to the bottom of the doors. Ivy didn’t need to poke anything underneath the chassis to know the snow was all jammed up in there once again; the tiny car was too low to the ground. The only way up the driveway would be to spend the next five days digging out the tires and jamming branches underneath them, over and over and over and over again until Ivy died of exhaustion.

  “What is it?” Mary Ellen asked when Ivy got back in the car.

  Ivy didn’t answer; she just started the engine and jammed the shifter into reverse. “Fuck it,” she muttered. She stomped on the gas, easing up on the clutch the way she was supposed to.

  “I don’t think it’s going to work, Ivy. The snow’s so deep—”

  “I’m not staying here.”

  The car rolled backward a few inches, then came up against something and stopped. The engine howled as Ivy harassed the gas pedal. She put it back into first and got it going forward a little, then reversed and tried turning the wheel to start getting the car faced the right way. It wouldn’t cooperate, though, the tires not even spinning anymore, just grinding against the screaming engine, the heat pouring out of the vents, Ivy’s hands like teeth biting the steering wheel. She screamed as she urged the gas pedal toward the floor, feeling the rage burn through her heart like it was paper, the thinnest tissue just evaporating in the blazing heat, black shreds of hope floating languidly into the freezing air.

  20

  “Honey. Sweetie. Rose. Shh.” Mary Ellen had been making comforting sounds for a while now, but the girl was so immersed in her fit of rage that nothing was getting through. Mary Ellen put her hands over her eyes and waited for it to be over. Finally, the girl stopped screaming and racing the engine, and the car became quiet.

  “Rose—”

  The girl pounded her fist on the steering wheel one more time. “It’s Ivy, okay? Ivy.” Tears were streaming down her face.

/>   “Ivy. I’m sorry. I keep forgetting.” Mary Ellen felt her own voice fill with tears.

  Ivy sniffled loudly. “I hate this fucking car so fucking much.”

  “I know, but listen, it’s going to be okay. You can still walk up to the road and get help.”

  The girl slowly rocked her head back and forth. “No,” she said, choking on her despair. “I already told you I can’t.”

  “Take my phone. Call somebody. Then you can just leave. They don’t need to know—”

  “I need this car. You promised I would get it, but now the deal’s off, okay?”

  Mary Ellen put her hands back over her eyes and drew a deep, shuddering breath. Could it be? All the girl cared about was the car? The gash in Mary Ellen’s leg throbbed, beating out its warning. She was really on her own now. She was on her own, and she was probably going to die. It wouldn’t be an easy death either. It would be a prolonged slide into fever and vomiting and blackening skin and the systematic surrender of her organs, one by one, until she was nothing but a bag of poison, useless and rotting. No one would hear her screams; she’d be the proverbial tree falling in the forest, silenced by solitude. Matt, Sydney, Shelby—they were already used to her being gone. What was another week, year, decade, eternity? A mere stretching-out of the distance that already yawned between her and them.

  “Stop it. Stop it.” Ivy raised her voice to be heard over Mary Ellen’s sobs. “Calm down. Jesus.”

  “If you’re not walking up there, I am,” Mary Ellen cried, hoisting herself up on one elbow and shoving the door open. She gritted her teeth and used her hands to swing her hurt leg sideways. It was almost dark, but she could just see the canoe paddle lying in the snow a few feet away. She gripped the sides of the car door and heaved herself up onto her aching, trembling “good” leg, a yelp squeezing through her clenched jaw. She hopped toward the paddle, one hand on the car door, then stopped, gathering her courage to let go and move forward without support. She heard the other car door slam.