The Runaways

by Sonya Terjanian

  She clapped her closed fists three times against her forehead, then sat up as well as she could and steeled herself to work on her leg. She loosened the pajama-pant bandage, and the feeling of flames washing over her skin suddenly became more pointed, more searingly focused. She lay back, panting hee-hee and hoo-hoo the way they’d taught her in Lamaze class. Her eyes were wide with amazement—amazement at the profound force of the pain, amazement that something so boundless and strong could come from inside herself, amazement that the violence of it wasn’t exploding her body into a million tiny shards. Tears streamed across her temples and ran into her ears.

  Gritting her teeth, she peeled the pad away from the wound, which looked angry and red, oozing pus. A foul smell rose from it, sweet almost, like rotting fruit. Gritting her teeth, she peeled away the two pads under her leg, which were glued to her skin with dried blood. With several breaks for Lamaze breathing, she managed to replace the pads and the towel under her thigh, noting, with mild relief mitigated by the sight of her grotesquely swollen limb, that the bleeding underneath her leg had stopped.

  She reached over to the coffee table and snagged her purse with her fingertips, pulling it close so she could take out her wallet. She opened it and rubbed her thumb over the plastic window protecting the photo of Matt and the girls. She wanted so badly to talk to them. She turned the wallet over, unzipped the pocket, and tipped her wedding rings into her hand. She slipped them on. She noticed that her credit cards and her ATM card were still tucked into their pockets, but the cash was gone.

  So Ivy had abandoned her. The supplies she’d left were a clear enough message that Mary Ellen was on her own. She was just going to have to summon some of the courage that had sent her down into the ravine in the first place; she had to get herself up and walking around. If she could get to the bathroom, she’d be able to clean the wound, and eventually maybe she’d be able to get into some warm clothes and get herself up the hill to the road. If she wanted to live, she had to move. She couldn’t stay under her blanket on the sofa, in the comfortable nest Ivy had left for her. That would only lead to hopelessness, dementia, sepsis, death.

  She took a deep breath and lowered her good foot to the floor, then reached for the canoe paddle. Gripping it with one hand, she used her other hand to pick up her hurt leg and swivel it over the edge of the sofa. She couldn’t bend her knee, so she had to put her leg down at an angle in order to avoid the coffee table. The pain made her gasp; she pushed air in and out through pursed lips. When the dizziness subsided, she gripped the paddle with both hands and levered herself up onto her good leg.

  She moved the paddle to the other side, waited a moment, then inched the hurt leg forward, hanging as much of her weight as possible between the paddle and her good leg. Her foot touched down, her weight shifted, and pain exploded like a galaxy being born, unfurling its arms infinitely outward. The light dazzled her, and then she was falling, so slowly but actually quite fast, into a deep, velvety, smothering cushion of oblivion.

  21

  Ivy shut the door softly and stepped out into the snow. She’d spent too much time indoors all geared up in Mary Ellen’s thick sweaters, socks, coat, boots, hat, and gloves. Now the cold air struck her sweaty skin like a clapper hitting a bell. She stood for a moment waiting for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, but the world remained hidden. No moon, no stars. No streetlights, storefronts, porch lights, or passing cars either. Ivy realized she’d never experienced a complete vacuum of light before. She was totally blind.

  She hugged herself, bracing for the wave of terror she knew was rolling toward her. Somehow, knowing it was coming never seemed to help. “Put yourself on the outside of it,” Colin used to say, whenever she would crawl into bed next to him, sweaty and shaking. “Stand outside yourself and say, ‘Look what a scaredy-cat I’m being.’ That’s what I always do when I’m scared. You see yourself, and you see your fear, and it kind of gets smaller. Because you’re not inside it anymore; you’re off to the side kind of, like, checking it out.”

  That never really seemed to work, probably because Ivy didn’t try very hard. It was enough to have the big, muscled mass of Colin next to her. This time was different, though. This time she really needed to be able to put her mind over fucking matter.

  There were sounds all around her—little sounds made big by the light vacuum. The forest was swishing and ticking and creaking. For once, there weren’t any crows flying around, but she knew there were other kinds of animals that only came out at night: hunting animals, the kinds with glowing eyes. She could hear their feet pricking the snow; she was pretty sure she could hear them breathing.

  She closed her eyes and tried going outside herself, off to the side and up in the air a little way, but in this kind of darkness, how exactly was she supposed to look back and examine the situation? You couldn’t see a damn thing. Maybe, she told herself, that was good. She nodded, twisting her torso back and forth to keep the blood moving. She was invisible. Whatever was out there couldn’t find her, couldn’t touch her, because she was like smoke.

  She opened her eyes, stretched out her hands, and aimed herself in the direction of the car, moving slowly, her legs tensed up, ready for the strike of a log or a rock or a car bumper. The distance to the car stretched like a rubber band, then snapped shut when she came up against the cold metal body. She felt her way to the front door lock, stabbing it with the key until she finally got it open and the dome light flooded the whole world with its brilliance. She swiftly grabbed the backpack she’d left in the back seat, then tossed the keys onto the dashboard and shut the door, the orange glow staining the backs of her eyeballs for another full minute.

  With trembling hands, Ivy opened the backpack and pulled out the kitchen knife. She would slice her way through the dark. She thrust the blade out ahead of her, and somehow this persuaded her legs to move as well.

  She thought she’d memorized the shape and size of the driveway, the way it curled into the first switchback, then scribbled its way up the slope. But the picture in her mind was useless now, the reality of the physical world as formless as a just-forgotten dream. She’d have to use the incline as her guide, keeping her feet moving uphill. As long as she did that, she was bound to reach the road eventually.

  She was in the woods now; branches scraped her face and thorns tore at her jeans. She stumbled a few times, nearly stabbing herself in the face with the knife as she pitched forward. She was pretty sure she was headed uphill, but it wasn’t always easy to tell in the confusion of the snowy undergrowth. Her foot hooked itself under something, and this time she flew forward, letting go of the knife just in time to break her fall with her hands. She patted around herself in all directions, but the knife was gone. She struggled to her feet and turned back toward the house.

  Something yellow was glowing down there, at the bottom of the hill and off to the left. Mary Ellen must have woken up and turned on a lamp. Ivy exhaled slowly, grateful for the shred of light, glad to know the lady was still alive. Earlier, Mary Ellen had started talking nonsense, her skin hot with fever. When Ivy changed the bandage, she’d seen that the wound was weeping yellow stuff and was starting to give off a whiff of death. She’d known then that waiting until morning would probably mean the end for Mary Ellen. Ivy’s fear of the dark was going to have to take a back seat.

  Keeping the light behind her—checking its position from time to time—she could kind of go in a straight line, even though she was as blind as ever, and trees kept jumping out in front of her. It was a little easier on her brain just knowing the glow was there, like the little bare-bulb night-light in her room back home. It helped her stay on the outside of the fear, looking back at herself.

  And what she saw when she did that was a girl who wasn’t all bad. She saw a girl who could take care of herself and sometimes even other people, a girl who’d stopped running away, because running away was for scaredy-cats. She was running toward somethin
g better, something that might turn out to be harder. But that was okay, because doing hard things gave her life a shape she hadn’t been able to see before.

  Her hands found something that felt like a frozen wall, and after feeling along it, trying to find its beginning or its end, she realized it was the bank of packed snow left by the plows. She scrambled over the wall and hopped down onto the asphalt, grateful for the smooth, hard surface.

  She could see the sky now, padded with light-gray clouds, and she could just make out the difference between the flat road and the humped banks that lined it. She looked up and down the road, waiting for headlights. There weren’t any for a while, so she started walking toward Agloe, looking over her shoulder from time to time, listening for the hum of an engine. Finally, she heard one coming up the hill from town, the headlights just a glow from behind the switchback. Ivy took a deep breath and stepped into the road. She raised her arms, making herself as big as possible. When the car stopped, she slung Mary Ellen’s scarf across the lower half of her face and pulled her hat down around her ears. The headlights made her squint, but she moved toward them, over to the driver’s side window. She said what she needed to say, pointed toward the break in the trees. Then she moved off to the side of the road, hopped back over the snowbank, and vanished into the woods. Like smoke.

  22

  Justine loved the accidental photos Mary Ellen had sent her. Birgit turned them down, but Justine said she had other galleries in mind, and a friend at the Fleischer who owed her a favor. She told Mary Ellen all of this in her hospital room after the first surgery, when Mary Ellen was out of intensive care and finally seeing visitors.

  “We’ll find a home for them, I promise,” Justine said, her eyes roaming the teal-and-beige room.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Mary Ellen, somehow embarrassed, in spite of everything, to be seen in this state—no makeup, haircut grown out, dirty lunch dishes still sitting on a tray across her lap. “I’d rather not do anything with those pictures. Bad memories.”

  Justine ripped off her glasses and polished them with the hem of her threadbare sweatshirt. Mary Ellen had never seen her so uncertain, so at a loss for words. But she understood what Justine wasn’t saying, and had, in fact, already accepted this apology in her head, eager to put the confusing question of blame behind her.

  Matt came in the room then, and Mary Ellen saw immediately that he hadn’t put anything behind him. Without a word of greeting, he took the lunch tray from Mary Ellen’s bed and cast about for a place to set it down, eventually choosing the bathroom sink. Then he busied himself unpacking the bag he’d brought, slamming through drawers and cabinets.

  “Can I bring you anything?” Justine asked Mary Ellen. “I’m sure the food is terrible—”

  “She has everything she needs,” Matt said.

  Justine watched him for a moment as he folded and refolded a sweater. “I heard good things about your surgeon. They say she’s the best.”

  “Mmm-hmm,” Matt said. “So tell me… Have you paid that snowplow bill yet?”

  Mary Ellen reached for the morphine pump.

  Justine leaned an arm on Mary Ellen’s bed, edging Matt out of her field of vision. “They say it’s an art, surgery,” she said. “Unlike the art world, though, women actually have a chance in medicine.”

  “How are you feeling, Mary?” Matt asked, coming to the other side of the bed. “Tired?”

  “I am a little, yeah.”

  Justine stood up. “All right,” she said, giving Mary Ellen a weak smile. “You have my number. If there’s…anything.”

  When she was gone, Matt draped himself over Mary Ellen’s torso, pressing his face to her neck. “I hate her so much,” he moaned, and Mary Ellen closed her eyes, feeling something pulse between them. She dropped the morphine pump and hugged him back, wishing there were space in the bed for Matt to stretch out beside her. At the moment, though, her leg, encased in plaster and bristling with tubes, seemed bigger than the two of them put together.

  “I know,” she said into his hair. “She won’t be back.”

  Matt straightened up and sat in the chair next to her bed, hands open in front of him. “How do you forget to pay the snowplow company? Hasn’t she heard of bill pay?” He lowered his head for a moment, then raised it and looked at Mary Ellen. “Don’t get me wrong, I hate myself just as much. For letting you take the Mini. Even the ski trip, the girls getting in trouble. I shouldn’t have let any of you leave home.”

  “This wasn’t your fault, Matt. And it’s behind us now. All of it.”

  “Well…” He gestured toward her leg with his chin.

  “I just mean we’ll get past this. A year from now, we’ll be thinking and talking about something different.” Mary Ellen closed her eyes. “I used to feel like every moment was going to end up being the permanent state of things…like, if I was sitting in my office writing a report, it felt like the rest of my life would be spent in an office writing reports. If I was walking down Sansom Street feeling annoyed by all the construction, then it seemed like Sansom Street would be under construction for all eternity, and I would never stop feeling annoyed by it.”

  She turned her head to look at Matt, who was squinting at her. “I only saw, like, a fixed version of things. But there’s this huge amount of movement happening all around us, and when you start looking at it that way, you…” She held her arms out in front of her. “I don’t know. You feel better. Things open up.”

  “You been hitting that morphine pump a little hard?”

  “Matt! It’s hard to explain. But I feel like life has this, this fluidity about it now that wasn’t there before. And it’s a good thing. For us.”

  “Okay.” He nodded slowly. “Good.”

  • • •

  Mary Ellen did her home exercises on a yoga mat in the den. At first, it was just a matter of lifting her foot off the floor and raising it to meet Sydney’s hand. After a week of that, Sydney began lifting the foot higher in the air, ever so gently, stretching Mary Ellen’s hamstring and the thick scar tissue that had knotted itself all around the muscle. This hurt so much that Mary Ellen would cry, which felt strange, because she’d never cried in front of her daughters before. Sydney would press her lips together and hold the stretch for another few seconds, then gently return Mary Ellen’s foot to the floor and stroke her shin, saying, “Good job, Mom, good job.” That also felt strange, but not in a bad way.

  Matt and the girls had initially taken turns driving Mary Ellen to her physical therapy appointments, but before long, Sydney took over, sitting in on every session and pestering the therapist with questions. She took charge of Mary Ellen’s home exercises, keeping her on a strict schedule and recording her progress on her iPad. Mary Ellen stuck with the exercises, as painful as they were, because she loved seeing Sydney come into her own. She learned to breathe through the stretches, riding the pain like it was a fiery wave, not fighting it but joining it, letting it carry her to the place she needed to go. It got easier as the summer went on. It got less painful too.

  Shelby seemed as directionless as ever, refusing to discuss possible majors or areas of interest beyond the World Cup. Then one day over breakfast, Sydney tearfully announced that the University of Pittsburgh had a better physical therapy program than Penn State, and that she’d like to give up her spot at Penn State to go there. Matt and Mary Ellen watched apprehensively as Shelby absorbed this news, as if she’d just been told she was going to have a leg amputated. But Shelby took a nonchalant bite of her English muffin and said she was fine with it.

  “You’re sure?” Matt asked, getting his worried German shepherd look.

  “Yeah,” Shelby said. “No problem.”

  And just like that, the twins were separated.

  • • •

  Walking with a cane, Mary Ellen realized, was so psychologically wounding as to be counterproductive
to her recovery. Once she made up her mind to stop using it, she began venturing out more, going to the occasional happy hour after work, rejoining her book group, even enrolling in a new class at the University of the Arts—printmaking this time. It was taught by a young Tyler student with ink-stained fingers who seemed intimidated by his middle-aged pupils.

  Walking without a cane allowed Mary Ellen to start using her camera again, which she did on her short walks around the neighborhood. She found herself spending more and more time at the Logan Circle fountain, photographing the water as it spewed from the mouths of the bronze turtles and frogs, accelerating her shutter until it raced along with each droplet, creating fleeting sculptures in the air. It was the only thing that could stop the obsessive slide show that had been strobing in her mind day and night—coppery hemlock fronds, blood on the ice, the beam of a penlight shining in her eyes. The looks on the paramedics’ faces as they shouted at her, urgently wanting to know what year it was and who was president. Taking pictures, she found, brought her peace.

  A show opened at the Institute of Contemporary Art that sounded interesting, but Mary Ellen hesitated to go, not trusting herself, or maybe just not trusting the art, but she finally went on a Sunday in late summer. Rather than walk through all the galleries, she forced herself to sit for a long time in front of a single abstract painting, her hands folded in her lap, waiting patiently for her thoughts to soften into feeling.

  It was hard to focus, though, because she had too much on her mind. There was the long list of things to buy for the twins’ dorm rooms, and the luncheon she had to plan for her book group, and a mammogram she’d already rescheduled three times. Taking deep breaths, she trained her eyes on the painting’s lines, following them as they charged forward in energetic angles and plunged downward in great, graceful swoops. She imagined herself holding the hand of the painter, stretching her arm up to the very top, then jaggedly dancing across the upper corner and back to the center. Gradually, her thoughts began to relax into images and memories, charging and plunging along with the lines—jazz, pistachios, a golden afternoon with a single red leaf floating in the pool—until she could almost feel the painting in her chest, like the beat of loud music pulsing across a row of roof decks late at night.