While Mary Ellen was sitting there, Cheryl Jones, a fellow Penn Charter parent, came over to say hi, saying she’d seen the article about Mary Ellen’s accident in the Inquirer. It turned out Cheryl’s son was also going to start at Penn State that fall. On top of that, she was going to the same physical therapy practice as Mary Ellen for a knee problem—a pair of what-a-small-world coincidences that led to them having coffee, and later, lunch, and eventually a concert at the Tower Theater with a group of Cheryl’s girlfriends, one of whom worked at the Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, which had just launched a search for a director of marketing.
• • •
On move-in day, Matt took Sydney to Pitt, and Mary Ellen took Shelby to Penn State. Shelby was nervous; she kept her earbuds in for the entire drive, barely speaking. On the walk from the parking lot to the dorm, she struggled to carry two trash bags of bedding while her rolling suitcase refused to cooperate, forever twisting onto its side. Mary Ellen limped along behind her, carrying an armful of hanging clothes, longing to take the suitcase but knowing it would be too heavy. She kept quiet, her heart aching along with her leg, wishing it didn’t have to be like this, knowing there was no other way.
Shelby’s suitemates hadn’t arrived yet. Mary Ellen explored the common room with wonderment, exclaiming over the flat-screen TV, the kitchenette, the sleek furniture. “How can you call it a dorm without cinder blocks and This End Up furniture? This is nicer than my first apartment!”
“This is how they are now, Mom.” Shelby was pulling pillows out of a trash bag, keeping an eye on the hallway, where some loudly chattering girls were broadcasting their social proficiency to the world.
“I bet you’re going to love your roommates,” Mary Ellen said, reading the names posted on the door. “Aaliyah, Brooke, Madison—they sound nice.”
“Mom,” Shelby complained, “you’re being ridiculous. Those are just names.”
“Okay, okay. Where do you want your shoes? In the closet or under the bed?”
“Wherever.”
Mary Ellen helped Shelby unpack in silence until a short brunette entered the suite and introduced herself as Brooke. While Shelby made awkward small talk in the common room, Mary Ellen stayed in the bedroom putting things away. In a pocket of the suitcase, she found the wooden nameplate that had hung on Shelby’s bedroom door since she was a baby. Mary Ellen took it out with a fond smile, running her finger over the colorful carved balloons and prancing cats that decorated the letters of Shelby’s name. She found some pushpins and mounted it on the outside of Shelby’s room door, then turned to Shelby and Brooke with a wide smile. The girls stopped talking, and Shelby’s face fell into the kind of deathly slackness she reserved for moments of fury or despair, or both.
After retreating to her room and slamming the door, Shelby hissed, “I can’t believe you,” her face working hard to maintain its mask of indifference.
“I don’t understand… It’s cute! Why did you bring it if you didn’t want to hang it up?”
“Mom!”
“So take it down!”
“I can’t now. God.”
“Then I will.”
“Don’t touch anything. Don’t do anything, Mom; just stop, I swear. You’re just…uhhh.” Shelby squeezed her eyes shut. “You’re ruining everything.”
“I’m sorry. I—”
“Shh!”
What was it about being shushed that was so infuriating? Mary Ellen crossed her arms, tamping down her anger, struggling to find a calm, reasonable way to defuse the situation. “Now, Shelby—”
“Shh!”
“Don’t shush me!” Mary Ellen’s breath caught up in her throat. Shelby’s eyes flew open. “Excuse me.” Mary Ellen pinched the bridge of her nose. “No, actually, don’t excuse me. I’m on your side, Shelby. Can’t you see that? You have no reason to hate me.”
“I don’t hate you.”
“You have no reason to act like you hate me, even if you’re stressed out.” Mary Ellen paused, breathing hard. “You should treat me with respect, damn it. I’m your mother.”
Shelby’s face folded in on itself, and after taking a moment to recover her senses, Mary Ellen sat beside her on the bed. “I know it’s hard, especially with Sydney going to Pitt. But you’ll make friends. It’s going to be amazing. You’ll see.”
“I know.”
“Just…try not to get sucked into the party scene, okay? No more fake ID shenanigans.”
Shelby looked down and away.
“I know we never really talked about it, with everything that happened, but Shelby, come on.” Mary Ellen searched for a way to say what seemed so obvious that it shouldn’t need saying. “Don’t do stuff that’ll get you in trouble with the police. And aside from all that, don’t drink too much. You start doing it for fun, but later on, it becomes, like, an excuse to avoid dealing with life. And then it’s not fun anymore. Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay.” She patted Shelby’s knee. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you after you got sent home. I was caught up in things that were happening up there, and I don’t know. I don’t really have a good excuse.”
“Did they ever catch that girl? The runaway?”
“I don’t think so.” Mary Ellen played with her wedding rings for a moment. She hadn’t told Matt or the girls very much about Ivy. “She was a pretty determined person. If I had to guess, I’d say she’s in Montana by now.”
• • •
Matt wanted to sue Justine. “Dale says it’s winnable.”
“Dale the tax lawyer?” Mary Ellen slid a letter into an envelope and passed it over to Matt, who stuck a stamp on it. She’d joined the board of Greensgrow and was helping with their annual appeal.
“He went to law school.”
“I really don’t see the point in suing her.”
“She sends you to this place in the middle of nowhere, no land line, no reception, and doesn’t bother paying the snowplow bill? She’s liable. Sorry.”
“Okay, but I think I just want to move on. Don’t you?”
“This is how we move on. By making the responsible party pay.” His jaw was tight—she could see the joint twitching under his second-day bristle.
“I guess I see it more as a mistake,” Mary Ellen said. “I mean, yes, what ended up happening was horrific. But I blame the woolly adelgid more than Justine.”
“The what?”
“The bug that’s been killing all those trees.”
Matt stuck a stamp to an envelope and pounded it with his fist. “I’m sorry, but that bitch—”
“Matt!”
“—has to pay.”
Mary Ellen squinted at him disbelievingly. It had been building for months—the muttering, the door slamming, the parking ticket he’d ripped to shreds and thrown to the ground. She’d never seen him like this. “Why are you so angry?”
“Why are you so not angry?”
She sighed and picked up another letter, folding it carefully and drawing her finger along the crease. In the beginning, she’d been touched by Matt’s fury. It had seemed protective, gallant even. But now it felt like a weight around her neck, pulling her into the past. She wanted to go the other way. Her leg was better; her new job would be starting in a month. She’d been taking new classes and making new friends. Why couldn’t Matt—
She put down the letter. “Oh.”
“What?”
“Is this really about Justine? Or is it about something else?”
“No, it’s definitely—”
“My father used to do this. It was like anger was his proxy emotion. Whenever he was anxious about something, he’d take it out on Mom. Or the reading lamp… He was always yanking the chain right out of the socket.”
“I don’t do that.”
“Are you worried about something?”
&nb
sp; Matt rolled his eyes and pounded another stamp into place.
Mary Ellen took a long, fortifying breath through her nose. “So, I know we haven’t really talked about this, and I don’t want you to feel like I’m pressuring you.”
“What?”
“I guess I’m just wondering if you have any plans. Now that the girls are gone and all.” This felt terrible coming out of her mouth. Nagging. Hectoring. “It’s okay if you don’t want to say.”
“You care about my plans?”
Mary Ellen blinked at him. “What?”
“Yes. I have plans.”
“Okay, good—”
“Which you would know if you’d ever bothered to ask.”
“Oh, come on, Matt. I was trying to leave you alone! I didn’t want to pressure you!”
“Well…” He shrugged, looked at the table. A lock of hair fell into his eyes, and he tucked it dolefully behind his ear.
“Matt, honey—”
“I get it. I realize I’m kind of useless at this point. My work here is done.”
“I never said that.”
“You’re probably thinking it.”
“You’re not useless.” Mary Ellen went back to folding and stuffing. She’d never thought that. And anyway, she wasn’t married to Matt for his usefulness. It was his friendship, his constancy. It was also, she was beginning to realize, his resemblance to her father. That steely dedication to the status quo.
“I know you’ve been through a lot, Mary, even before the whole tree-falling-on-you thing. You’ve been questioning things. And I just… I hope you’re not questioning me. Us.”
“Oh, Matt.” Mary Ellen squared a stack of envelopes, tapping them on the table. “I mean, sure, I’ve been trying to move things in a different direction. I haven’t been happy for a long time. And I’ve reached a point in my life where it feels kind of urgent to make changes.”
“And?” Matt was staring at her with wide eyes.
“What?”
“This is the part where you reassure me.”
Mary Ellen slid the stack of envelopes across the table to him. “I don’t know,” she said softly.
“What?”
“I don’t know if I can reassure you.” She looked down at the table, then raised her eyes to Matt’s confused and frightened face. She supposed her face looked the same, because she was finding this out at the same time Matt was. “It’s the honest truth, Matt. I feel different about things now. I feel like just because something has been a certain way for a long time doesn’t mean it’s going to be that way forever…or that it has to. I mean, when did we get so frozen in place? Remember what it was like to be a teenager, when every minute of every day was a chance to try things out, to try being this kind of person or that kind of person, to walk through all these different doors and see what was on the other side?”
Matt looked lost. “Yeah,” he said. “It sucked. I mean, at least now I know who I am.”
“Do you really, though?” Mary Ellen sat back in her chair.
“I know that I’m your husband, and I’m a father, and I don’t want those things to change.”
“I know you don’t.”
“Are you leaving me?”
Mary Ellen searched Matt’s face, seeing its contours as if for the first time, as if she were back in the drawing studio, teasing the physical world into shapes and shadows and lines. She saw the way the light from the kitchen window settled along the center of his forehead and down the ridge of his nose, skirting the hollows under his eyes and the recesses of his cheeks. She saw the worried dents in his forehead, the way his eyelids retreated into his brow. She saw the uncertain set of his mouth, the stubborn smile lines, the tiny fans at the corners of his eyes. She saw fragility and joy, pain and pride. The exhaustion of age and the anxiety of love.
Ivy was right—Mary Ellen had nothing but choices. It was easy to ignore the multitude of futures arrayed before her, harder to open her eyes and imagine wandering into the wilderness or going to the sun. Staying in one place could be a trap, or it could be a declaration of love. It all depended on how you looked at it.
Mary Ellen reached across the table and took Matt’s hand, which was warm and limp, waiting for her answer. She shook her head.
“No,” she said. “Not today.”
• • •
Mary Ellen Googled “Gardner Funeral Home,” just trying to sort the real from the made-up, and possibly to find an address to send a letter to. But there was no such business anywhere in New York. She supposed Ivy didn’t have any way of finding her either. Maybe she’d glimpsed Mary Ellen’s last name and address on her driver’s license, but it seemed doubtful that she would have memorized it.
She browsed some Montana smoke-jumping sites and considered calling them all to ask if they had any rookies named Ivy. For some reason, though, she never found the time to sit down and do it. Maybe she didn’t want to find out. Maybe she didn’t need to.
It wasn’t until years later, after the girls had graduated and she and Matt had downsized to a trinity in Northern Liberties, that she saw a report on the news about a forest fire outside Missoula. She grabbed the remote and hit Record, but no matter how carefully she scrutinized the footage, she couldn’t spot a familiar face among the smoke jumpers boarding a plane behind the reporter.
There was so much Mary Ellen wanted to tell the girl. She wanted to let her know that she’d rewound the news report three or four times, searching for her blue eyes and freckles and wispy blond hair. That she’d followed the story of the fires for the next few weeks. That she’d found an article online about a group of Missoula smoke jumpers who had died fighting those fires, trapped in a canyon between two walls of flame.
She wanted to say that when the paramedics arrived at Justine’s house, she’d been close to death, that another hour or two would’ve been the end of her. That she understood how hard it was for Ivy to walk into those dark woods, and that she longed, more than anything, to thank her for it.
She also wanted to say she was sorry for doubting Ivy, and that she didn’t doubt her anymore—that she knew for certain she’d accomplished everything she set out to do. In fact, Mary Ellen had been carrying that certainty around like a talisman, rubbing it between her fingers from time to time, drawing courage from it, and hope.
Finally, she wanted to tell her that she hadn’t read the names of the smoke jumpers who’d died; she hadn’t needed to. Because somehow, she could feel Ivy’s presence, still blazingly alive—not just in the big skies over Montana, but inside herself. Where a small part of her, she realized now, had always been.
Reading Group Guide
1. Why does Ivy think she has a black heart? Do you agree?
2. Mary Ellen feels excluded from her family’s life. Do you think this is an inevitable consequence of her choice to have a career, or has she brought it upon herself in other ways?
3. Why do you think Justine goes out of her way to help Mary Ellen?
4. How does Mary Ellen’s product, Numbitol, reflect her life choices?
5. How does Mary Ellen respond to the art when she first visits the Institute of Contemporary Art with Matt?
6. Why do you think Mary Ellen has trouble taking pictures in the beginning of her stay at Justine’s house?
7. Why do you think Mary Ellen loves the “accidental pictures” so much?
8. Why does Ivy have so little empathy for Mary Ellen’s midlife crisis?
9. Does Mary Ellen’s privilege make her unsympathetic? Why or why not?
10. What does Ivy learn about herself when she helps Mary Ellen after her accident?
11. What are some similarities between a teenager coming of age and an older person having a midlife crisis?
12. Do you think creating or experiencing art can help navigate life’s difficult passages? Have you ever had th
is experience?
13. Have you ever pretended to be someone you’re not?
14. Have you ever run away—from home, from your feelings, or from something else?
A Conversation with the Author
How did you get the idea for this book?
My friends have a beautiful vacation home in the woods of northeastern Pennsylvania, and sometimes they let me go there to write. While I was there one winter, working on my first novel, The Objects of Her Affection, it occurred to me that the house would be a great setting for a story. I loved the contrast between the modern, glassy house and the rough, blighted forest… I was also inspired by the ice formations on a nearby creek. Whenever I had writer’s block, I would walk to the creek and take photographs of the ice, and as I became absorbed in the pure, physical beauty of it, I found myself becoming more open to ideas and emotions. That experience became the core of this story.
Have you ever gone through a midlife crisis?
I don’t know if I would call it a crisis, but in recent years, I’ve definitely been thinking a lot about how to lead a more authentic life. I’ve decided to prioritize artistic pursuits—a choice I realize is only available to people of privilege. I’ve been reflecting a lot about that privilege, feeling simultaneously grateful and guilty—something that probably comes through in the way I’ve written about Mary Ellen and Ivy.
Was it difficult to write from the point of view of a teenager?
It was so much fun! I spent some time reading my diaries from high school, which was cringe-y but also really helpful. I was struck by how actively engaged I was in forging my identity and how obsessively I tried to view the results through the eyes of other people. I really felt like I was in control of my own actualization—a feeling that quickly disappeared after college, but which returned, in a milder way, later in life. Inhabiting Ivy’s character was a fun way to revisit that time of intense self-invention.
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