by Deb Caletti
They are not a team. “See, Ivy? See the bird?” Suzanne says. Her voice is righteous as church bells.
Carl appears. He lets the screen door slam shut behind him. “Daddy has to go to work,” he says. “Daddy’s got to go pay the bills.” Suzanne and Carl must have been crazy about each other once. They must have stared in each other’s eyes and had passionate sex, and dreamed of forever, and now they can’t stand to be in the same room. It’s hard to understand.
Carl lifts Ivy, kisses her, sets her back down again. Ivy starts to wail. Mads hears the front door slam as he leaves.
“Ivy, come on! Jesus, stop it! Please!” Suzanne rises. The damp grass has soaked her shorts, proving once again that the world’s against her. “Great. Terrific. Now I have to change.”
“I got her,” Mads says.
Mads wonders how one arranges a hit man so she can do in Suzanne and Carl. She needs to watch more 48 Hours. Is Ivy ruined already? She’s so perfect and so sweet, with her eyes the color of violets and her skin soft as tulip petals and a chortling laugh that makes you happy as a bluebell. But this is what Ivy sees and hears and takes in every day. This is the news she gets about love. No one is hitting her or sticking her in a closet, but no one is protecting her, either. She deserves better.
Ivy stops crying and studies Mads’s face. That’s what babies do. They look. And if they see anger or peril, or if no one really looks back, they’ve learned something about the world they live in, Mads knows. And so she smiles, sends messages of safety and love.
“You are one great baby, Ivy.”
“Bee you,” Ivy says. “Ibble be you.”
“Be you? Ives, you’re right. You’re so right. Let’s make that rule number one. Be you, no matter what. Fight for yourself like a samurai. Be your own noble warrior. Take it from me.”
“I’m gone!” Suzanne calls.
Gone. It sounds like an answer.
• • •
Carl left the mayonnaise jar out, and the TV is still blaring in the family room. Mads shuts off the screaming (un)reality housewives. According to her father, she has what she needs—her phone and a credit card. She adds book to that list, since, like a true reader, she never goes anywhere without one. Lucky she’s still got From the Mixed-up Files in her backpack. She needs a map, too, even if she never hears from Billy again.
A phone and a credit card are not enough for Ivy, though. You should see all the stuff they bring to go to the park. And they aren’t just going to the park.
The diaper bag already has the basics, but Mads stuffs a couple of grocery sacks full of extra diapers, changes of clothes, the chime ball, the frog, the toy telephone, the book with the talking bookworm in the center. Also: a box of cereal, and a few bananas, and graham crackers. Bottles of juice and milk.
She sets Ivy in her crib and runs outside to strap the car seat into Thomas’s truck. Across the street, Claire and Thomas’s garage door rises, and Harrison speeds out on his bike. Great. Terrific. This is all Mads needs. Harrison shoots right up to the Bellarose driveway and skids. The bike tires make a satisfying long black mark along the pavement, an expert, superhero arc.
“So, where’re you going?” he asks.
“Where’s your helmet?”
“I’m just coming here!”
“You still need your helmet.”
“You didn’t say where you’re going.”
“None of your business.”
“What’s in that bag?” He drops his bike. Now he tries to snoop through the open door of the truck.
“Don’t you have anything better to do?”
“That’s a lot of stuff.”
“Yeah? So? Hey, Harrison, I think Claire is calling.”
“I’m too old for that trick.”
“Ugh!” This is not meant for Harrison, but for the stupid car seat. It’s like wrestling a stubborn toddler.
“You’re buckling it in the wrong one,” Harrison says. “That’s for the middle person.”
He’s right. She finds the right buckle shoved down in the seat. There. The satisfying click.
“Hey, Hare, I gotta go. You be good.”
“You better not be meeting some boy in secret.”
This stops Mads. It stops her cold. She feels a thud of dread. She’s right to worry. This is all it takes to send a person’s whole life into a hurtling catastrophe—one weird kid, one wrong move, the butterfly effect, where the flap of far-off wings causes a hurricane across the globe. Harrison’s owl eyes stare at Mads from behind his glasses. They are large enough to make you believe he knows things.
“What are you talking about?”
“Hmm, I wonder.” Now he has one knee up, picking at a scab. He hops around to keep his balance. His shins are bruised and bumped as an old peach.
“Harrison.”
He stops hopping, examines the scab as if it’s a new specimen for the books.
“God, you’re gross.”
“You wouldn’t be nervous if you didn’t have anything to feel guilty about.”
“Who says I’m nervous?”
“You’re practically pooping your pants.”
“What are you even saying? Maybe I have friends you don’t know about.”
“You don’t have friends.”
“I have friends, all right?”
“What do you think I am, stupid?”
“You just better mind your own business, mister.”
“This is my business.” He reaches into a pocket of his cargo shorts. Pulls out one of those small spiral notepads. He waves it at Mads.
“What is that?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know.” She tries to snatch it. She lunges, but he’s too fast. He takes off, sprints a loop around the Bellaroses’ front lawn. “Can’t get me.”
God, he’s infuriating! And, whatever! It’s not like she’s ever going to see Billy again anyway. “Hey, this has been fun, but I’m at work. And I have somewhere I need to be.”
Inside the Bellarose house, her phone is buzzing. She does not want to even think it might be him. Yeah, well, no worries, because it isn’t. It’s her mother. Three texts, one phone message, which is what she does when Mads doesn’t answer right away. Made appt. with attny. Knightley the week you return to sign papers! So exciting! Tell me you got my text about signing papers when you get back!
Fury is some weird, out-of-control engine. She squeezes the phone, jams it down into her purse. Now she’s back outside with Ivy on her hip. Harrison is still on the front lawn. The Bellaroses’ cat lies across his shoes. Harrison’s hunched over the spiral notebook like he’s calculating the formula that proves the big bang.
He spots her, checks his watch. It’s nearly as big as a hubcap, with lots of circles and dials that do various things he’s tried a million times to tell her about. You could scuba dive with it on, he’s said. Which is very handy, since Thomas and Claire barely let him take a bath without supervision.
“Two thirty-eight,” he reports aloud. “Eleven thirty-eight p.m. in Cairo. Nine thirty-eight p.m. in the Reykjavik, Iceland.”
“Watch your head, Ives.” Mads pulls the car seat harness over the baby’s head and buckles her in.
“Two forty-one,” Harrison says.
Mads starts the truck. She sticks her head out the window. Harrison’s glasses are skewed, as if he’s had another unfortunate run-in with the Nerf darts. She better be nice to him. Someday he’ll discover how to live on Mars in the event of a nuclear catastrophe. “Two forty-three, suspect leaves the premises,” she calls. “You’re wasting your time, anyway.”
She takes off. Her general rage and despair do not fade, but her nerves about Harrison do. She stops worrying about him.
She shouldn’t.
She’s not nearly worried enough. The weird kid has a mission and a camera phone. He’s trying to protect her, and the urge to protect can cause plenty of trouble. Plenty. Some clueless butterfly flaps in Panama. The hurricane begins to swirl right there on the Bellar
oses’ front lawn.
• • •
Mads will not get on the southbound freeway again. She’ll head north. It’ll be an entirely new beginning!
Ha. New beginnings are nearly impossible with the exact old you. Mads thinks: a ferry, islands, Canada. She feels the city fall behind her. Now she passes the towns of the north suburbs. Just as she sees the first sign for the ferry terminals, she notices the thin, small arm of the gas gauge. It’s flicking back and forth, shaking as bad as Derek Carson’s hands whenever he had to give a speech in their ninth-grade public speaking class.
Honestly, Thomas’s truck? Mads thinks. You would be this cruel?
She takes the first turnoff, winds down a narrow, treed road. There’s a Bartells pharmacy and a Starbucks (of course), some yoga place and a chiropractic clinic, but no gas station. The road leads to the water and the ferry terminal. The signs say so, but she also can just tell. It’s beginning to smell salt-watery, and the sky is getting larger. She’s silently praying that she makes it to the town below, where there’s sure to be a gas station. Where is Cole when she needs him? He knows everything about cars. He’d know why the half tank of gas she’s sure was there has basically disappeared.
It smells like the sea out there, all right. You could bite right into that smell. Ivy’s fallen asleep. Mads sees the ferry terminal a few blocks away, sitting at the quaint end of a quaint town.
What are you doing? Mads thinks. What, what, what? You are stupid. This is pointless. You are a loser, and forgettable besides.
Of course, despair isn’t just one big ogre sitting in a corner; it’s an army of ogres. They’ve been gathering, hiding behind every tree, and now they swarm, smack into her and take her down. All at once, she’s too defeated to move. She’s so sad, she can’t even cry. The ogres drop a blanket of sad over her. She’s at a stop sign with the engine idling. She wants to lie right down on the seat, and the only thing that stops her is Ivy. Of course Mads won’t be getting on that ferry. Of course every single toy and jar of food will be returned to its usual place. Kidnapping Ivy is only a dream that keeps her feeling like something can be done and someone can be saved, she tells her loser self. But it can’t and no one can be; at least, this is what the mind-sick ogres chant. Their job is to keep you in place with their force and the tethers around your wrists and ankles. Your job is to do the impossible and fight the bastards.
She can’t fight right then, because you need weapons and tools and spells to be a warrior—potions are good, and so is an outstretched hand, a narrow window of escape, and, most of all, the shout of your own voice, yelling for help. The voice, saying me, I, mine. But that’s so hard, because the voice is rusty from lack of use, and now the ogres have their big ham-slice hands around the vocal cords.
She’s stopped at a railroad crossing. Crossroads, really? Please! Still, obvious is good, in her condition. Subtlety would surely fly right past. A Shell station is just on the other side of the tracks. Solutions, okay, maybe not solutions, but first steps toward solutions, are just beyond, if she would just . . . These are the words other people say and the ones she tells herself: just, and knock it off, and you think you have it so bad? One person against all those ogres is impossible. As far as weapons go, she’s got a smile shield and a guilt umbrella, and even her anger is still just a burp she covers behind her hand.
She wonders if trains even come through here anymore. She feels bad thinking about this with Ivy in the car. But later, alone, a train might work. It might do the trick. It’s not that she imagines exactly what would happen if she stepped out in front of one—the horrible details, the trauma to the driver of the train, to everyone she knows and doesn’t. She just imagines the burden that she has and the burden that she is being lifted. The mind-sick stuff that the ogres gleefully toss in the air makes her believe that there is only one story possible for her life. What a lie that is. You must never forget how ogres love a lie.
Only a single element needs to shift: carbon, nitrogen, a violin case, a museum ticket, the loud and frantic beep-beep! of a car horn. The loud and frantic beeping of a car horn? What? What is that? Jesus! Mads jolts out of her own head. There is some kind of screaming emergency. She looks around in panic—is a train coming? Is she on the tracks after all, putting Ivy in worse danger than she’s ever been in at home? But no, she’s just sitting at that stop sign, and there’s no train, and the tracks only disappear off into the quiet distance.
Still, the honking seems to require some action, so she swerves over into the first place she can, an adjacent restaurant lot, same as you might for an ambulance. The gas gauge, she notices, has returned to half full. Her heart is pounding. Who’s honking like that?
She checks her mirrors, cranes her neck.
No.
It can’t be.
She thinks she’s seeing things. Is she imagining this? She could swear that’s Billy Youngwolf Floyd’s truck barreling down the hill, honking like something’s on fire.
It’s him, all right. This is crazy. He pulls up right beside her, his tires spinning in the gravel. They’re in the parking lot of the Fog Horn Grill. Out her open window, Mads smells fish frying and the sunken, mysterious odor of kelp and deep water.
This—this is a coincidence definitely too strange to ignore. Billy leaps out of his SUV. He runs around it, leans right down into Mads’s window. She is speechless. His face is right close to hers. His eyes are a little wild. They look just like his mother’s in that yearbook photo from 1976.
“What are you doing!”
“What do you mean, what am I doing? What are you doing? What are you doing here?”
“I was just . . .”
“Just?”
Wait. He looks awfully guilty. Like he’s been caught. What was she thinking? This is no coincidence. It’s about as much of a coincidence as her seeing him at his own house. See? There’s fate, and there’s agency, dancing together beautifully, like a couple in sequined costumes.
“The baby is with you,” he says.
“Of course the baby is with me. I’m babysitting. Are you following me?”
“No! Jesus, come on. I mean . . .”
“Who is that?” A tall dog with shaggy bangs sits in Billy’s passenger seat. The dog gives her a quick glance, as if he’s too polite to stare.
“Rocko.”
“Rocko?”
“Look at him. It’s a fucking shame.”
“What?”
“He’s starting to get bald patches, see? By his—”
“Wait.”
“What?”
“He looks familiar.”
Ivy stirs. One thing about Ives, she wakes up like a champion. She opens her eyes and beams like the sun, and then she looks right at Billy Youngwolf Floyd and—clear as day—she says, “Dog.”
“Dog! Did you hear that?” Billy says. “She called me dog! She remembers me! You’re right,” he says to Ivy. “Wow, you’re amazing.”
Ivy chuckles. Mads does not know what’s going on here. She hunts around in one of the bags, finds Ivy’s bottle of juice, and hands it to her. Ivy sucks a little and then smiles and says dog again, through the squeak-suck of the bottle.
Mads narrows her eyes. “That dog lives in my neighborhood. I’ve seen him. I recognize his bangs.”
“Every day for a week, that owner—”
“Every day for a week?”
Billy rubs his forehead with his palm, runs his hand through his hair. Then he reaches into the open window by Rocko. “I wanted to leave you this. Like, a surprise.”
It’s a Whitman’s Sampler box. It’s yellow, and there are flowers in the corners of it and there’s a bird and a basket that look embroidered on. Chocolates.
“They’re my gran’s favorites, and I thought . . . Shit.”
“Chocolates?”
“I tried to leave them a few times, but once your uncle was mowing the lawn, and then there was this kid . . .”
“Harrison, my cousin.”
“He took my picture.”
“He did? I’m sorry. He’s a little protective.”
“And when I was on your street, I saw Rocko, you know? Pretty obvious what’s going on with him, the state he’s in . . . And so today—”
“You stole him.”
“I wouldn’t say stole exactly.”
“Kidnapped.”
“Fine, kidnapped. I don’t like to call it that, but whatever. And just as I’m getting him in the truck I see your truck pulling out of your street, and I thought—”
“You thought you’d follow me.”
“You make me sound like a creeper.” He’s right. Who is she to talk?
“I mean, you could have just called.”
“I tried!”
“You did?”
“I thought maybe you gave me the wrong number on purpose.”
“Let me see your phone.”
He digs it out of his pocket and hands it over. Ivy sucks her juice bottle and watches like Billy and Mads are Bert and Ernie in a riveting episode.
“Four five four eight, not seven. I’m an idiot. I’m so sorry.” She’s still astonished that he’s standing here in front of her now, but all at once, she’s relieved, too. Relief washes over her, pours and pours like a waterfall. She wants to tip her chin up to it in gratitude.
“Sometimes girls do that, the number thing. . . .” He blushes.
Ivy slurps the last of her bottle, flings it to the seat. “Duh,” she says.
“Do you want to get out of this car? Go down there?” He crooks his head toward the beach. “Walk, or something? Rocko probably has to pee.”
She shouldn’t. She remembers in a rush why even spending time with this boy is wrong. All that remembering pushes in and shoves at her conscience. But the relief is so great, and she’s just really so happy to see him. “Sure. Let me change Ivy first.”
“I’ll get Rocko on a leash.”
Mads changes Ivy and then slathers her with sun lotion. Ivy’s hair is stuck up all sticky and sweet-smelling. Mads pops a hat on over it, ties it underneath Ivy’s chin. Ivy grins like she’s having the best day ever.
Billy and Mads and Ivy and Rocko cross over the tracks, to a soft sand beach. Kids dig and build castles and fetch water from the shore in pails while moms unwrap snacks and keep a watch out. Mads puts Ivy in her pack.