The Revolution of Ivy

by Amy Engel

There are more people out on the streets than earlier, and they are all headed the same direction we are. Although a few people shout our names as we streak past, no one tries to stop us. Apparently whatever is happening with our fathers is more urgent than discovering I am back inside Westfall, which does nothing to ease my anxiety.

  “Do you think this is where Caleb and Ash went?” I ask. “Maybe they heard something and went to see what was going on?”

  “Maybe,” Bishop says, face grim.

  Bishop’s parents’ house is still standing, although one half of it is only a charred ruin, uneven remains of brick catching the snow against their bloodred surface. People are lined up outside the wrought iron fence surrounding the lawn. I see a few policemen, but they seem confused, milling around and looking at each other with no one making a move, everyone waiting for someone else to tell them what to do.

  Bishop and I shove our way through a small gap in the crowd, and I hear Bishop’s quick inhale before my eyes register what they’re seeing. My father is standing on the still-intact front porch, the gun in his hand pressed against President Lattimer’s temple, his other hand clutching the back of President Lattimer’s neck. Erin Lattimer is kneeling on the steps. I can hear the pleading sound of her voice, but not her exact words.

  “Daddy!” I scream, before I think about it, the word torn from my throat.

  My father’s head whips up, scans the fence line until it lands on me. “Ivy?” he calls.

  “It’s me,” I call back. “Please stop, Dad. Whatever you’re thinking. Please stop.”

  “They have Callie,” my father yells. “They’re going to kill her.”

  “No,” Bishop says, loud, and my father’s eyes swing to him. “We got her out.” His hand squeezes my forearm. “We’re going to come up there. Just Ivy and me. Is that all right?”

  My father hesitates, and President Lattimer flinches.

  “I’ll leave my gun on the driveway,” Bishops yells. “We’re coming up. Go, Ivy,” he urges me. “Go!”

  Just as we reach the gate, two policemen rush forward. But Bishop swings his rifle off his back and aims it at them. “No,” he says, voice firm. “Back off. Now!”

  If they were better trained or had more experience with firearms, Bishop alone might not be enough to stop them, but the ease with which he holds the rifle, the strength of his voice, causes both of them to obey his command, and they skid to a halt.

  I slip inside the gate and race up the driveway toward my father. I can hear Bishop’s footsteps behind me. A quick glance over my shoulder shows Bishop setting his rifle down on the driveway just as he promised. We reach the base of the steps at almost the same time and Erin stumbles down into Bishop’s arms. “Bishop,” she cries. Her face is ragged from weeping, her hair tangled. One of her feet is bare, and that’s the thing my mind snags on, wondering where she lost her shoe and thinking how cold her foot must be.

  “Don’t come any closer!” my father barks, and his voice snaps the world back into focus.

  I stop on the bottom step, the cold iron railing biting into my skin. “Dad,” I say. “Let him go.”

  “Ivy.” My father’s face softens. “You’re alive. You’re here.” He has dark circles under his eyes and a growth of beard that makes him look like a stranger.

  “I’m here, Dad. I came back. But you need to let him go.”

  “I can’t,” my father says. His face twists up, but not in rage, in a kind of exhausted sorrow that cuts right through me, rips my heart in two. In a flash, all the anger I’ve harbored toward him is gone. There is no room for it here, no way it can help me.

  “Dad, please…”

  “He’s been having people killed. People who spoke out after Callie was arrested, did you know that?” my father asks.

  “No,” I say. “I didn’t know. But that’s still not a good enough reason to shoot him.” Once upon a time it might have been, but not anymore. Now he is more than President Lattimer. He is Bishop’s father.

  “Yes, it is,” my father says. “It’s more than enough reason.”

  “That’s not why you’re doing this,” President Lattimer says quietly, startling me. I’d almost forgotten he was capable of speech, all my attention centered on my father and the gun in his hand. “At least be honest, Justin.”

  “For God’s sake, Matthew,” Erin cries. “Don’t make it worse. Don’t goad him.”

  President Lattimer glances at Erin, something like an apology skating across his face. “This has never been about Westfall. Or the way I run it. Not for you, Justin. It’s always been about Grace.” The sound of my mother’s name seems to suck all the air out of the sky like a held breath, the gasping seconds before a bomb explodes.

  “Don’t you dare say her name to me,” my father says. “You have no right.”

  “I have every right,” President Lattimer says. “I loved her, same as you did.”

  “You let her go! You killed her!” my father roars. His eyes are suddenly wild, the gun pressed so hard against President Lattimer’s temple that I can see the surrounding flesh turn white. Behind me, Erin moans.

  It won’t do any good to disagree with my father about who caused my mother’s death. I already tried that once and it got me nowhere. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” I say instead, trying to keep my voice calm, willing the shaking in my hands to stay there and not travel up into my vocal cords. “It was over a long time ago. She’s gone, Dad. And she wouldn’t have wanted this.” I take a deep breath, my eyes meeting President Lattimer’s. “She loved him. More than anything.” More than any of us, I think, but manage not to say.

  “Yes,” my father says. “She loved him, and he betrayed her. He broke her heart like it was nothing. Married someone else like it was nothing.”

  “It was never nothing,” President Lattimer says. “Do you think it was easy for me? Watching her marry you, have your children? Do you think you’re telling me anything I haven’t told myself a thousand times? You think whatever you do to me will be any worse than the day I found her dead?” President Lattimer’s voice is so raw, so naked, that it makes me want to look away, like I’m witnessing some intimate moment between my mother and him.

  Tears are running down my father’s face. The moisture makes his dark eyes glow. Snow is catching on his hair now, giving him a crown of white. He looks like a madman. He looks broken in a way I have no idea how to fix. He’s not pressing the gun as hard against President Lattimer’s temple now, but I’m not fooled. I know my father. I know how strong his hate burns.

  “Doing this won’t change anything,” I say. “The Westfalls aren’t going to take over. That dream is gone, Dad. But we can leave here. Make a life outside Westfall. Start fresh.” This has been my secret hope since the moment I decided to return to Westfall. But now, saying the words out loud, they sound ridiculous, futile in the face of so much painful history.

  My father shakes his head. “No. I’m never leaving.”

  My heart sinks. “If you ever cared about me, Dad, even a little,” I say, “please let him go.”

  “Of course I care about you, Ivy. Of course I do.” My father’s face crumples. “I love you. You’re my daughter. I wanted so much more for you, for all of us.”

  They are the words I’ve needed to hear, to believe, for so long. But they are too late. They aren’t going to be enough, for either one of us. In my bones I already know there is no way to stop this, but I have to try anyway. “Then put the gun down, Dad. Killing him would only be vengeance, not justice.”

  My father stares at me, and I fight to hold his eyes, but his gaze slides back to President Lattimer and our brief connection is lost. “Then vengeance is what he deserves,” my father says. He shoves President Lattimer forward, aims the gun at the back of his head.

  President Lattimer looks at me, a faint smile on his lips. He doesn’t seem resigned to his fate, so much as at peace with it. “Your mother would be very proud of you, Ivy.” His eyes shift to Bishop, glow with love. �
�The same way I’m proud of you.”

  “Dad,” Bishop’s voice breaks.

  “I’m so grateful you and Ivy found each other,” President Lattimer says. “I know Grace would be, too.” He looks at Erin. “And I’m sorry you always had to live in her shadow. That wasn’t fair to you. I wasn’t the husband I should have been.”

  “It’s all right, Matthew,” Erin says, her words clotted with tears. “I know you loved me the best you could.”

  “Turn around,” my father says.

  “Don’t,” I say, but my voice is swallowed up by the wind, by the force of my father’s grief and rage.

  “I always loved her,” President Lattimer says, turning to face my father. He keeps his head up, his voice strong.

  “Not enough. Not as much as I did,” my father says and pulls the trigger. President Lattimer’s forehead explodes in a flash of blood and bone. One second he is a living, breathing man, a husband, a father, the keeper of my mother’s heart, and the next he is a lifeless body, already gone.

  “No!” Bishop yells. I stagger up the steps, then stop when I see my father still has the gun in his hand. He’s swinging it in Bishop’s direction, and I try to move into his path but I’m too slow, my feet clumsy with shock, my hands slipping on the icy railing.

  There’s a whistle through the air, a sound I know, but can’t place, my brain working at half its normal speed. A bolt hits my father in the throat, knocks him backward, blood already spouting from the wound. He slides down the front of the house, leaving a trail of dark gore against the brick.

  It feels like I’m observing from outside my body, detached and numb, as I turn my head and see Caleb standing on the lawn, just lowering his crossbow. Ash is next to him, her face contorted with tears. I pivot away from them, watch as Erin slips through blood and snow to President Lattimer’s prone body. She presses her face into his chest, and her wails reverberate in the air, stabbing against my brain like knives. I would cover my ears but can’t find the strength to raise my arms. I look at Bishop, his shock-wide eyes and pale skin probably a mirror of my own. He collapses on the top step, his face buried in his hands.

  I thought I didn’t believe in fate, but maybe fate doesn’t care what you believe. Because this final, awful result seems inevitable. For all my fleet-footed games of bob and weave, all the ways I tried to avoid the carnage in front of me, it came to pass anyway. Perhaps it was set in motion long ago: when one man wrested power from another; when two children fell in love and weren’t allowed to be together; when my mother looped a length of rope over the branch of an oak tree and tightened a noose around her neck.

  My father’s blood mingles with President Lattimer’s, runs in rivulets through the pristine white snow that is still falling, until it forms a single river. Impossible to tell which is Westfall and which is Lattimer. I’m as frozen as the air, unable to move toward my father, unwilling to risk reaching for Bishop only to see him pull away. So I simply stand, hands curled around the iron railing and watch the snow drift down, watch the flakes turn to bloody ice on the bodies of our fathers.

  Chapter Twenty

  I hear a crow calling overhead, the whistle of wind through the snow-laden branches. But other sounds are distant. A knot of policemen is moving up the driveway and while their mouths are open, I can’t make sense of what they’re saying, don’t want to bother trying. When the first policeman reaches me, he grabs my arms, pulls my hands behind my back with a little too much force. I don’t resist, can’t bring myself to care about what they might do to me.

  “Let her go,” Bishop says, the first words that have actually reached my ears since our fathers fell. Bishop is still sitting on the steps. He looks boneless; even his voice lacks any sort of force.

  One of the policemen has stepped up onto the porch and is trying to gently pull Mrs. Lattimer away from the president’s body. “Mrs. Lattimer,” he says, “what do you want us to do with her?” He jerks his head in my direction. “Ivy Westfall?”

  Erin doesn’t get up, only turns her head to look at me. There is a smear of blood across her cheek. She looks very young in her grief, lost and alone.

  “What should we do with her?” the policeman repeats.

  A whole kaleidoscope of emotions passes across Erin’s face: pain, sorrow, anger, disgust, exhaustion. I’m not sure which one is going to win. Bishop must see it, too, because before Erin can reply, he stands, hauling himself upright with both hands wrapped around the railing. “I swear to God, Mom,” he says, voice tight. “After all this”—his arm sweeps the carnage on the porch—“if you don’t do the right thing here…” He is fighting for me, but he is still not looking at me, and my heart drums an insistent, mournful beat.

  Erin pushes herself up a little at the sound of Bishop’s voice, swivels her head in his direction. She must want vengeance of her own now. How can she not? And I’m the only person available from whom she can extract it. Bishop stares at his mother, his jaw clenched and his chest heaving with tears I know he is trying not to spill. Not here in front of strangers.

  “Don’t do anything with her,” Erin says finally. “Let her go, like Bishop said. Just…let her go.”

  The policeman releases my arms, but I don’t move. In some ways, the inside of a cell would have been a relief. I glance back at the fence and see that the people gathered there have not moved. Some are weeping, others are grouped in tiny circles, talking. All the earlier tension is muted, as if the deaths of President Lattimer and my father shocked the anger away, left both sides empty of anything but uncertainty.

  Bishop walks down the steps. “I don’t want anyone else hurt,” he says. “Try to get people to go home, keep things calm, but don’t use those guns. We need to diffuse the situation, not make it worse.”

  “Are you in charge now?” one of the policemen asks. “Or your mother?” No one seems to question the idea of another Lattimer taking over, same as it’s always been.

  Bishop looks over his shoulder at his mother, still curled over President Lattimer’s body. “Me. For now. But I’m going to want input from all sides. Tell people to gather in city hall tomorrow at noon. Everyone is welcome. We have to start figuring out how to put Westfall back together.”

  The policemen nod, then head down the driveway to begin dispersing the crowd. Bishop follows them for a few steps before veering off across the lawn toward Caleb and Ash. When he reaches them, Ash throws her arms around his neck, and Bishop hugs her back. They stay that way for a moment before Bishop turns to Caleb, pulls him into the same warm embrace. I pivot away, back toward the porch. My father’s eyes are open, flat and dark. I wish someone would close them.

  “Ivy,” a voice says from behind me, something heavy landing across my upper back. An arm, I think, maybe. It’s too much work to concentrate. “Come on.” There’s pressure on my shoulder and I give in to it, allow myself to be turned. “Come on,” Ash repeats gently.

  “Where are we going?” I ask her. “My father…”

  Ash keeps guiding me, and I keep following her. “Somewhere warm. And they’ll take care of your father.” A tear slips down her face. I wish one would slip down mine. “And Bishop’s father, too. Don’t worry.”

  Bishop and Caleb are walking ahead of us, the crossbow swinging on Caleb’s back. Bishop has picked up his rifle again, slung it in its familiar position over his shoulder. “I don’t…I don’t blame Caleb,” I say. Even my mouth feels numb, my lips working hard to form the most simple words.

  “I know,” Ash says. “He knows, too.”

  I don’t pay attention to where we’re going, not noticing the path we’re taking until we’re on the walkway to the house Bishop and I shared after our marriage. I stumble on the sidewalk. “Why here?” I ask, loud enough for Bishop to hear.

  He stops, his eyes meeting mine for the first time since my father pulled the trigger. I can’t tell if he’s looking at me or through me. “Because there’s nowhere else to go.”

  Bishop finds the spare key wh
ere we left it hidden on the front porch and unlocks the door. I climb the steps and go inside. The house smells musty and abandoned. I stand in the middle of the living room like a statue, while everyone else moves around me. A pair of Bishop’s shoes lies in the corner, a remnant of our earlier life.

  “I’m going to go take a shower,” I say.

  No one answers me. I wander down the short hallway and lock myself in the bathroom. The water is cold, but I undress and climb into the shower anyway, hoping that the sting of icy water can bring feeling back to more than my body. I wash my hair, shampoo running into my eyes, making them burn. I scrub and scrub at my hands until all of Callie’s blood is washed away. Then I just stand there, let the water stream down my face.

  I am shivering violently by the time I emerge from the shower. I leave my filthy clothes in a pile on the bathroom floor and wrap myself in a towel. I can hear Caleb’s and Ash’s voices from the living room, the sound of them starting a fire in the fireplace. I open the bathroom door as quietly as I can, cross to the bedroom, and slip naked underneath the blankets.

  I’m still shaking, my wet hair soaking into the pillow, when Ash comes in a few minutes later. “Hey,” she says softly. “Victoria brought over some food.”

  “I’m not hungry.”

  Ash pulls the blankets up higher on my body, makes sure my bare shoulders are covered. “Okay,” she says. “We’ll be in the living room if you need anything.”

  “Where’s Bishop?” I ask, teeth chattering. I don’t know if it’s from cold or shock.

  Ash pauses. “I’m not sure.” She lays a hand on my forehead like she’s checking for a fever. “But he’ll be back.”

  I close my eyes, roll away from her.

  I haven’t been asleep. I’ve been drifting, my mind skipping from memories of my father, thoughts of Callie, longing for Bishop. The soft sounds of Caleb’s and Ash’s voices from the living room trailed off earlier, replaced by Caleb’s muted snores. Bishop is back; I can hear him in the bathroom. It reminds me so much of the time we spent here as husband and wife, all the nights I listened to him get ready for bed. Of all the possible scenarios I pictured for our future back then, this was never one of them.