What Happened to Ivy (11 page)

Along the front of our house where Ivy’s ramp used to be, muddy footprints are filled with rainwater. Dad’s footprints and Hannah’s. Around the empty space, shrubs have been trampled and blossoms crushed. I look for the odd-looking plant among them but I can’t find it. And I can’t yet go inside and face Dad. I can’t.

Chapter 27

This late in the day, the playground is empty. Maybe I should have gone in for supper but I wouldn’t have been able to eat anyway.

With the bottom edge of my t-shirt I dry off the seat of a swing and jump on. I pump my legs and pull hard on the chains, sending myself as far as I can from the ground and the blur of neighboring houses and dog-walkers who didn’t get out earlier because of the rain. Back and forth I go, kicking hard into the leafy canopy of a nearby oak. Back and forth until the chains blister my hands.

“I went looking for you but I couldn’t find you.”

Beside the swings are Hannah and Shamus. I feel lightheaded, but pump harder anyway.

She calls up to me again. “I understand why you were mad.”

“Oh really?”

“I was still trying to fit everything together. You know, what I thought I knew about your dad and what you told me? And when I was getting dressed after my shower, I saw him. Out there in front of your house. All in a rage, it looked like, ripping apart the ramp.”

“That’s great, Hannah.” I yank hard on the chains. “I can see
exactly
why that would make you go over to help.”

“Give me a break, David, would you?” she calls up to me. “I’m trying to explain.”

Shamus is pulling on his leash toward some dogs running free at the other end of the park.

“It shocked me,” Hannah says. I’m too tired, too pissed off with everyone to hear any more, but swinging back and forth with Hannah below me, what can I do? “The violence of what he was doing. It didn’t fit with how I’d seen him, you know? Holding Ivy at your cottage? Cupping the back of her head so gently? Talking to her so sweetly? I wanted to try and understand, so I went over.”

My blisters sting. I feel like throwing up. I wish Hannah would shut up and go away. Instead she bends down to unhook Shamus’s leash. He hurtles across the park toward the other dogs.

“And now you do?” I ask her. “You get it now?”

“No.”

That’s something anyway.

“But I keep thinking about the seizure Ivy had by the bonfire,” she says, “and I wonder, if the one she had in the water with your dad…Well, it might have been even worse. And even if it wasn’t, even if it was just the same…Well…” She looks up at me.

I’m still swinging back and forth and I could barf any minute.

“I thought maybe your dad wouldn’t have been able to save Ivy, even if he tried. Even if he tried really hard. I just wanted to tell you that,” Hannah says, her voice trailing off. “In case it helps at all.”

From across the park comes a furious barking.

“Shamus, come!”

The dog moseys back across the park, sniffing another dog or two along the way.

The contorted grimace on Ivy’s face highlighted by the glow of the bonfire. The violent wracking of her limbs. Maybe Hannah’s right. Maybe Dad couldn’t have saved her. My arms are trembling from gripping the chains for so long.

The thing is, he didn’t even try.

Hannah clips Shamus’s leash back onto his collar and says, “There’s one other thing I’ve been thinking. You probably won’t agree but—”

No more.

I jump.

The jolt of landing jars me through my knees straight up to my teeth. I’m still off balance when Shamus yanks toward me, leans against me, and knocks me over onto the wet grass.

“David, I’m so sorry!” Hannah says. But she’s laughing and Shamus is wagging his whole back end and licking my face like mad.

Then he plunks himself down beside me as if lying around in the park together is something we do all the time, and what can I do but laugh, too?

When Hannah kneels down beside him and strokes his coat, her hand brushes against my side. A light breeze lifts wisps of her hair as she looks off in the distance, her face in silhouette against the setting sun.

And I just lie there on the damp grass, with my arm around Hannah’s dog, aware of her hand, resting now between Shamus and the beating of my heart.

Chapter 28

Hannah unfolds herself and gets up from the ground. “I was on my way to the cemetery when I saw you here,” she says. “Would you want to go with me?”

“You go there?”

“I’ve been a couple of times.”

I’d go anywhere with her just to hold onto the sense of her fingers against my shirt a while longer, even if her theory about Dad and Ivy doesn’t do anything for me.

The streets are quiet as we make our way to the cemetery, and so are we. The sun is getting low in the sky by the time we get there, softly filtering sideways through the trees.

Hannah kneels beside Ivy’s grave, holding Shamus’s leash loosely while he sniffs at the fresh earth.

“David, can I ask you something?”

“Yeah.”

“Ivy really liked the water, didn’t she.”

“You know she did. You were there.”

“If she hadn’t died in the lake, how—?”

“Hannah, I really don’t want to talk about Ivy anymore.” I kneel on the ground beside her. “I just can’t. Okay? Can we just…not talk?”

“Sorry.” She turns her face away.

“I didn’t mean…It’s just…”

She flexes her fingers. “No it’s okay. Really.” She looks back at me and sort of half smiles. I really have missed her.

I know what she was getting at. If Ivy hadn’t died in the lake with Dad that day, she would probably have died in a hospital eventually. Ivy hated the hospital, so looking at it that way, dying in the water had to be better. Especially if she went quickly. Which she might have. Kind of how things went for Livingston maybe.

But even if it was like that – and maybe it wasn’t – did that make it okay for Dad to do what he did? To decide – whatever made him decide – that her life would now end? Sure, she’s free of all the crap life handed her. But didn’t she deserve more chances to splash in her bath and laugh at Shamus’s tricks? To talk to the birds and eat orange gummy bears?

Gummy bears. Not worms.

“Hannah, I did something once. Something awful.” I don’t have to tell her this. She might even write me off if I do. I know I don’t matter to her like Dad does. But I do have to tell her. “I got mad at Ivy once. A long time ago.”

I pick up a handful of earth and crumble it between my fingers.

“I was supposed to go to a kid’s birthday party, but Ivy got sick and messed things up so I couldn’t go. So I went out to Mom’s garden – it was still hers then – and I dug up some worms. Earthworms. Big fat ones.”

Hannah is holding herself very still beside me. I don’t dare look at her.

“They were wriggling and moist and I took them, and I fed them to Ivy. All of them. I put them in her mouth. One after another. Even after worm guts were sticking to her teeth and her lips.”

The sun has almost disappeared and Hannah still hasn’t taken off.

“That’s how much I hated her that day. After I did it, I wasn’t mad at her anymore. But I never said I was sorry or anything because I wasn’t. Not then. Not really.”

I never intended to tell Hannah all that, I was never going to tell anyone any of it, but now that I have…“I wasn’t really sorry until this summer, after Ivy was gone, and I couldn’t tell her anymore.”

I look at Hannah then, breathing softly beside me. She just bites her bottom lip and says, finally, “You’re human, David.”

On the far side of the cemetery, in the fading light, a couple is pushing a stroller. A little kid marches along behind them, bashing a stick against the ground.

“It’s getting dark,” Hannah says. “Should we be heading home?”

When we stand up, a lone bird flies out of the canopy of leaves above our heads and into the gathering darkness.
Eep eeep.

Walking slowly toward the cemetery gates, Hannah reaches across the space between us. She takes my hand.

And that’s when I trip on a bump in the road.

She doesn’t even laugh.

Her grip on my hand is strong. Her fingers intertwine with mine. The skin between them is soft. I squeeze her hand and she squeezes back.

When I get home, Mom meets me in the kitchen. “Your dad’s gone to bed early,” she says. I just shrug and she urges me to eat something. I realize I haven’t eaten all day so I let her make me a ham sandwich. As I put my plate in the dishwasher she says, “Are you okay, David?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“We will be,” she says. “We have to believe that.”

I nod. “Okay.”

“Goodnight then, David.”

After I’m ready for bed, I go stand at the front door and turn on the outside light. The bird feeder leans crookedly in the middle of the mess out there and there’s no way to get down to the garden. I turn the light off again. Stars glitter brightly in the black sky. As I turn to go to my room, the craziest thought occurs to me.

The thing Ivy had about birds all summer…Could she have seen the gulls in the sky over the lake that day and decided, herself, that it was time to join them?

A nice idea. My sister, ready to die, flying off with the birds up to heaven. Whatever heaven might be for her.

And it is crazy.

But is it any crazier than what Hannah or my mom have come up with to get them through all that’s happened to us this summer?

Probably.

Chapter 29

The sun is already well up in the sky when I stir the next morning.

Standing at Ivy’s window – the living room window – I see that Dad is outside. He’s gathering stalks and branches that got wrecked when he took Ivy’s ramp down. There’s a look of grim determination on his face as he stuffs the debris into a bin.

I’ve had so many theories about what he did, and listened to so many attempts to make sense of it – none of them making sense – that all I feel anymore is raw. As if all my insides have been scraped with a knife and rubbed with salty gravel.

Across the street, Hannah’s front door opens and out bounds Shamus. He runs to the driveway, snaps up the rolled newspaper in his mouth, then bounds across the quiet street and drops it on the ground beside Dad. If Dad even notices, it doesn’t register on his face as he rams his arm down into the bin of debris.

From her front step, Hannah shouts, “Bring it home, Shamus! Come!”

The dog again grabs the paper and bounds back across the street. When he delivers it to Hannah, she takes hold of his collar, waves to me, and goes back inside.

The damage done to most of the plants isn’t as bad as I had thought. The mock orange and the mugho pine will grow new branches. That odd-looking plant I don’t know the name of – it’s still there, just leaning a bit lopsided, like the bird feeder. The coreopsis and delphiniums will bloom again in another season.

But something has to be done, soon, about the gaping space where the ramp used to be. I could map out a garden there and plant it all myself. With a bit of help, I could probably even build steps.

Dad looks to be contemplating that area now, but he wouldn’t have a clue where to start designing a garden. He takes a trowel from his back pocket and slowly begins trying to level the earth that has been gouged by heavy feet and ends of lumber.

After a few minutes, he sits back on his heels, as I’ve often sat myself, working alone in this garden. Dad’s alone out there now. As alone as he was in the water with Ivy that day, when he let her go. And as alone as he’s been ever since, even if Mom hasn’t left him.

What he’s doing out there is pretty feeble. But he is trying to do something. I have to give him that. He’s out there alone and making the best he can of the messes he’s made. For me? Maybe. Because maybe he’s already done what he could for Ivy?

I don’t know. I probably never will. I also don’t know how any of us will ever get through all the messes we’ve made. But maybe I have to do what Dad’s doing. Maybe I have to at least try, even if it hurts my chest just to take a deep breath and open the door.

It’s a long way from the front door to the ground, but I make the leap. Dad’s standing with his hands on the sides of the bin he’s been filling. When my feet thud to the ground, he turns in my direction, then turns away.

It would be so easy for me to just go around to the side door and go back in the house, or head down the driveway and hide out at the botanical gardens or the library again till school gives me a better excuse to be away from here all day. But I force myself to take another deep breath and step forward into the garden.

“Hang on, Dad.” I take hold of one side of the bin stuffed with debris. “You don’t have to carry that yourself.”

He looks at me for a long moment and says, “Thank you, David.”

We haul it into the backyard and dump it. We’re rounding the corner of the house, coming back out front, when a cop car pulls up at the curb.