What Happened to Ivy (9 page)

“He let her go.”

Hannah shakes her head. “Go where?”

Suddenly weak, I lean back against the fridge. “He let her
go
, Hannah. He took Ivy swimming…and when she started having her seizure he started lifting her…out of the water.” My bones have turned to jelly and I slide down the fridge to the floor. “But then he didn’t.”

Hannah turns away and shoves her hands into a sink full of dishwater. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“He admitted it, Hannah. Last night. He said it to Mom…He said, ‘I let her go.’”

“You’re lying.” Hannah’s words are tight. Her shoulders are hunched up tight around her ears.

It sounds crazy even to me, but my gut reminds me it’s true. The tears are starting now. Shamus saunters over, flops down beside me, and lays his head across my lap.

“Hannah, listen. I wish I
was
lying. I don’t want to be right about this…But I thought…”

I don’t know what I thought.

Hannah spins away from the sink and grabs a dish towel. “
You
listen, David.” She glares down at me from across the room. “I have watched your dad with Ivy and he is a
great dad
. Do you know how
lucky
you are, having a dad like him? How can you expect me to believe such a…such a
lie
?”

Hannah hurls the dish towel and it hits me in the face. I manage to rise from my spot on the floor and charge out of the house.

Chapter 23

An electric current is buzzing through me. I try to cry for help…But my chest…Something heavy…I sink deeper.

Gasping for air, I wake, tangled in my sheets. I rip myself free of the bedding and fill my lungs again and again.

Hannah didn’t believe me and I didn’t even get to the worst. That maybe Dad didn’t just let Ivy go, maybe he made her go. Because maybe he got fed up. Fed up like I got fed up. Fed up with all her shrieking like a dozen damn birds, and with all her shitty diapers. With having to hold her down every single time she had to take her meds, and fed up with all her ‘special needs.’ Then when he’s doing something that’s supposed to be so straightforward and pleasant – fun even – she goes and has another damn seizure. And suddenly he sees this chance to stop it. All of it. For good.

I turn over my pillow but even its cool side is hot.

Looking at just the facts of what happened – forget
how
it happened – it’s actually no wonder Mrs. Meyers and others came to the conclusion they did. A man takes a helpless, severely disabled kid into the water – a kid prone to seizures who can’t even walk, never mind swim – at an isolated cottage where no one will see them. His son isn’t around, his wife is napping, and the next thing anybody knows, the disabled kid comes out of the water dead.

But if anyone who mattered thought that, like cops and stuff, wouldn’t they have reported it? And if Dad was right about someone in the dunes seeing him with Ivy that day, they’d have gone to the cops, wouldn’t they? If they saw him doing something wrong?

I think too much. All this thinking has my guts in a mess. A bowl of cereal might help settle things down.

A faint light from the kitchen is shining into the hall. Whichever of my parents went to bed last must have forgotten to turn it off.

No. Mom is in the kitchen in her bathrobe, pushing an iron back and forth across the sleeve of one of Dad’s shirts.

“What are you doing?” I ask her.

The iron hisses steam. “I couldn’t sleep.”

I could say, ‘Dad’s the one who should be having trouble sleeping, he’s the guilty one.’ But I don’t. “Me either,” I say, “but I don’t want to iron.”

Unless…could Mom be feeling guilty, too?

She turns over the sleeve. “What do you want, David?”

My thoughts are so confused I’m not even making sense to myself anymore. “Something to eat.” I get a bowl and cereal from the cupboard, milk from the fridge, and a spoon from the drawer.

Is Mom awake, trying to figure out how to leave Dad? Ironing his shirts so he’ll have some to wear for a while after she’s gone? She keeps ironing the same, already smooth shirt. She looks even more tired than she did when Ivy was alive. But no one would iron shirts for someone they were leaving. Besides, now that I think of it, neither of my parents headed to the couch after they got ready for bed earlier.

I chew on a mouthful of cereal until it’s a dry lump in my mouth and force myself to swallow. Mom keeps pushing the iron up and down the same sleeve of Dad’s shirt. Up and down again. I dip my spoon back into my bowl.

“Dad really loved Ivy,” I say. “Didn’t he.” Not a question.

Mom looks up. Startled. As if she’s just remembered I’m there. “Of course he did. We all did.”

Yeah, we all did. But that didn’t stop me feeding her worms. It didn’t stop me pushing games with her too far. Like the time I was dragging her around the house by her feet and she thought it was really funny, so then I started pulling her down the stairs because I thought that would be even funnier. But she stopped laughing pretty fast because every time her head hit another step, it bounced.
Thunk. Thunk.
All the way to the bottom.

I wipe a dribble of milk from my chin.

“Listen, David.” Mom switches to the other sleeve of Dad’s shirt. “I know having Ivy for a sister wasn’t always easy for you.”

How much does she know, I wonder? Did she know before, or not till after Ivy was gone?

“What Dad did…” My spoon carves aisles through the cereal in my bowl. “How are you…? How can you…? Well, it seems like you’re okay with it. I mean—”

“You mean what Dad
said
he did?”

“Well, yeah.”

“David, your father…That night…Your father didn’t know what he was saying. He was – he
is
– simply grief-stricken. And he feels guilty. He thinks he should have been able to save Ivy that day. That’s all. Your dad…” Mom rests the iron on its base. “He didn’t do what he said. He could
never
have done what he said.”

I cling to my spoon as if that will somehow make it true, what she is saying.

“You know, David, he’s been having nightmares every night since Ivy died. Every night. Last night at dinner, when he said the things he did, he was just confusing his nightmares with what really happened.”

She sounds so convinced. But she
has
to believe what she’s said. She couldn’t stay married to Dad if she didn’t. And I guess she needs him. I don’t.

“Okay?” Mom says.

The whole scene, dimly lit by the light above the stove, feels surreal. Mom hangs Dad’s shirt on the back of a chair. It looks very white, whiter than it does in the daytime. She sets the iron on the counter and packs up the ironing board.

“Yeah.”

“You’ll get back to bed soon, then?”

“Sure.”

Before I finish my cereal – I should have just dumped it and gone back to bed when Mom did – Dad trudges into the kitchen.

“Your mother said you were awake.” He pours cold coffee into a mug and sits down across from me.

The last of my cereal floats soggily in my bowl. At the edge of my vision, I can see Dad’s hands wrapped around his mug. The hands that used to support Ivy in the water. The hands that should have saved her when she got into trouble. I feel his eyes staring at me.

“She would have been having surgery today,” he says.

The clock on the stove says it’s three o’clock.

“I’ll tell you now, your mother and I were terrified.”

I was always at school when Ivy was having surgery. I could never focus on what any of the teachers were saying. Half the time it seemed as if the hands of the clock had all but stopped moving.

“We didn’t tell you this before because we didn’t want you to worry, but the surgeon was going to have to expose her spinal cord.”

A bead of sweat trickles down the small of my back.

“It was a pretty risky procedure,” Dad says, “with no guarantee it would work.”

“So, why are you telling me now?”

“I’m sorry. Maybe it was a bad call.”

“Yeah, maybe.” I get up to leave but Dad goes on talking.

“The time they had to adjust the shunt to keep fluid from building up in her brain – that was supposed to be routine…”

I feel like I’m in some weird kind of waking nightmare. First Mom, convinced that Dad didn’t do what he said. Now Dad – what’s he doing? Trying to justify it?

I wish he would just shut up.

“Remember,” he says, “how Ivy used to lean on Livingston to help her walk when she was little? And how sometimes she fell asleep on the floor with him?”

I remember. I remember Ivy clutching Livingston’s coat and nuzzling her face into it, too. At least if Dad has to keep on talking, he has changed the subject.

“Of course, you were devastated when we had to have him put down.”

My jaw tightens. “In case you didn’t notice…” My fists are clenched now. “
Ivy
wasn’t a
dog
. She was my
sister!
And you…you had
no right
…”

Dad sets down his mug. “Who did then, David?
You
?” He folds his hands as if it’s either that or hit me. “Tell me. Did
you
sit through hours of medical consultations with teams of doctors with fancy solutions to Ivy’s problems but no sense of what her life was like? Did
you
sit up with her in the night while she cried and you could almost never figure out why, and even when you could you couldn’t do anything about it? Did
you
have to try to reassure her a hundred times a week that it was going to be okay, knowing it wasn’t? Eh, David? Did you?”

I hate him more than I would ever have thought possible. “It was her life. Hers to decide what to do with. Not yours.”

Dad looks at me like I’m the biggest fool living. “Ivy wasn’t capable of that kind of decision and you know it.” He’s breathing hard. I can feel him hating me as much as I hate him. And stupid as this is, it occurs to me that he’s paying attention to me and no one’s interrupting, and isn’t that what I wanted? What I thought I wanted?

Now that I’ve got it, it couldn’t feel worse.

“David, listen to me. Please.” Dad pushes aside his mug. “I’m as upset that Ivy is gone as you are. I’ll dare say I’m
more
upset because she came from me and because
I
had that moment when I could have…” Dad gets up from the table and looks out the window into the dark night. “I loved her, David…What else can I say? I loved her.”

I know he did. It’s in his voice. It’s in the haunted face I can see reflected in the dark window. I also know that I could stay here for a long time on the slim chance Dad might eventually get around to saying he loves me, too.

I get up from the table, dump the rest of my soggy cereal down the sink, and stagger back to bed.

Chapter 24

Despite how little I’ve slept, I’m awake early, which is good. I can get out of the house before my parents are up. I stumble to the kitchen for a glass of orange juice, then go stand in the empty space by the living room window.

A sparrow scrabbles pointlessly at the feeder that I’ve only thought to fill once since Ivy died. Two more peck at the ground underneath it. She sometimes drove me nuts talking away to the damn birds, but geez, what I wouldn’t give now for the chance to hear her ‘eep’ing and ‘awk’ing and ‘kree’ing again.

I miss Ivy and I miss Hannah, too. I even miss old Will who used to live across the street. I gulp down the last of my juice, set the glass on the windowsill, and head down Ivy’s ramp to the front garden. I pull some dead flowers off their stems and drop them to the ground.

Last night, was Dad trying to say he did what he did because he loved Ivy? How is that supposed to make sense? I’d sure never try to claim I fed her those worms because I loved her.

In my hand is something soft. I look down. The crushed, blood-red cardinal flower in my fist wasn’t ready to be plucked.
Lobelia cardinalis
. I gather the dead blossoms from the ground and take them to the compost bin in the backyard. It works better if there’s garden stuff mixed in with stuff from the kitchen.

The compost bin is almost full. What’s in the bottom of it, crawling with earthworms, is ready to be used.

Removing it with a shovel, I breathe in the moist decaying smell of it, then take it out front and spread it over the ground between some shrubs. I dig it in with my hands, crumbling it together with the dry earth. I do it slowly. It takes a long time.

It’s quiet here in the garden. I love how the sun warms my back and the top of my head, how the light shines through petals and leaves creating multiple shades of green, pink, yellow, and blue. I love how all of it helps me stop thinking.