And I hate that she is right.
“We loved her,” I say. “And you’ve got something green stuck in your teeth.”
Across the crowded room, someone laughs. I have to get out of here. When I turn, I see Hannah over by the stairs to the side door. She’s changed out of her funeral clothes into a light shirt and pants. Her mom says something to her and Hannah nods. When her mom leaves her, Hannah looks right at me. Her eyes are blue and sad and beautiful and I have to be with her.
I tip my head toward the hall. We slip through clots of people and disappear into Ivy’s room.
Chapter 16
Ivy’s pajamas are still hanging over the dropped railing of her crib. Her pink blanket lies in a heap where it landed the last time someone got her up, before we went to the cottage. As we stand there together, being with Ivy’s things, Hannah knows somehow not to say anything. It’s nice.
The little nubs on Ivy’s blanket are soft under the tips of my fingers. With anyone else, I’d be embarrassed to lift it to my face, but for some reason with Hannah it’s okay.
The blanket smells of baby powder. In one of the pictures on the board in the dining room, I’m holding Ivy wrapped in this same blanket. I was almost four and she was a tiny infant. Mom had one arm around my shoulder and with the other she was making sure Ivy didn’t fall off my lap. But Ivy was
my
little sister, and was I proud.
I remember the feel of her arms around my neck, later, when I was old enough to go to school. The slobbery kisses she planted on me every day when I left. And the way she shrieked ‘
Ga-beg!’
whenever I came home. Remembering is like a stab in the gut. Remembering the nice things but also remembering how I pretended she was nothing but a big pain whenever other kids were around.
Thing is, she
was
a big pain sometimes. Lots of times. Including the last time I saw her alive. I never knew missing someone could actually
hurt
.
“What are you thinking?” Hannah asks.
“I don’t know.”
After a while, only a few quiet voices drift in from the living room, along with the sounds of someone rinsing dishes and loading the dishwasher. Fiddling with a sleeve of Ivy’s pajamas, Hannah asks, “Do you believe in heaven?”
I set Ivy’s blanket back in her crib. “No. Do you?”
She shrugs. “I think so. But not with angels and stuff.”
“What then?”
“I don’t know. I think heaven might be different kinds of places for different people.”
It’s hard to see how that could be possible, but I won’t argue. Not with Hannah. Instead I reach up and wind Ivy’s mobile.
Its colored fish swim in circles to the tune of “When You Wish Upon A Star,” quickly at first, then slowing. I tell Hannah, “This always helped Ivy fall asleep, even on her bad days. Sometimes we had to wind it up twice, but hardly ever more than that.”
Hannah bites down on her lower lip.
Each slowing note plinks out a memory of Hannah doing something with Ivy: reading to her at the cottage. Doing ‘the moon is round as round can be’ around her grinning face. Holding a sprig of lavender up to Ivy’s nose for a sniff. That was the first time Hannah came over to our house with her mom, the day after they moved in.
My arm brushes against hers. Her skin is warm and soft. I’m aware of the flowery smell of the shampoo she uses, the soft sound of her breath, and the row of tiny buttons down the front of her shirt. A tear slides down Hannah’s cheek to the edge of her mouth. With my thumb I wipe it away. And then, just lightly, I kiss her.
Her lips are salty and wet and how is it I’ve waited so long to do this? Having tasted her I can’t stop wanting to taste more but that’s okay because – oh God – Hannah is grabbing my head. She is kissing me back. My tongue finds the hot inside of her mouth and—
As suddenly as it started, she shoves me away. “I have to go.”
Swiping the back of her hand across her mouth, she leaves me then, shaking and alone, beside Ivy’s crib.
Chapter 17
Going to bed that night, I know I’ve blown it. I can’t stop the brain-loop replaying that kiss and how it went wrong, and somehow that woman who somehow knew I’m relieved that Ivy is gone keeps getting all mixed up in it.
I should never have kissed Hannah. What was I thinking?
I
wasn’t
thinking. But the kiss wasn’t a problem at first. Because Hannah kissed me
back
, I know she did. And who
wouldn’t
be relieved that life might finally not be
all
about someone who was always messing things up, anymore? Besides, it’s not like relief is the
only
thing I feel.
I’ve just turned off my light when the phone rings. My parents don’t seem to be answering. The jangling this late at night sets my teeth on edge. Why hasn’t the answering system kicked in?
I haul myself out of bed and grab it. Unknown Caller.
“Hello?”
“Hey. Are you the guy who killed his own kid? You deserve to die.”
Click
.
Chapter 18
Tina opens her tin of paint. It’s a deep red like the cardinal flowers in my front garden. “Nice color,” I say.
“Thanks.” Tina shoves a cap over her loose curls. “It’s really good of you to be willing to take Murray off my hands for a while, what with…everything.”
At the playground, I let Murray play in the sandbox way longer than it takes to paint a door, then push him on the swing for a while. On the way home, we stop at the variety store. Before we go in, I give Murray a few coins to spend on whatever he wants.
“Can I have gummy bears?” he asks.
I lean heavily against the brick wall to catch my breath.
“What’s the matter?” Murray asks.
I try to come up with some excuse for why I’m suddenly falling apart, but I hate how people always avoid telling kids the truth, so I swallow the lump in my throat and make myself answer him. “I was just thinking about my sister.”
“Oh.” Murray examines his coins. “Your daddy maybe drownded her because she lived in a wheelchair, right?”
“What!? Who told you that?”
“Mrs. Meyers at the pet food store told it to my mom when we were buying budgie food.”
“Well, Mrs. Meyers is
wrong
, okay?”
First that creep – the one who called – went from reading, ‘disabled kid drowned,’ to ‘her dad must have done it.’ Now Mrs. Meyers is assuming the same thing. And how many people has
she
talked to? How many other people are talking like that about what happened to Ivy?
We go inside so Murray can buy his candy.
Sitting on the grass outside the store, he holds out his package and says, “Do you want a gummy bear, David?”
“No, thanks.”
I lie back on the grass, watching clouds scud past overhead while Murray nibbles the head off each bear before eating the rest of it. I remember hearing once about some guy who offed his kid by gassing her in his pickup truck. But he must have been off his nut. Dad
couldn’t
have done what Mrs. Meyers said.
When Murray has finished his gummy bears, we get up and start toward our street. I’ll have to tell Hannah that if her mom buys dog food at Mrs. Meyer’s store, she should start getting it someplace else. Except I can’t. I can’t talk to Hannah about anything now. Why didn’t I just keep my stupid feelings for her to myself? It was bad enough kissing her when I didn’t even know if she liked me, but to go and do it right after Ivy’s funeral? Right there in Ivy’s room? And I couldn’t just make it a nice little kiss either. I had to go and practically ram my stupid tongue down her throat. I never would have done that if Ivy hadn’t gone and died, that’s for sure. Even dead she’s messing things up.
When we get back to Murray’s, the paint on the front door is dry. Tina tries to pay me for the extra time we were away, but I tell her it’s okay, today was a free one.
Back home, rather than going inside, I grab a trowel from the garage. I jab it into the ground in the front garden, hoping Hannah might come out of her house while I’m out here. I dig out an ugly weed, bash the dry earth from its roots, and drop it into a bucket. I dig out another weed and then another.
Ivy loved everything in the garden. Even the weeds. ‘Mmm, bi-yee fars,’ she said again and again, ‘Bi-yee fars.’
There was so much more to her than most people knew. Like Mrs. Meyers, for one. And I should have told Murray that Ivy wasn’t just a girl in a wheelchair. She was also a girl who liked flowers and birds, and she liked gummy bears, too, just like he does. I should have told him that on good days she liked pushing Jack back in his box so someone would turn the knob and make him jump out again. And that she liked bonfires and roasted marshmallows and listening to stories, the same stories he likes, and that her favorite was
Go, Dog! Go!
I should have told him how Ivy loved water – in the bathtub, the sprinkler, her therapy pool – and how she knew that sprinkler water has rainbows in it but not the fountain at the mall, and probably not the lake where her dad took her swimming, either. I should have told Murray that Ivy probably saw things in the lake that ordinary people like us couldn’t see, but no one would ever know for sure because she couldn’t talk very well, and sometimes that made her mad. I should have told him that if Ivy could talk and if she were still alive, she’d want to tell Mrs. Meyers, and anyone else like her, that her dad didn’t drown her. Because he couldn’t. He loved her.
I dump the full bucket of weeds onto the compost heap in the back yard and go back out front to dig up some more.
I loved Ivy, too. But I bet she didn’t know it. Besides all the times I didn’t speak up for her – like today, which was nothing compared to sometimes – there were the times I did worse than not speak up for her.
Like the time I got invited to a friend’s birthday party, back when I still got invited to things like that. It was going to be a great party, a trip to a circus. Except at the last minute Ivy started throwing up and convulsing and when I said it was time to drive me to the party, my parents wouldn’t listen. I was so mad I went and dug worms out of the garden and I fed them to Ivy, knowing she could never tell. I’d never done anything crueler than pinch her before that, and that was when she was a baby and I was just little. But I was ten when I fed her the worms. Old enough to know that what I was doing was cruel and disgusting and downright
wrong
. But it didn’t matter. I took a worm, placed it on Ivy’s tongue, and watched her squish it all around and swallow it – and then I fed her another.
I sit back on my heels. Hannah still hasn’t come out of her house and I don’t want her to now. It feels like if she did, she’d see worm guilt tattooed all over my neck and down my arms.
Chapter 19
I wake to the sound of Dad’s voice in the kitchen.
“…strangest thing, Anne. I keep thinking that when I was carrying Ivy to shore, something moved. Up in the dunes.”
“Some animal, you mean?”
“No. Like someone was standing there watching,
and then quickly ducked down.”
“That’s hardly likely, Stephen. There’s no one along our stretch of shore but us.”
“I know.”
“And besides, if someone
was
there, surely they would have come over to see if they could help.”
“You’re right,” Dad says. “Of course. I must have been mistaken. There can’t have been anyone there.”
“Stephen, are you alright? I was about to go out for a while.”
“Yeah, fine. I’m fine. Go.”
It’s such a bizarre conversation I might wonder if I’m dreaming. But the pressure on my bladder is real-world. So is the clinking and clanking of dishes being taken out of the dishwasher and the sound of the van starting up and backing down the driveway.
After taking a leak and splashing water on my face, I head out to my garden.
Just beyond the wheelchair ramp, is a single, odd-looking plant that’s beautiful in a weird way. This spring it had both dark red flowers and cream-colored flowers on it. I went online to see if I could find a scientific explanation for how that could have happened, but nothing explained it very well.
It has a few new buds on it today. I sprinkle fertilizer around its base, the kind that encourages flowering. Then I refill the bird feeder. I can’t stop myself from looking up at the window, half-expecting to see Ivy watching me. I pull a few dried leaves from the stalk of the odd plant.
Often, when Ivy used to watch me out here, I felt a neat bond with her. Today it feels broken. I try to imagine her face at the window, but I can’t see it. Ivy’s
face
! How can a guy forget his own sister’s face?
I glance across the street as if Hannah might be heading over to see me. She’s not.