Ivy shook her head and dropped the phone back in the purse, then went to the kitchen and filled some grocery bags with food. She checked all the windows, making sure the lady hadn’t circled around to the front door. She gathered the bags of food, took the car keys out of the lady’s purse, and quietly left the house. She got in the front seat of the car and, after taking a deep breath, turned the key in the ignition.
Nothing happened.
She turned it again. Nothing.
She searched around the steering wheel for the lever that would put the car in Drive, but it wasn’t there. Looking around some more, she noticed that there were too many pedals, and a knobby stick with numbers on it right in front of the parking brake.
She’d heard of this. Her cousin Thomas had one of these cars; he’d offered to teach her how to drive it, but she never took him up on it because his acne was so bad she didn’t want to be stuck in a car with it, and besides, what was the point? Ma’s Taurus was a regular kind of car.
“Fuck,” Ivy muttered, breathing on her hands, which were white with cold. Maybe the answer was in the pedals. She tried starting the car with her foot doing different combinations: pressing the left and right pedals, center and right, left and center. On this last one, the car startled awake. “All right all right all right,” Ivy said, laughing a little. The gear knob had numbers on it; “one” seemed like a good place to start. She pushed the knob in the direction of the number, and after some fiddling, it slid into place. “That’s right,” she said. “That’s right.” All she needed to do was follow her gut, and everything would work out.
It was not obvious how to get the car to actually move. Every time she let up on the left pedal, the car quit. She kept it mashed down and pressed on one of the other pedals, but this just made the engine race and howl. She stopped periodically and scanned the woods, hoping Mary Ellen wasn’t nearby. It was clearly going to take a lot of pedal-mashing and engine-racing to get this figured out.
The heat was pumping out of the vents now, and Ivy was starting to sweat. She tried different numbers on the shifter, but that always caused the car to die. She fiddled with all the buttons and knobs she could find, switching on the windshield wipers and turn signals and the radio and everything else. She tried different pedal combinations, which only made the car jolt into silence. Finally, she leaned forward and rested her forehead on the steering wheel and cried.
She just wanted to leave. She was so sick of this place, where time seemed to be frozen and you couldn’t move forward or backward or anywhere at all. She wanted to get away—from the woods, from the snow, from this weird lady she couldn’t understand or trust. And now that she had a chance, a golden ticket, she couldn’t cash it in because of Thomas and his acne. Why couldn’t he have used some motherfucking Clearasil?
She cried for a while, pounding her forehead against the leather-clad steering wheel, feeling the black rot of hopelessness creep inside the car and wedge itself between her situation and her dreams. More hitchhiking, more hunger, more cold and frustration. Was it impossible, what she was trying to do? Would Gran call her a dumbass for thinking she could make it all the way out west on her own, for imagining that someone like her could create a life out of nothing?
Ivy leaned her head back. Yes. Gran would say it was dumb, and so would everyone else, because that’s how they were in Good Hope. They couldn’t imagine anything better for themselves. Going back, giving up, accepting the life she had coming to her—that was the dumb thing to do. Ivy hit the steering wheel with her fist, doing her best to summon the energy of anger, which seemed more faded than usual, probably because of the sickness. She sighed and gathered the bags of food from the back seat. She brought everything inside, returned the groceries to the fridge and the cabinets, and dropped the keys back in the lady’s purse. She checked the windows one more time—no sign of Mary Ellen—and went downstairs.
At this point, she figured, she had two options: walk up to the road and hitchhike to the bus station, or get the lady to give her a ride. A ride was better, obviously, if she could just get Mary Ellen to drop the idea of turning her over to the cops. She couldn’t figure out an angle for doing that, though. Normally, Ivy could size up a person’s worldview and play to it pretty quickly, but Mary Ellen was a different story. She was weird, cockeyed. Ivy couldn’t tell which side to come at her from.
Ivy pushed open the lady’s bedroom door, scanning for clues. She knelt beside her suitcase, which was large and filled with basic older mom clothes, stuff McFadden would wear. Khakis and thick sweaters. High-waisted cotton underwear and flannel pajamas. Underneath it all, Ivy found a package of pads that looked like they were for your period, except the box said for moderate leakage, which she was pretty sure meant peeing.
There was also a cardboard box of boring-looking books about art and photography, and a laptop. Ivy tried going on the laptop, but it was password-protected and nothing she tried—1234, MaryEllen, crazylady—worked. She put the computer down
