Walking out onto the creek, it occurred to her that it was the invisible slide of water that had created these gorgeous accumulations, these slumping folds and swelling globes. Rather than freezing a single moment, the creek was actually revealing the slow drip of time. The drip of choices, the drip of silence, the drip of unasked questions and withheld answers. Mary Ellen crouched next to a tree branch that had dangled close enough to the stream to have a few of its brown leaves cocooned in ice; she started shooting some close-ups and then stopped, thinking. It was all being swept downstream, wasn’t it? Slowly, yes, too slowly to be seen with the naked eye. But from the perspective of the boulders, the tallest hemlocks, the ravine itself, the current was swift. Mary Ellen felt dwarfed, and that, somehow, was a comfort.
She resumed shooting, feeling in the rhythmic sliding and clicking a growing sense of peace. And just behind it, a small tremble of excitement—the same feeling she’d had in that sun-drenched drawing studio, back at UNC, when she’d felt herself getting close to something real, something important, something she’d been blindly chasing without knowing exactly why. She was seeing everything in sharp, miraculous detail, each ice formation a landscape unto itself. She could see into things, through things, to the knobby bark of each stick that was layered with muscles and veins of ice.
She felt herself vanishing into the pictures and, at the same time, easing fully into herself. Her head was filled with the same buzzy lightness that was usually released after the fourth or fifth swallow of gin—only this time she was completely present, and instead of being pulled into a bottomless pool, she was being propelled forward on steady feet. All of her feelings were right there, floating on the surface, clear and bright and plainly visible: her guilt and anger toward her father, her disappointment in herself, the grief of losing her children to adulthood, the sadness of a dull marriage. It was all there, caught in the ice, and it was beautiful.
The wind kicked up, and a cloud of powdery snow swirled down from the tree branches. Mary Ellen aimed her camera upward, into the glittering haze. From somewhere within the haze she heard a loud, creaking moan, and then, with a gush of cold air, the forest slammed shut on her like a book.
She was on her back. She was lying on the ice. She was also up in a tree, which didn’t make sense, but a tangle of branches was scratching at her face, and the lower part of her body seemed to be pressed against the trunk. A burst of pain stretched and cracked up and down her leg and back. She gasped and wrestled a copper-colored hemlock frond away from her face. The sky above her was like a mirror of the icy creek, grayish white, bordered by black trees and flowing toward something bigger than itself.
She cried out. Every time she moved, her left leg seemed to burst into flames. She could see where the tree trunk was lying diagonally across her thighs, but she couldn’t feel the weight of it, probably because all of her senses were overwhelmed by the scorching pain in her left leg. She tried to sit up, but the pain grew too intense, and bursts of white light began eating away at her vision. She lay back on the ice, her moans tightening into a wail, trying to understand what was happening.
She could move her right leg, just barely, raising it a few inches off the ice until it came up against the tree trunk. Her left leg, though, seemed nailed in place. A tangle of branches blocked her view, preventing her from seeing how badly crushed it was. She reached through the branches with her left hand and carefully patted around the most painful area, in the middle of her thigh. The trunk, she was surprised to discover, wasn’t touching the top of her thigh; a branch seemed to be holding it up and off her leg. Around the branch, her thigh felt warm and wet. She pulled her hand away and looked at her fingers and felt herself step out of the scene for a moment, calmly observing the smear of blood and then, exploring a little more with her hand, coming to a more precise understanding of the situation.
She plunged back into her body then, pain exploding in her thigh, a scream flying out of her mouth. A pair of crows tore themselves from a treetop and spiraled upward, following the sound of her voice into the empty sky.
19
Ivy wasn’t sure what woke her up, but it had startled her enough to get her heart going. She sat up in bed and listened for a little while, wondering if it’d been a bad dream. This place was usually dead silent; she couldn’t imagine what could be loud enough to jolt her out of sleep like that.
She got up and went to the window, but there was nothing moving outside, not a squirrel or a bird or even a breeze. It was like everything had been startled into total stillness. She went down the hall and looked out at the deck, which was sloppy with footprints. The sliding door was unlocked. She hugged herself, feeling cold in the thin borrowed pajamas. She checked that Mary Ellen wasn’t in her room, then went upstairs.
She must’ve gone looking for her camera, Ivy thought, standing in the empty living room. The night before, she’d watched the lady out the window, a little worried she was going to break her leg or something, relieved to see her come back inside, then perplexed that
