Ivy let her hands drop. She sighed and looked up at the sky. Sure. Of course. Walk up to the road, call the cops. “I think that’ll take too long,” she said. “It’s freezing. You’re lying on, like, ice.”
“I know,” Mary Ellen wailed. “But I’m scared of what’s going to happen when you pull it out.”
“Well, I’m not exactly excited about it either!” Ivy stamped her feet, which were going numb inside the rubber boots. “Should I go get something to bandage it with? So if it bleeds a ton, I can tie something around it?”
“Okay, I guess, yeah.” Mary Ellen sniffed. “You’ll hurry? It’s really cold.”
Ivy looked at the lady’s face, which was getting whiter by the minute. Her lips were the same color as her skin, making her look like some kind of statue. “Don’t worry.”
“Come back, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Getting back up the hill was hard with all the snow, and Ivy’s heart was working overtime as she kept thinking about the hole in the lady’s leg and how she was going to have to deal with it after she pulled the branch out. And then what? Would Mary Ellen be able to get up the slope? Would she be able to drive her car? Pretty much every scenario ended with Ivy walking up to the road, flagging someone down, calling 911. Then she’d have to explain to the cops who she was and what she was doing here and why, exactly, this lady had gone into the ravine looking for her camera. It all ended up fine for the lady and quite shittily for Ivy.
Back at the house, she searched the bathrooms and linen closets until she found a first aid kit under one of the sinks. It was puny, with nothing but bee sting ointment, a few squares of gauze, and a skinny roll of tape. Ivy huffed in frustration and threw the kit into the sink. She looked up, catching sight of her reflection in the mirror: snarled hair, lips bunched together, eyes wide and blinking a mile a minute. She really didn’t look like much. Just a dumb kid who didn’t know what the hell she was doing. Not somebody you’d want to trust your life with, that was for sure.
Ivy grabbed the backpack out of her room and went upstairs. She found the lady’s purse and took out her wallet, holding it in her hand for a moment. Hitch a ride to Eaton. Hop on a bus. It wouldn’t be hard to put the lady out of her mind; they’d only known each other—what—five days? How long had it been since Mary Ellen had shown up? Since she’d pulled Ivy out of the tree house, nursed her back to health, and basically tried her damnedest to be Ivy’s mom?
Ivy leaned against the counter and put her head in her hands. “Fuck,” she whispered.
She left the wallet on the counter and hurried back downstairs to Mary Ellen’s room. She shoved a bunch of clothes into the backpack, then thought a minute and added some of the pads that were for pee. She went to the hall closet to get a water bottle. One of the canoe paddles fell out. She took the paddle, filled the bottle, and headed out into the cold.
Mary Ellen looked dazed when Ivy got to her; she slowly tilted her head in her direction and gave her a sleepy smile. “You came.”
“Drink some water.”
Mary Ellen took the bottle from Ivy and drank, but half the water slid down her neck. She started shaking—hard—which scared Ivy. She tried wiping the water off the lady’s neck with her hand, but most of it had already run down into her sweater.
“Sorry,” Ivy said. “I brought some stuff to tie around your leg, all right?”
“Okay,” Mary Ellen whispered.
“Just get ready to scoot out of there with your good leg. I probably won’t be able to hold the tree up for long.”
Mary Ellen blew out a few big breaths and nodded. Ivy straddled the tree trunk, carefully avoiding the lady’s leg, and wrapped her arms around it.
“Ready?”
“Mmm.”
Ivy strained upward, but the tree wouldn’t move. “Motherfucker’s heavy,” she gasped.
Mary Ellen had her hands pressed against her eyes. “Oh God.”
“Let me try it this way.” Ivy moved to one side of the trunk and squatted next to it. She hooked her elbows under the tree, closed her eyes, and squeezed upward with her legs. “Uuunnnhhh go go go go!”
Mary Ellen shrieked in pain as the branch lifted out of her leg. She pushed herself out of the way, and Ivy let the tree fall to the ice, keeping her eyes on Mary Ellen’s grimacing face, desperate to avoid looking at the hole for as long as possible. Mary Ellen was huffing and puffing, her eyes squeezed shut. “Rose,” she finally said, “bandage it up. Please.”
“Ivy.”
“What?”
“Nothing,” Ivy muttered, as she opened the backpack and pulled out a pair of flannel pajama pants.
“Try and stop the bleeding. Tie that around my thigh, tight, up here. Like a tourniquet.”
Ivy looked where the lady was pointing, and that meant looking at the hole, which was round and jagged and black with blood. Underneath, she could see the sop of blood inside Mary Ellen’s coat and all down the back of her pants, which made Ivy’s head go feathery, but she breathed through her nose and concentrated on threading the pajama pants under the lady’s knee and tying them in a knot above the hole. “Sorry,” she said, pulling the knot tight, wincing as Mary Ellen cried out. Blood squeezed out of the hole. “Jesus,” Ivy whispered, wiping her hands on her jeans.
“Did you find some bandages?”
“Just these,” Ivy said, pulling out two pee pads. She peeled away their backing, sticking the adhesive onto the front of a long-sleeved T-shirt. She slid the whole thing underneath Mary Ellen’s thigh, then brought the sleeves of the shirt up and around, added a pad
