Mary Ellen moaned for a while before opening her eyes, her lips working in and out. “I can’t,” she whispered.
“Well, sorry,” Ivy said briskly. “We made a deal. You have to teach me how to drive your car.”
“It hurts.”
“I know. But we’ve got to get you to a hospital, remember?”
“Mmm.”
“Here.” Ivy shook out Mary Ellen’s coat, still soggy with blood and snow, and laid it behind the lady’s head. “Put an arm in here.” She got Mary Ellen sitting up and helped her shove one arm into the coat. She stretched the other sleeve around and got that on too. Mary Ellen was panting fast through her teeth, like people do when they’re having a baby. Ivy gently lifted her leg and pulled the cushion out from underneath it, which made the lady scream. “Jesus, not in my ear,” Ivy said. “Okay, now turn and put your feet on the floor so I can get these boots on you.” Ivy worked the rain boots onto the lady, who was huffing and wheezing and leaning over as far as she could on her good thigh.
Getting her to stand up took a couple of tries, but eventually Mary Ellen heaved herself upward, Ivy holding her up on one side, the paddle on the other. She managed to hop weakly to the bottom of the stairs, where she halted and shook her head violently. “I can’t.”
“Don’t chicken out on me now,” Ivy said, breathing hard under the crush of the lady’s arm.
“I can’t put any weight on it. I’ll pass out.”
Ivy thought a moment. “So go up on your butt.”
Mary Ellen sighed and sagged even more heavily against Ivy. Then she slowly eased herself into a seated position on the first stair, her hurt leg stretched out straight. The dressing had loosened, but the pads seemed to be glued in place by the thick paste of drying blood. Mary Ellen used her arms and her good leg to push herself up one step, then the next, her face opening into a pained sneer each time she moved, like she had strings tied to the corners of her mouth.
At the top, Ivy helped her stand back up and hop across the floor. “We’re almost there,” she said, feeling a surge of excitement when they reached the front door. This was happening; she was doing it. She was getting the hell out of Dodge, out into the world, on to the next thing. When she pulled the door open, the freezing air quenched her overheated skin. “Come on,” she said to Mary Ellen, who was hanging onto the doorframe, panting. “Come on!”
The snow slowed them down, but the path to the car was pretty well mashed down, so getting there wasn’t too bad. While Mary Ellen leaned against the car, Ivy got the front passenger seat reclined all the way back. The lady was shivering pretty hard, so Ivy reached in and started the engine and got the heat going, then tossed the canoe paddle aside and helped Mary Ellen lower herself into the seat.
“Okay,” Ivy said once she was settled in the driver’s seat. “I can’t wait to find out how to drive this damn thing.”
Mary Ellen was still breathing hard. She put a hand on her chest, fluttering her fingers. “You’ve got three pedals. Clutch on the left, brake in the middle, gas on the right.” As she explained, she seemed to wake up more fully, exactly as Ivy would’ve expected, practically brought back from the dead by the chance to teach Ivy something. She was good at it too—patient, clear. She didn’t get rattled when Ivy stalled out on her first couple of tries.
Ivy finally managed to get the wheels going without the engine clunking into silence, and the car backed up a couple of inches, but then it stopped. “That’s okay,” Mary Ellen said. “Try first”—Ivy grabbed the shifter, and the car promptly stalled—“pressing the clutch before you shift.”
“Right.” Ivy tried again and got the car into first, and this time they started rolling forward. Excited, Ivy released the clutch and mashed the gas, but this, as usual, killed the engine. “Fuck’s sake.”
“Put it back in neutral and try again.” This went on for a while, the lady repeating everything a million times, Ivy eventually getting it, the car crunching forward a few feet, then backward, but after a while, it stopped and wouldn’t go forward any more, no matter how perfectly Ivy did the gas-clutch dance.
Head buzzing with impatience, she got out of the car to see what was going on. The tires had cleared the branches and were back in deep snow, which came all the way up to the bottom of the doors. Ivy didn’t need to poke anything underneath the chassis to know the snow was all jammed up in there once again; the tiny car was too low to the ground. The only way up the driveway would be to spend the next five days digging out the tires and jamming branches underneath them, over and over and over and over again until Ivy died of exhaustion.
“What is it?” Mary Ellen asked when Ivy got back in the car.
Ivy didn’t answer; she just started the engine and jammed the shifter into reverse. “Fuck it,” she muttered. She stomped on the gas, easing up on the clutch the way she was supposed to.
“I don’t think it’s going to work, Ivy. The snow’s so deep—”
“I’m not staying here.”
The car rolled backward a few inches, then came up against something and stopped. The engine howled as Ivy harassed the gas pedal. She put it back into first and got it going forward a little, then reversed and tried turning the wheel to start getting the car faced the right way. It wouldn’t cooperate, though, the tires not even spinning anymore, just grinding against the screaming engine, the heat pouring out of the vents, Ivy’s hands like teeth biting the steering wheel. She screamed as she
