“Ah, shit.” She got back in the car and started driving as fast as she dared. She rounded a bend and stopped abruptly. A tree was lying across the road, and it wasn’t the kind she could just push out of the way. She got out of the car and shoved the tree with her foot. Its trunk was almost three feet around, and its upper branches were braced against two pines, wedging it in place. She took hold of a branch stub and yanked uselessly in the direction of the ravine, then kicked it again.
The road at this point was just a narrow, flat interruption in the steep downward progress of the mountain. Turning around was not an option. Ivy walked back around the bend to see if there was any change in the situation behind her, but she would have to drive backward for a long time before finding a wide spot. She walked back to the tree and studied its roots, which fanned dramatically out of the slope just above the road. She thought about pushing the tree with the car, but the roots were so big she knew that even if she got the tree pushed parallel to the road, the roots would never clear it.
Exhaustion began to creep across the edges of her mind. Ivy got back in the car, shivering, and clunked it into Reverse. The engine made an adenoidal whine as she started going backward. She strained to see the road over her shoulder, but the trees were throwing thick, disconcerting shadows across the way. When she came to the bend, her hand hesitated on the wheel, then yanked it to the left, but the car jerked toward the ravine, so Ivy pulled quickly in the other direction, which just made the car swerve into the hillside. She tried stopping, but her foot was confused by all the backwardness, and instead of stomping on the brake, it stomped on the accelerator at the same moment that Ivy overcorrected her turn. The back wheels bumped heavily over the edge of the road into the forest floor, and the car tipped like a seesaw, the soda bottle rolling under the passenger seat and Ivy’s stomach rolling along with it. She lunged against the brake pedal, putting all her weight on it, but the ground was soft and the angle was steep, and for a few long moments, the car seemed to be considering its options.
2
Mary Ellen sat on the edge of the hotel bed, fully dressed and ready to go, watching her daughters sleep in the bed next to hers. Shelby was on her stomach, one arm hanging over the edge, her pillow pushing her slack mouth into a lopsided grimace. Sydney was on her back, her mouth also open, breaths struggling wetly past her unusually large tonsils. Mary Ellen was enjoying the chance to watch them like this, unguarded and uncomposed, elbows and knees going every which way, long blond hair hiking itself out of their ponytail holders. A rare chance to get a good look at them without being met with an affronted What.
They were so cute when they were asleep. Awake was a different story. Awake, the twins were extremely tall—a mysterious surfacing of genes, probably from Matt’s side of the family, that made it feel like a pair of Swedish exchange students had come to stay on a permanent basis. And they were moody. The moodiness was combined with a stubborn opaqueness, so Mary Ellen never knew which mood she might be dealing with, or what might cause that mood to suddenly change.
She reached out to tap Shelby’s arm, then changed her mind. It was still early. She was excited to start the campus tour, but she wanted to start it on the right foot, and waking the twins prematurely usually wasn’t a good idea. She pulled her phone from her bag and sent the girls a text: “Having breakfast downstairs. Come down when you’re ready.”
The breakfast room was full of families, and as Mary Ellen looked around at the other high school seniors, she regretted having come downstairs without her daughters. At home, they always seemed to be on different schedules, eating separate meals, but this trip was supposed to be different—a chance for mother-daughter bonding. A chance for her to show the girls her alma mater and try to explain the formative power of her college years—years that had begun flooding into Mary Ellen’s consciousness with startling, sun-dazzled clarity ever since the UNC viewbook had arrived in the mail.
That was all so long ago, but now it seemed like a terrible oversight that she hadn’t ever told her girls what she’d been like in college. Could Sydney and Shelby even begin to imagine her as that careless, overall-wearing art major, a girl without a thought in her head about the real world, dancing like a snake in a basket, hypnotized by the music of the here and now? A child, really, who loved smearing paint around and playing Frisbee on the quad and availing herself of the unlimited soft-serve ice cream in the cafeteria.
Mary Ellen took some low-fat yogurt from the breakfast bar and poured herself a cup of coffee. That girl would be unrecognizable to anyone who knew her today—pearl-wearing, feet-on-the-ground Mary Ellen, with her tailored jackets and her sculpted hair; her proficiency with PowerPoint and conference room projectors; her command of pharmaceutical positioning statements. She sat down and peeled the top off the yogurt, scraping the underside of the lid with her spoon. She’d done all right for herself in the end, thanks to her parents’ wisdom and encouragement.
At her father’s funeral last year, someone had said, “You were the best daughter he could have asked for,”
