It was dark. “Ivy?” she called. “Are you there?” She was desperate for some water. How late was it? Was the girl asleep? “Ivy!” she shouted, the girl’s name surfing on a wave of pain. “Ivyyy!”
Mary Ellen twisted her neck and fumbled for the floor lamp, flicking it on. The coffee table and the floor next to the sofa were cluttered; she blinked rapidly, trying to sort out the mess. Towels. Incontinence pads. Scissors. Three or four water bottles. A loaf of bread. A bottle of orange juice. A jar of peanut butter. Her purse. Her camera. A pair of rain boots. A canoe paddle. A bottle of gin.
She stared blankly at it all, pain fizzing on the surface of her thoughts. She seized one of the water bottles and drank, furiously at first, then stopped herself and put it back on the floor. “Ivy!” she cried. “Ivy, please.” She choked on her tears. “Did you really go? Did you really leave me here?”
She peeled back the blanket and looked at her leg. Its entire length was swollen; her skin bulged around the makeshift bandage, shiny and red. She couldn’t see her foot—she still had her socks on—but it felt huge, tight, immobile. The wound had bled through the bottom of the bandage and soaked the towel underneath. Mary Ellen knew she had to re-dress her leg, to keep it clean and dry, but she felt so weak she wasn’t sure she’d be able to sit up enough to reach all the supplies Ivy had left beside the sofa. She let her hand drop down beside her, where her fingers found the gin bottle. She unscrewed the cap, hoisted herself up on one elbow, and brought the bottle to her lips. She drank, then immediately spat a mouthful of liquid onto the floor.
She sniffed the bottle just to be sure.
“Very funny,” she muttered under her breath, then shouted into the darkness, “Very fucking funny!” Something white stuck out from the bottom of the bottle, which was no longer a gin bottle; it was just a stupid water bottle. She yanked away the note that was taped there:
You drink too much.
Mary Ellen collapsed back onto the sofa and cried softly for a few minutes. She longed to tell someone about the pain, to seize their hand and look them in the eye and explain what it was like. But of course, even if someone were there to hold her hand, there was no way to really make them understand. “On a scale of one to ten,” she would weep, “it’s a ten,” and the very act of assigning a number to the pain would squeeze it into a package that was absurdly small and tidy.
She clapped her closed fists three times against her forehead, then sat up as well as she could and steeled herself to work on her leg. She loosened the pajama-pant bandage, and the feeling of flames washing over her skin suddenly became more pointed, more searingly focused. She lay back, panting hee-hee and hoo-hoo the way they’d taught her in Lamaze class. Her eyes were wide with amazement—amazement at the profound force of the pain, amazement that something so boundless and strong could come from inside herself, amazement that the violence of it wasn’t exploding her body into a million tiny shards. Tears streamed across her temples and ran into her ears.
Gritting her teeth, she peeled the pad away from the wound, which looked angry and red, oozing pus. A foul smell rose from it, sweet almost, like rotting fruit. Gritting her teeth, she peeled away the two pads under her leg, which were glued to her skin with dried blood. With several breaks for Lamaze breathing, she managed to replace the pads and the towel under her thigh, noting, with mild relief mitigated by the sight of her grotesquely swollen limb, that the bleeding underneath her leg had stopped.
She reached over to the coffee table and snagged her purse with her fingertips, pulling it close so she could take out her wallet. She opened it and rubbed her thumb over the plastic window protecting the photo of Matt and the girls. She wanted so badly to talk to them. She turned the wallet over, unzipped the pocket, and tipped her wedding rings into her hand. She slipped them on. She noticed that her credit cards and her ATM card were still tucked into their pockets, but the cash was gone.
So Ivy had abandoned her. The supplies she’d left were a clear enough message that Mary Ellen was on her own. She was just going to have to summon some of the courage that had sent her down into the ravine in the first place; she had to get herself up and walking around. If she could get to the bathroom, she’d be able to clean the wound, and eventually maybe she’d be able to get into some warm clothes and get herself up the hill to the road. If she wanted to live, she had to move. She couldn’t stay under her blanket on the sofa, in the comfortable nest Ivy had left for her. That would only lead to hopelessness, dementia, sepsis, death.
She took a deep breath and lowered her good foot to the floor, then reached for the canoe paddle. Gripping it with one hand, she used her other hand to pick up her hurt leg and swivel it over the edge of the sofa. She couldn’t bend her knee, so she had to put her leg down at an angle in order to avoid the coffee table. The pain made her gasp; she pushed air in and out through pursed lips. When the dizziness subsided, she gripped the paddle with
