Her hands found something that felt like a frozen wall, and after feeling along it, trying to find its beginning or its end, she realized it was the bank of packed snow left by the plows. She scrambled over the wall and hopped down onto the asphalt, grateful for the smooth, hard surface.
She could see the sky now, padded with light-gray clouds, and she could just make out the difference between the flat road and the humped banks that lined it. She looked up and down the road, waiting for headlights. There weren’t any for a while, so she started walking toward Agloe, looking over her shoulder from time to time, listening for the hum of an engine. Finally, she heard one coming up the hill from town, the headlights just a glow from behind the switchback. Ivy took a deep breath and stepped into the road. She raised her arms, making herself as big as possible. When the car stopped, she slung Mary Ellen’s scarf across the lower half of her face and pulled her hat down around her ears. The headlights made her squint, but she moved toward them, over to the driver’s side window. She said what she needed to say, pointed toward the break in the trees. Then she moved off to the side of the road, hopped back over the snowbank, and vanished into the woods. Like smoke.
22
Justine loved the accidental photos Mary Ellen had sent her. Birgit turned them down, but Justine said she had other galleries in mind, and a friend at the Fleischer who owed her a favor. She told Mary Ellen all of this in her hospital room after the first surgery, when Mary Ellen was out of intensive care and finally seeing visitors.
“We’ll find a home for them, I promise,” Justine said, her eyes roaming the teal-and-beige room.
“Don’t worry about it,” said Mary Ellen, somehow embarrassed, in spite of everything, to be seen in this state—no makeup, haircut grown out, dirty lunch dishes still sitting on a tray across her lap. “I’d rather not do anything with those pictures. Bad memories.”
Justine ripped off her glasses and polished them with the hem of her threadbare sweatshirt. Mary Ellen had never seen her so uncertain, so at a loss for words. But she understood what Justine wasn’t saying, and had, in fact, already accepted this apology in her head, eager to put the confusing question of blame behind her.
Matt came in the room then, and Mary Ellen saw immediately that he hadn’t put anything behind him. Without a word of greeting, he took the lunch tray from Mary Ellen’s bed and cast about for a place to set it down, eventually choosing the bathroom sink. Then he busied himself unpacking the bag he’d brought, slamming through drawers and cabinets.
“Can I bring you anything?” Justine asked Mary Ellen. “I’m sure the food is terrible—”
“She has everything she needs,” Matt said.
Justine watched him for a moment as he folded and refolded a sweater. “I heard good things about your surgeon. They say she’s the best.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Matt said. “So tell me… Have you paid that snowplow bill yet?”
Mary Ellen reached for the morphine pump.
Justine leaned an arm on Mary Ellen’s bed, edging Matt out of her field of vision. “They say it’s an art, surgery,” she said. “Unlike the art world, though, women actually have a chance in medicine.”
“How are you feeling, Mary?” Matt asked, coming to the other side of the bed. “Tired?”
“I am a little, yeah.”
Justine stood up. “All right,” she said, giving Mary Ellen a weak smile. “You have my number. If there’s…anything.”
When she was gone, Matt draped himself over Mary Ellen’s torso, pressing his face to her neck. “I hate her so much,” he moaned, and Mary Ellen closed her eyes, feeling something pulse between them. She dropped the morphine pump and hugged him back, wishing there were space in the bed for Matt to stretch out beside her. At the moment, though, her leg, encased in plaster and bristling with tubes, seemed bigger than the two of them put together.
“I know,” she said into his hair. “She won’t be back.”
Matt straightened up and sat in the chair next to her bed, hands open in front of him. “How do you forget to pay the snowplow company? Hasn’t she heard of bill pay?” He lowered his head for a moment, then raised it and looked at Mary Ellen. “Don’t get me wrong, I hate myself just as much. For letting you take the Mini. Even the ski trip, the girls getting in trouble. I shouldn’t have let any of you leave home.”
“This wasn’t your fault, Matt. And it’s behind us now. All of it.”
“Well…” He gestured toward her leg with his chin.
“I just mean we’ll get past this. A year from now, we’ll be thinking and talking about something different.” Mary Ellen closed her eyes. “I used to feel like every moment was going to end up being the permanent state of things…like, if I was sitting in my office writing a report, it felt like the rest of my life would be spent in an office writing reports. If I was walking down Sansom Street feeling annoyed by all the construction, then it seemed like Sansom Street would be under construction for all eternity, and I would never stop feeling annoyed by it.”
She turned her head to look at Matt, who was squinting at her. “I only saw, like, a fixed version of things. But there’s this huge amount of movement happening all around us, and when you start looking at it that way, you…”
