What Happened to Ivy (3 page)

“Shamus, come.” The dog trots over. “Shamus, sit.”

Instead of sitting, Shamus lies down and rolls over. Ivy laughs.

Hannah says, “Shamus, take a bow.” This time Shamus sits, and again Ivy laughs at his mistake. Hannah glances over at me and I’m not sure, but it’s almost like it’s me she’s trying to impress. Wishful thinking?

“Shamus, can you
dance
?” Hannah holds a treat high above the dog’s head. He stands on his back legs and turns around. Ivy waves her hands and squeals.

“Good dog!” Hannah says.

Shamus runs over to Ivy, sniffs her wheelchair, and lays his head in her lap.

Ivy tries to lean over to put her head on his but she can’t quite reach. I wonder if she remembers our old dog, Livingston. Back when she could still walk with braces and canes, she used to lean on him to help her get around. A couple of years ago, when she was in hospital for one of her surgeries, my parents decided we had to have Livingston put down. We were having to support his rear end with a towel so he wouldn’t fall over trying to do his business, and coming home to puddles of runny poop by the back door. I still thought it was cruel to have him put down. But when we all gathered around him on the vet’s examining table – Mom, Dad, and me – we patted him and talked to him as the vet gave him the needle, and then he totally relaxed. It wasn’t long till his breathing just stopped. I was surprised how peaceful it seemed. That’s one of my few memories of us doing something together, just me and my parents.

Shamus leaves Ivy to go sniff a dog walking past. Hannah calls him back. “In the house,” she tells him, and he trots up the steps.

Ivy and I head across the street. Near the start of the ramp that leads up to our front door, several sparrows fly out of a mock orange shrub.
Philadelphus coronarius.

“Bi-yee fars. Eep, eep.”

I wheel Ivy inside, park her by the living room window, and put her prescription on the kitchen table. Dad’s putting finishing touches on a salad. The microwave beeps. From the back of the house Mom calls, “Davy, is that you?”

Piles of bills and receipts and stuff are spread across the desk in my parents’ room. “Can you run outside and see if the last load on the line is dry?”

Ivy squeals from the living room, “Eep! Eep!”

Mom says, “I want to get it inside in case it rains tonight, but I need to sort out what’s going on with this insurance. They seem to disallow something more every time we submit a claim.”

“Sure.”

“EEP EEP EEP!”

On my way outside, I ask Dad, “What’s with Ivy?”

“EEEEP!”

Dad shakes his head. “Beats me. She seems to have a real thing about birds lately.”

Chapter 5

It’s different being with Ivy when it’s just her and me, and when being with her is my choice, not my parents’.

Ivy pats the tummy of her turquoise bathing suit and beams. “Bi-yee bay zoot.”

“That’s right,” I say. It’s a conversation she wants to have at least six times whenever she wears it. “Your bathing suit is
very
pretty.”

“
Ba-yee
bi-yee!”

Some days it’s tedious but some, like today, it’s kind of sweet.

I push Ivy in her outdoor wheelchair through the sprinkler in our backyard. When the spray hits her thin thighs and hunched shoulders, she squeals and waves her hands. At the far end of the patio, Dad’s trying to fix the igniter on the barbecue. He says to Mom, “Have you ever seen a kid who loves water more than Ivy?”

Mom smiles. She’s sewing up a tear in the cushion of Ivy’s indoor wheelchair.

When my sister starts to cough, so suddenly and so hard she can hardly take a breath, I quickly steer her out from under the sprinkler and pound her back. My parents leap up and hover as if I don’t know what to do. As if I haven’t dealt with Ivy’s coughing fits a hundred times before.

As soon as she catches her breath, Ivy cries out, “A-ghi, Ga-beg! A-ghi!”

“Again? Crazy kid.”

Dad gives up on fixing the barbecue and Mom follows him into the house.

Again I push Ivy across the wet patio. As we make a turn, she looks up at me and grins. I bend down and kiss the top of her head. Halfway down the yard, a sparrow flies out of a tree.

After another few passes back and forth across the patio, Ivy goes quiet. Her hands, like claws, twitch on the arms of her wheelchair. Knowing what’s coming, I steer her away from the sprinkler.

“Mom! Dad!”

Ivy’s legs start jerking. Her head thrashes forward and back against the back of her wheelchair.

Mom rushes into the yard and grabs a towel from a lawn chair. Ivy’s back is arched. Her arms and legs are still jerking. My stomach twists. Even though I wasn’t cold a minute ago, I’m shivering now, my teeth clacking, my arms and legs juddering. I reach for my towel.

“
Three
seizures in the past
month
,” Mom says.

For almost a year, she’d stopped having them at all.

Dad mutters, “Damn, useless medication.”

“Stephen, don’t start. Please.”

They’ve been worse since they started up again.

Gradually Ivy’s spasms become small twitches, and the twitches gradually come farther apart, until finally – finally – her rigid body goes soft. She looks around as if she doesn’t know where she is. It’s how she used to wake up from naps when she was little. Back then, Mom lifted her out of her crib and sometimes said, “Ivy, do you want to sit with your big brother for a while?” And she’d put Ivy on my lap and let me rock her till she was awake enough to want some juice or a piggyback ride.

Ivy still sleeps in a crib – a big one – and it’s getting hard for Mom, or even me, to lift her out.

Dad takes Ivy from her wheelchair, holds her close even though she’s soaking wet, and together my parents go into the house, leaving me to dry off the wheelchair and turn off the sprinkler. It bugs me that they’ve both gone inside without so much as a word to me. I mean, my stomach is still in knots, and it’s not like it takes two people to put Ivy to bed, but it would never occur to them that her seizures might just freak me out.

But why
would
it? Unless they need me to do something, it’s like I’m not even here.

Chapter 6

I chuck my towel onto the grass and go to the garage for string to tie up some delphiniums that have started flopping over the coreopsis in the front garden.

The plural of
delphinium
should probably be
delphinia
.
According to a website I was on once, that’s how ‘um’ words work in Latin. But even I’m not a big enough dweeb to call a group of them anything but delphiniums. I separate their tall blue stalks from the yellow daisylike coreopsis they’re leaning on.

Today’s seizure was a bad one. I wonder if we’ll still get away to the cottage tomorrow. We better. Bad enough I couldn’t go to music camp this summer.

Once I have the stalks all gathered together, I need an extra hand to wrap the string around them.

Three seizures in the past month, Mom said. No wonder Dad swore. I heave a deep sigh and glance up at the living room window where Ivy often sits watching me tend the garden, but of course she’s napping now.

I lower the stalks gently and tie one end of the string to the railing.

She never had seizures at all before the surgery that went wrong when she was eight and I was twelve. Until then, she didn’t need a wheelchair either. Back then, Dad used to do stuff with me. Like, he took me to the museum once and showed me stuff about ancient Greece – neat things they figured out about astronomy. And when we were at the cottage, he took me fishing. I remember once, we were sitting in a rowboat in the middle of the lake with the sun going down and the loons calling. We didn’t catch any fish, but he told me the Latin name for the common loon that night. I still remember it:
Gavia immer
.

Again I gather the delphiniums close to the railing.

After today’s seizure, there’ll be more fooling around with Ivy’s meds and more doctor appointments that both my parents will go to. A lot of guys would probably see that as a chance to raid the liquor cabinet or have a girlfriend over. But my parents can’t afford to keep much in the liquor cabinet and I’ve never had a girlfriend.

The afternoon is hot. Heat bugs buzz above my head as I start tying the other end of the string to the ramp railing.

“David, hi.”

I drop the flowers and stand up. “Hannah. I didn’t hear you coming.” I wipe my sweaty hands on my almost-dry trunks. “But you’re here at just the right time to help me with this.”

Hannah shoves her hair behind her ears. I never knew ears could be…I don’t know…nice. She takes hold of the heavy stalks while I crouch down to tie the string.

“These blue flowers look great with the yellow daisies,” she says. “Like sapphires and topazes all mixed together when the sun hits them.”

It’s neat that she noticed. That she sees it that way. But I hope she doesn’t notice what she’s doing to me, standing so close.

“It was kind of a happy accident,” I tell her. “Nothing was blooming when I moved this coreopsis here. I just knew I needed something to fill a bare patch after a shrub died over the winter.”

Still holding the stalks, Hannah says, “I saw you working out here so I came over to ask what time I should be ready tomorrow.”

“I don’t know. Nine? Ten?”

If we go. With Hannah coming with us, for five whole days, we
have
to go.

“Great.” She smiles, and I almost drop the string.

Once the delphiniums are properly upright against the ramp, Hannah heads home and I head to the back yard. My parents are talking quietly on the patio, looking like they’d rather not be interrupted.

Slipping away, I hear Mom say, “No, Stephen, absolutely not. I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again. I will not send our daughter to live in a group home. Her home is here, with us.”

Wow. I’ve had moments of wishing Ivy out of my life. Sure. But to actually send her away? To live with strangers? Not that anyone’s asking me what I think, but that’s just nuts.

Chapter 7

When I cross the street to tell Hannah we’re just about ready to leave for the cottage, Shamus again greets me with his stuffed monkey hanging from his mouth. From upstairs Hannah calls down to me, “Come on in. I haven’t quite finished packing.”

I go in, give Shamus a pat, and call back, “Don’t forget your bathing suit.” I just mean so she can swim. I hope she doesn’t think I meant so I can see her in it.

For the first part of the trip, Hannah and I take turns playing on my Gameboy, an old one I picked up at a consignment shop. Strapped into the van’s middle seat, between us and my parents, Ivy squawks and burbles. We stop for lunch on the way up, a packed picnic because of how hard it is with Ivy in a restaurant. Then we drive on for another hour.

The closer we get, the more nervous I get. I mean, Hannah’s only coming to our cottage because her mom knew my mom, but still…

Hannah says to me, “It’s far, isn’t it.”

We turn off the paved country road onto a gravel one.

“Yeah, but we’re almost there now. Another ten minutes.”

Passing the acres of dunes that separate the road from the lake just before we get to our place, I tell her, “It was right about here that Livingston always started whining to get out of the car. He loved it here.”

By the time I’ve explained who Livingston was, we’ve made it down the long, narrow laneway that passes through a wooded area and leads to our cottage. Overlooking the water, it’s a small prefab that Dad inherited from his parents. The only work he’s done on it, or had someone else do, is building a makeshift ramp and widening the inside doorways. It’s pretty rustic.

Mom puts Ivy down for a nap while the rest of us unpack the van. When the groceries are all put away and suitcases are unpacked in the bedrooms, Hannah stretches out with a magazine in the hammock strung up between a pair of birch trees. Her long, athletic legs look even longer when she’s not standing or sitting. If she knew how I’ve started thinking of her, would she mind?

Not far from the hammock, Dad’s raking twigs out of the beach sand while Mom is inside making the beds. I wander over to the hammock and set it swaying. “Do you want to go for a walk?”

“Arf, arf!”

“I didn’t mean it like that. There are some neat dunes not far along the shore I thought you might like to see.”

Neat dunes
. It sounds lame, even to me.

Hannah fans herself with her magazine. “Maybe tomorrow, if it’s not as hot?”

“There’s rain forecast tomorrow,” I tell her.

Hannah shrugs. “I’ll take that chance. Is that okay?”

Can she tell that showing her the dunes was just an excuse to get her alone somewhere?