What Happened to Ivy (4 page)

I head into the cottage for a drink. Dad puts away his rake and follows me inside. Hannah, close behind, sits down on the couch and picks up my Gameboy. I hand her a can of pop from the fridge.

“Thanks.”

After a while, a sound like a siren comes from Ivy’s room.

“Stephen, can you go?” Mom’s hands are in the sink.

Dad carries Ivy, rubbing her eyes, into the living room. A stunned expression flashes briefly across Hannah’s face. I can’t figure why at first. Then I realize. In the three weeks she’s known us, she’s only ever seen Ivy fully dressed. Looking at my sister through Hannah’s eyes, I see what I hardly think about anymore – the delicate white curve of Ivy’s back, her sorry little legs.

And the diaper. Getting up from her nap on the hottest day of the summer, that’s all she’s wearing.

“David, spread a blanket on the floor, would you?” Dad says. “Ivy’ll be cooler there than in her wheelchair.”

Hannah jumps up to spread out Ivy’s blanket and sits back down beside me. She’s watching closely as Dad lays Ivy gently on the floor and kneels beside her.

“Did you have a good sleep, sweetheart?” he says. “You missed the baseball game on the radio. The Blue Jays won it in the ninth inning.”

“Eep eep? Fabel cow boo.”

Hannah is still staring at them, so I nudge her elbow. “Are you going to play with that Gameboy, or what?”

Without taking her eyes off them, she hands it to me. “The way your dad talks to Ivy and she makes those sing-songy sounds back at him? It’s so nice. Like they’re having a real conversation.”

Ivy reaches up and pats Dad’s chin.

“Want to get up, darling?” He cups the back of Ivy’s head and lifts her off the floor.

Ivy pats his back. “Da-a da-a.”

Hannah’s face goes all mushy and for a second I think she’s falling for my dad, which is really gross if you think about it, but then she says quietly to me, “I wonder if my dad ever held
me
like that. I’d remember, wouldn’t I?”

Dad puts Ivy in her wheelchair and turns it so she can look out the window. “There you go, sweetheart.” When he leaves Ivy and goes into the kitchen, Hannah’s eyes follow him.

After lunch we all get into our swimsuits and head outside. Hannah’s is a red two-piece. I quickly wade into the water up to my waist. Ivy pats her turquoise tummy as Dad carries her into the lake.

“Bi-yee bay zoot.”

“That’s right,” Mom says. “Your bathing suit is very pretty.”

“
Ba-yee
bi-yee!”

From the shore, Hannah watches Dad swish Ivy back and forth in the water. When he pauses, Ivy shouts, “A-ghi!” and Hannah smiles.

Mom laughs and calls across the water, “She wants more, Stephen.”

“I know. But she’s heavy. She’s not a little girl anymore.” Half laughing, he flips Ivy onto her back. Her hair makes a swirling halo in the water around her head as she stares up at the sky, with Dad’s hands underneath her. I wade through the water toward them.

“Here, Dad, let me.” I take Ivy and swirl her back and forth through the water. Her hands grip the backs of my arms and her face is one wide-open grin. I swirl her suddenly in the opposite direction and she laughs so hard she’s soon got all of us laughing – me, Dad, Mom, and Hannah still up by the shore, looking gorgeous in her red bathing suit, burying her feet in the sand at the water’s edge.

After a while my parents take Ivy inside. “How about a swim?” I suggest to Hannah.

“Promise you won’t think I’m an idiot?” she says.

“Why?”

“David, promise?”

“Okay, I promise I won’t think you’re an idiot.”

“I can’t swim.”

“Well, let me teach you then.”

“No, seriously. Please? I can’t.”

She looks so panic-struck, I just say, “Sure. No problem.”

That evening during a rummy game, the heat breaks. A cool breeze blows in the window. My parents take turns playing hands so one of them can be with Ivy, trying to figure out how to calm her down. She’s been wailing pretty steadily ever since we finished ‘
feemeen
’ but I hardly notice because under the table, Hannah’s foot is leaning against mine. She probably doesn’t know she’s doing it. She probably thinks she’s leaning her foot against the pedestal in the middle of the table. But all I care about is the pressure of that bare foot nestled up against mine in the dark space under the table.

Chapter 8

After a night interrupted a few times by Ivy hollering, I wake to the sound of pounding rain on the roof of the cottage. Over breakfast it settles into a steady drizzle, the kind not likely to let up any time soon. So much for walking in the dunes with Hannah today.

After breakfast, she pulls a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle from a shelf, an old one Mom got years ago, when she was the one into gardening. Together, Hannah and I clear the table to make room for it and start sifting through the box for edge pieces.

Most of the edge and the hydrangeas in the lower half of the puzzle are together, we’ve eaten lunch and the dishes have been cleared away, and still the rain continues. Mom’s busy with Ivy, Dad heads into the kitchen to try to fix a leaky pipe under the sink, and Hannah and I go back to our puzzle. With her shoulder so close beside mine, it’s easy for me to imagine she feels the same about being close to me as I feel about being close to her. And there’s that ear that I can’t not look at every time she tucks her hair behind it.

Into the sound of the wet clattering on the roof comes the tinkly tune from a jack-in-the-box that was Dad’s when he was a kid.
All a-round the cob-ble-er’s bench, the monkey chased the wea-sel…
I played with it too, back when I was my parents’ only kid.

Mom sings along with the tinny music coming from the box. “The monkey thought it was a-all in fun…”

Of course I lost interest in the toy long before I was eleven.

“What comes next, Ivy?” Mom asks.

The rain clatters on. I look up from my search for a lopsided H-shaped piece of red peony and see Ivy lift her head from her shoulder as if she’s about to answer, but her eyes aren’t focused anywhere, and her head flops again toward her chest.

Mom turns the handle again. Jack jumps out of his box. “Pop!” Mom says.

Still Ivy doesn’t react.

Mom finishes the song and begins cranking the handle again. Again the tinkly tune, and again, “All a-round the cob-ble-er’s bench, the monkey chased the wea-sel…The monkey thought it was a-all in fun…”

Sometimes Ivy yells ‘pop’ before it’s even close to time for Jack to jump out of the box, but today Mom waits, again. Again she says, “Pop!” and again finishes the song. Along with the tinkly tune, she again starts to sing, “All a-round the cob-ble-er’s bench…”

Dad pulls his head out from under the kitchen sink. “Give it up, Anne. Can’t you see she’s never going to get it?”

“Yes she will. She’s got it before. Lots of times.” Mom keeps turning the handle. “The monkey chased the—”

“Stop!”
Dad clenches the wrench tightly in his fist. “
Look
at her! She doesn’t have a
clue
what you’re going on about!”

I glance at Hannah. She’s either doing a good job of pretending she doesn’t notice the tension or else she doesn’t think my parents arguing is any big deal.

“Sometimes she just needs more time,” Mom says.

Suddenly I get a whiff of something I hoped wouldn’t happen when Hannah was around. Hoped! I practically
prayed!
Not that I’m religious. It’s just that I’ve had enough friends who came over after school once, and that was it, because of some gross thing Ivy did. And it doesn’t get much grosser than filling your pants.

Hannah’s face says she’s caught it now, too. Burying her nose in the crook of her elbow, she whispers, “Pwah. That’s worse than a Shamus fart.”

In the kitchen, Dad throws down his wrench. “Shit!”

Hannah jumps. We both do.

“Stephen!”

Dad tears his jacket from the hook beside the door and storms out into the rain.

Chapter 9

Lifting Ivy from her wheelchair, Mom winces. She better not put her back out. No way I want to get stuck hauling my sister around in her shitty diaper.

After Mom takes Ivy into the bedroom and closes the door, I open my mouth to apologize, but Hannah just shakes her head. “It’s okay, David. No big deal.” She leans across me and fits in a piece that finishes the peony in my corner of the puzzle. “Really.”

I take a piece of baby’s breath from the box and try it near the red peony. It doesn’t fit.

“Try it over here,” Hannah says.

I lean across her to reach the section of puzzle with fine white flowers in it –
Gypsophila paniculata –
and place the piece in the space she suggested. Her neck smells of gardenias. Could I kiss her now, while my parents and Ivy are all somewhere else? Would she let me? What if I just—?

Mom comes out of the bedroom and sighs. Having put Ivy down for a nap, she puts a kettle on for tea.

An hour later, when the tea’s all been drunk and the puzzle’s well over halfway done, a cool damp breeze sweeps in the back door. Dad shakes the rain from his jacket and hangs it up. Rubbing the space between his shoulders, Mom says, “Look at you, Stephen, your jeans are soaked.” As if he hadn’t noticed. I guess it’s her way of apologizing for pushing it with the jack-in-the-box.

After he’s changed into dry clothes, Dad carries Ivy into the living room and lays her on the floor. Sitting on either side of her, my parents bend and straighten her legs, moving them as if she were riding a bike. Ivy grimaces and groans the whole time.

“That looks painful,” Hannah says.

Dad says, “It is.”

I’m so used to the physio that someone has to do with Ivy several times a day that I forgot Hannah’s never been around to see it. Bending and straightening Ivy’s left leg, Mom says, “Ivy puts up with a lot, but we have to do this to keep her spine from getting any worse before the surgery, and so she doesn’t lose muscle tone.”

When Ivy’s back in her wheelchair, Dad props up a felt board and starts sticking fuzzy animal shapes on it. Pointing at a duck, he says, “What sound does a duck make, Ivy?”

Nothing.

“A duck says, ‘Quack quack.’ Ivy, can you say, ‘Quack quack’?”

“Buh buh buh.”

“Christ, why do we bother?” Dad stuffs a handful of felt animals back into their box. “Honestly, Anne! Why do we bother with any of it?”

Hannah glances up at me. Mom is definitely giving the onion she’s chopping way more knife than she needs to. Even I’m surprised by how testy Dad is today. If it wasn’t raining so hard, Hannah and I could go somewhere else.

When the felt board and animals are back on the shelf, Dad sighs.

“It’s alright, Ivy. Who cares what a duck says anyway, right?” He lifts her out of her wheelchair and starts dancing her around the cottage. He sings, “I’d do anything for you, dear, anything…” Cradled in his arms, Ivy coos. “For you mean everything to me.”

When he puts Ivy back in her wheelchair, Hannah goes over and runs her finger around Ivy’s face. “The moon is round as round can be.” Wouldn’t I just love to have her trace my face with her finger like that. “Two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, I see.”

“Boy, this puzzle is really coming along, isn’t it.” Dad’s standing behind me.

“Yeah, this section here was pretty hard. Now I’m just trying to figure out where this—”

Ivy shrieks. It’s a piercing shriek and Dad is by her side in a shot.

I chuck the piece that I’m now showing to no one onto the table.

So, big deal Dad was actually showing an interest in what I was doing. So, big deal it didn’t last because Ivy needed something. When
doesn’t
she need something? When isn’t she messing up
something
?

Like when I was in grade six and had my first solo part in the school concert. My parents actually found someone to stay with Ivy so they could come. And didn’t I sing my heart out that night.
I would not be just a nothin’, My head all full of stuffin’, My heart all full of pain, Perhaps I’d deserve you, And be even worthy erve you…
But it turned out they weren’t there to hear me because between the time I went to the school to get into my scarecrow costume and make-up and when they were supposed to get there, Ivy got a fever that spiked so high they had to rush her to hospital. I wished that night that she’d never come out.

Chapter 10

During supper, it finally stops raining. As Mom dishes out strawberries for dessert, Dad suggests having a bonfire. “Or would people rather just play a board game?”

Hannah accepts a bowl of berries. “Do you have Monopoly?”

This cottage thing is turning out okay. I mean, it could have been that Hannah would think stuff like puzzles and Monopoly were totally dorky.