Somehow I kept myself from turning around. Ms. Burden shouted my name a few more times, and then there was only silence.
Finally I felt brave enough to look back. Ms. Burden was gone. Piper’s improbable plan had worked. I started laughing, and Piper grinned and then laughed as well. Then we were both overcome with hilarity, fighting for breath, unable to stop. Someone stared at us as from across the street, probably thinking we were drunk.
Just as I got control of myself I noticed that I was still wearing my name tag, the one that said “Jane Green.” I’d wanted to be inconspicuous, but if I’d been trying to call attention to myself I couldn’t have picked a better name. I showed it to Piper, and we started laughing again.
He stopped before I did. He turned to me, looking up with an expression I had never seen before, diffident, almost serious. His mouth was open, as if he wanted to say something.
Then he leapt, and I felt him land within me. He turned around several times, like a dog on a favorite bed, until he nestled down somewhere he felt comfortable.
We asked someone where the Greyhound bus station was and went toward it. We’d left the car in the hotel parking lot, I remembered, but I wasn’t going back there to find it. Anyway, we’d stolen it in the first place.
Piper and I had grown so close that I could usually tell what he was thinking, and so I knew that he’d been about to ask if I wanted him back. The question confused me, even startled me. I’d thought that he’d be in my life forever, that I had no choice in the matter.
And if he had asked me, what would I have said?
CHAPTER 15
ON THE BUS BACK to Eugene I thought about how much fun I’d had, how I’d enjoyed being treated like a regular person again. It was coming time to get off the streets, but I’d been gone so long I couldn’t see any way back. I needed a phone number to get a job, but only a job would earn me enough money for a phone.
I started urging Piper toward homeless shelters, where I could get a bed and some food and maybe even a shower. But he didn’t like those places; they were too regimented for him, and some of them required you to sign up earlier in the day, something he couldn’t seem to manage.
I stayed with him for another year. We did what we had always done, confounding people, shaking them up, even teaching them something, though Piper always insisted that wasn’t his intention.
Toward the end it sometimes seemed as if we were doing the same things over and over, to the point that I almost felt bored once or twice. When he found abandoned houses and set them alight I thought of the ending of Ivory Apples, when the town burned down and one of the children of Tabitha and Quentin Foxtree died. Wild revelry was fine in its place, Maeve seemed to be saying, but it had to stop sometime. But Piper was as manic as always, and I knew he couldn’t understand how any of this could seem dull.
I was thinking about my family more and more, and finally I overruled him and went by my house. It seemed deserted, the lawn overgrown, a throwaway paper lying on the porch, still damp from the rain. I walked around to the backyard, watching the windows carefully, but I still saw no signs of life. Philip had hidden a key there after Beatriz had locked herself out a few more times, and after a moment I found the fake rock he’d used to hide it in.
Should I take it and go inside? Piper shook his head, and I could feel his fear. No, I was the one who was afraid. I wasn’t ready to confront Ms. Burden yet.
I left, telling myself that I’d come back later, or watch for my sisters at their schools. A few days after that I tried calling them from a payphone, but I got only voicemail.
Something else happened that should have made me leave the streets for good: I saw the blond man again. I turned and ran, but this time he spotted me and ran after me. “Wait!” he shouted. “I just want to talk to you!”
Of course he wanted to talk to me, I thought. Right before he’d throw me to the ground and tie me up, and then carry his prize back to Ms. Burden.
I kept running. Downtown Eugene is a grid of streets, with few places to hide. I knew a store that had another entrance in the back, and I darted through it and outside, leaving the man behind.
The weather turned cold again. My sixteenth birthday came and went, though I had lost track of time and wasn’t sure exactly which day it was. Around then we stole another car, and Piper directed me out of the city. The drive looked familiar, though the name of the highway, 126, didn’t mean anything to me. Then we started passing trees along the roadway, and I realized that this was the way to Aunt Maeve’s house.
I asked him, astonished, if he knew where Maeve lived. Of course he did, he told me. He had lived in the grove near her house for years, maybe centuries.
“What the fuck?” I said, jolted into speaking out loud. It was something I rarely did, knowing that it made people stare at me and edge away. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?”
I’m telling you now, he said. Anyway, I didn’t think it was important.
“Not important?” I was so angry I could barely catch my breath; it felt as if a band was constricting my chest, pulling tighter and tighter. “All I ever wanted was to find her.”
He never felt guilty for anything, I knew, might not have even known what guilt was. I shouted at him for a long time, told him all about the hopelessness and misery of those years. He didn’t seem to understand, though, and finally I gave up.
He lapsed into silence too, except to give me directions. We took the exit to the small town, which I saw now was called Woodbine. Why hadn’t I noticed that when I was a child, or remembered the name?
Then we drove the rough road toward Maeve’s house. As we came closer I started wondering how she had survived without Philip’s help, and I felt a jumble of excitement and worry that crowded out my anger. Piper was pure eagerness, straining to see around the next curve.
The first thing I saw was her garden. Tall knotted weeds had choked off all her flowers and were spreading along the driveway and up the path to the house. I got out of the car and rang the rope of bells on her door.
No one answered. I rang the bells again, then knocked loudly. “Aunt Maeve!” I called. “Aunt Maeve, are you there? It’s me, Ivy!”
I tried the door but it was locked, so I went around to the side. She’d never put curtains over her many windows, and I peered into every room, banging on the glass and shouting.
The back door was locked as well, and I started down the other side of the house. I came to what looked like her bedroom, a place I’d never gone into, and made out a lump in her bed. Was she sleeping? Or had she just left the bed unmade?
I returned to the back door, which had the smallest glass panes in the house, picked up a rock, and smashed out one of the windows. Then I reached inside and opened the door.
I hurried through the kitchen to her bedroom. There was a woman lying in the bed, but I didn’t know who she was; she seemed far too small to be Aunt Maeve. The skin on her face was lax, and her nose jutted up like a blade. White hair lay spread against the pillow, and her gray eyes were open, staring blindly in front of her.
No, it was Aunt Maeve. She’d lost a lot of weight—even with the blankets over her I could see that. Her new thinness looked grotesque on her large frame.
“Aunt Maeve?” I said, rushing over to her.
She turned toward me, alarmed. “Who are you?” she asked, her voice a hoarse whisper.
“It’s Ivy. Your great-niece.”
“Ivy,” she said, without recognition.
“Can I get you something? How about some food?”
“Drink.”
“Drink, great. Just a minute.”
I ran to the kitchen. The cupboards held very little; the first one I opened had an old box of pasta and a bottle of rice vinegar. The refrigerator was even worse, with celery so old it was turning liquid, and some other fruits or vegetables I couldn’t identify.
Finally I found a box of tea and set her kettle boiling. I opened another cupboard to look for sugar and saw ant
s swirling around a bag of flour; a black line led there and back, like eager shoppers at a sale. As I turned away from the cupboard I realized how bad the kitchen smelled, of food that had gone moldy or rotten.
I poured the water and took the tea into her bedroom. She sat up carefully, displacing a sour, vinegary odor from somewhere within the blankets. When was the last time she had washed? I tried not to recoil, to hold the cup steady at her mouth.
“Who did you say you were?” she asked.
“Ivy. Philip and Jane’s daughter.”
“Philip.” She closed her eyes and lay back.
“Are you tired? Do you want to go to sleep?”
“Why not? It’s all gone, anyway.”
“What’s all gone?”
“All gone. No reason to stay.”
I felt uncertain, hopeless. “Look—why don’t you go back to sleep? I’ll call a doctor.”
Everything seemed harder than it had to be, and took longer. Part of that was because I hadn’t done any work for a long time, I wasn’t used to coming up with a plan and following it. The phone was dead, for example, probably because Maeve hadn’t paid the bill, which meant that I had to drive to Woodbine and find a doctor. I took a quick shower in cold water (she hadn’t paid the heating bill either, apparently), then looked through her clothes for something presentable to wear. I couldn’t find anything that would fit me, though, and finally I just grabbed a dress at random. It billowed around me, and with its blue and white stripes I looked like a pool pavilion, but I couldn’t take the time to change.
When I went to the front door I saw a drift of letters and packages piled against it, so many that I couldn’t pull the door open. I bent down and started to arrange them, then realized that I could just go out the back.
And it didn’t help that Piper laughed at everything, that he was constantly coming up with ideas for tricks and jokes. I told him firmly to shut up, but I had gotten out of the habit of resisting him and I felt him grin.
When I finally found a doctor in Woodbine he told me he didn’t make house calls. It seemed like the last straw. I sat down, ready to give up, but the doctor said, “We can send an ambulance. Where does she live?”
That really was the last straw—I didn’t know her address. But I was able to describe how to get to her house, well enough that the doctor said, “Sure, I know where that is. I’ll go call them, and you can stay here, relax a bit. Would you like something to drink?”
It was the first time in years someone had been kind to me. I managed to thank him before I got outside and started crying, then drove back to Maeve’s house.
I got there just as the ambulance was pulling up, and I took the crew around back and let them inside. They slowed to look at the broken windowpane and the dust and dirt and ants in the kitchen, whispering to each other. I didn’t say anything, just led them to the bedroom.
It was too much like a repeat of the day Philip had died: a crowd of men and women in a room too small for them, voices talking, radios crackling. I found myself pushed into a corner, near her dresser. She had a group of photographs on the dresser, including the one Dr. Chapman had shown at the Adela Madden Conference, the light-haired children sitting in the sun.
For the first time I truly felt the connection between the two, Adela Madden and Maeve Reynolds. My great-aunt was Adela Madden, the woman who had written Ivory Apples . A national treasure, some people had called her. And now, just when I’d found her again, I was in danger of losing her.
“Miss?” one of the EMTs said. “Is this your—your grandmother?”
“My great-aunt,” I said.
“Yes, well, we’re going to have to take her to the hospital. She’s badly dehydrated, she’s malnourished, disoriented . . . Were you taking care of her?”
“No, I—I didn’t know.”
Aunt Maeve said something, a word as quiet as a sigh. “What?” I said. “What did you say?”
“No,” she said. “No hospital. Anyway, there’s a girl who comes in. I ordered her from the restaurant.”
Two of the EMTs looked at each other, clearly thinking she was unmoored or delirious. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but you need to see a doctor,” one of them said.
“I don’t want to go to the hospital,” she said, louder this time. She looked over at me. “What if—what if she takes care of me?”
“Do you know who she is, ma’am?”
Aunt Maeve said nothing. All of the EMTs had stopped what they were doing, as if everyone understood how high the stakes were.
“Of course,” Maeve said finally. She sounded a little like her old imperious self. “She . . . she’s my great-niece. I have four great-nieces. Her name is . . . her name is Ivy. Ivy Quinn.”
“Is that right, miss?” the EMT asked.
I nodded, hoping they’d take my word for it. I hadn’t had any identification for years.
“And what’s your name?” the EMT asked Maeve.
“Maeve Reynolds.”
“Do you know who’s president?”
“Oh God,” Maeve said.
Most of them laughed. She seemed to have passed the test. “Can you take care of her?” the EMT asked me.
“Yeah. Sure.”
The EMT started listing the things I needed to do, but I could only give him half my attention. I was wondering if I was up to the job. I’d have to buy groceries, clean the house, straighten out her finances . . . Could I take all this on, after two years of frivolity?
No, Piper said.
I pushed back at him, as strongly as I could. But I thought of all the hard work ahead of me, and I felt the same reluctance as he did.
Everything seemed unreal at first, as if I found myself in a country where I barely spoke the language or understood the customs. I had to remind myself to pay for my groceries, for example, and not lift them from the market the way I once did. I had to get used to sleeping on Maeve’s couch instead of out in the open, had to learn to relax at night, to stop listening for people creeping up on me while I slept.
I did all right, I think. I made a stab at cleaning up. I got rid of the ants, though Piper tried to convince me to write his name in flour and see if the black line of ants would spell it out. I got the heat turned back on; it was December, the dead of winter, and the cold crept in through all the windows.
But she had so many knickknacks, what Grampa Sam had called “tchotchkes,” and all of them had gathered dust and cobwebs. It seemed an impossible task, like sorting seeds in a fairy tale. I wondered if we could afford a cleaner, someone like Esperanza, which meant looking through her finances, which meant opening her letters to see which ones had checks in them.
The pile blocking the front door turned out to be only a small part of her correspondence. She had stuffed a closet with letters going back at least a year; her publishers had probably started sending them to her when the post office box closed. And there was more coming every day, filled with questions, theories, requests, photos and paintings and jewelry, so many that I didn’t see how anyone could finish it all.
Maeve got better, though slowly. A month later she was walking around a little. We’d been fined for the overgrown garden so I hired someone to cut it back, and the sigh of it razed to the ground depressed her so much that she usually stayed indoors.
She was different, though, sadder and less certain of herself. Her queenly manner, the way she had assumed that everyone would do her bidding, was gone. At times she seemed almost apologetic.
We settled into a routine, like an unmarried aunt and her caregiver niece in an old novel. In the morning I ran errands and did some chores around the house, and after lunch I settled down to her correspondence. I took it slowly, telling myself that I didn’t have to do it all at once.
At first I had to ask her a lot of questions about the world of Ivory Apples, but as time passed it became easier. I hesitated over what name I should sign the letters with, and finally I settled on Dave. Jane and Philip had used David, and I liked to imagine
heated arguments on the website over whether Dave and David were the same person.
And all the time I was working, I composed poetry in my head. In later years, reviewers would wonder why my earliest poems were so short, coming up with any number of ingenious explanations, but the truth was that I couldn’t stop to write anything longer.
Every so often I drove back to Eugene, where I’d deposit Maeve’s checks in the bank, and use Maeve’s library card to check out books from the library, and pick up things I couldn’t find in Woodbine. I rented a new post office box in Springfield, hoping to make the letter-writers forget about the Eugene address; the two towns were just across the Willamette River, but most people didn’t know that.
I’d grown unhappy over having stolen the car, so I left it on the street somewhere. Then I bought a new one, with Maeve’s money and her blessings, a four-wheel drive because of the rough roads where we lived. Piper was delighted by it. Different chimes and bells would sound depending on what you were doing—if you left the door open and the key in the ignition, for example, or you hadn’t fastened your seat belt. He spent some time playing tunes by opening and closing the door, putting the key in the ignition, touching the seatbelt buckles to each other. I loved him then, and missed having his wild spirit with me all the time. I didn’t know anyone else who could play a car.
One day, after we’d eaten dinner and I’d taken the dirty dishes to the kitchen to soak, Maeve said, “I think I’m well enough to hear about it now. Can you tell me how Philip died? And who was that dreadful woman at your house?”
“It’s a long story,” I said.
“I like stories,” she said, smiling a little.
So I told her everything, all the long, hard tale of the past five years. It was good to share it with someone; I felt as if I had set down some baggage, some—yes—burden, as if I had been made free of something.
“I don’t know why she’s so obsessed with you, though,” I said.
“I’ve seen it before,” Maeve said. “Some people want—well, a source of creativity, let’s call it. They want to make something, to bring something new into the world. Or they want the money and fame that come with it.”
Ivory Apples Page 13
