The Education of Ivy Blake (16 page)

Ivy lay
on the Oriental rug in the parlor, one of the forks from Aunt Connie's silver set resting on her chest. A half-finished crocheted blanket in clashing colors lay on the floor beside her. Her mother had been making it, in the time Before—before that terrible night when she picked up the gun.

Ivy had forgotten about it until she opened the box. Then the memory flew into her head: her mom on the couch in front of the TV, her head bent over the blanket. Frowning, yanking at the yarn. There was no great meaning to it. The blanket was just a thing her mom had been doing, a project. Then her mom catapulted them into the time After, and as far as Ivy could think, she'd never undertaken a project again.

Also on the floor was a spray of snapshots, Aunt Connie's silverware box, three model cars (a Thunderbird, a Mustang, and a Camaro), and one ticket to the Indy 500. Ivy picked up the Thunderbird and dangled it over her head. An image of her dad bent over a car with a paintbrush in his hand had raced back when she opened this box. The image of him hunched at the table beneath the shaded lamp that had hung from the ceiling made her throat tighten. He'd been good at painting. The stripes along the Thunderbird's sides were narrow and sure. There wasn't a single drop of paint anywhere it wasn't supposed to be.

The race ticket brought memories back too. She was five. Her favorite cereal back then was Cheerios, her favorite shirt was her blue-and-white-striped one. She heard her mom's voice in her head. Yelling.

We can't afford that!

What, like we can afford those clothes you bought?
her dad had said.

I can get myself something decent to wear if I want—

And I can go to a race with some buddies.

You know I hate being alone—

It's one weekend. And you won't be alone, you'll have Ivy—

You and your buddies. When's the last time
we
did something fun?

Ivy didn't remember what else they said, or if those were the exact words, but that was the idea. She'd blocked it out all these years. It was so ordinary. Nothing to shoot someone over.

She rolled onto her stomach and put her fingertips on the book Grammy'd given her the day she came with the cake. It was
The Invention of Hugo Cabret,
which the movie
Hugo
was based on. She touched the magnet from Grammy next.
Never, never, never give up
it said. Ivy closed her hand around it tight. She had things to consider besides her parents' last fight, things about
now,
things about her. At the moment, she was thinking. She'd been thinking, ever since they got back from the storage facility two days ago.

The doorbell pealed. FedEx, probably. Beryl always had a package to send out for her work, or one coming in. She liked to sign for them herself usually. She was likely to snap if Ivy tried to beat her to the door. “I'm not
crippled,
” she'd say. Then, “Well, I am, but I'm not unable.”

The doorbell rang again, two gongs in quick succession. “Ivy!” Beryl yelled from the den. “Get that, would you? I'm in the middle of a meeting.”

Ivy scrambled to her feet and padded down the hall, the fork in her hand.

Jacob stood on the porch. Ivy gaped at him in astonishment. His T-shirt was green, with a hedgehog on it.
Hedgehogs: Why can't they just share?
it said. He pushed a lock of hair back. “Movie Girl. Finally.” He held a paper bag out toward her.

The instant her fingers made contact, Ivy knew what it was. She knew the weight in her hand, the feel of the wire spiral through the bag, the precise hardness of the covers.

“You are not the easiest person to find,” he said.

“Where did you—”

“Outside the snack bar at the pool. I thought maybe you saw me—”

Ivy shook her head.

“I work there for the summer. I was emptying the garbage cans when I saw this fly out of your bag.”

Ivy's back tensed, remembering the phone call, and the reason for it.

“I thought it was you, but you took off so fast—”

Ivy had never put her name in the journal, not even after Ms. Mackenzie gave it back. It had seemed both unnecessary—it was a part of her, like her fingers—and much too dangerous. Someone might
identify
her with it. “How—”

“I studied the pictures.”

Ivy opened the book. There was her life. Captured, restored. She put a finger on the bunch of parsley in the bag of groceries in the back of the station wagon. There was her sneaker, there was Prairie's. She'd forgotten a second small sketch on the same page. The back end of the car with its license plate and the stickers that said
Love your mother, recycle
and
Hunt for Sasquatch!

She turned to a page further in. There was Ms. Mackenzie at the blackboard. She was pretty recognizable, especially if you'd run into her at the Really Fine Diner. Slowly, Ivy nodded. He'd tracked down Ms. Mackenzie, then. The two of them had talked about her. But—that was okay.

She looked up at Jacob and confessed abruptly, “I took down one of those posters you put up that day I saw you at the college.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Yeah? I designed it, but I didn't think it was
that
good. Not framable or anything. Although you never know—”

“It's okay—”

“Just
okay
?”

Ivy squinted at him, working to hide a grin. “Yeah, it's kind of plain actually—”

He flung a hand to his heart like she'd wounded him. “I was in a hurry! My grandmother asked me to do it, like, one night before she needed it—”

Ivy smiled. “I took it because I want to make a movie. I
am
making a movie. Trying, anyway. To enter in the contest.”

Jacob whistled. “Cool.”

“Your poster inspired me.”

“
Very
cool.”

Ivy smiled at the parquet floor.

Jacob crossed his arms and leaned himself on one hip, like he was settling in for a chat and could make himself comfortable anywhere, even standing on a stranger's porch. “I grew up in the movie business. Well, the theater business, anyway. My grandparents own the old theater in Rosendale, the brick one—”

Ivy's eyes snapped to his. “I love that place!”

He grinned. “Um, yeah.” He said it the same way you'd say
duh.
“I've never tried to make a movie, though. That's a radical undertaking. What's yours going to be about?”

Ivy opened the door wider. “That's kind of a long story. Do you want to come in?”

• • •

They sat cross-legged on the Oriental rug in the parlor for so long that Ivy's legs went numb. They'd been talking and talking. About Ivy's movie, and about movies in general. Their words had slowed down in the last few minutes, but the quiet felt as natural as conversation, and seemed to hold as much in it.

“What's this?” Jacob picked up the Thunderbird.

Ivy examined him. Hedgehog shirt, hair hanging past his shoulders in mild curls, hazel eyes, crinkled at the corners. There was an ease about him. Also a gravity. She considered telling him it was nothing. But then she thought of how she'd made friends with Prairie last year, so suddenly and completely. She thought of Ms. Mackenzie leaning toward her when she hardly even knew Ivy, telling her that her drawings were great, that she could do whatever she wanted with her life. She thought of Tate offering her apple in exchange for a mushy banana, of Beryl poking at the broken pieces of teapot with her crutch and then smiling. She reached out and put one finger on the Thunderbird's hood. “It was my dad's. He was working on it just before he died.”

Jacob's face went still and grave. “Oh, wow, I'm sorry. What happened?”

Ivy told him.

• • •

He told her stuff too. He'd lost his younger brother three years before. Cam. Hit in the head by a stray softball. “It was one of those if-only things. If only we'd gone ten minutes later, hung out ten feet farther down the field, if Cam had just turned his head—”

Ivy nodded. You could drive yourself crazy with if-onlys. A lot of them you couldn't do anything about. They sat in your path like huge boulders or a raging river that wasn't written on your map. You might stare at them for a long time before you searched out a long, hard detour around them. Like Ms. Mackenzie said in school that cranky, rainy day, you had to cope.

But some things—you might almost miss them, you could get so used to thinking every obstacle was a gigantic boulder—you could change, or try to. You could attempt to climb up over the rock or sneak your way across a log that spanned the river, and see how it worked out. It was risky, but maybe worth it. If you opened the door wider, picked up the phone, sometimes something wonderful could happen.

Ivy brought
her sketchbook to the dining room table after Jacob left. She looked at the last thing she'd written:
Heather takes a bus
—

In a way, Ivy had been on a bus herself these past few weeks. Riding around the world, trying to get off at the right stops, missing them sometimes.

She pulled the postcards Prairie had sent from North Carolina out of the back of the book. Lined up according to the numbers in the bottom right-hand corners, the message read,
I got so mad. Wish you were here, Love, Prairie.
Which was nice. But Ivy was pretty sure the real message was nicer yet. The card with a 1/6 on it must have gotten hung up in the mail somewhere. Ivy would've bet her video camera that it said
I'm sorry.

I'm sorry I got so mad.

Suddenly, Ivy wanted to be the first one to say she was sorry. She knew she ought to be.

With a brisk flip, she turned to a new page and wrote TO DO at the top with one of her
Senators
pencils.
Call Tate,
she wrote.
Finish script. Get actors.
There were twenty more things on the list, half a dozen of them involving Jacob, who'd already said he'd help. Last of all, Ivy wrote
Call Prairie.

She could hear Grammy telling her something quote-y and saying-ish:
There's no time like the present
or
Well begun is half done.
Or most likely,
Life's short, forgive fast.

She went into the den and shut the door. Sat in Beryl's office chair and experimented with raising and lowering it. Poked the hula girl bobble doll that stood by Beryl's pen cup. The hula girl swayed and her tiny grass skirt swished.
“Un-a-li,”
Ivy whispered. The Cherokee word for friend, the first Cherokee word she and Prairie had learned together. She remembered finding the translation site on the Internet, showing it to Prairie, the two of them whispering and giggling and getting yelled at by the librarian. How had they gone from that, to this? Ivy lifted the phone receiver.

“Hi, Prairie?” Her voice wavered. “It's me, Ivy. How are you?”

Prairie said
okay
cautiously and Ivy poked the hula girl again. The doll's painted-on smile seemed sympathetic; she was forever poised to strum a chord on her little ukulele. Ivy sucked in a belly breath, like Ms. Mackenzie had taught them. “I wanted to tell you that I'm sorry I haven't called in so long. And I'm sorry if I acted like a jerk. I was jealous, I guess, about Kelly, and about—well, how nice your family is, when mine's all messy and sad.”

“Yeah, but
you're
not messy and sad,” Prairie protested. “You're great. You're
you.
And—I don't know—all the messy, sad stuff made you you—” She made that growl of frustration that Ivy'd missed hearing. “This is coming out all wrong, but messy and sad is
not
the main thing about you.”

Ivy poked the hula girl again, and the green paper fringes of her skirt swished softly. “Thanks. Anyway, the main thing is, I miss you. I never didn't miss you. I was hoping we could get together pretty soon. Like, really soon. And there's something else. I need help with this movie. A lot of help. I was hoping you'd want to, and maybe Kelly too—”

They said good-bye and Ivy flung herself on the rug. She stretched her muscles and a feeling of contentment, one with fringy edges like the hula girl's skirt, spread out inside her.