The Education of Ivy Blake (13 page)

“Ivy! You ready?”

Ivy grabbed her bag off her bed and headed for the living room. Her mom had the car keys in her hand and was sliding her feet into her sandals.

“Do I have to come with you today?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I said so, that's why.”

“It's not fair. You and George never pay any attention to me. Now that you're all happily reunited.
Dating
and everything.”

Her mom slung her purse over her shoulder. “You're fine, you've got your camera. Work on your movie or whatever.”

Ivy plodded after her to the car. “How am I supposed to do that? There's not even a computer. You have to edit stuff, you know.”

“You'll figure it out.” Her mom backed onto the street and Ivy stared out the window.

“How's the movie coming, anyway?”

Ivy flicked a disbelieving look at her.

“You're still working on it, right?”

“Like you care. You don't even think I should do it.”

“Just because I tried to make you see reality doesn't mean I don't care.”

Ivy rolled her eyes at herself in the car window.

“What's it about, anyway?”

“I dunno,” Ivy mumbled.

Her mom flipped on her blinker and turned onto the highway. “Fine, don't tell me.” She switched on the radio.

But Ivy had been telling the truth. She was still determined to enter the contest, mostly because she'd told herself she would, but she hadn't known how hard it was going to be to make a movie. Every time she decided to stop, however, she heard Ms. Mackenzie in her head, saying,
Amaze yourself,
and
Promise,
and
Whatever you do, don't quit.

• • •

“I'm going to take a walk, okay?” she asked her mom as soon as they got to George's. George and her mom were smashed together on the couch, making goo-goo faces at each other.

“A walk where?”

“To the river—to the Walkway.”

“What for?”

Ivy silently held up her camera.

“Fine. Be careful, don't talk to strangers.”

“I won't,” Ivy said, but George was tickling her mom and her mom didn't hear her.

• • •

The river was just over a mile away. When she got there, Ivy pulled out her camera and headed for the Walkway, the old railroad bridge that had been turned into a footpath. A man on a unicycle was wheeling past the gates. His back was straight, his face serene; his feet made steady circles with the pedals. Ivy felt too shy to film him. She pointed her camera at the water and walked slowly forward.

The closest people were a young couple dressed in blue shorts and white T-shirts a hundred feet ahead. Ivy sighed, annoyed with herself for missing out on the unicycling man. Film with no one in it wouldn't be very interesting. Just as she was thinking that, someone walked into her frame. Ivy saw blue plaid sneakers. Then she was looking through the viewfinder at Grammy Evers.

Grammy's expression swam from surprise to delight. “Ivy Blake, as I live and breathe!” Her voice was so loud that the matching-outfits couple turned to look.

Ivy lowered the camera. “Hi, Grammy. Wow, it's weird to run into you in Poughkeepsie. You're back from your trip, then.”

“Two weeks, almost.”

Ivy nodded, tapping her finger nervously on the camera's Record button. She knew exactly how long the trip had been over.

“Well, don't just stand there, child. Get over here and give me a hug.”

Ivy hesitated, then stepped into Grammy's arms. “So how was the trip?” she asked when she'd stepped away again. “Did you have a good time?”

“Splendid. The weather was perfect, Tecumseh's vegetable garden was thriving, the blackberries were starting to ripen in the woods—it looks like it'll be a bumper crop this year—and Dorothy Peacock got us tickets to a music show in Asheville. Even Tecumseh came down off his mountain to see it.”

“Wow.” Ivy gazed at the hills and trees across the shore.

“He ended up having the best time of anyone, wouldn't you know? He was clapping and singing along and making a regular fool of himself. Dorothy and Prairie and I were so beat we could hardly keep our eyes open, but he just couldn't leave until the very last minute.”

“That sounds fun.” Ivy stared at her boots. She pictured herself using them to stamp out the wildfire of jealousy that had sprung up inside her.

“He was so wound up we had to go out to the Big Boy for hot fudge ice cream cakes and coffee, after. He only could be persuaded to head home at midnight and it was nigh onto one before we got there. Cranky as a wet hen the next day.”

“Funny.” Ivy tapped the Record button again.

“What about you? I see you got your camera.”

“Yes.”

“You're working on your movie, then? You're going to enter it in that contest?”

“I know I won't win, but—” Ivy lifted a shoulder.

“Why would you say that? You don't know any such thing.”

Ivy shrugged again. “It's just obvious.”

Grammy frowned. Then she said, “How's your mother?”

“Oh, you know. The same.”

Grammy smooched her lips out. Her face looked more like an old wrinkled apple than ever. “And what exactly does that mean?”

“Well, I guess if you ask her, she's never been better.”

Grammy snorted.

“She and George got back together.”

“How nice.”

Grammy didn't bother to sound sincere, which Ivy appreciated. “And she got fired from her job—”

“Uh-oh.”

“Yeah. But anyway, she called him up after she got fired, to have somebody to talk to, I guess, and they've been back together ever since.”

Grammy laid her arm across Ivy's shoulders and they looked out at the water together. “I do love to watch a river move. It's like life. Ebbs and flows.”

Something knotted up inside Ivy loosened, just a little.

“‘Men may come and men may go, but I go on forever,'” Grammy said in a quoting voice. “Alfred, Lord Tennyson. ‘The Brook.'”

Ivy sighed softly.

“You too, I'll bet. Love the water, I mean. Love to be near it, love to watch it.”

Ivy nodded.

Grammy squeezed Ivy's shoulder. “My Knasgowa.”

Tears pricked Ivy's eyes. Grammy started to say something more when a woman walked up to them carrying a bakery bag. “Sorry it took so long for me to get back. You should've come with me.”

Grammy raised her brows. “It takes what it takes, and you're quite capable without me. What kind did you get?”

The woman rolled her eyes. “Apricot blintzes,” she said, speaking deliberately. “Raspberry rugelach. And something called a knish.”

“Oh, those are good.”

“Is it
nish
or
k-nish
? I didn't know.”

“I don't know either,” Grammy said cheerfully. The woman made a face. Grammy grinned at her. “Leola, I want you to meet a friend of mine, Ivy Blake. Ivy's pretty much a member of our family, Lord help her.”

Leola nodded. She was thin, with grayish-blond hair held back in a ponytail. If Ivy'd been casting her in a movie, she'd have been a house cleaner, or maybe someone who took tolls on the highway. “Nice to meet 'cha,” she said.

“Nice to meet you too.”

“Leola and I've been doing some work together at the library,” Grammy said.

Ivy nodded. Maybe this was the lady Grammy'd been helping to learn how to read when she volunteered at the library. Something studious about the way Leola had asked about
nish
or
k-nish
and frowned at Grammy's answer made her think so.

A few awkward seconds passed. Then Ivy smiled politely; her throat felt tight and sore. “Well, it's nice to meet you, Leola,” she said. “It's good to see you, Grammy. I have to get going now. I have to do some camera work. Tell Prairie I said hi, okay? And Mom and Dad Evers. Tell Mom Evers I hope she's feeling okay.”

Grammy seemed about to say something, but Leola shifted on her feet and switched the bakery bag to her other hand. Grammy nodded, looking doubtful. “All right, then. Make sure you call. I know you're busy, but you come and see us, all right?”

“Sure,” Ivy said. She would. When she had her life as well balanced as the man on the unicycle.

The phone rang
at nine a.m. a few days later. “Ivy!” Ivy's mom yelled from the kitchen. “Phone!”

Ivy jogged from her room. Maybe Prairie was calling. The thought that she should've called Prairie first popped up in her head. She squished it down again. “Hello?” she said eagerly.

“Hi. Ivy? This is you, right?”

Ivy frowned. “Yeah—”

“It's Tate! I just got your message from the other day. Me and my mom went to visit my aunt in Pittsburgh. Bo-ring! Anyway, what're you doing?”

“Oh. I'm—nothing, really. What are you?”

“
Nothing.
I'm totally tired of practicing piano. It's too nice out to be inside. Do you want to do something? Maybe go to the pool after lunch? I go to the one down by the river usually.”

Ivy stared at the washer churning away. She glanced at her mom, who was drinking coffee. The only reason she'd be up this early was if they were going to George's again. “Um, sure. I'll ask if I can. If my mom says yes, I'll meet you there.”

Ivy held the receiver against her stomach and asked if she could go swimming with Tate.

“Who's Tate?”

“She was in my class, she's nice, she's good at math, she wants to go swimming. Can I? She's the only friend I even sort of made here.”

“What pool?”

“The one down by the river.”

Her mom stared into her coffee cup. Then she said, “Okay, fine.”

• • •

Ivy pushed through the door of the pool's snack bar half an hour before Tate was supposed to show up. A big bank of clouds had blown in and a drizzling rain started falling. She paid for a cup of tea and slid into a table by the windows and dragged her sketchbook out.

At the table next to her, a couple sat with a baby and a little girl. The mom wore a tie-dyed dress and carried the baby in a sling. The dad had round wire-rimmed eyeglasses and a cap made of patchwork pieces. The girl was in a white dress with pink polka dots. She held three tea bags in one hand and studied them gravely. “Which one do I want, Mom?”

The mom—who'd been gazing down at the baby—tilted her head. “You can pick, whichever one. Probably one with no caffeine in it.”

“This one?” The girl held up a tea bag in a blue foil wrapper.

“What's it say on it?”

“Purse—Purrzz—Per Simon.”

“Persimmon. Yeah, you'd like it, I think.”

“Persimmon. Okay.”

“Tear it open at the corner,” the dad said. “See the notch? Tear there.”

The girl tore the packet open and dropped the bag in her cup.

“Then you pour the hot water over—Dad'll do that—and leave it in there for a while. You steep it. That's what gives it flavor.”

“
Steep
? Like a staircase?”

The mom shifted the baby, who stayed curled up, sleeping. “Yeah, good question.
Steep
as in—I don't know. They must have different roots,
steep
and
steep.
It's just what it's called when you leave the tea in the hot water for a while. It brings the flavor out.”

The girl nodded and mashed the tea bag against the side of her cup with a spoon. A minute later the dad said, “You can take it out now.”

The girl lifted the string and the dad reached over to help. “I always use a spoon,” the mom said, and the dad picked one up. “I wrap the string around it and squeeze.” The dad began to do this, but the girl reached out and he let her take over.

Ivy gazed at them longingly.

“She's five going on fifty,” the mother said, catching her eye.

Ivy blushed and bent her head over her sketchbook to work on her script again, but instead she started to draw the family—the mom cradling the baby, the dad smiling at the little girl, who seemed solemn for her age until she laughed. It was a simple scene, but also not, of course. Ivy dropped her head onto one hand and her pencil moved more slowly. When she was this girl's age—

Tears brimmed in her eyes. She erased them with a swift rub of her palm. Everyone's life was different.

She picked up her pencil and wrote SCENE FIVE:
Heather's Discovery.

“Hey! Ivy!” Tate hurried across the room and slid into the other chair at Ivy's table. “I can't believe it's raining, the one day I want to go swimming. Oh well.” She tapped Ivy's sketchbook. “What are you doing?”

“Working on my movie.”

Tate scooted her chair around so they were side by side. “What's it about?”

“It's about a girl—” But it was hard to explain. Ivy leafed back to the outline she'd started the night of the carnival and passed it to Tate.

Tate wound a strand of hair around a finger and began to read. She made a small
hmm
noise that sounded interested as her eyes moved down the page, and Ivy leaned forward. “It started out as a story, way last winter. This girl named Heather Lake was kidnapped as a toddler. It was okay in a way—she didn't know she'd been kidnapped—but it was lonely. The lady who took her kept her hidden away. Partly so she wouldn't get caught, and partly to protect her.”

“Protect her?”

“Her legs are crippled. The kidnapper's sure she can't do stuff other kids can. That's part of the reason she took her. She saw Heather at a swimming pool with her mom and she was horrified that her mom had her in the water. She was sure it was dangerous, which it really wasn't—”

“It was probably good for her.”

“
Right.
But the lady didn't know that. And even though Heather's smart and strong and stuff, she believes what her supposed-mom tells her. She never swims in the pool or even leaves the estate—”

Tate squinted at Ivy. “
Never
? What about school? Does the lady hire a tutor or something?”

“Yeah, a tutor, that's a good idea, I didn't think of that.” Ivy wrote down
tutor
and underlined it. “Anyway, Heather believes the stuff the woman tells her, that the water's dangerous, the whole world is. Except then somehow she figures out she's been kidnapped and that she has a long-lost sister. She'll have to go on a journey to find her.”

“Interesting.” Tate bent to study Ivy's outline again. Ivy watched the tea-drinking family pack up their things and leave. A wave of sadness washed over her. The story was made-up, of course, but Ivy could sympathize with Heather. It was like her mom telling her that they weren't lucky people, that Blakes didn't get happy endings.

Tate tapped the sketchbook. “What if Heather has to cross a big lake to find her sister, since she's so afraid of water? You could make her have to take a canoe or kayak across it. You could get one of those to film. We could rent one from the livery—”

Ivy stared at Tate. “That is a
really
good idea.” Meeting Tate here was going to be the best part of her day, even with the sadness that had sloshed over her a minute before.

“So maybe she hires a taxi to get to this lake—”

“No, she takes a bus.” Ivy was sure about that. She wrote it down.

“And then when she gets there—”

The phone in Ivy's satchel began its old-fashioned ring and Ivy pulled it out. She didn't recognize the number that came up on the screen.

Frowning, she pushed the Talk button. A police officer introduced himself and Ivy listened.

A moment later she was stuffing her things into her satchel.

“What's wrong? What happened?” Tate handed Ivy a pencil that had rolled onto the floor.

“Something bad. My mom's in trouble. I'm sorry, I have to go. I'll call you pretty soon, okay? I'm really sorry—” Ivy jammed her sketchbook in on top of everything else and ran for the door without even snapping the bag's buckles closed.