What Happened to Ivy (6 page)

“She had another seizure,” Dad says.

“Even worse than the others,” Mom adds.

“You were there, too?”

“No, I was lying down inside. I heard your dad yell. He said, ‘Ivy’s in trouble. Call 911.’”

It feels like we’re talking about whether to order take-out chicken or pizza, not how my sister died.

“The stupid thing is,” Dad says, “I didn’t even realize that’s what was happening. Not right away…It was just…while I was holding her…” He holds his arms out the way he holds them under Ivy when she’s floating on her back. The way I’ve seen him do it dozens of times. “This look came over her face. Suddenly.” He shakes his head, like he still can’t believe what’s happened. “I looked up to see what she was looking at…”

“Gulls,” I say.

Dad turns from the window. “What?”

“Gulls. I saw them, too.”

Like it matters what I saw. Like anything matters now except that Ivy…

Dad’s face crumples.

I can hardly make out what Mom says next, she’s talking so fast and crying so hard. “I ran outside and there she was…limp, she was just limp and now she’s gone, but I can’t believe…she can’t be, she was just…she was just
limp.
”

I can’t look at Dad or Mom. And I can’t look at Hannah either. All I can do is stare at the blood oozing out the end of my toe. Because today? Today
I
couldn’t wait to get away from my sister. My sister. Who’s gone. And this time she
isn’t
coming back.

Chapter 13

No one talked in the van on the way home. Hannah went to her place as soon as we got back.

Now Mom and Dad are making arrangements for Ivy’s funeral. They’ve called the funeral home. And they’re meeting with a minister about the service.

I think one of the songs should be “How Much Is That Doggy In The Window” or “When You Wish Upon A Star” because they were Ivy’s favorites, but no one is asking what I think.

I click through pictures on a horticulture website on the computer in the family room without really looking at them.

I’d go see Hannah, to be with her, but I wanted to be with her and not Ivy, and now that I can’t ever be with Ivy again, how can I be with Hannah?

Chapter 14

The death notice my parents put in the paper is small. Beside a tiny picture it says: Ivy Jasmine Burke, daughter of Stephen and Anne, sister of David. It gives her date of birth, the date she drowned, and the time and place of her funeral. Turns out the seizure isn’t what killed her. The autopsy report said it was the water she took into her lungs when she had the seizure.

The next day, the paper prints a tiny article saying a child with severe disabilities drowned while in the water with her dad. Filling the rest of the page is news about the death toll from heat waves across the US having risen to more than a hundred. It takes up lots of space, like the story about a little girl whose body was found under some bushes last year. She’d been abducted on her way home from school, raped, and beaten.

Those are the things people care about. Lots of people dying in huge natural disasters and cute little kids dying gruesomely. Not the death of a not-so-little girl so severely disabled it was hard for most people to even look at her.

I keep thinking we’re going to get a call from the hospital any minute to tell us we can come get Ivy and bring her home. I want to make her laugh again. I even want to wipe her slobbery chin.

But then, with Ivy gone, maybe Dad and I can go fishing again. Maybe next time I have a concert, he and mom will get to it. If they can get a babysi—.

They won’t need a sitter.

It’s impossible to stay inside, thinking, thinking, thinking all my stupid thoughts.

On my way down the ramp into the garden, I pause and grip the railing. Ivy was cooped up in the house a lot. She’ll never ride down this ramp again. The wood of the railing under the midday sun is almost hot enough to burn my palms. I wish it was hotter.

Kneeling in the garden, I can’t figure out what to do with myself. I keep thinking of Dad and Ivy in the water. How he had her on her back, and she was looking up at the sky. And I wonder, when the seizure started and Ivy’s back arched and the water covered her face, did she feel the water going into her lungs? Did she struggle? Is that why Dad couldn’t get her out of the water in time? Because she was struggling and convulsing and hard to hold?

I look up at the window where Ivy should be watching me, then stab my trowel into the ground. An earthworm wriggles into the dirt.

Mom said when she saw Dad carrying Ivy to shore, she was limp. I try to replay again what must have happened, and what it must have been like for Ivy while Hannah and I were walking along that road. God, I was so
happy
then! While my sister was
dying,
I was
happy!

But damn! Is it a crime to want to be happy?!

Ivy would have been happy looking up at those gulls.
Aawk! Kreee!
Maybe they were the last thing she saw, looking up through the water while Dad held her.

Maybe she didn’t struggle.

Still, I can’t settle down. Not even in the garden. I’d go talk to Hannah, I can’t
not
talk to Hannah, but she took off for a run a while ago and I haven’t seen her come back.

Later that night, finally drifting off to sleep, I hear someone calling. I pull my pillow over my head, my whole body heavy with exhaustion. Again, this time loud enough to hear – “Ga-beg!”

I sit up. From the bathroom across the hall comes giggling and the sound of water splashing.

“Ga-beg, tum tee!”

I have woken from a long nightmare. Ivy is not dead. She’s alive and laughing in her bath!

I throw off my covers and hurry across the dark hall.

It’s dark in the bathroom, too. Of course. And silent.

The whole house is as silent as a tomb.

Chapter 15

The day of Ivy’s funeral is overcast, but hot enough that by the time we get to the church my shirt is sticking to my back. My parents and I wait in a small room until just before the service starts. Filing into the church itself, I can see that the pews are filled with people, but not who they are.

The minister strides in, his long robe fluttering around his ankles. He clears his throat. “Let us pray.” On either side of me, my parents bow their heads politely. I bow my head, too. My shirt collar chafes my neck.

How did I ever think having my parents all to myself would be a good thing? Because I never imagined sitting between them in a church, the air muggy and thick with the stink of lilies and gladioli, around a coffin with my sister inside it, that’s how. Riding bikes to the botanical gardens together, maybe, or traveling to see the ancient sites that Dad lectures about at the university. Not like this.

“Amen.”

The minister raises his eyes to the rafters and launches into his sermon.

“We are – all of us – God’s children. And so, He chooses when our time on Earth shall begin, and when it shall end. Some He leaves on Earth for a long time before calling them to His side, and some – like Ivy Burke – for only a short time.”

Yeah right. And what if
God’s children
would rather stay with their
real
families?

“God has His reasons for choosing those He does, when He does, unbeknownst to us though these reasons may be. It is a privilege, nonetheless, to be chosen, or to have a loved one chosen.”

What a crock. And
unbeknownst
? What century is this guy from anyway? My parents used to go to this church, years ago, but it must have been a different minister then. This one’s got nothing to say about Ivy that he wouldn’t say about any other dead person. She was much loved. She was a fine person. She will be missed. And there’s more yammering on about ‘a better place’ and ‘life everlasting’ and blah, blah, blah, until finally the service ends and anyone who’d like to ‘pay respects to the family’ is invited back to the house after the burial.

On the way out of church, I see Hannah and her mom. The little boy I babysit every Tuesday night is here, too, with his mom. I wonder if Will came, if he saw the notice in the paper. Would someone from the seniors’ home have brought him? I haven’t seen him.

At the cemetery, the minister does an ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ thing and throws a handful of earth down onto the lid of Ivy’s coffin.
Ka-thunk
. “Dear Lord,” he says, “may Ivy Jasmine Burke rest in peace.”

It’s a nice idea: Ivy hanging out with the angels, free of all the crap life handed her. Too bad I can’t buy it.

Trying to make small talk over stupid little sandwiches back at the house is even worse than the service. Neighbors, friends of my parents, and distant relatives who haven’t seen me in years, if ever, either look at me with a creepy mix of curiosity and pity, or else blab on about stupid things as if it doesn’t really matter that Ivy is dead. Snatches of conversation barely register in my brain.

“You can get them way cheaper at Costco.”

“They’ll be staying with us right through to the end of the summer.”

“It’s all re-runs now. I never watch it anymore.”

Ladies from the church pass trays of disgusting crustless sandwiches full of pickles and mayonnaise and bright red cherries. The bitter smell of coffee in the urn in the kitchen mixed with the sickly sweet smell of the sandwiches practically makes me gag, especially when a fat guy with a mountain of them heaped on his tiny paper plate starts talking with his mouth full. And people thought Ivy was gross.

When I turn away, a neighbor from down the street is standing at my elbow. “I’m so sorry, David,” she says. “This will be hard on your parents, losing a daughter.” Across the room, my parents are standing shoulder to shoulder, nodding their heads as words of sympathy drip from the mouth of some neighbor who always looked away when I passed her on the street with Ivy. They feel tight, my parents, like they always do – together in a way that doesn’t include me.

I’d like to say to the neighbor from down the street, ‘Losing a sister is no picnic either.’ Instead I nod politely and say, “Excuse me. I need to get something to drink.”

On the way to the kitchen, I pass Murray, the kid I babysit, sitting in the hall with a book about trucks across his lap. His mom, Tina, is in the kitchen, washing up a few dishes. “This is so sad, David. I’m so sorry.”

“Thanks.”

Tina takes her hands out of the sink and dries them on a towel crumpled on the counter. “Listen, David, I know you said before you went to the cottage that you could take care of Murray tomorrow afternoon while I paint our front door, but if you’d rather not, I certainly understand. The door can wait.”

The whole scene here – the people, the formal clothes, the small talk, the fake food – feels totally unreal. “No, I’d like to. It’ll feel sort of, I don’t know…normal. You know?”

Murray’s mom nods sympathetically, which is almost harder to take than people who don’t understand, so I head back to the dining room.

I hoped Hannah would come over after the funeral, but I haven’t seen her. An old guy with a kind face is standing alone, looking at a display of photos that my parents must have thrown together sometime since we got home. For a sec I think it’s Will. But it’s not.

Two gaudy bouquets flank the photo display. It includes stuff like Ivy grinning broadly on Santa’s knee and Dad holding Ivy up on Livingston’s back so she can ride him like a horse. Ivy gazing at bubbles I’m blowing for her in the backyard. There’s one of Ivy trying to blow out the seven candles on her birthday cake, too. I always ended up blowing out her candles for her, right up to her last birthday. She should have had more than eleven.

Talking to the old guy might be better than standing around like a piece of furniture. But it doesn’t matter. He’s moving toward the front door now. He’s leaving. Good idea.

I’m dying to yell through the crowded rooms, ‘Would you all just hurry up with your stinking little sandwiches and go home!’ and see everyone scramble for the door like ants when someone disturbs their hill.

But no. The torture continues.

“I hear your Lucas is off to university in the fall.”

“I wonder if Anne will go back to work now.”

“It must be reassuring to know their little girl is at peace.”

That ‘peace’ idea again. As if anyone can
know
that dead people are at peace. Maybe dead people are just that. Dead. And maybe there’s no right thing for people to say when someone dies, just a hundred wrong things.

A woman I don’t know, someone Dad works with maybe, walks up to me and smiles. “Really, it must be a
relief
, in a way.”

Make that a hundred and one. I hate the woman’s too-bright lipstick and the smudges of make-up on the side of her neck.