“IVY? IVY? IVY?” SITTING on the edge of the stage in Bent Oaks Grove, Martha rocked back and forth in time to the whispered question. It was a question all right, a huge question, and the longer Martha sat there, the more she began to realize that the question had a great many parts.
The first part was about who Ivy was. Who was Ivy now—now that she was almost sixteen? What would she look like? What would she act like? Who would she be, after all this time? But who had she ever been, really? Who was the small girl with the wild dark hair and fantastic eyes who claimed not to be what everyone thought she was—and had to be?
But the longer Martha thought about it, the more she began to see that there was another important part to the question, and that other part was about Martha Abbott. Who had Martha Abbott been, and who would she be now, if there had never been an Ivy? And what was the feeling that had made Martha’s stomach tighten and the blood tingle into her face when she heard that the Carsons had returned? Was it just excitement? Was Martha really just glad that Ivy was back? Or had it been partly fear? Fear of the unknown, and maybe even fear of what it would mean to Marty Abbott—today’s Marty Abbott—to have Ivy Carson back in Rosewood Hills? That question was really who Martha Abbott was, and, as usual, Martha didn’t entirely believe in the answer.
The shadows deepened in Bent Oaks Grove, and overhead the sky turned a deeper, duller pink, and Martha still waited, and wondered and worried about questions and answers. At last the questions began to turn into daydreams. Something, perhaps the frayed end of a rope dangling where Ivy had hung it years before in Tower Tree, reminded Martha of other times, and pictures began to float up like mirages in front of her eyes.
First there was a face, a small pointed face spinning down a rope, in and out of sunlight. That was when Martha had thought, “Of course, a changeling. That explains everything.”
Then there was another Ivy, curled over her bruised foot in the middle of the Smiths’ kitchen floor, looking up with glowing eyes, and the Smiths looking down at her with almost startled faces.
Then there was a dim distant Ivy, standing where dark fingers of shadow reached toward her down a hill. That silent ghostly Ivy was just fading when there was a noise of scuffling leaves and a figure moved slowly out of the dark passage between the gateway boulders of Bent Oaks Grove. The figure moved a few steps into the grove and stopped, and Martha caught her breath in a shaky gasp.
Even in the dim light, it was obvious that the person standing so quietly just inside the grove was small, much too small. When she moved forward into the grove, Martha could tell for sure that it was a very little girl. A little girl with long dark hair in heavy braids and thin legs under a short skirt.
It was Ivy. It had to be. But not a sixteen-year-old Ivy. Not even the Ivy Martha had last seen over two years before. This little girl seemed, unbelievably, to be the Ivy of years and years ago.
Crazy impossible explanations flashed through Martha’s mind. She sat motionless, staring, with both hands pressed against her mouth, while the shadowy figure stood still, too, with its face turned toward Martha. After an endless time it moved again, forward, and a small quavering voice said, “Martha? Are you Martha?”
Martha jumped to her feet, laughing with relief.
“Josie!” she shouted. “It’s Josie.”
“Are you Martha?” Josie asked again.
“Yes,” Martha said, laughing. “Yes. Don’t you know me, Josie?” She ran to Josie and hugged her, but Josie pulled away, staring.
“You look different,” she said.
“So do you,” Martha said. “I thought you were—I hardly knew you at first. You look just like Ivy.”
Josie smiled at that. “I know it,” she said. “I am just like Ivy.”
The night wind was rising now, and suddenly Martha began to shiver. “Why are you here alone, Josie?” she asked. “Where’s Ivy?”
Josie’s smile drooped. “She’s gone away,” she said. “She’s gone to live in New York.”
It was as if a rock, dropped from a great height, had crashed through Martha, landing with a sickening thud somewhere near the bottom of her stomach.
“New York,” she said, almost angrily. “She can’t go live in New York. She’s not even sixteen yet. How could she go to New York?”
Josie looked startled at Martha’s reaction, but after a moment she nodded again, firmly. “She did,” she said. “She went to learn to be a ballet dancer. See, Aunt Evaline died, and we went to Harley’s Crossing because my dad thought that Aunt Evaline was going to give her house and everything to Ivy, and then he could have some of it. But Aunt Evaline’s house was sold already, and the money was just for Ivy to go to dancing school. Nobody else could have any of it for anything.”
Martha could only nod, struggling against a hot lump in her throat and burning eyes.
“My dad was awful mad,” Josie said, looking more cheerful.
“I’ll bet,” Martha said with a weak giggle. But the giggle was a mistake. Somehow it made a crack in Martha’s defenses, and the tears broke through. She turned her back on Josie and walked away. At the edge of the stage she sat down with her face in her hands. She cried for quite a while before she realized that Josie was sitting beside her. She tried to smile at Josie, and then she cried again because she saw that Josie cried the way Ivy used to—silently and without real tears—only with great liquid eyes and wet satin eyelashes.
Finally Josie said, “Ivy says that as soon as she’s eighteen, she’s going to get her own place to live and I can go live with her. She has to stay with some people Aunt Evaline knew until then. But as soon as she’s eighteen, she’s going to send for me. Maybe you can go, too.”
Martha sighed and smiled at Josie, but she didn’t wipe her face. She didn’t want to because the tears were for Ivy, and they had been very real and painful.
“Maybe I can,” she told Josie. “Anyway, it’s great that Ivy’s getting to go to ballet school. It’s what she wanted more than anything.”
Josie nodded. Suddenly she looked around the grove uneasily. “I have to go,” she said. “It’s almost dark. I have to get home before it’s too dark. Good-by.” She turned to go and then turned back. “Wait! I almost forgot. I have a letter Ivy wrote for you. She told me to put it in the secret box. That’s why I came here—to put it in the secret box.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a crumpled envelope.
“The secret box is right here,” Martha said. “I was looking at it just before you came.”
“Well, I guess I don’t have to put it there, since you’re already here,” Josie said. She shoved the letter into Martha’s hand, hugged her so quickly that Martha barely had time to hug her back, and turned and ran.
The darkness was almost complete, and Martha could barely make out her name written in large letters on the envelope. She started for home, but after a few steps she stopped. Going back for the secret box reminded her of the candles and matches that it held, so she took it instead to the bench at the back of the stage. The first two matches wouldn’t strike, but the third one did; and spreading the letter on her knees, she began to read.
Dear Martha,
Tomorrow I’ll be in New York, and DANCING, the way I’ve always wanted to. Aunt Evaline did it all before she died. I’ll be living with the people Mrs. W., my old teacher, used to know.
I got the letters you wrote to me a long time after you wrote them, but they were good letters and I was glad to know that they found out that we didn’t do it. I wanted to write to you but I couldn’t then, and I wanted to come to Rosewood to see you before New York, but there wasn’t time.
Josie will deliver this letter, and I told her to look for you sometimes in Bent Oaks. I hope you still go there. And I hope you can look after Josie a little until I’m old enough to have her come stay with me.
I’ll write to you, hundreds of letters, when I get to New York.
Love,
Ivy
P.S. About what I said the day I went away—about changelings and everything. I guess you know already I didn’t mean it. I know now I was right about being a changeling. I had to be. But lots of people are changelings, really. You might be one yourself, Martha Abbott. I wouldn’t be surprised.
LOVE—LOVE—LOVE ivy
Martha folded the letter and put it with the candle and matches back into the secret box. Then she climbed up to the hiding place and put the box away. On the way back down, Martha stopped on the ledge above the cave.
From the ledge Martha could see way down over Rosewood Manor Estates where the lights were on, now, in most of the houses. The lights were in patterns, square and uniform, window-shaped, and every lighted yard was neatly framed in a dark border of hedge or fence. Around each block the streets made wider boundaries, studded with street lamps like planned and patterned electric stars, for a planned and patterned world.
Further up the hill the lights ended, except for a glow from a strange orange moon that sat just on the edge of the far hills and cast vague restless moon-shadows behind every tree and bush. Up there, near the top of the hill, the wind seemed warmer, but much stronger. It rushed in battering gusts against Martha’s face and sent her hair flying and whipping behind her head. She raised her face, liking the feel of it. Liking the wild push and pull of the darkness that flowed around her.
After a while she started smiling. “You know what, Martha Abbott?” she said out loud. “I wouldn’t be surprised, either.”