Our two weeks are abruptly cut short when Ivy’s agent calls about a series of meetings with some new casting directors in LA she’s never worked with before. “This could be big,” she says, throwing clothes into a suitcase. “This is what I’ve been waiting for. A new opportunity. A chance to reinvent myself.”
She says nothing about Ash, how Tami insisted on “quality time” with him today, how he is somewhere else, in his other life, while we have to go back to being a secret. She says nothing about how she’s going to be gone for four days, how I have no idea what to do without her.
I walk outside with Ivy when her car arrives. The grass is brown and dry. No one has cleaned up my bloody footprints.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?” I say. “As your assistant?”
“Stay here and relax,” she says. “You should still use the house when I’m gone. Everything that’s mine is yours.”
“Okay,” I say.
“I mean it.”
The air is bad today. The driver is wearing a mask. He says nothing as he hoists Ivy’s suitcase into the trunk of the car.
“Are you going to be okay?” I say.
She laughs. “Of course I am. I’m a professional. I’ve done this a million times.”
Of course she has. I don’t know why I’m so afraid of her being alone.
Or maybe I’m just afraid of myself being alone.
She kisses me on the cheek and says, “Be good,” then gets into the car.
“I always am,” I say, but the driver has already closed the door.
Ivy is gone, on her way to the ferry, to the airport, to a hotel in another city, to a series of offices where she will meet men who hold the keys to her future.
And where am I? Subterranean.
Ivy disappears across the water, then into the sky, and I disappear into the forest. I am on hold. Waiting until she comes back and we can be whole again.
Maybe I am home. Maybe I am watching nature documentaries with my fathers. Maybe it is a seamless transition. Maybe nothing’s changed all that much.
Maybe I drive to the coffee shop in town by the ferry terminal. People stare at me as I wait in line, hiding behind my sunglasses. They whisper. I am now the girl who hangs out with Ivy Avila. I was no one before.
Maybe Ash texts me and I text him back. Maybe he calls me on the phone and we talk like old friends. We do not mention the night we became other things. He tells me how he’s considering majoring in music at Yale next year instead of economics, how his mom will throw a fit but will eventually become too distracted by her own work to care, how his dad will probably secretly be proud. Maybe I ask him what Tami will think. Maybe he says we don’t talk about Tami.
Or maybe it is not that easy. Maybe I am sick and sleep deprived, poisoned, emptied, turned completely invisible, all the pigment and weight sucked out of me. But somehow Daddy can still see me. When I was a kid he always knew I was getting sick before I did. He feeds me smoothies with mysterious green powders. He juices anemic veggies from the garden.
Maybe I am still my fathers’ daughter. Maybe all the fresh green foods clean me out from the inside and fill in all the places I am missing, maybe I am nourished, and a surprise rainstorm bursts out of the afternoon and calms the heat and clears the air, maybe all the plants are given another chance to live, and I go into the forest and roll on the soggy ground so the coating of mud will tell me where my skin is.
After I am clean and fed, I find a pair of tweezers. I shine a light on my foot. I poke at the swollen place where the shard of Ivy’s glass is lodged, digging in, trying to find something solid inside my flesh. Jolts of pain shoot through me, but they are not unpleasant. With each one, I think, This is how I know I’m alive.
I put the tweezers down. The glass is unfindable. Skin will grow over it, this tiny fragment of Ivy that is now a permanent part of me. I will turn it into a pearl.