“As I please?” Ivy was incredulous. “Isn’t that what you’re doing? Whatever you please?”
Noah took a step back. Ivy’s gray eyes were like a cat’s. You never knew what a girl like Ivy might do. She was so emotional. You never knew when she’d snap. She might ring up his parents or arrive at their front door, pleading for help. She might blackmail him or stalk him, lurking behind him in Harvard Yard, attempting to ambush him. He had his future to think of, and Ivy was already a part of his past. He would likely have difficulty remembering her in years to come.
“Look, I have a class,” Noah said crossly, having no idea that he was behaving badly and not much caring. “Not everyone has all the time in the world.”
Noah stalked away, resigned to the fact that not all liaisons ended well. Ivy wasn’t the first girl he’d disappointed, and she likely wouldn’t be the last. He had wanted to say, It’s your problem, not mine, but it was easier to just disappear. Once he turned the corner, Ivy was already forgotten.
* * *
SHE WAITED A WEEK, but waiting didn’t make anything easier. Her dreams woke her in the middle of the night. Her clothes didn’t fit her anymore. When she finally told her father about her situation, he slapped her, a gut response he forever regretted.
He wasn’t ordinarily a violent man, but what was done was done and now Ivy stared at him as if he were a stranger. “What were you thinking?” he spat, agitated. He asked Ivy if she was trying to kill her mother, ruin his business, throw her life away.
“I’m having a baby,” Ivy told him. “I thought you would help me.”
She was sent to her room as if she were a child, and she heard her parents arguing down in the parlor. She sneaked out of her bedroom and perched on the stairs to hear what the adults were plotting. They had already decided her fate. Ivy would be sent to a school in Utah, a facility they referred to as a lockdown, and when the baby was born it would be placed for adoption. It was her body and her future they were discussing, but it seemed that it belonged to them, and they intended to take control of what they considered to be a disaster.
Ivy packed a suitcase and waited for them to go to bed, then she went down the three flights to the front door. She might have left a note for Helen, who had always been so kind to her, she might have taken the key from her jewelry box and ridden the T to South Boston, where Helen lived, but she wasn’t thinking straight. Her impulse was to get away as fast as she could so that her parents couldn’t rule her life. She would most certainly not allow them to take her baby. She didn’t care that the front door was still propped open when she left. Her parents’ belongings meant everything to them, and they were always careful to double-lock the front door. Let them see what it was like to have someone who didn’t respect their desires or dreams. Let them know that she didn’t intend to come back.
Ivy was shivering once she realized that her fate was in her own hands. All the same, she went to Harvard Square and sat cross-legged on the bricks near the T station, where young people gathered to hang out and buy drugs. Her back was against the wall, her suitcase stowed under her legs. Her long black hair hung loose down her back, and she was wearing jeans and a jacket that she now realized was too light for the season. It was chilly on September nights. Time was passing so quickly.
Ivy was hoping to spy Noah, yearning for him to change his mind, but he wasn’t there, and if he had seen her there in the Square, he would have walked right past her. He’d already planned that should their paths ever cross again, he would not engage at any level, not even a conversation. He owed her nothing, after all. He’d simply avert his eyes and wish her away. He’d already done that as a matter of fact.
A girl with a heavy backpack sat down next to Ivy. “Hey, how are you doing?”
“How do you think?” Ivy was embarrassed when she realized there were tears in her eyes.
“I think the world can be cruel,” the girl said.
Ivy wiped her tears away. What good would crying do? “Somebody must be happy somewhere,” she muttered, although she didn’t quite believe it.
“They are,” the girl said. “And I know where.”
Ivy’s new companion was Kayla, or at least that was what she called herself now; she used to have another name, the one her parents had given her, but that didn’t matter anymore. Kayla was on her way to Western Massachusetts. She’d heard about a community where people were respected for who they were and not expected to be who their families wanted them to be. They weren’t judged and they shared all they had. She’d come to Harvard Square to panhandle and get enough cash together for the bus ticket.
As it turned out there was no need for begging. Ivy had her dad’s credit card, and because her father had not yet canceled it, the girls went out and charged plates of fries at Charlie’s Kitchen, then they each bought new shoes. After that, they went downtown, and Ivy used her father’s card to withdraw enough cash for two bus tickets before tossing the American Express card in a trash bin at the Greyhound Bus Station. There in the station, Ivy froze for a minute. She knew everything was about to change.
“Don’t be scared,” Kayla said.
Ivy was shivering. The life she’d had seemed very far away, and she already regretted not calling Helen. “I’m not scared,” she insisted.
“We’ll find the place that will welcome us,” Kayla assured her.
Ivy was exhausted and she was grateful to fall asleep on the bus, where it was warm and cozy and dark. When she woke up three hours later in Blackwell, Massachusetts, she looked out the window and saw the night sky swirling with stars and she thought it might be possible that she had stumbled into paradise.
* * *
KENNETH JACOB CAME DOWN the staircase at a little past six in the morning, and he knew something was amiss. He got the message his daughter had sent when she left the door unlocked. It had blown wide open, and there were two pigeons doddering about on the black-and-white marble tiled floor. Ivy had disappeared so completely it was as if she had been swallowed whole by the earth. The private detective Ken hired couldn’t find her until ten months later, when she was living out in rural Massachusetts, past Blackwell on some run-down farm where she’d already given birth to a baby girl. The detective brought the photographs he’d snapped to Ivy’s father’s office on Beacon Street. Kenneth Jacob sifted through them as the detective explained that Ivy had fallen in with a cultish community run by a crackpot whose rules included a code that compelled members to sever all ties with their families of origin, completely cutting off contact. As it turned out, the Jacob family had long ago lived in the Berkshires and their direct relatives had made their fortune in the apple orchards outside Blackwell before turning to real estate and banking in Boston. One of their ancestors was said to have had a child with John Chapman, the man known as Johnny Appleseed, so Ken Jacob liked to say that apples ran in their blood.
In the grainy photos the detective had taken, Ivy’s hair was braided and covered with a scarf, and her beautiful face was serene as she picked what appeared to be blackberries. She wore a threadbare man’s jacket and carried a wicker basket. There was a baby on a blanket, left to its own devices as Ivy concentrated on the low-growing fruit. The sunshine was bright, and, in the distance, there was a forest of dark pine trees. Nearby was an orchard, and if Ken had known anything about apples, he would have seen they were a variety called Look-No-Furthers, descendants of the ones Johnny Appleseed had planted.