Susie Yang - White ivy

“No!” She grinned bashfully, relief making her brisk and overly eager. “Let’s get going.” She flicked on the turn signal. Roux strapped on his seat belt.

“Where exactly are we going?” he asked as she merged onto the freeway.

“Hiking.”

He frowned. “Isn’t it the wrong season for that?”

“I told you to dress warmly. I’ll have to speed a bit. It’s supposed to snow later.”

He took her lead and didn’t speak much, fiddling with the radio, rolling down the windows to smoke. The wind blew his disheveled black hair over his eyes; he didn’t look so much like a handsome man riding in a sports car as an actor playing a handsome man riding in a sports car. She, too, felt as if she were acting out a scene from an old movie, perhaps a scene near the credits, where the couple drives away from the city and bursts through a tunnel in their getaway car. That’s what this is, Ivy thought. A getaway car.

The sides of Route 93 were brown with slush and ice. Occasionally they saw a carcass of a dead deer or rodent, dragged to the side of the road and half-buried in a mound of fresh snow. Each mile away from Boston, the temperature outside dropped a fraction of a degree. The radio turned staticky, and then she drove with only the hum of the engine as backdrop. The Audi seemed to drive itself, responsive to her lightest touch, without any jerky movements or bumps when they went over potholes. Roux reached over and took her right hand, holding it limply in his lap while she drove with her other hand.

The roads turned narrow and winding; she made ascending circles around the mountain. Their breaths thinned; the view gave way to purple mountains and the brown lines of treetops. They hadn’t passed another car in the last thirty minutes.

“Cold today,” said Roux, rolling the window back up. “You sure about this hike? We could just go there”—he pointed at a billboard whizzing by, for Red Wingz Sports Bar and Grill, two for one, at the following exit toward Stocksfield—“and call it a day.” Despite his cultivated appetite for the luxurious, Roux truly liked places like that, roadside diners, Vegas casinos, hot dog stands, he was very American in that way. Places like that suited him, the way boats suited Gideon and rose gardens suited Liana Finley. “I want you to see this special spot,” Ivy said firmly. “It’s got to be today.”

Ten minutes later, she pulled off to the side of the road. It was a small lookout passengers used to photograph the view. In the summer, tourists could follow a set of rickety stairs to a tiny waterfall that trickled down the mountain. Of course, now everything was frozen. “This is it,” she said, cutting the engine.

Roux took in the absolute isolation around them. The few surrounding trees were bare and laden with icicles, thick with the smells of pine, frost, wet asphalt. “I never thought you were the outdoorsy type,” he said, rubbing his arms vigorously.

“I’m just superstitious. I wanted it to be—here.”

He didn’t ask the obvious: want what to be here? Since the time he’d slapped her across the face, he’d begun to mistake her deception for discretion.

“Where’s the start of the trail?” he asked.

“There is no trail.”

“You know your way up?”

“I’ve been here before.”

“With Gideon?”

She winced at the first break of code. “No.”

They walked half a mile from the parking lot and stopped by a nondescript junction with a small STAY IN YOUR LANE signpost. Ivy consulted her hand-drawn map. “This is it.”

“Lead the way,” said Roux, his mouth twitching in resigned good humor.

They began their ascent.

Underneath her coat she wore three layers, but he only had on a cotton zip-up under his fleece. “Give me your phone and wallet,” she said, “I’ll put them in my backpack so you can put your hands in your pockets.”

They walked on, slowly, because they were both smokers and out of shape, and because Ivy sometimes grew dizzy, her vision blurry with white spots, when she stopped to get a drink of water. The clouds momentarily parted and the sun peeked out, strong and distant, burning the backs of their necks. Sometimes she flapped her collar to let some of the heat escape from underneath her thermal shirt, and other times she walked with her hands tucked underneath her armpits.

“Are we almost there?” Roux asked at the two-mile mark. He took off his fleece and tied it around his waist. The first leg of the hike had been steep and unforgiving. During certain parts of it, they’d had to scrabble around snow-covered boulders, tripping over branches. Her hiking boots were sturdy but Roux wore thin suede shoes. He stamped his feet on a boulder to shake off the snow that’d collected around his ankles.

“You want my gloves?” she asked.

“I’m fine.”

She clasped his hands between hers and warmed his fingers with her breath. She wished she had told him to bring gloves.

“Do you hate me, Ivy?” he said keenly.

“Why would I hate you?”

“For what I made you do.”

“Let’s talk about it later,” she said quickly, pulling her hands away. “We’re almost at the halfway point.”

Their breaths came out in shallow pants, sometimes with wheezing sounds during a particularly steep climb. The path that Daniel charted had little red triangular markers he’d tacked on the trees. Ivy lost sight of them for a moment and panicked that she wouldn’t be able to find the ledge. As Roux rested on a fallen log, she looked for telltale marks. A strong breeze parted the branches, revealing the faint glint of red on a branch not fifty feet away.

“I thought we were lost,” she breathed, placing a gloved hand on her chest.

“I trust you,” said Roux.

FINALLY, A CLEARING opened up to their left, a flat expanse of rock overlooking a view of mountains that seemed to go on forever. There was no sign of technology or roads or civilization; the vast silence felt prehistoric, as if they were the first people to have ever looked upon this section of earth and graced it with human voices.

“Is this it?” asked Roux.

“Almost. We have another half mile or so. I thought this would be a good spot to stop for lunch.”

They admired the view for a moment. Then Roux laid the fleece blanket over the rocks and Ivy pulled out their lunch from her backpack: peanut butter and marshmallow sandwiches, a thermos of coffee, trail mix. Roux took out the whiskey—a deep, amber-colored bottle of 1942 Dalmore, which he twisted open and poured into a leather flask, giving her the first taste. “Jesus,” Ivy gasped, pounding her chest. A few more sips and she might start to believe that this poignant magic cast by the mountains was real.

As they ate, Roux told her the history of the Dalmore. He’d won it in an auction from a Scottish lord who’d also been auctioning off his castle where the Dalmore had been stored for decades in its cavernous wine cellars. “But what the hell am I going to do with a crumbling wall of bricks?” said Roux. “Better to have ten more of these bottles. Exquisite, isn’t it?” His cheeks were pink, his eyes lively and relaxed. Ivy told him to drink up—“It’ll keep the cold at bay,” she said. She picked the crust off her sandwich, made a little hole in the ground, and buried the crumbs.

“What are you doing?”

“Nothing. Just restless.” Roux always gave her the best of the best: whiskey, jewelry, a car. He would probably buy her that damn castle if she asked for it. “How are your businesses doing?” she asked.

“I opened a laundromat in Roxbury last week.”

“Exciting.”

He noticed her tone and said dryly, “Do you know how much revenue a laundromat brings in?”