Susie Yang - White ivy

STOCKSFIELD WAS AN eighty-five-minute walk away. Other than Red Wingz, the only other attraction for visitors was a bus stop where the 5:20 p.m. Concord Coach bus made its daily run to South Station. According to her plan, she would make it there with an hour to spare.

The sun had long disappeared but light was still clinging to the edges of the sky, which gradually became infused with color, wispy pinks and mauves and azure blues, the farther she pulled away from the mountains. She’d been afraid that cars would see her walking along the highway and pull over to ask where she was going, but there were few cars, only the odd SUV or truck, and no one stopped or even seemed to notice her. Twenty minutes later, when she’d walked herself into a trancelike rhythm, the cold didn’t reach her anymore. Occasionally, she was seized by the sensation that something was missing, like the time she’d left her purse behind at a restaurant. She would stop and rack her brain, going over all the details again. Wallet. Phone. Car. Clothes. Body. Snow. Only when she felt certain that no detail had escaped her would she begin to walk again. She felt empty and alone and numb. She imagined that this was what it would be like to be back in her mother’s womb, surrounded by amniotic fluid, the outside world a strange and foreign place that did not touch her.

Soon she began to see signs of civilization. There were more cars, the two-lane highway became a local road called Crest Lane. Ivy took notice of the cars she passed, the pedestrians waiting by the crosswalk. She used to be afraid of the crossing guard when she was young. What a silly girl she’d been. She was so tired. She was down to her last cigarette.

When she finally reached town—a dirty, graffitied sign wearily announced itself: WELCOME TO STOCKSFIELD, HOME OF THE FIRST TAVERN—she turned onto the main road and saw a Dunkin’ Donuts. She checked her phone. It was twenty past four, exactly an hour before the bus arrived. She marveled at her own punctuality. She went inside, ordered a half dozen donuts and a large coffee, and wolfed everything down at a booth overlooking the deserted parking lot. The donuts were delicious.

A police officer walked into the store. Ivy ducked her head so violently she knocked over the coffee. Scalding liquid spread through the thick fibers of her sweatpants, lighting her thighs on fire. She grabbed her backpack and fled to the bathroom. She immediately heaved into the toilet, bringing up the colorful mush of undigested pink frosting and rainbow sprinkles, and then a thin yellow liquid near the end. She sat on the cold floor, head between her knees. Seconds, maybe minutes passed, she didn’t know. The sound of wailing startled her. It was coming from her throat.

When she stopped heaving, it was 5:02. She peeked out the door. The policeman had left. She rinsed her mouth and came out from the restroom. At the commercial-sized dumpster behind the store, she unzipped her backpack and took out the plastic bag containing her hiking boots, thermal underwear, fleece jacket, gloves, wool socks, the keys to the Audi, and Roux’s phone, pounded to a pulp by a large piece of scrap metal she’d picked up somewhere along the highway—and dumped the entire load in the black bin.

She made it to the bus stop with five minutes to spare. She slept the entire ride back to Boston.

WHEN ANDREA KNOCKED on the bedroom door holding an extra-large beef noodle soup in a Le’s takeout bag, Ivy was so weak and feverish that Andrea insisted they go to urgent care. The overwhelmed night nurse, knee-deep in bronchitis cases, took one look at Ivy and promptly instructed Andrea to take her to the emergency room.

After hours of blood tests and urine samples by white coats prodding her swollen stomach, pressing their cold stethoscopes against her chest and back, all of them wearing the same mask of distracted confusion and concern, it was finally a baby-faced nurse who asked Ivy about her diet. “Have you had any fruits or vegetables in the last six months?” Ivy said she couldn’t remember. “You’re the roommate,” the nurse said to Andrea. “What does she eat?” Luckily, Andrea, like all chronic dieters obsessed with food, could rattle off every single bite she’d ever seen Ivy put into her skinny mouth. Instant ramen, canned spam, canned soup, dried crackers, bread, peanut butter, marshmallow fluff, the occasional pastry and chocolate, boiled noodles, alcohol, more alcohol, soda, coffee. All in minuscule quantities, except for the alcohol. “Let me guess,” said the nurse, “she smokes as well?” Andrea nodded eagerly. “Constantly. It keeps the appetite down. She’s getting married in two months.”

An hour later, a large crowd of doctors had assembled inside Ivy’s room and gathered around her bed, the atmosphere one of suppressed hilarity and amazement, to see the crazy lady who had gone and given herself scurvy, the sailor’s disease, in the modern age.

ANDREA CAME BACK to the hospital with a bag of fruit from the vendor on the corner: five oranges, three apples, a bag of muscat grapes, and a pomegranate she hacked open with a paring knife. “I called Gideon and told him what happened,” she said. “He wants me to tell you he’s taking an earlier flight back.”

After Ivy finished eating, her belly was stretched out like a pregnant lady in her second trimester. She was on the toilet all night long, her body no longer used to fiber. But the next morning, the swelling in her belly and ankles went down, the cut in her hand began to clot, and she was discharged with vitamin C: a hundred milligrams every day for the next three months.

That first night home, she couldn’t recognize her face in the bathroom mirror. It was a frightening face, the face of a deranged mental patient she’d once seen in a Japanese horror film. There was a long scratch down her throat as if someone had clawed her. She picked at the thin scab until it started bleeding.

Gideon came to the house the next morning. “You dyed your hair!” he said, depositing a grocery bag full of fruit juices onto the bedside table.

“Isn’t it gorgeous?” Andrea prompted.

“She’s always gorgeous,” said Gideon, his light tone veiling the flicker of concern as he kissed one sunken cheek.

He came every night thereafter to deliver Poppy’s home-cooked meals: roasted cauliflower, pork chops, hoisin-flavored stir-fries—“She’s bought a Chinese cookbook,” said Gideon. And always fruit: grapefruit, plums, unripened kiwis as hard as apples.

“You don’t have to come every day,” said Ivy. “I’m perfectly fine.” Indeed, she did feel better, terrific actually, in terms of mental clarity. Her muscles were still weak and atrophied but the sluggishness had receded; she felt pleasantly alert, like the steady buzz you get after a second cup of coffee. With nothing to do but eat and regain her strength until the wedding, she began to knit a scarf for Gideon. Her disorderly thoughts gathered around this project like cotton around a spool, giving purpose to otherwise formless impulses. After the scarf, she purchased a camera and began to take photos. She liked to photograph corners—windows, doorframes, book spines. But mostly she took photos of herself. She’d always been vain, unable to resist any mirror or reflective surface, but now her preoccupation with her looks reached truly narcissistic levels; she couldn’t stop examining herself, thirty times a day, in the bathroom, the camera, her laptop screen. She no longer derived pleasure from her looks because she no longer thought herself beautiful, and yet this new ugliness fascinated her. It was the ugliness of a woman stripped bare, without the armor of makeup or contrived cynicism, as if the white translucent skin stretched over the high cheekbones were the only thing separating the soul from the flesh. The masklike eyes gazing through the Polaroids were not her own.