Poisoning Ivy

1. Ivy

Chapter one

Ivy

It’s funny how things change slowly and then all at once. Someone goes from laughing at a joke to being offended, bananas turn from that perfect shade of yellow to rot, and lovers become enemies… and then sometimes, lovers again.

My safe place, similarly, turned into my own private hell.

The abrupt slam on the brakes makes my stomach lurch as I skid toward the dashboard at a dangerous rate of speed. I don’t even have time to see if something was in the road because I squeeze my eyes shut as if that will soften the impact and throw my hands out before me to brace myself in a misguided attempt not to go careening through the windshield.

I hear the crack as my wrist collides with the glove compartment, and then the weight of my own body slams over the top of it, pinning me in place as I yelp in pain.

It’s agony, but it’s not the worst pain I’ve ever felt. Tears fill my eyes and flood my cheeks as I try to tamp down the visceral reaction to internalize the screaming ache. But it’s not enough. When I open my eyes and blink away as much of the teary haze as I can, Cody is glaring at me.

“Knock it off, Ivy. You’re fine .”

I pull my lip between my teeth to stifle the words I really want to say and then nod my agreement, focusing on breathing through my nose. “I—I think it’s broken.”

I haven’t gotten the courage to look at my wrist because the pain is already churning in my stomach with the adrenaline and the bile.

“Sprained, if anything.” Cody rolls his eyes. “And if you had just given me the fucking map, I wouldn’t have had to slam on the brakes. Now give it to me.”

My eyes flicker to the atlas that fell at my feet. It’s probably older than I am and yet somehow in better shape. My parents took meticulous care of all their possessions… They just didn’t know that raising a child was different from owning something.

I grit my teeth and double over to grab the pages, using my uninjured hand to brace myself against the dash and get the leverage I need. The atlas is just out of reach, and I’m about to move my seat back to get the room I need to bend over further, when a hand on the back of my head pushes me further.

Now I really do think I’ll throw up, as white-hot pain rips through me when my fingers close around the edge of the book.

He isn’t delicate about taking it from me, ripping it from between my fingers without so much as a look of sympathy. Because he isn’t capable of sympathy, empathy, or general human emotion.

I don’t think I married a psychopath—or a sociopath, even. He wasn’t always so cruel… In the beginning, he hadn’t hated me so much. I’m not delusional enough to think that he ever loved me, and I’ve certainly never loved him, but it wasn’t always like this.

Cody used to be milder, kinder, and capable of human decency. But I guess the world took that from him.

Or rather, the hospital took it from him.

He told me he had to build up a callus, to let his skin thicken so that each loss and grief wasn’t affecting him. And I believed it. After the first patient he lost, he came home and cried in my arms for hours. It was the first time we connected, the first time I thought maybe there was a chance that my husband and I could love each other one day. By the end of his residency, he was coming home angry, as if I were the one who was making him lose patients. He built up a callous, and so did I, getting used to him dumping boiling pasta on the floor because we’d had spaghetti two nights before and the feeling of a hand whipping across my face followed by gentle kisses over the sting.

It isn’t like I like his anger or the way he hurts me. But as often as his eyes take on that wicked hatred, there are times where I see in him a chance to make good on our wedding vows.

I’ve definitely got the ‘for worse’ part down.

Turning my focus out the window, I watch the trees pass us by.

The woods are thick here, even more than I remember, crowding out all the light from the setting sun as we drive deeper into the backwoods.

Cody whips the wheel at the last minute, noticing the turn for the road.

Reaper’s Run.

I don’t know who chooses street names, but they should be fired. Calling a gravel road with a steep incline anything associated with a reaper is a choice I’ll never understand. And yet, as foreboding as it is, as much as I know I’ll never leave this mountain again, part of me feels like I’m coming home.

Dread blankets everything at the thought of my husband ruining my safe space, the last part of me he’s never had access to. Although, I suppose, if I’m honest with myself, my ‘safe place’ was ruined years ago. All this time I’ve just been ignoring the heartbreak and the pain. It’s what I’m good at—the only thing I’m good at, I suppose.

The headlights cast a glow on the hill, the warning sign not to continue without four-wheel drive.

Joining with the bile in my stomach, anxiety coils low as Cody pushes the car forward, taking it past its limits.

One wrong move up here, and our car goes slipping off the edge of the road—I saw it happen once.

The little car used to be blue—we saw it the first time not long after it happened. My father parked us right in the middle of the steep road and ran to the edge, looking down at where the car was suspended in the trees, a haunting sound still playing over the speakers, and the headlights casting an ominous haze through the foggy night.

The driver died in the car, and his passenger—a woman—was thrown through the windshield. They found her decapitated body in the woods, and months later, what was left of her head showed up in the Holmes’ backyard lake. Rumor has it that the woman was dead even before the accident—that he’d intentionally severed her and was taking her up the mountain to bury the body. They say it was her ghost who stepped out in the middle of the road and made him lose control.

My father sent one of his men to scale down the side of the mountain and confirm the driver was dead on impact. The animals feasted on him for months, but I imagine his skeleton is still hanging upside down, belted into the car, which is still stuck wheels-up in the trees, too far up the mountain for emergency services to reach. When we roll past the spot where he went over, I imagine that night— myself as the woman in that car.

Realizing we don’t have enough momentum to make it up the mountain, Cody throws the car in reverse instead. Gravel crunches under the tires and kicks up to hit the back of the car, causing little sounds like hail as it pops against the undercarriage. It feels almost like a freefall, and I wonder how well the tires are gripping the road or if we’re just letting gravity knock us back down the mountain at this point.

All the while, Cody glares into the rearview mirror, as if he could do anything to control it if a car happened to be climbing up behind us at this point. There are eight cabins on the mountain, each staggered far enough apart that all you can tell of your neighbor is whether they’re home by the smoke rising from the chimney. It’s late summer, which means that the majority of the neighbors aren’t even home, choosing to spend their time on the coast or the lake, soaking up every drop of sunshine they can get before the frigid air begins to creep in and steal it away.

I curl my fingers around the door handle with my uninjured hand, bracing myself for the impact to come.

It's probably a better fate to go out like this. No neighbors around on the mountain means that when my husband kills me, my body may not ever be found. At least this way, a crash will be public. Maybe he’ll lose consciousness, and I can make a break for it. Run and disappear into the woods somewhere and never be found.

Maybe I could swallow my hurt and my pride and run to them .

The blare of a horn behind us steals my breath, and I turn around to look out the rearview mirror in time to see the semi jackknife as we approach the main road, turning to miss us. And it does miss us, though we don’t miss it. The back of Cody’s Jetta slams into the cab of the truck, and the crunch of metal has me tense just before impact.

This time, I don’t brace myself as we slam forward. Cody’s seat belt catches him—my face catches me.

It’s not a hard hit, but I feel the immediate trickle of blood, which comes a fraction of a second before the airbag deploys—too little, too late. The sound of crackling glass, still sprinkling down from the shattered back window, joins with the blare of our horn, busted with the airbag that Cody strikes his fist against. As if that’s to blame for the backslide, as if he didn’t completely ignore the signs that say, ‘four-wheel drive only’.

A glance at my husband assures me that he’s fine, well enough to slam his hands against the steering wheel over and over again, his knuckles splitting with the force.

My thoughts are disjointed as I realize the opportunity to run is gone.

Lights come at us fast. At first, I think it’s a flashlight, someone coming to check on us. But it’s not the beam of a flashlight that blinds me, making it impossible to see the source behind it.

Headlights.

The realization comes a minute too late to make my body move, though I have nowhere to go anyway.

The impact ricochets me like a pinball—forward, then back, then finally coming to a rest against the glass.

But by that time, I’m already fading into unconsciousness.