Chapter Eighteen. Ivy, 1957
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Ivy knew from a young age she was luckier than most. It wasn’t because she possessed a beautiful face; Ivy’s thick curls refused to be tamed no matter how much Aqua Net she used and her lips were overly full, although decades later those very attributes would be coveted by many women.
She didn’t come from a wealthy family, either. Ivy’s father worked at a furniture store, selling Danish modern coffee tables and tripod lamps, and groused about the manager who’d been promoted over him.
“He’s slick, that one,” Ivy’s father would ruminate, downing his second whiskey sour before dinner. “But he’ll get his comeuppance someday.”
Unlike her father, Ivy had been granted the gift of a sunny disposition. She woke up every morning cheerful, as if it were her default setting. She brushed aside rudeness and petty slights. Her smile was a reflex.
And she did have one other advantage in life: She was often lucky.
Sometimes she’d feel compelled to change an answer on a school test at the last minute or touch up her appearance.
Small decisions that made her life take a turn for the better.
Because the new test answer was always the right one, and when she instinctively freshened her lipstick and smoothed her hair, she often ran into someone she knew and felt a higher level of confidence.
Once, Ivy was drawn to pause and peer into a storefront window she’d passed countless times before. She didn’t question the compulsion. She’d learned not to. Seconds later, the driver of an idling Chevrolet lurched forward, smashing into the space where Ivy would have been walking.
The elderly driver climbed out, clearly shaken, looking at his fender crumpled against the side of the building. And Ivy took his arm and helped him to a bench, reassuring him that no real harm had been done.
Ivy was uncommonly bright, but that quality wasn’t yet prized in girls, either.
She concealed her intelligence, just as she learned to hide the strange happenings that marked her life.
Her parents forbade Ivy to guess who was calling when the phone rang or to talk about dreams she’d had that seemed to foretell future events, though she secretly recorded the events in a diary she hid beneath her mattress.
“She’s plump and homely. She’s going to have a hard enough time catching a husband without being the town freak,” Ivy overheard her father tell her mother once. Those words seared into Ivy, as scarring as a brand.
After years of silence, Ivy broke the dream rule only once, when she was a senior in high school.
There was a quiet, shy boy named Charlie in her class whose home life must have been terrible.
He was small and wiry, and he often came to school without lunch, but with bruises on his arms and legs or a black eye he blamed on a farming mishap.
His father was known for having a volatile temper, especially when he drank.
Most people in town gave the man a wide berth.
Charlie missed school fairly often—Ivy couldn’t bear to think about why—but because he was brilliant, his marks put him at the top of their class.
Other kids mostly ignored him, even the bullies.
Maybe they recognized there was nothing they could do to Charlie that was worse than what he endured at home.
Charlie ran the several miles from his family’s farm to and from school every day because the bus followed a meandering route that took longer, and his time was precious. Ivy had heard he rose before dawn to complete farm chores, too.
One clear image surfaced in Ivy’s mind whenever she thought about Charlie: One morning a praying mantis flew in through a classroom window.
Girls screamed and boys batted at it, but Charlie just put out his hand and caught it, cupping it as tenderly as if it were a rose.
“Crush it!” someone shouted, but Charlie released the stick bug back out the window.
As he watched it wing away, Ivy felt certain he wanted nothing more than to do the same.
The sadness embedded in his eyes broke her heart.
The dream came to her during a cold snap in late January of their senior year.
Charlie was running alongside a shiny black sedan, his legs moving so quickly they blurred. He and the sedan disappeared over the horizon into the warmth of a golden sky.
She awoke abruptly at twenty-one minutes past midnight and was unable to fall back asleep.
The dream meant something.
But what?
It wasn’t until the last class period of the day that Ivy looked out the window and spotted the black sedan from her dream pulling into the parking lot. A tall man in a plaid sports coat got out, walking purposefully toward the school entrance. Then Ivy lost sight of him.
As soon as the final bell rang, she scrambled to find Charlie. She caught him on the sidewalk outside the school lacing his beat-up work boots in preparation to run home.
“Please wait, Charlie. Don’t go yet.” She gripped his scrawny arm. He turned to her, startled.
“Just a little longer,” she pleaded.
“Why?” he asked.
She couldn’t answer. But something in her expression must’ve convinced him.
Five minutes passed. Other students streamed by, walking home. The school bus started up and rumbled down the street. She could feel Charlie’s rising agitation.
“I have to get home,” Charlie whispered.
“Trust me,” she begged.
Agonizing minutes ticked by. Finally the man in the suit came out of the school.
“As soon as that black car goes, run alongside it,” Ivy instructed. “Run like the wind, Charlie. Faster than you’ve ever gone before.”
The car’s engine turned over. Its wheels began to move, slowly at first, then picking up speed as the vehicle turned out of the parking lot and onto the long, narrow road.
Without a word, Charlie took off, his legs churning. Ivy’s heart leapt into her throat as she hurried behind him, trying to see what was happening. For a moment she worried Charlie wouldn’t catch up to the car; it had too big of a head start.
Then Charlie seemed to find another gear.
His arms and legs whirled so fast they blurred; he moved like a sleek, efficient machine. It was a gorgeous thing to watch Charlie run. He caught up to the car. Then he passed it.
After a moment, the car drew up and kept pace with Charlie. Then the driver honked his horn furiously until Charlie stopped. The door opened and the man in the plaid sport coat slowly climbed out.
Ivy was out of breath, and still far behind them, but the man’s booming voice carried to her.
“Son, do you know who I am?”
Charlie shook his head.
“I’m the basketball scout for the University of Virginia.”
Ivy’s heart sank. Charlie didn’t play basketball.
Maybe her dream had meant something else.
Perhaps Charlie would’ve been hit by a car had he left earlier, or maybe by delaying him, she’d helped him avoid a violent encounter with his father.
This moment could just have been a precursor to the main event.
The man looked at Charlie’s worn boots and heavy backpack.
“Twenty-one miles per hour,” the scout said in his loud, clear voice. “I clocked it on my odometer.”
Ivy stopped cold. Twenty-one. The precise number in her dream; she’d documented it in her diary.
“Son, our track coach is going to want to talk to you.”
Charlie ended up getting a full scholarship to UVA, where he won dozens of medals and trophies. He was used to a grueling work schedule; he handled the blend of athletics and academics easily. “And I get three squares a day in the cafeteria,” he told Ivy in a phone call.
He could have trained for the Olympics, but he decided to focus on a career. He married his college sweetheart, had four children, and enjoyed success as an engineer.
When he tried to thank Ivy, she asked for only one thing: that he never speak of it again.