Free What Happened to Ivy by Kathy Stinson

But I don’t. “Me either,” I say, “but I don’t want to iron.”
    Unless…could Mom be feeling guilty, too?
    She turns over the sleeve. “What do you want, David?”
    My thoughts are so confused I’m not even making sense to myself anymore. “Something to eat.” I get a bowl and cereal from the cupboard, milk from the fridge, and a spoon from the drawer.
    Is Mom awake, trying to figure out how to leave Dad? Ironing his shirts so he’ll have some to wear for a while after she’s gone? She keeps ironing the same, already smooth shirt. She looks even more tired than she did when Ivy was alive. But no one would iron shirts for someone they were leaving. Besides, now that I think of it, neither of my parents headed to the couch after they got ready for bed earlier.
    I chew on a mouthful of cereal until it’s a dry lump in my mouth and force myself to swallow. Mom keeps pushing the iron up and down the same sleeve of Dad’s shirt. Up and down again. I dip my spoon back into my bowl.
    “Dad really loved Ivy,” I say. “Didn’t he.” Not a question.
    Mom looks up. Startled. As if she’s just remembered I’m there. “Of course he did. We all did.”
    Yeah, we all did. But that didn’t stop me feeding her worms. It didn’t stop me pushing games with her too far. Like the time I was dragging her around the house by her feet and she thought it was really funny, so then I started pulling her down the stairs because I thought that would be even funnier. But she stopped laughing pretty fast because every time her head hit another step, it bounced. Thunk. Thunk. All the way to the bottom.
    I wipe a dribble of milk from my chin.
    “Listen, David.” Mom switches to the other sleeve of Dad’s shirt. “I know having Ivy for a sister wasn’t always easy for you.”
    How much does she know, I wonder? Did she know before, or not till after Ivy was gone?
    “What Dad did…” My spoon carves aisles through the cereal in my bowl. “How are you…? How can you…? Well, it seems like you’re okay with it. I mean—”
    “You mean what Dad said he did?”
    “Well, yeah.”
    “David, your father…That night…Your father didn’t know what he was saying. He was – he is – simply grief-stricken. And he feels guilty. He thinks he should have been able to save Ivy that day. That’s all. Your dad…” Mom rests the iron on its base. “He didn’t do what he said. He could never have done what he said.”
    I cling to my spoon as if that will somehow make it true, what she is saying.
    “You know, David, he’s been having nightmares every night since Ivy died. Every night. Last night at dinner, when he said the things he did, he was just confusing his nightmares with what really happened.”
    She sounds so convinced. But she has to believe what she’s said. She couldn’t stay married to Dad if she didn’t. And I guess she needs him. I don’t.
    “Okay?” Mom says.
    The whole scene, dimly lit by the light above the stove, feels surreal. Mom hangs Dad’s shirt on the back of a chair. It looks very white, whiter than it does in the daytime. She sets the iron on the counter and packs up the ironing board.
    “Yeah.”
    “You’ll get back to bed soon, then?”
    “Sure.”
    Before I finish my cereal – I should have just dumped it and gone back to bed when Mom did – Dad trudges into the kitchen.
    “Your mother said you were awake.” He pours cold coffee into a mug and sits down across from me.
    The last of my cereal floats soggily in my bowl. At the edge of my vision, I can see Dad’s hands wrapped around his mug. The hands that used to support Ivy in the water. The hands that should have saved her when she got into trouble. I feel his eyes staring at me.
    “She would have been having surgery today,” he says.
    The clock on the stove says it’s three o’clock.
    “I’ll tell you now, your mother and I were terrified.”
    I was always at school when Ivy was having surgery. I could never focus on what