What Happened to Ivy by Kathy Stinson

garden. “Nice color,” I say.
    “Thanks.” Tina shoves a cap over her loose curls. “It’s really good of you to be willing to take Murray off my hands for a while, what with…everything.”
    At the playground, I let Murray play in the sandbox way longer than it takes to paint a door, then push him on the swing for a while. On the way home, we stop at the variety store. Before we go in, I give Murray a few coins to spend on whatever he wants.
    “Can I have gummy bears?” he asks.
    I lean heavily against the brick wall to catch my breath.
    “What’s the matter?” Murray asks.
    I try to come up with some excuse for why I’m suddenly falling apart, but I hate how people always avoid telling kids the truth, so I swallow the lump in my throat and make myself answer him. “I was just thinking about my sister.”
    “Oh.” Murray examines his coins. “Your daddy maybe drownded her because she lived in a wheelchair, right?”
    “What!? Who told you that?”
    “Mrs. Meyers at the pet food store told it to my mom when we were buying budgie food.”
    “Well, Mrs. Meyers is wrong , okay?”
    First that creep – the one who called – went from reading, ‘disabled kid drowned,’ to ‘her dad must have done it.’ Now Mrs. Meyers is assuming the same thing. And how many people has she talked to? How many other people are talking like that about what happened to Ivy?
    We go inside so Murray can buy his candy.
    Sitting on the grass outside the store, he holds out his package and says, “Do you want a gummy bear, David?”
    “No, thanks.”
    I lie back on the grass, watching clouds scud past overhead while Murray nibbles the head off each bear before eating the rest of it. I remember hearing once about some guy who offed his kid by gassing her in his pickup truck. But he must have been off his nut. Dad couldn’t have done what Mrs. Meyers said.
    When Murray has finished his gummy bears, we get up and start toward our street. I’ll have to tell Hannah that if her mom buys dog food at Mrs. Meyer’s store, she should start getting it someplace else. Except I can’t. I can’t talk to Hannah about anything now. Why didn’t I just keep my stupid feelings for her to myself? It was bad enough kissing her when I didn’t even know if she liked me, but to go and do it right after Ivy’s funeral? Right there in Ivy’s room? And I couldn’t just make it a nice little kiss either. I had to go and practically ram my stupid tongue down her throat. I never would have done that if Ivy hadn’t gone and died, that’s for sure. Even dead she’s messing things up.
    When we get back to Murray’s, the paint on the front door is dry. Tina tries to pay me for the extra time we were away, but I tell her it’s okay, today was a free one.
    Back home, rather than going inside, I grab a trowel from the garage. I jab it into the ground in the front garden, hoping Hannah might come out of her house while I’m out here. I dig out an ugly weed, bash the dry earth from its roots, and drop it into a bucket. I dig out another weed and then another.
    Ivy loved everything in the garden. Even the weeds. ‘Mmm, bi-yee fars,’ she said again and again, ‘Bi-yee fars.’
    There was so much more to her than most people knew. Like Mrs. Meyers, for one. And I should have told Murray that Ivy wasn’t just a girl in a wheelchair. She was also a girl who liked flowers and birds, and she liked gummy bears, too, just like he does. I should have told him that on good days she liked pushing Jack back in his box so someone would turn the knob and make him jump out again. And that she liked bonfires and roasted marshmallows and listening to stories, the same stories he likes, and that her favorite was Go, Dog! Go!
    I should have told him how Ivy loved water – in the bathtub, the sprinkler, her therapy pool – and how she knew that sprinkler water has rainbows in it but not the fountain at the mall, and probably not the lake where her dad took her