WINTER

When Finn brought me home, Ivy was gone, and I didn’t hear or see her until I woke the next morning to the sound of retching.

"That's it. We're going in," I commanded.

"Fine." Ivy's voice was weak with defeat.

After dressing, I found Ivy in the living room sitting on the sofa, hunched over, her head between her legs.

"You going to make it to the clinic?"

"Probably. I threw up those damn crackers. Only thing left in me is water."

"Can I get you anything?"

"A new stomach?"

"Crackers? Sprite?"

She shook her head and then groaned as if even that much movement made her ill.

"Why don't you lie down in the back?" I pressed my hand on her forehead. "You feel super clammy."

"It's probably toilet water."

"Gross." I laughed helplessly.

"You laugh now, but you're in the circle of infection, which means I'll be holding your hair in a few days."

"I hope not. Let's get you to a doctor and see what's wrong with you. Don't you want to feel better?" I wheedled.

"No, I want to puke every five minutes." But she allowed me to help her to her feet. "Can you tranq me first? I don't think I could survive a car ride."

It took ten or so minutes to get to the family care clinic. We had to go to the one that offered public assistance because Ivy didn’t have insurance. After we arrived, we waited. And waited. And waited some more. Thankfully, Ivy's stomach settled, and we didn't have to clean any unpleasant fluids out of the car seats.

"Tucker asked me about apprenticing again. What do you think?"

"Only if you want to do it." She leaned back, stretched her legs out, and rubbed her stomach. "You could work at Riskie's. Jimmy is always looking for new talent. You and Rosie could do some kind of Asian fan dance for the boys with yellow fever. Soon you too can be humping the dance floor in a G-string while college boys and old men stuff rolled-up one dollar bills in your crack."

"That's…a disturbing and very detailed picture."

Ivy grunted. "Happened to one girl I knew. Rachel Neuron. I think her stage name was Neon Neuron, and she wore this bra that had LED lights in it."

"Would I be the Ice Queen? Maybe I could make up this persona where I was chilly and disdainful, and I wouldn't take off my clothes, but I'd let them pay to touch my high heeled white boots."

Ivy nodded approvingly. "I like that. I like that a lot. Too bad Jimmy would require you to take off the clothes and let them touch your bare booty."

I shook my head and laughed. "I think my chest is too small. They might think I'm a boy."

Ivy and I both looked down at my chest and cracked up. "Jimmy is probably looking to expand to the gay market anyway!"

"Ivy Donovan!" the nurse called out.

"Finally. I felt like I was fossilizing,” Ivy muttered.

"I promise if that happens, I'll keep you forever."

"In your bedroom, bitch. I better be right by the bed at all times." She waggled her eyebrows.

"You are so creepy."

"I'm your older sister." She slung her arm around me, leaning onto my shoulder. "I get to keep watch over you all the time."

"What are your symptoms?" the nurse asked us impatiently.

"She's been vomiting on and off for the last couple of weeks," I jumped in.

The nurse swiveled in her chair, looking up from the computer where she'd been entering information. "Vomiting, huh? How about fatigue, mood changes, and breast soreness?”

Ivy and I exchanged wide-eyed looks. This nurse knew exactly what the problem was.

Walking over to the cupboard, she pulled out a cup. "Why don't you go pee. Down the hall and to the right. First door." With that, she left.

Ivy shrugged, picked up the plastic cup, and left. She was back in another five minutes. Shut up in the small room, Ivy began pacing. Twelve paces to the left. Pivot. Twelve paces to the right. "I hate hospitals."

I refrained from correcting her since we weren’t in a hospital. More importantly I agreed with her. Our experience with hospitals had to do with death or rehab, neither welcome subjects.

Impatient, Ivy started jumping on a step stool in the room. Off and on. On and off. Her frenetic behavior was going to drive me mad soon. She'd always been active, but her drug habit only fueled her inability to sit still. She'd taken meth, mostly. At one time, she admitted the sex when she'd been on meth was so fantastic that she couldn't have it without. Part of why she was addicted, she explained.

"I know."

Ivy had been involuntarily committed once due to her addiction. She’d spent a week hospitalized before they sent her to a local rehabilitation joint. It didn't take. None of them had. The longest she'd been clean was when she was down at the Northville Correctional Facility for six months.

Ivy said prison was fine, and she didn't look worse for wear. It was a minimum security place where she got to take classes in art, knitting, basket weaving, and even accounting.

She said it was like an all-girls camp with all the attendant girl problems. Lots of drama and fighting over the guards, who weren't supposed to sleep with the prisoners but apparently did—all the time.

I was about to haul Ivy to the chair beside me—for my own sanity—when the nurse came back.

“The doctor will be in shortly,” she said abruptly and then left. We waited another half hour before another woman came in, this one wearing a white lab coat and a nametag that said Dr. Turner.

"I see by your chart you don't have health insurance, is that right?" Dr. Turner asked.

Ivy nodded her head, and we exchanged worried looks.

"You'll need to call Department of Human Services to check out your options for prenatal care. You're pregnant."

She said other things. Gave us samples. The nurse came in. She said things. I didn't catch any of it, and I'm not sure Ivy did either.

We rode home in stunned silence. Neither of us spoke until we got to the apartment. We lived in a tiny two-bedroom apartment in a really shitty part of town. It was fine for two girls, but it was terrible for raising a kid.

Ivy dropped into a wooden chair in the kitchen and covered her face with both hands. "My life is officially ruined."

"I don't know," I said slowly. "You've got options."

"You're going to be an aunt," she said, ignoring me. "Being an aunt is awesome. Being a mom is not. You can go out and do shit when you want. A kid is twenty-four-seven obligation. We both know I can barely care for myself. It's a good thing Mom and Dad are dead because this would kill them. After they killed me."

"They would not," I objected almost automatically.

She turned to me in astonishment. "God, I can't believe I'm so ignorant that I failed to realize I wasn't just getting fat, I was pregnant. You know what Jimmy said to me the other day? Lay off the cheeseburgers, or I'll have to send you to One Dollar. Do you know what kind of hellhole that place is? It's so rundown that the strippers pay the clients to sit and watch them take off their clothes."

"We'll get you another job. Maybe Tucker could hire you. You could be the shop bitch."

"Nice, and no. I'm not going to work at your fancy tattoo parlor because I can't draw and I can't tattoo anyone, and I don't want to learn either. I’ll keep waiting tables. That brings in decent money."

For how long? It sounded like she had bypassed all her options but one.

I took a seat next to her and wrapped my arm around her shoulder. She felt thin, frail beneath my arm. She had gone into prison a junky with lanky hair and skin that was going bad and came out dry and healthy looking. But Ivy, who stood four inches taller than me, had always been very slender. She could barely take care of herself, let alone a child.

"There are clinics," I started to say, but she cut me off.

"I'm not doing that." She shrugged off my arm and went to the refrigerator. "I should probably drink more milk and shit like that. Throw me the bag of samples the doc gave us. Those prenatal vitamins are in there."

"Why not consider termination as an option?" I said, handing her the bag.

"I want to have this baby, Winter. I keep thinking how your birth mother carried you to term even though it must have been so hard for her. Whatever her circumstances. If she had aborted you, I wouldn't have you. I can't do that, Winter."

In the dark of night, we'd whispered all our fears to each other, and mine had made a bigger impact than I'd realized.

"I don't feel that way now," I urged.

"Winter, please, I want this baby." Her hand cupped her belly, and she looked at me with fierceness. “You have got to be with me on this. I know I can't do it alone. Together you and I are the Donovan sisters, and we can do anything."

We really couldn’t. I thought of our tiny bank account. I looked around at our shitty apartment. I squeezed her tighter. "Then maybe adoption."

"Seriously, do I even know you? We aren't letting someone raise our kid, Winter. I remember all those nights you cried in my arms, wondering why she gave you up. Why she wouldn't fight for you. I don't want that either. Please help me. This baby is going to be yours and mine. We'll raise it together." She pushed away and pulled out the vitamin box. I wondered how much those would cost. Babies were ridiculously expensive.

"How?" I asked helplessly. "We can't afford another place, especially if you won't have your tips from Riskie's."

"I'll get another job," she said stubbornly. Two pills disappeared in her mouth, and she washed them down with a glass of milk.

"What about the father?"

She was quiet for a long time before admitting, "Not sure."

I tried not to appear too judgy but must have failed.

"Look, I just got out of prison, and I felt…worthless and demoralized. I was a felon at the age of twenty-five. I had no job prospects. They do counseling when you're nearing your release date. They tell you that you have to have a positive attitude, or you'll wind up back in jail. So when I got out, I admit I went a little crazy, but it woke me up, and I've been sober now for over a hundred days." She waved a coin that Margo must have brought her.

"That was rock bottom?" I asked with raised eyebrows. The counselor had told us until Ivy reached rock bottom, she wouldn't be interested in recovering. Her excuses would always blind her to her addictions.

"No, I think I'm at rock bottom now." She gave me a resigned look and patted her belly. Putting the milk away, she stomped into her bedroom and left me standing there feeling shell-shocked.

The fear, the selfish part of me wanted to recoil and push her away, but I couldn’t do that to her or her child. If it was me, I’d have gotten the abortion. I couldn’t give a baby up for adoption and then live with someone I birthed walking around feeling this big hole in her chest. That was a wound that had never fully healed no matter how many times Mom and Dad reminded me that I had been chosen, that they had wanted me for Ivy’s sister and their daughter more than any other girl out there.

What people told you and what you truly believed were often very different things. But what I did believe was that Ivy needed me, and I couldn’t abandon her, no matter how scary and wrong her choice seemed to me.

On my phone, I checked my bank balance. We had a few thousand dollars in savings that I'd hoped to use to buy a car so Ivy and I wouldn't have to share. There was also a bit of money I'd set aside from the sale of the house that Ivy didn't know about. It was the emergency fund. I suppose if there was ever an emergency, this would be it.

But medical bills, another mouth to feed, a better place to live…those would all eat through our savings like Pac Man on steroids. Suddenly the inking job looked incredibly appealing.

"I'm going down to Atra," I called, but there was no response.

* * *

"Tucker here?" I asked Gig when I walked in. Of course he was here. Tucker lived in his tattoo shop.

"He's in the back." Gig jerked his head toward the rear of the shop.

Tucker was in our small break room that contained a card table, four chairs, and a microwave. And boxes. Lots of boxes full of ink, body jewelry, tattoo gun modification pieces, and who knew what else. There were shelves in boxes too.

"When are you going to put those up?"

He ran a hand through his unruly hair. "I'm a tattoo artist, not a fucking carpenter."

My thoughts flicked to Finn and his capable hands and his sawdust-covered boots. He'd have those shelves up in no time.

"How much would it cost me to apprentice?" I asked, sitting in one of the uncomfortable folding chairs.

He perked up at this. "Usually it costs a couple grand, but I'm willing to teach you for free if you agree to work for me for two years after you're done apprenticing. And this would include exclusivity over your designs so you couldn't take your art and talent somewhere else the minute you learned how to ink."

"Two years? I think indentured servants had to pledge themselves for less time."

"It was seven years for indentured servants, and most died before their servitude was over. We can go seven years if you like."

The worst thing about Tucker was that he had that stupid law degree under his belt. It sucked to argue with him. There was no winning. And he liked to argue. I could see his engines firing up. I, on the other hand, did not like confrontation. As he leaned forward, I scooted back.

"Would I have to pay for supplies? You make Gig pay for his ink and pig skins." Gig was learning to tattoo on pigskin procured from a local butcher, which I thought was tremendously gross, but the alternative was really expensive. Plastic skin cost twenty times as much as a pigskin.

"You'd need to pay for the disposables. Ink, needles, grips, skins. I'll make your gun for you, which you can rent. When you're done apprenticing, you'll need to buy your own gun."

"What if I can't do it?" I was worried I was too squeamish to permanently scar someone with ink. It was one thing to watch it done and a whole other level to do it.

Tucker just smiled, a long slow curve of his lips. "You love to draw. This is a human canvas. There isn’t anything better, Winter."

"I guess I won't know until I try it. If I start apprenticing, we might need another receptionist—"

"No way." Tucker stood abruptly. "I'm not hiring your sister."

"Why not? She went in for drug use not stealing." I didn't mention all the times she'd taken money from me or my parents. That wasn't relevant now that she was clean.

"I'm not, and that's the end of it. You and Gig can share those duties. You're going to have to start coming in before noon and practicing. I'm not paying you for those hours either."

"Gee, you make this sound so appealing."

"You need a job that pays more money, right? Well, this is it. You could have a real career at this. You're an amazing artist, and after you start inking, I bet your designs flourish even more. Concentrate on that and forget about your sister."

He wiped his mouth with a napkin and then went out.

I stared after his retreating back. I appreciated his confidence in my abilities, but the criticism of Ivy bothered me. If Tucker, a guy who owned a tattoo parlor for crying out loud, wouldn't even hire her to answer phones, what kind of job could she get? And if she didn't have a job, if she had to constantly worry about feeding herself and her baby, would she crumple under the stress and look to drink away that frustration?

None of these scenarios looked good to me. I leaned an arm on the table and let out a long sigh. I loved Ivy. I really did, but sometimes the weight of being responsible for both of us was too much for me. Adding a baby to that mix was insane, but what could I do? The Donovans adopted me when I was a baby. They saved me from a life in an orphanage or worse. The very least I could do was help the newest Donovan.