Where the Forest Meets the Stars Read online

  “That’s where you went the night you came to my fire?”

  She nodded. “There’s a bed out there. I share it with Little Bear.”

  When Jo had moved into the cottage, the one full-size mattress that was left in the house over winter had been ruined by nesting mice. Many biology students would have used the urine-tainted bed anyway, but Jo wasn’t quite that tolerant. She’d dragged the smelly, chewed mattress out to the shed and used some of her research money to buy a cut-rate queen mattress.

  “You shouldn’t go in that shed,” Jo said. “It looks like it’s going to fall down any day.”

  “I know. There’s big holes in the roof. And now our bed is all wet.” She’d said the last tragically, as though the foul mattress had been all the security she had in the world.

  “Are you hungry?” Jo asked.

  The girl eyed her suspiciously.

  “How about some pancakes?”

  “I bet you’re tricking me again,” she said.

  “I’m not. I’m on my way out, and I don’t want to leave you here hungry.”

  The girl mournfully stared into the rainy forest, considering what to do. Don’t pull that girl outta the pan and drop her into the fire, the deputy had said. Were those really her only options? Jo had a sudden urge to bundle the child into her arms and hold her. “I have syrup,” she said.

  The girl looked up at her. “I heard syrup on pancakes is good.”

  “I can’t believe you remembered to pretend you’ve never had it.”

  “Were you trying to trick me?”

  “I wasn’t.” Jo returned the key to the lock and opened it. “Come on, then.”

  After the girl stuffed herself with pancakes and orange juice, she begged Jo to let Little Bear come in from the rain and eat a pancake on the porch. Jo relented on the condition that the mutt and his fleas didn’t enter the house. Wearing Jo’s raincoat, the girl went to the shed with a pancake to lure the dog. The hungry dog slunk onto the porch to get the food, but only when Jo retreated into the house. “If he pees or poops out there, you have to clean it up,” Jo said.

  “I will. Can I give him a bowl of water?”

  “Sure. I’m going to the Laundromat now.”

  “Why isn’t there a wash machine here?”

  “I guess Kinney doesn’t want to waste his money on one when this place is only rented for a few months of the year.”

  “Is that why there’s no TV?”

  “Probably.”

  “You could bring your own.”

  “There’s no cable or internet,” Jo said.

  “Why not?”

  “Kinney is from a generation of biologists who believe you work, eat, and sleep when you’re immersed in the natural world.”

  “How long will you be at the Laundromat?”

  “A few hours.” She’d been trying to decide whether to lock the girl out of the house while she was gone. Instead, she put her binoculars in her bag with her laptop. Those and her wallet were the only two items she owned that were worth stealing.

  “Don’t turn on the stove while I’m gone,” she said.

  “You’re going to let me stay inside?”

  “I am—for now. We’re going to talk about what to do when I get back, okay?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Don’t mess with that desk while I’m gone,” Jo said.

  The girl looked at the desk piled with books, journals, and papers. “What is all that?”

  “It’s my science stuff. Stay out of it.”

  She followed Jo onto the screened porch. Little Bear was curled in a tight ball on the rug, his wary gaze on Jo as she walked to the screen door.

  “Remember, don’t let the dog in the house,” Jo said.

  “I know.”

  Jo put up her hood and bustled through the steady rain to the driveway. The girl watched her load the car and get in, her small body ghostly and distorted through the translucence of the rain-soaked porch screens.

  During the forty-minute drive to the small town of Vienna—pronounced Vī-enna by locals—the rain reduced to a drizzle, though the sky was dark with a threat of more. Downtown Vienna looked like places she’d seen in old movies, and something about that was oddly comforting. As she cruised the mostly empty streets, two old-timers seated under a store awning lifted their hands at her, and she returned the greeting. She passed the sheriff’s station on her way to the Laundromat.

  She sat in her usual blue plastic chair facing the window while her laundry churned in two washers. She brought up Tabby’s face on her phone contacts, a photo of her wearing striped cat ears, a plastic goldfish dangling like a cigarette from her lips. Tabby had been Jo’s closest friend since sophomore year of undergrad when they were lab partners, and she’d also stayed at the University of Illinois for her graduate work. She’d gotten into the veterinary school, a very good program, but she often questioned why she hadn’t switched to a school with better surrounding scenery than corn and soybean fields.

  “Hey, Jojo,” Tabby answered on the third ring. “How’s Dawg Town?”

  A town named Vienna in rural Illinois was hilarious to her, and she was certain it must be more about dawgs, Vienna-brand hot dogs, than the capital of Austria.

  “How’d you know I’m in Vienna?” Jo said.

  “I only ever hear from you when you’re doing laundry. I also know it’s raining down there because you’d wear the same disgusting clothes until they fell apart rather than do laundry on a nice day when you could be working.”

  “I didn’t realize I was so predictable,” Jo said.

  “You are. Which means you’re working your ass off even though your doctors told you to take it easy.”

  “I took it easy for two whole years. I need to work.”

  “Those two years weren’t easy, Jo,” Tabby said in a quiet voice.

  Jo stared out the misty Laundromat window at a puddle in a crater of broken asphalt, its surface dimpled with rain. “Today is my mom’s birthday,” she said.

  “Is it?” Tabby said. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Liar.”

  She was. She’d called Tabby to ask her advice about the girl but had instead blurted out the bit about her mother’s birthday.

  “Pick up your water,” Tabby said.

  “Why?”

  “We’re doing a toast.”

  Jo lifted her battered blue water bottle, predictably situated next to her.

  “Ready?” Tabby said.

  “Ready,” Jo said.

  “Happy birthday to Eleanor Teale, the flower whisperer who made everyone and everything around her bloom. Her light is still with us, growing love across the universe.”

  Jo raised her bottle to the gray sky and drank. “Thanks,” she said, wiping fingers on her lower lashes. “That was a good toast.”

  “El was one of the coolest people I ever met,” Tabby said. “Not to mention my surrogate mom.”

  “She loved you,” Jo said.

  “I know. Shit . . . now you’re making me cry, and I was trying to help you feel better.”

  “You did,” Jo said. “But guess who’s coming to visit today?”

  “Don’t tell me . . .”

  “Yeah, Tanner.”

  “I wish I was there so I could kick his ass!”

  “He deserves no such attention.”

  “Why would he fucking dare come there?”

  “I doubt he wanted to. He and two other grad students are at a workshop with my advisor in Chattanooga. They’re going to break their drive back to campus at Kinney Cottage and stay overnight.”

  “You have enough room for four more people in that house?”

  “Not beds, but most biologists will sleep anywhere.”

  “Put Tanner in the woods. On an anthill.”

  Where would Jo put the girl? During the drive from the cottage, she’d come up with only one possible solution. But if that didn’t work . . .

  “Are you there?” Tab
by said.

  “I’m here,” Jo said. “This weird thing happened two nights ago . . .”

  “What?”

  “A girl showed up at the house, and she wouldn’t leave.”

  “How old is she?”

  “She won’t say. I think she’s around nine or ten.”

  “Jesus, Jo. Just tell her to go home.”

  “I tried that, obviously. But then I saw bruises.”

  “Child-abuse kind of bruises?”

  “I think so.”

  “You have to call the cops!”

  “I did. But when the deputy got there, she ran away.”

  “The poor kid!”

  Before Jo could say the girl had come back, the call-waiting tone sounded in her ear. She looked at the screen. Shaw Daniels, her advisor, was calling. “I have to go. Shaw is calling.”

  “Okay, bye,” Tabby said. “And call me sometime when it isn’t raining, damn it.”

  “I will.” Jo hung up, then accepted the incoming call. “I was just going to text you.”

  “I’m surprised I got you,” Shaw said. “Between study sites?”

  “It’s raining. I’m in the Laundromat.”

  “Good, you’re taking a break.”

  Would any of them ever let her be the person she was before her diagnosis? She suspected Shaw was mostly stopping in to assess her health. He’d tried to make her hire a field assistant while she recovered, and he’d opposed her living in the Kinney house alone.

  “Are you still up for a visit tonight?” Shaw asked.

  “Of course. What’s your ETA?”

  “We’ll get on the road after the last session, at around three o’clock. We should be there by seven thirty—eight at the latest. If you can wait, we’ll take you out for dinner.”

  “Do you mind if we eat in? I was going to grill burgers. But I may have to make them inside if the rain keeps up.”

  “Are you sure you want to go to all that trouble?”

  “It’s no trouble at all,” Jo said.

  “If you insist,” he said. “See you soon.”

  After stops at the grocery store and farm stand, Jo returned to the cottage in the early afternoon. The girl was gone. Jo hoped she had gone home. But when she imagined the brutality the girl might be facing, she regretted wishing for it. She scanned the house, noting the girl hadn’t stolen anything. The only item out of place was a textbook, Ornithology , taken off the desk and left on the couch.

  Jo pushed the girl out of her thoughts. She had a lot to do before her visitors arrived. After she straightened the house, she began preparing pies for dessert, one peach and one strawberry-rhubarb, made with fruit she’d bought at the farm stand. Normally she wouldn’t spend her precious field time so frivolously, but the rain was still coming down and she wanted the dinner to be nice for Shaw—if not for Tanner Bruce. Tanner, also one of Shaw’s PhD students, had been only one year ahead of her when she entered graduate school, but now he was three years ahead and nearly finished. Shortly before Jo left school to care for her dying mother, she’d slept with Tanner. Three times. But the only contact she’d had with him since she left was his signature on a sympathy card from Shaw and his graduate students.

  Jo’s hands perfunctorily rolled out a circle of pie dough while her mind traveled to the last day she’d spent with Tanner. The July night was hot, too warm to sleep in the tent, and they’d stripped and made love in a deep pool of a stream near their campsite. The memory would have been one of the best of her life if Tanner Bruce weren’t in it.

  “Who are the pies for?”

  Jo’s attention snapped back to her hands. The girl had slipped into the house without a sound, her hair and Jo’s oversize clothing damp with rain.

  “Where were you?” Jo asked.

  “In the woods.”

  “Doing what?”

  “I thought you’d have that policeman with you again.”

  Jo laid a smooth round of floury dough in one of the new pie pans. “I’ve decided you and I should work this out on our own. Do you think we can do that?”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Tell me where you live and why you won’t go back. I’ll help you with whatever is going on.”

  “I told you all that already. Can I have some pie when they’re ready?”

  “They’re for later, for my guests.”

  “Who’s coming?”

  “The professor who oversees my project and three graduate students.”

  “Are they ornithologists?”

  “They are. How do you know that word?”

  “From your Ornithology book. I read the preface and first two chapters,” she said, pronouncing the word pre-fāce .

  “You actually read it?”

  “I skipped the parts someone from Hetrayeh wouldn’t understand, but not that much. I liked the chapter about bird diversity and how their beaks match what they eat and their feet match where they live. I never really thought about that before.”

  “You’re an advanced reader.”

  “I use the dead girl’s brain to do things, and she was smart.”

  Jo wiped her floury hands on a dish towel. “Go wash and I’ll let you pinch the edges of the piecrusts.”

  The alien ran for the sink. When she finished washing, Jo said, “I need a better name to call you than Earpood. Can you think of a regular name?”

  The girl put her chin in her hand and pretended to think. “What about Ursa . . . because I’m from the place you call Ursa Major?”

  “I like the name Ursa.”

  “You can call me that.”

  “No last name?”

  “Major.”

  “That makes sense. Have you ever made piecrust, Ursa?”

  “We don’t make pies on Hetrayeh.”

  “Let me show you.”

  Ursa mastered piecrusts as quickly as she grasped college-level reading, and while the pies baked, scenting the kitchen with their sweetness, she helped Jo make potato salad. They used Jo’s mother’s recipe—the only potato salad worth eating, in Jo’s opinion. Next they prepared ground beef to make burgers the way Jo’s mother had, with Worcestershire, bread crumbs, and spices. Jo hadn’t cooked so elaborately for herself since she’d lived at the cottage. She liked the idea of making her mother’s recipes on her birthday—a way of honoring her—and the food preparation helped distract her from the mounting tension of seeing Tanner again. Even the girl wasn’t enough of a diversion.

  When Ursa put away the butter, she surveyed the beer cooling in the refrigerator. “Are the ornithologists alcoholics?”

  “Why would you think that?” Jo said.

  “That’s a lot of beer.”

  “It’s for four people.”

  “You won’t drink any?”

  “I might have one.”

  “You don’t like to get drunk?”

  “I don’t.” Jo saw mistrust in the alien’s eyes. “Have you had bad experiences with people who drink a lot?”

  “How could I have? I just got here.”

  5

  After they ate sandwiches and the pies were set out to cool, Jo sent Ursa to change back into her own clean clothes. When Ursa came out of the bedroom and saw Jo working on her laptop, she sat on the couch and read more of the Ornithology text.

  Jo turned her screen so Ursa couldn’t see her use her phone to get on the internet. When she got a connection, she googled Ursa missing girl but found nothing. Though the sheriff’s deputy knew of no missing children in the area, she tried missing child Illinois , which brought her to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children website and a depressingly long list of missing Illinois children. Many of them were probably dead, their bones concealed in graves that would never be found. Some of the photographs were of kids who had been missing since as far back as 1960, and a few were computer reconstructions of dead children who’d never been identified. One nearly made Jo cry. It was a photograph of a pair of shoes—all that was recovered of a teenager’s rema
ins.

  Jo used the same website to look at photographs of children in nearby Kentucky, and also in the bordering states of Missouri, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Indiana. Ursa Major wasn’t on the lists, though she’d been away from home for at least two nights. Jo set down the phone. “How’s Ornithology going?”

  “I don’t like systematics that much,” Ursa said.

  “It’s not my thing either.” She took her car keys off the desk. “The rain has stopped. I’m going to drive down the road to monitor a few nests. Want to come with me?”

  “Yes!” She sprang off the couch and slipped on Jo’s oversize flip-flops. “How do you monitor a nest?”

  “I look at it and see how it’s doing.”

  “That’s how you get a PhD?”

  “There’s a lot more to it than that. I record the fate of every nest I find, and from that data I can calculate the nesting success of indigo buntings in each of my study sites.”

  “What do you mean by fate ?”

  “Fate is what happens after the nest is built. I monitor how many eggs are laid, how many hatch, and how many baby birds fledge from the nest. Fledge means they fly away from the nest. But sometimes the parents abandon the nest before the female lays eggs, or the eggs are eaten by a predator. And sometimes the eggs hatch, but the babies are eaten by a predator before they fledge.”

  “Why don’t you stop the predator from eating the babies?”

  “I can’t stop it from happening, and even if I could, saving individual baby birds isn’t the purpose of my study. The research is meant to help us understand how to conserve bird populations on a bigger scale.”

  “What is the predator?”

  “Snakes, crows, blue jays, and raccoons are the main ones in my study sites.” Jo slung her field bag over her shoulder. “Let’s go before the weather turns again. I don’t like to scare birds off their nests when it’s raining.”

  “Because the eggs can’t get wet?”

  “I don’t want eggs or babies to get wet and cold. Research should have as little impact on nesting success as possible.”

  When they left the cottage, Little Bear trotted over from the shed. He was much tamer, letting Ursa pet his head. “Stay here,” she told the dog. “Do you understand? I’ll be back soon.”

  Ursa didn’t like that she had to sit in the back seat and use the seat belt. Someone had been letting her sit up front unbuckled. Jo explained why the seat belt was necessary and how the front airbag could kill children if it opened.