Where the Forest Meets the Stars

by Vanderah, Glendy

  “I hope you see this is getting out of hand,” he said.

  “I know. Did I wake your mother?”

  “No.” He walked past her and headed for the barns. Jo followed in silence. They checked the toolshed first, the cow barn next. He looked in the chicken coop, rousing disgruntled clucks. He stood in front of the coop, pondering.

  “Maybe she finally ran away,” Jo said. “She barely said a word today.”

  “She knows she’s worn out the welcome mat.”

  “Do you think she’s gone?”

  “No. It’s more of her games.”

  “Let’s not forget she’s a scared little kid.”

  “Yeah.” He walked away in a new direction.

  “Where are we going?”

  “The tree house.”

  Jo followed him about a hundred yards down a trail until his flashlight hit a decayed sign painted with the faded, childishly printed words GABE’S HOMESTEAD . Below it, on the same stake, was a broken-off board that read NO TRESSP . He shined his flashlight up a huge oak tree onto an incredible tree house. It was high, three times Gabe’s height, and supported by four tall log beams. An enchanting spiral staircase with sinuous branch banisters led to its entrance.

  “This is the best tree house I ever saw,” she said.

  “I loved this place. My dad and I built it when I was seven. We constructed it on timbers so we wouldn’t hurt the tree.” He walked to the staircase that encircled the trunk and thunked his foot on the first stair. “Still in good shape, too.”

  “Ursa knew about it?”

  “She spent hours up here. This is where she stayed out of my mother’s sight when I sold eggs.”

  “I’m surprised she didn’t want to sell eggs with you.”

  “She did.”

  “Why didn’t you let her?”

  He faced her. “Funny you don’t think of these things.”

  “What?”

  “I was afraid to have her out there on the road. What if whoever she ran from saw her out there? I’d have to let him take her, and I’d have no idea if I was doing the right thing.”

  “That makes sense.”

  “You need a little more of that.”

  The jab hurt, but she was in no mood to retaliate. “What sense can there be when I’m under an alien’s control?”

  The scowl he’d worn since he came out of the cabin relaxed into a slight smile.

  “You may not believe this,” she said, “but before star-girl showed up, I used to be a sensible person, almost to the point of annoyance.”

  “I know the feeling,” he said. “I’ve been fighting a riptide of quarks since I set eyes on her.” He held his hand out. “You go up first. I want to be behind you in case you trip.”

  She didn’t need his help, but she accepted his warm hand and caution as reconciliation. But when he released her fingers, he touched her again, on the waist this time, lightly guiding her up the stairs. Was he being a gentleman, or did he crave physical contact with her the way she did from him? Based on the data she’d so far collected, she supposed the former was more probable.

  The handrail was sturdy, and good thing, because the treads spiraled dangerously high. Jo arrived at the top, shining her light into a room divided by two large boughs of the oak. A small rope hammock was strung between a wall and one of the trunks. A child-size chair and desk made of what looked like wood pallets sat on the other side of the space. The room opened to two views of the forest, one balcony facing the incoming trail and the other looking down a beautiful wooded ravine. Jo shined her light into the gorge, imagining little Gabe as king of all he surveyed.

  “Weird,” Gabe said behind her.

  She turned around. His flashlight illuminated the small desk. On its surface were two pencils with erasers, an illustrated book of fairy tales, and several pieces of white printer paper weighed down with rocks. The rocks threw sparks of light from crystals embedded in them, the kind Ursa liked to collect.

  Jo looked at Ursa’s pencil drawings with Gabe: a cartoonish sketch of a frog, a very realistic rendering of a newborn kitten, and the drawing he had pulled out from beneath them. It was a picture of a rectangular grave colored dark with pencil. A white cross with no lettering stood over the burial dirt. Next to the grave, Ursa had written I love you on one side and I am sorry on the other.

  “There’s a person in that grave,” Jo said.

  “I know.” He picked up the paper, and they examined the grave. Ursa had drawn a prone woman with closed eyes and shoulder-length hair before she colored the dark dirt over her. “Jesus,” Gabe said. “Are you thinking what I am?”

  “Someone she cared about died, and that’s why she’s on her own.”

  He nodded.

  Jo took the drawing out of his hand. “I wonder why she wrote I am sorry .”

  “I know. It’s creepy,” he said.

  “Please don’t tell me you think that little girl killed someone.”

  “Who knows what happened? That’s why you should have taken her to the police right away.”

  Jo returned the drawing to the table. “You know, I’m tired of your sudden virtue. I think you’ve forgotten you were the one who decided we should keep her until we found out more about her.”

  “You’re doing it again,” he said.

  “What am I doing?”

  “You attack me to avoid the problem with Ursa.”

  “Who avoids the problem of Ursa more than you? You dumped us like we were stray cats you didn’t want to deal with anymore—only I know you’d have treated cats better.”

  He came close, right up in her face. “That was a shitty thing to say!”

  “It was a shitty thing to do.”

  “I had to do something. We’re already in big trouble. Don’t you get that, Jo? We could be arrested for kidnapping and put in jail.”

  She kept her eyes on his. “That’s not why you dumped us.”

  He couldn’t maintain eye contact. And that revealed much more than he’d tried to hide by looking away. Aware that she was onto him, he turned to leave.

  Without thinking, she grabbed his forearm. “Don’t,” she said.

  He faced her, his features carefully sculpted. “Don’t what ?”

  “Don’t close yourself off from me. We need to talk about what’s happening between us.”

  His detached facade faded into outright fear.

  At least he knew what she was talking about. “Can’t we be honest with each other?”

  He stepped back, pulling his arm free of her hand. “I have been honest. I’m fucked up. You know I can’t do this.”

  “You aren’t fucked up.”

  “No?” He wrapped his arms around his chest. “I’ve never been with a woman. How fucked up is that?”

  “Clever,” she said.

  He unfolded his arms. “What is?”

  “You remind me of Ursa—always fortifying the fortress walls, even against the people who fight on your side.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “You’re hoping I’ll be shocked and turned off by a twenty-five-year-old guy who’s never been with a woman. You said that to get rid of me—just like you use your illness to keep me at a distance.”

  His jaw clenched, and he glanced at the stairs.

  “Please don’t run out on me right now.”

  “We have to find Ursa,” he said.

  “Is that really all you have to say?”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  She looked down at Ursa’s drawing of the grave. In the dark rectangle that enclosed the dead woman, she saw the empty crematory box that had held her mother’s cindered remains. After she’d fulfilled her mother’s last wishes—poured her ashes into a cold roll of whitecaps on Lake Michigan—Jo couldn’t discard the box, dusted with the pale powder of her mother’s body. She still had it. Its emptiness was always there, hidden inside her, a void where her mother’s love had been and, more tangibly, where her femal
e body parts had been.

  He was looking at the grave with her.

  “I’m as afraid as you are, you know,” she said.

  He raised his eyes from the drawing to hers.

  “Remember that feeling you described—the ‘horrific crush of humanity’ on your soul—maybe that’s another way of saying you’re afraid people will hurt you if you let them get close.”

  He kept silent. But how would he know how to respond if he’d never experienced intimacy?

  “When you said you’d never been with a woman, did that include kissing?” she asked.

  “I didn’t know how to be with girls in high school. I had social anxiety.”

  “Never kissed?”

  “Never.”

  Where they stood, high in the dark forest, felt like a fulcrum, a pinnacle of honesty they’d finally achieved. Ursa had steered them where she wanted them, but any second their unsteady emotions could tip them off that tiny point of balance. Ursa had to be found, certainly, but Jo knew she was safely hidden and not in any real danger. The only danger of the moment was that Jo—and Gabe—might let those seconds pass away without seeing them as Ursa did, as her own teeny tweak of fate in a vast and miraculous universe, as a wondrous gift she was offering to them.

  Jo turned off her flashlight and set it on the desk next to her. She tugged his flashlight out of his hand and flicked it off. He startled, moving backward in the sudden darkness. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “Making it easier for you.”

  “Making what easier?”

  “Your first kiss.”

  20

  She had no trouble finding him in the darkness. His body was radiating heat—and maybe fear. He recoiled a little when she put her palms against his chest. She slid her hands up his neck. His skin was warm and humid, like the summer night around them. She ran her hands through his beard and touched her lips to his. Once he got the hang of it, she pressed closer. He’d showered before he went to bed, but the smell of his fit body, with tinges of forest and farm, overpowered the light fragrance of soap. “I love the way you smell.”

  “You do?”

  “I have a weirdly primitive sense of smell.” She slipped her hands under the bottom edge of his T-shirt and pushed it upward. She placed her face against his skin and breathed him in. “Mmm . . .”

  “Jo . . .”

  She tilted her face up to his. “What?”

  He touched his mouth to hers. An exceptional kiss.

  After they parted lips, she pressed her body against his. He wanted it, too, holding her tighter. They fit together with ease, as if their bodies had known this outcome and prepared for it since the day they first met out on the road. They melted into one another and into the night. She hadn’t believed darkness could ever feel that good again.

  “Is this too much crush on your soul?” she asked.

  “It’s the perfect amount of soul crushing,” he said.

  But Ursa was there with them. Jo was haunted by the drawing of the grave. “I wish we could do this all night,” she said, “but we have to find Ursa.”

  He pulled back but kept one hand on her waist. “I think I know where she is. It’s the only place left to look.”

  “Then she better be there.”

  He felt around for a flashlight. Jo found one first and turned it on. A man often looked different to her after the first release of sexual tension—as if he were somehow softer, especially in the eyes—and she wondered if Gabe saw her differently. He was staring intently.

  “Where do you think she is?”

  “In the little cabin. My dad built it when our family outgrew the big cabin. Lacey’s boys loved staying out there alone when they got old enough.”

  “Ursa knew about it?”

  “I showed it to her one day. You always have to keep that girl’s brain stimulated.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  He held her hand on the way to the stairs, letting it go with reluctance as he led the way down. They descended from the giddy atmosphere of the treetops to the soft earth of the forest. “This way,” he said.

  They passed the GABE’S HOMESTEAD sign and turned onto a new trail. After a few minutes, Jo saw the little cabin in Gabe’s flashlight beam. The rustic tin-roofed structure reminded her of a summer camp cabin. It was made of unpainted cedar shingles and elevated about three feet from the ground on wooden poles. “This is beautiful,” she said. “Who’d ever think a literature professor would be so good at building things?”

  “Arthur Nash was what you’d call a Renaissance man. He could do anything.”

  She followed him up the wooden stairs and onto a screened porch with two rocking chairs that faced the woods. He slowly opened a wooden door, its rusted hinges whining from lack of use. The door led to a small open area with a table and chairs, behind it two sleeping rooms. Gabe shined his light into the left bedroom, while Jo looked in the right. “Here,” Gabe said. Jo went to him and saw Ursa curled on her side on the lower bunk of a two-tiered bed. She still had on the blue flower-print pajamas she’d worn to bed, and she’d brought the afghan from the porch couch to use as a pillow. Her eyelids quivered in a dream state.

  “Don’t say anything about the grave drawing,” Jo whispered. “Not tonight.”

  He nodded.

  She turned off her light and sat on the edge of the lower bunk. She stroked Ursa’s hair. “Come on, Big Bear, wake up,” she said.

  Ursa’s soulful brown eyes opened, and her first sleepy words confirmed the strategy behind her elopement. “Is Gabe here?”

  “I am,” Gabe said. He walked over, keeping his flashlight out of her eyes. “Jo and I have decided you have to sleep in a locked dog crate from now on.”

  Ursa sat up. “No I don’t.”

  “You’ll get used to it.”

  She smiled drowsily.

  He crouched in front of her like he had the night she got lost on the creek. “Get on my back and I’ll carry you home.”

  “That’s too far to carry her,” Jo said.

  “Then I’ll take her to your car and ride home with you.”

  “You will?” Ursa said.

  “Yep. Climb aboard. The Gabriel Express is leaving.”

  Ursa scrambled up onto his back.

  “Look who’s enabling her now,” Jo muttered. “How did that happen?”

  He carried Ursa out the door, a covert smile peeking from under his beard. Jo bundled the afghan into her arms and followed. When they arrived at the car, Gabe deposited Ursa into the back seat and sat next to her.

  “Are you sure you can leave your mom?” Jo said. “What if she has to go to the bathroom?”

  “She still manages that herself, thank god. But her balance is getting worse, and she refuses to use the walker Lacey bought.”

  Jo looked at him in the rearview mirror as she began to drive. Ursa was snuggled against his chest, and he had his arms around her. She hated to take her eyes off them but had to confront the rutted road ahead. “Damn it,” she said when the chassis scraped bottom. “Your road is ruining my mom’s car.”

  “This was hers?” he said.

  “Yes.” Jo turned left on Turkey Creek Road and drove to the Kinney property, where Little Bear, locked on the screened porch, barked rowdily.

  Gabe carried Ursa into the house. He tried to lay her on the couch, but she sat up. “You have to sleep,” he said.

  “Don’t leave,” she said.

  “I’ll stay right here. Go to sleep.” He covered her with a blanket as she put her head on the pillow. Jo kept the house dark, turning only the stove light on.

  “Why are you nice again?” Ursa asked him.

  “I’m always nice,” he said.

  “Not sometimes.”

  “Close your eyes.” He sat on the edge of the couch, his arm resting across her as she fell asleep. Jo sat in the chair next to them. When Ursa’s breathing became deep and regular, Gabe motioned to the front door. They stepped out of the cooled cottage i
nto the sultry forest.

  “I’ll drive you home,” Jo said.

  “I’d rather walk,” he said.

  “Need to expend the first-kiss energy?”

  “Is that what this is? To expend it all, I’d have to walk thirty miles.”

  “Same here. Maybe a good-night peck will help.” She wrapped her arms around him and gave him more than a peck.

  “I think that made it worse.” He held her, looking at the house over her shoulder. “It’s so strange that I love coming here now. I used to hate this house. I hadn’t looked at it for years until that day you asked me to bring over the eggs.”

  Jo pulled out of his arms. “Why would you hate it? I thought you were close with the Kinneys?”

  “Not really.”

  “You said George Kinney taught you about aquatic insects.”

  “He did.”

  “Well, your mom obviously likes him, so it must be your dad who didn’t.”

  “Arthur and George had a weird love-hate relationship.”

  “Why?”

  “Arthur had the kind of confident intelligence that was always on display. He had to be the smartest guy in the room, the one who had the last brilliant word on any topic. George is as smart and confident as him, but in a quiet way. I don’t know what he’s like now, but when I was a kid, George Kinney was . . . it was like he knew actual mysteries of the universe, but he was too laid-back to care about sharing them.”

  “Silent waters run deep?”

  “Definitely, and George’s quiet confidence bothered Arthur. Arthur would try to undermine him with these underhanded jabs that he disguised as jokes. Like, he often pointed out that George was a ‘bug picker’ at the University of Illinois while he was a lit scholar at the University of Chicago.”

  “Geez, poor George.”

  “You don’t have to feel sorry for him. It rolled off George like water off a duck. He’d laugh along, and Arthur would end up looking like a jerk. Somehow, George always got the upper hand. Arthur dominated social situations with funny stories and intellectual discussions, and then there would be George, quietly collecting the smartest people in the room with his few carefully selected words.”

  “He didn’t have to work at it.”

  “Right.”

  “That’s why your dad and George stopped being friends?”