“A pinwheel?”
“It looks like an indigo bunting nest. And the white stars are the eggs.”
“I have to see this.” Jo got off the chair and looked in the telescope. Ursa was right. The ethereal swirl was a celestial nest filled with white star eggs. “Okay, this is the coolest thing I ever saw. It’s like an indigo bunting nest viewed from above. They often have that messy shape around the edges.”
Gabe took another turn looking. “I see it. And the nest’s center spirals down into infinity. I like that so much better than a pinwheel. The Infinite Nest. From now on, that’s how I’ll see it.”
“That’s where I live,” Ursa said. “I live in the Infinite Nest.”
“Lucky girl,” Jo said, ruffling her hair with her fingers.
Ursa bounced manically like she was about to rocket into the stars. “Can I toast marshmallows?”
“Ursa . . . I’m too tired to light a fire.”
“I will,” Gabe said. “Get the marshmallows, Lady of the Nest.”
Ursa ran to the back door.
“Is that okay?” he asked.
“I’ve been up since four thirty,” Jo said. Ursa had, too, but Gabe’s unexpected visit had energized her.
“Sit down and rest,” Gabe said. “I’ll monitor the marshmallow toasting with better judgment than I had earlier today.” He started throwing twigs into the fire pit. “That was an apology, by the way.”
“Okay.” She returned to her lawn chair. “And I apologize for saying you’re a dumb Shakespeare reader.”
“I’m a Shakespeare reader who sells eggs on the road—which amounts to about the same.” He studied her face. “You must wonder why I sell eggs and don’t have a regular job.”
“That’s none of my business,” she said, though she had often pondered that very question.
“I sell eggs because my hens produce far more than I can use.” He looked away from her and took more sticks out of the woodpile. “But the egg stand is also therapy.”
“How is it therapy?”
He looked at her again. “For social anxiety, depression, and a touch of agoraphobia.”
She sat up in her chair to see how serious he was.
“Don’t worry, I’m okay with Ursa. I wouldn’t hurt her or anything.”
Ursa ran outside and plopped the bag of marshmallows on a lawn chair.
“Would you please bring a lighter?” Gabe said.
She ran back to the house.
“Why would I think you’d hurt Ursa just because you have depression?” Jo said.
He shrugged. “Lots of people don’t understand mental illness.”
“Where’s the lighter, Jo?” Ursa called from the back door.
“The drawer by the toaster.”
“It’s not there.”
“That means Shaw and company put it in the wrong place. You’ll have to look around.” She turned back to Gabe. “Does medication help?” she asked.
“I blew off the doctors when they tried to put me on drugs.”
“When was that?”
“A few years ago. When I was a sophomore at U of C, I had what my parents quaintly called a ‘nervous breakdown.’ I haven’t gotten my shit together since.”
“University of Chicago? Where your father taught?”
“Yeah, major embarrassment, right? And all his dreams for his only son down the outhouse hole.” He cracked a branch over his knee and tossed the pieces into the fire pit.
“Gabe, I’m sorry.”
“Why? It’s not like it’s anyone’s fault. You can’t pick your genetics.”
“Tell me about it. My breast cancer was caused by the BRCA1 mutation, if you know what that means.”
“Shit, yeah, I do.”
Ursa returned with the lighter. “You know where they put it? In your desk drawer.”
“Weird,” Jo said. “I hope that wasn’t a subtle judgment about my research.”
Gabe ignited a flame on the lighter and grinned. “I promise I won’t go near your data.”
“You better not,” Jo said.
As he lit the twigs in the fire pit, Ursa went off in search of a marshmallow stick.
“I shouldn’t have brought up the cancer,” Jo said. “I didn’t mean to minimize what you told me.”
“Go ahead, minimize it—if only.”
“You never seem anxious to me. You’re more sociable than lots of people I know.”
“Yeah? I guess the egg stand has helped. But take me out of my realm and kaplooey.”
“Is that why you hate the grocery store?”
He nodded. “If the line is long, sometimes I have to leave.”
“Why?”
“The horrific crush of humanity on my soul. Haven’t you ever felt it?”
“I think I have—in Walmart.”
“Yes! That place is the worst!”
Ursa returned with a stick and poked it into three marshmallows.
“Nice,” Gabe said. “One for me, one for Jo, and another for me.”
“All for me!” Ursa said.
Jo fell asleep watching them roast marshmallows, thinking how cute they were together. She woke to Gabe’s fingers brushing her cheek. “There was a mosquito on you,” he said.
“I’ve probably fed the whole forest.”
“You haven’t. I’ve been keeping watch.”
She tried to shake off her drowsiness. “On me?”
“On you.” He was looking at her as if he might kiss her, and the rush of adrenaline straight from sleep made her feel strange. Dizzy, almost. Her heart jumped against the bones of her chest, as if it were trying to escape.
She sat up to see if Ursa had seen him touch her. She was asleep in a lawn chair on the other side of the fire, melted marshmallow stuck to her chin.
Jo stood shakily. “Ursa has to go to bed. She gets up early.”
“I know,” he said, rising next to her. “I wanted to take her but didn’t know where. Does she sleep in your bed or on the couch?”
“The couch.”
He lifted her out of the chair. “Gabe?” Ursa mumbled.
“Don’t wake up,” he said. “I’ll take you to bed.”
After they disappeared into the house, Jo watered down the fire.
“I could have done that,” Gabe said from the kitchen door. He came outside, took the hose from her hand, and coiled it over the spigot.
“Where is the telescope?” she asked.
“I put it away.”
“How long was I asleep?”
“About fifteen degrees of star movement.” He stood close to her, his face lit by the fluorescent stove light inside the house. She saw what he wanted. He wanted to sleep with her.
The stuttering beat in her chest returned. Was it hormonal, something to do with the surgeries? Why did a man coming on to her—a kindhearted, good-looking one, at that—make her body react like she was confronting a pissed-off grizzly?
She tried to remember how she used to respond when a guy she was attracted to came on too strong or too fast. She’d have made a joke to tone things down a little. The humor would have come easily because she’d be confident and relaxed. And probably a little turned on by his interest. But Jo couldn’t find her, that self-possessed woman she used to be, and the discovery of her absence made her shudder like a fever had come over her. She had to hug her arms around her body to try to make it stop.
She had no idea what her terror looked like to Gabe. Whatever he saw, he backed away, his eyes alight with fluorescent panic.
“I think . . . you’d better go,” she said.
He vanished so fast she might have dreamed he’d been right there in front of her if she didn’t hear the rumble of his pickup fading into the distance.
10
Jo waited until five to wake Ursa because she’d been up late. “Can I go with you today?” Ursa asked while they ate bowls of Raisin Bran.
“Why?”
“I want to see what you do.”
“Yo
u saw.”
“I want to see those places way in the forest. Are you going there today?”
“I am.”
“Please!”
“It wouldn’t be as fun as going to Gabe’s farm.”
“Yes it would.”
“If you hate it, I can’t come back. You’ll be stuck out there with me.”
“I promise I won’t hate it.”
Jo didn’t see any harm in it, and having someone to talk to for a change might be enjoyable. “We have to tell Gabe, because he’s expecting you.”
“We will,” Ursa said.
“I don’t have his cell phone number.”
“We have to go there to tell him. I don’t even know if he has a phone.”
Jo made two sandwiches and packed extra water and snacks. She had Ursa change into long pants and a long-sleeved T-shirt Gabe had bought her at the yard sale. After Ursa put on her beloved purple gym shoes, Jo showed her how to tuck her pants into her socks and her shirt into her pants to prevent ticks from crawling inside her clothing.
Before they locked the house, Ursa poured a big bowl of dog food. Jo had given in to buying it when she agreed to “wait awhile” with Ursa. Each morning they fed the dog at the rear door to distract him while they made a quick getaway down Turkey Creek Road.
Jo stopped the Honda at Gabe’s potholed lane, nocturnal insects swooping in the beams of the car’s headlights. “I hate this road. It tears up my car.”
Ursa unbuckled. “Then wait here. You wouldn’t know how to find him anyway.” She jumped out and disappeared at a run down the dark driveway. Minutes later, she returned breathless and got in the car.
“What did he say?”
“He said okay.”
“That’s all?”
“He was busy.”
“Doing what?”
“Fixing the hog pen gate. But he might be mad,” she added, buckling her seat belt.
“Why do you say that?”
“Usually he’s happy when he sees me in the morning, but he wasn’t. Do you think he wanted me to stay with him instead of go with you?”
“I’m sure he’s just busy with the gate.”
There was more to it than that. Now rested and thinking clearly, Jo replayed the previous night’s events in her mind and decided she’d misinterpreted Gabe’s behavior. If he had social anxiety, there was no way he’d wanted to sleep with a woman he hardly knew. He probably hadn’t almost kissed her either. Jo had panicked, maybe because she’d felt a connection with him—her first since her surgeries. She’d given the poor guy mixed signals, and even worse, he might think she’d rejected him because of what he’d confessed about his depression. If she’d opened up to a man about her cancer and he suddenly rebuffed her, she’d have been as hurt.
“Shit,” Jo said under her breath.
“What’s wrong?” Ursa said.
“Nothing.”
They began at North Fork Creek, the most distant of her “natural edge” study sites. As always, Ursa was unfazed by the hardships of a new environment. No matter how dense, wet, or prickly the creek-side vegetation, she never complained. Even pesky mosquitoes and ticks crawling up her clothes didn’t bother her.
Jo explained their three goals: monitoring the nests she’d already found, finding new nests, and downloading data from nest cameras onto her laptop. She showed Ursa how to search for nests by watching the birds’ movements and listening for alarm calls, which might mean they were protecting a nearby nest. Ursa immediately recognized how alarm calls were different from other bird sounds, and she often went off on her own to investigate when she heard one.
After North Fork, they went to the Jessie Branch study site, and after that, to Summers Creek, the prettiest of Jo’s study sites. Ursa didn’t find a nest all day, but she saw many eggs and baby birds. She also spotted a doe and her fawn, caught a leopard frog, watched a hummingbird drink nectar from cardinal flowers, and took a swim with minnows in a creek pool to cool off.
The pool was Jo’s favorite resting point. While Ursa played in the water, Jo turned on her cell phone and discovered three messages from Tabby. Tabby’s first text at nine thirty in the morning said, OMG, the peony and iris house is for rent.
The second text had come at one fifteen. I talked to owner. Lots of interest. Will go fast.
The third text—sent a minute later—said, Answer damn you! And get your ass up here!
Jo and Tabby had been apartment-mates for years, but when Jo returned to graduate school after her cancer treatment, they decided they would look for a rental house, a place with actual trees around it. The peony and iris house was on a jogging route they’d been running in Urbana since their junior year of undergrad. It was a little white clapboard house with a porch, and the first time they saw it, a profusion of peonies and irises colored the front yard. The house was ideally located in the quaint neighborhood just east of campus known as the “state streets.”
Can you grab it? Jo sent.
The text went through after about twenty seconds. Tabby was on phone sentry. She responded immediately. She says she needs us both to sign. In hurry to rent. Someone in Maine is sick and she’s going up there.
Jo knew that sudden upheaval all too well.
Tabby texted, Please come! I love this house! U have to see inside! And the backyard OMG!
While she had some reception, Jo checked the weather for the next day: 70 percent chance of rain. She would probably have a short field day anyway.
I’ll be there around noon tomorrow. Ask her to hold it.
Tabby texted back. Will try. Meet at house. Love U! She sent an emoji of a monkey with its hand on its mouth and a pair of lips, her “monkey-blown” kiss.
Jo put the phone in her backpack and watched Ursa try to catch fish with her hands. “You need a net,” she called to her.
“Do you have one?”
“I saw one at Kinney Cottage. Maybe one day we can take it down to Turkey Creek and see what we find.”
“I want to! There’s a really pretty one in here, but I can’t get close enough to see him.”
“You’d better come out now. I need you to drip dry before we go back to the car.”
Ursa waded out of the chest-deep water and crossed the dry streambed to the big mossy rocks where they’d eaten lunch. She had a smudge of mud across her nose and cheek. Just like Jo at that age, a little mud hen, as her father used to call her.
“Where are we going now?” Ursa asked.
“Sadly, the best part is over. Now we’ll monitor and look for nests next to a cornfield until it gets dark.”
“That will be fun, too.”
“It will be hot. Good thing you cooled off.”
“Why don’t you?”
“Being wet isn’t good for handling data sheets.”
Ursa picked up a rock that caught her attention.
“Ursa . . . tomorrow I have to go up to where I live.”
She stopped rock hunting and looked at her. “The place called Champaign-Urbana?”
“Yes.”
“Can I come with you?”
Taking someone else’s kid on a trip was wrong on many levels. But Ursa couldn’t stay with Gabe because Jo might get home past the time she was allowed to stay at his farm. Gabe’s mother was already asking worrisome questions about Ursa and why she was at their farm every day.
“Can I?”
“Are you sure you want to?” Jo asked.
“Yes!”
“It will be boring. I’m going to look at a house.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m probably going to rent it. My friend and I want to move out of our apartment when our lease runs out in August.”
“It’s a real house?”
“It is, and that’s what’s so great about it. It even has a porch swing.”
Ursa turned away and threw the rocks she’d found into the pool. “I don’t want you to go live in that house.”
“I know you don’t, but I have to
leave when I’m done with my fieldwork. That’s why you need to tell me why you left your home. We have to figure out what to do before I go.”
Ursa faced her. “I told you why I left my home.”
“I wish you would trust me.”
“I do, but that doesn’t change anything.”
“What doesn’t it change? Tell me.”
“I’ll probably be gone by the time you leave anyway. I’ll have seen five miracles by then.”
11
Jo parked the Honda in the oak shade behind Tabby’s red VW Bug. Tabby climbed out of the VW dressed in purple Dr. Martens boots, jean cutoffs, and an orange University of Illinois T-shirt that belonged to Jo. Though she wore her amethyst nose stud and her brown hair was streaked with blue and purple, Jo had rarely seen her dressed so conservatively. She met Tabby on the street halfway between their cars and gave her a hug.
“You look great—all tan and shit,” Tabby said. “But more importantly, you look conventional. Maybe this lady will want to rent to us when she sees you.”
“Is that why you’re wearing my T-shirt?”
“I’m showing my school spirit. The lady’s father was a professor here.”
“It’s a fail on you.”
“Only because you know I don’t do rah-rah.” She looked at Jo’s windshield. “Were you aware that there’s a little girl in your car?”
“I am aware.”
Tabby stared at Ursa. “Oh my god . . .” She turned back to Jo. “Is this the girl, the one with bruises who wouldn’t go home?”
“Yes. Keep your voice down.”
“I thought you said she ran away?” Tabby whispered.
“Obviously, she came back.”
“Why the hell is she with you?”
“It’s complicated.”
“What does that mean?”
“What I said.”
Tabby glanced at Ursa again. “So this is what it’s like in Banjo Land? You just randomly collect kids?”
“Stop calling it that. Banjo Land is way south of Illinois.”
“You have to call the cops!” she whispered.
“I told you I did already! She’ll just run again. I’m trying to figure out what to do.”
“You have enough on your plate!”
“I know, but I had to do something. Be nice to her.” Jo walked around the front of the car to the passenger door. Normally Ursa would have gotten out by then, but she’d been reticent all morning, probably because seeing the house scared her about her future. Jo opened the door. “Ursa, this is Tabby. Tabby, meet my friend Ursa.”
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