“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?” Tabby 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.”