“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 female 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 into the sultry forest.
“I’ll drive you home,” Jo said.