After breakfast they bought Ursa colored pencils and art paper and Jo purchased a new cell phone. Jo walked Gabe to the parking garage. He gave Jo his two room keys. And for the first time since they’d been together, they exchanged phone numbers. “I guess we’re a normal couple now,” Jo said.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” he said.
“Can I go so far as to say, I love you? I know it’s not the most romantic place to say it the first time—in front of a parking garage and all . . .”
“I love you, too, Jo.” They pressed their bodies together, Jo’s crutches clattering to the ground. People stared as they walked by.
Jo acutely felt his absence as she walked to the hospital. Ursa missed him, too.
The sentry policeman was gone. Later that day, Jo heard Nathan Todd had been arrested. Ursa was moved to a regular room in the children’s hospital the next day. Jo was allowed to visit as much as she wanted except during her counseling sessions. Those hours gave Jo time out to have a meal or to buy something for Ursa to keep her mind occupied.
Keeping Ursa engaged wasn’t easy. After several days, she was bored with books, drawing, and TV. Jo brought her an adult puzzle—a picture of a doe and fawn standing in a wooded scene that looked like Ursa’s beloved magic forest. They were working on putting the outer edge together when someone knocked on the half-open door. Lacey entered, two stuffed kittens in her hands. “Am I intruding?” she asked.
“Not at all,” Jo said.
Lacey held up the beanbag kittens, one white and one gray. “I know they aren’t as good as the real thing, but these are supposed to be Juliet and Hamlet.”
“Gabe told you their names?” Ursa said.
“He told me all their names,” Lacey said. “You did a great job naming them.” When she held out the kittens, Ursa looked at Jo, apparently suspicious of Lacey’s intentions.
“Go on, and you know what to say,” Jo said.
Ursa took the kittens. “Thank you,” she said. She lifted the tabby cat, Caesar, off her pillow and laid the three kittens together. “I only need Olivia, Macbeth, and Othello now.”
“You look like you’re feeling well,” Lacey said.
“I am,” Ursa said. “Tomorrow or the next day they’ll let me go to Urbana with Jo. I’m going to live with her and Tabby.”
“That sounds nice,” Lacey said.
“But that’s more wishful thinking than reality,” Jo said.
“It’s not!” Ursa said.
“If it’s not, no one told me, love bug.”
“Maybe they didn’t tell you yet, but I know it’s going to happen.”
Jo got off the bed. “Have a seat,” she told Lacey, pulling out a chair.
“I can’t stay,” Lacey said. “I wanted to see how Ursa is doing and talk with you for a few minutes. Would you mind a quick chat out in the waiting room?”
“Of course not.” She told Ursa, “Find more edge pieces while I’m gone.”
“Will you come back and help?” she asked.
“I will, but I have to leave soon. Dr. Shaley will be here in thirty minutes.”
“I don’t want to talk to her!”
“Can we please not have this discussion every time?” Jo said.
“She talks about stupid things!”
“She’s trying to help you. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Jo was curious about what had caused Lacey’s transformation. Even her face looked different, calm and radiant, and her torn jeans and bright peasant blouse matched her mysteriously relaxed mood. They sat in a colorful room decorated to cheer sick children. “How are things going?” Lacey asked.
“Depends on which things you mean.”
“I hope you won’t be angry, but Gabe told me you might be charged with a child endangerment felony. He said the police told you not to travel outside of Illinois when you return home.”
Jo was peeved, and a little surprised, he would talk about her situation with his sister.
“He also said you’re unlikely to become Ursa’s foster parent, even though you’re obviously the one who should get her.”
Maybe Lacey had an identical twin sister Gabe didn’t know about. Another family secret.
“The social workers haven’t said anything to you?” Lacey asked.
“They haven’t, and I take that to be a bad sign. But you saw how Ursa is counting on it.” She looked out the window at slices of blue sky enclosed in buildings. “Sometimes I think I’m doing the wrong thing sticking around here. Maybe I’m making everything worse for her.”
“Then why do you?”
“Because I care about what happens to her. I think I have a stabilizing effect on her, and she’s been to hell and back.”
“I guess you two have that in common.”
Jo wasn’t sure if she meant the cancer and her mother dying, the shooting, or both. If she meant the cancer, she had to have found out from Gabe.
“So the reason I’m here . . . Gabe doesn’t know, by the way.”
“What doesn’t he know?”
“That I’m here. He also doesn’t know I talked to my husband about your situation. Troy is a family law attorney. He mostly handles divorces, but he occasionally does child custody and adoption cases. If you’ll let him, he wants to help you, and he’ll do it free of cost.”
“I have money.”
“We wouldn’t feel right about taking money from Gabe’s girlfriend.”
“I’m his girlfriend now?” Jo said.
Lacey knew the comment was sarcasm, but she smiled. “Didn’t you know?”
“I guess I didn’t get the Nash family memo.”
“Well, the rest of us have.”
An apology. Subtle, but Jo still welcomed it. “I appreciate the thumbs-up.”
“It was Gabe,” she said.
“What was?”
“Before I left for Saint Louis, he called a family meeting. When the time came, George Kinney knocked on the door. He’d been over at his property fixing the broken doors. He was as clueless as me about what was going on. Gabe just told him to be there.”
Jo smiled. Wonder of wonders, Gabe had pulled a Katherine.
Lacey studied her face. “You knew what he was going to do?”
“I didn’t, but I can guess what he did when he got you together.”
“He told us the whole thing! About how George and my mom’s affair began and how they and my father had agreed that Gabe should never know he was George’s son. Obviously, my mom and George knew all that. But they were shocked when he told them he’d seen them make love in the forest and found out he wasn’t Arthur’s son. He said that was why he’d started hating them. And then he said the most amazing thing.”
“What?”
“He told them he forgave them. He said now that he was in love with you, he understood everything they’d done. He said he would rather have died the night the guy pointed the gun at you than watch you die. He said love like that can’t be stopped by anything, and he was happy he was born of that kind of passion.”
Jo didn’t care if Lacey saw her cry.
“I know! All four of us were bawling our eyes out. It was the best fucking thing that ever happened in my family.” She opened her shoulder bag and took out two tissues, handing one to Jo. “George has felt little more than responsibility for his wife since she wrecked her body with booze,” she said, dabbing the remaining tissue under her eyes. “He and my mom are getting married. George asked Gabe and me if that was okay.”
“Are you okay with it?”
“I’m thrilled! We even had an engagement party. I stayed one more night, and we had the best time, grilling ribs and drinking beers. Gabe and I were up late talking, and we vented all the bullshit that’s been between us for years.”
Jo found it difficult to believe they could get over that much so fast.
“I’m sure he told you how I treated him when he was little,” she added, as if she’d read Jo’s thoughts.
Jo wouldn’t betray anything Gabe had told her in confidence.
Lacey understood her silence. “I guess he did,” she said. “I know it’s no excuse, but I got bad depression around the time Gabe was born. I felt fat and ugly, and I knew my writing was shit. And there was Gabe, this perfect, beautiful little boy. So damn smart, too. I was so fucking jealous of him.”
“Did you know he was George’s baby?”
“I’d suspected my mother was having an affair with George. And one night before Gabe was born, my father got really drunk and told me. He was crying—” She choked up and wiped new tears. “I blamed that poor kid for everything. For my mother not loving my father. For how crushed my father was. Even for my depression. And when my father couldn’t help adoring that perfect little kid, I totally lost it. I felt abandoned at a time when I really needed my father, when I gave up on writing.”
Jo put her hand on Lacey’s hand. “I’m sorry. It was a worse situation than I imagined. Do you still suffer from depression?”
She nodded. “But thank god for my husband. He’s always been there for me. Even when he should have dumped me.” Fresh tears arose.