Where the Forest Meets the Stars(17)

Jo took her arms off her chest. “This is how I want it. Now that I’ve experienced the chest freedom a guy has, I’ll never go back.”
He half smiled, assuming her humor came from bitterness. “I can see why you would want that after everything that happened. But at least your mom was diagnosed in time to save you.” He tilted his head to one side to crack his neck. “I mean . . .”
“I know what you mean, and you’re right. She even said it herself. No one gets a mammogram at age twenty-four. If she hadn’t gotten sick and found out she carries the mutation, my cancer might not have been found until it was too late.”
“I hope you don’t mind that I know, but I heard you made them take out everything.”
“They didn’t take out everything. I kept my uterus. I’m pretty sure they left in most of my brain, too.”
He didn’t smile this time. “Maybe you should have waited to make that decision.”
He was probably expressing opinions exchanged between professors and graduate students during the two years she’d been away. “My mom’s mother and sister died of ovarian cancer before age forty-five,” she said. “I wasn’t going to sit around waiting for that time bomb to explode.”
“Didn’t you save the eggs or anything?”
“Why, so I can pass this misery on to a daughter?”
“I see your point. But what about the hormones?”
“What about them?”
“Doesn’t having no ovaries make you go into menopause?”
He’d definitely been discussing her medical decisions. He’d probably never uttered the word menopause before she’d been diagnosed. “I’m on hormone replacement therapy,” Jo said.
“Does that make you feel normal?”
She supposed kicking him in the nuts wouldn’t appear very normal. Instead, she said, “Yeah, I feel great.”
He nodded, tipped the bottle to his lips, and drained it. “You know that actress”—he tried to remember the woman’s name, but his brain cells were too pickled—“she had one of those mutations, too, and she had everything taken out. She had reconstruction, and they say she has really nice . . . you know . . .”
“She has really nice tits because she’s rich enough to make her body any way she wants it. And she never had cancer. She could save her nipples and any skin and tissue that wasn’t at risk.”
He got brave enough to look at her chest. “But don’t you think someday you’ll—”
“No! Get over it! If I’m happy with what I look like, you should be happy with it. Do you get that, Tanner? Is it even possible for you to see me as a whole person anymore?”
“Shit . . . Jo, I’m sorry . . .”
“Go back to Carly. And you two can quit pretending you aren’t together to spare me the grief. There isn’t any.” She walked away into a numbing black cloud of cricket and katydid noise. It was like going under anesthesia, the darkness driving deeper and deeper the farther she walked. When she came out, she was standing next to the creek. She’d been crying.
“Jo?”
She turned around. In the shadowed moonlight, the girl looked like a changeling again, her pale face marked with the veins of forest branches.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Of course,” Jo said.
“I think you’re lying.”
The sound of Little Bear lapping water from the creek filled the space between them.
“Ursa, you have to—”
“I know. I’m going,” she said.
“You’re going home?”
She unscrewed the lid of the jar and held the glass in the air. Her fireflies discovered their freedom one by one, an expanding constellation in the dark forest. She put the lid back and gave the jar to Jo. “Come on, Little Bear,” she said.
Jo watched girl and dog walk up the slope toward the road. “Where are you going?”
“I’m going where you want me to go,” she said.


7

Jo worked an exhausting fifteen hours in the Shawnee Forest the next day, as much to purge Tanner Bruce from her mind as to make up for lost time after the rainy day. Maybe she also did it to prove she wasn’t sick. She monitored and searched for nests in all of her “natural edge” study sites, the most difficult to work in because they had to be far from human disturbances, and once she reached them, she often had to wade through riparian thickets of catbrier and stinging nettle.
The sun had dropped behind the treetops when she, and the variety of creatures that had attached to her, climbed into the Honda. Exercise and the green world had rejuvenated her, as they always did. Tanner and his loutish opinions were still with her but ignorable, like a malfunctioning idiot light on a car dashboard.
But she couldn’t clear the little alien from her thoughts. From the moment she awoke, Jo had chastised herself for not seeing the girl to her door, though she doubted the girl had gone home. When Ursa walked away she’d said, I’m going where you want me to go . The more Jo tried to interpret what that meant, the more ominous it sounded. Yet she’d just stood there and watched the girl disappear into the night.
She turned onto Turkey Creek Road, certain the girl would be at Kinney Cottage waiting for her. Then she would wish the girl had disappeared. In the last bit of gray twilight, she pulled up the gravel driveway. She looked at the hickory in the front yard. No girl. No dog.
She dropped her gear on the screened porch and walked to the fire pit. “Ursa?” she called. The only reply was the peent! of a nighthawk foraging over the field behind the house.