Where the Forest Meets the Stars(39)

Ursa fell quiet, tears dripping down her cheeks. The rain and thunder diminished, the only sound in the car the intermittent swish of windshield wipers. On the outskirts of Marion, Gabe slowed behind another car at a stop sign. Before the Honda came to a full stop, Ursa popped open her seat belt, flipped the lock, and slammed the door behind her. Jo scooted across the seat, but Ursa had already sprinted into a thicket at the edge of the woods. By the time Jo pushed through the dense vegetation, Ursa had vanished. “Ursa!” she shouted. “Ursa, come back!”
Gabe emerged from the undergrowth, scanning the trees. “She must be hiding. She can’t have gotten far that fast.” He jogged a short way into the forest and stopped. “Ursa, I know you can hear me!” he called. “Come out and we’ll talk about it, okay?”
“Ursa, please!” Jo shouted. “Please come out!”
They searched behind all the trees that were big enough to hide her.
“She’s still running,” Jo said. “We’ll never find her!”
“Ursa!” Gabe shouted as loud as he could. “If you come out, we won’t go to the hospital.”
They waited. Rain dripped from the trees. A chickadee scolded.
“She’s gone,” Jo said.
“Looks like she is.” He saw that Jo was about to cry. “We’ll find her. Let’s drive down the road in the direction she went.”
“Was that a promise?” Ursa said behind them.
They turned around. She was standing at the edge of the roadside thicket.
“I’ll run again if you don’t promise to take me home,” she said.
“But . . . where is your home?” Gabe said.
“My home on Earth is with Jo!” she shouted.
“Ursa . . .”
“You aren’t my friend if you don’t do what you said! You said we wouldn’t go to the hospital!”
“We won’t,” Jo said.
“Do you promise?”
“Yes.” Jo walked toward her slowly to keep her calm. “How is your head?”
“It’s okay.”
When Jo reached her, she lifted her hair to assess the cut. “Look, it’s stopped bleeding,” she said to Gabe.
“Because she has the hardest goddamn head I ever saw. Where the hell were you?”
“In a metal thing,” Ursa said. “It’s in here.” She led them into the thicket and showed them the opening of a corrugated drainage pipe, rainwater swirling out of it. They would never have found her in there.
“I give up,” Gabe said. “This alien is way too smart for me.”
“Can we go home?” Ursa said.
“We’re going home,” Jo said.


16

Jo had hardly stopped the Honda when Ursa jumped out, grabbed a stick, and threw it for Little Bear. All the way home she’d been manic, trying to prove that the blow to her head hadn’t done any damage.
Jo unlocked the front door of the house. “Ursa, inside for a bath.”
“You mean a shower?” Ursa said.
“No, I don’t want you standing up.”
“I’m okay.”
“At the very least, your head has to hurt. Do what I said. I’ll be in the bathroom to help in a minute.”
“I don’t need help,” Ursa said, though she obediently walked inside.
Still cloaked in his bloodstained shirt, Gabe put his backpack in the back of his truck. “She looks good.”
“I think a lot of that is fake,” Jo said.
He laid the bloody shirt they’d used to put pressure on Ursa’s cut next to the backpack.
“Will you come back after you clean up?” she asked.
“Do you want me to?”
“I do. What if I can’t wake her up in the middle of the night or something like that?”
“That’s the risk we’re taking by letting her call the shots.”
“Come on . . . I feel bad enough.”
He gently touched her arm. “I’ll be back soon.”
“You’re welcome to have dinner with us,” she said.
“Are you sure you have enough? Your fridge looked pretty bare when I put things away last night.”
“I know. We’ll have to do omelets with the eggs you brought.”
“I’ll bring something over to cook. Let me handle dinner. You look beat.”
“You must be about the same.”
His weary smile confirmed it. “We’ll manage. I’ll see you soon.”
Jo had Ursa undress and sit in warm water. After she cleaned the wound on Ursa’s scalp, she gave her the soapy cloth and let her wash her body. Ursa came out of the bathroom wearing the pink Hello Kitty pajamas she and Gabe had bought at a yard sale. She didn’t want to lie down on the couch while Jo showered, but Jo made her.
Jo bathed and dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. When she emerged from the bathroom, Gabe was already in the kitchen cooking. “Hope you don’t mind if Ursa let me in,” he said. “I wanted to get dinner on as fast as possible.” He was seasoning a chicken in a roasting pan, and he’d brought bread stuffing to cook on the stove top.
“This looks great,” Jo said.
“I want to make the stuffing, but he won’t let me,” Ursa said.
“Because you’re supposed to be resting,” Gabe said. “Go back to the couch.”
“I’m not an invalid,” she said on her way to the living room.
“Invalid,” Gabe said. “My sister doesn’t use vocabulary like that, and she’s a writer.”