Where the Forest Meets the Stars(89)

“How did you know that?”
“Ursa told us.”
“You pumped a little kid for information about me? Did you ever think to ask me?”
“We didn’t pump her. She told Dr. Shaley during their sessions.”
“That’s worse! She used psychotherapy to obtain information that would eliminate me!”
“Please help Ursa accept this. It’s the best way to love her.”
“I disagree, but I’ll try to convince her. I’m afraid she’s going to run and something awful will happen to her.”
“Don’t worry, these kids settle down.”
“These kids?” Jo didn’t trust her temper enough to stay in Lenora’s presence a second longer. She walked into Ursa’s room.
“Why are you mad?” Ursa said.
“I’m not.”
Ursa stared her. “What did Lenora say?”
Jo sat on the bed and told her. Ursa cried and protested. She was still crying when her doctor came in an hour later. Jo left the room so he could examine Ursa’s wound. When he came out, he said in a quiet voice, “Jo . . . I’m very sorry about what they decided. Most of us here believe they’ve made a mistake. We’ve seen how you are with her—the bond between you two.”
Jo nodded.
“I don’t even know if she would have recovered without you. When we were prepping her for surgery, she woke up. Despite incredible blood loss, she returned to consciousness to ask for you. I told her we had to fix her belly, and she said that was good because she’d come back from the stars to be with Jo, and Jo would be sad if she died.”
He saw that he’d made her cry. “God, I’m sorry. Did I make it worse telling you that?”
“No. Thank you. I appreciate your support.”
An hour and a half later, Jo cleared out for the new foster parents as Ursa cried bitterly. Jo went to her hotel and called Gabe. He wanted to come to Saint Louis to support her, but he couldn’t leave his mother. Lacey was with her family, and George was in Urbana with his daughters. George had decided to tell them that Gabe was his son. He didn’t want any more secrets in his family.
Jo didn’t return to the hospital that night. Maybe the foster parents would be there. She hoped they were. Spending lots of quality time with Ursa before the move was the only way to reduce her risk of running.
When Jo arrived at the children’s hospital the next morning, Lenora was waiting for her, clearly angry. “Did you even try to help her accept it?” Lenora asked.
“I did! Ask the nurses. I tried to reason with her for hours.”
Lenora searched Jo’s eyes and saw she was telling the truth.
“What happened?”
“A grand failure is what happened. You know what Ursa said to them?”
“What?”
“First she went on about being an alien. My foster parents were prepared for that because I’d warned them. But when smart little Ursa saw that wouldn’t scare them off, she told them she came from a planet of people eaters.”
The purple people eater.
“You know what that rascal told her new foster parents? She said when they went to sleep she would stab and kill them—and she would eat them. They have another foster child who’s only one, and Ursa said she would be the most delicious and she would kill her first.”
“Obviously she was saying the most extreme thing she could think of to scare them off. Ursa doesn’t have a violent bone in her body.”
“How could those people know that and take the risk? Especially when they have a baby in their house?”
“Do you want me to talk to them?”
“They’re done! They left in a hot hurry, and they want nothing to do with her.”
“Now what?”
“Door number two—the couple we’d chosen as second best.”
“You’d better warn them. I’ll talk to them, if you want.”
Lenora rubbed her hand up and down the back of her short hair. “Maybe you’d better.”
The next day, Jo gave the runner-up couple a crash course on Ursa Alien Dupree. They were nice people. The husband ran an engineering consulting firm, and his wife was a former gym teacher who now stayed home with their six-year-old son. They weren’t able to have any more biological children.
Jo talked to Ursa before the couple came in, begging her to cooperate. Ursa refused, insisting that she only wanted to live with Jo. Once again, Jo left the hospital with Ursa’s plaintive sobs haunting her.
When Jo returned to the hospital the next day, the foster couple was in Ursa’s room for their second visit. Jo was going to leave, but they asked her to stay. “Let’s talk,” the wife said. “I want us all to be friends.”
Jo tried to get Ursa to open up, but she was sullen and only answered direct questions with curt replies. When Jo tried to show the foster parents Ursa’s drawings, she said, “I don’t want them to see those! They’re private!”
When Jo told Ursa it would be nice to have a little brother, she said, “I don’t want any stupid little brother!”
“You’ll have a swimming pool, Ursa,” Jo said. “Won’t that be fun?”
“It won’t be!” Ursa said. “I only want to swim with you and Gabe in Summers Creek!”
“Please try to be the nice girl I know you are,” Jo said.
“I won’t be nice to them!” Ursa said. “I only want to live with you! You said you wanted that, too! Why are you trying to make me like them?”
“I’d better go,” Jo said.