Wednesday, 6:32 p.m.
Dee was out the front door before Jo had the engine off. She came down the porch steps in her work blouse and her house slippers with her reading glasses pushed up in her hair, and she stopped at the bottom step and looked through the windshield at the passenger seat, and then at Jo.
Jo got out and shut the door behind her.
“Jo,” Dee said. “Who is he.”
“A search volunteer. Retired.” Jo came around the front of the car. “He’s been up at the lake. He needs a place tonight.”
“He needs a place.”
“The Timberline’s full of TV people.”
Dee was four years older and two inches taller and had managed the Bend branch of Cascade Federal for six years, and she had a way of looking at a thing that made it hold still. She turned it on the car. The old man was sitting with a bag of Goldfish crackers on his knees, looking at the house.
“Is he wearing socks?”
“His boots got soaked. He was in the water all day.”
“In the water.” Dee took her glasses out of her hair and folded them. “Jo. You’ve been gone eleven days, and you come down off that mountain the night before her first day of school with a man I’ve never seen in my life, in his socks, and you want to take him home. To the house. With Pip.”
“He’s harmless. He’s sixty-something with a heart thing. He sat with me down at the water.” Jo heard her own voice and made it slower. “Somebody should do something for somebody.”
“Somebody. Not you. Not tonight.” Dee lowered her voice, which was worse. “She can stay here. I’ll take her in the morning, I already took the day. Marcus can run him to the Motel 6 in Redmond—”
“I promised her.”
Dee looked at her. It was the look Dee had been giving her since Jo was three and their father’s truck went down the driveway for the last time, the look of someone standing between Jo and whatever was coming, whether Jo liked it or not. Jo didn’t look away. In the end Dee put the glasses back up in her hair.
“You text me,” she said. “You text me the second you walk in that door.”
The screen door banged. Pip came out onto the porch with her backpack on, a purple unicorn backpack twice the size of her back, and her rain boots, and Captain Otter under her arm, and her hair in a lopsided ponytail with the butterfly clip holding the part of it the elastic had missed. She came down the steps one at a time with both feet on each step, the way she’d done since she was two, and then she ran at Jo, and Jo went down on her knees on Dee’s driveway and caught her.
Pip smelled like Dee’s fabric softener and grape. Jo held on too hard. Pip let her for a count of four and then pushed back.
“Is that a grandpa?” she said.
The passenger window had come down. He had found the button again. He was leaning toward it, not too far, the way you’d lean toward a deer.
Pip stayed where she was, in the circle of Jo’s arms.
“Are you a grandpa?” she said. “You look like a grandpa.”
He thought about it.
“Kind of,” he said.
Pip sniffed the air. She had a nose like a beagle; she could tell from the front door if somebody had made popcorn at the neighbors’.
“You smell like a campfire and a sheep,” she said.
“There were sheep,” he said.
Dee made a small sound behind them. Jo stood up with Pip on her hip, too big for it, all legs and boots, and carried her around the car and buckled her into the pink booster on the driver’s side, as far from the passenger seat as the car allowed, and Pip let her, and didn’t take her eyes off the back of the old man’s head.
◆
Larch Street was four minutes. Nobody said anything for three of them. Jo watched Pip in the rearview mirror. Pip was watching him.
At the corner of Larch and Sixth he turned around in his seat.
“Hi, Pip,” he said.
Pip pulled Captain Otter in against her chest with both arms.
“You’ve been looking after him,” he said.
“He’s Toby’s,” Pip said.
“Toby’s lucky,” he said.
Pip studied him. Jo had seen her do it to a spider in the bathtub, a long, frank, unfriendly study, working out whether it was going to jump.
“What’s his name?” Pip said. “Toby’s otter. If you’re Toby you know it.”
Jo’s hands were at ten and two. She kept them there.
“Captain Otter,” he said. “And he’s scared of the dryer. Because his eye came off in there. And the eye he’s got now is a button off Mom’s coat.”
Pip looked at the otter’s face, at the green button with the four holes. She put her thumb on it.
“Toby’s eight,” she said.
“I was,” he said.
Pip didn’t give him the otter, and he didn’t ask for it. She watched him the rest of the way home, and he let her, turned half around in his seat with the belt cutting across his throat, and when Jo pulled into the driveway at 1147 Larch Street he didn’t turn back around until the engine was off.
The house was the way she’d left it on the twentieth, a seventies ranch house the color of oatmeal with the big juniper eating the front walk. Somebody, probably Dee, had been bringing in the mail and stacking it on the porch chair under a rock. Across the street the swings in Larch Street Park hung straight down.
He stood on the front walk in his socks and looked at the house. His lips moved.
“One one four seven Larch Street,” he said, not to her. “Calder, Oregon. Nine seven seven—” and he stopped, and frowned at the juniper, and didn’t finish the zip code.
◆
His room was the way he’d left it on the twentieth, too. Jo had not been able to go in. She went in now ahead of him and turned on the light, and she saw it the way he would: the bunk bed with the Pokémon comforter on the bottom and nothing on the top but a pile of stuffed animals he said he was too old for, the glow stars on the ceiling that Rob had put up in the shape of the real constellations with a chart and a stepladder over a whole Saturday, the Lego sets on the dresser, the dirty socks. The K’nex bridge on the floor.
It was half built. He had started it the week before camping and made her promise not to vacuum around it. One side of the truss was done, gray rods and orange connectors in a long run of triangles, and the other side was in pieces in the lid of the bin.
He stood in the doorway. Then he went down on one knee beside it, slowly, a hand on the bunk rail, and he reached out and put one finger on the top corner of the finished side, where the rods met, and pushed. Nothing moved. He pushed harder. It held.
He took his finger back. He looked at the glow stars and the stuffed animals and the socks, and he got up, and he said, “Do we have the blue box?”
They had the blue box. They had six of them. Jo boiled two boxes, because Pip hadn’t eaten either, and she made it the way he’d always wanted it, too much milk, out of a gallon Dee had left in the refrigerator with a Post-it on it that said EAT SOMETHING, and he ate standing up at the counter with the bowl held up under his chin like a man eating on a job site between one thing and the next. He ate the first bowl in about a minute. He held it out.
“You’re not allowed to stand up and eat,” Pip said from the table.
He came and sat down across from her, and Jo filled the bowl again and put it in front of him. The clock on the stove said 7:04. He didn’t look at it. He ate the second bowl sitting down, slower, and scraped the bottom with the side of his spoon to get the orange, and put the spoon down.
“Awesome,” he said, the way a builder says a beam is sound.
Pip ate her own bowl and watched him and didn’t say anything. She had never gone this long without saying anything in her life.
Jo texted Dee. Home. She looked at the word on the screen until it went dark.
◆
He had put the flashlight on the kitchen counter when they came in. After dinner Jo picked it up, because she had to do something with her hands, and she unscrewed the tail cap. Two D cells slid halfway out. They were crusted white around the terminals, and a brown crust had grown down the inside of the barrel, and they were so light they rattled.
There were batteries in the junk drawer. There was everything in the junk drawer: birthday candles, rubber bands, a tape measure that didn’t retract, three pairs of Rob’s drugstore readers, a fortune-cookie fortune Toby had saved that said YOU WILL BE HUNGRY AGAIN IN ONE HOUR. She found two Duracells still in the card. She scraped the contacts in the barrel with the tip of a butter knife until they were bright, and she dropped the new batteries in, and screwed the cap back down, and twisted the head.
The beam went across the kitchen and made a white circle on the wall by the table, on the calendar, which was still on August.
He had been looking at Pip’s welcome letter from Ms. Delgado on the refrigerator. He turned around, and the circle of light was there on the wall, and he stood and looked at it. Then he sat down on the kitchen floor with his back against the dishwasher. He didn’t fall. He sat down on purpose, the way he’d sat on the step, but faster, and he put his hand over his mouth.
“It’s just a flashlight,” Pip said.
Jo turned it off. She stood holding it. After a minute he took his hand off his mouth and put it on the floor and pushed himself up, and he asked for hot water, please, in a cup.
She boiled the kettle. He took a little leather pouch out of his bag and took from it a dried leaf, gray-green and furred like a rabbit’s ear, and crumbled half of it into the mug and poured water on it, and the kitchen smelled like cut hay and something bitter under it.
“What’s that?”
“Heart-leaf,” he said. “For the slow falling.”
“What’s the slow falling?”
He tapped two fingers on his breastbone, off rhythm, and then on rhythm, and then off.
“When it forgets how to count,” he said.
He couldn’t read Ms. Delgado’s letter without his arm all the way out, so Jo opened the junk drawer again and gave him a pair of Rob’s readers. He put them on. He read the letter standing at the refrigerator with his tea, all of it, the supply list and the part about labeling everything and the part about separation being hard for grown-ups too, and then he sat down at the table across from Jo while Pip went to find her pajamas.
It was 8:40.
“Mom,” he said. “Will you drive me back now?”
“The gate locks at eight,” she said. “Forest Service.”
Toby looked at her over the rim of the mug. The steam had fogged Rob’s old readers, and he took them off and wiped them on his shirt with the same impatient thumb Rob used, which he could only have learned at a kitchen table in this house.
“First light,” Jo said. “I’ll drive you up first light.”
“You’re touching your ear,” he said.
She put her hand in her lap.
He held the readers up to the ceiling light and looked through them and put them back on.
“Before first light, then,” he said, and drank his tea.
◆
Pip wouldn’t sleep.
She lay in her bed in her pajamas with the rain boots on under the covers and Captain Otter on her chest and said her stomach hurt, and then she said her ear hurt, and then she said she didn’t want to go to kindergarten, she wanted to go to Aunt Dee’s, she wanted to go to the lake, she wanted Daddy. Jo sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed her back and said the things. Pip kicked the covers off. Pip cried in the dry, furious way she had cried every night for eleven days, which Dee had told Jo about on the phone and which Jo had not, until now, had to hear.
He was standing in the doorway. Jo didn’t know how long he’d been there.
“Can the grandpa do it?” Pip said, into the pillow.
He came in and sat on the floor by the bed, because there wasn’t a chair, with his back against the nightstand and his knees up. He didn’t touch her. He waited until she turned her head on the pillow to look at him.
“Sessa,” he said.
Pip stopped crying to be suspicious. “What’s that?”
“It means hush. It means it’s all right.” He said it again, lower and slower. “It’s the first word I learned there.”
Pip tried it, testing it for a trick, and said it wrong, and said it again right.
“That’s it.”
He began to hum. It wasn’t a song Jo knew. It was four or five notes, low, going around and around and coming down at the end every time, like someone setting down a bucket, and then going around again. Pip listened with her eyes open. By the third time around her hand came out from under the otter and found his hand on the edge of the mattress, and she took hold of his first finger, the whole of her hand around it, and held on.
Jo unclipped the purple butterfly from Pip’s hair and put it on the nightstand by his shoulder. Pip didn’t notice. He was still humming. Her eyes closed and opened and closed.
Jo went out into the hall and stood with her back against the wall.
He coughed once in there, softly, and then again, a deep wet cough he kept low in his chest so it wouldn’t wake Pip, and Jo was in the hall bathroom at three in the morning with the shower running hot and the mirror gone white, sitting on the closed lid of the toilet with a two-year-old on her knees barking like a seal, counting the pull of his ribs under her palm. Rob asleep. The steam on the tile. Then she was in the hall again.
She stood there until the humming stopped. When she looked in, Pip was asleep, and he was still sitting on the floor with his finger in her hand and his head back against the nightstand and his eyes open, looking at the ceiling, where there were no stars.
◆
At 1:30 she got up because she wasn’t sleeping anyway, and his door was open and the bottom bunk was empty, and the back door was open too.
He was sitting on the back step in the dark with the afghan from the couch around his shoulders and his socks on the concrete. The yard went back to the fence and the Kowalskis’ carport and then there was nothing but sky, the way there was out here, all of it.
She sat down next to him. He moved over to make room.
“That’s Orion,” he said, and pointed low in the east over the carport, where something was just clearing the roofline. “That’s his shoulder. That’s the one that’s red.” His finger moved lower, to nothing. “His belt comes up next.”
“Betelgeuse,” she said.
“Beetle juice.” He didn’t smile, but his beard moved. “Dad said it’s going to blow up.”
“Not for a while.”
He kept his arm up, pointing, as if he were holding it there to be sure. Then he let it down.
“The stars at home are different,” he said.
The word went into her and stayed there. She let it. She looked at Orion coming up over the Kowalskis’ carport one star at a time.
“Did you ever try to come back?” she said.
He didn’t answer for so long that she thought he wasn’t going to.
“Once,” he said.
She waited.
“Does Dad still have the truck?”
“He still has the truck.”
“The white one. With the rack.”
“The white one.”
He nodded. He pulled the afghan tighter at his neck. When the belt was up over the carport he said he was cold, and she said then come in, and he did, and he stopped in the hall outside his door and stood there with the afghan on.
“Will you tuck me in?” he said.
◆
He was too long for the bottom bunk. He lay on his side with his knees drawn up and his socks against the footboard and his head on Toby’s pillow, the one with the Pikachu case, and the white braid lay across it. Jo pulled the comforter up over his shoulder. She tucked it in along his back, the whole length of him, the way she had done it every night of his life, and then she went to the foot of the bed and tucked it hard around his feet, burrito, and he let her.
She sat down on the edge of the bunk. It creaked. She put her hand on his hair.
He looked up at her from the pillow. In the light from the hall his face was all bone.
“Ost ta fael?” he said.
She didn’t know what to say.
“Where’s your fire,” he said. “It means hello. It means where are your people.”
Jo kept her hand on his hair.
“Here,” she said.
He closed his eyes.
◆
She sat in the hall with her back against the wall outside his door and her knees up, the way he’d sat against the nightstand, and she listened to him breathe.
In the kitchen the flashlight was standing on its tail on the counter where she’d left it after the tea. She had turned it back on at some point, she didn’t remember when, and it made a white circle on the kitchen ceiling, and from where she sat in the hall she could see the edge of the circle, steady, not moving.
Fourteen breaths a minute. There was a catch at the top of every third or fourth one. Fifteen breaths a minute. The refrigerator came on and ran and shut off. A night was—
Sixteen. The water heater ticked in the garage. He turned over in the bunk and the bunk creaked and he settled. Fourteen. A car went by on Larch with its radio going and was gone. The circle on the ceiling didn’t move. From here to first light was—
Fifteen. Fifteen. Fourteen.
At four o’clock the circle was still there on the ceiling, and she was still in the hall, counting, and she hadn’t gotten up to turn it off.