Friday, 6:35 a.m.
Three vans. Jo counted them from the gap at the side of the living room curtain, the way she’d been counting them since five: the Bend station, the Portland one with the satellite dish folded on top like a hand over a mouth, and a white Sprinter with nothing written on it at all, which was worse. A man in a puffy jacket was standing on the grass at the edge of Larch Street Park with a coffee, filming the house with his phone, not even pretending.
She let the curtain go.
She had slept in Toby’s bunk. Not slept. Lain on top of the Pokémon comforter in her clothes from ten o’clock until the vans came, with her face in the Pikachu pillowcase, which smelled of woodsmoke and some kind of animal fat and, under that, very faintly, still, of the strawberry shampoo he’d refused to stop using when he was seven because it was Pip’s and it made him laugh. The bottom bunk sagged in the middle now. It hadn’t sagged before Wednesday.
She’d brought Pip home from Dee’s at seven last night, over Dee’s dead body, because Pip had stood in Dee’s front hall in her rain boots and said, I want my bed, and Jo had needed somebody in the house who wanted to be in it. Pip was asleep in her room with the door open six inches. Jo had checked twice.
Her phone was on the kitchen counter, face down, on silent. It had been on silent since day four, when the first episode dropped and the calls started coming from numbers in Portland and Seattle and once, for some reason, Tampa. She turned it over.
Tall Timber had posted at 11:00 last night. Dee had sent it to her at 11:04 with no words, and then at 11:05, Call me, and at 6:02, I’m coming at 7:30 to take her in. Don’t argue.
WHO IS THE OLD MAN WITH PIP VOSS?
Ms. Delgado’s room. The rug with the states on it, the little tables, the cubbies with the names taped over them. Toby folded into a kindergarten chair with his knees up past his beard and his hands hanging between them, and Pip leaning against his arm, telling him something. He had his head down to hear it. Jo’s own shoulder and one arm were at the edge of the frame, cut off, a piece of Ducks-green sleeve.
She looked at his hands in the picture, and at Pip’s weight against his arm, how she’d given all of it to him without thinking, the way she did with Rob.
Twelve hours. He’d been in there twelve hours without the leaf.
She put the phone down.
◆
At 6:40 somebody knocked. Two knocks, heavy, and then the flat of a hand on the frame once, as if to check the door was square.
She knew it before she was out of the kitchen.
Rob was on the porch in yesterday’s clothes, a gray Voss Decks & Fence T-shirt with a sawdust ghost down the front of it and his canvas jacket over it. He hadn’t slept. His eyes had the red, scraped look they got in the old days, and she looked at them for the other thing, the thing she’d looked for every morning of their marriage, and it wasn’t there. He hadn’t been drinking. He’d just been awake.
Behind him the man in the puffy jacket had crossed the street. “Rob! Rob, who’s the man with your daughter? Rob—”
“The path,” Rob said.
He said it standing on the mat. He didn’t come in.
Jo put her hand up to her ear, and caught herself doing it, and took it down.
He saw. Of course he saw. He’d seen it for fourteen years. He waited on the mat with the cameras behind him.
“Not out here,” she said.
◆
She took him through the kitchen to the back step, where you couldn’t be seen from the street, where Toby had sat at 1:30 on Wednesday night with the afghan around him, naming Orion. She shut the back door behind them. The Kowalskis’ carport. The fence. A sky gone the pale no-color it went before the sun got over the Cascades.
Rob stood on the concrete pad. She stood on the step. It put her eyes almost level with his.
“Gil let me in last night,” he said. “Ten minutes. He told me.”
“What did he tell you.”
“Don’t.” Rob’s jaw moved. “Don’t make me say it, Jo. You say it.”
So she said it.
“I left camp at quarter after three with Pip. I told him to stay with his dad. I went down the path.” She kept her eyes on his chest, on the sawdust. It was easier to talk to the sawdust. “He came after me. At the split cedar. He was crying. He asked if he could come, and I had Pip on my hip, and she was kicking, and I was so tired, Rob, I’d been tired for a year. I said go back to your dad. I said I need ten minutes without you.” She heard her voice keep going as if it belonged to someone reading it off a card. “He said he wished I wasn’t his mom. And I turned around. I didn’t watch him go. I didn’t look back once. I went down to the water and I stood there with Pip and I counted to six hundred, because I’d told him ten minutes, and I thought, that’s fair, I’ll give myself exactly what I said.”
Rob didn’t move.
“When I came back and you said with you, I knew. Right then, I knew he’d gone up instead of back. And the deputy asked me, and I said at the table with his dad, three-fifteen, and I watched him write it down.” She made herself look up at his face. “And then it was on you. And I let it be on you. I let them put it on you because I couldn’t carry it.”
Rob sat down on the step.
He did it all at once, like a load coming off a strap, and the step was too low for him and his knees came up, and he put his forearms on them and his head down between his arms. He was making a sound. It wasn’t crying. It was his breath not going in. It caught at the top and wouldn’t go, and caught again, the way it had the one time she’d seen him fall off a ladder, flat on his back in the Andersons’ yard with the wind knocked out of him, his mouth open, his hands clawing at the grass.
She sat down beside him. She didn’t touch him. She didn’t think she was allowed.
“Eleven days,” he said, when he could. He said it to the concrete. “Somebody writes it on my truck every night. The kid at the Chevron won’t ring me up, he calls his manager. Cody quit. The church my mom went to put me on the prayer list.” He laughed, and it was a bad sound. “Every morning, Jo. The dog went down the path. Every morning I told Ann, and she looked at me like I was a drunk trying to point at his wife.”
“You let me,” Rob said.
“Yes.”
He turned his head and looked at her. It was the look he’d given her across the hospital bed the night Pip was born, and across Denise Albright’s desk when they signed the papers. She didn’t look away from it.
“How is he,” she said.
“Gray. Real gray.” Rob wiped his face with the heel of his hand, forehead to chin. “He says they took his leaf.”
“He said you know what it is.”
“I know what it is.”
Rob waited. When she didn’t go on, something went across his face, and he looked away from her, up past the Kowalskis’ carport, toward the north, where there was nothing to see but the pale sky. He had the look he got when a bid came in under what he’d figured, the look of a man doing a sum he didn’t like the answer to. His hand went up to his ear for the pencil that wasn’t there, and came down.
Then he stood.
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” he said. “You go to Ann. You tell her about the path. All of it. What you just told me.” He stood on the pad with his hands hanging at his sides. “And you tell her who he is.”
“Rob. She’ll think I’m—”
“I don’t care what she thinks. You tell her it’s him.” He looked at his watch, a big steel thing she’d bought him for their fifth anniversary that he still wore. “Noon. Or I tell her.”
“She’ll put him somewhere. She’ll put him in a room at St. Anne’s and—”
“Noon, Jo.”
She stood up. On the step she was taller than him again.
“Give me today with him,” she said.
“You heard what a day costs him.”
“I heard.”
“Then what are you doing?”
“I’m his mother.”
“His wife’s a mother too,” Rob said. “Four times over.”
The back door opened behind them.
◆
Pip was in the kitchen doorway in her pajamas and her rain boots, with Captain Otter hanging upside down from one hand by his foot. Her hair was flat on one side and standing up on the other. She’d put the butterfly clip in by herself, crooked, over her ear.
“Daddy,” she said.
Rob went down on one knee on the kitchen floor, and Pip walked into him, and he put his arms around her, the otter and all, and held on with his eyes shut. Jo stood in the back doorway and watched her daughter’s hand pat him on the shoulder, twice, the way Pip patted Dee’s dog.
Pip leaned back in his arms and looked at her mother over his shoulder.
“Why can’t Toby live in his room?” she said.
The kitchen clock ticked. It had ticked in that kitchen for eleven years, and nobody ever heard it.
Rob stood up, with Pip still hanging off his neck, and set her down on the kitchen floor in her boots.
“Ask your mom,” he said.
“Get dressed,” Jo said. “Aunt Dee’s coming. Go get dressed, Pip. The purple leggings.”
Pip looked from one of them to the other. She had a way of doing it, a slow swing of the head, like a sprinkler, and it had always made Rob laugh. He didn’t laugh. Pip went down the hall, and her boots went clomp, clomp on the hall carpet, and her door shut.
“Noon,” Rob said.
He went out the front, and the voices on the street went up like birds off a wire.
◆
Dee came at 7:28 in the Highlander, and parked it in the driveway so close to the porch steps that the passenger door would open onto the bottom one, and she came in without knocking carrying a Dutch Bros cup she put into Jo’s hand and a look she didn’t have to put anywhere.
“I passed Rob on Fourth,” she said. “He didn’t wave.”
“He’s allowed.”
Dee took her sunglasses off and folded them. She looked at Jo, at the Ducks hoodie, at her hair.
“Ms. Delgado called me back last night,” she said. “At home. She was very nice. She said Pip had a wonderful first morning, right up until the sheriff.” She put her sunglasses in her purse. “She said Pip told the whole circle you hid a man’s boots in the car. She said she wanted me to know she’s required to report certain things, and that she has.”
Jo drank the coffee. It was too sweet. Dee always ordered for her as if she were still nineteen.
“I’m running her through,” Dee said. “You stay in here. You don’t come out on that porch looking like that. You don’t say one word to any of them.”
“Fine.”
“I’ve got the branch audit in Bend. Regional’s coming down. I can’t move it.” Dee took Pip’s unicorn backpack off the hook by the door and checked inside it, and took Captain Otter out, and set him on the hall table, and zipped the backpack. “You’re picking her up at two-fifty.”
“I’m picking her up.”
“Two-fifty, Jo. Room 4. Not three o’clock. They walk them out to the bus loop at two-fifty and if nobody’s there they take them to the office, and I will hear about it from the office, and so will the sheriff.”
“I’m picking her up,” Jo said.
She picked up her phone off the counter while Dee watched, and opened Reminders, and typed PIP 2:50, and pinned it to her lock screen under the clock, where Dee kept the boys’ practice times on her own phone. She held it up. Dee looked at it for a second, and then at her, and nodded once.
Pip came down the hall in purple leggings and a T-shirt with a cat on it that said PURRFECT, and her rain boots, and the clip. She saw the otter on the hall table and picked him up and unzipped the backpack and put him in and zipped it back up.
Dee opened her mouth. Then she shut it.
◆
Jo watched from the gap in the curtain.
Dee came down the steps first with her hand on the back of Pip’s neck, steering, the backpack between them. The man in the puffy jacket came across the street. The Bend van’s doors opened. A woman got out of the white Sprinter, thirties, fleece vest, dark hair pulled back, and Jo knew her before she saw her face, knew her by the way she walked, easy, unhurried, a friend coming up the drive.
Brynn Kessler went down on her heels on the sidewalk so she was Pip’s height. She had her phone out in her hand at chest level, the red dot on the screen. She was smiling. She said something.
Dee turned to put her body between them. She was a half step late, because the Highlander door had caught on the porch step.
Pip gave the woman the frank, unfriendly study she’d given the old man in the car on Wednesday night. Then Pip said something. Four words, maybe five. Jo saw her mouth make them. Brynn Kessler’s smile stayed exactly where it was, while everything else in her face went still.
Then Dee had Pip in the car and the door shut, and she came around the hood without looking at anybody, and the Highlander backed out into the street so fast the man in the puffy jacket had to step back onto the park grass.
◆
It was on the Bend station’s website at 8:51, and on the Tall Timber feed at 8:54, and at 9:00 the Portland station ran it at the top of the hour with a graphic of Toby’s school picture behind the anchor’s shoulder.
Jo watched it on her phone standing at the kitchen counter.
Pip on the sidewalk in the purple leggings and the rain boots, the clip over her ear. The backpack. Dee’s hand on her neck. Brynn Kessler’s voice, gentle, from below the frame: “Hi, Pip. Who was the man at school with you yesterday?”
And Pip, not shy, not anything, the way she told you the dog was sick or it was raining: “My brother got old.”
“Your brother?” Brynn said.
Pip nodded. Then Dee’s arm came across the frame, and the picture swung, and there was the Highlander’s door and a piece of sky.
Jo watched it again. She watched it four times. On the fourth time she watched only Pip’s mouth, the gap on the bottom where the loose tooth was going to come out any day now, the lower lip pushed forward. She knew that lip. It was the lip Pip made when she said a thing and you didn’t believe her, and she was getting ready to say it again.
She turned the phone face down.
◆
At 9:10 she called the Sheriff’s Office and asked for Ann Treadwell, and a woman at the front desk said the sheriff was in a meeting until ten-thirty, and could someone else help her, and Jo said no. The woman asked if she’d like to leave a message.
“Tell her Jo Voss is coming in,” Jo said. “Tell her it’s about the path.”
She hung up before the woman could ask her to spell it.
She stood in the bathroom and brushed her teeth. She brushed them as she told patients to, two minutes, small circles, angled at the gumline, and she didn’t count, because her hand knew two minutes by now the way it knew the stairs. The toothbrush holder on the sink had four holes. Hers, the blue. Pip’s, the purple one with the sparkles in the handle. An empty hole where the green dinosaur used to stand. And Rob’s, which had been empty for two years, and which she’d never once thought about until this morning.
She spat. She rinsed. She looked at the empty hole.
At 9:40 she took a shower and stood under it until the hot ran out. She put on jeans. She put the Ducks hoodie back on, because it was what she had.
At 10:02 she took the flashlight off the counter on her way out and went out to the driveway.
The Subaru was where she’d left it, nose to the garage door. The cargo floor was down. Under it, in the well, curled around the spare the way she’d put them yesterday morning while Pip watched from the garage step, were the boots. She didn’t open the hatch. She stood with her hand on it.
“Jo! Jo, is it true your daughter says—”
“Jo, is the man in custody related to your family?”
“Jo, can you tell us what Pip meant—”
She got in and shut the door, and the voices went flat and far away. She put the flashlight in the glove box.
Her phone lay on the passenger seat. It lit when she set it down: 10:05, and under the clock, small and square, PIP 2:50.
Rob had said noon. It was ten minutes to the Sheriff’s Office by Main Street, which ran past the end of Juniper Road.
She backed out through the vans, and at the stop sign she turned away from Main and took Fourth.