Jo turned back to the radio.
Becca lowered herself carefully into the deep sofa, that strange fog surging through her again. What kind of linguistic warp was wandering through this conversation? Becca had been talking about sexual attraction. Hadn’t she? Good old red-blooded lesbian lust. They had both felt it in the cemetery, in the car, she was pretty sure of this. But Jo was telling her she was incapable of love — emotional connection, devotion, etcetera. A miscommunication of the highest order. There wasn’t the faintest possibility on the planet that Becca was falling in love with Jo. She was almost certain of this.
They were quiet for a long while. Jo moved methodically to each of the small radios she had set up around the room, including the yellow ball that had blasted her dead mother’s voice the day before. She adjusted them until they all hissed softly with low-key, empty static, much like Becca’s brain.
Becca waited until the grandfather clock in the corner chimed ten and her mind had settled a little. She wanted to be sure that pang of hurt had faded. There were things she needed to know now, for all kinds of reasons, but she wanted to be sure she would speak from kindness alone. “Do you know anything about Nonverbal Learning Disorder, Jo?”
Jo’s hands stilled on the silver machine, and the corner of her mouth lifted. She smiled rarely, and Becca had never seen this particular smile. She remembered her first impression of this woman — a tall, dark wraith who seemed quite capable of cruelty.
“Most people guess autism. You’re closer.”
Becca nodded. “I don’t know if you give much credence to labels like that.”
“I don’t fit forty percent of the diagnostic criteria for Nonverbal Learning Disorder.” Jo lifted a white cloth from her satchel and rubbed her hands in it. “I have no problem with eye contact or spatial awareness. I’m not physically clumsy. I’ve worked hard to compensate for my inability to read facial expressions.”
Becca suppressed an urge to apologize, and a stronger one to offer comfort. The anger was draining from Jo’s voice.
“I guess I give credence to the label Rachel Perry used tonight. She said some minds are too inscrutable for modern psychiatry to help. That’s the diagnosis the best of those useless doctors gave me. That’s what they told my parents.”
“Inscrutable?” Becca remembered the stark change in Jo’s expression when Rachel used that term. “A psychiatrist told your parents you were inscrutable?”
“Yes, when I was ten years old.”
“And what did he mean by that?”
“That no one would ever really know me, basically. They didn’t have your fancier diagnoses back then, all these disorders. I decided being inscrutable is preferable to being an emotional cretin, which is how another doctor described me.”
“Jo.” Becca closed her eyes in pain. “Please tell me no doctor laid that idiocy on a ten-year-old kid.”
“No, I was eight when we heard that one. My parents took me to lots of doctors. Luckily, my mother and father were smart enough to let me be, for the most part. They hired competent au pairs.” Jo rested her hand on the silver radio. “May I show you this? It’s something special.”
Becca blinked, trying to shift mental and emotional gears. Jo was doubtless only capable of a given amount of personal disclosure in one night, and she may have reached her limit. She pushed her way out of the sofa and stood next to Jo at the coffee table. “There’s something special about this radio?”
“It’s not a radio, it’s a Spiricom. Spiritually speaking, a Spiricom is to a radio what a computer is to a hand calculator.” Jo shrugged with that note of shyness that humanized her completely. “Sorry. I’ll try not to wax too rhapsodic. But this little device successfully established afterlife communication in nineteen seventy-six, and several times since. It detects signals and broadcasts them, like a radio. But it can also send signals back.”
Becca stared at the innocuous box and its small, glowing screen. “We can send messages back? Back where, exactly?”
“Back to the source. Wherever they came from. I’m simplifying all this terribly, Becca. But theoretically, if your mother contacts us again, if she speaks to you…”
“Then I can speak to her.” Becca had shot heroin exactly six times in her life and not for more than twenty years, but the craving came back on her strong and sweet and hard. She clenched her teeth on an expletive and her knees went weak.
“Becca? Maybe you should sit down.” Jo gripped her elbow and steered her back to the sofa, and Becca sat. “Your lips have gone that alarming limburger shade again. Are you all right?”
“Limburger lips,” Becca murmured. “Sounds lovely.” The fog was roaring through her, scraping her nerves raw. She swore if her mother bellowed out of any of these infernal radios right now, the top of her head would blow off.
“Jo, I’d only rage at her.” She looked up at Jo helplessly. “That’s all I could feel just now, when you said she might hear me. If I could talk to my mother tonight, I’d just scream at her. I didn’t know I’m still so angry. After all these years, my work with Rachel, all the insight I have into mental illness…” Becca trailed off as her throat closed, and she felt tears threaten. Again. She knew Jo was uncomfortable with such overt emotion, but she wasn’t sure she could hold them back.
“Slow down a moment.” Jo lowered herself beside her on the sofa. She sat in stiff silence, her expression intensely thoughtful. When she spoke, she measured her words as carefully as Becca would if she were trying to describe a mathematical theorem. “It makes sense to me that a small child would rage at a parent who chose to leave her. But I’m sure you have other feelings for your mother as well, Becca. Gentler feelings. They’re just not accessible right now, given your emotional state these days.” Jo cleared her throat. “But I hope you’ll continue with this, no matter how hard it gets. The child has a right to rage, but the adult daughter has a right to know the truth about what happened that night.”
The dizziness was receding, but Becca still gazed at Jo in confusion. This was the same scientist who described her mother’s dead, bullet-pierced face without a qualm. Now she was discussing human emotion with a calm logic that Becca found soothing beyond all reason. The tears that had filled her eyes subsided easily.
Becca sighed and rested her head against the back of the couch. “You define our relationship any way you see fit, Jo. I’m going to think of you as a friend.”
Jo looked at Becca as if she were a queen granting her an honorable but distinctly dangerous knighthood. “Well,” she said finally. “Do as you feel you must.”
Becca grinned and took mercy on her. “You’re really expecting us to bunk down here, for the immediate millennium?”
“Yes, I think we can make ourselves comfortable enough.” Jo looked around the spacious room. “You take this sofa. I sleep at my desk half the time anyway. I’ll be fine in one of those armchairs.”
“Not for nights on end you won’t, but we’ll take it one stiff neck at a time.” Becca levered herself out of the deep cushion and went to the duffel bag she had dropped in one corner. “We might be able to find a blanket or two in some drawer upstairs.”
A muffled clank emerged from the bag as she lifted it, and Jo frowned. “What do you have in that thing, if I may ask? Bowling pins?”
Becca opened the duffel and drew out two smooth, rounded sticks just over two feet long. They were slightly thicker than broom handles, and fit in her palms with practiced ease. “These are my chobos. Mock not my chobos.” She lifted a warning hand to Jo. “They travel with me everywhere. To the beach, sometimes to the grocery store. I’m sure not sleeping here without them. I don’t think I’d have the guts to shoot anyone, but I’d happily wale the merry hell out of any burglar with these.”