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Memphis, and Jo's at a payphone outside a gas station, still bloody from that damn poltergeist throwing her into a wall, and trying to remember if it's 1-800-CALL-ATT or 1-800-COLLECT. She picks the second one. It seems more likely.
"State your name," the automated voice tells her.
"Joanna," she says.
Ellen accepts all charges.
"Hey, ma," Jo says. "I'm still alive. Just got rid of a real nasty poltergeist. I think it might've broken my arm, but it might just be sprained, I can't tell yet."
There's a pause. "God damn it, Jo," Ellen says, and hangs up.
Jo racks the receiver back in its cradle. It's March, and still cold. She buttons her thin coat, the canvas fraying at sleeves and hem. Her truck's parked in front of the store, not twenty feet away, but it's too far—too far, her knees rubbery all of a sudden, and she doesn't know if she'll be able to make it.
"Fuck you," she mutters, "fuck you, move," and swings her right leg forward.
She drives back to the motel she's staying at. Her room's got worn green shag carpet and a sink with a brown stain in a ring around the drain. She strips off her shirt and looks at her shoulder in the bathroom mirror, the long cut starting there and slicing down her arm, halfway to her elbow. It isn't deep. She puts some butterfly bandages on it, and antibiotic cream.
The heat's off in the room, and she's mostly-naked from the waist up, shivering in her bra, but she's too tired to do anything but crawl into bed and pull the comforter up around her ears.
She's been on her own for two months, three weeks and five days. She doesn't count the hours or minutes. But she knows how many days.
***
The loneliness is what's worst.
All her life, she's been surrounded by people, the ever-changing cast of characters at the Roadhouse: gruff hunters and their much-younger girlfriends, elderly farmers whose wives kick them out of the house periodically, Ash's weekly gathering of hillbilly math nerds.
It used to make her crazy, the way she never had any privacy, the intimate details of her life fodder for Ellen's bar patter. She still remembers being fifteen and coming downstairs with her schoolbooks, hearing Ellen talking to an old hunter about Jo's monthlies. She'd been furious; hadn't spoken to Ellen for a week.
That's what she misses, though: someone knowing every tiny, unimportant thing about her.
On Saturdays, she finds a laundromat and washes all the dirt and sweat and crusted blood out of her clothing. While the washer's thumping away, she sits with her People magazine and watches the tired mothers scold their children, the bearded hobos shuffle in and out. It's life, here in a hundred towns across the country, most of them poor, all of them run-down: somebody drunk, somebody laughing.
She doesn't go home, though.
***
Her first werewolf almost takes her out for good—another inch or two and those claws would've ripped right into her belly instead of hitting her hipbone. She staggers back to her truck, afterward, and holds onto the door handle while she retches, imagining her own intestines roped around her fingers, hot and slimy.
At least it's her right leg, and not her left. She doesn't think she could work the clutch.
It's a bad time, after that. She has to stitch herself up, and she botches the job and the wound festers. She goes days without eating, sweating out her fever in a shitty motel room, praying her card will cover the bill when she leaves. If. It's a thought she has a time or two, that week, nearly blacking out from the pain every time she hauls herself to the bathroom, running low on antibiotics and everything else, and scared.
That's what's worst. Being scared.
She calls Ellen the day she leaves that town, feeling like she's cheated death. Ash answers, says Ellen isn't available, but he'll take a message if Jo asks real nice.
"Fuck you," Jo says. "I'll come home and beat you up if you don't, how's that?"
"Figure that might be enough," Ash says.
"Tell her I almost died, but I'm okay now," Jo says. "Tell her not to worry."
She doesn't know what impulse in her makes her want to twist the knife like that, remind Ellen of what else she might lose. If Jo were a better person, she'd tell Ellen sweet lies, make some attempt at convincing her that everything's okay.
If she were a better person, she never would've left in the first place. But she couldn't stay there her whole life, playing barmaid. Things change; people change; people leave. Jo left. She's still leaving—still calling, still thinking about home. She's not all the way gone.
***
At first, she stays in the midwest, circling around Nebraska like a dog tied to a stake, pacing its familiar muddy track around the yard. She doesn't realize it right away; thinks she's being bold, going as far east as Ohio, as far south as Texas.
The first time she hits Utah, driving west, she realizes she's been holding herself back, for some reason, homesick or afraid. She stays west of the Rockies for an entire month, making tracks up and down the west coast, and through Colorado and Wyoming.
She sees the Pacific for the first time when she's in LA, tracking a basilisk through the canyons. After she kills the thing, she drives along the coast, stopping at beach after beach until she finds some sea lions, squalling to each other along the black rocks.
She heads east, after that, and ends up in South Carolina, knee-deep in the cold water of the Atlantic. It's late April, and nobody's in the water—just Jo, her jeans rolled up, shoes in her hand.
***
Jo's strong and fast from years of tagging after the local boys and the hunters who passed through, making them teach her how to shoot and cuss and throw a right hook, but there are things her body just can't do, and she knows it. Part of hunting is knowing your limits and being smart enough to stay out of things you can't handle. Her daddy told her that, before he died. Be smart, Jo. Know what you're good at.
In Missoula, the two harpies she's tracking turn out to be seven, and she turns around and goes back to her truck, swearing a blue streak. She can't manage seven, and she knows it—she doesn't have the weaponry for it, and her stupid, small girl-body will probably end up getting eaten.
Still, it takes her an entire day to swallow her pride enough to make the call she knows she needs to make. She does two shots of bourbon and dials.
Sam answers.
"Hi, it's Jo Harvelle," Jo says.
"I only know one Jo," Sam says. "Your mom's worried about you."
"Yeah, well, sucks to be her," Jo says. "Look, you two anywhere near Missoula? I've got a nest of harpies and there's just—there's too many of 'em for me to deal with."
She hears Dean in the background—Who's that, he says, and there's a noise, and he yelps. "Yeah," Sam says, "Missoula, sure. Send me an email with all the details, okay?"
"Sure," Jo says, swallowing the bitter taste in her mouth. "Thanks."
She's ill-tempered for nearly a week after that, furious with herself for not being good enough, for giving in, for calling the goddamn Winchesters who already think she's a stupid little girl who needs to run on home. She starts three bar fights. They don't make her feel any better.
She gets a call, a few weeks later. It's Dean.
"Uh, hi," he says. There's a pause. "Uh, it's Dean. Winchester. Um."
Jo stays silent, loving to hear him squirm.
"Uh, look, there's something going on up in Youngstown—probably some goddamn spirit, but we're stuck in Nevada for at least another week, so. Think you could take care of it?"
"Even after I couldn't handle those harpies," Jo says, not meaning to, and then claps a hand over her mouth.
"There's stuff we don't take," Dean says. "Crazy-ass mystical bullshit, mine fires, big packs of werewolves. We call Ramsey, or—sometimes your mom."
"Really," Jo says. This is news to her—she kind of thought Sam and Dean were invincible.
"Yeah," Dean says. He clears his throat. "So, anyway, can you do it?"
"Yeah," Jo says. "Of course."
***
In Tuscaloosa, a man tries to grab her outside a bar.
"Pretty little thing like you," he drawls, sneering, half-drunk and all the way stupid, "ain't safe, bein' out all late and lonely."
"I'll manage," she says, one hand behind her back, fingering the knife stuck in her waistband.
"Aww, sugar, lemme take you home, show you a good time," he says, reaching for her, his meaty hand landing on her shoulder.
She breaks his nose and his wrist; revels in the muted crack of bone snapping.
She goes back to her motel room after that, looks at her reflection in the cracked mirror, its surface flecked with toothpaste spots. Pretty little thing, and she is, her big eyes, pink mouth, long curly blond hair, like a fucking doll.
She cuts off her hair with her hunting knife, saws it off at chin-length, just long enough to tie back. Long hair's an impracticality. It gets in the way. She doesn't know what she was thinking, keeping it so long for all these months.
She stops wearing lip gloss, after that. ChapStick's cheaper, anyway.
She's in Portland in June, and a woman smiles at her from the other end of the bar, tilting her beer bottle. Jo thinks to herself, Why the hell not, and goes.
They fuck in the back of the woman's station wagon. Jo's never done this before, but she's got a cunt of her own, and she knows mostly where to touch, what to do. It's good.
"What's your name," the woman says, after.
"Marla," Jo says. "And I'm just passing through."
She calls Ellen the next day.
"Jo," Ellen says, and Jo can imagine her gripping the receiver, flapping a dirty rag at Ash to make him shut up. "Where are you."
"Up in Oregon," Jo says. "I just wanted to call and let you know I'm doing okay."
"Yeah?" Ellen says. "So everything's fine?"
"Yeah," Jo says. "You don't need to worry."
"I won't ever stop," Ellen says. "You know that, right?"
Jo says, "I know."
***
She fucks up bad, down in Georgia late that summer: goes left when she should've gone right, and two little girls die right in front of her, each of them knifed through the heart by the same spirit Jo's trying to save them from. She's too slow. She turns her head when the lamp crashes to the floor in the next room, and that moment of distraction is all it takes.
She leaves them there, their limp little bodies all bled out. She doesn't know what else to do. She gets in her truck and drives until she crosses over the border into Alabama, and then she pulls over and vomits into the bushes at the side of the road. She's had close calls before, but nobody's ever died, she's never fucked up like this before, this monumentally.
Her cell phone's in the truck; she calls Ellen. She stopped worrying months ago about Ash tracking her calls. The line rings and rings, and nobody picks up. Jo thumbs the phone off, her hands shaking.
The air's so humid-thick it's hard to breathe, and Jo's tank top is soaked through, sticking to her lower back. She leans forward and rests her forehead against the steering wheel, and just sits like that for a while, reeling.
She can't burden Ellen with this. It's something Jo has to deal with herself.
She drives back to Georgia and takes care of the spirit. Then she heads west, toward Nebraska.
Jo grew up with hunters—men and women alike, old and young, and most of them crazy in one way or another. They would thunder in after a good hunt, often still covered in blood, and drink themselves into a stupor, gloating about whatever it was they'd killed. The other hunters would scoff good-naturedly, pat whoever it was on the back, buy a round of shots.
And Jo was always there, listening wide-eyed, her school books shoved aside in favor of hearing how many people were saved, how many tears were wept by grateful mothers. Hunters were dirty and wounded and poor, but they saved people, and they made the world a little safer, and that was what Jo wanted, more than anything.
Until her father died, she never realized that hunts didn't always go as planned. After that, she always wondered why she didn't hear about the hunts that went bad, the ones that left hunters with one arm, or with a twisted scar instead of an eye.
She understands it now. Harvelle's is a place for celebration, not mourning. Hunters who have fucked up don't want to be scrutinized; they want to crawl into a hole for a while and lick their wounds.
The Roadhouse is the only hole Jo's ever known. She heads there on blind instinct, driving through the night on a dwindling tank of gas: not for celebration, but mourning.
***
She calls Ellen when she's a couple of hours away. It's well into the morning; Ellen will be up by now, kicking Ash out of bed, firing up the kitchen stove.
"We don't open until noon," Ellen says when she answers the phone.
"Ma," Jo says. "It's me. I'm nearby, thought I might stop in for a visit."
Ellen's waiting in the yard when Jo drives up, hands on her hips, a rag tucked in her back pocket. Jo parks and gets out of the truck. She feels small and uncertain beneath Ellen's sharp gaze, but she forces herself to keep her head high, shoulders straight.
"Hey, ma," Jo says.
"Jo Beth, I should beat you with a wooden spoon," Ellen says, and then she's pulling Jo into a hug, squeezing all the air out of Jo's lungs.
"I missed you," Jo says. It's not an admission of weakness—she thought it would be, but it's half statement of fact, half gift to this woman who bore her and raised her, not always deftly but as best she was able. Jo misses her ma, but she's not coming home.
"There's cornbread in the oven," Ellen says, pulling back. "You don't eat enough. Just look at you. What happened to your hair?"
"I cut it," Jo says, and they go inside.
She leaves that afternoon, before the drunken rush—excited hunters are the last people she wants to see right now, the shame of her failure still so fresh in her mind.
"Stay the night," Ellen says. "I'll make up your bed."
"No," Jo says. "I gotta get going; there's something up in North Dakota needs checking out." There isn't, but she'll find something soon enough. She's reluctant to stay at the Roadhouse too long; her independence is heady because of its newness and uncertainty, and she doesn't want to settle too deeply into the familiar shape of her mother's life.
"You call," Ellen says. "And I expect you back here for Thanksgiving."
"I will be," Jo says, and gets in her truck. She's already planning out her route, back road to state highway to interstate, and wherever she wants to go after that—the world bigger than she ever imagined, and all roads open to her, as long as her truck doesn't die and she doesn't run out of gas. Minor obstacles. Life never gets easier, but Jo's learning some things. She'll make it.