Part 4
Months meant the rest of the winter, perhaps longer. Vera looked at her hands on the coat and thought of the appointment card in her wallet, the one she had not shown Hannah because another person reading it would not improve her eyes.
“I’m eighty-five,” she said.
“I know,” Hannah answered.
Vera had not meant to say it to her. She looked at Lena, wanting the woman to understand that she could not put things off as casually as people who expected to have another twenty winters.
Lena left her chair close. “We can send you updates. You can call me. I can’t promise you the outcome, but I’ll tell you what we know.”
Vera thought of Finn coming to the glass while she stood with the food behind it. She had liked how quickly he arrived. She had told herself it proved that the house was good for him.
“You’ll need to know about the spoon,” she said.
Lena waited while Vera described the tap against the dish, the time of day she had fed him, the way he watched her right hand. She told her about the window, the hares, and the two afternoons he had gone out and come back. Then she asked for paper because there were things she might forget to say.
Hannah moved the lamp closer, but Vera wrote the list herself. Beside the evening feeding time, she added the nights she had fed him outside after he escaped. She folded the paper once, then opened it again and handed it over.
“If I call, I want to hear how he’s doing,” she said. “You don’t have to let me talk you into anything else.”
Lena put the paper with her notes. Vera tucked Ned’s coat beneath her arm and stood, taking Hannah’s offered hand until her knee straightened.
In the hallway, a cart rattled past carrying folded towels. Vera turned toward the treatment-room doors. She stood there long enough for Hannah to shift the overnight bag to her other hand, then followed her daughter toward the exit.
They stayed in a motel and went home the next morning. At the kitchen table, Vera took the appointment card from her wallet and laid it beside Hannah’s coffee.
“It’s next Thursday. They said I shouldn’t drive afterward.”
Hannah read it without asking how long she had known. “I’ll see what I can rearrange.”
“If you can’t, help me find somebody else.”
Before Hannah left, Vera brought the pendant to the table with its instructions. She asked which light meant it was charged, and Hannah sat beside her to show her.
The first weeks were awkward. Hannah sometimes called twice in an evening and sometimes began a sentence with “You need to” before stopping herself. Vera still said she was fine when what she meant was that she did not want to discuss it. On one such evening she called back, annoyed with herself, and admitted she had not been sleeping.
They made a plan for the following night. It was small enough that Vera could agree to it: Hannah would call after supper, and neither of them would leave the television on while they talked.
Luke helped her find another plow driver. The new man cleared the driveway adequately but left the mail in the box and never came in for bread. When the wardens later asked Vera to confirm her account for Dean’s case, she did. She still caught herself saving the heel of a loaf before remembering.
News of Finn came slowly. At first Lena talked about the wound and the leg; later she described what the staff saw from a distance. He used the sheltered platform. He waited until the service area was empty before eating. Once, a keeper could not find him in the brush until a tufted ear moved above a fallen log.
Vera repeated that last detail to Hannah. She had to explain why it pleased her.
By late April, Finn was moving well enough to hunt in the large enclosure, although his left foreleg still shortened his stride when he tired. The wildlife team approved a release into suitable forest near the area where Vera had found him, beyond the houses and feeding yards.
Lena offered to let her watch from a closed vehicle well back from the release point. Hannah waited until the call ended before asking whether she wanted to go.
Vera went to the cupboard and took out Finn’s dish. It had been washed and unused since the night he returned with the trap. She held it a moment, then set it back on the shelf.
“Yes,” she said. “But leave this here if I forget and put it in my bag.”
Two mornings later they waited in Luke’s truck at a quiet forest landing. Finn’s covered carrier stood at the far edge of the clearing. A biologist had fitted him with a tracking collar, and Lena had explained that it would help them monitor how he managed after release.
The carrier opened. For a while there was nothing to see but a dark interior and one broad paw resting at the threshold.
Then Finn came out.
He was larger than Vera remembered, his cheek fur thick with scattered silver. He paused with his head raised, listening. When he turned, she saw the slight unevenness in his forelegs and pressed her hands together beneath her coat.
He crossed the clearing without looking toward the truck. At the trees he stopped again, then passed beneath the low branches with a movement so easy that Vera lost track of exactly where he had gone.
Hannah’s hand lay on the seat between them. Vera put her own over it and kept watching the empty place.
The next November, after the first snow, a sound at the mudroom woke her before dawn. She listened from the bed before getting up. There was no dragging metal, no cry, just one scrape followed by a long quiet.
Vera put on her glasses and slippers. Her pendant rested beneath her nightgown, and she moved through the dark kitchen without switching on the light.
A black lynx stood beyond the glass. The collar showed beneath his ruff, and when he stepped sideways, his left forepaw came down slightly short. He looked into the kitchen, then turned an ear toward the firs.
Vera’s hand closed around the latch. She stood with it in her palm until he moved away from the door.
He went down the steps and crossed the open yard. Once he paused to listen, his body angled toward the old hare run. Then the branches moved around him, and she could no longer see his coat against the trees.
Vera stayed by the glass a little longer. At the bottom of the steps, snow had fallen into one of his tracks; the others were still clear.
When the kitchen clock reached seven, she called Hannah. Her daughter answered in a voice thick with sleep.
“Everything all right?”
“Yes,” Vera said. “Finn was on the steps. You should have seen him.”
She pulled out her chair and sat down, leaving the back door latched.