Part 4
They finished the sandwich because Lena insisted, then took turns changing into dry clothes. Ruth found an old Hollow Creek sweatshirt in the office cabinet. Its cuffs were stretched, and someone had stitched a small tear beneath the embroidered bobcat. She recognized her own uneven stitches.
The two dry rooms became the center of the sanctuary. Everything else could wait. During the examination and treatment, Ruth stayed outside the door with the supplies Celia had requested. By evening Otis’s breathing had eased somewhat. It was still not normal.
Fern remained in the adjoining room. When Otis was settled again behind the partition, the lioness lay beside it, her shoulder almost touching the mesh. She accepted a little food from her usual feeding point and returned to the same place. Ruth wrote down what she ate. The ordinary act steadied her.
The damaged passage had been isolated, and the surviving rooms checked before anyone agreed to use them overnight. Owen and the responders had diverted the worst of the water away from the building. It left a gray-brown mark on the lower outside wall, well above the heads of the marigolds Ruth could no longer find.
She went to look only once. In the loading yard, the docked crate had been secured on a temporary support. Beneath it was a hole where part of the apron had washed away. The ground looked soft and harmless in the work lights. Ruth stood behind the cordon and tried to connect it to the place she had swept that morning.
Owen came up beside her. He had changed his socks but not his boots.
“Nobody’s going in that section again until it’s assessed,” he said.
“I’m looking.”
“I know.”
She had never liked the easy way he could agree with her without stepping aside.
He held out Cal’s construction binder. The photographs were spread between dry sheets of paper, the cover bent beyond saving.
“Your daughter asked me to put these somewhere warm.”
Ruth took it. In one photograph, almost hidden behind the corner of a steel panel, was Lena at about twelve, holding a level with both hands. Ruth had forgotten she had helped that day. In her memory the building belonged to herself and Cal, made in evenings stolen from other work. There, in the corner, was the child who had spent those evenings with them.
“She always hated getting wet,” Ruth said.
Owen glanced toward the keeper entrance. “Could have fooled me.”
He went to check the temporary drainage. Ruth carried the binder inside.
At ten, Celia told them to stop asking whether Otis could travel in the morning. They would assess him again after the night. There was no transport deadline worth putting ahead of his condition, and Haven Ridge had already confirmed that both places would remain available.
Ruth felt relief so strong that she almost smiled. Otis would stay. Fern would stay. For another night, perhaps longer, there would be feed sheets with names on them.
Then she saw Lena’s face and looked down.
Her daughter was too tired to hide what she was thinking. Ruth could not blame her for seeing it. She had spent all day afraid of losing Otis, and now some small, frightened part of her was grateful for the reason he could not leave.
“I don’t want him ill,” she said.
“I know you don’t.”
“Then don’t look at me like that.”
Lena put the empty water pitcher in the sink. She stood with her hands on its rim until Ruth thought she was going to say nothing at all.
“I’m not going to help reopen this place.”
“Who said anything about reopening?”
“You asked Owen what the damaged section would cost to replace.”
Ruth had asked him. She could have called it a practical question, something an owner had to know. She had already begun fitting that explanation together.
Lena turned. “I’ll stay for what Otis needs. I’ll help with the records and the equipment and all of it. But after that, I’m taking the job.”
“You make it sound as if I’ve been keeping you here.”
“Sometimes you ask for help. Sometimes you tell me about a thing that will go wrong if I’m not here. It’s hard to tell which one you mean.”
Ruth looked toward the treatment-room door. There was a low scrape from inside, then silence. She waited for another sound before answering.
“I thought you wanted this work.”
“I do.”
That was the part Ruth had been refusing to hear. Lena was not going to an office where Ruth could imagine her bored and homesick. She was going to work with animals, with people who would know her as an experienced keeper before they knew whose daughter she was. Fern and Otis were going with her. It was possible for almost everything Ruth loved to have a future that did not require her to run it.
She sat down at the keeper-room table. A wet footprint had dried beneath the chair opposite her. She rubbed at it with the edge of her shoe.
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do tomorrow,” she said.
Lena’s face changed, but she did not hurry to fill the silence.
“Tomorrow we check Otis.”
“After the tomorrows like that.”
“I don’t know either, Mom.”
It was a disappointing answer. Ruth had expected comfort once she had managed to say the difficult thing. Lena came and sat opposite her, and for a while Ruth resented her for not having a plan ready.
Then she remembered the water against Otis’s chin, her daughter counting doors while Ruth wanted someone to take away the fear. She pushed the construction binder across the table and opened it to the photograph.
“Look at your shoes.”
Lena leaned forward. The child beside the panel was wearing red sneakers with enormous white soles.
“I begged you for those.”
“Your father said they looked like clown shoes.”
“Then he wore them on his hands.”
Ruth remembered. Cal had put a sneaker on each hand and walked them across the dinner table until Lena laughed milk through her nose. The memory arrived without the force of a fresh injury. She touched the edge of the photograph where the wet paper had begun to curl.
Near midnight, Otis shifted closer to the partition. Fern lifted her head, sniffed toward his mane, and settled again. Celia let Ruth look through the observation window, then sent her to the cot in the office for two hours while Lena took the next watch.
Ruth lay down with her boots beside the cot. She could hear her daughter’s quiet voice through the wall, speaking to the veterinarian about the readings on a chart. She understood most of the words. For once she did not get up to check the chart herself.
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