Part 3
“Then we try something else,” Ruth said. She picked up the scraps, already deciding which larger sample to bring. Willa slipped the paper bracelet off and left it on the workbench beside the torn pouch.
The next afternoon, Celia had two temporary arrangements ready for observation. Facilities staff had secured opaque panels outside the glass, leaving Boone’s ledge partly screened while preserving a low view at one end. The staff would watch how the gorillas used the space over time. Willa could visit, Celia said, but her presence wasn’t part of a test.
Ruth agreed. She had brought a full-size paper mockup of the proposed artwork, rolled around a tube, and a folding stool so Willa wouldn’t have to sit on concrete. The stool was too tall for the low opening; she noticed that as soon as she set it down.
“We can use the floor,” she said.
Willa stayed beside her. She had remembered the pouch too. Dana had taken it home with her jacket the night before, and its bottom was still torn. Now Willa held the damaged corner closed between her fingers.
Boone was visible through the far window, stripping leaves from a branch. Celia explained that the other gorillas had been using the outside space and that he could join them whenever he wanted. She offered Willa a cushion from the education room, which the girl accepted with both hands.
“Right there,” Ruth said, pointing beside the narrow opening.
Willa put the cushion down. Boone looked in their direction, then went back to the branch. Ruth unrolled the paper and held it against the blank wall where the new panel would hang. She had redrawn the tree shapes so the low opening looked intentional, part of a clearing, and was rather pleased with it.
“You’ll have to come around this way,” she told Ben when he arrived. “Otherwise you won’t see the effect.”
Ben crouched where a seated visitor might be. He asked whether the opening could be shifted a little to allow a second person beside it. Ruth moved the mockup, and Willa shuffled her cushion away from its edge.
Boone rose. Willa’s shoulders lifted, and for a moment Ruth saw the girl from yesterday, alert to something that had nothing to do with the adults’ discussion. He carried the branch toward the sheltered ledge and stopped behind the opaque panel.
“He’s there,” Willa whispered.
Ruth leaned around the paper. From the place she stood, she could see part of his shoulder. “Move a little to your right, honey.”
“I can see.”
“Ben can’t see you both.”
Ben straightened. “I don’t need to.” But Ruth was trying to explain the scale of the sightline, how the girl and the animal occupied the same low level, how the new art would frame that without making a hole look like a mistake. She heard herself saying that families would love it.
Willa got up and moved the cushion into the corner where she had sat the day before. She set her pouch on it and sat down facing partly away from the opening. Boone made a small movement on the ledge, the branch leaves scraping over his forearm.
“That’s behind the panel,” Ruth said. “Nobody will be able to see what you’re doing.”
“I’m not doing anything.”
Ruth lowered the paper. “Willa, just help me for a minute.”
The girl’s jaw shifted. Ruth knew that movement from the days Willa had to be reminded to put away a game, and she was embarrassed to see it here with Ben waiting and Celia watching. She said the girl’s name again, making it shorter.
Willa stood up, picked the cushion off the floor, and folded it against her stomach. She stayed there holding it, her fingers pressed deep into its edge. Across the glass, Boone left his resting place and moved toward the open retreat doorway.
Celia stepped between Ruth’s rolled paper and the child. She didn’t touch either of them. “We’re done with visitors in here for now,” she said. “Ruth, take a break.”
“I only needed her to—”
“I heard.”
Ruth rolled the mockup too tightly. Its edge buckled around the tube. Ben offered to carry her stool, and she told him she could manage it herself, though she couldn’t comfortably carry the stool, the roll, and the tool case together.
Willa returned the cushion to Celia. She set the blue pouch on Ruth’s tool case, then asked to borrow her phone so she could call her mother. She spoke to Dana near the public entrance, far enough away that Ruth could hear the child’s voice without making out the words.
Ruth sat on the stool she had brought. There was a smear of pale adhesive on her knuckle, and she picked at it until a patch of skin came away. Through the window she could see Celia making a note, then moving on with the afternoon’s work. The keeper didn’t try to bring Boone back.
Ben set the tool case beside Ruth. “We’ll review the drawings tomorrow without a visit attached,” he said. “You can send the material price in the morning.”
“The girl was tired.”
He looked toward Willa, who was waiting on a bench with the phone in her lap. “Sure.” He lifted the stool only after Ruth stood, and carried it to the van.
Dana arrived in a work shirt with a missing cuff button. Willa gave Ruth back her phone before going to meet her. Dana listened while Ruth explained that there had been a misunderstanding about where Willa should sit. Willa stood beside her mother, twisting the loose cuff thread around one finger.
“I thought you were just going back to visit,” Dana said.
“We were. She was enjoying it.”
“Yesterday.” Dana waited, but Ruth could hear the shop in her own explanation: the deadline, the people waiting, the job that would be easier if everyone cooperated. She had explained late dinners and canceled Saturdays that way for most of her daughter’s childhood.
“I didn’t know you wanted to leave,” Ruth told Willa.
“I said I could see him.”
Ruth started to answer. The girl rubbed the cuff thread between her fingers, watching it fray. Ruth remembered the narrow view, the piece of shoulder she herself had seen, and Ben saying he didn’t need to see them both.
“I can take you home,” she said at last. “We could stop—”
Willa shook her head. When Dana turned toward the parking lot, Ruth held out her hand as she always did at the curb. Willa walked past it and took her mother’s instead.
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