Part 4
“You need somebody here with you,” Lena said. She brought him water and waited while he tried to unscrew the cap.
Wade was still working at it when a black SUV stopped beyond the cruiser. Beth got out in navy scrubs, leaving the driver’s door open until she noticed and went back to close it. That small, uncharacteristic mistake frightened him more than the speed with which she came toward him.
She looked at the bus, the equipment around Amos, and the papers on Wade’s knees. Then her gaze stopped at his wrist.
She took the bottle from him, loosened the cap, and put it back in his hand before speaking. Wade drank without meeting her eyes.
“They called me when you didn’t check in.”
“Beth—”
“After your tests, Dad. You were supposed to go upstairs. I told them you knew that.” She had reached him now, breathing hard. “Then somebody at work showed me an alert about an old man on a safari bus.”
Voss introduced himself. Beth barely glanced at him before looking back at her father. Wade tried putting the papers together, but their corners would not line up.
“Nothing bit me,” he said.
“I can see that. Why aren’t you at the cancer center?”
Behind her, the rangers moved Amos toward the transport trailer. Beth turned at the sound of its door and saw the scarred foreleg before it disappeared into the crate.
“Is that Amos?”
Wade nodded. He watched her recognize him, remembering the college weekend when she had come home and found a cub in the mudroom. She had called him irresponsible while taking the bottle from Ruth’s hand. He had hoped, absurdly, that she might remember only the bottle.
Beth looked down at the oncology letter. “You came to see him before you—” She stopped and pressed her lips together. “You thought this could be your last visit. And you let me think you were talking to a surgeon.”
“They weren’t operating today.”
“They were deciding what they could offer you. You promised you’d call me afterward.”
Wade opened his mouth and shut it. The deputy was a few yards away, and Eli was standing by the bus with his phone held against his chest. He wanted this conversation to happen somewhere without witnesses, though he had arranged almost everything that made it happen here.
“Look what’s been done to him,” he said finally.
“I have looked.” Beth crouched so he had to meet her eyes. “I’m also looking at you.”
Lena told them Amos was being taken to the clinic barn. Beth immediately reached for Wade’s cane, intending to get him to her SUV, but he held on to the handle.
“I need to know they’re treating him. That he’ll still be here tomorrow.”
“You’re barely sitting up.”
Lena studied him before speaking. “There’s a shaded bench outside the treatment area. He can wait there with you while I finish the examination. If he feels worse, he leaves immediately.”
Beth asked several short questions about his dizziness, his breathing, and whether he had eaten. Wade answered them without the usual claim that he was fine. She watched him drink, then stood.
“Thirty minutes at the barn. I’ll call oncology while you sit.”
He agreed. When a park employee brought a utility cart to collect keys and belongings, Beth asked for a ride to the visitor lot. She took Wade’s pickup keys with her and returned in his truck; the SUV could stay by the service road until somebody collected it.
She helped him into the passenger seat. Ahead of them, Amos’s trailer was already moving slowly toward the clinic. Wade kept the torn envelope flat on his lap as Beth followed it past the giraffe yard and the shuttered snack stand.
“Were you going to turn them down?” she asked.
He watched dust gather in the corner of the windshield. “I was thinking about what comes after the operation.”
“So was I.”
“The bills. Your shifts. The boys needing things. I can’t have you giving up everything because I need somebody to get me out of a chair.”
Beth slowed for a turn. “You don’t know what I can manage. You didn’t ask.”
“I know you’d try to manage all of it.”
She kept both hands on the wheel until the truck was straight again. Wade could see the pulse working at the side of her neck. He remembered Ruth driving home from difficult appointments, concentrating on traffic while he pretended to inspect the road.
“I spent the morning trying to find you,” Beth said. “I couldn’t help a patient without looking at my phone. Start there, if you want to know what this costs me.”
He lowered his eyes to the envelope. When they reached the barn, he let her come around to his door and help him down.
The bench stood outside a reinforced treatment stall, beneath a fan that pushed warm air across the passage. Through the open gate, Wade could see Amos on padded mats with a technician monitoring him. Lena clipped the matted fur around his neck and photographed what it had hidden.
Beth sat beside Wade after making her call. The oncology office was checking with the surgeon; they were to come in as soon as they left the park. She set an alarm on her phone for the remaining waiting time and offered him another drink.
“Mom sent me pictures of him every week,” she said. “Remember? I’d be in the dorm, trying to study, and there’d be another envelope.”
“Usually a picture of something he’d broken.”
“With you in the background looking pleased.”
Beth paused over the tissue packet. “She was proud of you. All that complaining about the towels, and then she’d make sure I knew he’d gained another pound.”
Wade looked toward the treatment stall. He had forgotten the letters arriving at Beth’s dorm, how far Ruth had sent those small reports while he was occupied with the next feeding.
He rubbed at a patch of dirt on his knuckle. Beth reached for his hand with a damp tissue, then gave him the tissue when he pulled back. She stayed beside him while he cleaned the dirt himself.
Calvin Shaw arrived with Voss carrying two folders. Bell had brought the animal-welfare investigator over from a nearby inspection; the deputy followed them into the barn with Eli. Shaw introduced himself and asked whether Lena had finished examining the neck.
“And the review on that form?” he asked Voss. “Was an examination completed before it was opened?”
“The review was still in progress.”
Shaw waited, but Voss offered nothing more. He opened his notebook to a clean page.
She came out, pulling off her gloves. “Recent restraint injury. There are fibers in the damaged skin. I’ll have them examined, but the photographs already document the pressure pattern.”
Voss opened a folder. “Temporary restraint may be necessary with an animal that won’t shift safely.”
“Then you get qualified staff and a medical plan,” Lena said. “There isn’t one in his record.”
Shaw asked for the movement logs, holding records, camera files, maintenance reports, and the communications behind the disposition review. When Voss mentioned legal review, Shaw told him to contact the office responsible and preserve everything in the meantime.
Eli handed Bell a stack of emails he had printed in the visitor office. They were his own messages, he explained when Voss challenged his access. Then he looked at Shaw.
“Leon trained me to retrieve camera clips when the server misses an upload. The recorder keeps a local copy.”
“Did you check it?”
“After Dr. Mercer asked about medical holding. I was closing last night. I thought there might be something.” He glanced at Voss and looked away. “Some files from the last forty-eight hours weren’t there. One from last night was.”
He looked at Wade. “You might want to let them watch it first.”
Wade kept his hand on the bench. Beth was beside him, and Amos was being cared for a few feet away. “I want to see it.”
Eli unlocked his phone and turned the screen toward the bench.
On it, Amos stood in the narrow holding section of the pen as a man in a white polo came through the gate into the adjoining work passage.
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