Part 3
“Okay,” Beth said.
She set the legal pad down on the table, squared it with the edge, and looked at Mai and then at Owen, who was hovering in the bunk room doorway with the stake still in his hand like he’d forgotten it.
“Could you two give us the room for a minute?”
It was her school voice. Martin had heard it once at an awards assembly and once on the phone when she’d been dealing with a parent. Mai picked up her cases without a word. Owen said, “I’ll warm up the truck,” although the truck did not need warming.
When the door closed, Beth didn’t sit. She went to the window and looked out at the plow scar on the road.
“You wrote seven paragraphs to the State of Colorado,” she said.
“It seemed like the right thing to do.”
“It is the right thing to do. It’s very thorough. It’s got coordinates.” She turned around. “You know what I got? Seven years ago? I got a voicemail from the Denver airport that said you’d missed a connection and you’d be there in the morning.”
He had no answer to that, so he gave none.
“Here is what I did that week,” Beth said. “You got in the next morning, four hours after she died. And I still picked out the casket. I called her sister in Tucson. I called the hospice company to come get the bed out of the living room, and they came the morning of the funeral because that’s the only day they had, and I stood in the driveway in a black dress and watched two guys carry Mom’s bed out to a truck while you sat in the kitchen. You stayed eleven days. Then you took a job where the mail comes up twice a month on a snowmobile.”
“I know.”
“You don’t know. That’s what I’m telling you.” She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, briefly, and took them away. “I didn’t come out here to fight with you. I came to drive you home. I’ve got the realtor coming to the house the first week of November. Somebody has to go through her study before strangers walk through it, and I thought, for once, the somebody would be you.”
He looked at the stack of boxes by the door. “List it,” he said. “Take anything you want from the study. I trust you to decide.”
Beth looked at him for a long moment.
“That’s not trust, Dad,” she said. “That’s delegating.”
She went out to the SUV without her coat. He watched her stand beside it, arms folded, and talk to Owen for a minute, and then she came back in, got her coat and purse, and told him she had a flight out of Montrose at six-fifteen and she would make it if she left now. She hugged him at the door, quickly and hard, and said into his shoulder, “Take the pills. Answer your phone.” Then she was gone down the plowed road, going too fast.
Mai drove the kitten down at noon. Martin followed in the station truck with his duffel and a box of books. Owen stood on the porch to see them off and held up his bandaged hand in something between a wave and an accusation.
“Hey,” he said as Martin got in the truck. “What do we call her?”
“Her log number will be K-thirty-something.”
“That’s not a name, man.” Owen thought. “Lefty.”
“Don’t name her.”
“Too late,” Owen said. “I just did.”
The state’s wildlife rehabilitation facility sat at the end of a gravel road outside Del Norte, a low steel building and a row of chain-link runs backed up against a cottonwood stand on the Rio Grande. It took eagles with lead poisoning, fawns hit on Highway 160, bears that had learned about trash cans. The kitten went into a large run at the far end, behind a solid wall and a privacy screen, with a den box, a spruce log, a pile of straw, and a ceiling camera.
Mai’s rules were posted on a laminated sheet beside the door to the observation room. No voices within fifty feet of the lynx run. No one enters without the suit. Food goes through the chute, never by hand, never at the same time twice.
The suit was a shapeless camouflage poncho with a mesh hood that hid the head and shoulders, so that nothing that walked into the run looked like a person. Martin put it on the first time Mai sent him in to rake straw while the kitten was shut in her den box. He felt ridiculous. He raked the straw anyway, slowly, the way you’d rake around a sleeping animal, and didn’t once look at the den box.
Nobody wanted the overnight camera shift. Martin rented a room above a feed store on Grande Avenue and took it five nights a week. The kitten became K-31 in the log. He wrote the number in block capitals at the top of each page, and when Owen called on Sundays and asked how Lefty was doing, Martin said K-31 was eating.
She was eating. That was the first good thing, and it came on the third night, at 3:20 a.m., when she crept out of the den box on three legs and found the rabbit quarter that had come down the chute at nine. Martin watched her on the monitor from the observation room, the screen turned low, and did not move until she was finished.
The bad thing was the paw.
For the first month she would not put it down. She carried it against her chest, curled, the toes drawn in, and she moved around the run in an awkward three-legged bounce that got faster without ever getting better. Mai came on Tuesdays and Fridays to change the bandage under sedation. When the bandage came off for good in mid-November, there was a band of bare pink skin around the leg just above the wrist, an inch wide.
“Hair will grow back over that,” Mai said, tilting the leg under the lamp. “Probably white. Scar tissue does that. She’ll look like she’s wearing a bracelet.”
“Will she use it?”
Mai set the leg down gently on the towel. “I don’t know yet.”
In December Mai brought a man named Doug Hailey into the observation room. He ran the state’s lynx program, which meant he had spent twenty years trying to keep a few hundred animals alive in mountains that had once held thousands. He was tall and polite and watched the monitor for a long time without saying anything.
“Front feet are everything for these guys,” he said finally. “They’re snowshoes. She’s got to run down a hare in powder. Three good feet won’t cut it.”
“She’s barely six months old,” Mai said. “Give her the winter.”
“I’ll give her the winter.” Doug turned to Martin. “There’s a zoo on the Front Range that’s asked about her already. Accredited, good people, big enclosure. If she can’t go back out, it’s a good life. Twenty years, maybe. Longer than she’d get up there.”
Martin looked at the monitor. K-31 had dragged a strip of straw into the den box and was arranging it with her teeth. Her left paw hung against her chest.
“A good life,” he repeated.
Doug left. Mai stayed behind, pulling on her coat.
“In April,” she said, “Doug’s going to ask me whether she goes back up to the basin or goes to the zoo. When he asks, I’m going to hand him your log.”
Martin looked up. “Mine?”
“You’re the one who’s awake when she is,” Mai said. “Whatever you write down is where she spends the next twenty years.”
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