Part 4
The first time K-31 put her left paw on the ground on purpose, it was 1:52 a.m. on the eleventh of December, and Martin almost missed it because he was refilling his coffee.
He came back to the monitor and she was standing on the spruce log with all four feet under her. It lasted perhaps two seconds. Then the paw came up again, curled, and she hopped down. He rewound the clip and watched it six times and wrote, 01:52, weight on L fore, approx 2 sec, voluntary. He did not write voluntary in capitals, although he wanted to.
After that it happened more. Not every night, and never for long. She would stand on the left paw and then look down at it, as if it belonged to some other animal that had wandered into the run. By the new year she was walking on it at a slow pace and carrying it again whenever she wanted to move fast.
Mai began the hare trials in late January. Doug’s protocol required that any lynx released after rehabilitation be seen to kill live prey in the large enclosure before release, which was a sentence that sounded clean on paper and was not clean at all. A snowshoe hare went into the outer run at dusk. The kitten went in after dark. Everybody else stayed behind the wall.
The first night she didn’t try. The second night she tried twice, launching from the log, and both times her left paw folded on the landing and the hare was gone into the brush pile before she got her feet back. Martin wrote it down. 22:14, attempt, failed. 23:40, attempt, failed. L fore collapsed on landing both.
He was supposed to be in Denver by eight the next morning.
The ablation had been scheduled since November. A cardiologist at a hospital on the east side of the city would thread a wire up through the vein in his groin and burn a few small lines on the inside of his heart, and with luck the gallop would stop. The procedure would take three hours. He’d be home the next day if nothing went wrong. He had not told Beth the date. He had told her the month.
She was sitting in the recovery bay when he woke up.
He didn’t recognize her for a moment because she was wearing reading glasses, which he had never seen her in, and grading something on a clipboard. She looked up when he moved.
“Don’t,” she said. “You’re supposed to lie flat for four hours. They told me to sit on you if I had to.”
“How did you—”
“Mai Tran gave me the date. You had to ask her for the nights off, so I asked her.” Beth set the clipboard down. “She answers questions directly. It’s very refreshing.”
He lay there. The ceiling had a water stain shaped roughly like Lake Michigan. His groin ached and his throat was raw from the tube, and under all of it, for the first time in two years, his heart was doing nothing interesting at all.
“Thank you for coming,” he said.
“I was always going to come. You’re the one who hides the dates.”
A nurse came in to check the pressure dressing and left. Beth took her glasses off and folded them.
“I didn’t list the house,” she said.
He turned his head.
“The realtor came. She walked through. She was very nice about the calendar in the kitchen, the one that’s still on August. She said a lot of families leave things like that until the end.” Beth looked at her hands. “I couldn’t go in the study. I stood at the door with a box. So it’s not listed. I’m paying the gas bill on a house nobody lives in, and I’m telling you so you know I’m not any better at this than you are.”
Martin thought about Ruth’s study: the sewing machine under its cover, the shelves of seed catalogs, the corkboard of photos of the grandkids they’d never had, because Beth had decided early and firmly. The kitchen calendar. Ruth had kept a list on the kitchen calendar every year of first things. First junco at the feeder. First frost. First tomato. She wrote them in green ink with the time of day, as if it mattered what hour a tomato turned red.
The last entry, he knew without needing to see it, was in July. First hummingbird, 6:40 a.m. She had seen it out the kitchen window while he was in Colorado.
“I’ll come,” he said. “In the spring. I’ll go through the study with you.”
“After April.”
“After April.”
“There it is.” Beth almost smiled. “There’s always an April.”
He should have let it go. It was the kind of thing he had let go for seven years: her small, exact accusations, which were always true, and which he had learned to wait out like weather. The drug they had given him for the procedure was still loosening something at the edges. He looked at the water stain.
“I need to tell you why I missed the connection,” he said.
Beth went still.
“Your mother called me that morning. Before you did. Ten to six, it was barely light here. She said the doctors wanted to talk to me, and she said, very calmly, I think you should come home. And I said I would.” He could see the station kitchen, the light on the counter, the plot sheets clipped to the board. “I had four plots left on the bench. It was a twelve-year dataset, and if I didn’t count that week, the season was a gap. I told myself two hours. The first flight out of Montrose wasn’t until one anyway.”
Beth didn’t move.
“It took me three and a half hours,” Martin said. “I packed up ten plots and left two. I missed the one o’clock out of Montrose, and the evening flight got me to Denver after the last plane east had gone. That’s why I was sleeping in an airport when she died.”
He made himself look at her.
“I finished the count first,” he said.
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