Part 4
Ruth used her free hand to open the album. I bent beside the chair when she turned it toward me.
The first photograph showed a towel bundle in a laundry basket. On the next page, a small bandaged paw rested against someone’s sleeve. There was Ruth eleven years earlier, her hair tucked back and her face lifted in laughter, while a cub worried the strap of the old scouting pack.
Another picture showed him sleeping against her chest. His ears looked too large for the narrow face below them.
“If I left the clinic, he took offense,” she told me. “He’d refuse to look at me when I came back.”
“I’m acquainted with that expression.”
She glanced through the panel at Scout and laughed quietly.
Ruth became part of our mornings without asking anyone to make a fuss about it. When the park videos began circulating, reporters tried to reach her. She declined. Visitors sometimes recognized her and wanted a photograph. She said no to that, too.
She never encouraged anybody to imagine they could approach Scout as she had. What had happened in the park was not something she intended to demonstrate a second time.
When there were few people nearby, she talked to him. On a few of those mornings she read a paperback, turning down a page corner when she stopped. Other mornings she told stories about field clinics, a generator that quit during a long night, or a truck whose driver had learned to keep spare parts beneath the seat.
Scout usually settled within sight of her chair. He could hear through the protected ventilation strip above the panel. Whether he attended to her words or simply to her familiar cadence, I couldn’t say. He stayed.
During summer, I began to allow for her in my rounds. I would check the holding locks, prepare the feed, and glance toward the staff entrance. Ruth brought her own drink and never asked me to stop working for her sake.
The slope from the parking area became too much for her in September, so she chose the flatter path. A month later, the staff cart was taking her to the habitat. Toward the end of November, even that ride left her needing a rest before she walked over to the chair.
One afternoon I asked whether I should call Natalie.
“Leave that girl at work,” she said. “You can look worried enough for both of you.”
“Have you been eating properly?”
“I’m not on your feeding chart, Daniel.”
“You could still answer.”
“I eat.”
Scout moved his tail once while we talked. Ruth noticed the way I watched her hands, which seemed smaller inside her gloves than they had in May.
“I’m tired,” she said, less sharply. “A person is allowed to be tired.”
She returned the next morning. She returned on a day when freezing rain glazed the railings and I wanted to turn her around at the entrance. Under a dark green umbrella, she sat for half an hour with one gloved hand near the panel. Scout left the warmth of his den and remained opposite her, dampness collecting along his mane.
On the first Tuesday of December, she did not arrive.
I checked the path from the parking lot. The weather was ugly, and I was relieved to think she might finally have stayed somewhere warm. I moved her chair farther into the sheltered alcove and wiped moisture off its seat.
Scout sat facing the visitor path.
“She picked a sensible day to stay in,” I told him while I worked.
Wednesday passed without her. By Thursday, he was refusing food.
He paced along the back wall, stopping at the end of each turn to check the promenade. After lunch he began to call. The sound was rough and low, different from the territorial roars we heard in the evenings. Keepers paused in the adjacent habitats when it carried down the route.
I retrieved Ruth’s access record from the office. Natalie was listed as her emergency contact. I called, got no answer, and left a message. Then I drove to Ruth’s address, about twenty minutes away in a quiet part of Linden Falls.
A neighbor was bringing his trash bin in. He watched me park, and I introduced myself before approaching the house.
“I’m from the zoo. I’m looking for Ruth Mercer.”
He lowered the handle of the bin.
“Oh. She talked about you people.”
I stopped beside my truck.
Natalie had gone over on Wednesday after two unanswered calls and a missed appointment. Ruth had died in her sleep, probably on Monday night. The family had been told her heart had failed. A book lay open on the blanket beside her.
The neighbor spoke carefully, as if each fact might be less painful if he gave me time between them.
I thanked him. Then I sat behind the steering wheel with the engine running and my gloves still on. A wreath tapped softly against Ruth’s front door whenever the wind reached it.
I had known her from May to December. It didn’t seem long enough to explain why I couldn’t make myself put the truck in gear.
When I got back, Scout was at the observation panel. He looked beyond me toward the path before turning his attention to my face.
I took Ruth’s chair.
I couldn’t make him understand what I’d learned from a man beside a driveway. Words about a heart, a bedroom, and a granddaughter would mean nothing to him. Her absence was already present in the missed mornings, the empty path, and the silence where her voice belonged.
“I wish she could be here,” I said. “I’m sorry, fellow.”
He watched me. After a while, he folded his forelegs beneath him and lowered his chin to the ground beside the panel. I stayed until my hands were cold.
We heard no more searching calls that afternoon.
A week later, Patricia sent for me while I was cleaning up in the carnivore kitchen. An attorney sat in her office with his coat still on and a briefcase open beside his shoes.
Ruth’s burgundy album lay on the desk. The attorney had brought it with an envelope addressed to Patricia and a copy of the relevant estate papers.
“She revised her will,” Patricia said.
The attorney placed the documents where we could both read them. Ruth’s signature was careful and upright, much as I remembered her writing in the access book.
Patricia touched her mouth with one hand while I read the provision beneath it.
Ruth had left her house to the zoo foundation…
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