They’d run blood tests. They’d done a scan. Now Griffin was doing an exploratory procedure.
“Dammit,” he muttered. He was frowning.
Charlie was assisting by handing him tools and helping position the otter. She’d like to think that she was also helping him just by being there, but she doubted that was true. She had no idea what was going on and couldn’t get past her intense fear that this wasn’t going to turn out well.
But she reined her thoughts in every time they started to go down the path of, what will we do if the otter dies?
It would devastate the Landrys, Tori and Kennedy in particular. On a more superficial note, it would not be good publicity for the park. Of course, in the back of her mind, she knew that they would have to deal with sick animals and animals that passed away, but having it front and center made her realize that not only was it emotionally hard on the family, but they would have to deal with a public message around it as well.
Where she would not allow her thoughts to go, even for a moment, was to Griffin.
He was the primary caregiver to these animals and closer to them than anyone. Tori might’ve been closer to some of the barnyard animals, but Griffin had a special place in his heart for the otters.
She couldn’t even allow herself to think about how this would affect him.
“Fuck,” Griffin held up a pair of tweezers.
From the end protruded a bloody object that looked like a tiny stick.
“What is that?” Charlie asked
“A fucking toothpick.” Griffin’s tone was angry. “He swallowed it.”
“Why would he eat a toothpick?”
“He wouldn’t unless it was stuck in something he did want to eat.”
Charlie frowned. “How would a toothpick get into the otter food?”
“Someone tossed it or dropped it in his pen. It might’ve had food on it or have been attached to something else he ate. It looks like it’s just about half of one. I need to make sure the other half isn’t inside somewhere.”
He tossed the bloodied toothpick into the basin next to him and bent over the otter again.
Charlie felt a little lightheaded. A human had obviously tossed the toothpick—intentionally or accidentally—into the otter enclosure.
“Is the toothpick poison to him or something?” she asked.
“No. There’s a chance it would just pass through. But this one punctured his intestine and is causing leakage into the rest of his body. That’s a serious infectious condition situation. I need to see if there’s more toothpick in here, repair the perforation, and then we’ll have to treat him for the infection.”
He said all of this while carefully exploring and not sparing Charlie even a glance.
“Will he be okay?” she asked softly.
“I’ve no idea.
The otter might not be okay. The otter might die from a toothpick.
It might have just been a careless act, but negligence was just as dangerous to the animals. Maybe more so in some ways. If people didn’t realize what could happen, they could do it again. There could be other toothpicks in the otter enclosure or in other animal pens.
Charlie felt her throat tighten. With fear.
Next time it could be a lemur. Which was not only special to Griffin but was an endangered animal.
Charlie felt her heart pounding hard in her chest.
People had been feeding the otters and the lemurs and the sloth and all of the barnyard animals over the past few weeks. Because of her. As part of the stupid activities she’d come up with to drum up business and increase their bottom line. She’d pushed for all of this. She was the one who had pressed Griffin into agreeing to more human interaction with the animals. Even before she’d known his past encounters with human beings who hadn’t properly respected the animals they were interacting with, she’d known that he was against the idea in general. Now that she knew what he had been through before, she realized that he was not only right, but she’d been very wrong.
“I’m not seeing any other pieces of the toothpick,” Griffin said after a few minutes of tense silence. “I’m going to repair the perforation.”
Charlie worked on breathing and not crying as she assisted. The only conversation was him giving terse instructions. Which was fine. She had no idea what to say to him. She needed to apologize, of course, but she didn’t think this was the time. And she wasn’t sure she could get the words out without breaking into tears.
Griffin finished the procedure and gave the animal a huge dose of antibiotics. Then they settled Snickers in one of the cages.
Finally, after what seemed like a day, Griffin was cleaned up, and he took the first big breath Charlie seen him take.
He turned to her. “Are you okay?”
That was all it took to make the tears start running. He was asking if she was okay?
“We had fruit kebabs,” she blurted out.
He frowned. “What?”
She nodded, tears tracking down her cheeks. “We had fruit kebabs during Sloth Storytime. We also had them for Lunch with the Lemurs. They were two or three pieces of fruit on a toothpick for the kids. They were told to pull the fruit off to hand it to the animals. But they easily could have dropped one.”
She was certain at this point that’s what had happened. Toothpicks didn’t randomly show up. People didn’t routinely carry toothpicks with them. Did they?
“If they dropped them around the sloth or lemurs, Snickers wouldn’t have gotten a hold of it,” Griffin said as if processing what she was saying as he spoke.
“Maybe a couple of the kids saved their kebabs and thought they would feed them to the otters later. Then they couldn’t get in to hand the food to the otters like they did with the lemurs, so they tossed it over the enclosure wall,” she said.
Griffin nodded slowly. Of course, he did. It made sense. That had to have been what had happened. Which meant that not only was it her fault that there was more human interaction with the animals, but the toothpick was directly her fault. The fruit kebabs had been her idea. With each animal interaction, they had food that the animals could also eat. Not just so the kids could have the fun of feeding the animals, but to also show that humans and animals had some things in common. For instance, the love of fruit kebabs.
“Charlie—”
“Do you need me to stay?” she interrupted.
He studied her face. “No,” he finally said. “You can go.”
Yeah, she needed to go. She needed to give him some space. She also needed to deal with what she’d done.
If the otter died, it was her fault. She would’ve killed one of the animals that was most special to Griffin. She would’ve come into his life, turned it upside down, thought that she knew more than he did about how to make the animal park successful, and in the process, endangered the animals and put him through more pain and frustration that came from a human being interacting with an innocent animal.
On her way past the front desk, Charlie glanced at the laptop computer where she’d been talking to Fiona. She grabbed it quickly, tucking it under her arm, then practically ran to her car.
She headed to her grandmother’s house. She needed to be alone. She hadn’t spent more than a couple of nights there in the last couple of weeks because she’d been at Griffin’s every night.