Page 113 of Spiced!

“I’m a scientist,” I said. “I want to see it work.”

She almost laughed, not quite, but close. “How long would you want to observe?”

“Two to three weeks. If the episodes stop or reduce significantly after the ventilation modification, we have our answer. If they continue, we go back to the imaging and look harder.”

I stared at the footage paused on my screen of Marisol standing in the right corner of her enclosure, away from the left wall, managing something she couldn’t name. “But I think she’s going to be fine.”

“You think?” Dr. Reyes asked. I could hear that she was choosing the word carefully, the way good clinicians chose words.

“I think so,” I confirmed. “Ask me again in three weeks.”

When she spoke again, her voice had something in it that wasn’t quite relief, more like the first breath of it. “I’ll have her moved immediately, then we’ll start with the ventilation modification. I’ll have facilities look at it today.”

“Good, and Dr. Reyes, you might want to increase the behavioral monitoring for the next few weeks. We’ll want timestamps on every enclosure preference she shows. If the withdrawal pattern disappears, that’s our confirmation before the episodes even stop.”

“I’ll brief the keepers.”

“She’s a good patient,” I said. “She figured out most of it herself.”

I sat for a moment after the line went dead.

Outside my office door, I could hear the clinic doing its thing, Diane talking to an owner on the phone at the front desk, the sound of a carrier being settled in the waiting room, Marcus’s footsteps in the hallway. They were ordinary sounds, the sounds of a place unaware that something potentially amazing had just developed on the other side of a closed door.

I stood and opened the door to find Marcus in the hallway holding a chart.

I texted Adrian at lunch.

Me: I think I’ve cracked the tapir case. It’s not confirmed yet. We need to observe, but I think I know what’s been causing Marisol’s episodes.

He called before I put the phone down.

“Tell me,” he said.

I could hear the panadería’s background hum, the tail end of his morning, the warm, ambient sounds of a place that was done with its principal work and was settling into the afternoon.

He listened the whole way through without interrupting.

“She was moving away from it?” he asked when I finished. “Every time? Ninety minutes before each episode?”

“She knew something was wrong and told us in the only way she knew how,” I said. “We just had to learn how to hear her.”

He was quiet for a moment. “But you won’t know for certain for a few weeks?”

“At least. We need to see the episodes stop after the ventilation modification.”

“So you’re not celebrating yet?”

“I’m not celebrating yet,” I said. “But I’m . . . cautiously optimistic is the clinical term.”

“What’s the non-clinical term?”

I stared at my desk, at the imaging and the footage notes and the cold coffee and the eleven-person update list that Marcus was even now composing a carefully worded message for.

“I think she’s going to be fine,” I said.

“When you know for certain,” he said, “we celebrate properly. Deal?”

“Deal.”