They got him onto the stretcher with the particular choreography of people who lift heavy, unwilling things for a living — count of three, a grunt, an adjustment — and Everett borne it with the offended dignity of a man accustomed to being his own transportation. The drawing he would not surrender; it rode inside his fist, against his chest, where a nurse would eventually have to negotiate for it like an armed truce, and where, in the end, a paramedic with a daughter of his own simply taped the folded paper to the inside of Everett's vest and charted it as personal effects, patient declines release, which was the most accurate medical note of the day.
There is a photograph of that moment — not from the plaza cameras, which were too far and too grainy, but from a teenager in the crowd who raised a phone and then, years later, thinking better of having kept it private, sent it to Claire: a giant on a stretcher, a small girl walking beside it with her hand on the rail and her chin set, both of them lit from the side by the whole Kentucky sun. Claire had it printed and kept it in Junie's baby book, between the first lost tooth and the kindergarten certificate, where it belonged in the family's official history. The day the bear came back, she wrote under it, in the caption hand she used for birthdays. It was not, strictly, accurate. The bear had never gone. But the family history was being revised in those days, in many respects, by everybody concerned.
Junie walked beside the stretcher the whole way to the ambulance. This was not permitted, procedurally, but the paramedics were parents and the trooper was a grandfather and there are regulations and there are rulings, and the ruling of every adult on that forecourt was unanimous and unappealable: the child walks. She kept one hand on the stretcher rail, marching to keep up, braids bouncing, and at the doors — where the choreography finally required an ending — she stopped the whole procession with a question she had clearly been composing since the concrete.
"Will the bear be okay?"
The paramedic — the one with the daughter — began the professional answer, the one about vitals and the surgical team, and Everett raised his head off the pillow with an effort that made two people reach to stop him, because he had recognized, in the hierarchy of that moment, whose question it actually was and whose answer she required.
"Bears are tough," he told her.
Junie considered this with a furrow that could have stopped traffic. She had the air of a small quality inspector who has found the product wanting in one particular.
"Nice bears are tougher," she corrected him.
For the second time that day, the laugh came out of him cracked straight down the middle — and this time there was more laugh in it than crack, and the paramedic with the daughter looked away for a second, professionally, at the sky. "Yes, ma'am," Everett said. "They are. You're gonna have to remind me how that works."
"I will," Junie said. "I'll come every day. I'll bring the growl practice."
Claire got there then, running the last of the distance, and lifted Junie up so the child could see over the doors as they loaded him, and Junie pressed both hands flat to the ambulance window, and Everett — flat on his back, gray with loss of blood and twelve years and their sudden reversal — raised his own hand, still red, still shaking, and pressed it to the glass from the inside, palm to palm with his bear cousin through the window of the ambulance, and held it there while the doors closed and the sirens wound up and the whole bright terrible afternoon pulled away from the curb.
Claire stood in the exhaust and the heat with her daughter on her hip and watched it go, and Junie waved, not sadly, with the unhurried confidence of a child waving at a train she fully expects at the same time tomorrow.
"He's not going where she can't visit, Mommy," Junie said, in response to nothing her mother had said aloud. "It's not that kind of trip." She rested her head on Claire's shoulder, suddenly and completely five years old, worn out by the enormous errand of the day. "I'm hungry," she announced, to the forecourt, to the sky, to whoever was keeping the list now. "Being a bear cousin is hungry work."
Claire laughed — it surprised her out of her body like a hiccup, grief and relief and the plain absurd music of her daughter's survival — and held on tight, and carried her back across the plaza toward the car, past Pump Seven, where a small bright scar in the concrete and a dark place that the sun was already drying were all that remained of the story, and past the red ice machine, where Junie, half asleep, lifted one hand off her mother's shoulder and waved — small, casual, goodbye-for-now — at absolutely nobody at all.