The Dragon Keeper (12 page)

Meg backtracked to the mounds and furrows on the beach. She pushed the rake into one and started redistributing the sand.

“Hey, speaking of swimming,” Gemma said, “I promised Ally we’d go to the beach this weekend. Wanna be our date?” Gemma flipped her braid over her shoulder and winked at Meg.

“Sure.”

Gemma attached a hose to the hidden wall hookup and started watering the trees, bobbing her head to some imaginary music only she could hear. That was Gemma, doing whatever had to be done, but with Zen. She’d grown up on some farm in the middle of the state and gotten pregnant by her high school boyfriend, who’d freaked out, joined the army, and blown himself up on a land mine outside Fallujah. Her parents hadn’t kicked her out, but they opened the door plenty wide when she got enough grants and scholarships to go to college in the cities. Gemma didn’t tell stories like that, though. Meg hadn’t heard any of that until they had a few too many at the Christmas party one year. Gemma’s real stories were all stuff like the time Allison turned three while they lived in a student-family co-op, and Gemma bought her a turtle for $2.00 from a kid down the hall. They watched it swim around the bathtub all night and had peanut butter sandwiches on the bathroom floor. That was a Gemma story. She stayed cool and even-keeled in a place full of Nazi dolphin trainers and administration drones so she could go home and have peanut butter picnics. It was as if some lotus blossom had unfurled from the land of easygoing mothers to reveal Gemma, their bohemian child, sitting cross-legged and shaking sparkling corn seed from her hair.

A day at the beach. Meg raked and remembered: Earlier that summer, she and Gemma had stretched out on beach towels while Ally decorated sand castles with lake weeds and rocks.
Pretty groovy, sweetie
, Gemma said from underneath her hat.
Tell us about who lives in your castle
.

Before they met, Meg hadn’t known people like Gemma existed, and it was years before she accepted that Gemma’s personality wasn’t an act. She had genuine skills when it came to mothering, and Allison was living proof. The kid scored off the charts on all her tests, was interested in absolutely everything, and showed this awesome quiet concentration whenever you gave her a problem to solve. It would be amazing to have a kid like that, to watch her grow and learn and take on the world. Meg hadn’t known Gemma that well when she and Ben decided to get the abortion. If she had—

No. There was no point in thinking about it. Meg worked the sand into smooth lines, raking forward and back, forward and back, as intently as if her own brain were sprawled out in front of her and if she just raked hard enough, she could obliterate all these
what if
s that had started to haunt her lately.

The rake scraped over something solid. A dull crunch sounded under the metal teeth, and Meg yanked the rake away from a small sand pile next to one of the palm trees. The noise echoed in her ears, clear and untouched by thought for two endless heartbeats. Then she gasped as the realization hit her.

“Oh my God.”

Falling to her knees, Meg smoothed the darkening mound of sand away from the indentation of her rake. The granules slid through her fingers in clumps, revealing oblong patches of bumpy tan and brown mottled curves. Eggs. Her throat caught somewhere between shouting and choking. There were two, then four. Gemma’s hands slid in among Meg’s, and together they cleared the top of the nest with butterfly fingertips. The more they revealed, the lighter their touch.

On the side closest to Meg was a shattered eggshell, its gelatinous, milky contents seeping into the sand and onto the eggs below. The destroyed shell was darker on the inside and filled the air with a faint musk. A second, nearby egg was also cracked. She could barely hear Gemma’s voice over the roar of the building’s ventilation system in her head.

“We should radio this in. Chuck will want Antonio to take over. We shouldn’t disturb the area.” Gemma backed off and nudged Meg’s arm.

Meg drew back but didn’t reach for the walkie-talkie hanging from her belt. Frozen, she stared at the second, cracked egg. The hairline fracture looked like a tiny flash of lightning, and a dark fist seemed to take hold of her lungs. A cracked egg was as good as smashed. Her fault. She should have recognized the depressed behavior and unusual appetite, both egg-laying hallmarks of a healthy, breeding-age female Komodo. God.

“Meg? Hon, can you believe this? I mean, wow. Hey, are you okay?” Gemma touched Meg’s shoulder.

“Yeah.” With a flat-eyed smile, she patted Gemma’s hand and stood up. “I’ll call it in.”

~

“Hey, Meg. Did you free the animals today?”

“Maybe tomorrow.” She didn’t bother raising her head to Neil. He was in his usual spot on the screened-in porch above her back door.

“One got loose, anyway.”

Inside, she threw her keys on the crap heap of a kitchen table and understood what he was talking about.

Ben’s spare key was on the top of a pile of mail, with its square, plastic keychain that read I
N DOG YEARS,
I
’M DEAD
over a cartoon dog skeleton. She’d gotten it for him when he turned thirty, and even though he’d bitched about it like an old man, he’d carried it ever since.

Ben was back. Paco must have dropped him off after the fair closed. They always wrapped up fair season in Minnesota, but usually Ben called before coming over. It was ten-thirty, and except for the stove light—which she left on every morning for nights like this, when she needed that comforting ball of light in the window—the house was dark.

Meg went straight to the bedroom to change, grabbing whatever clothing her fingers stumbled over on the floor. She pulled on some shorts, but instead of the smooth elastic waistband, she felt wet, grainy clumps of sand hug her stomach. Her skin crawled. Sitting on the edge of the bed, she covered her face. The eggs shone against the back of her eyelids, pulsing in their leathery shells. They rolled, oblong and wobbly along the ground, each one smacking into her rake and cracking, oozing amniotic fluid into the sand. God. She shook her head, rubbing her eyes until they were filled with purple sunbursts of pressure, crowding everything else out.

When her vision cleared, she saw the flickering light in the hallway. In the living room, she found Ben half-sitting, half-lying asleep on the couch with his mouth gaping open. CNN shadows ran like ticker tape across his face, and even from across the room Meg could smell the deep-fryer grease. And something else. Mustard?

He woke up with a snort when she turned off the TV. Twisting up on the couch, he yawned and stretched.

“Hey, stranger.” The words were distorted into the end of his yawn. “Have a nice summer?”

He’d called once or twice. The last time she’d heard from him was Independence Day weekend, when he and Paco had pulled into Tulsa. Or Tennessee. Somewhere in the middle, anyway.

“It was normal. Until today.”

Ben grabbed her hand, lacing his fingers through hers, and pulled her down to the couch. His palm was sweaty.

“They finally fire Chuck today?”

“No.” Her other hand pressed over her pitching stomach. “I broke some of Jata’s eggs.”

Ben scratched his neck and yawned again. “That’s your Komodo, right?”

“Yeah.” Her voice sounded tiny in the dark room.

“Won’t she lay more?”

“Yeah.” It might have been true. She could’ve been laying a second clutch right now, for all anyone knew. Every captive Komodo female was different. Some laid once, others laid multiple clutches over several weeks. She read that one time Bubchen, the German Komodo, laid only a single egg and then ate it. And they were all unfertilized, for God’s sake. They would just shrivel up and rot anyway, unless by some miracle they were parth, which was a huge dice roll—if the dice had three billion faces and only one winning side. The two eggs Meg had destroyed would never have hatched anyway.

“So no worries, then. You’re still the best thing since raw meat to that dragon.”

She smiled, and suddenly she ached with the relief of seeing Ben, of being able to lean into the warm bulk of his body and rest her chin on the shelf of his collarbone. She’d been so cold this summer.

“You wouldn’t believe the shit I’ve had to put up with from Paco this year,” Ben said. “Angelica dumped his ass mid-July, and he’s been drunk ever since. Smoking over the deep fryer, bitching at other vendors, blasting the RV stereo. We almost got kicked out of Iowa, and Cincinnati told us not to come back next year.” As he talked, he petted her back in lazy, sleepy strokes. “I was so busy babysitting I forgot to mail rent in for a few months.”

“What?”

“I’m homeless. Funny, huh? I can stay in the RV, but it might be kind of a bitch in the winter.”

She drew her finger over his stomach. She’d forgotten how his belly punched out over his jeans, not soft like baby fat but solid and thick like an animal hide. It was skin that could withstand anything. “You can stay here until you find a place.”

“Thanks.” He paused, kissing her temple and letting his lips linger. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it? You smell like zoo.”

“You smell saucy.”

“Creamy horseradish. I invented it this season. It’s a huge seller.”

“Yuck.” She leaned into his neck, letting his hand drift up her back and work out the knots in her shoulders.

“Well, since we’re both already dirty … ” He let the sentence trail off.

Meg didn’t reply. His skin was warm, and she leaned into the heat the way Jata hugged her sunning boulders, for comfort and the instinct to survive. They stripped off their clothing, and Ben ran his hands over her body. When they came together, the abortion was there—it was always there in that moment—but she ignored it and reached for him anyway. It didn’t matter anymore. There was nothing she could do about it. Remembering was as pointless as trying to fit the pieces of a broken eggshell back together.

7 ½ Months
before
Hatching

I
don’t know if I should be doing this.” The girl glanced nervously behind Meg as they approached the nursery door.

“That’s why you’re here, isn’t it? What kind of an intern doesn’t assist the staff?”

It was humiliating enough that Meg’s badge wouldn’t clear the security on the nursery door, but then she had to go dig up one of Antonio’s girls and actually ask for help. The girl’s hair covered half her face and exploded over her back in waves like a blonde kelp forest. Meg remembered this intern, mainly because she’d pinned two weeks on her in the pool. Michael from the Mammal Kingdom had gone for the long haul, and he’d cleaned up when the girl made the six-month mark. The cut-and-run theory had seemed like a winner, especially considering the huge hair. It was hard to believe there was intelligent life inside that, but then Michael had pointed out the kelp forests and how if his sea otters could take cover in them, maybe so could a damn good intern.

It was a standing rule that the keepers always made bets on how long the interns would last. Gambling wasn’t allowed on the property, but they just called it a football pool, and nobody seemed to wonder why the score sheet tacked on the announcements board in the cage had teams named “Cincinnati Sally’s” and “Texas Curry Breath.” The girl in question, who was stubbing her toe into the floor and blinking through a break in the forest, had gone to the Super Bowl as the “Milwaukee Mermaids.”

“Maybe I should check this with Dr. Rodríguez first. He assigns all the security clearances.”

“There are animals in there under my care. Do you want to answer for them if they’re neglected?”

“I don’t want to get in trouble.”

Meg leaned in closer and found the girl’s other eye hiding behind a glossy kelp leaf. “And I don’t want to have to make trouble for you, so open the damn door and we can both get back to our days. Okay?”

“One of you can, anyway,” someone said behind her. Relief flushed the girl’s face, and Meg stepped back, gritting her teeth.

“Winifred, go see Michael from the Mammal Kingdom about increasing the cheetah’s antidepressants. I’ll handle the wayward keeper.”

Meg waited until the girl rushed off and silence settled back in the corridor before swinging around. Antonio was in full bouncer pose—arms crossed and feet spread as if he owned the hallway and everyone in it. “You lost, Yancy? This isn’t your side of the zoo.”

“Maybe it should be, since your people can’t even manage to open a door.”

“You’re just bitter because you lost on her in the intern pool.” He grinned.

Rolling her eyes, she changed the subject. “The cheetah’s on antidepressants already? We just got him a year ago.”

“Go figure. An animal that can run seventy miles an hour gets depressed about living in a fifty-yard box.”

“Maybe he sensed that they named him Chester.”

Antonio chuckled and casually swiped his badge against the nursery lock. The door immediately unbolted. Swinging it open with an arm, he ushered her inside.

Tanks and incubators lined the walls, all the baby machines that housed little cubbyholes of life. Eggs, larvae, and cast-off newborns from all over the zoo came through here. Sometimes the animals just didn’t take to their young as they would have in the wild or—in Jata’s case—the mother would have cannibalized the eggs if she’d stumbled upon them again. Antonio walked to the far wall and pulled a chart from the pocket of a large, metal enclosure fitted with a bay window. Flipping a switch, the interior of the tank lit up to reveal three leathery eggs. Jata’s eggs.