The Dragon Keeper (17 page)

After each draw was complete, she tagged their legs with ID markers. He watched her strap the second ID onto a hatchling and reached over to give it a tug, then let his hand drop onto hers.

“They’re going to get out of those.”

“We’ll see.” She pulled away. It was the exact same thing she’d said to Gus when he told her that’s how they ID’d the community hatchlings at the Wildlife Refuge, but then he went and suggested microchips. So ID tags all around.

“We wouldn’t have an identification issue if they were segregated.”

“We’d have other problems. Aggressive behaviors, inability to acclimate to new environments, difficulty mating.”

“You don’t think the AZA is really going to allow these guys to breed, do you?”

Leave it to him to bring up the Komodo Dragon Species Survival plan, which was basically a lot of charts and endless hoops to jump through. The AZA, the Association of Zoos and Aquariums, were the guys who sat up in the proverbial clouds and looked down on the desert island scenario. If you had three women and four men, all with unrelated DNA sequences, could you successfully propagate the species without turning their descendants into a race of idiot flipper children? This was one of the pressing questions of the AZA.

“Why not?”

“You know why not.” He was getting irritated again. Good. “There’s a limited gene pool of Komodos in the U.S., and these guys unbalance the whole population.”

No one had said anything yet, not officially, but everyone knew Jata’s place on the breeding list was crossed out because of the tiny dragons wriggling one by one beneath Meg’s hands. Underneath their delicate yellow, black, and green scales pulsed the same genetic code as Jata’s. Four dragons with the exact same genetic signature were three too many, according to the AZA. If they bred them at all, it might be only Jata, or maybe one of the hatchlings after they reached maturity.

Meg understood that. Empirically, scientifically, she could read those charts and draw her finger along the line of hope for survival. If she were in those clouds looking down, she’d make those same decisions. But she wasn’t there; she was here, surrounded by hatchlings that shouldn’t exist. Deprived and cut off from any possible mate, Jata had reproduced anyway. When there was no life to be found, Jata created it—and now the AZA was going to punish her genetic code for taking an unauthorized step up the evolutionary ladder.

“It figures.”

“What figures?”

“You, jumping into the clouds with the AZA. It must be pretty easy up there, away from all these messy, real lives.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Antonio sealed the last sample and turned to face her. Gently, she lifted the last hatchling from the table and set him into the makeshift taxi, locking the door. He skittered back to the far corner and adopted a threat pose: head cocked and neck puffed out.

“It doesn’t matter. I should get these guys over to their new home.”

“I told you I’d help you.”

She shrugged. “Whatever. I don’t want to keep you. You probably have a date lined up.”

He opened the nursery door and waited for her to walk through, with the carrier in tow, before asking, “Is it men in general or just me?”

“What?”

He didn’t answer.

It took half an hour of going back and forth with the taxi from the nursery to the baby building next door. When the last hatchling was safely deposited inside the new tank, she and Antonio sat on opposite sides of the long stone bench that paralleled the glass and watched them.

She’d chosen a completely terrestrial exhibit, filling it with organic dirt and sand and setting just a few large sunken water pots in the corners. Pruning trees and palm shrubs, she’d planted them at various points in the tank and scattered a few rocks around the bottom, too, but those were mostly for show. Juvenile Komodos lived in trees in the wild, and her hatchlings turned out to be no different. Meg watched them scramble from limb to limb of their pseudo-trees until they found a comfortable vantage point, and then they sat, poised and warily alert. If they acknowledged one another at all, it was too subtle to detect. At least there was no aggression. Not yet. She’d designed the enclosure to be three-sided, like a square U, so each could have his own mini-territory without even having to see the other two. The added benefit, of course, was that there was more glass for the visitors to belly up to. After a few minutes, Meg dumped a bagful of live crickets into the middle of the enclosure before returning to the bench next to Antonio.

One by one, the dragons descended to the ground, moving hesitantly around one another, training their awkward limbs to crouch and hunt. They had amazing concentration. Only two weeks old, and their sleek trunks and tails pointed straight at their prey with the purpose of a poisoned dart. It was the rushing attack that still needed some working out. Meg laughed as one of the hatchlings lunged for a cricket and came up with a mouthful of sand.

“I thought we agreed to give them dead crickets to start.”

“I did. But they need to start working on their coordination, not to mention their hunting skills.” She chuckled again.

“I don’t understand you, Yancy.” He stood up and walked over to the glass, crouching to see one of the hatchlings beneath the foliage. It would be a perfect height for kids to peer underneath the canopy. “You put these hatchlings together when every other zoo in the U.S. segregates because they’re afraid they’ll rip each other apart rather than learn to live together.”

He glanced back, and his gaze was dark. “And yet you think everyone at this zoo, including me and probably everyone else in the world, is a self-centered asshole just trying to get ahead and use whoever’s handy, right?”

The exhibit lights bounced a sharp glare off his head and threw his face into shadows.

She tried to shrug it off. “I don’t know everyone in the world.”

“You don’t know the people standing right in front of you. What did you really want from this, Meg, just a warm body?” He hooked his finger between the two of them. “Did your boyfriend cheat on you and you’re playing catch-up? Whatever it is, I’ve heard it before.”

Behind him, the remaining crickets panicked and fled across the dirt. “I’m sure you have.”

“You know what your problem is?”

“Oh, you’re going to tell me?” She raised her voice, spoiling for a fight.

“Your problem is that you have more faith in dragons than people.” He picked up the empty taxi and walked away, leaving her alone in the darkened building.

~

The late-night maintenance crew mopped its way down the public trail toward the reptile building exit. Meg watched them through the leaded glass window of Jata’s exhibit and waited until they finished up and left. It wasn’t that she was forbidden to be in the exhibit after hours; she just wasn’t supposed to be alone.

Quietly she opened the door and slipped inside. Jata was inside her cave but popped her head out the minute the door squeaked.

“Hey, there.”

Meg carried the bucket of minnows (also known as her “accompanying staff,” if it ever came up) across the floor and dumped them into the pool. Jata lumbered up beside Meg, her dart-shaped head appearing next to Meg’s hip, and licked the air with her tongue. Her eyes were intent, a midnight swirl of attention and calculation as they followed the bouncing streaks of minnows through the shadowy water. After a few minutes, she waded into the pool and submerged underwater.

Meg watched her, reminded as she always was of the other Komodos, the ones who didn’t care about shotguns and got captured by the explorers a hundred years ago, the ones who tore apart their cages and leaped from the cargo ships. They disappeared from the sailors’ sight just as Jata’s body now faded away from Meg, slipping into the far shadows of her pool. Had they known, when they jumped, that there was no going home, that they’d gone too far to survive the journey back? A dragon wouldn’t understand, of course, but say it was a human. Say she was standing on the edge of a ship, and her life as she’d known it was over. She could let the powers-that-be throw her into a box for the rest of her life, or she could jump, desperate and alone and free in the middle of the ocean. How was she supposed to have faith in people when her entire life was distilled into those choices?

As Jata nosed her way around the bottom of the pool, Meg propped herself against the same palm tree where she’d discovered the eggs. This irony was that this
was
her escape. The ocean and the cage were the same thing for her; she had no home that called her anywhere but back here, just here, in this glorified box with Jata. Everything was simpler in here, away from the crazy lovers, the deadlines, and the media. She didn’t want to think about any of that, didn’t want to deal with this stupid reception Chuck was planning or the hurt she’d seen in Antonio’s eyes. They were just distractions from what was actually important. Rubbing her temples, she spoke to the massive shadow that snaked along the pool floor.

“The boys are doing fine in the new space. One has a big yellow splotch on the center of his forehead, and he’s the only one I can tell apart from the others. Today I fed them live crickets, and one smashed his head into the sand trying to attack. You should have been there—that is, if you could promise not to eat them … ”

15 Days
after
Hatching

B
en, the hatchlings are in their new tank, and we need to break up. I can’t see you anymore. They said it was impossible, did you know, for the dragons to live together, but Gus keeps them in communities in Jakarta. This isn’t working. I cheated on you. No, I don’t love you. They’re so beautiful. I want to cry when I think about it. You have to go. I can’t keep lying.”

The house was dark and Ben’s pickup was gone when Meg pulled into the driveway. Shit. It was barely six o’clock—the earliest she’d arrived home since the birth—and the sun was still high above the houses across the alley. She dropped her head onto the wheel and pushed the bridge of her nose into the warm vinyl. Maybe tomorrow.

She’d been practicing the speech during her drive home for the past week, and it changed as quickly as she changed radio stations. Yesterday’s song was a sappy number about reconciliation and possibilities. Tomorrow might be an angry metal anthem, kicking him out of the house. It was hard to predict the playlist these days. She rolled her head to the side of the steering wheel and raised a hand to Neil, who was lounging in his usual spot on the porch with a Bloody Mary and a newspaper. He toasted her back.

Staring at the dark windows of her apartment, Meg pulled the phone out of her pocket and—before she could talk herself out of it—dialed the number. There was a long silence, then an odd ring: two short, even bursts and then a pause before it repeated.

“Yes?” The voice was gruff and sleepy, and Meg rubbed her temple on the steering wheel and smiled. He never said hello like other people did; growing up, she always thought he was too important to say things like hello or good-bye. It never struck her, until after the divorce, that not saying them made it easier for him to show up or leave whenever he wanted.

“Did I wake you?”

“No.” He was surprised, she could tell. “No, I barely sleep anymore. All that crap they tell you about getting old? It’s all true. That’s the big joke.”

“I’ll remember that.” Meg drew an outline of a dragon on the window with her finger, trying to figure out why she had called. What did she want to say? “What time is it there?”

“Eleven or so.”

He waited. That was one thing he was good at, waiting until she was ready to say what she wanted, or answer the trivia question, or order from a restaurant menu. He didn’t distract her with small talk or rush her into a conversation. Suddenly, she missed him with the intensity of that idiot girl who’d stared out a minivan window over nameless roads twenty years ago, while her mother’s voice ran shrill over the radio and the smell of wet dog feet and feed bags saturated the seats. The sensations shuddered over her like ghost fingers. She thought she’d forgotten all that, that she’d buried the memories with her mother and never looked back, but here they were, popping into her life again just the way he’d done, without any warning or reason.

She’d longed for him on those never-ending trips, had spent hours imagining how he might appear during the next competition—ripping through all the bunting and trophy tables, scattering combs and hair dryers and leashes behind him like a finger of God—and claim her, declaring that Meg belonged with him and promising her that she would never have to go back.

Now a lifetime had passed, and yet here she sat, in another car, feeling just as powerless, as if Jata and her hatchlings were the stars of a brand-new dog show. Did she honestly still want her father to save her somehow? She sat up straighter and traced and retraced the dragon on the window. The phone grew sweaty against her cheek.

“I’m cheating on Ben. With the veterinarian you met. Antonio.”

The line was quiet, and she thought maybe they had been disconnected.

“Hmm. Have you told Ben?”

The dark kitchen window was framed in the belly of her dragon. “He’s not home.”

“You have to decide what you want.”

“I know.”