The Dragon Keeper (25 page)

“Excuse me, Ms. Yancy, did you say you talked a Komodo dragon out of a stress reaction?” Dr. Reading pierced her with those hawk eyes, and her sandpaper voice bounced off the diplomas and framed articles on the walls.

Meg faltered under her speculative gaze. They were the same eyes that had first noticed how bonobo feeding patterns anticipated drought seasons and had observed the territorial dance displays among snowy owls. It actually took a minute for Meg to shrug and swallow. “Yeah. I’ve been the primary keeper for this Komodo since she was one year old, and we’ve established a relationship.”

“A relationship?” A thin eyebrow arched.

“A recognition pattern.” The old college jargon snapped back into place. “The Komodo has responded well to the environment I’ve designed and has shown a huge aptitude for non-aggressive interaction with familiar humans, specifically me.”

“Until today.” Dr. Reading dropped her gaze to the SAM report.

“This was extremely rare, and brought on by the foreign noise. She recovered very quickly, which was why I wanted to report the behavior to Antonio—I mean Dr. Rodríguez—to discuss how well she was doing in the new exhibit.” Meg groped backward for the door, trying to escape those eyes. The temperature of the office had gone up at least five degrees since she got here. A ten-by-ten box just wasn’t big enough for three people.

“There you are.” Chuck stepped into the doorway and practically bowed toward Antonio and Dr. Reading. “I hope your accommodations here are satisfactory, Dr. Reading.”

“Excellent. Thank you, Mr. Farrelly,” Dr. Reading said, in the same tone people used to dismiss waiters.

“Megan, a word.” Chuck nodded, backed out of the office, and stalked down the hallway toward the cage. If there was any other way out of the vet area she would have run for it, but this Wonderland only came with one rabbit hole. Muttering good-bye to no one in particular, she caught up with Chuck at the double doors, where he shoved a piece of paper into her hand. His usual albino complexion was steaming toward red, and a vein pulsed through his fleshy forehead.

“What’s this?”

“The official notice of your partial suspension.”

“What did I do?” She threw her hands into the air, crunching the notice.

“Do you really need to ask that? After the CCCR boycott?”

“Chuck, that’s not my fault. They’re boycotting us because Jata’s babies are female. Tell me how I could have possibly caused that.”

He moved in closer than she thought his comfort zone would allow, leaning over her, squashing all the denials and arguments dead in her throat. His eyes were wide and surrounded by dark, bloated sockets—the cement-weighted stare of a sleepless night. “I saw the Channel 12 story. In fact, everyone on the management team watched it together in the boardroom again this morning. As of today”—his voice went flat—“you are no longer to talk to any media, PR, or public liaisons of any kind. You are done leading tour groups. You will not answer any e-mails that are sent from outside this institution. You will work with the animals and no one else. Do you understand the parameters of your suspension?”

It should have made her gleeful. He’d revoked almost everything she hated about this job in one giant sweep, but instead of celebrating she felt cold, icy cold, and when he spoke again, his voice was coated with an angry frustration that turned her chest inside out.

“Management is overwhelmed by this … aberration. They don’t know what step to take next, but it’s their step to take, not yours. Do you understand that? They own the animal. This suspension is coming from the board, Megan, not me. If you make another wrong move, or jeopardize the Zoo of America’s reputation in any way, my hands will be tied. They’ll terminate you.”

27 Days
after
Hatching

I
t was barely a week after the reception, and everyone had cut Meg out. She was like the asshole at the party who chased everyone away from the punch bowl. Antonio buried himself in the vet lab with Dr. Reading, and all the other staff seemed too intimidated by the doctor to question anything either one of them demanded. When Meg asked an intern why he was ordering 2,000 cc’s of frog plasma, all she got in reply was, “It’s for Dr. Reading.” Dr. Reading had become the great Because, the new SAMs, the only thing anyone needed to say on their purchase order. Chuck shut Meg up every time she asked him anything, Gerald Dawson lived inside closed-door boardrooms, and even Gemma had acted icy around her since the other day when she’d asked Meg about Jata’s log again and Meg hadn’t given Gemma a straight answer.

The only person in the world who did want to talk to her was Nicole Roberts. She’d been waiting at the entrance with her camera guy today, both of them ready to swarm as soon as Meg punched out.

“Ms. Yancy, do you have a minute?” The two of them chased her heels.

She wanted to rip the microphone out of Nicole’s hand and stuff it in her mouth, but Chuck’s warning pounded in her head. Checking behind her, she saw the cashiers staring and pointing at them.

“Ms. Yancy, over one million Americans belong to the CCCR. Can you confirm if there’s been a drop in attendance over the last few days because of their boycott of the zoo?”

Meg ducked under the gate into the employee parking lot, but Nicole followed her all the way to her car, firing questions at her back. As Meg turned to open the car door, Nicole took the opportunity to shove the microphone in her face as the cameraman stood right behind her. Meg didn’t even know what Nicole’s last question had been.

“No comment.” She smiled sweetly and stepped down hard on one of Nicole’s high heels before getting into her car, but the whole way home she was torn between satisfaction and the dread that somehow management would find out what she’d just done.

As she pulled into the driveway after work, she saw Ben’s pickup backed up to the kitchen door and piled high with boxes and garbage bags—Ben’s signature luggage set. She hadn’t seen him since their fight five days ago. As she walked through the house, it became obvious that all his things were gone. His bedroom dresser drawers were open and empty. The hallway closet was cleaned out of everything except her stacks of
National Geographic
s, and a break in the dust on the back of the toilet was the only trace of his shaving kit. He always left. That wasn’t news. Every winter he drifted in and out of the house, but she could still follow the trail of his life: an empty cereal bowl in the kitchen sink, a half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray on the porch, a picture sent to her cell phone of a snowman holding a beer in its tangled branch hands. His territory wandered around the perimeter of hers in a comfortable, piss-marking familiarity, until the spring when he packed up and disappeared as if their relationship were just something he hibernated inside. She always knew he would leave, but then she always knew he would come back, too. And now … now there would be no coming back.

Circling into the living room, she found him on the couch chucking his news notebooks one by one into a garbage bag.

“You’re leaving.” It wasn’t a question.

He didn’t glance up but nodded tightly.

A few minutes passed, and there was nothing to do but watch him pack, each notebook hitting the last with an angry plastic hiss of the bag. The silence stretched out. Ben was the one who filled the silences, not her, whether he was explaining the latest in-depth coverage of a breaking story or finding out what she wanted for dinner or telling her who Paco had pissed off lately. Even when she was only half-listening, he still talked. But that was before, when he thought she was someone worth talking to.

“I have some crates you could put those in. They’ll get all mixed up like that.”

He kept tossing notebooks.

“I’ll go get them.”

“Don’t.” He spit out the word. “These aren’t coming. They’re trash.”

“What?”

He finally looked up at her, and the echo of their last conversation haunted the air between them, the crashes of his boot against the couch, his voice bellowing,
Why are you fucking him?
They both froze, as though the last five days apart had never happened. When he finally spoke, his voice was harsh and low.

“The notebooks are pointless. I never did anything with them. Isn’t that what you always said?”

“Yes, but—” Watching him destroy all his research, all the carefully constructed files on which he’d spent so much time and passion, broke her heart. Ten months or even ten minutes ago, she’d have said they were a waste of space with no hope for anything to come of them, but suddenly she desperately wanted him to keep them going. “I was wrong. Your thesis. You need them for your manifesto.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“I’m not. I mean it.” She came around the couch and scooped up the folders he hadn’t gotten to yet. “Don’t throw them all away now, after everything you’ve written.”

“So let me get this straight.” He stood up, glaring. “You’re the one who wanted these notebooks in the garbage for years. Whether you said it or not, I knew, okay? And now that I’m finally agreeing and doing exactly what you wanted in the first place, I’m the asshole?”

“No—”

He grabbed the last of the notebooks out of her hands, shoved them into the bag, and walked out of the living room. “Even when I’m on the road, they always remind me of your place—sitting around the TV together while we both did our research. I can’t stand the sight of them anymore.”

“Don’t do this because of me.” She ran after him as he left the house and crossed to the garbage cans on the far side of the garage. The recent rain had turned the ground around the cans into a muddy mess, and she slipped, unsteady, pulling on his arm. “Ben, please. You’ll regret this. Someday you’ll wish you’d kept them. I know you will.”

“Forget it, Meg. You’re going to get exactly what you want, and you’re not going to make me the bad guy for it this time, all right?” He pulled the cover off the garbage, rearing back and jerking out of her grip at the same time. It wasn’t a punch, but the effect was the same. She flew backward and lost her balance, hitting the mud with a bruising splat. He didn’t even look over.

“I always did everything you wanted, you know? You never wanted people over here, so I never had parties. You were obsessed with those animals, so I started collecting all those stories for you.” Ben shoved the bag of notebooks into the can and crashed the cover back down. “You needed someone to blame, someone to be your designated whipping boy. Well, guess who that was.”

The weight of his words pressed her further and further down. Everything sank into the wet ground—her shoes, her hands, her hips—as if the mud had no bottom, as if she could keep sinking forever. He was right, everything he was saying. She’d blamed him completely for the reception, refusing to accept any responsibility for what happened. She’d thought that he was the one who didn’t care enough about her. She’d hated him because he supported her most terrible decisions.

After a long silence, she hitched in a breath and choked on it. He sighed and offered her a hand up, but she shook her head. Here, where everything had turned to cold mud and shadows, there were things that had to be said.

“You were easy to blame.”

The words were choppy, but she forced them out.

“It was so much simpler to be angry with you than admit … everything. That I could never make things right, not between us, or for Jata, or … the baby. That guy—he was just so excited about the hatchlings. I never thought anyone could want them as much as I did and … it was terrible what I did to you. I’m sorry.”

He mumbled something that sounded like
yeah
, and then there was silence, the kind where nothing comes afterward, as when she’d stood at her mother’s grave or raked into the sick crunch of a hidden egg—the moments that shatter a person into something else.

After a minute, he sighed and shuffled back into the house, coming back out with the last of his bags. Before climbing into the pickup, he stared at her across the yard. She hadn’t moved from the ground next to the garbage. She lifted a hand—cold and invisible in the black silhouette of the building—and watched Ben leave.

30 Days
after
Hatching

L
adies and gentlemen of the press, thank you for coming on such short notice. I sincerely apologize for the weather.”

The woman had been here less than a week and was closeted away with Antonio in that laboratory love nest most of the time, but Meg had still managed to learn a few things about Dr. Reading. Fact one: She liked to remind people how old she was. Like at this press conference, standing behind the podium in her Asian tunic with her stone-gray hair scooped into that perma-bun, she said shit like
ladies and gentlemen of the press
. Who said that? No one had said that since Cary Grant, and Dr. Reading probably wanted to remind everyone that she’d known him and given him pointers on filming
Bringing Up Baby
.

The dozen reporters who’d turned out for the conference—probably the largest press group they’d ever had for a single zoo announcement—all laughed when she mentioned the weather. Yeah, it was mid-May in Minnesota, which meant cool with a chance of soaked, freezing upholstery if you left your car windows down. So what? Dr. Reading had only mentioned the weather because it let her bring up fact two: She constantly reminded people how important she was.