The Dragon Keeper (33 page)

The whole speech was too perfect, the words chosen as if he had pulled every one off the hospital shelf and examined it, making sure it was exactly what he meant. He had been waiting for her, she realized. He thought she blamed him for Jata’s death.

Now he shook his head in disgust. “When I followed you into the exhibit, I didn’t even see Jata. I looked right through her.”

“I should have made you leave the second you walked in.” She twisted her arms around her stomach, searching for the words that came so easily to him and tripped her up every time. “It was my fault. She was under so much stress, and then I pushed you. It was like waving a red flag.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

She nodded, the same way she nodded at everyone at the zoo who said that. As if they thought that as a collective, speaking the words would actually displace the blame, would exempt the keeper from keeping her animal from harm.

He reached out and touched her, sliding his fingers into the hand that she’d locked into her ribs, and squeezed.

“I’m so sorry about Jata.”

It was his touch that broke her. She pressed her lips together and nodded, nodded, fighting the salt that glazed her vision. He muttered something in Spanish, pulled her down around the gurney, and tucked her into the space between his chest and chin. Dropping her head on his shoulder, she felt the paper-thin gown turn hot and wet under her cheek as his arm circled her back, rubbing comfort into her bones. He held her, rocking for long, silent minutes while she cried, letting all the hurt unravel and pour out.

“We killed her, I know,” he said, but she felt the words more than heard them as the scratchy vibration of his throat pulsed through her forehead. She closed her eyes. “Not you or me, but all of us. We all did.”

After a while the tears slowed and then stopped, crystallizing into tight, raw tracks on her face. The quiet strung out, and she stared at the wall as the bustle of the hallway filtered into the room. They didn’t speak. It was a mourning silence, a space wide enough for Jata to swagger into, claim her place, and bask.

After a few minutes, she sat up, wiped at the dark splotches on his shoulder, steadied her breathing, and then spoke quietly. “I’m sorry, too.”

“I keep thinking what if, you know, what if I had done something differently that—”

She laid a finger on his lips and smiled, cracking the dried tears open on her cheeks. “There you go again.”

His eyes locked on hers. He took her wrist and moved her hand from his mouth, pulled her down, and kissed her. It was a smooth, lingering kiss, sweet and salty, a first kiss—because for the first time they weren’t fighting—and it tasted like the last. Eventually, she pulled back but didn’t know what to say. What was left? As the silence turned from comforting to awkward, she got up out of the bed.

Antonio cleared his throat. “The doctors say I’ll make a full recovery. Two legs and all. I would have been out of here a lot quicker if I let them amputate, but I had this weird thing about having two feet.”

She didn’t say anything, so he kept talking. “They’re discharging me in another few days, ready and certified to take care of some hatchlings.”

“Only one hatchling.” She glanced up, relieved that she remembered. This was why she’d come in the first place.

He shifted in the bed, trying to sit up higher. “What? Did something happen? Chuck didn’t say anything about it when he was here last.”

“Nothing bad.” She kicked the floor with her sandal. “The Wildlife Refuge in Jakarta is taking two of them. We signed the final agreement last week.”

“They’re too young to travel now.”

“Conventionally, yes. You’re right. But there’s been some special arrangements.”

He waited, but she didn’t continue. As the silence drew out, a kid in scrubs knocked on the door. He wore a pink Mohawk and a cheesy grin.

“Supper time.” He carried a tray over to the bed and set it down in front of Antonio. “How’s it going, man?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“We got some tasty soylent green tonight. Goulash and a killer veggie medley.” He whipped the cover off the tray and sent waves of greasy meat sauce wafting across the room. Meg’s stomach clenched. She tried to breathe through her mouth, but the pools of saliva were already forming at the back of her throat. Shit.

“Is this the bathroom?” She didn’t wait for an answer before running through a side door by the TV and slamming it closed. Flushing the toilet to cover the noise, she gagged into the basin. So much for the whole-wheat sandwich and apple.

She started to rinse her mouth out but spit the metallic, lukewarm water back into the sink. No wonder it took so long to get healthy around here, when it tasted as if they were pulling tap water straight from the Mississippi.

Antonio was watching the door when she came out. He’d put the cover back on the tray, thank God, and the Mohawk guy was gone.

“You okay?”

She nodded. “Yeah, I guess. The autopsy was hard.”

“That’s not what I meant. You look pale. You’re shivering.”

She sidestepped the look of concern and brushed the covers around the end of the bed. “There’s a virus going around.” She tossed him a smirk as she reached the top of the blanket. “I probably should have told you that before you kissed me.”

“Well, I guess I can’t say you didn’t bring me anything.” He flashed her a smile, the old cat grin, the one she used to want to slap off his face, and reached out for her hand.

“I should get going so you can eat.” She glanced at the leg in the swing. “I’m glad that you’re going to be okay.”

“I always land on my feet.” He squeezed her hand.

“Yeah, I know you will.” She looked at the floor. It was time.

Reaching into her back pocket, she pulled out the faded picture of Bubchen and her keeper and pressed its curled edges into his palm. “See you around.”

2 ½ Months
after
Hatching

T
he ship’s horn blasted—a low, bleating siren—as the bow pulled away from the berth. Meg stood on the balcony outside her room, five stories above the churning froth of the Pacific Ocean, and watched the land recede into gray, choppy water. Industrial warehouses and shipyards faded behind a huge suspension bridge that spanned the width of the port of Los Angeles.

“See you later, suckers!” someone shouted from a deck above her. A woman laughed and added an ecstatic, “Good-bye!”

Meg didn’t say anything; she just watched as the United States disappeared, with no idea when she’d ever see it again.

As of last week, she was no longer Keeper Level 1 at the Zoo of America. She, Meg Yancy, the zookeeper who could barely keep her own job, had accepted the position of Behavioral Studies Head Researcher at the Wildlife Refuge in Jakarta, and they expected her to arrive with the hatchlings in two weeks. They were launching a new research department and—after Dr. Reading highly recommended her—asked Meg to head up the project. Her goal, the one they had given to her in neat, black letters on the contract, was to find ways that humans and Komodo dragons could coexist. They wanted her to find hope for Komodo survival. It was a base-jumping job, pure professional suicide to go halfway around the world in search of a holy grail with a tiny budget, coworkers who spoke Malay, and virtually no legal way of preventing the invasion of people into the dragons’ territory. How could she say no?

Hope. They wanted her to bring hope to the dragons. The word intimidated her; she had no idea what it even looked like—was probably the last person in the world qualified to find it—and all she’d brought with her was a newspaper. It was the closest thing she had.

Last week they ran the headline she’d been waiting to see: M
IRACLE
B
IRTH
E
NDURES!
L
EGENDARY
S
CIENTIST
S
TUMPED BY
V
IRGIN
B
IRTH
. She’d barely crossed the Minnesota state line when the story hit the AP wire, and it kept popping up in local papers the whole way to California, like some giant middle finger unearthing itself from the Rocky Mountains and stretching its shadow all the way back to the Zoo of America. The zoo wasn’t giving any further press releases about it, but Dr. Reading—who was back in Costa Rica by now—co-published the breaking story in a trade journal with Antonio. The two of them were planning on writing a book together, but Meg didn’t need to read it to know what it would conclude: Jata’s miracle lived on.

Despite all the new press, she’d managed to make the cross-country trip without drawing any attention. She’d convinced Chuck and Gerald not to use airfreight to transport the hatchlings. People went back and forth on which was better—air or ground—but she’d seen too many arriving specimens come off the plane sick or traumatized. It was far less stressful, if a bit longer, to transport animals by ground with a familiar keeper. Driving the hatchlings herself, she’d checked the rearview mirror obsessively, watching the dark pools of their eyes for any signs of tension. During the whole drive she’d never turned the car off or left them for longer than the time it took to get a coffee, pee, and pay the gas station attendant. She talked to them all the way across the country, telling them a little about the refuge and Jakarta, but mostly stories about Jata—like when she’d stolen one of Meg’s gloves and wouldn’t give it back, and the time she’d ripped apart the shrub that used to grow in front of her cave, meeting Meg at the exhibit door with a mouthful of branches. She’d been so pleased with herself. Though neither generation would have had any interest in the other, Meg felt as if she were bridging a gap, if only to mend the jagged pieces in her own mind.

The sea transport didn’t even cost that much more than a plane ticket because, as luck would have it, two round-trip tickets from New York to Dublin easily converted into a single one-way suite from LA to Jakarta, with a few stops in between. She’d called her father from the motel last night and told him the news. He was shocked and a little hurt that she’d cashed out his present, but he didn’t say much after asking the usual questions—where would she live, how was she moving her stuff. The stuff part was easy enough. She’d sold most of it to Neil so he could rent the place out as a furnished apartment, and her entire wardrobe and
National Geographic
collection fit into the trunk of her car. As for living arrangements, Gus—who was over the moon about welcoming Meg to his team—had found her a little house right next to the refuge and even arranged for a woman to cook and clean. Her father asked if the house had a spare bedroom, somewhere the old man could crash if he flew down to see her for Christmas. She said it did and was surprised at how good the idea sounded. He congratulated her one more time, and when they hung up, neither one of them said good-bye. The Yancys didn’t say things like good-bye.

The call she hadn’t expected came right after that. Ben had heard the news about the hatchlings, of course, but he hadn’t known she was poised to leave the country for good. She’d left him a message to call but never really thought he would. After filling him in, there was an uncomfortable silence before Ben sighed.

“I’m glad for you, Meg. I really am.”

“Thanks, Ben. I feel like … like this is what I never knew I always wanted.”

He laughed. “Yeah, well, neither of us were too good at thinking about the future. I’m glad yours found you, anyway.”

“What about yours? Did you get my package? I didn’t know where to send it besides Paco’s place.”

“Yeah, I got it. We stopped back there between Tulsa and Montana.”

She’d pulled his garbage bag full of notebooks out of the trash can after he’d left that last night but didn’t know what to do with them. They’d sat in the corner of the living room, next to the TV, until she was cleaning out the rest of her personal items from the apartment and came across them again. Ben had recorded years’ upon years’ worth of news analysis in those pages, and it wasn’t just idle note taking, she’d seen as she flipped through them. He really did have a gift for seeing the true stories, understanding the psychology of what was said and the cost of what went unspoken. He simply had to keep them; it was impossible to throw them away.

“I don’t know what I’m going to do with them,” Ben said after another long silence.

“You’re going to keep writing in them. I bought you some fresh ones and something else, too.”

“Yeah, I saw that.” There was some rustling in the background and then he cleared his throat, reading. “
Mother Jones
.”

“I read through a whole rack at the bookstore before I found it. That’s where you’ll publish your paper.”

“So now that you have a fancy new job, you’re just going to tell everyone their future? Psychic dragon lady. You could work a good hustle at the fairs.”

She laughed. “That would require contact with people, right?”

“Yeah, maybe not your thing.”

“Well, I read a little about Mother Jones, too, the actual one. She spoke out against mining bosses, I guess, but the union organizers didn’t like her either because she was an agitator. She just got people worked up.”