The Dragon Keeper (11 page)

Their bodies shifted and bumped into her locker door, breaking the kiss. Antonio leaned back, his fingers sifting over her ponytail.

“Damn.” The word was like smoke from his throat. He rested his forehead against hers and closed his eyes. “Let’s just take a second here.”

Her breath came choppy and hot. She shook her head slightly, trying to think of a reason to stop, or really just trying to think at all. This was Antonio, the cocky vet who hit on every woman within a five-mile radius. He probably had sex on speed dial, but he watched over fatherless eggs and defended dragons. He wore hair gel, but he tasted hot and sweet. She felt his breath on her face, unsteady and anxious. This was Antonio. The warmth in her chest turned over and over, until she felt it catch fire and decided she might as well burn.

She rested her head back against the cold metal slats of the lockers and smiled.

“I don’t think this is what you want.” His eyes burned now in ambers and blacks; there was no more brown left in them.

“It is. I want you to touch me,” she demanded and tightened her fingers into his back, bringing him closer. He kissed her mouth, then moved to her temple and earlobe, working his way down her neck. She’d never felt this alive, this needy, with anyone. Like a latecomer to the party, Ben’s ghost finally showed up, but she shoved him aside. The betrayal was so natural, she almost wondered if it had been there the whole time, just waiting for an opportunity.

“Someone could walk in.” Antonio’s voice was muffled against the collar of her uniform.

“Who?”

“Security. The cleaning crew. Or … Chuck.”

She nuzzled the side of his head. “Uh-oh. You’ll have to take the workplace harassment training again.”

“How did you know about that?” He popped up, surprised.

She laughed and pushed away from the locker, feeling freer and giddier than her body could remember. There was no memory like this, no recognition in the weightlessness that propelled her across the room.

“Where are you going?”

She didn’t look back as she pushed through the doors to the veterinary wing. “Your office.”

2 Years
before
Hatching

E
veryone was so polite. The girl who bumped into her knees apologized twice before moving past Meg to sit on the open chair on her right. A guy with a bull ring in his nose asked Ben if he was reading
Time
magazine—the one that lay closed on the end table next to Ben’s arm—before picking it up. The waiting room was full and silent, except for the corner TV that was playing a documentary on volcanoes. Every mumbled
thank you
or
excuse me
traveled the length of the long rows of chairs. It was unnatural. Even the walls were freaking polite, painted a creamy, yellowy beige that faded into nothingness, the absolute non-color, just a diplomatic middleman between the waiting room and the February Minneapolis night. An abstract painting of a sunset hung on the wall across from her. Or maybe it was a sunrise, depending on who was looking at it. Sunrise for Meg. Sunset for not-Meg. But not-Meg couldn’t see it anyway and never would.

“Did you notice how quickly they processed our IDs?” Ben whispered. His dark, greasy hair flopped over one eye as he leaned toward her. “In and out, just like credit cards at the cash register.” He snapped his fingers.

The girl on Meg’s right startled, but she didn’t look over. That was the second rule. First: Apologize a lot; apologize for everything you’re about to do. Second: Don’t make eye contact. She was getting it—slowly the rules of this little ecosystem were sinking in—but of course Ben was oblivious.

“They’ve got to be hooked in to some serious databases. Interpol, maybe. Some kind of special clearance. Believe me, they know exactly how many parking tickets you have now. The holding charge I got when we did Topeka that first year? Yeah, I could see it in her eyes. That popped right up.” His right foot was tapping, bumping his knee into her leg. Little, insistent raps. It had been almost an hour since they’d arrived, scanned their IDs for the receptionist in her bulletproof cage, and gotten the green light through the steel door, and the longer they’d sat waiting the more fidgety he’d become.

“Ben.” She shook her head, glaring at his knee.

“Okay.” He reached out for her hand, but she moved it away. “It’s just taking forever.”

He let the silence last for another minute or so, just as the sunset painting started to draw her back in. “I’m going out for a cigarette. You want to come?”

It would have been nice to get some air, see the sky, but behind the steel doors and the red call button was the long, silent elevator ride and the woman with the pamphlets outside another set of doors—the woman whose reddish, pixie-cut hair looked like her mother’s, except now her mother’s hair had all fallen out.

“No.”

He nodded encouragingly, making no move to get up.

“I don’t want to be gone when they call me.” She twisted the front cover of
Newsweek
, half-surprised that it was in her lap.

“Okay.” He patted her hand and sat for another minute before getting up. She watched him walk out to the lobby. His sweater was wrinkled and bunched up above his pants from sitting too long. It was a relief, all of a sudden, watching him go. He’d been hovering over her for the last few weeks, barely letting her breathe, and the attention had become as claustrophobic as this room. It was her decision, after all. Hers alone. It didn’t matter that he agreed. His watchfulness was as pointless as the death watch at work, as all these
please
s and
I’m sorry
s floating through the stale air.

Ben: big, loafing, greasy, boyish Ben. It was so easy for her to see a child of Ben’s. Just make it smaller. Trim the too-long curly hair and remove the dusting of fur from his soft, wide chest. Inflate the gut into a half moon and shrink the penis to a peanut. There was baby Ben. Screaming, laughing, chattering baby Ben, toddling off in crazy pursuits of invisible bumblebees and, later, daddy’s marijuana.

The problem was her. She couldn’t project this tiny ball of nauseating cells into anything that resembled offspring, and even if she could, the logistics were overwhelming. How would she support a baby? Who would watch it while Ben was gone four months out of the year? Where would it sleep in her one-bedroom apartment? What did babies even eat? She could barely remember to keep any food in her kitchen for herself, let alone for a whole other person who would be completely dependent on her.

The day after she took the test, she caught herself daydreaming, imagining she was rocking a baby on the front porch, watching it sleep in her arms while the world drifted by, and the vision was strangely intoxicating. But the more she thought about keeping it, the scarier the idea was. Babies weren’t simple. Kissing their cheeks and rocking them to sleep didn’t exactly cut it. All the stroller moms at the zoo were terrifying proof of that. They carried insane amounts of stuff with them, and even though they had years of experience at motherhood they still exuded this air of harassed, vigilant exhaustion. She’d wandered into the baby aisle at the grocery store the other day and panicked at the sheer number of products for sale. What did she know about any of this? Give her a baby alligator any day—but a baby human?

Last weekend, before making her final decision, she’d even called her mother. The cancer was bad now; it had spread through her abdomen and intestines, and the last round of chemo hadn’t even made a dent.

“Do you want me to come see you?” she’d asked from her usual conversation spot on the toilet lid.

“What for? You haven’t visited me once since I moved to Florida. I don’t see any point in starting now.” Her mother’s voice was as matter-of-fact as it had been ten years ago and less emotional than when she’d packed suitcase after suitcase for their endless road trips. She didn’t sound as though she was dying. Meg hesitated before asking the next question, then figured,
Why not?
There was nothing to lose and no one to fight with about it later; it was almost like talking to a memory.

“Do you wish you’d had more children? Ones who would visit? Ones more like you, who would get married and have children of their own?”

“I wouldn’t recommend my life, if that’s what you’re asking, especially not now.” Her mother laughed once, then coughed weakly for several minutes. Meg breathed silently, as conscious of the air moving easily up and down her own throat as the painful gasps on the other end of the line. When her mother finally got her breath back, she was quiet for a minute before speaking again. “You’ve lived a lot smarter than I did, by focusing on your career and not settling for—well, it doesn’t matter now. I made what I could of it. That’s one thing I want you to remember, Megan, the one thing I hope I’ve taught you. You have to fight for what you want. No one will ever hand it to you.”

“I know.” Her stomach was still flat. She traced a figure eight over it.

“Although it might have been nice, I suppose, to have some grandchildren, someone who would’ve liked to inherit the whippet dynasty. After all the years you were my assistant, I’d hoped you would have grown to love them as I did.”

“I’m sorry, Mom.” She didn’t know what she was apologizing for—for not being the daughter her mother wanted, for not visiting her on her deathbed, for not having grandchildren? It was so horribly clear, when she hung up and let herself cry, that she didn’t have what it took to be a mother. She couldn’t even talk to her own mother without this choking resentment and regret filling the back of her throat.

In the waiting room, Meg stared blankly at a magazine page, unaware of time passing. Eventually the door at the far end of the room clicked open. A portly nurse called her in to a room, and before she was ready, they plunged needles into her arms and placed her feet into metal stirrups. She clenched her eyes shut so tight that blood vessels burst along her corneas. As the drugs coated her veins, she saw sunrises and their painfully bright streaks of color that she’d pretended to finger-paint from her mother’s minivan window as a girl. The nurse hushed her and wiped the streaks from her face with a scratchy tissue. Later Ben picked up her favorite pad thai, and she ate a few bites to make him happy. She slept deeply that night and didn’t speak the next day about her terrible dreams.

But part of her stayed back there. Part of her was still sitting in that Minneapolis waiting room two years later, staring through a magazine at a mass of swarming cells that changed, shape-shifting in every second from embryo into cancer, from animal to death to baby to mother.

“You don’t like kids,” she had whispered into the magazine as the cells multiplied and mutated in front of her eyes. “Jata is the only child you want.”

8 Months
before
Hatching

A
nd I listed off everything—the listlessness, the redness in the gums, his temperature, all after the recent laceration. I was like, it’s an infection, right? And the dude’s like, did you get the temperature from the SAM report?” Gemma wiped her forehead with an arm. “And I was like, no, I put a rectal thermometer in the Gila monster’s butt. Come on.”

Meg laughed as she dragged the biohazard bin across Jata’s exhibit.

“Yeah, and he didn’t even laugh.”

“He’s an intern.” Which pretty much explained everything.

The two of them were on a serious cleaning binge. They’d already been through three exhibits that morning, and the best part about doing maintenance detail with Gemma wasn’t even how focused or efficient she was—it was that she was fun. She just got it. Lately Meg had realized she even preferred working with Gemma to being alone with her animals.

Meg shoveled the piles of white dung into the biohazard bin while Gemma trimmed up the peeling bark on one of the palm trees, mainly so it didn’t end up as part of the dung in a few more weeks. Jata liked to sample things.

“How come we never get keeper interns?” Gemma asked. “Antonio gets to make his do all the worst stuff. We could have them on vomit and poop detail and get them to collect all the rat carcasses in the traps.”

“I’d rather have them fill out our paperwork.”

“Check our SAMs.”

“Take our training classes.” Meg sighed. She wrapped the shovel in a fresh garbage bag, put it back in the cart, and grabbed a rake. “But then how would we torture the newbies? There’d be nothing left to haze them with.”

Gemma grinned. “How’s the lagoon look to you? Do you want me to top it up?”

“No. She hasn’t been swimming much lately.”

Meg walked over to the beach area and looked at the clear, filtered water in the concrete pool. It should have been murky with dirt and sloshed over the nearby ground. The pool was deep enough for Jata to fully submerge and long enough to swim a mini lap, but unless Meg dumped a bag of minnows in the water, she usually just lay in the shallow end. Recently, though, she hadn’t even been doing that. She was depressed, lethargic, and Meg couldn’t figure out why. Jata wasn’t even making a fuss about being in the restraint box while they cleaned the exhibit. Antonio had been a jerk about her behavior the other day, big surprise, and his words circled her mind—
death watch
—but she shook them loose. What did a microchip-happy vet know about the behavioral patterns of Komodos, let alone her Komodo? Not a goddamn thing, as far as she was concerned. There was no death watch here.