The Dragon Keeper (14 page)

Chuck tried to interrupt, but Nicole was already signaling the camera to cut.

“This was fascinating. Really, really great stuff. Really. Thanks so much for having us, and make sure to watch for the segment.” Nicole shook hands with both of them, oblivious to Meg’s clammy palms and Chuck’s sputtering objections. “We’ve got to go if we want to make the deadline for the evening news.”

4 Days
after
Hatching

T
he reporters were late. Meg stood outside the zoo’s main entrance with Pam, one of the PR women, and Chuck flanking either side of her, both of them wound so tight you could bounce quarters off their puckered mouths. The elephant in the room—the huge, unavoidable thing no one had the balls to mention but couldn’t stop replaying in their heads—was the virgin birth interview. Meg’s job was on the line here—she couldn’t have been more aware of that fact—but Chuck and Pam acted as if their necks were sticking out just as far. Today was a test; Chuck had made that obscenely clear that morning in his office. Management wanted to see if she could handle the media, or they would reconsider her animal assignments—which was a backhanded way of saying they would pull Jata from Meg’s care. She’d been preparing for this for the last two days—or maybe eight months, if preparing for it meant trying to ignore the possibility that she’d ever have to talk to a reporter again.

Meg stared at the edge of the parking lot. Channel 12 hadn’t confirmed who they were sending out for the story, whether it was Nicole Roberts or someone else. Anyone, Meg hoped, but Nicole Roberts.

Chuck cleared his throat nervously. “Maybe we should call Antonio to assist with the tour. He’s very good with the media.”

“No.” Blood surged into Meg’s face, and she shrugged out of Chuck’s line of sight. “I think he’s tied up.”

She hadn’t seen him yet today, but every time someone even mentioned his name, her gut twisted up, hot and guilty. They’d destroyed each other last night. She didn’t even recognize herself in the memory—that laughing, gasping, demanding woman—and even though she planned to pretend the whole night never happened, it kept replaying over and over in her head, and she hated herself for wanting more.

The Channel 12 news van pulled around the corner and into the parking lot. Meg held her breath as the three of them silently watched it approach. God, not Nicole Roberts. Please.

As the van pulled up to the curb, a shaggy-looking guy hopped out of the passenger seat and walked over to shake their hands. He was stoop-shouldered, wore khakis, smelled like onions and rye—and he wasn’t Nicole Roberts. Meg exhaled.

Pam still seemed nervous about the whole thing but overcompensated by shaking the reporter’s and the camera guy’s hands a dozen times and making a big show of handing them their visiting press badges and a couple of gold envelopes.

“It’s going to be a wonderful event,” she gushed. “We’re so excited about it.”

As Meg and Chuck led them inside to the exhibits, Pam half-followed them, her hands clasped as if in prayer, eyebrows crunched together. Chuck nodded at her and raised his clipboard in reassurance, but she kept trailing behind the group until Meg shot her a sarcastic thumbs-up. Scowling, she reluctantly doubled back to the Visitor Center.

The reporter acted all touristy, commenting on every animal they passed. He even crouched down when they came to the gecko exhibit and made the whole group stop and wait. If Meg didn’t know better, she’d think he was decent. The thing to remember was that even though the guy looked all wrinkled and harmless, he was the media, and the media were bees.

It had all clicked one evening during Ben’s nightly news hounding. She’d been talking to one of the insect guys earlier that day and had learned that honeybee colonies could have thousands of members, but the colony itself was essentially a single organism. Each bee played out its role in the interest of the whole. When part of the colony was wounded, the rest banded together to heal the wound. If an intruder came into their sphere, the colony reared up as one to react. Just look at the Nicole Roberts incident. They claimed to be unbiased, individual reporters, but how far did they all ride on the Virgin Mary bit together? It took days to float from the front pages and morning shows to the editorials and the Internet, where the general public finally got its turn with the whips and gags. There were hundreds of TV reporters, newspaper journalists, radio talk show hosts, and web writers working in the Twin Cities, and maybe each had little distinctions they thought of as individual personalities—a Clark Kent demeanor here or a Jackie O. outfit there—but underneath they were just a huge colony of honeybees looking for the next hit of nectar to bring back to the hive.

“Are you coming?” Meg called from several yards ahead of him. Chuck and the camera guy both stalled next to her. The camera guy shook his head, as if this kind of thing happened a lot. Chuck cleared his throat loudly and wrote something on his clipboard.

The reporter caught up with them, grinning. “Sorry. I used to have geckos in college. A whole family of them, actually.”

She forced the edges of her mouth up. “No problem. I was just saying that the new tank is almost ready for the hatchlings. We’re hoping to get them moved in by the end of the month.”

She led the way on to Jata’s viewing platform. “The tank is actually in the baby building, which we can check out later. This is the Reptile Kingdom, where we’re building a new outdoor, multi-dragon habitat.”

“Is this where the mother is?” The camera guy craned his head around the empty exhibit.

“Yep. Jata’s probably napping in her cave, right underneath this platform.” Meg walked ahead to the outside of the building and unlocked the temporary plywood door to the new exhibit, leading the group inside. A construction light inside the exhibit illuminated the almost completed space. Three walls of steel-enforced glass revealed a four-hundred-square-foot enclosure filled with grasses and boulders. Meg stepped into the center of the stone slab viewing area and felt as if she were peeking into a wild and humid savannah. Maybe Jata would feel the same way.

The reporter stood next to her, jotting notes while Meg pointed out the highlights of the exhibit: the heated waterfall that fed into the lagoon and constantly cleansed the water; the multi-tiered terrain with several basking spots; the radiant heat skylights, which would keep the space toasty even during a blizzard.

“This is nice,” the reporter interrupted, “but is it big enough for four Komodo dragons? They get pretty huge, don’t they?”

“Over two hundred pounds and ten feet long.” The smell of drying paint fought with the reporter’s onion stink, and Meg stepped deliberately backward. “We aren’t going to exhibit all four. The three hatchlings will be housed together temporarily in the baby building. By the time they’re three to four months old, all but one will be moving to other zoos around the world. The one we keep here will share this exhibit space with Jata, the mother, and we’ll rotate the two of them in between the indoor and outdoor area.”

“Can we see the hatchlings, to get some video for the news?”

“Of course.” Meg deliberately smiled at Chuck, who gave a tight, approving nod toward the door. He’d finally started to relax a little, maybe realizing that she wasn’t going to fuck it up this time. There was too much to lose.

The nursery was vacant when they got there, thank God, but Meg—so trained by the click of that door handle and the antiseptic air—hurried automatically to the incubator to check on the last un-hatched egg, letting the door swing shut in the news team’s faces. Chuck caught it and shot her a glare before ushering the guys inside the room.

As Chuck showed them the setup for the nursery, Meg hunched over the last egg that lay all alone in the middle of the incubator dirt. A tiny slit ran up the side of the shell, and she blinked, squinted, and grinned.

“You guys are living right today. Are you ready with that camera?” She waved them over and pointed out the fracture in the shell. Chuck made some constipated noises that she took for pleasure. He knew as well as she did that with the rare exception of an escape or attack story, the media used the zoo strictly for puff pieces, and here they were, serving one up on a silver platter.

Meg leaned in over the incubator, and Chuck and the reporters followed her lead. There was a strange silence for a while, the kind that came from the proximity of relative strangers. And even though it was quiet, Meg could hear a sort of hum in the air from the tension generated between their bodies. She held her breath, partly out of anticipation and partly because, well, onion and rye just never got better over time.

It only took a few minutes. The tiny hatchling fought his way free from the eggshell and dragged his body out onto the dirt. He walked a few hesitant steps and lay exhausted on the incubator floor, oblivious to his audience.

“Wow.” It was all the reporter could say at first, but then he rolled into a million questions. What will the hatchling eat? How big will he get? Where will he live for now?

She answered everything as patiently as she could, considering she’d already told him half this stuff, and showed the crew the two other hatchlings in their individual tanks, explaining her process of moving them gradually to the new exhibit in the baby building.

“When will that be?”

“In roughly two weeks,” Chuck interrupted. “As you’ll see in the invitations Pam gave you earlier, we will be hosting an exclusive VIP reception for the Komodos’ debut, and I sincerely hope you can both join us.”

“We’re hosting a what?” Meg couldn’t quite close her mouth.

“Cool,” the reporter said, waving the gold envelope. “Do you want us to send a copy of this footage?”

“Yes, we’d be very grateful for that. Perhaps we could incorporate it into the reception somehow.”

“We’re hosting a what?” Meg repeated, louder, because they were all moving away from her toward the door. Chuck’s eye twitched at her as he ushered the guys out the nursery door, but that was all. No explanation, nothing.

She couldn’t follow them out; she felt as if her legs had filled with concrete. Screw the reporter and management and anyone else who wanted to test her public relations abilities. She’d failed, all right? What did it matter when they couldn’t even bother to tell her about an invitation-only party starring her Komodos? Hers.

She turned back to the incubator and prepared the last hatchling for his new tank. Carefully, she took his measurements while the word
reception
pounded in her temples, and her hands kept shaking between 11.5 and 11.7 on the tape measure. Hell with it. She wrote down 11.6 and released his tail, letting it gently curve into a dark question mark over the new log form. Watching his eyes droop closed, she weighed him and placed him in the last individual tank. After a few minutes he was sound asleep, recovering. Meg closed her eyes, too, and pushed the palms of her hands into her eye sockets, waiting for the wave to pass so she would be steady enough to take the other hatchlings’ stats.

The door clicked open, and Chuck cleared his throat. “Why didn’t you accompany the news crew back to the main gate, Megan?”

She opened her eyes and glared at him. “I asked you a question first.”

He sighed and flipped through the papers on his clipboard, pulled out a memo, and handed it over. The title was A
N
E
VENING
A
MONG
D
RAGONS
. Oh God. The guest list looked as if it had been copied straight out of the black-tie fundraisers they hosted at the aquarium every fall: corporate sponsors, local government, private donors, and media groups. The date of the reception was a Friday night at the end of April, less than three weeks away. In less than three weeks, they expected her to transport three Komodo hatchlings to a completely foreign environment and acclimate them to each other, not to mention to hundreds of pairs of inquisitive, circling eyes. Meg skimmed the schedule for words like
jumping through hoops
or
breathing fire for your amusement
. Nothing yet, but there was still time.

“Why am I hearing about this now?”

“Because apparently you haven’t been checking your e-mail or your in-box. The initial correspondence was sent out yesterday morning, and PR hosted an open meeting yesterday afternoon to seek our input on the reception. You chose not to attend.”

Chuck nipped the memo back out of her hand and slid it neatly back into the same place on his clipboard.

“I didn’t know about it.” She threw her hands in the air, fingers itchy with the need to wrap around something and choke it. “Someone should have talked to me first. I’m their keeper.”

“They tried. You didn’t respond. The reception will be held as planned, and you and your Komodos will be there. Now, I suggest you take the rest of the afternoon to read and respond to your company correspondence as expected.”

Chuck walked back to the door of the nursery, then turned. A small smile played around the corners of his mouth. “And congratulations. With the exception of the last few minutes, you handled the media very well today. I’ll make a note of it.”

His neatly combed head disappeared a split second before the pen she’d been holding cracked against the doorframe.