“Spare a dollar? So I can get something to eat?”
I gave you a dollar yesterday, she started to say, but then she thought, That was yesterday, and today he needs to eat again. She had a dollar and some change in her pocket. She gave it to him.
“Jesus loves you,” he said. “But the Shining Ones, the deceivers, they take a pleasing form.”
There were a lot of gaps in her memory. The stuff she’d learned in school, especially law school. Some of it was there, but she couldn’t connect it all together. And other kinds of things: incidents. People she knew. Places she’d visited. She’d remember, sometimes, if someone reminded her, that, oh yes, she’d been there. She’d seen that.
Other people and places were gone, no matter how well they were described to her.
The zoo was something she did remember. She’d been coming here since she was a little kid, for all her life, really.
Walking through the front entrance, seeing the flamingos across from it, smelling that strange chlorinated bird-shit smell, she thought of coming here with her parents, back when her parents were together, and her little brother.
Before everyone died.
“Let’s get some tacos,” she said to David.
Her father had died first. A heart attack. Had left the house to her and her brother. They’d talked about selling it, but Jake wanted to live there while he went to college. It was something the two had argued about, because she’d wanted the money to pay off her law school loan, but they’d decided to table the discussion for at least a year. There was insurance money from her dad, at least, to compensate her for the lost income, the money that Jake couldn’t afford to pay.
She’d graduated. Passed the bar. Her stepfather and mother wanted to celebrate. They’d all ridden together in her stepfather’s car: Kari, Frank, Mom, and Jake.
There was life insurance money from Frank and her mom. Money from the sale of the very nice house they’d owned in Del Mar. Money from their IRA. She’d had her own insurance, though it hadn’t begun to cover the total cost of her hospitalization and rehab.
The real money came from the lawsuit over the accident, which had just been settled.
“You’re going to need advice and guidance,” Helen had told her. “But you’re competent to make some basic decisions about your future.”
David wanted to be her advisor. He was her husband, it only made sense. But the things he wanted to do with the money—investments, expansions, new houses—didn’t interest her.
She hadn’t said no yet. But she hadn’t said yes, either.
“How much longer do you want to stay?”
He was already bored. They’d been there nearly two hours, including the time it took to eat, and they’d only gone to the Children’s Zoo and the Insect House and the Reptile House, then through the Monkey Trail and down to see the pandas.
“I don’t know,” she said. “We haven’t been to the tigers or the elephants yet.”
She thought that he sighed. “Okay. Let’s go see the elephants.”
The elephant exhibit was new. When you entered it, there were signs welcoming you to see the animals that were here in Southern California thousands of years ago. There were statues of mastodons and saber-toothed tigers, equipment for kids to climb on, all sitting in beds of ground-up tires; metal monoliths two, three times her height, with cutouts of gas pumps and faucets and bulldozers, slogans like Reuse and Recycle and Sustainability. There was a tar pit with animal skeletons—fakes, she figured.
And then there were the real animals. Rattlesnakes. Condors with wingspans as big as Chinese kites. Lions, with signs warning you that their spray range was seven to ten feet.
The elephant enclosure wound around the mesa like a broad, lazy river of packed brown dirt and sand. They followed it, watched an elephant use its trunk to retrieve items stashed up in the branches of a metal tree. “Look at that,” she said, pointing. “Look at the end of his trunk! It’s like …” She stopped, puzzled. “I don’t know. Like a finger, but with no bones. Like what an octopus has.”
“A tentacle.”
She laughed. “Yes! Like that.”
They reached the Elephant Care Center. From the front, it looked ordinary, a small building that could have been a vet’s, or a dental office, or anything. Then around in back, it opened up, like someone had unfolded a pop-up book, into a huge sort of barn, as big as a jet hangar. Banners of elephants’ legs hung above massive steel bars—cages. It looked like a science fiction movie, she thought. Like there should be monsters inside. But it was empty. Dark.
“Is that where the elephants sleep?” she asked. “Or just where they go when they’re sick?”
“I don’t know,” David muttered. He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. The sun had finally come out, late in the afternoon.
The greatest danger to elephants is the encroachment on their habitat by man, she read on one of the plaques. It took her a few times but she understood it. She got it right.
“We need to leave soon,” David said, “so we can go home and get changed for dinner.”
“Dinner?”
“We have a reservation at Tapenade. I told you that.”
She nodded. She didn’t think that he had, but it wasn’t worth arguing about. Sometimes she thought that he pretended to tell her things and didn’t, but she wasn’t sure why.
Maybe so she would think that she needed him more than she did.
They took one last walk through the rainforest, into cool mist and vegetal darkness. There was one place she particularly liked: a giant walk-through aviary, taller than jungle trees. Birds flew overhead, emitting alien cries and chatter. She and Jake used to play here when they were little, race up and down the greening cement paths until their parents lost patience. She remembered that, suddenly, smelling the mossy water, hearing the birds call.
“Let’s walk a little longer,” she said. There was still so much she hadn’t seen.
Below the aviary was a series of paths and grottoes. There were sun bears. Tapirs. Monkeys with names she’d never seen before. Golden-bellied Mangabey, with the Do Not Feed warning next to it. A sleeping snow leopard. A North American lynx. She read the placards on each, mumbled the names of the animals to herself.
Status—Endangered. Status—Threatened. Loss of habitat. Extinction.
“Are you crying?” David asked. “What’s wrong?”
“Just … it’s sad.”
Do Not Feed.
“Let’s go home,” David said. “You’re tired. You get stressed out when you’re tired.”
“I’m not. I’m not … tired. Or stressed.” She pulled her arm away from him and continued down the path.
Here were some smaller enclosures, containing little monkeys and birds.
Did you know … the sign said on one.
“Did you know,” she repeated aloud. “Like people, not all animals are … are physically perfect. It is the, the policy of the San Diego Zoo to allow … to allow these … individuals to, to live normal lives …”
“Let’s go home, Kari,” David said. “We’re going to be late.”
“I know what I want to do now, with the money,” she said over dinner.
David had just taken a sip of his wine. He held onto the glass, frozen in place. “Oh?”
“I want to, to do something … for animals.”
David put the glass down. “What?”
“I’ve been thinking a lot about it,” she said slowly. “Like when I’m out feeding the cats. And then today, at the zoo.”
“Kari, what are you saying?” His voice rose. “You want to give your money to cats?”