The Dragon Keeper (22 page)

He cursed and kicked the couch again, making her jump. Without another word, he left the house, banging doors and screeching tires in the driveway. She sat on the couch for what felt like hours, in the exact place she’d been when he arrived, except now with her eyes clenched shut, heart breaking, and dragons all chased back into the books that were stacked like silent witnesses around her.

~

The news didn’t report anything that night about Jata’s daughters. So far their identities remained hidden, unrevealed to the world. Meg turned the TV off quickly, ashamed to be watching it without Ben, and paced the edges of the empty house. The tickets for the cruise line remained on her bedroom dresser. She stared at them and, for the first time since becoming Jata’s keeper, wished she was on the other side of the planet. Maybe when all this blew over, when she could be sure that the hatchlings were safe and out of the spotlight, she would take that trip to Ireland to see her father. Alone, of course. She swallowed the knot that swelled in the back of her throat and nodded at the swift realization. She would always be alone.

23 Days
after
Hatching

W
henever something changed at the zoo that wasn’t part of the three-year plan they handed out to everyone in January, management called an emergency meeting. It was like some kind of elixir for them; why work the problem when they could sit around and discuss what they didn’t know? Maybe even get lunch brought in. Meg had never been to one, but like everyone else who actually worked around here, she felt the trickle-down effect of policies that came from sedentary, overfed managers.

Normally it was all in a day’s work, no bigger a deal than the time it took to wad a memo and dunk it into the trash, but today the emergency happened to trump everything known to science.

The meeting was supposed to start at 8:00 a.m. on Monday, and, still shaky from the confrontation with Ben the night before, Meg shouldered her way into the overflowing room at 7:45. A sign on the boardroom wall said the room’s maximum capacity was thirty, but it didn’t say thirty what. The fourteen chairs lining the mahogany table were filled, and people circulated at least two rows deep behind them on all sides. Working her way into the herd, Meg sandwiched herself between Gemma and the bay window that overlooked the zoo grounds. The two of them comprised the grand total of zookeepers in attendance; the rest of the room was full of administration, management, and the entire PR department, who must have arrived early because they had grabbed almost half of the chairs. It didn’t even smell like animals in here; there was only the scent of coffee, with the sick lemon undertone of commercial cleaners. If you didn’t turn around to see the zoo outside the window, you could have been in any corporate boardroom in America.

Antonio showed some files to a couple of men near the head of the table. She’d left him two messages over the weekend, but he hadn’t returned her calls or stopped by her exhibits. And now, after seeing the pain that had ripped apart Ben’s face last night, she couldn’t bring herself even to speak to him.

“It’s weird that there aren’t more keepers here. Do you think we’re supposed to be here?” Gemma whispered.

“We’re the reptile keepers. Jata’s a reptile. Who’s gonna kick us out?”

“Right now my money’s on the fire marshal.”

More people crammed their way into the space between the table and the walls, but no one was talking above a murmur or making eye contact with anyone else.

“It’s creepy up here.” Gemma tucked herself behind Meg as a guy from accounting almost stepped on her. “I mean, what are they waiting for?”

Gerald Dawson entered the room, and the hush went out in ripples.

“Right,” Gemma said.

Gerald Dawson wasn’t your typical zoo director. He was a short guy without the Napoleon complex who always wore pinstripe suits, loud ties, and bifocals, capped with a helmet of neatly trimmed, graying curls. He was a lot jollier than you’d expect from someone in his job or boxing class, though that was probably because he made middle management enforce all his budget cuts. Despite his usually pleasant demeanor, he knew how to command attention. Everyone in the boardroom fell absolutely silent as he calmly took the only vacant seat, at the head of the table.

“It seems we have a miracle on our hands.”

All the shuffling stopped.

“Antonio Rodríguez tells me that parthenogenesis prevents Komodo dragons from giving birth to female offspring. This fact leads us to some logical conclusions.” He ticked the possibilities off on slight, gnarled fingers. “The Komodo did not reproduce parthenogenically.” One finger. “The hatchlings are not female.” Two fingers. He paused on the third fingertip, as if inspecting the nail for cracks. “What we know as scientific fact is not true. The science is wrong.”

Gerald looked from face to face around the room. “Ladies and gentlemen, we are the Zoo of America, and we are committed to discovering the truth. We will not rest until the mystery has been explained. It is our privilege and duty to let the world know what has happened within our walls.”

A murmur tunneled through the bodies.

“Well, I should say,” Gerald acknowledged with a tiny smile, “that it is our duty to more fully explain what Ms. Yancy announced on Friday night. Is she here, by chance?”

Meg pushed a hand into the air. “Yeah.”

Leaning forward, Gerald followed the hand and voice to pick Meg out of the crowd. “I can barely see you.”

“That’s fine,” Meg said, and the entire room laughed.

“Ms. Yancy, come to the front, please.”

If she was getting fired, it better not be in front of this suit-and-tie crowd. She pushed her way to the front with whispers of “Ow” and “Hey!” following her.

Out in the open now, she lifted an eyebrow at Gerald in silent invitation.

“You haven’t done much public speaking before, I take it?”

She shook her head. Her nails bit into the flesh of her biceps.

“Let’s keep it that way.” He didn’t laugh with the rest of the crowd but looked her over with a quiet amusement that wasn’t quite condescending, wasn’t quite hostile. It was the same look that crossed the older faces in front of the howler monkey exhibit. Hey, look at that one. Isn’t that one funny?

She sighed and tried to relax in the shadow of apparent safety, but who knew when the spotlight would return? Channel 12 hadn’t aired anything about the reception yet, but the longer they waited, the more nervous she got.

“Now, let’s briefly outline the parameters of our three possibilities.” Gerald steepled his fingertips together and nodded at Antonio, who stood up and cleared his throat.

“Right. Well, my team and I have been researching all weekend, but nothing has broken loose yet. As for the first possibility—that the adult Komodo did not reproduce parthenogenically—we have to consider the idea of long-term sperm storage.”

“Can that happen?” someone asked.

Antonio nodded. “It’s been recorded in other reptile species during periods of drought or lack of available mates.”

“Jata hasn’t been exposed to a male Komodo since she was brought here five years ago.” Meg didn’t realize she’d spoken out loud until all the heads in the room cranked in her direction.

Antonio glanced at her and then at his notes. “Yes, but she would have been exposed to males in the community environment where she spent the first year of her life—the Wildlife Refuge in Jakarta.”

Meg dropped her eyes to the table, not quite ready to look at him yet, but she couldn’t let it go either. “She was sexually immature then. As a juvenile, she wouldn’t have been selected for mating.”

“You can’t assume that.”

“But it’s ridiculous. Any interest a male would have shown in her at that stage in her life would have been as an afternoon snack.”

“Ms. Yancy,” Gerald interrupted. “We can’t assume anything at this point in our research. We need to pool our collective expertise and examine all possibilities—no matter how preposterous they seem.”

“Okay. Yes.” Meg rolled her shoulders and repositioned herself closer to the table. “If she was capable of mating with a male five years ago, then we need to prove that Komodo sperm can survive for five years without fertilizing anything. Do you have a test set up for that, Dr. Rodríguez?”

“Of course not.” He smiled at her as the room laughed again, but when he spoke, he spoke to Gerald. “There are other, equally as likely possibilities that we should examine first. My team is interested in scenarios such as amphibian DNA recombination or the possibility that the adult is a hermaphrodite.”

“Don’t forget about Mr. Dawson’s second point,” Meg interrupted. “The hatchlings might not be female.”

Antonio nodded, and it was as if there were diagrams running through his head, strategies for dividing and conquering this phenomenon. It was the doctor in him. He discovered a condition and eliminated possibilities one by one until he could diagnose the problem. This was just another disease. “We’re running a third set of blood tests on all three hatchling dragons and have also started blood tests on the mother.”

Meg blinked. “When did you get Jata’s blood sample?”

Where the hell had she been when this happened? She realized she was holding her breath and let it out slowly, deliberately, narrowing her eyes on Antonio.

“Yesterday.”

“As her primary keeper, I should have been consulted.”

“I e-mailed you on Saturday.” His tone was professional, but there was a slight gleam growing around the edges of his eyes now. He knew damn well she never checked her e-mail.

“Let’s back up for a second,” Gerald interjected in a mild tone. “For the benefit of everyone in the room, including myself, let’s review the basics here. Antonio, these tests are looking for certain alleles in the DNA?”

“That’s correct. Unlike humans, Komodo dragon males have identical ZZ chromosomes, and the females have ZW. So when the female clones her DNA in parthenogenesis, the only possible results are ZZ and WW.”

The faces around the boardroom, with the exception of the vet interns, looked blank. Meg shook her head. “Here. I’ll draw it out.” She retracted the overhead projector screen behind Gerald Dawson’s chair, and it hit the ceiling with a metallic crash, revealing a clean whiteboard. With a marker, she sketched the basic equations that were now scrawled over most of the surfaces in her apartment—from magazine covers to toilet paper, all staring back at her from nooks and crannies like crib notes from the edge of sanity.

“What does the third scenario represent?” Gerald asked, shifting his chair toward the whiteboard.

“This is the possibility of DNA recombination, as I suggested earlier.” Antonio walked around Gerald’s chair and tapped the third equation. His knuckles sounded hollow on the board as he tagged her with an inviting look, letting her know it was her turn to say something, but her throat constricted, choking off anything she really wanted to say to him. Why hadn’t he talked to her before containing Jata and drawing a blood sample? Who the hell was on this team he kept mentioning, and how could they know a fraction of what she did about Komodo dragons? Torn between the need to know and the shame of asking, she just shook her head. When she remained silent, Antonio took up the lecture again, addressing the room at large.

“We know that frogs are capable of gene switching in order to reproduce asexually during times of environmental stress. There’s a species of whiptail lizard that is completely female, reproducing by cloning themselves. Given that our knowledge of Komodo dragons is so limited, it’s possible that they may be capable of these same techniques.”

“How can you say that our knowledge is limited?” Meg found her voice again. “I’ve read every study ever published. I regularly communicate with the Jakarta refuge.”

“Collectively, Ms. Yancy.” The name, from Antonio, was like cold water in her face. He didn’t even turn away from the boardroom at large as he said it, squaring up beneath his lab coat in an easy, dismissive move.

“We have only known of the species’ existence for less than one hundred years. They survived for millions of years in complete isolation from humans, thriving in their niche environment largely unchanged from the varanoids that appeared in the late Cretaceous period. They are living fossils, and if this aberration—for lack of a better word—can teach us anything, it is how little we truly understand about the Komodo dragon.”