The Wolf Keepers

by Elise Broach

  “Yeah,” Lizzie agreed.

  But she knew full well that there was nothing crazy about the woman’s reaction. Someone had stolen her son’s lunch.

  She scanned the plaza. There was no sign of the boy.

  Chapter 3

  NOBODY

  LIZZIE WALKED WITH Wesley back to the food line, which now snaked around the plaza, twice as long as before. She reclaimed her notebook from the table where she’d dropped it.

  “Still writing in that notebook?” Wesley asked her.

  Lizzie nodded.

  “Want to read me something?”

  She shook her head, feeling shy. “It’s private.”

  “That so?” He had a teasing look on his face, but when she clutched the journal protectively against her chest, he relented. “What do you want for lunch? I’ll go in the back and get us something.”

  Lizzie smiled at him. She loved Wesley. Even though he had no kids of his own, he had certain unassailable beliefs about being a kid: that you had the right to climb any wall or fence that presented itself; that anytime you dropped your ice cream, you got another one, no questions asked; and that you should never, ever have to wait in line.

  “Cheese pizza, please,” Lizzie said. “And a frozen lemonade.”

  “You got it.”

  Wesley walked around the side of the snack bar, while Lizzie waited under an oleander tree, shaded by its spiky leaves and pink blossoms. She thought about the boy and felt piqued. First of all, it was horrible to be screamed at, by a stranger no less, for something you didn’t do. It made her feel sick to her stomach, and that was his fault, because he’d run off and left her to take the blame. (Okay, maybe that wasn’t quite fair, because she could have told the woman the boy stole the food. The little kids would have backed her up … if they could even talk. But she hadn’t wanted to tattle on him. She didn’t know why.)

  Second of all, even though the zoo was full of tourists, it wasn’t a spot where people did things like that. There weren’t muggings. There weren’t fistfights. It wasn’t a place where people committed crimes. Sure, they broke the rules … They tapped on the glass of the exhibits in the rain forest, or they threw food to the animals, or they wandered into areas that were off-limits. Her father complained about these infractions, as did Wesley and the rest of the zoo staff. But it was generally accepted that zoo visitors didn’t mean any harm. They were just excited and careless and ignorant. They were on vacation in a place full of animals they’d never seen before. They didn’t always think about what would happen if, say, you threw part of your hot dog over the wall into the giraffe compound. Lizzie knew that giraffes were herbivores, which meant they didn’t eat meat. So eating a hot dog might make them sick—and because their necks were very long, giraffes couldn’t easily throw up, like, for instance, a hyena could.

  So while zoo visitors did make mistakes and cause problems, they generally didn’t do it on purpose. But the boy? There seemed to be no question that he’d meant to steal the food. Not only that, it seemed clear to Lizzie that it was something he’d done before. He had waited until the exact moment when the mother left the table, and when he took the tray, he walked quickly but didn’t run … probably to avoid attracting attention.

  Why would he steal food? The only reason Lizzie could think of was that he was hungry and had no money. But where were his parents or friends? Kids never came to the zoo alone.

  And now here she was, with the food court more crowded than ever, having to wait for her lunch—if not in line—all because of that dumb boy. It made her mad. And he hadn’t even seemed grateful when she took the blame for him! He’d just run off. If she saw him again, she would have a few things to say to him, she decided.

  “Here you go,” Wesley said, reappearing with a paper plate that sagged under the weight of two pizza slices. “And here’s your lemonade.” He handed her a jumbo-size cup frosted with condensation.

  “Thanks, Wesley.” Lizzie beamed at him. “You’re the best.”

  “I sure am,” he agreed, hoisting his own plate of food over his head like a waiter. “Back to work!”

  Lizzie grabbed a napkin and straw and carried her lunch up the path toward the elephant house. She was looking for a blue shirt.

  * * *

  At the elephant house, the two elephants, Timbo and Belle, stood flank to flank in the dusty yard, their tails swishing. Belle’s long trunk stretched up into a nearby tree and curled over a thin, leafy branch, tugging until it broke loose. Pinching it with the end of her trunk, she swung it over Timbo’s back and scratched his neck with it. His big ears flapped appreciatively. The elephants were some of the smartest animals at the zoo, according to Lizzie’s father.

  With her notebook clapped under one arm, Lizzie cradled the pizza in the greasy paper plate and took small bites from the tip. It was molten with cheese and blisteringly hot, so she followed each bite with a sip of the sweet, tart, slushy lemonade, cold enough to numb her tongue. There was still no sign of the boy.

  She walked along the curve of the path toward the giraffes, with their impossibly long necks and their beautiful, soft eyes. One of the most amazing things Lizzie had ever seen at the zoo was a baby giraffe being born. The mother gave birth standing up, and the baby had tumbled through the air, falling more than five feet and landing in a jumble of knobby limbs on the straw. But the baby hadn’t been hurt at all. Moments later, after the mother finished licking it with her long, black tongue, the baby had wobbled to its feet and stared right at Lizzie with huge eyes, blinking its long lashes.

  There was no sign of the boy by the giraffe enclosure. Lizzie glanced up the hill, toward the tiger cage. This was the part of the zoo she hated—a line of old cages that hadn’t been replaced yet. Most of the other exhibits at least tried to mimic the animals’ natural environments, but these just looked like prison cells. Lizzie had heard all the arguments from her father about how the zoo’s mission was conservation and education; how virtually all zoo animals were born in zoos, so they didn’t “miss” the wild; how so many of these animals would face extinction if there weren’t zoos to create safe, healthy places for them to breed and survive. But her father hated this old section of the zoo as much as she did, and it was his top priority to raise enough money to replace it with larger, more natural-looking habitats.

  The Siberian tiger paced back and forth, back and forth, along the perimeter of his cage. The hopelessness of it made Lizzie cringe.

  Then she saw the boy.

  He was sitting on the low curb in front of the tiger exhibit, watching the tiger, his back facing Lizzie.

  She walked slowly toward him, thinking if he heard her, he might run.

  When she was a few feet away, she said, “Hey.”

  The boy jumped up, spinning around. He glared at her. “What do you want?”

  Lizzie frowned at him. “You could say thank you.”

  “For what?” he demanded. “Taking my food?”

  “It wasn’t your food! You stole it.”

  The boy scanned the walkway, quick, darting looks that seemed full of nervousness and guilt.

  “I didn’t steal nothing,” he said.

  “You did too! I saw you.”

  “I did not. They were finished! They left it on the table.”

  Lizzie shook her head at him in disbelief. “The mom was taking the kids to get drinks. You grabbed their lunch before they even had a chance to sit down.”

  A flicker of doubt crossed the boy’s face. He seemed about to argue with her further, then abruptly changed his mind. “It’s not like those little kids were gonna eat it. She bought way too much.”

  That was probably right, Lizzie thought. There had been a lot of food on the table, and little kids never ate much of their lunch, in her experience. They were usually more interested in playing with it.

  “It doesn’t matter. She paid for it,” Lizzie said. “You can’t take it just because you think there’s too much for them to eat.”

 
He shrugged. “Well, I thought they were finished. People leave food on the tables all the time.”

  “I had to give it back,” Lizzie protested. “And then that woman blamed me.”

  The boy’s dark eyes widened, and for the first time, he looked worried. “Did you get in trouble?”

  Lizzie hesitated. She wanted him to feel bad, but not that bad. Maybe he really had thought the family was finished with their meal. “The mom yelled at me,” she told him, “but it ended up okay.”

  The boy relaxed. “See? It would have been a lot worse for me.”

  Lizzie looked away, embarrassed. She suspected he was right.

  But the boy seemed suddenly cheerful. He pointed at her plate, greasy and curling under its one remaining slice of pizza. “You eating that?”

  “I’m not hungry,” she said, thrusting the plate at him. “Do you want it?”

  The boy didn’t wait. He seized the plate and plopped back down on the curb, folding the pizza in half and shoving it into his mouth. When he was almost finished with it, he paused. He rolled the crust inside the paper plate and crammed it into his shorts pocket.

  Lizzie had never seen a person eat like that. He had gulped it down frantically, but he was clearly saving some for later.

  Mesmerized, she held out her lemonade.

  “You done with that, too?” he asked, snapping off the lid and guzzling it. It splattered over his shirt. A moment later, the cup was empty.

  “Wow,” Lizzie said.

  He wiped his mouth on his arm. “What?”

  “Nothing,” she said quickly. “I guess you were hungry.”

  “So?” He crunched the empty cup with his foot.

  She shrugged. “Nothing,” she said again, still watching him. “I’m Lizzie Durango,” she said. “I live here. My dad’s the head zookeeper.”

  The boy looked interested. “You live at the zoo? For real? That’s pretty sweet.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, it is.” She looked at him expectantly. “Who are you?”

  The boy recoiled, suddenly bouncing to his feet. He tossed the flattened cup into a garbage can. “Nobody,” he said.

  He started down the path toward the elephant house. “Thanks for the lunch,” he called over his shoulder.

  “Sure,” Lizzie said. “See you around.”

  The boy didn’t answer and he didn’t look back.

  Chapter 4

  LIKE FATHER, LIKE DAUGHTER

  THAT NIGHT, LIZZIE heated a pot of water on the stove to make spaghetti and waited for her father to come home. The Durango house was a large bungalow on one of the maintenance roads at the edge of the zoo property. A big sign at the beginning of the long gravel drive said AUTHORIZED VEHICLES ONLY—NO TRESPASSING. On rare occasions, visitors would walk down the road by mistake, but the fact that it was gravel, rather than paved, combined with the absence of any zoo animals and the distance to the house, usually persuaded them to turn around. The house had a big porch across the front with white wicker furniture and a swing. It was painted yellow, with green shutters, because those had been Lizzie’s mother’s favorite colors (or so Lizzie had been told).

  Lizzie’s mother had died right after she was born—in the hospital, the very night after Lizzie’s birth. She had something called preeclampsia, which was a kind of high blood pressure some women got when they were pregnant. It could be treated, but Lizzie’s mother’s wasn’t diagnosed in time, and she’d had a seizure and died.

  Of course, Lizzie had no memory of this, or of her mother, Clare. There were several photos from the hospital, with her mother in a pale floral-print hospital gown, cuddling a little pink-blanketed log against her chest. The pink log was Lizzie. Her mother looked pale and exhausted, her forehead shiny with sweat. But she was smiling, and Lizzie’s father, leaning into the frame of the photo, beamed with joy.

  Sometimes Lizzie would stare and stare at these pictures, because, after all, there she was, in her mother’s arms, and that moment had to have been preserved somehow, somewhere, in her distant memory. But try as she might, she could remember nothing about her mother … not her smell, not her voice, not her touch.

  She had come to realize that this was one of the terrible things about dead mothers: You would miss them for the rest of your life, even if you’d never known them. Sometimes Lizzie would look at pictures of her pretty mother, with her sun-streaked hair and big laughing eyes, and allow herself to imagine, just for a minute, what it would be like to wrap her arms around her. But even thinking about that gave her a shivery, dangerous feeling, like holding your hand too close to a flame.

  And anyway, what was the point? It had to be said: Losing your mother the day after you were born was not like losing a mother you had known and loved. Lizzie could never really feel sad about it, because her mother was not a real person to her. She had no idea what it would be like if Clare Durango were still around. Oh, occasionally, she did feel sorry for herself, in an abstract sort of way, as a kid who didn’t have a mother. Whenever there were class field trips with parent chaperones, or after back-to-school night when mothers and fathers left notes on the desks, or when the Lodisto Community Center held its annual Mother-Daughter Tea: These were times when it seemed particularly bad to have no mother.

  In fact, it was so often a situation that had to be explained to strangers that Lizzie occasionally called herself an orphan. It had a romantic sound to it, like something from a fairy tale … though it did cause confusion at times, when her father showed up.

  “Don’t I count for anything?” he’d ask in mock outrage.

  “Well, okay,” Lizzie amended. “Not an orphan. A motherless child.”

  “Oh, come on, Lizzie,” Mike Durango would scoff. “Where do you get this stuff? Stop being dramatic.”

  Mike had no patience for self-pity, but that almost made Lizzie feel sadder for her father. You could tell from the old photos that they had been a pair—Clare and Mike, Mike and Clare. Her parents had met when they were both keepers at the San Diego Zoo, one of the biggest and best zoos in the world. Her mother worked with the hoofstock, which meant antelopes, giraffes, zebras, and anything with hooves. Her father worked with the big cats. But they shared a language of zoo animals—their care and habits and quirks—and when her mother died, Lizzie had the sense that her father had lost the one person in the world who had always understood exactly what he was talking about.

  When Lizzie sifted through the old photographs of her parents together, she could see an unfamiliar expression on her father’s face: a happy, wide-open grin that he never wore now. Lizzie’s Grandma May had commented once that it was impossible to understand who Mike was now without knowing about Clare’s death; but that it was equally impossible to understand who he’d been before, all those years ago, without peeling away Clare’s death like the skin of an onion. And since that was an impossible task—taking away the death of his wife as if it had never happened—Lizzie was left to believe that the old version of her father was as lost to her as her dead mother.

  Lizzie’s mother had been an avid horseback rider and came from a long line of women who were adventurous in the out-of-doors. In fact, a distant cousin, Clare Marie Hodges, for whom Lizzie’s mother had been named, had been the first female park ranger in the country. She had worked in Yosemite in the early 1900s. She rode her horse all over the park, checking on trails, helping people who’d gotten lost or stranded. In the little second-story apartment over the Durangos’ garage, where Grandma May stayed when she visited, there were old photographs and other mementos from Clare Marie Hodges’s time in Yosemite. Lizzie liked to look at them. When she found herself missing her mother (or at least the idea of her mother), it was reassuring to imagine that the same love of the wild that had been in her mother’s family for generations was now coursing through her own veins.

  Mike Durango, however, was not one to linger in the past, or to let Lizzie do that, either. Grandma May had also told Lizzie, “Your father doesn’t have a good personality
for grief.” When Lizzie asked what that meant, she said only, “He believes in getting on with it.”

  But wasn’t that what everyone had to do? Lizzie wondered. What was a good personality for grief, anyway? If you got stuck in your sadness, caught in the swirling vortex of if-onlys and might-have-beens, surely it would pull you under. You might never make it to the surface again.

  Fortunately, Lizzie liked her life very well just as it was. She lived at the zoo! By the time she was barely able to walk, she had bottle-fed a baby llama, ridden on an elephant, handled a boa constrictor, and stroked the velvety nose of a giraffe. She loved animals as much as her father did, and in turn, he let her see and do things at the zoo that no other kid ever got to experience. It was a lucky, fantastic life, Lizzie knew … and having no mother was only a very small part of it.

  She was thinking about all of these things as she boiled water in the huge stockpot and ripped open a package of spaghetti. She was also realizing that the one person she did truly miss right now was her best friend Margaret Kincaid, who was in Australia for two months visiting relatives. They were planning to Skype or e-mail each other, but the time change was so vast (Margaret was always going to bed right as Lizzie was waking up, and vice versa) that it seemed as if Margaret might as well be on another planet. Summer was the busiest time at the zoo, so there was plenty to occupy Lizzie, but it would have been much more fun with Margaret for company. And right now, it would have been especially good to be able to tell Margaret about what had happened at the snack bar with the mysterious boy.

  “Hey, Lizzie.”

  The back door slammed and Lizzie could hear her father in the laundry room.

  “Hey, Mike,” she called.

  Her father was Zookeeper Mike to everyone at the zoo, so Lizzie sometimes called him Mike, too. Now that she was older, she had started calling him Dad more often. People outside the zoo seemed to find it strange that she called her father by his first name, and it was often easier to conform to their expectations than to have one more thing she had to explain.