by Ruthie Knox
They pulled up at the entrance. Kal ushered her through the ticket collection point and into the zoo. “What do you want to see?”
“I don’t mind.”
“It’s all pretty good,” he said. “The aviary’s the best part, I guess.”
She liked Kal. Very much. He’d been, on the whole, good-natured and easygoing from the moment they’d made it off the mountain. But he was also a man who was protecting something, a man who, according to his mother, had lost his priorities, and Rosemary didn’t know how far he could be pushed before his easygoing facade broke to reveal the true feelings beneath.
It was her intention to push him until she found out.
“Kal?”
He flashed her a smile. “Yeah?”
“I owe you an apology. I shouldn’t have sprung that on you at lunch.”
Kal looked away from her to the cranes, then down the zoo pathway. “Let’s walk. You should see the aviary. It’s really something.”
“Will you talk to me in the aviary?”
“I’m talking to you now.”
He was already walking. She followed him along the asphalt, the sun warming the top of her head, her feet sore in the unfamiliar heels, her animal self only too happy to inventory the shape of Kal’s back, his arse moving in black trousers.
He looked good, running from her.
“I’d like to speak to your mother again,” she said to his back.
“You do that.”
“I’d like to tell her story, if she’ll let me.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“There will be press when I do. More questions. Uncomfortable questions, I imagine. For you.” He kept walking, his pace measured, his arms swinging loose at his sides, his bubble tea bumping his thigh now and then, as though he hadn’t a care in the world. But he didn’t look at her. “That article about her from a few years ago—”
“I don’t want to talk about the article.”
“I do.”
Rosemary stopped. Kal walked. He didn’t slow down or speed up. He didn’t cease bumping his thigh with the tea, even though he ought to have if his movements had been natural, if there’d been anything remotely normal about his charade of ease.
“Kal!”
He turned, twenty feet away. “What?”
“That article about your mother should never have been published, but it was, and it’s the only story that’s out there, so people are going to tell it and keep telling it.” Rosemary clipped across the asphalt to close the distance between their bodies. She bumped him in the chest with her fist wrapped around her cup. “The only thing to do about it is give them another story.”
She waited for his face to go blank and bland, for him to turn away, but he didn’t this time. His dark eyes were intense with whatever he was feeling—anger, frustration—and he let her see it, frankly, for once.
“The only thing to do about it,” she repeated, “is to write something better. Something real. That’s what I want to do, and if you intend to stop me—”
“I’m not going to stop you.”
“Then help me.”
She could feel his heartbeat in the backs of her fingers. She could feel the breath moving in and out of him, the heat of him, and she pressed herself back—pressed her own heartbeat, her own breath, the warmth and weight of her will.
She’d been wallpaper. For years, she’d blended into the furnishings, and then she’d broken her life open and left it behind so that she could have something else. This was what she wanted. Right now, besides seeing Beatrice, it was the only thing she genuinely seemed to want: this story to tell, and this man to help her get it. It felt important to pursue that, though Rosemary couldn’t put her finger on why.
Kal dropped his chin and sucked the last of her tea up through the straw. He chewed up her boba, his square jaw working, and swallowed it. “All right.”
“All right?”
He nodded. This time, when he turned his body away, he grabbed her hand with cold fingers. “Come on. The aviary’s fun. I used to take my little sister Patricia here.”
Rosemary let out a long exhale, relieved.
They followed the path in an arc past the lynx and the puma, both sleeping in the sun, past the owl, also sleeping, to a geodesic dome, which they entered by walking downhill, as if to sneak beneath it.
Kal opened the door for her. The aviary smelled of moist earth, reminding her of the vast conservatory at Kew Gardens and all the doomed outings she’d taken there with Beatrice.
The pathway inside the building was spongy, quieting the sound of their footfalls. They began to climb straightaway, and Rosemary looked up to see the sky had been replaced with triangles and hexagons. The pitch was steep, winding through lush evergreens to emerge among the treetops, eye to eye with parrots and magpies.
“This is amazing.”
“Yeah, I know. Patricia used to run all over this place, banging into people.”
“How old is Patricia?”
“She’s eight now.”
“Beatrice hated the zoo. The very first time I took her to one, thinking it would be a special treat, she burst into tears. She said the animals were all in prison, and they hadn’t done anything wrong.”
“That’s intense.”
“She was a very intense little girl. Is, actually, I should say. Will ever be.”
“Like you.”
They walked over a duck pond, the birds bobbing up and down on their blanket of water. “She is and she isn’t. Like me. Her school used to phone me two or three times a week. ‘We were reading a book in the classroom, and Beatrice burst into tears. She won’t leave off crying.’ As though they wanted me to make her, somehow, when that was just how she was. It would always turn out they’d been reading a book where someone died, or a granny was sick, or an animal had lost its mother. Or one of her schoolmates had said something mean or insensitive. She felt things deeply.”
“That’s not a bad quality.”
“No, but I have to say it’s inconvenient, from the parenting perspective. She texted me, you know. Finally. That’s why I’ve decided to go. I haven’t seen her since the holidays, and I nearly—”
Died.
But that felt too dramatic. Had Rosemary nearly died, or had she merely been in proximity to death?
Death was always proximate. Everyone died. When you climbed, you accepted the possibility of death. She’d accepted it, or thought she had, but now she wondered if she’d been fooling herself.
Kal was looking at an evergreen with white birds perched on its branches.
“At any rate,” she said, “I’ll go in the morning, assuming I can book a flight.”
They resumed their upward trek.
“So what’s the deal with you and her?” he asked.
“Beatrice?”
He gave her an odd look. “Yeah, Beatrice.”
“She’s angry with me for not being a proper mum.”
“What did you do?”
“I divorced her father when she was sixteen, sold the house she’d grown up in, and left. She moved to New York for university. Her father moved here with her. I’m gallivanting around the world, putting my life at risk, and she’s punishing me by withholding affection and information.”
“I can’t tell if that’s her perspective or yours.”
Rosemary stopped, ostensibly to watch a pair of brightly colored birds fight on a nearby branch, but in fact because she didn’t know the answer to the implied question.
Kal steered her by the elbow to the railing so a family with a baby in a wrap and a five- or six-year-old boy could pass by.
She looked out over the green branches, the birds in the trees, the ducks in their pond, wanting to feel a sense of wonder. Her shoes had rubbed a hot spot onto the high back of both heels. She felt weary in a way that she remembered vividly as the emotional landscape of the last years of her marriage.
“I spent most of Beatrice’s growing-up years trying to figure out how to make h
er…less. Not because I didn’t love her. The love part isn’t optional, at least not in my experience. But it’s a terrible sort of love when your child makes absolutely everything difficult. She wouldn’t properly eat, even as a newborn. We had to have the lactation specialist to the house again and again because none of the tricks one is meant to use worked for Beatrice. When she was meant to be eating solids, she wasn’t interested in any of the foods, not yogurt or mash or rice cereal. She liked prawn crisps, though, and chocolates, so it became a battle to get her to eat anything but rubbish.”
“That sounds hard.”
“As a mum, feeding your baby—well, it’s sort of the first thing, isn’t it? You expect to be able to feed them. All the other mums talked about offering healthy choices and their babies would be dipping carrots in hummus in the pram. I was having hour-long showdowns with my daughter simply to get her to consume one small bit of carrot.”
The parrots had stopped fighting. Rosemary had assumed they were male parrots, but given the way one had positioned itself behind the other, she revised her assumption. “Let’s move along.”
“They do look like they could use privacy.”
She and Kal climbed higher. She felt as though she’d been rambling but hadn’t managed to say anything, or to put her finger on what she wanted him to understand.
Beatrice was…Beatrice. She had always been Beatrice. She would ever be Beatrice, and all Rosemary had learned to do was insist on space for herself to occupy, lest she disappear completely.
“There were so many years when she wanted me around every second,” she said.
“Kind of a mama’s girl, huh?”
“It was more that she wanted someone to witness her, as though she couldn’t figure out how she felt about things or who she was without someone to bounce all of her thoughts and feelings and ideas off of. So she bounced them off me, relentlessly, until I felt exhausted. I had to teach her how to stop doing that—how to notice what others were feeling and adjust her behavior accordingly. All these things you don’t think you’ll have to teach children, you think they’ll learn on their own, but that’s not the reality.”
“Some kids are just hard. I’m the oldest of five. Tashi and Tenzing, my brothers, came along when I was already Patricia’s age. First Tashi, I mean, then Tenzing, when I was ten or eleven. I remember them as babies pretty well, but they were easy kids. And then Sangmu, my sister, she was the last kid my mom had with Merlin. Sangmu was terrible.”
“How old is she now?”
“She’s going to graduate high school this year. She was a screamer. Every time she didn’t get something she wanted, she’d scream until she turned purple. She was one of those kids who would make herself pass out, even. She was born screaming. And Sherpa babies, they always say we’re really sweet and fat and quiet. Not Sangmu. She was a nightmare.”
“She seemed lovely.”
“Yeah, she hasn’t screamed in years now.”
“Beatrice is lovely,” she said. “Everyone seems to think so.”
“It’s just you she’s hard on.”
“I don’t know.”
They listened to the birdsong, descending again, presumably toward the exit.
“You know, for so many years, I worked so hard to make her someone I could handle, someone I could be alone with and not feel like I would crawl out of my skin. And then when she became a teenager, it actually began to work. She stopped crying at the drop of a hat. She didn’t insist on being with me every moment. Her school stopped phoning me, and she brought home good marks, and she understood how to eat food and use utensils. I looked at her one day and thought, God. She’s turning into you.”
Her breath caught in her throat. She couldn’t look at Kal, couldn’t look at birds anymore. She counted her footsteps, and hurt.
Rosemary had run away from her daughter in order to have an adventure. The purpose of the adventure, of the book, was meant to remind her of the girl she’d been, to give her back the life she was meant to have, to test her and heal her and fix her.
It had been two years. Nearly three.
She’d hauled herself up and down mountains, shivered at Camp Three on Everest, but Rosemary didn’t feel she’d discovered a single useful thing.
Nor had she healed.
“You’re not so bad,” Kal said.
“I don’t know.”
Kal laced his fingers through hers. His hand was warm, his grip firm. He pulled her close until her hip collided with the side of his leg, and then he did the strangest thing.
He put his forehead on her forehead. He looked into her eyes. “You know how you hurt a kid?”
“How?”
“By hurting them. You hurt a kid by punching them. Smacking them in the face, or smacking their mom around in front of them. Or you hurt a kid by telling them they’re stupid, ugly, and worthless. You hurt a kid by forgetting to feed them, not caring if they eat, not sending them to school because you don’t give a fuck. All those things hurt kids.”
“Of course.”
“You don’t hurt a kid by loving them and trying to teach them how to eat, and how to act in the world so they’ll have friends and be good people. You don’t hurt a kid by asking them to accept love from another person who loves them, or taking time for yourself to do something that’s important. I bet you never missed a birthday, princess. I bet you never forgot your daughter for a day, no matter where you were in the world.”
“She’s my daughter.”
“So if she’s mad at you, you tell yourself, she’s nineteen. She’s got things to learn. Don’t tell yourself it’s because you suck.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Yeah, you did.” He lifted both hands to his ears, folding them forward with his fingers. “I’ve got ears.”
“You look very silly doing that.”
“Yeah? How about if I do this?” He pulled his forehead away from hers, then crossed his eyes, widened his lips into a grimace, and stuck out his tongue between his teeth.
Rosemary laughed. Kal’s smile broke through, the grin that took over his whole face. “See, that works on Patricia, too. Nobody can resist my charms.”
“To think they called you Doctor Doom.”
“Right? And me so charming and everything.”
“You have a highly inflated sense of your own charm.”
“You seemed to like my charm okay on the airplane. And back in Lukla, you liked my charm twice. Oh, and at your ex-husband’s apartment? Just last night, I seem to remember you finding me more than charming.”
“You’re incorrigible.”
Kal leaned forward to kiss her, and Rosemary kissed him back. She wound her arms around his neck. His hands found the curve of her waist. They fit perfectly—so perfectly, Rosemary didn’t want to give them up.
She wondered for the first time if she really had to.
—
As the afternoon lengthened, they wandered through the rest of the zoo and some of Flushing Meadows, Kal pointing out buildings leftover from the World’s Fair, some of them rehabbed into museums, others left to rust.
She seemed to like the giant globe of the Unisphere surrounded by its geyser fountains.
When Rosemary started to limp from her shoes hurting, they sat on a park bench and people-watched a while, talking about nothing. It should have been boring, but it wasn’t.
That was Rosemary. She should have bored him. Or at least, she shouldn’t have been his type. She was seven years older, born and raised across an ocean of time zones. Every significant experience in her life had been different from his.
But she didn’t bore him. Not even close.
“Let me see your feet,” Kal said.
“I’m not going to show you my feet.”
“C’mon, let me see them. I’m going to work my foot rub magic on you.”
“Kal, I have climber feet. I haven’t had a pedicure in a thousand years, and until I do, you’re not going anywhere near my feet. Also, fo
ot rub magic only works on hormonal teenagers.”
He reached across her body, grabbed her ankle, and pulled hard enough that she lost her balance and had to reposition herself to keep from tipping over. Her feet ended up in his lap. Kal slid off her shoe.
Her heels were a raw, bloody disaster.
“Jesus Christ, Rosemary.”
“They look worse than they feel.”
“I’ve seen climbers with frostbite and chilblains and every fucking thing you can think of whose feet look better than this.”
She yanked on her foot and nearly succeeded in pulling it out of his grip. “That’s enough, thank you.”
“No, come on.”
“You said my feet look worse than frostbite and chilblains and every fucking thing.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.” Kal loved how the word fucking sounded coming out of her mouth. He put the knuckle of his thumb against the arch of her foot and dragged it back and forth. “Settle down, princess.”
She stiffened her spine. “I will not.”
He rubbed her foot, digging into the small muscles behind her toes. She sighed. “I’ll let you do that for a moment. Though it’s only going to make it worse when I put my shoes back on.”
Kal didn’t want to think about her putting her shoes back on. Their day together was almost over. She would leave in the morning. That was reality.
Also reality: he’d promised Rosemary he would help her with her book project. He would help her because he couldn’t stop her, and because some perverse part of him wanted to, even as he knew that trying to help her with this project was no more intelligent than taking a shovel and pushing it into the earth at exactly the spot where you’d buried the body.
He switched to the other foot. Rosemary had closed her eyes. “You should get back to that sweet apartment and put your feet in the tub with Epsom salt.”
Her eyelids opened, and there was that cool blue gaze, taking his measure. “What did you like to do when you lived here?”
“I do live here.”
“I mean when you were younger. What do the youth of Queens do with themselves?”
“Same things everybody else does, I guess. Eat, hang out, go to events and stuff. Nightclubs.”