Chapter 18
MIKA
At first, living with my parents had seemed more like staying at a bed and breakfast. Mom treated us like guests.
That all changed a week after we moved in. That Friday night, I took over her kitchen, cooking vegetarian basmati rice pilaf and grilled mushroom tofu burgers.
"Where did you learn to cook?" Mom asked me after the first bite of her burger.
"Instructional videos."
"You know how I feel about that bitch—"
"They're just regular people with cooking vlogs," I hastily interrupted. Mom hated all celebrity chefs. Whenever they appeared on her morning news shows, she cursed them out before changing the channel.
I showed her a few amateur videos, and she was hooked. The next night, she asked me to help with dinner a half-hour before she began meal prep. Then, she progressed to sharing the menu she wanted to prepare for the following day.
I loved every minute I got to spend in the kitchen with my mom.
She was very no-nonsense about cooking, which also meant she detested new recipes.
Learning them was good for her. It would help her maintain brain function in her old age, or so she said.
She was nowhere near old by shifter standards, but stubborn? Fuck yeah.
Unfortunately, Gabe had an adversarial relationship with food once his morning sickness started.
The federal court judges allowed him to take a single picture on his cell phone when he needed to run to the court's restrooms, and then they recessed until he was ready to sketch the next witness.
Thankfully, that had only happened twice, including the time I'd brought him a change of clothes but ended up taking him home instead.
The worst part of Gabe's morning sickness was that it didn't stick to the morning.
I found him sucking down ginger tea and snacking on saltines at all hours of the day.
He lost weight in his first trimester, which our family doctor said was normal.
Dr. Ostref lived at the compound and had been my doctor since I was born.
I trusted him with my unborn child's wellbeing, so when he said to call him if Gabe was still getting sick into his second trimester, I marked it on the calendar and waited.
When Gabe instead began feeling better a week before the deadline, we both breathed a sigh of relief.
"We're fine. Baby's fine," he insisted when we spoke on the phone over lunches. I worried while he was at work, but he insisted on staying until Dr. Ostref's cutoff date, only a few days before he was due.
"It's less stressful now than it was when I had to walk," Gabe said. "Your mom's driver drops me off at the front steps each morning."
"She's not Mom's driver," I said.
"Whatever you say." He still thought my mom was connected to actual organized crime instead of the organized chaos of our meerkat family. Meerkat and Mafia both started with the letter M, and they both focused on family, but that's where the similarities ended.
For his part, Dr. Ostref did little to dissuade Gabe from thinking we were mafia. The elder beta meerkat shifter had an entire bookcase dedicated to mobsters.
"Light reading, eh?" Gabe asked.
"Oh, I'm enamored with organized crime," the doctor said.
"I love me some true crime, don't get me wrong," Gabe said, "but yours have more to do with getting away with crimes than holding people accountable for them."
Dr. Ostref glanced at his books and shrugged. "They do. Huh. I never thought of it that way. You're right. Maybe that's part of the appeal, getting away with it. What do you read?"
Gabe went through his list of true crime books, recommending several mafia-adjacent ones, based on the titles. "Want to do a book exchange on Sunday before dinner?" Gabe asked.
"Let's do it." They shook hands, and the doctor led us to the examination table. "Time for your first ultrasound. Take off your shirt."
Gabe hoisted himself onto the table and lay back. I clasped his clammy hand in both of mine, and he squeezed my fingers until they ached while the doctor rubbed gel into his skin, making him hiss.
When the doctor touched the sounding device to Gabe's abdomen, we heard our baby's heartbeat for the first time.
"There they are," Dr. Ostref said. "Singular they," he corrected. "There's only one heartbeat, one child. Do twins run in your family?"
"Not that I know of," Gabe said. "I'm an only child, and my dads each have one sibling."
"Then probably not," the doctor said with a nod. "There are a few multiples in our family, but not in Talia's line."
"Thank goodness for small miracles," Gabe said. "I'm scared enough with one."
The doctor moved the wand around, shifting the image of our tiny little peanut and showing them secured to Gabe's womb. "Well, everything looks good," he said after a moment. "They're a healthy size. No worries that you'll pop out a tiny meerkat instead of a human baby."
Gabe's eyes nearly popped out of his head at the doctor's words. "That's a possibility?"
"Very rare." The doctor continued with his checklist, oblivious to Gabe's mental state.
"No extra limbs, and none missing. Still too small to count fingers and toes, but they look to be coming along nicely.
You're having a baby!" Usually, I appreciated his jokes and jovial laughter, but today, it grated on my last nerve.
"When will we know if they're a meerkat shifter?" Gabe asked.
"It's a 90% chance for fated mates."
"Wow, strong genes." Gabe grinned up at me.
"What can I say?" I shrugged. "They're dominant."
"Good thing you're not," Gabe whispered as the doctor rolled the ultrasound machine away.
I couldn't wait to show him how submissive I could be once we were in our own house and away from my parents' sensitive ears.
While he wiped the remaining gel from his rounded belly and pulled his baggy t-shirt back on, my imagination wandered.
It had taken months of planning, but finally, the energy commission was ready to discuss my alternatives to building a plant at the Wolfcat Nature Reserve.
A lot was riding on this meeting. If I failed to convince them to build an energy plant elsewhere, I had no way to explain the loss to my mom.
We all loved having the wilderness within sight of our compound.
Like most meerkats, I'd had my first hunt in those woods.
My great-grandmother had first purchased the land on which the compound was built knowing that the nature reserve was nearby and with the expectation it would always be there.
I couldn't let them down, not now.
My first presentation was on the delicate balance of the ecosystem, including a few adjacent endangered species, like the California condor, who used the woods to nest. Then, I went into disturbing the seismic balance by drilling and excavating so close to a known fault line, "Not to mention the higher risk of water contamination, if the cooling pipes were to break during an earthquake. "
The harried representative from the Department of Energy looked up from his notepad. "Let me guess," he said. "You also have a long list of notes on upfront cost, land subsidence, and air and noise pollution this would introduce to a national park."
"Yes."
He sighed. "I gave the committee this exact same information when they first mentioned the reserve as a potential building site." He pointed to my presentation. "This, though. The facts and figures you've compiled should be enough to dissuade them, but first, we need a better site."
"Agreed," I said. "If you'll allow me to skip ahead, I've picked three other locations near the coast that would work better."
After another fifteen-minute discussion of the other areas, he agreed to take them back to the committee.
"Off the record," he said, "Clean energy alternatives aside, I don't think this is the reason Teddy Roosevelt set all this land aside for national parks, only to have the government fuck it up in the name of progress. "
"You've invoked Teddy's ghost," I said with a grin. Rumor had it, if anyone mentioned Teddy Roosevelt's name when criticizing the government's actions on public lands, his ghost would ensure swift vengeance on the offending public officials. "This project is doomed to fail now."
He laughed. "You've heard that one, too? Well, let's hope it works."
It helped to know we were on the same page when it came to the nature reserve, but while my part was done, the fight was far from over.