42. Brendan
Brendan
The zoo opened at ten o’clock, but we came through the staff entrance at nine-fifteen, because Dr. Reyes had cleared us in early to see a recovered patient before the crowds arrived.
Adrian found nothing unusual about this. He knew that Brendan-the-veterinarian had veterinary-adjacent access to places, and a private early visit tracked completely with who I was and how I operated.
“She’s really okay?” he asked as we walked the empty path toward the tapir enclosure, the zoo quiet and green and gold around us in the early light.
“She’s completely okay. The trigger cleared within the observation window. There have been no episodes in nearly three months. She’s back to full behavior.”
“You said it was mold,” Adrian said.
“The working theory was mold. The confirmed cause was chemical off-gassing from the new ductwork insulation as it cured. There was a small amount of mold, but it turned out to be a red herring. The compounds coming off the insulation were the real trigger.” I heard myself and stopped.
“Sorry. You didn’t ask for the whole scientific gobbledygook. ”
“I always want the full workup,” Adrian said, and meant it, the way he always meant it.
I didn’t reply.
I couldn’t quite, at that particular moment, with the particular thing I was carrying.
I looked at the path instead and kept walking and hoped he’d read it as the ordinary quiet and not the other kind.
He didn’t seem to notice.
That was good.
I needed a few more minutes of him not noticing.
Marisol was at the fence when we came around the last bend.
She stood near the viewing rail, unhurried and healthy in a way that showed in how she moved.
She looked loose and easy, with none of the careful avoidance that had defined every piece of footage I’d studied for two months.
When she saw us, she made a low sound through her nose and came the rest of the way to the fence.
“Hi,” Adrian said quietly, leaning on the rail. “Look at you. You’re all better.”
She investigated his fingers through the gap, slow and deliberate, and then huffed and pressed the flat of her snout briefly against the rail near his hand. This was as close to affection as a Malayan tapir came, and which Dr. Reyes had told me privately she did for almost no one.
Adrian made a small sound.
“She likes you,” I said.
“She remembers me.”
“She might,” I said. “Dr. Reyes says she does that for maybe three people.”
“I asked about her for months,” Adrian said, watching her, his whole face open the way it went open when something reached him. “I told you she’d know.”
She stayed at the fence with us, occasionally investigating, mostly just present, the way animals were present when they felt safe.
The morning was warm and quiet.
The zoo hummed faintly with its early machinery, keepers somewhere out of sight, the day not yet started.
My heart was doing something I would have found clinically interesting in a patient.
“Adrian.”
“Yeah.” He didn’t look away from Marisol.
“I want to tell you something, and I need you to look at me for it.”
He turned, a question scrawled on his brow.
Something in my face must have told him, because his own face began, very slowly, to change. It was the dawning of a man who read rooms for a living arriving at the meaning of this particular room about two seconds before I got the words out.
“Brendan?” he said.
“I’m not good at saying things loudly. You know that about me.
I do things quietly, and I do them once, and I mean them all the way down.
” I made myself keep his eyes. “I’ve spent every day we’ve been together telling you smaller truths, because the large ones were too big to get out of my mouth.
The first time I saw you, you were dancing on a bar, and I couldn’t look away.
I told myself it was the choreography. Then you carried a beagle into my clinic, and I told myself it was professional interest. Both times I was lying.
I knew I was lying. I did it anyway, because the truth was the size of the rest of my life, and I wasn’t ready to hold something that big. ”
Adrian’s eyes were wet.
Mine, I was aware, were not entirely dry either.
“I can’t imagine my life without you in it,” I said.
“I tried this morning, in the car, as a test, and I couldn’t build the picture.
There’s no version of my life worth living that doesn’t have you in the middle of it, making coffee by feel, talking to bread dough, leaving orange Fanta in my refrigerator.
I want all of it. I want every ordinary morning I have left to have you in it.
” My voice held steady, which surprised me, because nothing else did.
“I’m not asking you for anything. I’m telling you where I am.
This is it, for me. You’re it. I wanted to say it out loud, in the daylight, once, all the way. ”
Adrian put both hands over his mouth.
Marisol chose that exact moment to huff loudly and press her entire snout against the rail with what I can only describe as emphasis, as though a Malayan tapir had opinions about the proceedings and wished them entered into the record.
Adrian laughed through the hands over his mouth, the wet, broken, helpless kind, and took his hands away. “Even the tapir—“
“Even the tapir agrees,” I said.
“I’m here, too,” Adrian said, quiet and certain. “All the way. You know that.” He pressed his forehead to mine. “You didn’t have to say it in the daylight for me to know it. But I’m glad you did.”
I kissed him at the fence at the Lowry Park Zoo at nine-twenty in the morning, with a recovered tapir huffing approval eighteen inches away. It was not a quiet kiss, and it was not a careful one. For once, I didn’t try to make it either.
When we broke apart, Adrian was crying and laughing at the same time.
I was somewhere in the same country.
Marisol had drifted back toward the middle of her enclosure with the satisfied air of an animal who had witnessed something, given it her blessing, and now had a full day of being a tapir.
“You set this all up?” Adrian asked, wiping his eyes.
“The early entrance, the quiet slot, Marisol at the fence—yeah. I wanted you to have this.”
“Dr. Reyes,” he said, shaking his head, smiling. “The whole time.”
“Tarpon Springs I planned for a week. This one I just wanted to be right.”
“You told no one?”
“I told Puck.”
“Puck is a ferret.”
“Puck approved. Dr. Reyes knew. She set all this up—the early entrance, the quiet slot, Marisol at the fence. She said it was the first time she’d ever set something like this up at the zoo.”
“You set this up with the tapir and a doctor and told no human being?”
“I don’t do the loud version,” I said. “You know that.”
“I do,” Adrian said, and pulled me back in, and I let him.
“Oh, come on,” said a voice from about twenty feet down the path.
We turned, still wrapped in our embrace, to find Peter standing near the otter enclosure with a clipboard under one arm, a visitor lanyard around his neck, and the frozen posture of a man who had walked into something he had no preparation for.
“Peter?” Adrian said.
“I’m consulting,” Peter said, too fast. “On the otters. There’s a behavioral issue with the—it’s a completely separate matter.
I had no idea you’d be—that I was walking into—“ He gestured vaguely with the clipboard at an enclosure he had demonstrably not been walking toward.
“This is a coincidence. I want that on the record. I was not invited to this.”
“You weren’t,” I confirmed. “Nobody was.”
“Good. That’s good.”
Peter cleared his throat.
He adjusted his clipboard.
He looked at the two of us, and then at Marisol, and then back at us. Something happened to his face that I had never seen happen to Peter’s face in the entire time I’d known him.
His eyes went bright.
“Peter,” Adrian said, delight blooming across his wet face. “Are you—“
“No,” Peter said.
“You are—“
“I am not!”
“Peter, you’re crying—“
“I have allergies,” Peter said, with tremendous dignity, blinking rapidly. “It’s a zoo. There’s dander. There’s pollen. There’s an enormous amount of airborne particulate at a facility like this, and I have a documented sensitivity—“
“You cried at your own commitment ceremony, too,” Adrian said. “Benji told everyone.”
“That was a controlled environment,” Peter said.
“This is an outdoor facility with high allergen density.” He wiped one eye with the back of his hand in a motion he clearly intended to look like something other than what it was.
“I’m reacting to the environment. Congratulations, by the way.
I mean that. I’m reacting to the environment, and I’m also happy for you. Those two facts are unrelated.”
“You came over here,” I pointed out. “You saw us. You weren’t walking toward the otters at all. You changed direction.”
“I heard a tapir,” Peter said. “Professionally, I was concerned.”
Marisol, from the middle of her enclosure, huffed.
“She’s fine,” Adrian said. “She approved the proposal.”
“I’m aware she’s fine,” Peter said. “I can see she’s fine. I came to confirm she was fine, and she is, and now I’m going back to the otters.”
He didn’t move.
His eyes were still bright.
He looked at the two of us for one more moment, and whatever composure he’d been rebuilding cracked slightly at the edge.
“It’s a good thing,” he said, more quietly. “What you two have. It’s a good thing. That’s all I’ll say about it.”
“Peter—“ Adrian started.
“That’s all I’ll say about it,” Peter said, turned, and walked back toward the otters with the wounded dignity of a man who had been ambushed by his own heart at nine-twenty in the morning and intended to deny it for the rest of his natural life.
“He’s going to tell Benji the second he’s out of earshot,” Adrian said, watching him go.
“He’s already texting,” I said. Peter’s hand had gone to his pocket before he’d made it ten feet.
“Benji’s going to make it a whole thing.”
“Benji’s going to put it on a napkin,” I said.
“Benji’s going to put it on the menu,” Adrian said, laughing again.
He leaned into me, and we stood at the fence in the gold early light with a tapir behind us and a weeping veterinary surgeon retreating toward the otters. I held the man I was going to build the rest of it with, and it was, by a considerable margin, the best morning of my life.
On the following pages, please enjoy a free sample of the final novel in the Barbacks series, Bounced!. This is Mark’s story.