Five #2
Elsie waves, but instead of a greeting she just yells, “He’s already tried to feed a pigeon to his sister!” pointing at Milo, who is now using the stroller bar as a pommel horse. “I had to call the city last night about the escaped rat snake. Guess what, it’s here. In this very zoo.”
Leo is deeply invested. “Are we going to see it? Please say yes.”
“Absolutely,” Noah says, with a kind smile. “We’re going to see everything.”
Next to arrive is Luca, who is wearing sunglasses so enormous they could serve as landing pads for small helicopters, a pink button-up with tiny zebras all over it, and shorts that appear to be made out of a picnic blanket.
He struts up to the gate, waving at every human in a thirty-foot radius, and immediately launches into a story about how he “read up on the okapi enclosure and apparently they can lick their own eyeballs, which, if I’m honest, is a skill I deeply envy. ”
Adrian is two steps behind, dressed in his lawyer-casual, holding a single duffel bag that I recognize as the “emergency supplies” kit Luca leaves in every car and apartment they have ever entered together.
He takes the bag, hands it to Luca without comment, and immediately scopes out the nearest coffee stand.
Their dynamic is so seamless I feel like I’m watching a dance performed in another language.
Liv is last. She walks up with an iced coffee the size of her femur, a T-shirt with a cryptic slogan that might be a threat or a compliment (“DON’T MAKE ME TURN THIS CAR AROUND”), and Leo proceeds to pass her aforementioned necklace of tiny plastic dinosaurs, now strung with a shoelace which she takes hesitantly but still treats it like a presidential medal.
She doesn’t say hi, just holds up the coffee in salute.
“I want it on record that I am here under protest,” she says, “but only because I’m still bitter about the last time I got sunburned at an outdoor event and Harper told me SPF 8 was ‘enough for a morning’.”
I bow, slightly. “My defence is that you looked amazing, even when peeling.”
She grins and shoves the dinosaur necklace in my direction. “Can you put this on for me? I just need to take the old one off.”
I do, and she winks at Leo, who is already vibrating in excitement. “I made that one for you too,” he says, slightly awed that she still has it, and the sight of it on her.
“I know, buddy. I would never get rid of it” She tugs the new dinosaurs into place. “I will wear the new one for luck.”
Ten minutes later, we are all inside. The plan is to let the kids choose the route and the adults just try to keep up, but in practice, it’s more like a tactical retreat from one minor disaster to the next.
The first stop is the penguin pool. Milo screams, full-throttle, and the penguins respond in kind.
Three separate families turn to glare. Maisie, in contrast, stands at the glass, watching the birds with a focus so intense I’m briefly concerned she is learning how to move things with her mind.
Liv tries to narrate the entire event like a nature documentary: “Note how the mother attempts to wrangle the offspring, only to be outwitted by chaos incarnate…” Elsie flips her off behind Maisie’s back.
Next, the reptile house, which is air conditioned and dark, a blessing really.
Leo leads the charge, but he stops at every info placard and reads it out loud, even if the words are complicated.
He points at the python exhibit. “That one is the same as the escaped snake! But it can eat whole rabbits.” He turns to me, face deadly serious. “Do you think it could eat a cat?”
“Probably only if the cat is dumb enough to get in the cage,” I say.
Liv, who has had a complicated relationship with snakes since childhood, leans in close to the glass, then shudders. “I would rather get eaten by the penguin than be trapped in a tube of meat like that.”
Luca says, “Don’t say tube of meat in public, you’ll get us all arrested.”
Milo tries to lick the glass. Noah wipes it with a napkin before the zoo staff can see. Adrian snaps a photo of the exact moment Milo made contact and emails it to Luca, who immediately makes it his lock screen.
We loop through the rest of the building, Maisie never letting go of the stroller bar, her face expressionless but absorbing everything. At the iguana habitat, she presses her palm to the glass, holds it there for a full minute. I catch Elsie watching her with something like awe, or maybe terror.
Back outside, the heat has arrived in force.
The smell of fried food is everywhere, and the main thoroughfare is jammed with people.
We stop for lemonade. Noah opens a container of fruit from his backpack and offers it around.
Leo is too busy studying the map to eat.
He traces the path to the giraffes, then announces, “We have to go, or we’ll miss feeding time and I’ll never get to feed the giraffe a carrot. ”
It is, of course, the highlight of the day.
The giraffe enclosure is mobbed, but Luca’s sunglasses work like a charm at making the staff believe he is some undercover celebrity; the attendant waves us through, and within five minutes, Leo and Maisie are both holding carrots up to the fence.
The giraffes have impossibly long tongues, and when one licks the carrot out of Leo’s hand, he is so delighted that he nearly falls over.
Maisie does not flinch when the giraffe’s mouth gets within inches of her face.
She just stares back, unblinking, until it takes the carrot and moves on.
Milo gets his hand into something sticky and unidentifiable. Luca, always prepared, produces a packet of wet wipes from nowhere and cleans him up without fuss.
“I could do this in my sleep,” he says, and Adrian just nods, steadying him as he wipes his own hands off on Luca’s shirt, causing him to jump away in horror.
Liv narrates again. “It is a little-known fact that giraffes can kill a lion with one kick. You can Google it.”
“Good for them,” I say. “I wish I could kill things with a kick. That sounds like a great party trick.”
“You could try, but then you’d get sued,” says Adrian.