35. Brendan
Brendan
Four weeks post-modification. Episodes: zero. Behavioral withdrawal pattern: gone entirely. She’s been engaging with the left-side enrichment daily. I think we have our answer. Great work, Doc.
I read it twice before grabbing my phone to call Dr. Reyes.
“Mold,” she said, before I’d finished my first question. “Facilities found it during the ventilation cleanout. Apparently, there was a massive colony along the duct seam closest to the left wall. They’ve fully replaced the affected section.”
“That tracks with the timeline,” I said. “The new system must’ve disturbed the colony.”
I kept the caveat to myself—that a mold colony along a duct seam and brand-new ductwork curing in a sealed space could easily be two faces of the same disruption.
The lab was still running the air panel, and Dr. Reyes didn’t need my hedging today, and honestly, neither did I.
The direction was right. The left wall was the problem.
The rest we’d nail down when the full workup came back.
“Marisol’s been a different animal,” Dr. Reyes said. “She’s eating with enthusiasm and initiating contact with the keepers again. I haven’t seen her this engaged since before all this started.”
There was a certain satisfaction when a theory held up under four weeks of real-world pressure—but none of that compared to the joy of knowing a living creature’s life was better because of something I did.
“She was right the whole time,” I said. “She knew exactly what she was avoiding. We just had to catch up.”
“One hundred percent. She’s a smart girl. You want to come see her?” Dr. Reyes said. “I think she’d like the visit.”
I looked down at my desk, at the folder I’d kept the imaging in for weeks.
With finality—and no small amount of pride—I reached down and closed it.
How such a simple act could feel so monumental was a wonder I would ponder for days to come, but in that moment, all I could think about was sharing Marisol’s news with one special guy.
“I’d like to bring someone,” I said. “If that’s all right.”
Adrian had been asking about Marisol since the night I first told him about the case, the same way he asked about everything that mattered to me.
It wasn’t performed interest. No, he was genuinely seeking information, the way he wanted to know about Mofongo’s bloodwork or Gerald’s soil moisture or whatever might be happening at the panadería when he wasn’t there.
So when I told him that Dr. Reyes had cleared a visit, he was already reaching for his shoes.
“Now?”
“She has office hours until five.”
“Brendan. Now?”
“Now is fine,” I chuckled through a toothy grin. Adrian’s excitement was infectious.
His keys were in his hand before I even finished the sentence.
The Lowry Park Zoo was loud with families and strollers and small children meeting large animals for the first time.
We walked past the otters, past a group of teenagers arguing about whether the flamingos were real, and arrived at the tapir enclosure where Dr. Reyes was waiting near the keeper gate.
“Dr. Davis,” she said, extending a hand to shake. Then she turned toward Adrian. “And you must be Adrian.”
“He’s heard a lot about you,” I said. “I feel like he knows the case better than either of us.”
“Dr. Davis told me that you asked the right questions early, Adrian,” Dr. Reyes said with a smile. “Is she eating? Is she scared? Those matter more than people give them credit for.”
Adrian looked pleased and more than a bit embarrassed at her praise.
“Come on. Let’s meet our baby girl,” she said, reaching up and squeezing Adrian’s arm.
Marisol was at the far end of the enclosure, moving with a deliberateness I recognized from months of footage.
Except everything looked different now. Marisol seemed looser and more at ease.
She investigated something near a water feature, lingered there, then moved on without any of the careful avoidance of the left side that had defined every clip I’d watched for months.
“She’s been doing that,” Dr. Reyes said. “Going everywhere, like she’s relearning the space now that it doesn’t have a bad corner.”
Adrian was quiet, watching her, his hands folded over the top rail of the fence.
“Is she going to come over?” he asked.
“She might,” Dr. Reyes said. “She’s been more social since the recovery. Give her a minute.”
So we waited. I was fairly certain I couldn’t have pried Adrian off the railing with a crowbar. He looked like so many kids I watched with their pets at the clinic, fixated and utterly in love—or awe—though there was rarely a difference with kids.
Marisol finished her circuit near the water and turned, unhurried, toward the fence.
She came slowly, the way she did everything, and stopped a few feet from where we stood.
I’d seen her assess keepers countless times in the videos, but this time, I was close enough to watch her eyes actually find us instead of documenting it secondhand.
“Hi,” Adrian said quietly, leaning slightly over the rail. “I’ve heard a lot about you, Miss Marisol.”
Marisol looked at him for a long moment, then she huffed, a low sound through her nose, and turned her attention to the fence post near where Adrian’s hand rested.
“She’s checking you out,” Dr. Reyes whispered, smiling. “That’s a good sign. She doesn’t do that for strangers.”
“I’m not a stranger,” Adrian said. “I asked about her for two months.”
“She doesn’t know that.”
“She knows,” Adrian said with complete confidence. He then reached down to let Marisol investigate his fingers through the fence gap, which she did, slow and deliberate, taking her time with the decision.
I stood there for a second and watched the two of them, a tapir who’d spent months silently managing a medical problem nobody could see and a man who had asked, from the very beginning, whether she was scared instead of what was wrong with her.
He’d understood instinctively that those were two different questions and only one of them actually mattered to Marisol.
Then I thought about a corner of an enclosure on a screen in my office, watched late at night, and how far that screen was from this, from actually being here.
“Thank you,” I said to Dr. Reyes.
“I should be thanking you,” she said. “You stayed on this when most consults would have moved on after the bloodwork came back inconclusive the first time.”
“She kept telling me something was wrong,” I said. “I just had to listen.”
Marisol huffed again and wandered back toward the water, satisfied, leaving Adrian still smiling at the fence post where her nose had been.
We stopped by the gift shop on the way out because Adrian insisted. He bought a small stuffed tapir from the rack without telling me, paying while I was looking at the otter postcards. He didn’t reveal it until we were in the car.
“For Diane,” he said, handing it over. “I figure her desk needs a second one, for solidarity, you know?”
“She has a stuffed tapir already.”
“Then this one can be her backup. Tapirs travel in pairs sometimes, don’t they? I read that somewhere.”
“You didn’t read that somewhere.”
“I read it just now, in my head, as a fact I decided was true.”
I chuckled, shook my head, and took his hand in mine. He immediately entwined our fingers and began stroking with his thumb.
I drove us home with the small stuffed tapir riding in the cupholder between us. Somewhere on the Veterans Expressway, my phone chimed with a text from Marcus.
Marcus: Mark wants the anniversary headcount by Monday. He says, “tell Brendan to ask Adrian since Adrian actually knows things.” His exact words.
I showed Adrian the screen.
“That’s very Mark,” Adrian said.
“Is it?”
“He doesn’t ask for things directly if he can route them through someone else first. It saves him a conversation, and he’s efficient if he’s anything.
” Adrian was already typing something into his own phone, a note or a list. I couldn’t be sure.
“He also doesn’t trust numbers he didn’t generate himself, so whatever I give him, he’ll probably run it through his own formula anyway. ”
“Why ask for it then?”
“It’s his process,” Adrian said. “He likes having the raw data even if he doesn’t end up using it. Don’t take it personally if he questions it.”
“I wasn’t going to take it personally. I don’t know him well enough to take anything personally.”
“You will,” Adrian said, looking up from his phone. “Give it time. He warms up. It just looks like a spreadsheet at first.”
I typed back to Marcus that we’d have the headcount Sunday, which Marcus answered a moment later with a single word: Bold.
“What’s bold about Sunday?” I asked.
“Mark’s deadlines are aspirational,” Adrian said. “He sets a date and then revises it down. If we actually hit Sunday, it’ll throw him.”
“Sounds like you know him pretty well.”
“All those Fridays and Saturdays will do that, I guess,” Adrian said, and went back to his list.
Puck met us at the door the way Puck always met us, fast, loud, and immediately suspicious of anything new.
Within four minutes, he’d located the stuffed tapir, removed it from the counter where Adrian had set it, and was conducting a full investigation that involved extensive sniffing, one cautious paw-touch, and a posture I could only describe as deeply distrustful.
“He thinks it’s real,” Adrian said.
“He knows it’s not real. He’s confused about why it smells like the actual one.”
“Tapirs have a smell?”
“A distinctive one,” I said.
Puck dook’d at the stuffed tapir, backed up two inches, circled it, and dook’d again, louder.
“He’s negotiating with it,” Adrian said.
“He doesn’t negotiate. He assesses and then makes a unilateral decision.”
Puck, as if responding to the challenge, sank his teeth into the stuffed tapir, which was nearly as large as he was, and dragged it toward his hammock, committed and unwilling to entertain further discussion.
“He’s adopting it,” Adrian said, delighted.
“He’s stealing it.”
“It’s a stuffed animal, Brendan. There’s no theft. There’s only acquisition, possibly liberation. Free the tapir!”
I watched Puck wrestle the tapir into his hammock, where it did not fit, but where he kept trying anyway, undeterred by physics or reason.
“I’ll have to take it to Diane eventually,” I said.
“He’ll grieve.”
“He’ll be fine.”
“You don’t know that. You haven’t seen ferret grief.” Adrian cocked a brow, a clear challenge to my veterinary knowledge of my own pet.
“There’s no such thing as ferret grief.”
“There’s absolutely ferret grief,” Adrian said. “I read about it. Just now. In my head.”
I squinted at him.
He stared back, entirely unbothered by the dishonesty of his own sourcing, and went to put the kettle on.
Puck continued his losing battle with the hammock.
Somewhere across town, a tapir who had spent four months silently managing her own quiet crisis was, for the first time in a long while, simply basking in the sun.