Unspoken Page 12

  Not one to be upstaged, Kamili reached for Rafiki, pulled the baby onto her lap, and began grooming the youngster. I half-expected Aisha to rise up and snatch her child from Kamili’s grip, but she kept grooming the silverback.

  I studied Kamili, looking for special signs of pregnancy within her round gorilla belly. At ten years old, she was pregnant for the first time. Because she’d been born in captivity and raised by humans, we would have to be vigilant when it came time for her baby to be born.

  I blinked at a sudden realization—according to the material I’d read, Kamili was due in early April. I was hoping to be home with Sema by then, but if Matthews insisted that we make occasional visits to the zoo—a compromise I’d be willing to consider—we might well be here when the blessed event occurred.

  Reluctantly, I shoved the thrilling thought aside. I couldn’t allow myself to become attached to these animals. If our attempt at habituation failed, Sema and I might be home within four weeks. We’d miss meeting Kamili’s baby, but a gorilla birth would allow Ken Matthews to focus on something other than a talking gorilla.

  I lifted my head as Rafiki escaped Kamili’s grip and executed a series of somersaults across the floor, finally crashing into his father’s strong arm. Dakarai looked down at his son, then lifted the grinning baby with one hand and cradled him in the bend of his arm.

  The scientific researcher in me melted into a puddle of sentiment. Silverbacks have been known to kill men, wild beasts, and even infants fathered by rival males, but they are generally the gentlest of fathers.

  I blinked away a sudden smattering of tears. I had to focus my thoughts. I’d come out here to study this group in order to see how Sema should approach them. If my plan failed and she were fully habituated, she would enter this group with a lower social rank than Aisha. Depending upon the animals’ personalities, she might even rank lower than Kamili.

  How would she handle such a demotion? Though she’d been born in captivity, she’d never known anything but lavish human attention and near-constant stimulation. I had been her social group, teacher, mother, and friend. She had been the center of a human’s universe, so how would she react if these gorillas ignored or mistreated her?

  Until that moment, I had hoped I could convince Fielding that Sema couldn’t be habituated while secretly believing she could join this group. But as I watched Dakarai with his children and his females, I couldn’t help but wonder if these gorillas would know what to make of her.

  I rested my elbow on my knee and parked my chin in my hand. Sema tended to pout when she didn’t get her way; in her early years she had thrown temper tantrums worthy of a spoiled starlet. We’d worked through most of those childish behaviors, but if Sema tried to reason with these gorillas as she reasoned with me, Dakarai might react with fierce resistance.

  For my beloved girl’s sake, I decided to scour the trailer for Natural Wildlife videos of free-living gorilla behavior. Over the next few days, Sema and I would watch these videos together. I’d spent eight years teaching her how to relate to humans—the least I could do now was spend a few days teaching her how to relate to her own species.

  I’d be walking a fine line for the next several days. I wanted Sema to be safe when she interacted with the other g’s, but I didn’t want her to adjust completely. If she did, I’d never be able to take her home again.

  Fielding’s left brow shot up when he saw me walk into the office with my overnight case and a sleeping bag. “May I ask what you’re doing?”

  I dropped my burdens by the side of my sorry-looking desk. “What does it look like? I’m preparing for a slumber party.”

  “That’s not a good idea, Glee. You said you’d follow the rules.”

  I took a deep breath and adjusted my smile. “Since when are pajama parties against the rules?”

  He crossed his arms. “I’ve been trying to cut you some slack because I know this situation is . . . unusual. But what good do you think you’re going to accomplish by spending the night? Sema has to make a break from you sooner or later.”

  “Then she can make it later. She might have a hard time adjusting to all this. I want to be here if she does.”

  “Glee.” Fielding’s voice flattened. “The other animals come in, adjust, and manage to cope perfectly well.”

  “Sema’s not just another animal.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if you forget she is an animal.”

  I met his gaze, careful to keep my voice low so Sema wouldn’t overhear. “What is an animal, Fielding? Something with fur? Some creature with the misfortune of not being born homo sapiens ? Animals have emotions, too, and Sema has them in high definition and surround sound. She won’t understand if I take off and leave her.”

  “You might be surprised—she’s a big girl.”

  “She’s a big baby and you know it.”

  “I know she doesn’t need to be mollycoddled.”

  I inhaled a deep breath. “Listen to yourself. I know you’ve spent the night with sick gorillas. You’ve stayed awake to see a mother safely through labor. I know you, Fielding, and I know you wouldn’t think twice about sticking around if one of the other g’s needed you. Sema may not be sick, but she needs me, so I’m spending the night. So go about your business and forget I’m here. I promise I won’t go through your desk or burn the place down while you’re out.”

  Though his brow remained as low as a Neanderthal’s, Fielding unfolded his arms. “You can stay—but only for one night and you can’t sleep in her room. That’s strictly against zoo policy.”

  I turned and moved toward the door. “Like I care about policy.”

  “There’s a cot,” Fielding called over the creak of his chair. “It’s in the storage closet. You can set it up in the hallway outside the observation room.”

  A little amazed at how easily he had acquiesced, I smiled as I entered the kitchen. A moment later Fielding peered around the edge of the door and gave me a warning look. “Don’t say anything to anyone about this. And if you wait a minute, I think I can find you a pillow.”

  After Sema’s dinner, I commenced our regular evening routine: one storybook followed by tooth brushing and a light application of baby oil on the soft portions of her face and the smooth areas of her chest. These tender rituals had bound us since Sema’s infancy, and I didn’t want to disturb them.

  By eight o’clock, my girl and I lay awake in the steady glow of her Jungle Book night-light. Even in a sealed building, the night around us had filled with the noises of all sorts of creatures—the chuff of lions, the trumpeting of elephants, the call of roosting birds. From closer at hand, we heard the rustling sounds of the other gorillas as they settled into their night nests.

  Ignoring the cot Fielding had set up in the hallway, I stretched out in my sleeping bag on the straw-covered floor. Sema sat in her inner tube-comforter nest, her chin resting on her chest, her eyes round as she listened. Every few minutes she would ask What noise? and I’d try to identify the sound we’d heard.

  She broke into a grin when we heard the wail of a siren on the highway. Hurry hurry truck?

  “That’s right, sweetie. The same hurry trucks we heard at home.”

  After an hour of playing “what’s that sound?” Sema curled up on her Care Bear comforter and drifted into a doze. Knowing she would sleep for the next several hours, I crawled out of my sleeping bag, pulled a few bits of straw from my hair, and crept through the complex. Though I was as emotionally drained as I’d ever been, my body would not shut down before 11:00 PM.

  After getting a cup of water from the cooler in the kitchen, I walked down the long hallway and looked through gates into the other night rooms. Silence had settled over this end of the building, broken only by an occasional rumbling belch, an innocent vocalization Dian Fossey had interpreted as I’m here .

  The gorillas were shadowy sleeping forms inside their darkened rooms, but I felt a thin blade of foreboding slice into my heart when I looked into one room and saw a pair of glowing eyes watching from above.

  Dakarai.

  The silverback did not yet know me; no wonder he was alert and on guard. Obeying a primitive instinct, I ducked my head and took a half-step back, reflexively signing sorry as I retreated.

  As I walked back to the office, I wondered if my presence could have an effect on the other gorillas. I didn’t plan to be around long, but if I became a permanent part of their lives, might my occasional signing make an impression? Would the other animals pick up new words? The older animals might not, but Rafiki was young, bright, and adaptable.

  I stepped into the office and stood in the glow of a solitary desk lamp. With nothing else to do, I sipped my water and watched the bank of digital cameras mounted on the walls. Six monitored the habitat; six others monitored the night rooms. The equipment operated at all times, Fielding had explained, and motion-activated sensors would record anything that moved throughout the night.

  The improved security impressed me. When I worked here in before-Sema days, the setup had been far more primitive. One night a man had purposely remained in the zoo after closing, then he crawled over a railing and dropped into the lions’ habitat, waiting for sunrise and an opportunity to “wrestle the king of beasts.” Fortunately, a motion detector picked up the man’s movements and activated a video camera, which malfunctioned after a few minutes. The next morning, the blinking red light caught the lion curator’s attention; blind luck revealed the trespasser sleeping under a tree. Instead of wrestling a pride of lions, the man tangled with a pair of security guards who successfully removed him before the animals were released.

  The memory drew me to Fielding’s desk, where I realized the man was still as tidy as a cat. While piles of unorganized clutter littered my desk, his files accordioned
in a neat stack, his pens waited at attention in a leather pencil cup. Several books, including Fossey’s Gorillas in the Mist , stood erect between two wooden bookends. His books, I noted with a frisson of horror, had been ordered by height—the tallest hardcover on the left, the shortest paperback on the right.

  Only one photo occupied Fielding’s desk—the framed five-by-seven Sema had kissed. I picked it up for closer examination. Rafiki must have been no more than two months old when the photographer snapped the photo. The little gorilla looked like a downy ball of fluff with bugging golden brown eyes.

  I smiled at the picture and tenderly traced the outline of the infant’s round head. In time that head would elongate and grow into a splendid sagittal crest like his father’s; in fourteen or fifteen years Rafiki would be ready to lead his own family group. If Dakarai still reigned at Thousand Oaks, Fielding would transfer Rafiki to another zoo.

  Despite the irritation that rose from within me every time I spoke to Fielding, I couldn’t help but smile as I set the picture back on his desk. The man had no sports paraphernalia on his desk, no girlie calendar in view, no portrait of a girlfriend.

  Only baby Rafiki.

  Clearly, the man had his priorities in order.

  13

  A bright light pried at my eyelids. Groaning, I rolled over in the straw, then glanced at my wristwatch: 5:30 AM. The early shift had arrived.

  A moment later I heard Claire’s sneakers squeak over the tiled floor in the hallway. I turned back toward the offending light in time to see the girl slap her hand across her mouth. “Oh! I’m so sorry, Glee! I didn’t know you were here.”

  “It’s okay.” I pushed myself up, then raked hair from my eyes and peered up at Claire. “Time to eat, is it?”

  “Time to prepare breakfast ’n browse,” she whispered, tiptoeing into the kitchen. “Go back to sleep if you want. It takes me a good hour to get everything together.”

  “I’ll help you,” I said, struggling to pull my legs free of my sleeping bag. “Just let me splash some water on my face.”

  After taking a few minutes to freshen up in the restroom, I pulled on clean underwear, jeans, and a fresh T-shirt, then slipped into my dingy lab coat. When I stepped out into the kitchen, Claire had already covered the dinette table with plastic bowls the size of industrial garbage can lids. She slid a plate of baked apples from the microwave as I dropped my overnight case into an empty chair.

  I leaned against the wall, watching as she slipped vitamin pills into the center of each soft apple, then tossed an apple into each bowl. “Do you feed them the same thing every morning?”

  “Pretty much—but what we give them, of course, depends on what’s in season. The local grocer leaves boxes of produce by the door every morning at five; we try to feed the animals and get the browse into the habitat before eight. Once the g’s are awake, the first thing they want is food.”

  She grinned at me beneath her spiky bangs and I grimaced back at her. “Do you mind if I take what I need for Sema’s breakfast?”

  “Help yourself.”

  I grabbed one of the bowls from beneath the counter and picked through the boxes of organic fruits and vegetables. Along with different kinds of leafy greens, I found several of Sema’s favorite foods—apples, oranges, cantaloupe, assorted peppers, string beans, corn, and brussels sprouts.

  I had to admit, the zoo had good grub.

  I picked up a cantaloupe and weighed it in my palm. “Do you slice fruit like this?”

  Claire smiled. “Sometimes I’ll cut them in half, but not always. Dakarai likes to smash melons against the wall and eat the broken bits.”

  “Sounds messy.”

  “It is.”

  I felt a blush burn my cheek as I set the cantaloupe in Sema’s bowl. I usually sliced my girl’s foods; sometimes I inserted juicy cantaloupe segments between slices of soft bread. I didn’t dare admit this to Claire—no sense in telling her how thoroughly I had spoiled my girl. But my overindulgences might work in our favor if Sema didn’t like the change in feeding routine. If we were going to make a case for maladjustment, no issue would be too trivial to consider.

  I added greens, apples, and a mixture of brightly colored peppers to the bowl, then sprinkled the mixture with a handful of chickpeas. Sema ate between ten and twelve pounds of produce a day, along with several snacks, three juice boxes, and at least half a hamburger.

  I glanced over my shoulder at Claire, who hummed as she doled veggies into the plastic bowls. “You’re awfully chipper for this awful hour.”

  She stopped humming as the tip of her nose went pink. “Sorry.”

  “You don’t have to apologize—I’m just not a morning person. I’ve always been grateful that Sema likes to sleep until eight or so.”

  Claire scooped up an armload of corn on the cob. “I can’t help it— I like getting up early because I love watching the sunrise. I grew up in Cocoa Beach, and the sight of the sun coming up over the ocean—wow. Just thinking of it can take my breath away.”

  From lowered lids, I shot a quick glance at my companion. Was she kidding?

  “It’s so spiritual,” she went on, dealing ears of corn into the bowls. “Even the sky itself seems to celebrate the glory of mother earth. It’s like every sunrise is a celebration, every night a benediction.” She shrugged slightly as a smile lit her face. “You may think I’m crazy, but I don’t think I’ll ever get used to it. I see the glory of nature in almost everything, especially the animals, but nothing paints as simple a picture as a sunrise.”

  I looked toward the door, half-expecting Fielding or a team from Candid Camera to come barreling through the doorway. When seconds passed and nothing happened, I shook my head and went back to filling Sema’s bowl.

  “That’s nice. You sound like my grandmother. She’s religious too.”

  “Religious?” Claire sucked at the inside of her cheeks for a minute, her narrow eyebrows working. “I don’t think of myself as religious anymore. I used to go to church three times a week, but I got fed up with being stuffy and conventional. The earth is so much more alive, you know?”

  “You’re not religious? Then how would you describe yourself?”

  She tilted her head, her gaze roving the ceiling tiles as if the answer were printed above our heads. “I think I’d say I’m . . . spiritual. In tune with the spirits of the earth and sky. That’s why I love the gorillas—I yearn to hear the songs of the gorilla nation; I want to experience the ties that bind us together.”

  I felt a smile creep over my face. Claire might be young and a little flaky, but at least she understood the link between humans and animals. “Believe it or not, I understand.”

  I watched as she stacked the first three bowls, then lifted them with both hands. “Do you need help?”

  She peered at me around the sloping edge of a bowl. “You can get the door for me; after that I’ll be fine. We slide the bowls through the spaces at the bottom of the doors. While the g’s are eating, I’ll hit the stairs and get started on the browse.”

  “I don’t remember seeing stairs.”

  “They’re on the outside of the building—and not much more than scaffolding, really. We toss bundles of browse through openings in the covered part of the habitat,” Claire answered. “With a little practice, you’ll be able to land browse in the tree branches and high on the rocks—and that’s good for the g’s. You know—gotta keep them interested and active.”

  I nodded. The harder the animals had to work for their snacks, the better off they’d be. Sema, on the other hand, had spent her life pursuing rewards through more intellectual pursuits. Though I had occasionally scattered browse in her play yard, she was not going to like having to climb trees and race the others to win a fistful of celery.

  Another reason why she might hate living here.

  I felt a little like dancing as I lifted her bowl and carried it to her room.

  After Sema had eaten her breakfast, I took the empty bowl back to the kitchen, then paused in the doorway to the office. Fielding had come in while I fed Sema. He sat at his desk, a clipboard in his hand and a frown on his face.

  “Hi,” I called, purposely trying to maintain a pleasant tone. “Didn’t hear you come in.”