When We Break

by Piper Lennox

  But at night, when it was just me and the darkness, the hum and rattle of our fridge down the hall reminding me endlessly of the exact moment I started to kiss her...all I could think about was how much I wanted to finish it.

  Now, as we push through the turnstiles to the Mission Street Zoo, I stare at the blister scars on the back of Colby’s heels as her sandals thwack the pavement. I study the glint of her hair ahead of me. I find the freckles on her shoulders, one by one, and congratulate myself again: I don’t feel overwhelmed by temptation. This is doable. We can spend a few hours together. We can even become friends. That doesn’t mean anything has to happen.

  Then, as soon as we’re through the entrance and back into the open white sunlight, she looks at me. The briefest look, her smile small and unsure, like she still can’t tell if my invitation was sincere. But I catch her eyes, filling with light to shine in just the right way, and know I’m in trouble.

  “Where, uh...where should we go first?” I cough and step past her to check the map board. “We can’t stay too long, so—”

  “Baby tigers!” London jumps up and slaps the tiger enclosure section of the map with her palm. “It’s right there, Daddy!”

  “London, remember the rules for public places?” I put my hand on her shoulder and take a deep breath. She pouts a second, then mimics it. When we figure out our route and start down the forked path to the first exhibit, she’s considerably calmer.

  “Wow,” Colby comments. “I’ve never seen a kid chill out that fast.”

  “It’s only effective about half the time, to be honest.” I slide my hands into my pockets as we stop at the first enclosure. It looks like a small sloth combined with an even smaller anteater, but the plaque calls it a “tamandua.” “So. Having vets for parents and working for one, you must know everything about these guys already.”

  “Right. I encounter exotic arboreal animals, like, every day.” She smiles and nudges me. “Most vets have a specialty. Kind of like how all doctors and nurses don’t know how to treat every illness, but they do know all the basics for, like, giving somebody stitches.”

  “So you wouldn’t know how to feed a sloth—”

  “Tamandua,” she corrects, hitching her thumb at the plaque.

  “—but you could sew him up if he very slowly injured himself.”

  “Exactly.”

  We let London lead the way. She’s like a pinball, ricocheting back and forth across the path from habitat to habitat.

  “Any plans to follow in your parents’ footsteps?” I ask at the giraffe bridge, where London cranks quarter after quarter into a pellet machine, shrieking with delight every time a long, creepy tongue scoops the food from her palms.

  “Lots of plans,” she says, sighing. I watch her crouch and pick the lines of dropped pellets from between the cracks of the bridge. “Just not enough action.”

  I kneel down and help. “What kind of vet work do you want to do?”

  “I haven’t decided.” Her shrug isn’t convincing; I can tell she’s embarrassed. “But it doesn’t matter. I don’t have enough money for vet school yet, so I’m focused on saving my paychecks. I’ll have to get a second job soon, though. Dr. Aurora’s changing her office hours because she’s pregnant, which means all the assistants can only get twenty hours a week. Max.”

  “Your parents don’t want to help you with vet school?”

  “Only if I move back to Kona.” She gets up and holds her cupped hands over the bridge railing. A giraffe saunters close, sniffs the air, and extends its tongue to scoop up the food. “And that’s definitely not an option.”

  I follow suit, but flinch and drop most of the food before the giraffe can take it.

  Colby laughs. “Scared?”

  “No,” I protest, “just grossed out. Purple tongues are unnatural.”

  “I wish my tongue was purple,” London chirps. She grabs the last of the food from Colby’s hands and feeds it to a baby giraffe through the bottom section of the railing. “It looks like they ate lollipops.”

  “You know why they’re that purply-black color?” Colby crouches beside London and pets the giraffe’s nose. “It’s melanin. So they don’t get sunburned tongues from sticking them out and eating leaves off trees all day.”

  “Really?”

  “Really really.”

  The tiger exhibit is more crowded than I expected, but London and Colby are too excited to notice. They charge ahead into the mass of people while I’m still figuring out my entrance strategy.

  “London!” I shout. “London Amelia, get back here!”

  My heart pinches. I scan the lines of heads bobbing and weaving in front of me, edging my way through, but can’t see hers.

  “London!”

  I’m in the middle of the throng now. My pulse beats against my skull. I ask a woman with a baby in a sling if she’s seen a blonde girl run past, but she shakes her head.

  While I push my way to the front, my brain pages through the Rolodex of every possible horror that can happen to a lost kid: abduction into a van, vicious animal attack.

  “London!” I call again, my voice straining.

  Then, finally, I see her. She’s at the very front of the exhibit, eyes wide and fixed on the four cubs wrestling in front of an exhausted mother tiger. One hand spreads across the Plexiglas wall.

  The other, I notice, holds firmly onto Colby’s.

  “Daddy, look! Look at the babies!”

  I step up beside them. My heart rate sinks into its normal pace. “Yeah, bug, I see them.”

  “Kerouac, Keats, Longfellow, and Frost,” Colby says, reading from a pamphlet one of the zoo workers is distributing. She tilts the photo so London can see. “Frost is the one with the white tufts in her ears.”

  London pushes herself up on her tiptoes, nose a millimeter from the Plexiglas. She points. “There she is! Near the water dish.”

  “Good eye! Okay, what about this one—Longfellow. He’s the smallest.”

  “There! He’s on that rock.”

  While they talk, London grinning all the way to her chipped eyetooth, I watch Colby. The way her eyes focus completely on London, not distant or distracted; how her chin tilts the slightest bit as she listens, truly listens, to everything my daughter has to say.

  “Can we pet them?”

  “No,” Colby and I say at the same time, drawing the word out into a laugh. When she looks at me, I divert my attention to the tigers.

  “Where to next?” Colby asks, when we finally pry London away from the cubs. “I think the koalas are this way...and the nocturnal exhibit’s down here.”

  I start to answer, until I realize she’s asking London, not me.

  “Not turtles?”

  “Noc-turnal,” she enunciates. “It means they sleep during the day, when it’s bright, and wake up when it’s dark. That’s why the zoo keeps them in a dark, cool building—we get to see them move around and eat.”

  “What kind of animals does it have?”

  “Bats, bobcats, maybe some snakes—”

  “I want to see bats!” London bolts down the path. I’m about to shout after her, middle name and all, when Colby grabs my hand and pulls me along at the same breakneck pace.

  Stepping into the nocturnal exhibit is like entering another world entirely. There’s an eerie purple glow, calm and chilling at once; I can barely hear the crowd milling past the rubber-encased door.

  “What’s this?” London whispers. She hoists herself up on the metal rail and gets close to the glass. Colby tells her it’s a bushbaby at the exact moment the animal grabs a grasshopper in its paws and chomps down.

  “Ew, it’s eating bugs!”

  “I bet it thinks the stuff you eat is pretty gross, too,” Colby teases. “‘Ew, it’s eating jelly beans!’”

  London locks her hands over her mouth, muffling her laugh. The sound diffuses into the darkness.

  While she does her trademark ping from tank to tank, I try, with every fiber of control I’v
e got in me, not to look at Colby. I already know the way the skin between the freckles on her nose and forehead must be glowing in the light. I can already imagine the purple glint in her eyes, this fake moonlight electrifying her stare in a way I can’t possibly handle.

  “This is so cool,” she whispers. I look at her feet, the neon white tips of her toenails, instead of her face. “I love how authentic the habitats are. Some zoos really phone it in, you know?”

  “I’ve only ever visited this one,” I confess. “How many have you been to?”

  “More than I can count. That’s where most of my snow globes came from—all the zoos my parents took me to, when we’d visit people on the mainland.” She snorts, correcting herself. “Here, I mean.”

  It’s a risk, but I decide to look at her hands now. It feels less strange than staring at her feet. “I would’ve thought anyone into veterinary stuff wouldn’t like zoos.”

  “Oh, no, most zoos are the good guys.”

  “The good guys?”

  “Yeah, like, most zoos take injured animals, or ones raised in captivity for whatever reason—like people having them as pets, research lab animals, that kind of thing—and they either keep them forever, if the animal wouldn’t survive in the wild, or they help them get their strength up so they can go home. The bad guys,” she adds, “would be...I don’t know, the testing labs. Poachers, hunters, whatever.”

  “How do you know the good zoos from the bad ones, though? How do you know their animals are here because it’s better for them?”

  “Well, they’re bigger, for one. And they always put something about it in their mission statements.” I feel her glance at me. “Go ahead, make fun of me. I know it’s weird.”

  “It’s not weird. It’s cute.”

  Nice, Walker. So much for resisting. I’m practically setting up my own bear trap.

  “That kid is going to crash hard during the drive home,” Colby whispers after a moment. If my slip-up caught her attention, she doesn’t show it. “How do you keep up with her 24/7, all by yourself?”

  “Walt,” I shrug, and the combination of our hushed laughter fills the air like fog.

  “I never did ask....” Colby’s voice trails. She takes a breath, like she might start over, but lets it out slowly.

  I forget all about my goal to look at anything but her face. Just like I predicted, her skin is a pale, ethereal color. Purple-white, like something you’d find in the ocean. The ring of light caught in her eyes dances as she looks between mine.

  “What?”

  She looks at the floor. “Nothing.”

  “Come on, ask.”

  “No, really—I’m trying to work on, you know, not blurting stuff out, so much? And I realized this is probably one of those things I shouldn’t ask.”

  I watch her profile shift; she brings up her head and watches London, running on the rubber floor mats ahead.

  My pulse is back to earthquake mode. Quietly, I say, “Let me guess. You’re wondering what happened to London’s mom.”

  Colby moves her purse higher on her shoulder, folding her arms in the chill. “You don’t have to tell me.”

  “No, it’s okay. I appreciate how you went about it. You’re right—it’s not one of the things you just blurt out.”

  “Progress, not perfection,” she smiles, and tucks her hair behind her ear. It’s almost impossible to tear my eyes away from the cool blue skin of her neck.

  “Emily and I met at Kidney Camp, which you already knew. Don’t laugh.”

  She covers her mouth. “I’m not.”

  “Anyway....” London is yards ahead, but I lower my voice, just the same. “After camp we did long-distance, kind of—she lived in Phoenix, so we could only visit for a day or two at a time. And we were both still doing dialysis, which made traveling kind of hard.”

  “Not to sound totally ignorant,” she says, “but I didn’t know women with kidney disease could get pregnant.”

  “Neither did we.” I manage the world’s smallest laugh. “We knew it was possible, but the odds were so low. And you know how it is when you’re a teenager. You think you’re invincible.”

  “Even when you’ve already gotten proof you aren’t?” She laughs, but bites her lip. “Sorry. Bad time to joke.”

  “You’re not wrong.” I laugh, too, but it’s quiet. “When she got pregnant....”

  My voices fades into a shot of twisted air, breath sucked out like a vacuum. I don’t think I’ve ever told this story aloud.

  But I have thought it. Rehearsed it. Relived it so many times, I don’t think I’ll ever start to forget it.

  “Carrying a baby is.... It’s really hard on a woman’s body, when she’s got kidney failure.” I clear my throat. This is good: the medical facts. At least I can spit these out without faltering. Once upon a time, facts were my best friends. “And being only sixteen, that added in all these other risks that teen moms have.”

  “So the odds were stacked against her twice as much.”

  “Yeah.” I crack my knuckles against my legs. “She got preeclampsia about two and a half months before her due date. I drove there with Walt when they admitted her to the hospital, because her mom was like, ‘Get here now, the baby’s coming now.’ I was just numb about it, because...because I couldn’t picture the baby arriving so far from the date we kept talking about.”

  “They delivered London that early?”

  I nod.

  “Whoa. You’d never know it, looking at her now.”

  This pulls another smile from me. “Yeah. Doctors kept telling me she’d be behind at walking or talking, or she’d have vision problems or asthma...but she didn’t. She just kept getting stronger and stronger.”

  Colby’s quiet again. I know she’s figured out the ending. It’s not hard to decipher. Which is probably the worst part about it—how natural the conclusion feels, the path so fast and linear, there’s no use wondering if it could’ve turned out any other way.

  “Emily was still really sick, though.” We stop walking. London is almost to the end of the building, rapping on the glass of some poor animal’s home, but I don’t dare raise my voice. This story makes it impossible.

  “They started her dialysis again, talked about doing a transplant from her mom even though she wasn’t a great match...but it was too late, I guess.”

  I lean against the metal railing on one side of the path. Colby stands near the other side, directly across from me. She’s silent, and in all this time I’ve known her, I’ve never wanted her to speak more than right now.

  Finally, she whispers, “I’m so sorry, Orion.”

  It’s these words, not the story itself, that unhinge the memory completely and let the full weight rest against my ribcage. All the sorrys beside the grave. The apologetic look of the nurses in the NICU when I arrived in my funeral clothes that evening, ready to take Emily’s place beside the incubator, slipping my hand through the opening and watching London’s impossibly small fingers work to grip mine.

  “London cried for the first time the night Emily died. A real cry—ear-splitting. Second day of her life. The nurses said they’d never seen a baby’s lungs get strong enough to do that, so fast.” The ache in my chest fades a little and I smile, remembering the rest of the story. The part where an ending could go, but instead, there’s just another chapter.

  “Walt said Emily probably sent her a piece of her spirit that night. I know it sounds cheesy as hell, but—”

  “It doesn’t.” Colby closes the gap between us. Not so much I think she wants me to kiss her again, even if that’s what I’m suddenly hoping for. Just enough to hug me.

  And in the darkness, this safe, fake night, I slip my arms around her and hug her back.

  Twelve

  Colby

  “I don’t know if you’d be interested in this at all, but you remember how you said you’d be looking for a second job soon? Since the vet’s office is narrowing its hours and all that?”

  I look back at Orion o
n our way to the car. My arms are filled with the souvenir cups, stuffed tiger cub, and snow globe he bought London, who told me, in great detail, about the collection she’s hoping to amass. His arms are filled with a sleeping rag-doll version of the little fireball we could hardly keep up with after the nocturnal exhibit.

  “Yeah,” I answer. “Why? Do you know anywhere that’s hiring?”

  He shifts London’s weight in his arms. Not staring at his muscles is hard enough. Ignoring them when they’re carrying the child we’ve been tracking like hawks all day is impossible. Maybe it’s just me, since I’m not used to watching kids, but it feels like we just survived some big adventure together.

  “Not a place. Just a...person.”

  “Yeah? Who?”

  He wipes his chin on his shoulder to get some of London’s hair from his mouth. “Me.”

  I bite back my smile and slap on a look of skepticism. “What would it be for?”

  “Watching London a few hours a day?” He cringes as he says it, as though he’s just asked me to defuse a bomb. “School just let out, so I don’t have that six-hour block to work anymore. I can squeeze in some time before she gets up in the mornings, and a couple when she goes to sleep, but adding some after breakfast or whenever would really help.”

  Orion closes his speech with a sharp breath, like he can’t shut himself up. I find it absurdly cute.

  “That’d be perfect, actually. My new shifts at the clinic don’t start until noon each day.”

  “Really? Oh, my God, that would help me out so much. Thank you.”

  “Thank you. Like I said, I need any money I can get. Vet school is insanely expensive.”

  “I, uh...I can’t pay a whole lot. It’d only be a hundred a week.”

  “I repeat, any money I can get.” I smile and take the balloon ribbon slowly slipping from London’s hand, tying it around the stuffed tiger instead. “Besides, I get to chill with London everyday. What could be better?”

  “I’m sure she’ll love the arrangement, too,” he chuckles. “She really likes you.”

  I study the subtle twitch of his jaw and wonder if there’s anyone else he meant to include in that statement.