She took another step backward, rigid and tense. He opened his mouth to beg her to stay, to promise he’d not bring it up again, but a big giddy knot of women came down the path, hands full of shrimp cocktail and cheap wine, and when Teagan moved out of the way to let them by, Darcy bolted.
twenty-six
Darcy fled past the hippopotamus in her bare cement stall, the three-toed sloth marooned on his exposed bit of topiary, and the wretched jaguar stalking back and forth in his glass-sided exhibit.
She didn’t know where she was going, but every turn led to another miserable creature displayed in an enclosure that maximized human observation, rather than animal welfare. She wanted to let every animal loose. The New York suburbs couldn’t be worse for them than this place, which abruptly loomed dark and confining around her.
When she reached a cage full of reasonably content parakeets, Darcy lifted her phone and recorded a voice note, her tone the one that people use to report car accidents and shipwrecks. “Point number one: we never come back to this zoo.”
That was an important stake in the ground. Teagan needed to cut off all association with the Westchester Zoo. This place was as bad for Teagan as it was for the animals.
If Darcy was making notes, though, she supposed that meant she was also making a conservation plan for one Darcy Albano, to be released in the marginally favorable habitat ofmetropolitan New York. She was thinking about what Teagan could promise that would let her say yes, she’d turn down the gig in Yellowstone and stay here indefinitely. Whether she dared stay with Teagan just because she loved him and he’d asked her to, and not because it made any kind of sense.
Kristin would be horrified at her. No, Kristin would be researching New York’s alimony laws.
If Teagan had asked her to run away with him, if he’d ever said yes to a single one of her suggestions that they take up beet farming or beekeeping or vanilla bean orchid pollination, she would have done it in a heartbeat, as easily as she’d decided to come out here in the first place.
Because here was the thing about running away together: that was a story you could see the end of from the very beginning. When it inevitably didn’t work out, when it proved to be a mistake, when they ran out of money or patience or love, she could look back and sayof course. Of course that had been a mistake. Nobody could expect it to end any way but badly,beet farming.You ran off and farmed beetsfor a while.
There was no way she’d ever be able to look back and say that she’d expected it to end if she told Teagan she’d stay.
Darcy felt unprepared. Undersupplied. Untrained. She’d come to doubt whether her long string of temporary jobs, places, and relationships would ever lead to real ones, no matter how much she wanted them.
She rubbed her chest, where her heart was pounding like she’d just run a mile. She wished she wasn’t terrified. She wished she didn’t have to think about it. In any of the scenarios she’d ever daydreamed about a life with Teagan, it was always later. After she’d finished her degree, after hewas sober, after he’d quit his job, after she’d found hers and she was standing, confident, on her own two feet—when somehow, implausibly, they found their way back together.
He had to know there were tangible risks if they did this now. Darcy might be terrible at her job. Darcy could get fired. Teagan didn’t seem to be very good at his job, soTeagancould get fired. Darcy might always hate New York. Teagan could relapse.
But Darcy knew her own resilience, and she knew that she could slog through any of those disasters. Relapse was part of recovery, right? And if Teagan did relapse, which seemed like a thing that could really happen, Darcy could imagine herself driving him back to rehab (a better one, this time), picking him up a month later, cheering him on through all of it. She didn’t worry about how to keep loving him, even if it got a lot harder to do that than it had been so far.
The real thing she had to worry about, the one risk she didn’t know how to manage, was whether he’d keep loving her. Everything else fell apart if he didn’t. Out of everything he might promise her, how could he promise her that?
That was the question that kept her pacing like the poor jaguar. What would Teagan do when it didn’t get any easier to be with her? Could she really expect that from him on top of everything else he was already struggling with?
Darcy reached an area that was lit as bright as midday due to all the rented floodlights. Sucked to be a crepuscular species here tonight: the nearby flock of flamingos was probably going to get jet lag. A cheerfully painted sign announced that she’d reached the enclosure for the Asian small-clawed otter.
There was a crowd around a couple of zoo staffers, the guests squealing and whispering in the way people babbled at all infant mammals. Irritation rising, Darcy went up onher tiptoes to see over the crowd, anticipating some further outrage to the name of conservation biology.
Darcy gasped when she saw what was happening.
Motherfuckers.
The zoo staffers were passing around baby otters like they were canapés, reciting a robotic compilation of otter factoids under their breath as the partygoers ignored them in favor of fondling the little balls of brown fur. No reintroduction program at work here: if they were habituating the babies to this much human handling, they were never getting out of otter jail.
A short, skinny man in a loud suit was jiggling an otter in the crook of his elbow, mugging for his wife’s flash photography. Another woman in an elaborately ruched red satin cocktail dress was trying to jam an anchovy into the protesting mouth of a second juvenile.
Darcy felt her hands curling into fists. She resisted the urge to wade in and snatch the otters away from the zookeepers. These were definitely the kind of people who’d call the cops on her if she attempted animal rescue.
She needed to document this. She’d take pictures, find Teagan, and tell him that if he was signing up for years of her paperwork, they were starting with a complaint regarding the Westchester Zoo otter exhibit. He’d know how to get it to the right authority.
“Point number two: we will get the otter exhibit shut down,” Darcy said quietly into her phone. She knew she ought to be thinking about big picture things, like where they’d live, whether Darcy would stay in school, what they’d do if Teagan fell off the wagon, but the whole idea was so big and bright that she couldn’t quite look straight at it.
“Shame on you,” Darcy muttered at the otter handler.Heprobably had the degree she hadn’t been able to secure in more than ten years of trying. He knew better. But he hadn’t even noticed her, so Darcy spun on her heel and walked on, urging the poor otters to hold on a few days longer.
Darcy reached a fork in the path, where one direction led back to the main pavilion and the other to the South American exhibits. She’d walked in a near circle, letting forward momentum substitute for action. There was a small chain partition partially blocking the second route, but she could see a few people drifting around beyond, and she wasn’t done thinking. This area hadn’t been lit for the evening event, and Darcy soon found herself mostly in the dark. She would have turned back, but she spotted the cherry-red glow of a lit cigarette in front of a large aviary.
How many animal welfare violations could she spot in one evening? Could she turn this into some kind of experiential learning credit?
She briskly approached the unknown smoker, halting only when close range revealed him to be Nora’s fiancé, Adrian. Darcy scanned the area, but she couldn’t spot the woman herself.
