Wild Heart (22 page)

"No, of course not, don't be silly. I'm fine." She gave a false laugh and moved away from him, out of reach. At the window, she took hold of the ring on the end of the string that pulled his shade up and down and started to fiddle with it. Where the sun lit up her hair, he could see each strand, glowing reddish gold. He wanted her
so
much. But something had happened. She was untouchable now; she didn't want him to come near her.

He could guess what was wrong. "She told you we .can't do what we did. We can't be together anymore. That's it, isn't it?"

She tossed her head. "She's my aunt, not my mother. She doesn't run my life. I respect her, but I'm a grown woman; I make my own decisions."

He listened to that again, weighing the message and Sydney's voice. It was just words, with nothing behind them. No truth. "What did she say, then?" he asked her. But they were just playing a game now.

Her eyes turned dark, so he knew that whatever the aunt had said, it had hurt her. "What does it matter? Nothing you can't guess. Michael . . ." She dropped the string, but she kept clutching at her hands, squeezing and bending her fingers. "In some ways, she's right. What happened this morning—it probably shouldn't have happened. I wasn't thinking. I lost my head, and I'm sorry. It's my fault."

So, he thought, but his mind stopped and wouldn't go any further. To keep the conversation going, he said, "What is your fault?"

"Everything. I shouldn't have let it happen. It . . ." She couldn't look at him; she looked out the window. "I'm afraid it mustn't happen again."

He leaned against the doorpost, watching her, thinking how words could hurt worse than any physical pain. And wondering how he could ever have thought he could have her. She looked so beautiful in the sunlight in her sky-colored dress, so beautiful that what they had done together began to seem like a dream. She couldn't belong to him. She was Sydney Darrow. She had a pack. Friends. Everybody loved her, and she could go anywhere and do anything because she was free. What was he? Lost. The last man in the world she would choose for a mate.

"Oh, God, Michael, don't look like that." He turned his head so she couldn't see. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." She started to cry. "I don't know what to do. Look at me, tell me what you're thinking." Her hand on his back was light and shy, like a stranger's hand. "Please don't be sad. Oh, Michael, please."

She wanted him to smile and say he was fine, the way Sam did when she kissed him after he fell and scraped his knee.- "But I am sad," Michael said, turning around to look at her. "I love you. We didn't do anything wrong, Sydney. You know that. If you loved me, it wouldn't matter what the aunt said." He stepped away from the door, so she could leave. "Don't tell me not to be sad," he said for the last time. "It doesn't do any good."

She just kept crying. She didn't move.

"Don't you want to go? Or do you want me to go?"

She put her hand on her throat. She tried to speak, but she couldn't, so she shook her head.

"I'll go, then." He made her a little bow—he had seen Lincoln Turnbull do that once—and left her in his room by herself.

* * * * *

All the way to the zoo on the train, Sam drew pictures to try to cheer him up. "This is the lake, and this is our house, and this is my window. This is my face in it. This is your window, and here's you. See?"

Michael smiled and said he liked it. He said he liked the picture of the horse, too, and the train, and he kept smiling the whole time. But he didn't think he was fooling Sam, or Philip either. How did they know? Since he couldn't tell them what had happened, he was trying to pretend that nothing had. But he was pretty sure they knew.

"Look, Michael, it's you. You're laughing."

He looked down at the drawing Sam had laid on his lap, of a round face with black eyes and a big, grinning mouth. The head had black hair and a neck with a spotted tie, like the one he was wearing today, MICHAEL MACNEIL BY SAMUEL ADAIR WINTER, Sam had printed at the bottom.

"Thank you."

"Keep it in your pocket. Fold it up, and when you get sad you can look at it and feel happy."

"Okay." His throat felt tight and thick. He wanted to hug Sam, but he didn't. He had been forgetting that he didn't really belong to this family, but yesterday Sydney and the aunt had reminded him. He wasn't going to forget again.

The zoo was in Lincoln Park. By now he knew what a zoo was, because Sam couldn't keep the secret and told him. At first he had thought it was a joke. "It's a big place where they keep animals so people can come and look at them," Sam said, which didn't sound likely. How could you keep animals? How could they belong to anybody? But as soon as he walked through the high stone and iron gates of the park, he knew from the strong smell of captivity that it was true.

"Let's see the elephants first. Over there, next to the giraffes. Know what a giraffe is, Michael?"

Not really, and when he saw one he couldn't believe his eyes. "Look at its neck," he marveled, letting himself be pulled over to a low metal railing in front of another fence, much higher. What sort of creature was this? "Look at its
eyelashes."

Sam laughed gleefully, leaning against him and clapping
his hands. "Look at his neck! It's so he can eat the leaves on trees. Dad says it's evolution."

Elephants were even stranger than giraffes. They were
huge.
And slow and plodding and kind-eyed, with ivory tusks and hides like rubber. They seemed like fairy-tale characters out of one of Sam's books, not real animals. "Where do they come from?" he asked, watching Philip toss a peanut into their enormous cage.

"These are from Africa," Sam answered, pointing to a sign nailed to the railing. "There's Indian ones over there. Look, it can eat out of my hand." He stretched his arm toward the cage as far as he could, and the long, wrinkled trunk uncurled over his open hand. But at the last second he gave a shriek and jumped back, dropping the peanut on the ground. "Rats." The elephant picked up the peanut with his trunk and stuck it in his small, dainty mouth.

Amazing—Michael couldn't get over it. "How do they get here? Why don't they let them go?"

"They're captured by game hunters and sold to zoos. Why don't they let them go?" Philip laughed. "Because they'd trample things. This one weighs about three tons, and God knows what it eats. Anyway, they couldn't survive on their own. This is Chicago, not the veld."

"Then why don't they leave them alone?"

"Because then we couldn't look at them."

"We could look at pictures," Sam said uncertainly.

"They don't mind being here," Philip told him. "They like it."

"How do you know?" Michael peered at the gigantic animals, trying to read happiness in their gray, unknowable faces.

"Why wouldn't they? All they have to do is eat and sleep."

"Yeah," said Sam, brightening. "They like it here. Come on, let's look at the hippopotamuses."

Hippopotamuses had frog eyes and tiny ears, huge jaws and big flabby tongues, and they were the ugliest creatures Michael had ever seen. One was a baby, only seventy pounds, the sign said. It looked like an enormous puppy, and never left its mother's bristly, thick-skinned side.

Rhinoceroses were just as peculiar, interesting but not quite real. They looked like scaly, overweight unicorns, but beyond that he couldn't make much of a connection with them. Maybe Philip was right and these animals, captured on the other side of the world and put into fenced paddocks and concrete pens so humans could look at them, really did like it here. Who could say? They looked peaceful.

The lions were beautiful, but they wouldn't wake up. "Hey!" yelled Sam, clapping his hands. "You! Hey!" Nothing; the four gorgeous animals lay on their sides, flicking their tails and panting from the heat, too hot to open their eyes.

"Do they like it here, too?" Michael asked Philip, and he shrugged and said, "Sure." But he didn't seem as positive as he had been about the elephants.

The tigers looked bored. Sam couldn't get their attention, either; they wouldn't even glance at him. "They'll eat you if you go near them," he warned, and then told a horrible story about a little girl who had gone too close to the cage and got eaten alive.

"Is that true?"

"It's really true," Sam assured him, and even Philip nodded without smiling. Still, it was hard to believe. They looked like big, lazy cats. Then he saw the leopards.

There were two of them, and after watching them for a few seconds he realized what was wrong. "They've gone insane." Sam and Philip laughed uneasily. "No, look. Because of the cage. They've gone mad." They had worn a deep path in the dirt around all the sides, and they never stopped pacing around and around the small square, with their jaws slack and their whitish eyes crazy. Plod, plod, heads swinging, tails flicking.

"Animals don't go insane." Sam waved his arms. "Hey! Are you crazy?" Without even looking at him, one of the leopards slashed at the bars with its clawed paw and roared.

Sam screamed; everybody around the cage jumped back in shock. Then they felt silly and tried to laugh, and a man next to Philip taunted the leopard in a nervous, nasty voice. The animals ignored him and kept pacing, pacing, staring and pacing.

Michael's heart slowed down gradually; he could feel his rational mind returning, pure instinct starting to recede. This animal wanted his blood. Nothing had stopped it from killing him but the bars on its cage.

"They were probably captured as adults," Philip said as they walked away. "They do better if they're born in captivity."

"Yeah," said Sam. "Then they don't know what they're missing, right, Flip?"

"Right."

Bears next. Michael didn't know the fierce grizzlies, or the blinding white polars, or the small brown Europeans. But he knew the black bears. They hadn't been his friends, exactly, but they hadn't been enemies, either. They were ... neighbors. He had respected them and had kept out of their way, and they had done the same for him. So it was strange to look at them through metal bars and watch them sitting and leaning, lounging and lolling, tame as children, playing begging tricks on the people around their cage. One mother bear sat down and held her feet with her front paws so people would throw peanuts into her lap, like a lady's apron. Another one sucked on his paws while he made a loud humming noise. Sam said he wished he could play with them, and Philip told another horrible story, this one about a lady who had been pulled by her clothes against a bear cage and slowly eaten.

Michael didn't doubt it. They might look it, but he was sure these bears weren't tame. And their clumsy, lumbering walk was deceptive. He had seen them at night, chasing their next meal at that bounding trot that was twice as fast as he could run.

Then again, maybe these dopey, wheedling animals were tame. They embarrassed him. Doing nothing night and day had turned them into fools. People were laughing at them, and they deserved it. They had lost all their dignity.

They saw kangaroos, then anteaters and East African warthogs. Mongooses, wallabies, musk oxen. Then monkeys—-what a revelation they were. They looked like animal-men, and Philip said his father called them the link in the evolutionary chain between humans and beasts. They made Sam laugh and laugh with their silly play and their amazing agility.

Michael felt glad for the silliness and the laughter, because inside something was happening to him. Or something was going to happen. He was waiting for it, not doing anything to stop it, while a sickly dread filled up in him like fear, like slow, killing hunger. He smiled, spoke to Philip and Sam when they spoke to him, but he thought they knew. They knew something, not everything. When they bought food from a vendor and carried it to a table to eat under some trees, he couldn't get it down. It stuck in his throat and almost made him gag.

"What'll we see next? We could go to the reptile house."

Philip made a face. "You go, I'll wait outside."

"Philip's scared of snakes.
I'm
not, and I'm only seven. But he is, and he's a man."

" 'Scared' isn't the word I'd use. I'm averse. I have an aversion to slimy things. Which seems eminently sensible to me."

Michael didn't say anything, didn't give an opinion. Whatever they would see next, they would see. If it was the thing he was most afraid of, that's what it would be.

It was.

smaller carnivora, the sign said. "Meat eaters," Philip explained as they walked down a path toward a group of low buildings and small, fenced pens. Sam remembered the foxes from another visit. "Let's go in here," he said, and even though Michael's blood had begun to throb in his throat, he let Sam pull him through the open door of a squat stone building, where the heavy smell of dumb, blind confinement hung like smoke.

There wasn't even a cage, not one with bars. The foxes lived behind a glass wall in a bright square box, with a log and some dead moss for cover. A long window ran along the length of the back wall.

"There's one, I think." Sam pointed to a ball of dirty gray fur, curled up and partly hidden behind the log. "Is that one? Last time you could see it. It came to the glass and looked at me." He tapped on the glass with his knuckles.

"Don't do that," Michael said, and Sam looked at him with curious eyes.