Sara Gruen Read online

  The bonobo pulled his lips back in a smile and nodded quickly.

  “Do you need some oil? Let me check your hands,” said Isabel, reaching for his arm.

  Mbongo obligingly stretched it toward her. Isabel took his hand and ran her fingers over it. Although the lab had humidifiers going all the time in the winter, the air still couldn’t compete with that of the bonobos’ native Congo Basin.

  “That’s what I thought,” she said. She squeezed a glob of Lubriderm onto her palm and massaged it into his long, heavily knuckled hand.

  As one, the bonobos turned to face the hallway.

  “What is it?” Isabel looked from face to face, puzzled.

  VISITOR, signed Bonzi. The rest of the apes remained motionless, their eyes trained on the door.

  “No, not a visitor. The visitors left. The visitors are gone,” said Isabel.

  The apes continued to stare down the hallway. Sam’s hair rose until it stood on end, and a pricking like tiny spiders crept over Isabel’s neck and scalp. She rose and muted the TV.

  Finally she heard it—a muffled rustling.

  Sam pulled his lips back and screamed, “Whah! Whah! Whah!” Bonzi scooped baby Lola under her arm, grabbed a hanging fire hose with the other, and swung onto the lowest of the platforms that jutted from the walls at various heights. Makena joined them, grinning nervously, clinging to the other females.

  The rustling stopped, but all eyes—human and ape—remained on the hallway. After a moment, the rustling was replaced by a muted jiggling.

  Sam’s nostrils flared. He turned to Isabel and signed urgently, VISITOR, SMOKE.

  “No, not a visitor. It’s probably just Celia,” Isabel said, although she couldn’t hide the apprehension in her voice. Celia hadn’t had time to get the coffee and return. Besides, Celia would just come in.

  Sam stood up and swaggered a few bipedal steps.

  The females swung to an even higher perch and backed against the wall. Mbongo and Jelani darted around the corners of the room on all fours.

  Isabel let herself out through the partition that defined the bonobos’ inner sanctum and stopped to check that it was locked behind her. In eight years of daily contact, she’d never seen the bonobos act like this. Their adrenaline was contagious.

  She flicked on the light. The hallway looked as it always did. The noise, whatever it was, had stopped.

  “Celia?” Isabel asked tentatively. There was no answer.

  She walked toward the door that led to the parking lot. When she glanced behind her, Sam galloped silently past the doorway of the group room, a dark and muscled mass.

  Isabel reached for the doorknob and then retracted her hand. She leaned in close to the door, her forehead nearly touching it.

  “Celia? Is that—”

  The explosion blasted the door entirely out of its frame. As it carried her backward, she processed that she and the door were being propelled down the hall by a billowing, rolling wall of fire. She felt lucid and detached, parsing the events as though examining consecutive frames of a video. Since there was no time to react, she recorded.

  When she slammed into the wall, she noted that her skull stopped moving before her brain did. When the door came to a stop against her, trapping her upright, she observed that the left side of her face—the side she’d had pressed against the door—took the brunt of the impact. When her eyes filled with stars and her mouth with blood, she filed these facts away for future reference. She watched helplessly as the fireball whooshed past the door and rolled onward toward the apes. When the door finally tipped forward and released her, she crumpled to the ground. She couldn’t breathe, but she did not appear to be on fire. Her eyes shifted to the empty doorway.

  Shadowy figures in black clothes and balaclavas swarmed in and spread out, strangely, frighteningly silent.

  Crowbars swung and glass flew, but the people didn’t speak. It wasn’t until one of them knelt briefly by her head, with oversized rubber-band lips mouthing the word “Shit!” that she realized she couldn’t hear. And still she couldn’t breathe. She fought to keep her eyes open, fought the crushing weight in her chest.

  Black-and-white static, the roar of a million bees interrupted by the fluttering of her own eyelids. A vision of boots running past her. She lay on her back with her head tilted to the right. She moved her tongue, fat as a sea slug, and pushed one, two, and then three teeth from the corner of her mouth. More static, longer this time. Then blinding light and crushing pain. She was suffocating. Her eyes drifted shut.

  Time passed—how much, she didn’t know—but suddenly she was being yanked around. An acrid latexed finger swept through her mouth, and a bright pinpoint of light illuminated the veined landscape of her inner lids. Her eyes sprung open.

  Faces hovered over her, speaking urgently to each other. She heard them as though through surf. Gloved hands scissored roughly through her T-shirt and bra. Someone suctioned out her nose and mouth and covered them both with a mask.

  “—respiratory distress. No breath sounds on the left.”

  “She has a tracheal shift. Get a line in.”

  “I’m in. Any crepitus?”

  Fingers massaged her chest. Something inside cracked and popped like bubble wrap.

  “Crepitus present.”

  Isabel tried to gasp, but succeeded only in producing a rasping wheeze.

  “You’re going to be okay,” said the voice attached to the hand attached to the oxygen mask. “Do you know where you are?”

  Isabel tried to inhale, and the pain was like a thousand knives. She mewed into the mask.

  A male face appeared above hers: “You’re going to feel something cold on your skin. We have to insert a needle to help you breathe.”

  A freezing swipe of antiseptic, a long needle flashing above her and then down and into her chest. The pain was excruciating, but accompanied by instant relief. Air hissed through the needle and her lung reinflated. She could breathe again. She gasped and sucked so hard the mask inverted against her face. She clawed at it, but the hand holding it stayed firm, and Isabel discovered that even though it flattened against her face, it still delivered oxygen. It stank of PVC, like cheap shower curtains and the type of bath toys she avoided buying for the bonobos because she’d read that they exuded fake estrogens when the material began to break down.

  “Get her on a backboard.”

  Hands maneuvered her sideways, holding her head, then eased her onto her back. A radio sputtered in the background.

  “We have a female, mid- to late twenties, victim of an explosion. Tension pneumothorax—needle decompression performed in the field. Breath sounds present. Facial and oral trauma. Head injury. Altered level of consciousness. Ready to evacuate—ETA seventeen minutes.”

  She let her eyes drift shut and the bees swarmed again. The world was spinning, she was nauseated. When the crisp night air hit her face, her lids snapped open. Each movement of the gurney was amplified as its wheels crunched through the gravel.

  The parking lot was full of flashing lights and sirens. Velcro straps prevented Isabel from turning her head, so instead she turned her gaze. Celia was off to the side, screaming and crying and pleading with firemen to let her past. She was still clutching a cardboard tray of grande caramel macchiatos. When she caught sight of the gurney, the tray and drinks splattered to the ground. The video camera swung from a strap on her wrist.

  “Isabel!” she wailed. “Oh my God! Isabel!” and only then did Isabel have a concept of what had happened to her.

  When the front wheels of the gurney met the back of the vehicle and folded beneath her, Isabel caught a glimpse of a dark shadow at the top of a tree, and then another, and then another, and she bleated into the mask. At least half the bonobos had made it out.

  The ceiling of the ambulance replaced the starry night and her eyes flickered shut. Someone yanked them open, first one, and then the other, and shone a light into them. Against the ambulance interior she saw faces and uniforms and glo
ved hands, bags of intravenous fluid and crisscrossing tubes. Voices boomed and radios hissed and someone was calling her name but she was helpless against the riptide. She tried to stay with them—it seemed the polite thing to do, given that they now knew her name—but she couldn’t. Their voices echoed and swirled as she sank into a chasm that was beyond the bees and darker than black. It was the complete absence of everything.

  3

  John opened his front door and came to an abrupt halt. It was the scent of Pine-Sol that startled him.

  Nine weeks earlier, the death of their cat had pushed his already-teetering wife into an abyss from which she seemed unable to emerge. It was the end of a long progression that had begun more than a year earlier, before they moved from New York City to Philadelphia for John’s job at the Inquirer.

  John had known moving wouldn’t be easy for Amanda. She was still reeling from the near-simultaneous loss of both her book contract and her agent—what was euphemistically termed “an economic downturn” turned into a mudslide that swept away her entire publisher. Her agent was so disenchanted she left the business to start a natural-fiber yarn boutique, leaving Amanda a literary orphan.

  John did his best to infuse Amanda with enthusiasm for Philly—who wouldn’t love its food, its neighborhoods, its architecture?—but she wasn’t swayed. She missed her friends. She missed the city. She even spoke wistfully about their tiny six-story walkup, seeming to forget that it had been infested with mice. John had hoped their new house in Queen Village with a private garden and alley would cheer her up, and it did give her new energy: she was so determined to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat that she immediately holed up with her laptop to finish her second novel. She worked in complete isolation, prompting John to suggest that she volunteer at the animal shelter. He had hoped she would meet some people and make new friends, but the inevitable and alarmingly swift result was that she fell in love with a cat.

  Although named Magnificat, the creature in question was an ancient twenty-three-pound one-eared Maine coon with a permanently crooked tail. He also had a flaking skin rash that left him scaly and bald in places, which might have been bearable except that he also insisted on sleeping between their heads, spreading his considerable heft between their pillows and batting at their heads if they didn’t pet him enough. Amanda didn’t understand why John got so upset about a bit of dander on his pillow, and John didn’t know how to explain that he had fully expected she would adopt something, but that he had assumed it would be a sweet little baby something, not a monstrous beast with a weepy eye whose tongue stuck out perpetually because he had no teeth left to hold it in place. And yet, eight months later, when Magnificat’s kidneys failed and they had to have him put down, John was as shattered as Amanda. They wept over the empty cat crate in the car, clutching each other for a full twenty minutes before John felt composed enough to drive. Back home, Amanda drew the blinds, crawled into bed, and stayed there for three days. It killed John to see her like that: she had no friends within a hundred miles, her writing career was in tatters, her cat was dead, and there was nothing he could do about any of it. His suggestion that they get another cat was met with a look of horrified betrayal. His suggestion that she see a therapist went over even worse, although even John could see that she was clinically depressed.

  She ate barely anything. She couldn’t sleep, although it took her longer and longer to get out of bed in the morning, and when she finally did, she rarely got dressed. She moved from bed to couch, lying under a quilt with her laptop on her knees and the curtains firmly drawn. The only light in the room was the ghostly blue glow of her monitor.

  John hadn’t realized just how much of the housekeeping Amanda had been doing until she stopped. Clean underwear and socks no longer appeared in his drawer. The pile of shirts remained in the corner of the closet until he gathered them and took them to the cleaners. Greasy cobwebs sprouted along the undersides of furniture and reached with filmy fingers to ensnare the baseboards. The hall table all but disappeared under towering piles of bills, catalogs, and credit card offers. John had taken over the kitchen to some degree, but there were always stacks of dirty dishes in the sink, and usually on the counter too. At this point, Amanda’s efforts were limited to spraying lemon Pledge in the center of the powder room and turning the towels around if someone threatened to come over.

  Alas, “someone” was always his parents. Their proximity was something he had failed to factor in when considering their move, an oversight for which he and Amanda were paying dearly.

  For almost a year after they moved, Patricia and Paul Thigpen tried to persuade John and Amanda to join their church. If it had been anybody else, John might have considered it simply because it would force them to meet people, but the idea of his parents being even on the periphery of whatever social circle he and Amanda eventually assembled was unthinkable. The elder Thigpens had apparently given up, but now they inexplicably showed up at noon each Sunday to recount the sermon and wax on about how darling, how adorable, the children in the nursery were. The mournful sighs and static-filled silences made John want to curl into a ball and weep. Amanda tolerated them with an aloof grace (whether resigned or icy, John knew and cared not—he was just grateful, since her own family’s brand of conflict resolution tended toward the throwing of crockery).

  Patricia’s thin-lipped and accusatory glares grew more overt in perfect correlation with the decline of the house. Sunday after Sunday John watched as Patricia shot smoldering blame rays in Amanda’s direction. John knew he should do something to shield his broken wife, but his family dynamic was not such that he could address his mother’s assumption about who was responsible for either the slide toward squalor or the lack of babies without risking an epic maternal sulk, and if the Thigpen males were united on any one front, it was the absolute necessity of Not Upsetting Mother. (John’s brothers, Luke and Matthew, didn’t realize how fortunate they were to live on other continents. Or perhaps they did.)

  Now, with ice in his veins and a hand on the door frame, John sniffed again. In addition to Pine-Sol, he identified scented candles, seared beef, and the lingering odor of pomegranate bath bubbles. He steeled himself, entered the house, and pulled the door shut behind him.

  Amanda was leaning over the coffee table in the living room, arranging shucked oysters on a bed of crushed ice. Two bottles of Perrier-Jouët and crystal flutes sat off to the side, along with a tiny, perfect mound of Osetra caviar in the center of a small piece of their wedding china. Amanda stood barefoot on fresh vacuum tracks, wearing the silk nightgown John had given her for Christmas. It was a hopeful, desperate gift, a clumsy attempt to address her increasing reluctance to get out of bed. As far as John knew, this was the first time she’d worn it. He felt suddenly light-headed. The last time he’d come home to such a scene, she’d just sold The River Wars. Had she found another agent? Had someone bought her second book, Recipe for Disaster?

  “Wow,” he said.

  She swung around, beaming. “I didn’t hear you come in.” She grabbed a bottle and came to him. Her hair, a mass of unruly spirals in a shade he referred to as Botticelli gold and she as Ronald McDonald orange, was arranged in a disheveled knot at the nape of her neck. She was wearing lip gloss. Her toenails were painted an opalescent shade that matched the pink silk. Something glittered on her eyelids.

  “You look amazing,” he said.

  “There’s a beef Wellington in the oven,” she replied, kissing him and handing him the bottle of champagne.

  As John fumbled with the foil, tiny silver flecks drifted down to the carpet. He balled the rest up in his palm and loosened the wire cage. “What’s up?”

  She smiled coyly. “You first. How was the trip?”

  A bolt of joy displaced his apprehension. He tucked the cold bottle under his arm and dug his cell phone from his pocket. “Actually,” he said, fumbling with the touch screen, “it was kind of exciting.…” He held the photograph triumphantly forth. “Ta-dah!”r />
  Amanda squinted. She leaned closer and cocked her head. “What is that?”

  “Hang on,” he said, taking the phone back. He zoomed in on the image of a real live stranger reading The River Wars. “Here.”

  When Amanda realized what she was looking at, she snatched the phone.

  “A sighting in the wild!” John popped the champagne. He watched Amanda with an expectant smile.

  She held the phone with both hands and stared at the screen without a hint of jubilance. John’s smile faded. “Are you okay?”

  She sniffed, wiped the corner of one eye, and nodded. “Yes. Yes, I am,” she said in a tight voice. “Actually, I have something to tell you. Come sit.”

  John followed her to the couch, where she sat with a straight back and clasped hands. His eyes moved nervously from her profile to the spread. There was no mistaking this for anything other than a celebration dinner, yet she appeared to be on the verge of tears. Was she pregnant? Probably not, as there were two glasses set out for the champagne. He tried to ignore the metallic tang of fear that blossomed in the back of his throat, and leaned forward to pour the champagne. He left the glasses on the table and reached for her hand, interlacing their fingers. Her fingertips were cold, her palm moist. She stared at the table’s edge.

  “Honey?” he said. “What’s going on?”

  “I found a job,” she said quietly.

  John winced. He couldn’t help it. He forced his features to relax and breathed deeply, steeling himself. He did not know whether to pretend to be happy about the job or to try to talk her out of it. All she’d ever wanted to do was write novels, and he knew she’d recently completed Recipe for Disaster. Surely this was the worst time to give up. Then again, perhaps a reason to get up in the morning would be a good thing. Contact with the outside world, an opportunity to make new friends, to not be pummeled relentlessly with rejection letters—