That night, I toss and turn and dream of things that make me break out in a cold sweat: Kai’s impermeable scowl. Phil snatching the Dr. Kimber bobblehead off my desk and flinging it into the trash. Trudy chasing me around Nona’s backyard, peppering me with questions about Nick and my impending spinsterhood as the basset hound from her sweatshirt leaps off the polyester blend and lunges at me. I know they’re ridiculous dreams—who ever heard of an aggressive basset hound?—but they rattle me enough to have me out of bed by five a.m. and inside Ape House by six, my hair still wet from a hasty shower.
I’m not on breakfast prep duty today, but I head to the kitchen anyway, where I fill paper cups with biscuits and raisins for the gorillas’ morning snack. For safety, I need to wait for another keeper’s arrival before moving the troop to their daytime exhibit, so I carry the cups to their sleeping quarters. I sit cross-legged in front of the mesh barrier that separates me from the gorillas and tug a surgical mask over my face to protect them from germs. The troop is still asleep, so I set their snack aside and fish a sketchpad from my backpack.
When I dated Nick, I rarely arrived at the zoo before sunrise. Instead, we’d sip coffee in bed while he reviewed his daily lineup of procedures and I brainstormed activities for gorilla enrichment. We’d drive to work together, and he’d drop me off at Ape House with a kiss before heading to the animal health center. I thought we’d spend the rest of our lives like that, climbing the career ladder as a team. I thought we were happy.
I was wrong. Just after our second anniversary, Nick’s younger sister had a baby. On the drive home from meeting the little tyke, a red-faced bundle of joy whose screams made my teeth clench, Nick reached across the passenger seat and took my hand.
“I think I want kids,” he said, his tone perfectly casual. Like he’d said, I think I want tacos or I think we’re out of detergent.
I’d been thinking the opposite—that I was elated to return to his quiet townhome, where we could have sex and send emails without a tiny human disrupting us. I’d been honest from our first date that I didn’t want kids, and maybe not even marriage. That I’d witnessed how children could hinder a woman’s career, and I wasn’t about to have a kid and then resent her so much that I ship her off to her grandmother’s. And Nick was on the same page, until he wasn’t. Until that one-sentence grenade he flung in the car exploded, and suddenly he was talking about engagement rings and ovulation strips and ring sling baby carriers. Until he realized that I wasn’t going to suddenly transform from a workaholic caterpillar into a beautiful butterfly of motherhood, wasn’t going to ooh and aah over tiny baby onesies like Elle.
So when he dumped me and started dating Margo from Guest Relations three weeks later, I needed something to fill my early-morning hours, and something to do with my hands besides scroll through Margo’s Instagram for evidence of their abundantly hashtagged bliss. At Nona’s suggestion, I bought a sketchpad and a charcoal pencil set and have spent the predawn hours of the past four months trying to draw the gorillas. Unfortunately, my artistic ability is about on par with my people skills, and my recent sketch of Mac, the troop’s eight-year-old blackback, looks like a portrait of a chubby dog with oversized pecs.
I flip my sketchbook to a fresh page to start over, and when I look up from my work, I spot Zuri knuckle-walking past her sleeping troopmates toward me.
“Morning, Z,” I greet her as she settles across from me on the other side of the mesh. “Want a snack?”
She scratches her chin in response, and even though I look at her every day, I can’t help but marvel at the pronounced ridge of bone that juts out over her remarkably human-looking eyes. A thin blaze of copper fur stretches from her brow ridge to the top of her head, as if someone ran a paintbrush over her with an elaborate flourish, and the slight upward curve of her lips makes her look perpetually amused.
“Touch.” I ball my hand into a fist and place it on the mesh. When Zuri places her dinner-plate-sized hand against mine, I pass a biscuit square through the netting.
“Smart girl!” I cheer. “Now, arm.” I press my other fist to the mesh, and she leans one thick arm into my touch in exchange for another treat.
Using biscuits and handfuls of raisins as enticement, I ask Zuri to show me everything from her chest to the inside of her mouth so that I can note any physical changes, from a patch of dry skin to an infected tooth. Western lowland gorillas in captivity can live into their fifties, and at thirty-one years old, Zuri is in excellent health. As I conduct her daily health check, the familiar routine loosens the knot of anxiety in my belly. When I’m working, whether I’m interacting with the gorillas or traipsing around Ape House with a bucket and a mop, I don’t have the mental bandwidth to worry about my scuffle with Kai Bridges or contemplate the fact that Nick replaced me in no time at all. I can concentrate solely on the task in front of me, and practicing Zuri’s operant conditioning training gives my mind a break from the inconvenient stressors of my personal life.
After Zuri clambers off to fluff up the hay in her night nest, I return to my sketchbook. Mac’s still asleep, which makes it tough to work on his portrait, so I focus on perfecting the unruly bit of fur that sticks up from the back of his head. But I’ve barely touched my charcoal pencil to the paper when my phone vibrates, and I grab it out of my satchel to find a text from Elle.
Drinks at Liberty Tavern later no matter what happens at your meeting. You got this, Lucy! And by drinks, I mean you guys can get margs while I cry into my sparkling water.
I fire back a thumbs-up, but the calm that came over me during Zuri’s training session dissipates instantly. I’m grateful for Elle’s support, but I don’t think she and Sam realize how devastated I’ll be if Phil fires me. They love their jobs, too, but if Elle got laid off or Sam moved to a corporate gig, they’d adapt just fine. Unlike me, they have thriving social lives and actual hobbies that don’t involve dreadful attempts to doodle primates at six a.m. So when Elle says I’ve got this, no matter what, I know she’s wrong: my keeper job is everything to me, and without it, I’ll be lost.
After all, while Sam was buying her luxury townhome and Elle and Nadeem were deciding to start a family, I was knee-deep in hay in Ape House, poring over journal articles and research data and Excel spreadsheets until my eyes ached. Sam has her five-thousand-hits-per-day blog and impressive investment portfolio, and Elle has her doting husband and growing belly, and Nona has a flush retirement account and a seemingly endless ability to forgive Karina for her sins.
I have Zuri. I’ve got bonobos and Suma the orangutan and a perfect work attendance record, and that’s all I ever wanted.
But if I lose that, I’ll have nothing.