By Thursday of the following week, Zuri and Keeva are inseparable. Keeva only accepts a bottle through the mesh if her new surrogate mother sits beside her, and when she gets a surge of energy and crawls off to explore her surroundings, Zuri keeps a close eye and grabs her by the ankle if she ventures too far away. Around midday, we restrict public access to the outdoor Gorilla Villa so that Zuri and Keeva can enjoy it in privacy, and my heart almost explodes out of my chest as I watch them nap together on a hammock in the sun.
“Atta girl, Zuri,” I whisper, scribbling in my logbook as the older gorilla uses a stick to dig honey out of a manmade anthill. Everything she does—fashioning sticks into tools, gathering hay to assemble a night nest, foraging through the grass for leftover bits of food—is a tutorial in Gorilla 101, and Keeva’s a fast learner. Even when Keeva disrupts Zuri’s painting time by grabbing the brush and flinging it across the yard, sending blue paint flying, Zuri only grunts at her as if to say tsk, tsk before retrieving the brush and making sure to hold it high enough that the infant can’t reach.
On Friday, Phil grants me permission to let Tria, her daughter Piper, and Inkesha into Gorilla Villa with the pair, reasoning that giving them access to twenty-six thousand feet of outdoor space might help prevent skirmishes. I’m not too worried about Tria, since I know she’ll focus more on Piper than Keeva, but I hold my breath as Inkesha runs into the Villa and makes a beeline for the baby. It’s unclear if she’s just curious about Keeva or wants to drag her around by her ears, but she doesn’t get more than six feet from the infant before Zuri, launching into mama-bear mode, lets out a warning growl and beats her chest with her fists. It’s a powerful display of strength, and after she struts back and forth in front of Inkesha a few times, the other female shifts into a crouching position and contents herself with bending a slab of cardboard into various shapes. Zuri lets curious, wide-eyed little Piper sit about three feet from Keeva, but she positions herself between the infant and the toddler to ensure no funny business happens.
It’s a hugely successful day, and even though Katie the summer intern breathes down Kai’s neck for most of it, peppering him with questions about everything from his favorite Wild Side episode (He can’t choose! He loves them all!) to his relationship status (“Well, Katie, the show is my one great love”), I don’t pay them much attention. After all, Kai’s business is his own, and if he wants to date someone who practically has the same name as him and was born so late that she’s never seen an episode of Boy Meets World, that’s his prerogative. I’m definitely not jealous, and it definitely doesn’t take me an hour longer than usual to update my spreadsheets because I can’t stop imagining them hiking the Matterhorn together, not a strand of hair out of place between them.
“Hey, Lucy,” Lottie says, poking her head into my office as I map out a plan for next week, when we’ll let the rest of the troop—minus silverback Ozzie—mingle with Zuri, Keeva, and the girls. “You have visitors.”
I set my pencil down, confused. I don’t get visitors at work. Jack’s fiancé appears occasionally to drop off Starbucks for him and say hi to Ozzie, and Phil’s kids pop in once a month or so to decorate his office with adorably messy paintings and macaroni art, but nobody stops by for me.
“Who is it?” I ask Lottie. But she’s already gone, so I close my logbook with a sigh and make my way out of the office.
As soon as I round the corner toward the indoor gorilla exhibit, where Ozzie, Tomo, Risa, and Mac are taking their afternoon nap, I spot Mia waiting by the glass with three Pyrex containers in her arms.
“Lucy!” she says, hopping with excitement. She’s sporting the hat Kai signed for her, and it bobs up and down on her head as she moves.
“Hey, Mia. What are you doing here?”
She grins. “Mom had the day off, so we decided to come to the zoo. And I brought you a surprise.” She hoists the Pyrex into my arms, and I’m pretty sure they weigh more than Keeva. “It’s fairy bread. A whole week’s supply!”
“Oh. Wow,” I say, my arms almost buckling under the weight. All those early-morning harmonica rehearsals must be giving my half sister some serious upper arm strength.
The hopeful optimism that crosses Mia’s face as she waits for my reaction softens my heart, and I remind myself it’s not her fault she gets a camping-themed birthday and I got a lifetime supply of crippling insecurity. “This is awesome,” I say, trying on a smile so wide, it makes my cheeks hurt. “How’d you know I had a craving?”
“Mom!” Mia calls. “Mom, she loves it!”
I glance behind her to see Karina, dressed in a blue jersey wrap top and rouge trousers she probably got at Ann Taylor and carrying what I can only assume is a Tupperware container of more fairy bread. I suck in my breath, forcing myself to think of three horrific animal facts to stay calm. The zoo is my Karina-free zone, the one place in the world where I can go about my days without her asking me to meet for coffee or ice cream or a seaweed-wrap mani-pedi. Where there’s not a walking, talking, Girl-Scout-vest-wearing reminder that she’s perfectly capable of being a responsible mom; she just didn’t care enough to be one for me.
“Luce, hi!” Karina says, waving, and I scramble for more facts before my brain launches into panic mode. Female dragonflies fake their own deaths to ward off unwanted sexual advances. Nine-banded armadillos carry leprosy. I’m tempted to make like a dragonfly and fake my own death as Karina catches up to Mia.
“I hope you don’t mind us stopping by,” my mother says, giving me a bashful smile. “We planned to leave your food with the security guard, but he let us in the back gate. We haven’t seen you at Nona’s in weeks, so we figured you must be incredibly busy.”
“Super busy,” I agree. I’ve also been taking special care to avoid them, but I keep that to myself.
“Mia thought you’d like some fairy bread, and I baked sugar cookies,” Karina continues. “I know you always liked those.”
When I lived with her in LA, when a guilty pleasure was just the occasional dessert we ate for dinner and not a primetime show, I thought my mother baked the tastiest sugar cookies in the world. She could never get the timing right, so we always ended up with black-bottomed cookies that tasted faintly of ash, but Karina only made them when she was in a good mood. She’d put on an Amy Grant CD and dance around the kitchen, and I’d crack the eggs and try not to spill flour everywhere. I still can’t appreciate a sugar cookie unless it’s burnt on the bottom.
“I left them in the oven a little too long,” she says, scrunching her nose as she hands me the Tupperware.
“Oh. Um, thanks. Thank you.” There’s so much I want to say to her—A batch of cookies doesn’t make up for ditching me; I can’t bring myself to attend Mia’s birthday party; do you remember how we used to watch Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and eat Pop-Tarts in our pajamas?—but they’re the mopey, self-pitying thoughts of my inner child, and I shove them back down where they belong.
“I better get back to work,” I say. “Thanks for the fairy bread, Mia.”
“Oh,” Karina says. “Well, we were going to grab lunch at the Congo River food court, and we thought maybe—”
Jack’s voice crackles over the walkie-talkie, asking someone to please bring a squeegee to the colobus monkey exhibit, stat. Even though it’s a message meant for an intern, I tap my radio like I have to respond.
“Sorry, gotta take care of that. But thanks again.”
I hurry back to my office, refusing to feel guilty about Mia and Karina’s matching crestfallen looks. They clearly hoped this would turn into a special mother-daughter hangout, but I don’t have time to skip off for a long lunch. And even if I did, I’d rather eat dirt. I drop the containers of food on my desk and head to check on Keeva and Zuri. But when I step into the hallway, Karina’s voice floats toward me from around the corner.
“. . . big fan of your work,” she’s saying, and I wonder if she and Mia ran into Ellie the Elephant, the zoo’s ambassador mascot. I spent a summer during high school making minimum wage to wander around the zoo in the heavy fur suit, and I passed out twice during a particularly scorching week in July.
“That’s so kind. Thank you,” Kai says back to her, and my heart sinks all the way down to my toes.
Great. Now Kai and Karina can bond over their shared success and mutual respect for Diane Lane’s glossy hair. Fire burns in my belly, and I wish Karina had never set foot in Ape House.
“I’m actually in the business, too,” my mother continues, like she and Kai have anything in common. Like her soapy, melodramatic series ever had a shot in hell of winning a Peabody. Kai might drive me insane with his over-the-top on-screen energy and refusal to stop saying “Wowza!”—but at least Wild Side teaches people something about the world around them. “Or I was, anyway. I played Kitty Conway on Guilty Pleasures.”
Her tone is eager, almost desperate, like a high school QB who won’t shut up about his championship passing stats thirty years after the fact, and despite my best efforts, I feel a pang of something like pity for her. But it evaporates when I realize what’s coming next: Kai, seizing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, is going to feed right into her need for attention. He’s going to score one for Aunt Susan by asking who the Malibu Fish Hook Killer was, and he’s going to make Karina feel less like a washed-up star in the process. He won’t mean to, but it’ll feel like a betrayal anyway, and I turn on my heel to head back to my office.
Because I can’t bear to listen.
But his answer stops me in my tracks.
“I’m sorry, I’ve never heard of that,” Kai says, his tone full of confusion. Like he has no idea what the hell she’s talking about. “Guilty Pressures, was it?”
I’m huddled just around the corner, so I can’t see Karina’s face, but I imagine a pink blush creeping over her cheeks. This never happens to her. As soon as she mentions her show, people’s eyes light up like she was on Seinfeld.
“Pleasures,” Karina says, her voice a tiny bit louder than necessary. “Guilty Pleasures.”
“No, I’m sorry, I must have missed that one.” Kai’s voice floats around the corner. “Wait, was it the sitcom about the skinny mum who was always dieting and arguing with her bumbling husband? Did it have a canned laugh track?”
I cover my mouth to prevent a gasp from escaping. There’s nothing Karina hates more than laugh tracks, except maybe varicose veins, and she’d probably rather be asked if Guilty Pleasures was a porno.
“No,” she says, quieter this time. “It was a drama about PIs in Malibu. Maybe you’re familiar with the theme song?” She hums a few bars, and Kai must shake his head, because she stops suddenly. “Well, maybe you’ve heard of the Malibu Fish Hook Killer? The show was canceled before we could reveal the murderer, but turns out—”
“No, I’m sorry,” Kai says, cutting her off before she can reveal the answer to the question he’s spent decades asking. “We didn’t get cable on Mount Karisimbi, and to be honest, I was more into cartoons anyway.”
“Right. Of course. Mia, time to go, sweetheart!” Karina calls, evidently embarrassed enough to haul her spinning-toned ass out of Ape House. “Great to meet you, Kai.”
“And you as well, Katrina,” his voice booms back to her. “I’ll keep my eyes peeled for Guilty Pressures next time I’m browsing Netflix.”
I hot trot it back to my office, my heart pounding. I’m so shocked by Kai’s display of loyalty that my knees tremble, something that hasn’t happened since he took my face in his hands and kissed me. He had no reason to pretend he wasn’t a Guilty Pleasures fan, other than to deny Karina the satisfaction. He tanked his chances of ever solving the Malibu murders, and he did it for me, without even knowing I was there to witness it.
I just can’t figure out why. He owes me nothing, especially after my blowup in the nursery. You were wrong, you know, he told me that first day after the Critter Chat, when he wore the hardened scowl of a man who just stepped on a Lego. I wasn’t wrong about Dr. Kimber’s nickname, but maybe I was for how harshly I judged Kai. For assuming he was just another condescending asshole. For thinking I could kiss him and somehow forget about it, or for deeming him incapable of having my back. Maybe I was wrong for wanting to act like the kiss never happened; not for wanting to put work above a hookup, but for denying the possibility that Kai was worth the risk.
Before I know it, I’ve polished off a half dozen of Karina’s lightly burnt sugar cookies, but I’m still not satiated. Because as much as I want to deny it, a hunger gnaws at my core, and it’s got nothing to do with baked goods and everything to do with the hazel eyes and rock-solid biceps of the one and only Kai Bridges.