She didn’t care for her son but she didn’t like her daughter more. Her daughter was loud and seemed more confident in herself than she ever felt herself to be. Misplaced, she usually thought. Though these things weren’t why she didn’t like her, she couldn’t put her finger on that. (She’d eventually figure it out but it would be a long time after the day at the zoo.) Her son didn’t share these qualities but he looked a lot like the little boy from Lord of the Rings and that unsettled her.
They were at the zoo, the four of them, and it was too hot. She felt her shirt sticking to her back and she looked over at her husband but he was glowing and comfortable like he always was. They met in college and back then she had to practically pinch herself because he was so conventionally attractive and she always felt leagues below him. That feeling morphed over the years and faded into a resentment that hibernated at times, waking when she was her most tired and frustrated. The other moms made comments about her husband’s looks, the kids’ teachers blushed, things worked out easier for him, and all the while he pretended to have no idea. One time she was asked if she was his assistant and he laughed and she asked why he’d bring his assistant to a grocery store.
The kids were fussy. The daughter, Phoebe, was yelling and waving a stick around like it was a wand, pretending to make her mother disappear. Her brother Connor was two years younger and screaming that they hadn’t seen the wooly mammoths yet. She had given up on telling him there were no mammoths at the zoo. They were in front of the sun bear exhibit. Sun bears are like black bears in almost every way except they are worse at climbing and they had a pale-yellow collar of fur around their necks. She was reading the plaque at the exhibit about how these three bears came from a rescue in Arizona. Apparently they were taken from a home where poachers had been selling exotic animals to circuses and for rugs and trophies. The bears had been named by Mrs. Lewinski’s third grade class: Moses, Clint, and Barry. She felt the sweat dripping down her back. She looked over the plaque and saw her husband. He was talking to a group of tourists, he was smiling and pointing at their map for them as if for some promotional photoshoot the zoo had put on. Then his face changed and he focused on something in between her and him. He looked confused. She realized that she hadn’t heard her kids in a while right as she turned her head a little to follow his gaze.
Connor and Phoebe were in the pit. The little in between area. Whatever it was.
There was a ditch sort of thing dug around the sun bear exhibit. A moat? This, along with a small fence, separated the bears and their area from the humans. It was a deep well, deeper than they were tall, though it was a 10-foot fall at least from the fence. Phoebe was standing and Connor was laying down, both covered in dirt. She thought about how long they had been out of her sight. She thought about what other parents probably thought. She thought about a hundred things. She felt mad, mainly at Phoebe and then at herself. She should be mad at her husband but she didn’t feel it yet. It’s so hard to be mad at someone so symmetrical. She would be later. She moved towards her husband just as some people started to notice. Someone yelled and someone else shushed. She kept her eyes on the kids, they looked disoriented but not scared. They didn’t know exactly where they were.
She and her husband met without words. The crowd of onlookers kept making noise and then shushing each other and she didn’t realize why until right then, when she saw the bears. All three were sprawled on the rocks, basking in the sun, panting. They either hadn’t seen the kids fall or they didn’t care. From where the bears were, they didn’t have a direct line of sight to the kids in the ditch. Her husband tried to yell-whisper to Connor to get up and it seemed to work for a second. He rolled over and put his arm over his eyes and he was smiling, still laying on his back. She did the same whisper-yell to Phoebe, telling her to crouch down. If she could keep her head below the top of the ditch, the bears wouldn’t see her. Phoebe yelled back at her to stop telling her what to do and she felt her stomach clench and her teeth grind together.
When she was giving birth to Phoebe it had been a nightmare delivery. It was one that started too early and then took too long to really get fully dilated and the doctor then said the baby had turned the wrong way and they couldn’t give her the epidural and then they were thinking a caesarian may be needed and then they said no, they’d just need to do it now and the whole thing felt like it took weeks and Connor was the opposite. Connor was right on time and came out practically on the way to the hospital and he latched fine and he only cried during the day and this wasn’t why she liked him more, even though she did.
When Connor was born her husband walked on eggshells for weeks. He called her parents weekly to give them reports. Everyone was nervous she’d react to him as harshly as she had to her. When Phoebe had been born she didn’t want to hold her, couldn’t breastfeed, didn’t even care about the name; he picked the name. But when Connor was born she knew she had to try harder because she remembered the shame of Phoebe. She remembered her mother flying in and talking with her, looking at her like she was some creature that couldn’t be related to her.
They got Phoebe and Connor out of the pit. The zoo keepers cleared the crowd and put a ladder down and scooped them up while tranquilizer guns kept the bears in their sights, even though they slept through the whole ordeal. The whole time she felt like she was watching some bad television show. She watched her husband cry and watched them hug after it all and watched Connor smile and saw all of their emotions and she felt embarrassed but nothing more than that. She thought it felt too easy. Like maybe they should see how else it could’ve gone. Maybe they could’ve been eaten, or maybe they could’ve fought the bears off.
Maybe they could’ve walked up to the bears’ perch and laid down with them. Maybe they would’ve started panting too, the kids, like the bears did in the heat. They would take their clothes off surely. They’d be soaked with sweat. They’d take their clothes off and they’d pant and sniff and grunt and the bears would push them around when they needed to or they’d steal their food but eventually they’d work out a rhythm, they’d need to. They’d figure out how to live together, they didn’t need to like each other for that. Do you see what she’s saying?
And she and her husband would be sad of course. Devastated. They’d wear black and they’d shake the hands of the relatives that would come to visit them to mourn the loss of their two beautiful perfect children. She’d shake her father’s hand and she’d hug her mother who would purse her lips like she knew a secret she was being polite to keep. Before all that though they’d have to leave the zoo. They’d get in their now-too-big car and he’d cry and she’d put her hand on his and they’d turn back to look at the zoo for one last time, at their children’s new home, and one day, weeks later, the zoo would install a new plaque. The new one would start like the old one, explaining the evolutionary relationship of the sun bear to the black bear: cousins once or twice removed on the tree. And then after all that there would be a new paragraph about their two new cohabitants, more removed on the tree of life, plucked from a home in another state, saved from a place they didn’t belong, with people who needed to move on, and found their opportunity. She wondered if Mrs. Lewinski would pick new names or just use the ones her husband picked. ■