“I’m old.”
“Well, who isn’t?” She let out a laugh that reminded him of Marjorie. She drank her second toddy, her cheeks flushed.
“You still ride a Harley?”
“Yeah, but I was thinking if I move down here, it seems like a recipe for death. All these winds and wet roads.”
“So there’s no way to learn more about runaways from Brightwood?”
“I didn’t say that. Let me do some digging.”
Amanda was standing by a viewing window outside the polar bear habitat. From here, visitors could look through the smeary glass—the staff tried to keep it clean, but kids were always touching it—into an underground den. The den had been made of concrete, painted white to imitate snow.
Molly knew it was not snow. When real snow came, Molly raced and ran like a frantic child. Visitors thought it was cute, but Amanda could see the desperation in the bear. In the real snow, Molly was looking for her mother. She tunneled under it, searching for the secret dens bears made.
She watched Molly now. It was a rainy spring day, and a few visitors walked under big umbrellas. The zoo had regulars—lost souls like her. Amanda watched them drift past.
Molly was looking at her.
The giant bear had crawled down into the den. She was crouched inside, looking out at her keeper, her massive paws nearly touching theglass. Amanda felt a wave of emotion, and most of it was shame. She often felt complicit in some great wrong, only it was the wrong of life.
“I’m sorry,” she said, lightly, to the bear. She was wearing her bright red zoo jacket, and she knew Molly recognized her. Sean said Molly stared at every blond woman when Amanda was not around, searching for her. But it was like being offered a plastic apple when you’re hungry, Amanda thought. Molly was hungry in her soul.
“How is she?” Sean asked, stepping beside her. He had been cleaning the walkway and held a broom and dustpan in his hand.
“She knows the white concrete is not snow,” Amanda said.
That was a stupid thing to say, and she immediately worried Sean would say something sarcastic. A lot of guys his age would. It was what passed for intimacy for them. But Sean was never sarcastic. He never made fun of her.
“Are there any studies about polar bears and color?” he asked.
“Not that I’ve seen,” Amanda said. “I think if Molly lived in gray concrete, it would be the same to her. We paint it white for us.”
The bear was staring intently at Amanda. Molly completely ignored Sean. That was progress, at least—earlier in her life, Molly had attacked male humans. No one knew why.
“I wish it was colder for her,” Amanda said.
Sean pointed into the artificial den.
“What kind of den is that?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I read that polar bears have different kinds of dens. There are sleeping dens. Then there are the maternity dens.”
Amanda turned to stare at him. He was right. They hadn’t thought of that when constructing the fake den. No wonder Molly seemed to have such mixed feelings about it. Especially the viewing glass. The den the zoo had made was the size of a maternity den. Mother polar bearsdug those deep, and didn’t break open the snow entrance until their babies were several months old. They lived in darkness until then. Snowy, warm, feral darkness.
“Wasn’t she found in a maternity den?” Sean asked.
“Yes,” Amanda said slowly. She was thinking of the stacks of research back at her apartment. She wasn’t good at math, but she was doing her own addition.
“Do you mind if I run home for a minute?” she asked.
Amanda didn’t bother to take off her rain jacket. She went immediately to her desk, and the neat and orderly piles of research on top.
In one stack were reports from Molly’s previous zookeepers and her medical records. In the next stack were research articles about polar bears, many of them unpublished and from obscure sources. The third stack held information about the area where Molly had been found and the polar bears specific to that region.
Amanda went digging through the last stack, with wet hands. She pulled out a sheet titled Anger Bay Research Station. It contained the names of the staff working the station where Molly was found.
