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They followed the path in an arc past the lynx and the puma, both sleeping in the sun, past the owl, also sleeping, to a geodesic dome, which they entered by walking downhill, as if to sneak beneath it.
Kal opened the door for her. The aviary smelled of moist earth, reminding her of the vast conservatory at Kew Gardens and all the doomed outings she’d taken there with Beatrice.
The pathway inside the building was spongy, quieting the sound of their footfalls. They began to climb straightaway, and Rosemary looked up to see the sky had been replaced with triangles and hexagons. The pitch was steep, winding through lush evergreens to emerge among the treetops, eye to eye with parrots and magpies.
“This is amazing.”
“Yeah, I know. Patricia used to run all over this place, banging into people.”
“How old is Patricia?”
“She’s eight now.”
“Beatrice hated the zoo. The very first time I took her to one, thinking it would be a special treat, she burst into tears. She said the animals were all in prison, and they hadn’t done anything wrong.”
“That’s intense.”
“She was a very intense little girl. Is, actually, I should say. Will ever be.”
“Like you.”
They walked over a duck pond, the birds bobbing up and down on their blanket of water. “She is and she isn’t. Like me. Her school used to phone me two or three times a week. ‘We were reading a book in the classroom, and Beatrice burst into tears. She won’t leave off crying.’ As though they wanted me to make her, somehow, when that was just how she was. It would always turn out they’d been reading a book where someone died, or a granny was sick, or an animal had lost its mother. Or one of her schoolmates had said something mean or insensitive. She felt things deeply.”
“That’s not a bad quality.”
“No, but I have to say it’s inconvenient, from the parenting perspective. She texted me, you know. Finally. That’s why I’ve decided to go. I haven’t seen her since the holidays, and I nearly—”
Died.
But that felt too dramatic. Had Rosemary nearly died, or had she merely been in proximity to death?
Death was always proximate. Everyone died. When you climbed, you accepted the possibility of death. She’d accepted it, or thought she had, but now she wondered if she’d been fooling herself.
Kal was looking at an evergreen with white birds perched on its branches.
“At any rate,” she said, “I’ll go in the morning, assuming I can book a flight.”
They resumed their upward trek.
“So what’s the deal with you and her?” he asked.
“Beatrice?”
He gave her an odd look. “Yeah, Beatrice.”
“She’s angry with me for not being a proper mum.”
“What did you do?”
“I divorced her father when she was sixteen, sold the house she’d grown up in, and left. She moved to New York for university. Her father moved here with her. I’m gallivanting around the world, putting my life at risk, and she’s punishing me by withholding affection and information.”
“I can’t tell if that’s her perspective or yours.”
Rosemary stopped, ostensibly to watch a pair of brightly colored birds fight on a nearby branch, but in fact because she didn’t know the answer to the implied question.
Kal steered her by the elbow to the railing so a family with a baby in a wrap and a five- or six-year-old boy could pass by.
She looked out over the green branches, the birds in the trees, the ducks in their pond, wanting to feel a sense of wonder. Her shoes had rubbed a hot spot onto the high back of both heels. She felt weary in a way that she remembered vividly as the emotional landscape of the last years of her marriage.
