Endangered (5 page)

Believe it or not, those weren't the big guns. She didn't believe in witchcraft, but she knew her audience.

“I am a sorceress, do you know that as well? I have touched you now, and my curse is already running through your blood. If you ever harm a bonobo again, my spirit will come at night and cut off your toes. Then it will feed them to you, one by one.”

The man scrambled to his feet and jumped for his bike.

“Take them, Mom!” I gasped. “Get those bonobos before he's gone.”

But the man heard me and freed a knife he'd lashed to the side of the bike.

Undeterred, my mom stepped closer. “Do you think I'm scared of you because you have that little knife? I —”

But she stopped, because the man swung the knife, not toward her, but toward the two screeching babies in the cage. Mom held up her hands.

“If you don't take your curse off me, witch, I will kill them both right now,” the man said.

“Okay,” Mom said quietly. She mumbled some nonsense words. “I take it off you.”

The man waved the knife at her threateningly. “They are my property, and you cannot take them away. Do you want me to starve, madame? You will call your powerful friends and tell them to turn back. If you try to follow me, I will kill one. If you continue, I will kill the other.”

He got on the bike, the knife pinned precariously between his palm and the handlebars.

Patrice tried to pull me up from the ground as he went inside to get help. But I resisted, and he disappeared through the front door without me.

I sat up on the ground and pointed wildly at the man. “Mom! You have to stop him!”

But she was frozen still. “We cannot be the ones to take them. That is what caused this in the first place. And I believe him that he would kill them if we tried.”

“But, Mom —”

“I already told you to take Otto away. Go inside!” she said, whirling on me furiously. I got to my feet.

The bike was almost all the way down the driveway. The trafficker hadn't had time to put the cover back on the cage, and I would forever remember the image of the two little bonobos in back. They clutched each other as the bike bounced over the dirt road, then finally turned a corner and vanished.

The only one of us to run after the bike was Otto, who dashed forward on all fours. He got only a few yards, when he fumbled and fell in the dirt. He looked back at me in confusion. I expected to see him angry or upset, but his expression was wistful. It said:
Why has my father gone away again?

 

My mom locked herself in her office for an hour. I sat on the floor outside her door, listening as she called the Ministry of Environment, then various other government contacts. With everyone she talked to, she started calmly and then got angry when they couldn't help her; the space from one emotion to the other kept narrowing until eventually she was like, “Hello, is this Monsieur Ngambe?
Mbote
, monsieur, thank you for taking my call. A TRAFFICKER HAS TWO BONOBOS AND YOU IDIOTS WON'T HELP ME!”

She slammed down the phone one last time. There was only an ominous silence from inside her office.

When the door whizzed open, Otto got scared and climbed to the top of my head, gripping me by covering my eyes. I pushed his hands up to my forehead so I could see.

“Sophie,” my mom said quietly, “no one will be able to save those bonobos. Patrice and Clément are off looking for them, but it doesn't look good.”

“I'm sorry, Mom.”

She put her face in her hands. “How could you, Sophie?”

“I'm sorry! I've told you a million times.”

“I've spent years trying to put an end to the market in baby bonobos. Slowly, they stopped appearing in Kinshasa. In one moment, you reestablished it.”

I lifted Otto's hand so it looked like he was waving at my mother. “But she saved me!” I said in a fake bonobo voice.

Instantly I knew it was a mistake. Her face darkened with fury, but she didn't say anything, buried her anger, and held me. Held me like she knew I really needed to be held. She whispered against my ear, because she couldn't hold it in: “Sophie. You know the only way they can get a young bonobo is by killing its family, yes?”

I'd known it but not really known it. I started imagining what horrors Otto had endured: the murder of his mother as he clung to her, having her shriek and bleed all over him as he saw the rest of his family butchered and smoked. And not just that terrible moment: It had been followed by weeks fighting the cord tied around his waist, surviving hundreds of miles of canoe travel down the Congo River to Kinshasa, all the while remembering his mother chopped down.

Otto squirmed out from between us, gasping from my crushing hug, and sat on my mom's head.

I needed her to say it wasn't my fault, even though I knew it was. I took her hand. “I know we're a very lucky family, Mom, that I'm so blessed I get to go to high school abroad and that when I'm here we don't have to worry about having food to eat. That I'm one of the only people in Congo who can decide to give a man sixty dollars that I was going to spend on notebooks.”

But she wasn't going to let me off that easily. “If you were that man, Sophie, with no belongings in the world and no job, what would you have done? His only way to feed his family was to go back into the jungle and kill more bonobos so he could steal two infants so some rich girl would give him five months of income on a whim. So he did it.”

She had to say that. The bonobos meant too much to her not to make that point to me. I told myself that even as my heart broke.

“So would I,” she continued. “If you were starving, I would kill as many bonobos as it took to keep you fed.”

I knew she was upset about the two infants, but she wasn't making me feel any better. I
did
see what I had done wrong. “Don't you realize how guilty I feel already, Mom? It's not like I meant for all of this to happen.”

“Darling, I'm really upset right now. Please, go upstairs with Otto and let me deal with this problem.”

I unwrapped Otto from her head and pressed him to my chest. My fingers played over his ribs and he panted happily.
He felt his first tickle with me
, I thought, somehow pleased within my frustration and sadness. At least something in this horrible world was working right; Otto was getting tickled.

But my mom … I worried that, as much as she tried, she would now always have this feeling of disappointment every time she looked at me.

I slept terribly that night, especially since Otto woke up every hour or so to eat. By morning, evidence of his hunger was piled at the side of the bed: the remains of eight mangoes, two cartons of milk, a knee-high pile of sugarcane husks — the ones that I was able to rescue from Otto's mouth before he wolfed them down whole — and a mound of peanut shells. Though sugarcane gave them a run for their money, peanuts were quickly becoming his favorite food. I'd shell them and then he'd delicately peel them further with his front teeth — he didn't like the papery red coverings.

When the sun came up I went to brush my teeth and returned to find Otto spread-eagled on the bed, asleep. Near daybreak he'd moved on to oranges, and their juice matted the hair around his face as he snored away. I sat beside him and tried to wake him, but all he did was sleepily crawl into my lap, producing occasional citrus burps.

Finally I had him awake, out of bed, and bathed. We lumbered to the front yard, where Patrice was directing the staff as they unloaded metal cages from a truck. Bonobo-sized cages. “What's going on here?” I asked, jostling Otto on one hip. He playfully slapped my cheek and murped.

“The trip to the release site. Four more bonobos are going.”

My mom's most recent success had been to get a forested island set aside as a bonobo preserve. A local tribe served as wardens to keep the bonobos safe from hunters, in return receiving funding for a local school and clinic. The project had been a success, and
she was adding four more bonobos to the original six. Ideally, all the orphans would end up there someday, settling in with their new families. But this latest transfer hadn't been scheduled to happen until after I went back to the States.

“The plane schedule,” Patrice explained when I asked. “We have to fly them in on a charter since there aren't any roads going north. We'd reserved a plane for next month, but for some reason the government's grounding non-commercial flights starting tomorrow, probably to get bribe money. So it has to be today or never.”

“Where's my mom?” I asked.

“She's off with the handlers in the enclosure, getting the bonobos ready for sedation. Want to go say hello to her?”

I wasn't sure how to answer. We hadn't had a fight last night, not really, but I could tell she didn't know where to put her misery over my mistake, and I was scared to find out where things stood today. So I changed the subject. “I assume no one found those two bonobos?” I asked.

He shook his head sadly.

“Is there any way I can help you guys here?”

“You should keep Otto away. We have to tranquilize the adult bonobos to travel, and seeing the dart guns can be upsetting to the infants. Reminds them of the last time they saw their mothers, and they think the same thing is happening all over again.”

So Otto and I played more modified Scrabble while I sneaked glances at the driveway through the window. My mom held and comforted the adult bonobos while they slowly fell asleep. She looked like she did in the photos of her holding me as a child — except, bizarrely, with giant hairy apes in her arms. Once the bonobos were out cold, the men lifted them into the cages and then heaved those into the back of a truck to be transported to the airport. My mom presided watchfully over the whole process, barking out reprimands whenever the men banged the cages. Once
the bonobos were secured in the truck, it hit me: They had to fly north, then take the cages by dugout canoe up the Congo River until they reached the release site. And once they got there, they had to introduce the bonobos, make sure they were adjusting, and make their way back. Last time they'd been gone for weeks.

I was scheduled to fly back to Miami in ten days.

It wasn't like I thought my mom would leave without saying good-bye, but just in case, I had to get out there to tell her I was sorry one more time before she left. There was no e-mail or phone access out in the jungle; if for some reason I didn't catch her, I'd have to sit with my guilt until she got back.

I hesitated. She was out front with the sedated bonobos, where Patrice had told me Otto couldn't go. I hadn't been apart from Otto since the day I'd found him. Sitting him down in his favorite chair, I motioned for him to stay still while I backed toward the door. He stared curiously at me for a few seconds, wondering at this new game, then scampered over and wrapped himself around my leg. Humming softly, I set him back on the chair and held out my hand for him to stay. He was soon off the chair and running to me, but before he reached me I ducked through the doorway and, heart breaking, slammed it in his face.

He hit the door audibly and began to cry.

“It's okay, I'll be right back!” I called out, which only made him cry harder.

I stood there, torn by his loud shrieking. He wasn't ready to be apart from me, not even for a minute. The decision was instant: I wouldn't be going outside to talk to my mother. I'd give up on that so Otto wouldn't give up on me.

I reopened the door. Otto was stunned for a minute and then, screeching happily, leaped into my arms. It's like I hadn't existed while the door was closed, and now I'd magically come back to
life. He shivered against me, his murps only gradually quieting into contented gurgles as he calmed down.

“Sophie.”

I turned around and saw my mom at the end of the hallway, framed by the front door to the sanctuary. I rocked Otto and stared at her. “Hi, Mom.”

“I have to leave early for the release,” she said.

“I know. Patrice told me.”

She rubbed her head. “Honey, I'm so sorry. But I know you'll understand this is our only chance for months to do the relocation. I've been preparing a year for this moment, and those four bonobos are at the perfect state to transition. If I let this chance go, I don't know when everything will come together again.” There was so much in her expression: a profound sadness to be leaving me at all during the short summer I would be home, and a principled stance that she shouldn't be too warm to me so that I learned my lesson.

Also, the weight of history. Years ago, my dad patiently begging her to move to Florida with him; he had to go to America for work and to enroll me in a good high school, he'd argued, but she could come with us. Her raging back that she'd founded the only sanctuary in the world devoted to bonobos and couldn't abandon it. She knew it would mean splitting us all up for a few years, but she couldn't give up her life's project.

That was how she put it.

Her life's project.

Their marriage could have survived the years apart, but I guess it couldn't survive what my dad realized in those fights: Family would always come second for her.

And she was choosing bonobos over family again. It made me angry, but I couldn't find the words to tell her.

As if reading my thoughts, she said, “We've had a great two
months. You're flying back next week, anyway. Patrice and Brunelle will make sure you get off to the airport okay.”

I've learned my lesson
, I wanted to tell her.
You don't need to punish me.

“I get it,” I said. “You're doing what you have to do. I'll be fine.”

“How would you feel about flying back to Miami early?”

My mom's proposal caught me off guard. What I felt was:
Absolutely not.
Now it was a matter of making sure she didn't make me go. “You can't be serious, Mom. You'd have to pay for a whole other plane ticket.”

“That's fine, Sophie. I don't mind.”

“It's really that I can't leave Otto, Mom. I know the surrogate mothers are great, but he's bonded to me and it would kill him if I abandoned him.”

She sighed and nodded. “I imagined you'd say that. Remember, you're going to have to leave him soon anyway, so you have to pick one of the surrogate mothers and transition him over. I think he'll be a good fit for Evangeline, and you'll see, he'll be more adaptable than you think. Patrice and the mamas are experienced with the process. If you need it for any reason, your aunt and uncle's number is in the phone book at my desk. And you know your father will be calling to check in all the time, online or through Patrice's cell phone.”

“I know. I'll be fine, don't worry.”

“The plane's waiting. I have to leave now, Sophie.”

“Yes.”

After a long moment she took my hand, gave Otto a warm rub on the head. I held myself to her, felt her warmth. “I'm so sorry, Mom,” I whispered. I was sorry for the two little bonobos and, I guess, obscurely apologizing on my mom's behalf, for her choosing to stay six years ago and breaking us all up.

“I know you are, darling,” she said, stroking me. “Don't worry about that anymore, okay? Shh.”

“Thanks, Mom,” I said. “I love you.” Of course there were a lot of darker feelings I had toward her then, too, but in all my guilt I wanted to be consoled more than be right. We held each other for a while, but not long enough; then she turned around and was gone.

 

That night I was able to fall asleep but woke before dawn, mind looping from Mom to Otto to those two little bonobos in the crate. Once it was light out, I took Otto for our morning walk. He enjoyed being outside so early, because there were more birds on the grass to try to catch. When we headed back, I found Patrice near the enclosure's electrified fence, high on a ladder to wash the solar panels. I left Otto ineptly hunting finches and joined him.

“Hello, Sophie. Hello, Otto!” he called down. Otto murped once in acknowledgment and then returned his concentration to what was important.

“Patrice,” I said, “did my mom sound okay to you when she left?” I'd never opened up to Patrice before, but he and Mama Brunelle were the closest I had to friends here, and I needed to talk to someone.

“Yes, Sophie,” he said, smiling. “Why do you ask?”

“Nothing. She was mad at me about those two bonobos.”

“She has a big heart, that's all. She's going to be fine,” he said.

There was a heaviness to his words that I couldn't quite figure out. “What do you mean, she's going to be fine?” I asked.

He looked surprised. “I … I'm sorry, I thought someone told you, and that's why you were asking.”

“No. What's going on?”

Patrice let out a long breath. “It's nothing to get worried about, it really isn't.”

“Patrice. Tell me.”

“On the way back from dropping your mother and the bonobos at the airport, we were stopped downtown. No one was on the street. There were more fake police. And more UN trucks, even though they didn't seem to be doing anything. It's like we were suddenly back to the early 2000s.”

“You think the fighting is going to come back to Kinshasa?” We had plenty of street crime, but all the actual warring in recent years had been way in the east of the country, a thousand miles away.

“I don't know. Maybe we're all getting worked up.”

But Patrice wasn't the type for paranoia, which made me all the more concerned. “So what do we do?” I asked.

He shrugged his skinny shoulders. “Nothing. Just keep your eyes out.”

“Will my mom be okay?” I asked.

“Yes,” Patrice said, though his voice was distant. “It is safest to be far away from the capital if war comes here.”

“Oh,” I said, relieved … until I realized, of course, that we were the ones in danger.