Page 11 of Darling Beasts

“You do what you want. But if you’re the only one who goes...” He sucked in a breath. “I might not be here when you get back.”

Chapter Six

Gabby

The baby flamingo—flaminglet—from the mantel multiplied overnight, and now a dozen grown flamingos frolicked in my pond. A flock was called aflamboyance, which might’ve been fun if they were in someone else’s yard. But alas. My clean streak had ended. It was my nineteenth flare.

On account of Mom’s unexpected death, the eagle was pretty ignorable, a secret between me and Diane. Ditto the pair of ocelot kittens curled up on my pillow six months later. But when the mongoose hit the book bag, Diane leapt into action. Over the course of two weeks, she took me to see a bizarre cast of characters, including her personal internist, a paranormal doctor, a pet psychic, and several vets. One doctor locked me in a room with a tabby cat and told me to jot down its innermost thoughts. I guessed he was hungry, but that was as far as I got.

At first, I didn’t mind. It was nice to have something to focus on other than Mom. In the year following her death, Talia transferred schools and moved home. Dad grew increasingly distant and short-tempered, his demeanor not enhanced by Ozzie’s new hobby of casual fire experimentation. Meanwhile, I wandered around half-dazed, worried I wasn’t feeling the right things.

I was seven and a half when Mom was diagnosed with thyroid cancer, nine when she moved to the Ranch and Dad hiredDiane. Mom was supposed to be in California temporarily, to recuperate, and work on her art, but one year turned into two, and soon the arrangement became the accepted state of things. Honestly, I didn’t feel too awful about it. Mom treated Talia like a best friend, but regarded Ozzie and me with a detached curiosity, as though we were somebody else’s pet she’d been assigned to watch, usually while accompanied by an assistant or housecleaner or some other person who hung around for three months and disappeared.

When Mom died, I hadn’t seen her in many months. It would have been many more until I’d see her again, and because of that, I wasn’t as sad as I knew I should be. A dead mom was canonically Very Tragic, and I kept waiting to experience something deeper. The animals gave me a new reason to feel ashamed.

“We’ll solve this,” Diane vowed. “If I have to go to the ends of the earth.”

Finally, after weeks of interviews and blood tests and consultations, Diane’s internist called us into his office and delivered the news. I had Portum Bestiae Syndrome, a condition that resulted in the manifestation of live animals.

“Exactly what I thought!” Diane said, and this was news to me. Apparently, she’d read about it online.

“So, I’m a port for beasts?” I said, my voice trembling. “That’s my disease?” The doctor explained that technically it was a syndrome not a disease because it involved a group of symptoms with no clear cause or treatment path, which I didn’t find helpful at all. Mostly I wanted to know whether I was going to die.

“I guess it depends what animal shows up,” the doctor said, then proceeded to briefly laugh his head off.

The prevailing theory—to the extent there was one—linked PBS to weather disturbances. A storm hit a part of the globe, and an animal from that region appeared somewhere else,alongside a PBSer. The ocelot kittens could be tied to flooding in Mexico. The mongoose arrived during India’s monsoon season. But what was a “weather disturbance” in this day and age, I wondered? Wasn’t some part of the planet always burning or flooding? The real question was, why was it happening to me, and how could I stop it?

“I’m sorry. I have no idea,” the doctor said as he looped his Snoopy tie through his fingers. “I’d never heard of PBS until Diane brought it up. It seems the medical community hasn’t quite gotten its arms around it yet.” There were only about one hundred documented cases worldwide, and no known cures. It was a treat-the-symptoms kind of situation, and I’d been treating the symptoms ever since.

***

“What if I kept them?” I said to Diane, about the flamingos, over the phone.

“You are not keeping anything,” she said, firmly. “That never ends well. Your good intentions always spiral out of control.”

“Hey!”

“Plus, I doubt they’d survive the winter. You wouldn’t want anything bad to happen to them,” she said ominously. I silently fumed.

Usually Diane acted like my care for the animals was a bad trait.You’re the only person in the world who keeps worrying about a problem after it’s gone, she liked to tease, because I checked on my vanquished animals from time to time. Maybe this meant I coddled my symptoms, but they were living creatures, so what else was I supposed to do? I no longer trusted most governmental agencies, not after what happened with the Tasmanian devil, and rescue organizations were almost impossible to vet (lol).

“What’s the plan?” Diane pressed. “Have you tried googling ‘flamingo rescue New York’?”

“Yes, Diane,” I said, sighing, rolling my eyes. Unfortunately, the only results were news stories about a flamingo found in the Hamptons and several warnings not to dye pigeons pink. When I expanded the parameters to include the entire Eastern Seaboard, the few operations I unlocked looked very fly-by-night, so to speak. Petting zoos. Crusty guys with inflatable pools in their backyards.

“I’ll help you search,” Diane said. “Do you know what to feed them in the meantime?”

“Flamingos eat shrimp.Obviously. It’s why they’re pink. Get it together, Diane!”

She chuckled. “Just checking. Don’t want another jerboa incident.”

“We can drop the jerboa thing.” Jerboas—my most recent flare—subsisted on a diet of windblown seeds, which explained why Diane walked in on me standing over three tiny rodents, holding a hairdryer and bag of quinoa. She laughed until she cried. “Oh, Diane,” I moaned, rubbing my face, turning away from the pond. “I’m so sick of this shit. It’s been eleven years. Why hasn’t science made any progress?”

“Progressisbeing made,” she said. “If you bothered to visit the message boards, you’d be aware of this.”

“Thanks for the tip,” I grumbled. Diane understood perfectly well that I found the online PBS support group neither helpful nor supportive. Did I really need to know that one guy ported aGorilla gorilla gorilla—a critically endangered subspecies of theGorilla gorilla—and ended up with two broken arms? No, I did not. The man was lucky he hadn’t been torn to shreds, and I saw no reason to torture myself with worst-case scenarios.

“Dr. dos Santos has some interesting research underway,” Diane said. “You might consider him a charlatan, but he’s the world’s foremost expert on your condition.”