Why shouldn’t she go to the zoo? Sylvia thinks, defiant. The zoo is one of the reasons she loves this neighborhood, why she’s so glad to be back. There’s no reason to deny herself. Ted asked twice, after all; he needn’t have asked her if he hadn’t wanted her to come. And it was Nicholas’s first visit. She had a right to be here; it was just as much her zoo as it was Ted’s.

At Chalcot Square they’d been close enough to hear the seals barking in their pools on mild summer nights. Windows flung open, savoring their bed; the leaves on the locust trees susurrating in the children’s garden outside their building. They had come to the Regent’s Park Zoo nearly daily after Frieda’s spring birth, dutiful new parents but also notebook-toting gatherers of exotic fact: the exact blue of a condor’s legs. The oak leaf—patterned coat of a Masai giraffe, its eyelashes long as baby fingers. The thrilling roar of lions at feeding time: first a whoofing from the belly as the cats listen for the metallic slide of the keepers’ door. Then the keepers appear, balancing their wheelbarrows, and one lion starts. They all start: an oceanic roar, a calling so deep and loud it enters the lungs and inflates the body’s internal sac, blowing it up like a sausage case. How one’s own chest expands, vibrating, exhilarated, how one is terrified on some deeply atavistic level by the lions’ call. This is what they had always loved most, their unwavering point of gravitation: feeding time in the briny light of the lion house. Today, as on so many days in the past, they stand patiently in a crowd of parents with prams and mittened children, waiting for the doors of the filigreed old building to open precisely at noon, amused meanwhile by a nearby school of Emperor penguins who pop with a mystifying lack of effort onto their island out of falsely blue water, as if projected backward on film.

Nick is snoozing through his maiden voyage to the zoo, offering his parents a conversational gambit on their otherwise silent excursion through the exhibits. They wonder aloud, without direct address except to a concerned Frieda: Should Baby Nick be woken up? His nap is already running long; the lions, they decide, may do the job for them.

The doors are opening, and inside the building the lions have begun their huffing. One of the keepers, dressed in khaki green coveralls and heavy, steel-toed boots, has already appeared and is walking from cage to cage with a small canister of spice, a scent offered to arouse the animals’ curiosity in an environment otherwise dull and uniform in its temptations. The keeper shakes a pile of cinnamon onto the sloping concrete; the dark-maned lion inside raises his head, panting obscenely.