“At least one of us is incognito.” I lower the dark glasses down my nose and scan his less-than-subtle outfit.
When Torrin looks at himself, he shakes his head. “Just when I think I’ve got it all planned out.”
I smile at him and shove open the door. After closing it, I check my reflection in the window to make sure the scarf’s still covering the scar.
“Ready?” He comes around the front bumper and waits for me.
I answer him by strolling up beside him. “Do you always have to wear this when you’re out in public?”
I’ve been to church before, and mass with Torrin a few times, but I don’t know the rules. After do unto others and thou shalt not murder, that’s where my church knowledge runs out.
Torrin scans the parking lot as we move through it. Nothing but strollers and frazzled-looking parents. “No, I just think it’s better if I do.”
I nod. “To help me remember what you are now?”
Torrin’s arm stops me when I’m about to step out in front of a minivan. It’s been a decade since I’ve had to use a crosswalk.
“No,” he says, dropping his arm. “To help remind myself.”
I don’t know what to say next, so I just don’t say anything. Seems like a better option than asking him to explain. Because I think I know what he means. When he glances at me once we reach the ticket booth, I think he knows I understand what he means too.
He holds up two fingers at the ticket booth and pays for our admission. He pays with a card.
Money. Credit cards. Checks. I have none. I’ve never written a check. I’ve never used a credit card. I’ve never paid a bill.
I feel like I fell asleep as a child and woke up as an adult. The whole world has moved on while I’m still clutching my blanket.
“Thank you,” I say, about to tell him I’ll pay him back, but I can’t.
Unless I ask my parents for money, I can’t pay him back, and I don’t want to ask them. I don’t have a job that earns a paycheck and don’t know what I’d be qualified for anymore. What kind of person’s going to hire someone who can list their last ten years of experience as making bologna sandwiches and pouring milk while chained to a metal pipe?
“Thank you.” He nudges me as he passes through the gates. “I haven’t been to the zoo since the last time we skipped class the first week of school.”
That’s another good memory. A painful one now. “Why not?”
Torrin takes a map from an employee handing them out and stops. He’s looking at me in that same way again. “Because it wouldn’t have been the same without you.”
I think I’m looking at him the same way. The sun’s out, and it’s warming my back, and there are no reporters or hospital staff or family to make me feel like an anomaly. There’s no past and no future when he looks at me like that—there’s only right now.
The map drops to his side, and he steps closer to me. His hand is reaching for me, and just when I feel his thumb brush the inside of my elbow, an old woman waddles up to us.
“Bless you, Father.” She reaches for the hand he’s stretching out to me and gives it a gentle squeeze. “God bless you for all you do.”
She shoots me a quick smile before going on with her business, but our moment is carried off with her down toward the Arctic Adventure.
Torrin clears his throat and steps back. “What do you want to see first?” He slides his finger underneath his collar like it’s too tight and holds up the map for me.
I don’t need to look. I know what I want to see first. “The elephants.”
“The elephants.” Torrin tries to groan, but it’s pathetic. Just like it always was when he’d try to grumble over my excitement at the elephants. “Why always the elephants? Why not the lions? Or the gorillas? Or the adorable sea otters?”
“Because,” I answer him.
He follows me with another grumble. “They eat. They poop. They trudge. What’s so exciting about that?”
“Try looking in their eyes this time, Mr. Lion Lover. If you do, you’ll see that there’s a soul in there. Not just an animal that’s all instinct. Not one who only eats, poops, and trudges.”
He makes a face like he’s considering that, but he shakes his head a whole five seconds later. “Nope. Lions are cooler.”
I roll my eyes and shove him as we wander down the path to the elephants. It’s a beautiful day at the zoo, so it’s a busy day at the zoo. People are passing by me and in front of me and around me, and I’m trying my hardest not to think about it.
I tell myself that I’ve got to get used to this again. People. Places. Living in the suburbs of one of the largest cities in the nation. By the time we round the zebra enclosure, I think I’m doing a pretty good job of it. I might be the only person meandering around the zoo with sweaty palms from fighting off an anxiety attack, but at least I’m not succumbing to it.
I’ve got a headache too. A bad one. I think it’s from the sunshine. I haven’t been in direct sunlight in a decade, and it’s making my brain feel like it’s about to explode through my temples. Even the sun hurts me now—just like everything else good from my life before.
Torrin stays beside me, matching my unhurried pace, looking happy. I wonder if I look the same—because I feel happy. At least what I think happy feels like. Or what I can expect it to feel like after everything.
When we reach the elephant pen, a keeper is standing at the fence, talking to a group of people.
“Elephants.” I hear the excitement in my voice as I smile at Torrin.
He frowns, but it’s another pathetic attempt. “Elephants.”
I hurry around the edge of the crowd and try to wedge in closer so I can hear what the keeper’s saying. Torrin shadows my every step.
“Some of you might have heard of the practice of chaining an elephant from the time it’s a baby. Like most everything relating to the training and exhibiting of animals, it’s a controversial topic.” The keeper leans down to pick up something from the ground. I can’t see what it is. “I’m not going to talk about the controversy because it gets real ugly, real fast. We’re talking the-lions-are-loose bloodbath ugly.”
A soft chuckle rolls through the crowd gathered around.
“I’m just going to talk about the practice of baby elephant chaining and the reasons it’s done. Simply put, it’s done because it works. It’s the only way a person my size can control something that size.” The keeper’s arm swings behind him toward the elephants.
When I see what’s in his hand, I feel like someone’s just stabbed me in the stomach.
“One of these chains we use on a baby, and one we use on big Brutus out there. Which one of these chains do you think goes on a baby elephant? This thick heavy one or this one that looks like paperclips strung together in comparison?” The keeper bounces the two chains in his hands.
The way they rattle makes me want to cover my ears. The way they move in his hands, almost like two iron snakes slithering, makes me want to close my eyes. I feel Torrin’s hand on my shoulder, gently pulling me back, but I don’t move.
The keeper points at a kid who shouts out the paperclip chain. Another kid says the same.
The keeper shakes his head at both and lifts the heavy chain. “This goes on the baby elephant.” His hands switch, and the paperclip chain goes high. “This one’s for big Brutus. You wanna know why?”
The crowd is looking around at each other with surprise. The kids are gaping at him.
“You see, a baby elephant’s going to fight the chain like crazy the first time he’s tied to it. He’s going to cry and fight and make everyone and anyone think he’s being attacked by a herd of hyenas. Baby elephant’s going to fight. She’s going to fight hard.”
The keeper shakes the heavy chain again, and the knife-slashing sensation travels higher. Now it’s stabbing into the hollow of my neck.
“So why does this chain go on junior and this one go on big daddy?” the keeper asks the crowd, still jingling those
chains.
No one’s saying anything, probably afraid to be wrong like the two kids before. I’m not afraid to speak up, because I know why.
“The baby elephant stops fighting.” I don’t realize it’s me talking until I notice the keeper’s gaze shift in my direction. “It learns it can’t break the chain no matter how hard it fights, so it just . . .” When I pause, I feel Torrin move closer behind me. “It gives up trying to escape.”
The keeper nods. “That’s correct. It’s called learned helplessness, and I would not suggest typing that into an internet search engine unless you want to spend the rest of your life in a chronically depressed state.”
He’s smiling, and so is the crowd, but I don’t understand why. What about any of this is funny? How is taking an animal and fucking with its head to control it worth a smile?
“So by the time junior grows up into a five-ton mammoth that could move a semi if it wanted to, it’s learned it’s helpless. It doesn’t fight this chain or this one because it’s figured out that the chain is stronger than him.” The keeper lets go of the chains and lifts two different things, one still giant in comparison to the other. “It’s the same with the stakes they’re chained to. Junior gets the one that looks like it’s as heavy as Thor’s hammer, and Dad gets the one that looks like a paper cutter in comparison.”
My lungs are straining, and I feel the urge to run. To remind myself I’m free and no chain is trapping me.
“To make this more relatable, it would be like tying a length of Silly String to this guy’s ankle and staking him to the ground with a toothpick.” The keeper points at a guy who looks like he could be the leader of a motorcycle gang. “It would work too, but only if we’d beaten the fight out of him from the start with something a little more substantial.” The keeper kicks at the chains at his feet.
When my gaze flickers to the elephants roaming behind him, I have this intense urge to rip apart the barrier stretching around their exhibit to free them. So they know they’re free. So it’s not a manipulation keeping them from realizing how powerful they are.
“It’s cruel,” spouts from my mouth before I know I’m thinking it.
Torrin’s hand squeezes my shoulder. It’s not a suggestive one to shut up. It’s not one to pull me away. It’s one to support me—to let me know he’s here.
“Why’s it cruel? It’s the only way for humans and elephants to coexist in relatively close quarters.” The keeper has warm eyes, but I learned ten years ago that warmth on the surface doesn’t mean that what’s deeper isn’t encased in ice. I don’t let it fool me. I won’t let it fool me again.
“Elephants don’t need to coexist with us. They don’t ask to be around us. They don’t want to.” I move a little closer to the keeper. Torrin moves with me. “The reason they coexist with humans is because we’ve taken them from their homes and forced them into a life they’d never choose. They’re here because someone took them from their lives in Africa or Asia or they took their parents or grandparents, because some asshole decided they wanted an elephant, and why the hell not?”
I notice a few parents take their kids by the hand and pull them away from the “crazy lady.” I should stop. I don’t know what I’m saying—it just feels like I have to say it.
“You can’t just take something because you want it,” I say. “You can’t just fuck with its freedom then chain it up and fuck with its head too.”
The crowd is quiet now. Really quiet. I’ve been shouting loudly enough that more of a crowd has gathered. As I scan the crowd, I see phones raised and what I guess are people snapping photos or videos.
It isn’t until the keeper’s eyes lower to my neck that I realize what’s happened. The scarf has come loose in the midst of my fit. People are staring at the scar, recognition flickering in their eyes. With the way some of them are looking at my neck, I start to wonder if I have a real knife sticking out of it.
“I’m sorry, ma’am.” The keeper sets the stakes down and kicks the chains back a ways. Recognition is on his face too. “I didn’t mean to make it so personal.”
More people stare—even the kids are looking at me like they know something’s off. I feel like everyone knows who I am and what happened to me. The scar is like walking around with a sign listing my darkest, deepest secrets. I haven’t seen the news or read the headlines, but I can imagine what has been blasted out there.
How many young girls in this area have wide purple scars winding around their necks?
From the phones that continue to rise toward me, I know not many.
“This isn’t about me,” I shout to the keeper as I back away. “This is about the goddamned elephants.”
I turn to leave because I’ve seen enough of the zoo for one day. Phones pan with me as I hurry back up the same path we just walked. Torrin is beside me before I get more than a few steps away.
“I don’t like the zoo anymore,” I say, trying to ignore a few of the cameras still following me.
Torrin curls his nose. “Yeah. Zoos suck.”
I catch one last look of the elephants before we reach the top of the pathway. I didn’t get close enough to look in their eyes this time. If I had, I wonder if I’d still think I could see their souls. I doubt it—how could a soul survive when it had been strangled out by a length of chain?
The scarf is swinging at my sides, my neck drawing more attention as we fly to the zoo’s entrance. Grabbing the scarf, I start to wind it back around my neck, tighter this time so it stays. When I’m about to wrap it around a third time, Torrin stops me. Taking the end of the scarf from me, he unwinds what I’ve just done. Then he lets it slide off the back of my neck and clutches it in his hand.
“You’re better without it.”
SINCE I CLEARLY don’t like the zoo anymore, I let my mom drag me to the mall close by the house. Maybe I’ve gone all opposites on myself and what I used to loathe now I love.
I realize that’s not the case the instant I step inside the mall in Bellevue. It’s a Saturday after lunch, and I remember this place being crazy busy on a Tuesday morning. It feels like just as many people are milling about here as at the zoo a few days ago, but we’re enclosed here. No fresh air to help me flush out the panic attack before it digs its claws into me.
“Anywhere you want to start?” Mom asks as we join the masses of shoppers zipping around like Christmas is seven hours away instead of seven months. “You’ll need new everything, so we might want to start at one of the big anchor stores first.”
I’m wearing another one of my old outfits. It’s a shirt of a band that’s not even around anymore, and my cut-offs are only staying up because I borrowed one of Mom’s belts. I know I need new clothes, but I’m not in the mood to shop.
Shopping. Spending hours and hours skimming through, trying on, and purchasing things that will be dumped off at a thrift store next year was a practice I hadn’t really understood as a teenager—it’s even more extreme now.
I know it means a lot to my mom though, so I try to look interested. “Okay, sounds good.”
She waits for me, but I can’t remember the names of the big stores or in what direction they are. “Let’s start at Nordstrom.”
She starts down the hall, and I follow. I know she still feels uncomfortable around me. Sometimes I catch her looking at me like she can’t figure out who invaded her daughter’s body or how I can be exorcised. She isn’t the only one who looks at me that way.
Torrin’s the only one who still looks at and talks to me the way he used to. I’d rather have the old mom who would be ordering me to keep up and to wipe the sulk off my face than the one who keeps glancing back at me like she’s waiting for me to blow.
As we pass a cell store, I pause to look inside. The phones have changed a lot since I had one. “I think I need a cell phone.”
Mom backs up toward where I’m hovering at the entrance, and she glances inside. “Why do you think you need one?”
I shrug. “In case I want to call anyo
ne.”
“We’ve got a landline for that.” She tries moving on, but I don’t move with her. She stops and waits.
“In case anyone wants to call me.”
Recognition settles into her expression. “You mean in case Torrin wants to call you.”
I shrug again. “Since Dad’s been screening my calls, yeah, it would be nice to be able to talk to who I want to when I want to. I’m not a kid anymore, Mom.”
When I say the “I’m not a kid” part, my mom’s shoulders fall just enough to notice. She knows it’s not quite the truth. Even I know it’s not. I might be twenty-seven, but I still feel very much like the seventeen-year-old I was. I might as well have been cryogenically frozen because I feel like ten years have slipped by without including me.
“You know Torrin’s a—”
“A priest?” I interrupt. “Yeah, kind of hard to miss.”
“You might not have missed it, but do you understand what that means?”
Right then, I feel very much like a teenager having an argument with her mom about a boy in the middle of a mall. “That hopefully he likes wearing black? A lot?”
“Jade.” I hear a fragment of the mom I remember. It urges me on.
“Mom, let it go. I know what I’m doing. We’re friends.” I cross my arms like she has. “Even if he wasn’t a priest, it wouldn’t matter because I’m not ready to jump into a relationship with anyone right now. Or ever.”
I look away, but I’m too late. She didn’t miss the look that flashed on my face when I decided to involuntarily gut myself in front of her.
“I just don’t want to see you hurt,” she says. “You’ve been through enough. Don’t put yourself in a position to open yourself up to more.”
“Torrin would never hurt me.”
“Not intentionally, but him being back, being around so much . . . I wonder if he already has.”
The idea of a cell phone withers. She’s right, of course. I don’t need a cell phone just so he can call me when he wants to. He’s stopped by every day since I got home, and we can say whatever we need to then. I shouldn’t need a private phone so he can reach me any hour of the day . . . or so I can reach him.