That’s when we thought about elephant memory.
The trainer who’d worked with these two females more than a decade ago had not seen them since they were released into the reserve. Randall was happy to come to Pilanesberg to help. We tracked the two herds, which at this point had merged because of the injury of the older female.
“There are my girls,” Randall said, delighted, as the jeep shuddered to a halt in front of the herd. “Owala,” he called. “Durga!”
To us, these elephants were Felicia and Notch. But both of the stately ladies turned at the sound of Randall’s voice, and he did what no one did with the fragile, skittish Pilanesberg herd: He got out of the jeep and started walking toward them.
Now, look, I’ve worked in the wild with elephants for twelve years. There are some herds you can approach on foot, because they’re used to researchers and their vehicles and they trust us; and even so, it’s not something I would do without carefully thinking it through. But this was not a herd that was familiar with humans; this was not even a stable herd. In fact, the younger elephants immediately stampeded away from Randall, identifying him as one of those two-legged beasts that had killed their own mothers. The two matriarchs, however, came closer. Durga—Notch—approached Randall. She stuck her trunk out and gently snaked it around his arm. Then she glanced back at her nervous young adoptive charges, still snorting and huffing on the ridge of the hill. She turned to Randall again, trumpeted once, and ran off with her babies.
Randall let her go, then turned to the other matriarch and said softly, “Owala … kneel.”
The elephant we called Felicia walked forward, knelt down, and let Randall climb on her back. Although she’d had no direct contact with people in twelve years, she remembered not only this individual man as her trainer but all the commands he had taught her. Without being given any anesthetic, she allowed Randall to direct her to stay, lift her leg, turn—commands that made it possible for the bush vet to scrape away the pus from the infected area, clean the wound, and give her an injection of antibiotics.
Long after her infection healed, long after Randall had returned to training circus animals, Felicia went back to leading her patchwork family in Pilanesberg. To any researcher, to anyone at all, she was a wild elephant.
But somewhere, somehow, she remembered who she used to be, too.
JENNA
There is another recollection I have of my mother that ties to a conversation scrawled in her journal. It’s a single handwritten page, scraps of dialogue that for some reason she didn’t ever want to forget. Maybe that’s why I remember it so clearly, too, why I can flesh out what she has written as if it is a movie playing out before me.
She is lying on the ground, her head in my father’s lap. They are talking as I yank the heads off wild daisies. I’m not paying attention, but part of my brain must be, recording everything, so that even now I can hear the gossip of mosquitoes and the words my parents toss back and forth. Their voices rise and fall and swoop like the tail of a kite.
HIM: You have to admit, Alice, there are certain animals that know there’s one perfect mate.
HER: Crap. Complete and utter crap. Prove to me that monogamy exists in the natural world, without an environmental influence.
HIM: Swans.
HER: Too easy. And not true! A quarter of black swans cheat on their mates.
HIM: Wolves.
HER: They’ve been known to mate with another wolf if their mate is kicked out of the pack or isn’t able to breed. That’s circumstance, not true love.
HIM: I should have known better than to fall for a scientist. Your idea of a Valentine’s heart probably has an aorta.
HER: Is it a crime to be biologically relevant?
She sits up and pins him onto the ground, so that now he is lying beneath her and her hair swings over his face. It looks like they’re fighting, but they are both smiling.
HER: Do you know a vulture caught cheating on his mate will be attacked by others?
HIM: Is that supposed to scare me?
HER: I’m just saying.
HIM: Gibbons.
HER: Oh, come on. Everyone knows gibbons are unfaithful.
He rolls, so that now he is on top, looking down at her.
HIM: Prairie voles.
HER: Only because of the oxytocin and vasopressin released in their brains. It’s not love. It’s chemical commitment.
Slowly, she grins.
HER: You know, now that I think about it … there is one species that’s completely monogamous. The male anglerfish, which is a tenth the size of the girl of his dreams, follows her scent, bites her, and hangs on until his skin fuses into hers and her body absorbs his. They mate for life. But it’s a really short life, if you’re the guy in the relationship.
HIM: I’d fuse to you.
He kisses her.
HIM: Right at the lips.
When they laugh, it sounds like confetti.
HER: Fine. If it shuts you up about this once and for all.
They stop talking for a little while. I hold my palm over the ground. I have seen Maura lift her rear foot inches above the dirt, moving it slowly back and forth like she is rolling it over an invisible stone. My mother says that she can hear the other elephants when she does that; that they talk even when we don’t hear them. I wonder if that’s what my parents are doing now: speaking without sound.
When my father’s voice comes again, it sounds like the string on a guitar that is pulled so tight, you can’t tell if it is music or crying.
HIM: Do you know how a penguin picks his mate? He finds a perfect pebble, and gives it to the female he has his eye on.
He hands my mother a small stone. Her hand closes around it.
Most of my mother’s journals from her time in Botswana are stuffed chock-full of data: the names and movements of elephant families trekking across the Tuli Block; dates when males came into musth and females calved; hourly logs of the behavior of animals who do not care or do not know they are being watched. I read each entry, but instead of seeing elephants, I picture the hand that wrote the notes. Was there a cramp in her fingers? A callus where the pencil pressed too hard against the skin? I put together the clues of my mother the same way she shuffled and reshuffled the observations of her elephants, trying to make a bigger picture from the smallest details. I wonder if it was just as frustrating for her, to get glimpses but never the whole mystery revealed. I guess a scientist’s job is to fill in the gaps. Me, though, I look at a puzzle and can only see the single missing piece.
I am starting to think Virgil feels the same way, and I have to admit, I don’t exactly know what that says about either of us.
When he says he’ll take the job, I don’t quite trust him. It’s hard to believe a guy who is so hungover that he looks like he’s having a stroke when he tries to put on his jacket. I figure my best bet is to make sure that he remembers this conversation, which means getting him out of his office and sober. “Why don’t we talk over some coffee?” I suggest. “I passed a diner on my way here.”
He grabs his car keys, but that’s not happening. “You’re drunk,” I say. “I’m driving.”
He shrugs, going along with it until we walk out the entryway of the building, and he sees me unlock my bike.
“What the fuck is that?”
“If you don’t know, you’re drunker than I thought,” I say, and I climb on the seat.
“When you said you’d drive,” Virgil mutters, “I assumed you had a car.”
“I’m thirteen,” I point out and gesture at the handlebars.
“Are you kidding? What is this, 1972?”
“You can run alongside instead if you want,” I say, “but with the headache I’m guessing you have, I’d take Door Number One instead.”
Which is how we wind up arriving at the diner with Virgil Stanhope sitting on my mountain bike, his legs spread, while I stand up between them and pedal.
We seat ourselves at a booth. “How come there
weren’t any flyers?” I say.
“Huh?”
“Flyers. With my mom’s face on them. How come no one set up a command center at a crappy Holiday Inn conference room and manned a telephone bank for tips?”
“I told you already,” Virgil replies. “She was never a missing person.”
I just stare at him.
“Okay, correction: If your grandmother actually filed a missing persons report, it got lost in the shuffle.”
“You’re saying I grew up without a mother because of human error?”
“I’m saying I did my job. Someone else didn’t do theirs.” He looks at me over the edge of his mug. “I was called in to the elephant sanctuary because there was a dead body there. It was ruled an accident. Case closed. When you’re a cop, you don’t try to make messes. You just clean up the spills.”
“So you’re basically admitting you were too lazy to care that one of your witnesses for the case had disappeared.”
He scowls. “No, I was making the assumption that your mother left of her own free will, or else I would have heard otherwise. I assumed she was with you.” Virgil narrows his eyes. “Where were you when your mother was found by the cops?”
“I don’t know. Sometimes she left me with Nevvie during the day, but not at night. I just remember eventually being with my grandma, at her place.”
“Well, I should start by talking to her.”
I shake my head immediately. “No way. She’d kill me if she knew I was doing this.”
“Doesn’t she want to know what happened to her daughter?”
“It’s complicated,” I say. “I think maybe it hurts her too much to keep dragging it up. She’s from that generation that just puts on a stiff upper lip or whatever and soldiers through the bad stuff and pretends it never happened. Whenever I used to cry for my mom, my grandma tried to distract me—with food, or a toy, or with Gertie, my dog. And then one day when I asked she said, She’s gone. But the way she said it, it sounded like a knife. So I learned pretty fast to stop asking.”
“What took you so long to come forward? Ten years isn’t just a cold case. It’s a freaking Arctic wasteland.”
A waitress walks by, and I signal to her, trying to get her attention, since Virgil needs coffee if he’s going to be of any use to me. She doesn’t see me at all.
“That’s what it’s like to be a kid,” I say. “No one takes you seriously. People look right through you. Even if I’d been able to figure out where to go when I was eight or ten … even if I’d managed to get myself to the police station … even if you hadn’t left your job and the sergeant at the front desk told you a kid wanted to get you to reopen a closed case … what would you have done? Would you have let me stand in front of your desk talking while you smiled and nodded and didn’t pay attention? Or told your cop buddies about the girl who showed up and wanted to play detective?”
Another waitress bustles out of the kitchen, and a wedge of noises—frying, banging, clattering—squawks through the swinging door. This one, at least, comes right toward us. “What can I get you?” she asks.
“Coffee,” I say. “A whole pot.” She looks at Virgil, snorts, and retreats. “It’s like that old saying,” I tell him. “If no one hears you, are you even talking?”
The waitress brings us two cups of coffee. Virgil hands me the sugar even though I haven’t asked for it. I meet his gaze, and for a moment, I can see through the haze of the booze, and I am not sure if I’m comforted by what I see, or a little scared. “I’m listening now,” he says.
The list of what I remember about my mother is embarrassingly short.
There’s that moment where she fed me cotton candy: Uswidi. Iswidi.
There’s the conversation about mating for life.
There’s a glimpse I have of her laughing as Maura reaches her trunk over a fence and pulls her hair free from its ponytail. My mother’s hair is red. Not strawberry-blond and not orange, but the color of someone who’s burning up inside.
(Okay, so, maybe the reason I remember this incident is because I’ve seen a photo someone snapped at that very moment. But the smell of her hair—like cinnamon sugar—that’s a real memory that has nothing to do with a picture. Sometimes, when I really miss her, I eat French toast, just so that I can close my eyes and breathe in.)
My mother’s voice, when she was upset, wobbled like a heat mirage of asphalt in the summer. And she would hug me and tell me it was going to be all right, even though she had been the one to cry.
Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and find her watching me sleep.
She never wore rings. But she had a necklace that she never took off.
She used to sing in the shower.
She took me out on the ATV with her to watch the elephants, even though my father thought it was too dangerous for me to be in the enclosures. I rode on her lap, and she would lean down and whisper in my ear, This can be our secret.
We had matching pink sneakers.
She knew how to fold a dollar bill into an elephant.
Instead of reading me books at night, she told me stories: how she had seen an elephant free a baby rhino stuck in the mud; how a little girl whose best friend was an orphaned elephant left her family home to go to university and returned years later, to have that now fully grown elephant wrap a trunk around her and pull her close.
I remember my mother sketching, drawing the giant G clefs of elephant ears, which she would then mark with notches or tears to help her identify the individual. She would list behaviors: Syrah reaches for and removes plastic bag from Lilly’s tusk; given that vegetation is routinely carried in tusks, this suggests awareness of foreign object and subsequent cooperative removal … Even something as soft as empathy would be given the most academic treatment. It was part of being taken seriously in her field: not to anthropomorphize elephants, but to study their behavior clinically and, from that, to extrapolate the facts.
Me, I look at the facts I remember about my mother, and I guess at her behavior. I do the opposite of what a scientist should do.
I can’t help but think: If my mother met me now, would she be disappointed?
Virgil turns my mother’s wallet over in his hands. It is so fragile that the leather starts to crumble beneath his fingers. I see that, and I feel a stab in my chest, as if I’m losing her all over again. “This doesn’t necessarily mean that your mother was a victim of foul play,” Virgil says. “She could have lost the wallet the night she wound up unconscious.”
I fold my hands on the table. “Look, I know what you think—that she’s the one who put the wallet up in the tree, so she could disappear. But it’s pretty hard to climb a tree and hide a wallet when you’re knocked out cold.”
“If that’s what she was doing, why didn’t she leave it someplace it might actually be found?”
“And then what? Smash herself in the head with a rock? If she really wanted to disappear, why wouldn’t she have just run?”
Virgil hesitates. “There might have been extenuating circumstances.”
“Like?”
“Your mother wasn’t the only one injured that night, you know.”
Suddenly I understand what he’s saying: My mother may have been trying to make herself look like she was a victim when, in reality, she was the perp. My mouth goes dry. Of all the potential personas I’ve given my mother over the past decade, murderer wasn’t one of them. “If you really thought my mother was a killer, why didn’t you go after her when she disappeared?”
His mouth opens and closes around empty air. Bam, I think. “The death was ruled an accident,” he says. “But we did find a red hair at the scene.”
“That’s like saying you found a bimbo on The Bachelor. My mom wasn’t the only redhead in Boone, New Hampshire.”
“We found the hair inside the body bag of the deceased.”
“So, (a) that’s gross, and (b) big deal. I watch Law & Order: SVU. It just means that they had contact with each other. That
probably happened ten times a day.”
“Or it could mean that hair got transferred during a physical altercation.”
“How did Nevvie Ruehl die?” I demand. “Did the medical examiner say the cause of death was homicide?”
He shakes his head. “He ruled it an accident, caused by blunt force trauma due to trampling.”
“I may not remember a lot about my mom, but I know she wasn’t five thousand pounds,” I say. “So let me toss out a different scenario. What if Nevvie went after her? And one of the elephants saw the whole thing and retaliated?”
“They do that?”
I wasn’t sure. But I remembered reading in my mother’s journals about elephants that held grudges, that might wait years to even the score against someone who’d harmed them or someone they cared about.
“Besides,” Virgil said, “you just told me that your mother left you in Nevvie Ruehl’s care. I doubt she would have let Nevvie babysit if she thought the woman was dangerous.”
“I doubt my mom would have let Nevvie babysit if she also wanted to murder her,” I point out. “My mom didn’t kill her. It just doesn’t add up. There were a dozen cops swarming around that night; based on pure probability, chances are one of them was a redhead. You don’t know if that hair belongs to my mother.”
Virgil nods. “But I know how to find out.”
Here’s one more thing I remember: Inside, my parents are fighting. How can you do that? my father accuses. Make this all about you.
I am sitting on the floor, crying, but no one seems to hear me. I won’t move, because moving is what led to all the shouting. Instead of staying on the blanket and playing with the toys my mother had brought into the elephant enclosure, I had chased a yellow butterfly as it flew a dotted line across the sky. My mother had had her back to me; she was recording her observations. And just then, my father had driven by, and had seen me heading downhill, where the butterfly went … and where elephants happened to be standing.