This is the sanctuary, not the wild, my mother says. It’s not like she got between a mother and a calf. They’re used to people.
My father yells back: They are not used to toddlers!
Suddenly a pair of warm arms closes around me. She smells of powder and limes, and her lap is the softest place I know. “They’re mad,” I whisper.
“They’re scared,” she corrects. “It sounds the same.”
Then she starts to sing, close to my ear, so that her voice is the only one I hear.
Virgil has a plan, but the place he wants to go is too far away for me to bike, and I’m still not getting in a car with him. As we walk out of the diner, I agree to meet him at his office the next morning. The sun’s swinging low, using a cloud as a hammock. “How do I know you won’t be blitzed tomorrow, too?” I ask.
“Bring a Breathalyzer,” Virgil suggests drily. “I’ll see you at eleven.”
“Eleven’s not the morning.”
“It is for me,” he replies, and he starts walking down the road toward his office.
By the time I get back home, my grandmother is draining carrots in a colander. Gertie, curled up in front of the refrigerator, beats her tail twice on the floor, but that’s all the hello I’m getting. When I was little, my dog used to practically knock me down if I came back after a trip to the bathroom; that’s how happy she was to see me again. I wonder if, as you get older, you stop missing people so fiercely. Maybe growing up is just focusing on what you’ve got, instead of what you don’t.
There’s a sound like footsteps overhead. When I was little I was sure my grandmother’s house was haunted; I was always hearing stuff like that. My grandmother assured me it was rusty pipes or the house settling. I used to wonder how something made of brick and mortar could settle, when I seemed incapable of doing just that.
“So,” my grandmother says, “how was he?”
For a second I freeze, wondering if she’s been having me followed. How ironic would that be—my grandma tracking me as I’m tracking down my mom with a private investigator? “Um,” I reply. “A little under the weather.”
“I hope you don’t catch whatever he has.”
Unlikely, I think, unless being a drunk is contagious.
“I know you think the sun rises and sets on Chad Allen, but even if he’s a good teacher, he’s an irresponsible parent. Who leaves their baby alone for two days?” my grandmother mutters.
Who leaves their baby alone for ten years?
I’m so wrapped up in thinking about my mom that it takes me an extra beat to remember that my grandmother still believes I have been sitting for Carter, Mr. Allen’s freaky, alien-headed kid, who she now thinks has a cold. And he’s going to be my excuse tomorrow, too, when I go back to see Virgil. “Well, he wasn’t alone. He had me.”
I follow my grandmother into the dining room, taking the time to snag two clean glasses and the carton of orange juice from the refrigerator. I force down a few bites of fish sticks, chewing methodically, before I hide the rest of my meal under the mashed potatoes. I’m just not hungry.
“What’s wrong?” my grandmother asks.
“Nothing.”
“I’ve spent an hour making this dinner for you; the least you can do is eat it,” she says.
“How come there wasn’t a search for her?” I blurt out and then cover my mouth with my napkin, as if I can stuff the words back inside.
Neither of us wants to pretend she doesn’t know who I’m talking about. My grandmother goes very still. “Just because you don’t remember, Jenna, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”
“Nothing happened,” I say. “Not for ten years. Don’t you even care? She’s your daughter!”
She gets up and dumps her plate—which is still mostly full—into the kitchen trash.
All of a sudden I feel the way I felt that day when I was tiny, and chased that butterfly down a hill toward the elephants, and realized I had made a colossal tactical error.
All these years I thought my grandmother didn’t talk about what had happened to my mother because it was too hard for her. Now, I wonder if she didn’t talk about what had happened because it would be too hard for me.
I know, before she speaks, what she is going to say. And I don’t want to hear it. I run upstairs with Gertie at my heels and slam my bedroom door, then bury my face in the fur at my dog’s neck.
It takes about two minutes before the door opens. I don’t glance up, but I can feel her there, all the same. “Just say it,” I whisper. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”
My grandmother sits down on the mattress. “It’s not that simple.”
“Yes, it is.” Suddenly I am crying even though I don’t want to be. “Either she is, or she isn’t.”
But even as I challenge my grandmother, I understand it’s not that simple. Logic says that if I have been right—if my mother never would have willingly left me—then she would have come for me. Which, obviously, she didn’t.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out.
And yet. If she were dead, wouldn’t I know it? I mean, don’t you hear those stories all the time? Wouldn’t I feel like a piece of me was gone?
A little voice inside me says, Don’t you?
“When your mother was little, whatever I told her to do, she would choose the opposite,” my grandmother says. “I asked her to wear a dress to her high school graduation, she showed up in cutoff shorts. She’d point to two haircuts in a magazine and ask which I liked better; then she’d choose the one I didn’t. I suggested she study primates at Harvard; she picked elephants in Africa.” My grandmother looks down at me. “She was also the smartest person I have ever met. Smart enough to outwit any policeman, if she wanted to. So if she was alive, and had run away, I knew I couldn’t trap her into coming home. If I started putting her face on milk cartons and setting up a hotline, she would only run farther away, faster.”
I wonder if this is true. If my mother has only been playing a game. Or if it’s my grandmother who’s been fooling herself.
“You said you filed a missing persons report. What happened?”
She takes my mother’s scarf from the back of my desk chair, runs it through the sieve of her fist. “I said I went to file a missing persons report,” my grandmother says. “I went three times, in fact. But I never stepped inside the front door.”
I stare at her, stunned. “What? You never told me that!”
“You’re older now. You deserve to know what happened.” She sighs. “I wanted answers. At least I thought I did. And I knew you would, when you were older. But I couldn’t bring myself to go inside. I was afraid to hear what the police might find.” She looks at me. “I don’t know what would have been worse. Learning Alice was dead and couldn’t come home, or learning she was alive and didn’t want to. Nothing they told me was going to be good news. There wasn’t going to be a happily ever after here. There was just going to be you and me; and I thought the sooner we moved on, the sooner we could both start over.”
I think of what Virgil had hinted at this afternoon—the third option that my grandmother hasn’t considered: that perhaps my mother had run away not from us but from a murder charge. I guess that’s not exactly something you want to hear about your daughter, either.
I don’t think of my grandmother as old, really, but when she gets up off the bed, she looks her age. She moves slowly, like all of her is aching, and stands silhouetted in the doorway. “I know what you look up on your computer. I know you never stopped asking what happened.” Her voice is as thin as the seam of light that surrounds her body. “Maybe you’re braver than I am.”
There is one entry in my mother’s journals that feels like a hairpin turn, a moment where, if she hadn’t reversed direction, she would have become someone entirely different.
Maybe even someone here.
She was thirty-one, working in Botswana on her postdoc. There is a vague reference to some bad news from home, and how she had taken a l
eave of absence. When she returned, she threw herself into her work, documenting the effects of traumatic memory on elephants. Then one day, she came across a young male that had gotten its trunk caught in snare wire.
This was not uncommon, I guess. From what I’ve read in her journals, bush meat was a staple for some villagers, and every now and then that necessity was ratcheted up into a business. But traps meant for impala sometimes wound up entangling other animals: zebra, hyena, and, one day, a thirteen-year-old bull named Kenosi.
At his age, Kenosi wasn’t part of his mother’s breeding herd anymore. Although his mother, Lorato, was still the matriarch, Kenosi had gone off with the other young bulls, a roving teenage bachelor gang. He’d play-fight with his buddies when he came into musth, like the stupid boys in my school who shove each other in front of girls to try to get noticed. But like with teenage humans, these were just practice runs of hormones, and other males could upstage them simply by showing up and being older and cooler. This happened in the elephant community, too, when older males knocked the young ones out of musth, which was biologically perfect, since they wouldn’t actually be ready to breed until about age thirty, anyway.
Except Kenosi wasn’t ever going to get it on with a lucky female, because the snare had practically severed his trunk, and an elephant without a trunk cannot survive.
My mother saw Kenosi’s injury in the field and knew immediately he was going to die a slow and painful death. So she put aside her work for the day and went back to camp to call the Department of Wildlife, which was the government agency allowed to put the elephant out of its misery. But Roger Wilkins, the official assigned to that game reserve, was new there. “I have a lot on my plate,” he told her. “Just let nature take its course.”
The job of a researcher is to do just that: to respect nature, not to manage it. But even if these were wild animals, they were also her elephants. My mother would not stand by idly and let an elephant suffer.
There’s a break in the journal. She changes from pencil to black pen, and there is an entire page filled with blank lines. Here’s what I’ve imagined happening in that gap:
I walk into the main office at camp, where my boss is sitting with a tiny box fan blowing stale air. Alice, he says. Welcome back. If you need more time off—
I cut him off. That isn’t why I’m here. I tell him about Kenosi, and about that asshole Wilkins.
It’s an imperfect system, my boss admits, and because he doesn’t know me very well, he thinks I will just go away.
If you don’t pick up that phone, I threaten, then I will. But I’m going to call The New York Times, and the BBC, and National Geographic. I’m going to call the World Wildlife Fund and Joyce Poole and Cynthia Moss and Dame Daphne Sheldrick. I am going to unleash a swell of bleeding hearts and animal lovers on Botswana. And as for you: I’m going to bring so much shit raining down on this camp that this elephant research study funding is going to dry up before the sun sets. So you can pick up that phone, I say. Or else I will.
Anyway, that’s what I imagine she would have said. But when my mother actually starts writing again, it is a detailed account of how Wilkins arrived holding on to a knapsack and a grudge. How he sourly rode beside her in the jeep, clutching his rifle, as she located Kenosi and his homeys. I knew from reading my mother’s journals that the Land Rovers did not get closer than forty feet to bull herds—they were too unpredictable. But before my mother could explain this, Wilkins raised his gun and cocked the trigger.
Don’t! my mother screamed, grabbing the barrel of the rifle and pointing it at the sky. She threw the Land Rover into gear, driving forward to push the other young bulls out of the way first. Then she pulled off to the side, looked at him, and said, Now. Shoot.
He did. Through the jaw.
The skull of an elephant is a mass of honeycombed bone, made to protect the brain, which sits in a cavity behind all this infrastructure.
You cannot kill an elephant by shooting it in the jaw or the forehead, because although the bullet will do damage, it will not hit the brain. If you want to humanely kill an elephant, you have to shoot it cleanly behind the ear.
My mother wrote that Kenosi was bellowing his heart out, in pain, worse off than he had been before. She used curse words she had never used in her life, in multiple languages. She was contemplating grabbing that gun and turning it on Wilkins. And then something remarkable happened.
Lorato, the matriarch—the mother of Kenosi—came charging down the hill toward where her son was stumbling around, bleeding. The only obstacle in her way was my mother’s vehicle.
My mother knew not to get between an elephant and her calf, even if that calf was thirteen years old. She threw the Land Rover into reverse and zoomed backward, leaving a clear path between Kenosi and Lorato.
Before the matriarch could get there, however, Wilkins took a second shot, and this one hit its mark.
Lorato stopped on a dime. This is what my mother wrote:
She reached out to Kenosi, stroking his body from tail to trunk, paying special attention to the spot where the snare wire had cut into his hide. She stepped over his massive bulk, standing above him the way a mother would protect her calf. She was secreting from her temporal glands, dark streaks marking the sides of her head. Even as the bull herd moved away, even as Lorato’s breeding herd joined her and reached out to touch Kenosi, she refused to move. The sun fell, the moon rose, and still she stood, unable or unwilling to leave him.
How do you say good-bye?
That night, there were meteor showers. It seemed to me that even the sky was weeping.
Two pages later in the journal, my mother had composed herself enough to write about what had happened with the objectivity of a scientist:
Today I saw two things I never thought I would see.
First, the good: Because of Wilkins’s behavior, the researchers in the reserve have now been given the right to euthanize an elephant on our own, if necessary.
Second, the devastating: A female elephant whose baby wasn’t a baby anymore by any means still returned with a fury when he was in distress.
Once a mother, always a mother.
That’s what my mom scrawled at the bottom of the page.
What she didn’t write was that this was the day she narrowed her study on trauma and elephants to the effects of grief instead.
Unlike my mother, I don’t think what happened to Kenosi was tragic. When I read it, actually, it makes me feel like I’m filled with sparks from those meteor showers she talks about.
After all, the last thing Kenosi saw, before he closed his eyes forever, was his mother coming back to him.
The next morning, I wonder if it’s time to tell my grandmother about Virgil.
“What do you think?” I ask Gertie. Certainly it would be easier to get a lift to his office, instead of having to bike all the way across town. So far all I have to show for my search are calf muscles that rival a ballerina’s.
My dog thumps her tail against the wooden floor. “Once for yes, twice for no,” I say, and Gertie cocks her head. I hear my grandmother call for me—it’s the second time—and I clatter down the stairs to find her standing at the counter, shaking cereal into a bowl for my breakfast.
“I overslept. No time for anything hot today. Although why you can’t feed yourself at the age of thirteen, I have no idea,” she huffs. “I’ve seen goldfish with better survival skills than you.” She hands me a milk carton and unplugs her cell phone from its charger. “Take the recycling out before you leave for your sitting job. And for God’s sake brush your hair before you go. It looks like there’s a woodland creature nesting inside.”
This is not the same woman who came into my room last night with all her defenses down. This is not the same woman who admitted to me that she, too, is still consumed by thoughts of my mother.
She digs in her purse. “Where are the car keys? I swear I have the first three signs of Alzheimer’s …”
“Grandma ??
? what you said last night …” I clear my throat. “About me being brave enough to search for my mom?”
She shakes her head, so slightly that if I weren’t staring so hard at her, I might have missed it. “Dinner’s at six,” she announces, in a voice that lets me know this conversation is over, before I really ever had a chance to get it started.
To my surprise, Virgil looks as comfortable in the police station as a vegetarian at a barbecue festival. He doesn’t want to use the front door; we have to sneak in the back after an officer has buzzed himself in. He doesn’t want to chat up the desk sergeant or the dispatchers. There’s no grand tour: This is where my locker was; this is where we kept the donuts. I’d been under the impression that Virgil left this job because he wanted to, but I’m beginning to wonder if maybe he did something to get fired. This much I know: There’s something he’s not telling me.
“See that guy?” Virgil says, pulling me around the bend of a hallway so that I can peek at the man sitting at the desk of the evidence room. “That’s Ralph.”
“Um, Ralph looks like he’s a thousand years old.”
“He looked like he was a thousand years old back when I was still working here,” Virgil says. “We used to say he’d become just as fossilized as the stuff he watches over.”
He takes a deep breath and walks down the corridor. The evidence room has a half door, with the top open. “Hey, Ralph! Long time no see.”
Ralph moves as if he’s underwater. His waist pivots, then his shoulders, and finally his head. Up close, he has as many wrinkles as the elephants in the photos clipped to my mother’s journal entries. His eyes are as pale as apple jelly, and look to be about the same consistency. “Well,” Ralph says, so slowly that it sounds like whaaaaale. “Rumor has it that you walked into the cold case evidence room one day and never came out.”