by Jodi Picoult
Was I right to keep this from him? No. Blame it on the fact that I immersed myself in a matriarchal society every day, or blame it on cowardice: I just wanted to take a careful, closer look at Thomas before I let him claim partial ownership of this child. I didn’t know, at that point, if I would even keep the baby. And if I did, clearly I was going to raise it in Africa by myself. I simply didn’t feel that one night under a baobab tree meant Thomas necessarily deserved a vote.
In Boston I stumbled off the airplane, rumpled and tired, stood in line at passport control, collected my luggage. When the doors belched me into the arrivals lounge, I saw Thomas immediately. He was standing behind the railing, sandwiched between two black-suited chauffeurs. In his fist, he was holding an uprooted plant upside down, like a witch’s bouquet.
I wheeled my bag around the barrier. “Do you bring dead flowers to all the girls you pick up at airports?” I asked.
He shook the plant so that a little dirt rained down on the floor, over my sneakers. “It’s the closest I could get to a baobab tree,” Thomas said. “The florist was no help, so I had to improvise.”
I tried not to let myself see this as a sign that he, too, was hoping we could pick up where we had left off, that what we’d had was more than a flirtation. In spite of the carbonation of hope inside me, I was determined to play dumb. “Why would you want to bring me a baobab?”
“Because an elephant wouldn’t fit in the car,” Thomas said, and he smiled at me.
Doctors will tell you that it wasn’t medically possible, that it was too early in the pregnancy. But at that moment, I felt the butterfly flutter of our baby, as if the electricity between us was all she needed to combust into life.
• • •
On the long drive to New Hampshire, we talked about my research: how Mmaabo’s herd was coping after her death; how heartbreaking it had been to see Kagiso mourning her dead calf. Thomas told me, with great excitement, that I would be there for the arrival of his seventh sanctuary elephant—an African named Maura.
We did not talk about what had happened between us under that baobab tree.
We also did not talk about how I had found myself missing Thomas at odd moments, such as when I saw two young bulls kicking around a dung ball as if they were soccer stars, and I wanted to share it with someone who would appreciate it. Or how I woke up sometimes with the feel of him on my skin, as if his fingerprints had left a scar.
In fact, with the exception of the plant he’d brought to the arrivals lounge, Thomas had made no mention of anything except our relationship as scientific colleagues. So much so that I was beginning to wonder if I had dreamed the night between us; if this baby was a figment of my imagination.
By the time we arrived at the sanctuary, it was night, and I could barely keep my eyes open. I sat in the car as Thomas opened an electronic gate and then a second, internal one. “The elephants are really good at showing us how strong they are. Half the time when we put up a fence, an elephant will take it down just to let us know that she can.” He glanced at me. “We had a rash of phone calls when we first opened the sanctuary … neighbors saying that there was an elephant in the backyard.”
“So what happens when they get out?”
“Well, we get them back in,” Thomas said. “The whole point of living here is that they won’t get beaten or hurt for escaping, like they would have been in a zoo or circus. It’s like a toddler. Just because a kid pushes your buttons doesn’t mean you don’t love him.”
The mention of a toddler made me cross my arms over my abdomen. “Do you ever think about that?” I asked. “Having a family?”
“I have one,” Thomas replied. “Nevvie and Gideon and Grace. You’ll meet them tomorrow.”
I felt as if I’d been run through the chest with a spear. Had I never even asked Thomas if he was married? How could I have been so stupid?
“I couldn’t run this place without them,” Thomas continued, oblivious to the total internal breakdown happening in the passenger seat. “Nevvie worked for twenty years at a circus down South as an elephant trainer. Gideon was her apprentice. He’s married to Grace.”
Slowly, I began to puzzle out the relationships. And the fact that none of those three people seemed to be his wife or offspring.
“Do they have children?”
“No, thank God,” Thomas said. “My insurance rates are already sky-high; I can’t imagine the liability of having a kid wandering around.”
That, of course, was the right response. It would have been ludicrous to raise a child on a game reserve, just as it would be crazy to raise one on the grounds of a sanctuary. By definition, the animals Thomas took in were “problem” elephants—ones that had killed trainers or acted out in some way that made the zoo or circus want to get rid of them. But his answer made me feel like he had failed an exam, one that he didn’t even know was being administered.
It was too dark to see anything in the enclosures, but as we passed another high fence, I unrolled the window of the car so that I could smell that familiar dusty, sweetgrass scent of elephants. In the distance, I heard a low rumble that sounded like thunder. “That would be Syrah,” Thomas said. “She’s our welcome committee.”
He pulled up to his cottage and took my luggage out of the car. His home was tiny—a living room, a kitchenette, a bedroom, an office no bigger than a closet. There was no guest room, but Thomas didn’t put my battered suitcase in his bedroom, either. He stood awkwardly in the middle of his own house, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Home sweet home,” he said.
Suddenly I wondered what I was doing here. I barely knew Thomas Metcalf. He could have been a psychopath. He could have been a serial killer.
He could have been a lot of things, but he was the father of this baby.
“Well,” I said, uncomfortable. “Long day. Would it be okay if I took a shower?”
Thomas’s bathroom was, to my surprise, pathologically neat. His toothbrush was in a drawer, parallel to the tube of toothpaste. His vanity was scrubbed spotless. The pill bottles in his medicine cabinet were organized alphabetically. I ran the shower until the small room filled with steam, until I stood like a ghost in front of the mirror, trying to see into my future. I showered beneath the hottest water until my skin was pink and raw, until I had worked out the best way to cut my visit short, because clearly coming here had been a mistake. I don’t know what I had been thinking: that Thomas had been eight thousand miles away, pining for me? That he had been secretly wishing I would travel halfway across the globe to pick up where we had left off? Clearly, the hormones swimming through my system were making me delusional.
When I stepped out in a towel, my hair combed through and my heels leaving damp footprints on the wooden floor, Thomas was fitting sheets and blankets on the couch. If I had needed any clearer proof that what had transpired in Africa had been a rogue mistake, rather than a beginning, here it was staring me in the face. “Oh,” I said, as something broke inside me. “Thanks.”
“This is for me,” he said, averting his eyes. “You can take the bed.”
I felt heat rising to my face. “If that’s what you want.”
You have to understand—there is a romance to Africa. You can see a sunset and believe you have witnessed the hand of God. You watch the slow lope of a lioness and forget to breathe. You marvel at the tripod of a giraffe bent to water. In Africa, there are iridescent blues on the wings of birds that you do not see anywhere else in nature. In Africa, in the midday heat, you can see blisters in the atmosphere. When you are in Africa, you feel primordial, rocked in the cradle of the world. Given that sort of setting, is it any wonder that recollections might be rose-colored?
“You’re the guest,” Thomas said politely. “It’s whatever you want.”
What did I want?
I could have taken the bedding and slept alone on the couch. Or I could have told Thomas about the baby. Instead, I walked toward him, and let the towel I was holding around me fall t
o the floor.
For a moment, Thomas just stared. He reached out one finger and traced the curve from my neck to my shoulder.
Once, as a college student, I had gone swimming at night in a bioluminescent bay in Puerto Rico. Every time I moved my arms or my legs, there was a fresh shower of iridescent sparks, as if I were creating falling stars. This is how it felt when Thomas touched me—as if I had swallowed light. We ricocheted against furniture and walls; we did not make it to the couch. Afterward, I lay in his arms on the rough wooden floor. “You told me Syrah was the welcome committee.”
He laughed. “I can go get her if you want.”
“That’s okay. I’m good.”
“Don’t sell yourself short. You’re fabulous.”
I turned in his arms. “I didn’t think you wanted to do this.”
“I didn’t think you wanted to do this,” Thomas said. “I didn’t want to make any assumptions, you know, that what had happened before would happen again.” He tangled his hand in my hair. “Penny for your thoughts?”
Here’s what I was thinking: that gorillas will lie to deflect blame from themselves. That chimps deceive. And monkeys will sit high in a tree and pretend there’s danger, even when there isn’t. But not elephants. An elephant will never pretend to be something she’s not.
Here’s what I said: “I was just wondering if we’re ever going to get to do this in a bed.”
A white lie. What was one more?
The land in South Africa often looks parched, its heels and elbows cracked with drought, its valleys baked red by the sun. This sanctuary, by comparison, was a lush Garden of Eden: verdant hills and damp fields, flowering, muscled oak trees with their arms bent in fourth position. And, of course, there were the elephants.
There were five Asian elephants, one African, and another African on the way. Unlike in the wild, the social bonds here were not formed by genetics. Herds were limited to two or three elephants, which had chosen to roam the property together of their own accord. There were some elephants, Thomas told me, who just did not get along; there were some who preferred to be on their own; there were others who didn’t move four feet away from their chosen companion.
It surprised me, how much the philosophy of the sanctuary was like ours in the field. Just like we might want to rush in and save a gravely injured elephant, we wouldn’t, because it would disrupt nature. We took our lead from the elephants, and considered ourselves lucky to be able to watch unobtrusively. Likewise, Thomas and his staff wanted to give his retired elephants as much freedom as possible, instead of micromanaging their existence. They might not be released into the wild in their dotage, but this would be the next best thing. The elephants here had spent most of their lives being hooked and chained and beaten to force behavior. Thomas believed in free contact—he and his staff still went into the enclosures to feed the elephants and to medically treat them if necessary—but behavior modification was done only with reward and positive reinforcement.
Thomas took me around the sanctuary on an ATV so that I could get my bearings. I rode behind him, my arms wrapped around his waist and my cheek pressed into the warmth of his back. The gates were designed with openings small enough for the vehicles to pass through, but too small for an elephant to escape. There were separate enclosures for the Asian elephants and the African elephants, and each had its own barn—although right now, Hester was the only African elephant in hers. The barns themselves were giant hangars, so clean that you could practically eat off the floors. Heaters ran through the concrete to keep the elephants’ feet warm in the winter, and heavy straps hung on the doors, like the long fabric tongues of a car wash, so that heat could be retained in the winter but the elephants could choose to go in and out. There were automatic watering mechanisms in each stall. “It must cost a fortune to run this place,” I murmured.
“A hundred and thirty-three thousand dollars,” Thomas answered.
“Each year?”
“Each elephant,” he told me, and laughed. “God, I wish it were per year. I sank everything into securing the land, when I saw the property advertised. And we let Syrah sell herself, by inviting all the neighbors and the press to come see what we were doing. We get donations, but that’s a drop in the bucket. Produce alone costs about five thousand bucks per elephant.”
My Tuli elephants had years of drought, where you could see the macramé knots of their spines and the grooves of their ribs beneath the skin; South Africa was different from Kenya and Tanzania, where the elephants always looked comparatively fat and happy to me. But at least my elephants had some food. The property of the sanctuary was vast and verdant, but there would never be enough brush and vegetation to support the elephants here; and they did not have the luxury of roaming hundreds of miles along elephant corridors to find more—nor did they have a matriarch to lead them there.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to what looked like an olive barrel, strapped to the steel grid of the stall.
“A toy,” Thomas explained. “There’s a hole in the bottom, and inside is a ball that’s stuffed with treats. Dionne has to put her trunk in and move the ball around if she wants to get the treats out.”
As if he’d called her, at that moment an elephant swept through the whispering straps of the doors into the barn. She was small and speckled, with a dusting of hair on the top of her head. Her ears were tiny, compared to those of the African elephants I was used to, and ragged around the edges. The bony ridges over her eyes were pronounced, a hooded cliff. Those eyes were big and brown, so thickly lashed that they could have put a model to shame, and they were riveted on me—the stranger. I felt as if she was trying, intensely, to tell me a story, yet I was not fluent in her language. Suddenly, she shook her head, the same in-your-face warning behavior I was used to seeing at the game reserve when we inadvertently invaded the space of a herd. It made me smile, because her smaller ears didn’t quite have the same intimidation factor. “Asian elephants do that, too?”
“No. But Dionne was raised in the Philadelphia Zoo with African elephants, so her attitude’s a little bigger than those of most of the other Asian girls. Isn’t that right, gorgeous?” Thomas said, sticking out his arm so that she could sniff at it with her trunk. From nowhere, he produced a banana, and she delicately took it from Thomas’s hand and tucked it into the side of her mouth.
“I didn’t know it was safe to keep African and Asian elephants together,” I said.
“It isn’t. She got hurt during a shoving match, and after that, the zoo staff kept her segregated. But they didn’t have the space for that, so they decided to send her here to the sanctuary.”
His cell phone started to ring. He took the call, turning away from Dionne and me. “Yes, it’s Dr. Metcalf,” he said. He covered the receiver, glancing back, mouthing: The new elephant.
I waved him away and then stepped closer to Dionne. In the field, even with the herds that were used to seeing me, I never forgot that these elephants were wild animals. Wary, I held out my hand, the way I might have approached a stray dog.
I knew Dionne could smell me from where she was, across the stall. Hell, she could probably smell me from outside the barn. Her trunk lifted in an S, its tip swiveling like a periscope. The fingers pinched together, then snaked through the bars of the stall. I stayed very still, letting her brush my shoulder, my arm, my face; reading me by touch. With each exhalation I smelled hay and banana. “Nice to meet you,” I said softly, and she traced her way down my arm, until her trunk found the cup of my palm.
She blew a raspberry, and I burst out laughing.
“She likes you,” said a voice.
I turned to find a young woman behind me, with a flaxen pixie haircut and pale skin, so delicate that my first thought was of a soap bubble destined to burst. My second thought was that this woman was too tiny to do the heavy lifting necessary to take care of elephants. She looked young, hand-blown, fragile.
“You must be Dr. Kingston,” she said.
&nbs
p; “Alice, please. And you’re … Grace?”
Dionne began to rumble. “Oh yes, I’m not paying attention to you, am I?” Grace patted Dionne on her brow. “Breakfast will be ready shortly, Your Majesty.”
Thomas walked back into the barn. “I’m sorry. I have to run up to the office. It’s about Maura’s transport—”
“Don’t worry about me. Seriously, I am a big girl and I’m surrounded by elephants. I couldn’t be happier.” I glanced at Grace. “Maybe I can even help.”
Grace shrugged. “Fine with me.” If she saw Thomas give me a quick kiss before he left to jog up the hill, she didn’t comment on it.
If I had believed Grace to be weak, however, she proved me wrong in the next hour, as she told me what her day was like: The elephants were fed twice, at 8:00 A.M. and then again at 4:00 P.M. Grace had to pick up the produce and make the individual meals. She would sweep out manure, pressure-wash the stalls, water the trees. Her mother, Nevvie, restocked the grain for the elephants and picked up the food left behind in the fields, which was delivered to the compost field; she also tended the garden that grew produce for the elephants and their caregivers, and did office work for the sanctuary. Gideon took care of gate maintenance and landscaping; oversaw the boiler, the tools, and the four-wheelers; mowed the grass; stacked the hay; hauled boxes of produce; and did rudimentary elephant health care and maintenance. All three of them took turns doing training, and being the overnight caregiver. And that was just on an ordinary day—one on which nothing went wrong or when an elephant did not need some special attention.
As I helped Grace organize breakfast for the elephants in the barn kitchen, I thought—again—how much easier my job was at the game reserve. All I had to do was show up and take notes and analyze data; and every now and then help a park ranger or vet dart an elephant or administer some sort of medication to one who was injured. I wasn’t running the wild. And I certainly didn’t have to fund it.