by Jodi Picoult
“Not until she’s done grieving,” I said, and the word triggered my silent wish of just days ago: that one of these elephants would die, so that I could continue my postdoc research.
I felt as if I had subconsciously willed this. Maybe Thomas was right to accuse me. “I’m going to stay here,” I announced.
Thomas stepped forward. “You don’t have to—”
“This is what I do,” I said tightly.
“What about Jenna?”
I saw Gideon take a step away as our voices escalated. “What about her?” I asked.
“You’re her mother.”
“And you’re her father.” For this one night in a year of Jenna’s life, I could pass up putting my baby to bed so that I could watch Maura stand over hers. This was my job. Had I been a doctor, this would have been the equivalent of being paged for an emergency.
But Thomas wasn’t paying attention. “I was counting on that calf,” he murmured. “It was going to save us.”
Gideon cleared his throat. “Thomas? How about I take you back to the cottage, and I’ll have Grace bring a sweater to Alice?”
After they left, I took notes, marking the times Maura ran her trunk along the spine of the calf, and her listless toss of the amniotic sac. I wrote down the differences in her vocalizations—from a cooing rumble of reassurance to the call of a mother trying to get her calf to return to her side—but it was a one-sided conversation.
Grace returned with a sweater and a sleeping bag, and sat with me for a while in silence, just watching Maura and feeling her sadness.
“It’s heavier here,” she remarked. “The air.” Although I knew that the barometric pressure could not be affected by the death of an elephant, I understood what she meant. The quiet pushed in at the soft spot at the bottom of my throat, in my eardrums, threatening to suffocate us.
Nevvie came to pay her respects, too. She didn’t say anything, just handed me a bottle of water and a sandwich and stood a distance away, seemingly shuffling through a deck of memories she didn’t want to share.
Just as I was nodding off, at three in the morning, Maura finally stepped away from the calf. She scooped the baby up in her trunk, but it slipped out of her grasp twice. She tried to lift it by its neck and, failing that, its legs. After several aborted attempts, she managed to curl the body of the baby under her trunk, the way she might lift a bale of hay.
Carefully, slowly, Maura started to walk north. In the distance, I could hear a contact call from Hester. Maura responded softly, muted, as if she were worried about waking the calf.
Gideon and Nevvie had taken the four-wheelers when they left, so I had no choice but to travel on foot. I didn’t know where Maura was headed, so I did exactly what I shouldn’t have done—I ducked through the opening in the gate made for the vehicles and walked in the shadows behind her.
Luckily, Maura was either too lost in her own grief or too focused on her precious load to notice me, slinking along behind the trees as quietly as possible. We walked, twenty yards between us, past the pond and through the birch woods and across a meadow until Maura reached the spot where she liked to come at the hottest part of the day. Underneath a sprawling oak was a carpet of pine needles; Maura would lie on her side and nap in the shade.
Today, though, she placed the calf there and began to cover him with branches, breaking off pine boughs and kicking up fallen needles and tufts of moss, until the corpse was partially covered. Then she stood over him again, making a pillared temple of her body.
And I worshiped. I prayed.
• • •
Twenty-four hours after Maura had delivered the calf, I had still not slept, and neither had she. More critically, she had not had any sustenance. Although I knew she could go without food for a little while, she had to have water. So when Gideon found me, safely on the far side of the fencing again, I asked him for a favor.
I needed him to bring back one of the shallow tubs we used for foot soaks in the barns, and five half-gallon jugs of water.
When I heard the ATV approach behind me, I looked at Maura to see if she’d react. Usually the African elephants were curious when it was feeding time. But Maura didn’t even turn her head in the direction of Gideon’s approach. As he idled to a stop on the path, I said, “Get off.”
What I was doing would have been strictly forbidden in the game reserve, because I was planning to adjust the ecosystem. It was also reckless, because I was encroaching on the personal space of a grieving elephant mother. And I didn’t give a flying fuck.
“No,” Gideon said, figuring out exactly what I was up to. “You climb on.”
So I did, wrapping my arms around him as we drove through the small opening in the fencing, into the enclosure with the elephant. Maura charged, flying toward us with her ears spread and her heavy feet thundering on the ground. I felt Gideon throw the ATV in reverse, but I put my hand on his arm. “Don’t,” I said. “Turn it off.”
He looked over his shoulder at me, wild-eyed, caught between obeying his boss’s wife and his own instincts for self-preservation.
The vehicle shuddered to a stop.
So did Maura.
Very slowly, I got off the ATV and pulled the heavy rubber tub from the flatbed on the back. I set this about ten feet away from the vehicle and then poured several gallons of water inside. Then I climbed behind Gideon again. “Reverse,” I whispered. “Now.”
He backed up as Maura’s trunk twitched in our direction. She stepped closer and drank the whole tub of water at once.
She angled herself, so that her tusks were only inches away from my skin, close enough for me to see the nicks and scars on them from years of use, close enough for her to look me in the eye.
Maura reached out with her trunk and stroked my shoulder. Then she lumbered back to the body of her calf and resumed her position sheltering him.
I felt Gideon’s hand on my back. It was partly comfort, partly reverence. “Breathe,” he instructed.
After thirty-six hours, the vultures came. They circled overhead like witches on their brooms. Every time they swooped, Maura would flap her ears and bellow, scaring them off. That night, it was the fisher cats. Their eyes flashed neon green as they crept closer to the calf’s body. Maura, coming out of her trance as if a switch had been flipped, ran at them with her tusks to the ground.
Thomas had given up asking me to come home. Everyone had given up asking me. I would not leave until Maura was ready to leave. I would be her herd, and remind her that she still had to live, even if her calf couldn’t.
The irony did not escape me: I was playing the role of the elephant, while Maura was acting rather human by refusing to stop grieving her dead son. One of the most amazing things about elephants mourning in the wild is their ability to grieve hard, but then truly, unequivocally, let go. Humans can’t seem to do that. I’ve always thought it’s because of religion. We expect to see our loved ones again in the next life, whatever that might be. Elephants don’t have that hope, only the memories of this life. Maybe that’s why it is easier for them to move on.
Seventy-two hours postdelivery, I tried to imitate the “let’s go” rumble I’d heard a thousand times in the wild and to point myself in that direction, like an elephant would. Maura ignored me. By now, I could barely stand, and my vision was blurred. I hallucinated a bull elephant breaking through the fence, only to realize that it was an ATV approaching. On it rode Nevvie and Gideon. Nevvie looked at me and shook her head. “You’re right, she’s a mess,” Nevvie said to Gideon. And then to me: “You’re going back home. Your girl needs you. If you don’t want to leave Maura alone, I’ll stay with her.”
Because Gideon didn’t trust me to hang on to him without falling asleep, I did not climb behind him on the ATV. I sat in the circle of his arms, the way a child might have done, and nodded off until he parked in front of our cottage. Embarrassed, I leaped off the vehicle, thanked him quickly, and walked inside.
To my surprise, Grace was asleep on t
he couch beside Jenna’s crib—which was in the middle of the living room, since we didn’t have space for a nursery. I woke her and told her to go home with Gideon, and then I went down the hall to Thomas’s office.
Like me, he was wearing the clothes he’d been wearing three days ago. He was bent over a ledger, so engrossed in what he was studying that he didn’t notice I was there. A bottle of prescription medicine was spilled on its side on the desk, and a depleted bottle of whiskey sat sentinel beside him. I thought he might have fallen asleep working, but when I got closer I saw that his eyes were wide open, glassy, sightless.
“Thomas,” I said softly, “let’s go to sleep.”
“Can’t you see I’m busy?” he said, so loud that, in the other room, the baby started to cry. “Shut the fuck up!” he yelled, and he lifted his book and threw it at the wall behind me. I ducked, then bent down to retrieve it. The pages fell open before me.
Whatever had engrossed Thomas so deeply … it wasn’t this book. This was an empty journal, one blank page following the next.
I understood now why Grace had not felt comfortable leaving the baby alone with him.
It was not until after we’d had our wedding ceremony in the Boone Town Hall that I found bottles of pills, lined up like foot soldiers in Thomas’s dresser. Depression, he’d told me when I asked. After his father—his last surviving parent—had died, he could not muster the strength to get out of bed. I had nodded, trying to be compassionate. I was less unnerved by the news of his clinical despair than I was about the fact that I had entered into marriage with someone so quickly I did not even know his parents were both deceased.
Thomas hadn’t had another depressive episode since then that he’d told me about, but to be honest, I hadn’t asked, either. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer.
Shaking, I backed out of the room and closed the door. I picked up Jenna, who quieted immediately, and carried her to the bed I shared with a stranger, who happened to be the father of my child. Against all odds, I fell immediately into a deep, velvet sleep, my daughter’s tiny hand caught like a fallen star in my own.
When I woke up, the sun was a scalpel, and a fly was buzzing in my ear. I brushed at my temple, willing it to go away, only to realize it wasn’t a fly, and I couldn’t get rid of it. It was the distant sound of construction equipment, the backhoe we used to do landscaping work in the sanctuary.
“Thomas,” I called, but he didn’t answer. I scooped up Jenna, who was awake and smiling now, and carried her into his office. Thomas was at his desk, his face pressed to the blotter, completely unconscious. I watched his back rise and fall twice to make sure he was alive, then bundled Jenna into a sling on my back, the way I had learned from the African women who cooked at the camp in the reserve. I left the cottage, climbed on an ATV, and headed toward the northern edge of the sanctuary, where I had left Maura last night.
The first thing I noticed was the hot wire. Maura paced back and forth in front of it, trumpeting and raging, jerking her head and tusking at the ground, coming as close to that wire as she could without it shocking her. Through all of these aggressive gestures, she never took her eye off her calf.
Which was chained onto a large wooden pallet beside Nevvie—who was directing Gideon where to dig a grave.
I drove the ATV through the gate, past Maura, and skidded to a stop a foot away from Nevvie. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
She glanced at me, and at the baby on my back, and with one look let me know what she thought of my mothering skills. “What we always do when an elephant dies. The necropsy samples were already taken this morning by the vet.”
Blood roared in my ears. “You separated a grieving mother from her calf?”
“It’s been three days,” Nevvie said. “This is for her own good. I’ve been with mothers who see their calves suffer, and it breaks them. It happened to Wimpy, and it will happen again, if we don’t do something about it. Is that what you want for Maura?”
“What I want for Maura is for her to make the decision when it’s time to let go,” I shouted. “I thought that was the whole philosophy of this sanctuary.” I turned my face to Gideon, who had stopped digging with the construction equipment and was standing awkwardly to the side. “Did you even ask Thomas?”
“Yes,” Nevvie said, lifting her chin. “He said he trusted me to know what to do.”
“You don’t know anything about how a mother grieves for her calf,” I said. “This isn’t mercy. It’s cruelty.”
“What’s done is done,” Nevvie argued. “The sooner Maura doesn’t have to see that calf, the sooner she’ll forget what happened.”
“She will never forget what happened,” I promised. “And neither will I.”
Not much later, Thomas woke up subdued, his old self. He gave Nevvie a dressing-down for taking matters into her own hands, neatly erasing his own responsibility in the situation for giving her permission when he was not in a sound mental state to do so. He wept, apologizing to me, and to Jenna, for letting the demons in. Nevvie, miffed, disappeared for the rest of the afternoon. Gideon and I removed the straps and the chains from the calf’s body, although we did not attempt to slide him off the pallet. The moment I turned off the electricity on the hot wire, Maura tore it away as if it were made of straw and rushed toward her son. She stroked him with her trunk, backed up to him with her hind legs. She stood beside him for another forty-five minutes, and then slowly lumbered into the birch forest, away from the calf.
I waited ten minutes, listening for her return, but it didn’t happen. “Okay,” I said.
Gideon climbed onto the backhoe and bit into the earth beneath the oak tree where Maura liked to rest. I strapped the calf’s body onto the pallet again, so that he could be lowered into the grave when it was deep enough. I took a shovel Gideon had brought and began to cover the body with dirt, a tiny gesture to add to the fill that Gideon was scooping with the excavator.
By the time I patted down the overturned earth on top of the grave, rich as coffee grounds, my hair had fallen from its ponytail and perspiration ringed my underarms and soaked my back. I was sore and exhausted, and the emotion I’d pushed away for the past five hours suddenly rushed over me, knocking me off my feet. I fell to my knees, sobbing.
All of a sudden Gideon was there, his arms around me. He was a big man, taller and broader than Thomas; I leaned into him the way you press your cheek to solid ground after falling a great distance. “It’s okay,” he said, although it wasn’t. I couldn’t bring Maura’s baby back. “You were right. We never should have separated her from the calf.”
I pulled back. “Then why did you?”
He looked me in the eye. “Because sometimes when I think for myself, I get into trouble.”
I could feel his hands on my shoulders. I could smell the salt of his sweat. I looked at his skin, dark against mine.
“Thought you might need this,” Grace said. She was holding a jug of iced tea.
I did not know when Grace had come walking up; I did not know what she thought, to find her husband comforting me. It was nothing more than that, yet we still jumped apart, as if we had something to hide. I wiped my eyes with the hem of my shirt as Gideon reached out for the jug.
Even when Gideon left, his hand in Grace’s, I could feel the heat of his palms on me. It made me think of Maura standing over her calf, trying to be a haven when, clearly, it was already too late.
JENNA
When you’re a kid, most people actively go out of their way to not notice you. Businessmen and businesswomen don’t look because they’re wrapped up in their phone calls or texts or sending emails to their bosses. Mothers turn away because you’re a glimpse into the future, when their sweet little porker of a baby will become another antisocial teenager, plugged into music and incapable of holding a conversation beyond grunts. The only folks who actually look me in the eye are lonely old ladies or little kids who want attention. For this reason, it’s incredibly easy to hop o
n a Greyhound without ever buying a ticket, which is pretty awesome, because who has $190 lying around? I just hang out near the ragged edges of a family that can’t keep itself together—there’s a shrieking baby and a boy who’s about five with his thumb jammed in his mouth, and a teenager texting so fast that I think her Galaxy is going to burst into flames. When the boarding call to Boston is made, and the frazzled parents try to count the luggage and their offspring, I follow their older daughter onto the bus like I belong with them.
No one stops me.
I know the driver is going to count heads before he pulls out of the station, so I immediately go to the bathroom and lock myself inside. I stay there until I can feel the wheels rolling, until Boone, NH, is an afterthought. Then I slip into the rear seat of the bus, the one no one ever wants because it smells like the urinal cake, and pretend to be fast asleep.
Let’s talk for just a second about the fact that my grandmother is going to ground me until I’m, oh, sixty. I left her a note, but I’ve purposely turned off my phone because I don’t really want to hear her reaction when she finds it. If she thinks that my Internet searches for my mom are ruining my life, she’s not going to be thrilled to hear that I’m stowing away on a bus, bound for Tennessee, so that I can track her in person.
I’m a little pissed at myself, actually, for not thinking to do this before. Maybe it was my father’s anger—totally out of character for a guy who spends most of his time virtually catatonic—that jogged my memory. Whatever it was, something fell into place so that I would remember Gideon, and how important he was to me and my mother. The way my father had reacted to the pebble necklace was like a jolt of electricity, lighting up neurons that had simmered quietly for years, so that banners waved and neon signs flashed in my mind: Pay attention. It’s true that even if I had remembered Gideon before now, I still wouldn’t have been able to figure out where he had gone ten years ago. But I do know somewhere he stopped along the way.
When my mother disappeared and my father’s business was revealed to be bankrupt, the elephants were sent to The Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee. All you have to do is a quick Google search to read about how their board of directors—hearing about the New England sanctuary’s plight—had scrambled to find space to house the homeless animals. Accompanying the elephants was the only employee who’d been left behind: Gideon.