The Elephant's Girl

by Celesta Rimington

  “Oh.” I reach across the table and place my hand right next to hers. “I’m sorry, Miss Amanda.”

  Miss Amanda stands up from the table. “Well, haven’t I poured enough vinegar on the day! Where are my manners? Would you like some biscuits or cookies?” She goes to the cupboard and pulls out a plate. “Aren’t you going to drink your tea this time?”

  “Tea?” And then I remember.

  Lunch.

  Lunch with Roger.

  “Oh shoot!” I glance at the clock. It’s twelve-thirty-five. “I’m sorry, Miss Amanda, but I have to go! I’m late for lunch with Roger!”

  I nearly trip over the table legs getting out of my seat.

  “Goodness! Well, I guess you’d better skedaddle.” Miss Amanda beats me to the door and opens it for me. “Thank you for coming, Lexington. It’s always a pleasure.”

  I hurry down the steps into the humid blast of summer heat. Miss Amanda’s trailer must still have some sort of power to be so comfortably air-conditioned inside.

  “Goodbye, Miss Amanda!” I call as I leap over an awning pole.

  “Come again soon and we’ll work some more on that lost treasure box.” Her voice has a slight echo to it as it sails through the trees.

  And then I realize I never showed Miss Amanda the train ticket that I found beneath the gift shop floor. And no matter how much I like Miss Amanda Holtz or how much I believe she is telling the truth as she remembers it, it seems more than ever that either she must have left Angus Fenn’s money at the circus or she really did steal it.

  My tennis shoes slap against the parking lot pavement. Scratches on my right leg sting where I brushed past a thorny weed at the woods’ edge. I’ve avoided the worst weeds before, but this time I was in too much of a hurry and didn’t see it coming. My radio thumps against my hip as I run. I yank it from my waistband and press the call button.

  “Willow to Hostler.” It comes out breathless and unsteady as I run right through the main gate, flashing my pass at the college student at the ticket booth.

  “Hostler here,” Roger answers.

  I veer right at the lion pride statue. “I’m on my way down,” I say into the radio. “Just came in the main gate.”

  The Wild Eats Café is at the bottom of the zoo hill, just after the seals and sea lions at Harbor Reef. My throat stings, and my chest feels like it will burst. Running through the woods and up the sloping parking lot is a long way all by itself, but when you add the distance across the zoo, it’s massive. I keep running, though, and pass the turnoff to the Leighs’ house.

  “Thanks, Willow. See you soon.” It’s hard to tell through the radio with the hum of people and the whir of wind whether Roger is disappointed or not. At least I had my radio and could call him this time.

  I reach the sea lions, and the orange building of the Wild Eats Café comes into view as I round the Harbor Reef maintenance building. I have another pressing feeling in my chest that I don’t think is related to running. It was bad enough when I didn’t show up without telling Roger last time. Doing it again feels a hundred times worse. Roger doesn’t ask a lot of me. I’m picturing him sitting at our outside table, the one with the best view of the birds. I think of him eating alone and watching the path for a glimpse of me coming to meet him. I can almost see his worried face in my mind, because I saw that look when Mrs. Leigh brought me to the main station in the golf cart.

  And then I see him for real. He’s taking his napkins to the recycling bin.

  “Roger!” I call.

  He sees me and waves.

  I run to the outdoor seating without going through the café first. I stop a few feet away from him, clutching the pain in my side and leaning over my bent knees.

  “Walk it off, walk it off.” Roger chuckles, guiding me to the long path in front of the Swift Aviary. “You had quite the run, huh?”

  I nod, unable to speak amid my heaving gasps.

  “I thought maybe it would be a tight schedule for you to get back from Fisher’s practice in time.”

  He’s not disappointed. He’s not disappointed because he thought I was stuck at Fisher’s practice and that my return to the zoo depended on the bus schedule. I’m still trying to catch my breath, so I have a minute to think. Roger turns with me at the second aviary entrance, and we walk along the path the way we came.

  Would it be better to let him think I was late because of the bus? Maybe I could just let him think it without correcting him. We could avoid disappointed looks, and perhaps a consequence, if I don’t mention visiting Miss Amanda again. But what if Roger finds out from Fisher that I left his practice early? I’ll just have to find Fisher first and talk to him.

  “I’ve got to get back on the train soon,” Roger says. “But let’s find something for you to eat first.”

  “Okay,” I say, still out of breath. “I’m sorry I missed lunch again, Roger.”

  We slow our walk as we reach the café seating again.

  “Well, I get worried when you don’t show up, but I figured you came back as soon as the bus could get you here.”

  His words are little rocks in my stomach. It’s as if my conversation with a ghost was more important to me than Roger, but that’s not at all how I feel. I’m just not sure it will sound right if I explain it. Everything is getting so messy, and I don’t know how to clean it all up.

  “How about I help you tomorrow morning?” I say. “I could give the speech a few times around, so J.P. can switch places with you and give you a break.”

  Roger often lets me give the train speech over the intercom. He says I have a better voice for it. His voice is so deep that the intercom speakers vibrate and make his words difficult to understand, but Roger is the engineer, anyway. He’s usually in the cab at the throttle. J. P. Felt will often give the speech, or if they happen to have an extra employee available, they take turns.

  “You know what?” Roger says with a smile. “I would like that very much.”

  “Okay.” I’m almost breathing normally again, but I’m completely out of spit.

  “You need a drink,” Roger says.

  He takes me through the café’s employee entrance. He gets me a water bottle, a lemonade, and a deli sandwich from Lucile, the café manager. We have to pay for zoo food, but at employee discount prices, it costs almost the same as going to the grocery store for everything ourselves. I do look forward to the occasional home-cooked dinner, though. Roger is a master of marinades and barbecue.

  The people are lining up behind the gates at the train stop in front of the café. Roger pulls out his engineer’s watch.

  “It’s time for me to get going. Do you and Fisher have plans?”

  “I’m going to go see him right now,” I say. “We have to talk about baseball.” We really have to talk baseball—about how I went to watch him play and then left without seeing a single bit of baseball or saying goodbye. I take a big drink of my water, but it’s difficult to get it to go down.

  “Well, stay out of trouble, okay? Isabel radioed me this morning and said you’ve worked off your debt to the gift shop.” Roger keeps two radios on the train with him—one set to match my channel, and one set to the channel for the rest of the zoo.

  “Oh. That’s good.”

  “And keep that radio with you. Just like the grounds crew.”

  I promise, although I’m especially tired of the heavy thing hanging off my waistband after my long run. I wish Roger would just consider getting cell phones.

  “Maybe you can come on a round trip later today. I’ve got the new speech all ready. You could try it out.”

  Roger’s been working on the new speech for a while. I’d like to give it a try, but it’ll have to wait. “Maybe tomorrow…”

  He smiles and says, “I know, I know. You and Fisher have plans.” I walk with him to the engine, and he p
ulls on his engineer’s hat. J. P. Felt and one of the student employees take tickets at the gate. Roger climbs the steps and waves at me from inside the cab, just as Fisher’s voice comes through Roger’s zoo-wide radio.

  “Slugger to Willow, where are you?”

  Fisher is a very good listener when it’s important. I return his Dodgers hat to him without a mark on it. I explain the whole thing about the ball field and about the girls and how they recognized me from school. I tell him what Tae called me, and how I felt like Karana in her canoe (which he hasn’t read, but I try to explain that part of the story anyway). He doesn’t say anything until I finish. As I said, he’s a very good listener.

  “Okay,” he says.

  But I can tell it’s not okay. He said he missed the eleven-forty bus because he couldn’t find me. He said he looked all around the ball field and in the bleachers. He asked some girls to check and see if I was in the girls’ bathroom. He wasn’t going to leave without me.

  I’ve been disappointing a lot of people lately, and I’m running out of ideas for how to make it up to them.

  I try, with Fisher, by helping him with his chores, but Mr. Leigh gives out a big sigh when we ask what Fisher needs to do today.

  “Fisher, I’m calling it good. I’ll tell Frank you’ve worked off your punishment.” Mr. Leigh rubs his forehead with his fingertips. He hasn’t shaved for a couple of days and has a sunburn on top of his tan. He looks like he did in some of his photos from Kenya. “Thomas and I have a big evaluation coming up for the elephants, and I have a meeting about that Ashby family party. They want to pay big bucks to rent the zoo for the evening and send up some paper lanterns, and my crew still has to figure out an acceptable alternative.” He takes a sip of his coffee. “I don’t have the mental energy to come up with one more thing.”

  Mr. Leigh picks up a clipboard from his desk and walks us to his office door. “But thanks for offering to help him, Lex.”

  Fisher mutters something under his breath as we leave Mr. Leigh’s office.

  “What did you say?” I ask.

  “Nothing.” Fisher kicks at the gravel path that leads from the Wild Kingdom Education Center to the back of the Birds of Prey Amphitheater.

  “Yes, you did. You said something.”

  Fisher turns to look at me. His hair is pretty wild from being sweaty in his ball cap for hours. He stuffs his hands into his pockets. “I said, ‘You should offer to help, since you’re the reason we got in trouble.’ ”

  “I…” Heat floods from my neck into my face. “Wait…you wanted to do it. You propped open the gift shop door so we could sneak in there. I didn’t make you do it.”

  He shrugs.

  “I thought you said it was fine this morning. You weren’t upset about it before. Besides, your dad said you’re done. You don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

  “Yeah, well…” Fisher shakes his head and looks at me like he’d rather be anywhere else than here. “I think I was fine about it this morning.”

  “Is this about the baseball practice? I told you why I left. I didn’t mean to take off like that. I really did want to see you play.”

  “Yeah, I know,” he says, and continues walking toward the amphitheater.

  I follow him.

  “Fisher?”

  “What?” he answers softly and keeps walking. He doesn’t wait for me, but he goes slow enough that I can catch up.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I’m going to help the keepers with the raptors. I want to learn more about falconry.”

  “Oh.” I never knew Fisher was interested in that. I wonder if this is a new interest.

  He pauses at the door. The words Stage Door are printed on it, but it’s really the employee entrance to where they set up the raptors before a show. The Birds of Prey Amphitheater is fairly new, and I don’t know the keepers who work with the birds very well. I’ve never gone in this door.

  “Lately, it seems like everything is about you,” he says. “I’m doing this right now.” His voice stays calm, but the way he says it, with stress on the words I’m and this, makes it clear he doesn’t want me to come along.

  “Oh. Okay.” The words sneak past my lips without my permission. I want to tell him I made a big effort to take care of his Dodgers hat. I want to tell Fisher that the bullies weren’t the only reason I left school, but that I also stopped going so he wouldn’t keep getting into trouble for me. I want to say that being called “Elephant Girl” makes me feel even more lost, and that I couldn’t stay at the ballpark and feel that way. But instead, I stand there doing nothing and saying nothing. My face feels like it’s painted on—like the clowns in Miss Amanda’s photo album.

  “See ya later,” Fisher says.

  I don’t say sorry or anything, although I do feel sorry. Very sorry.

  Fisher goes in the Birds of Prey stage door without me, and the only place I can think to go is to see Thomas and Nyah. But I’m pretty sure Roger hasn’t talked to Mr. Bixly yet about lifting his ban on me visiting the elephant barn. I knock on the side maintenance door anyway. Thomas never comes. So I walk around to the observation path and pavilion above the Grasslands. It’s full of zoo guests and strollers and voices everywhere. I’m a stranger surrounded by strangers.

  I wriggle through the crowd until I find a place near the fences at the overlook. Nyah is down by a tall post and a dangling feeder. She reaches her trunk high, rears onto her hind legs, and pulls clumps of hay from the feeder.

  The rest of the elephants are spread around the habitat, doing what they do. Asha, the herd matriarch, is lying down, resting in a bit of shade and watching her daughter, Zaire. Jazz plays with a giant red ball around the perimeter fences, stopping only to investigate the puzzle feeders. The feeders are brainteasers with rewards for the elephants—tires and spinning boxes mounted on poles that release a treat as the elephants play with them. Zaire is examining a metal barrel that hangs on a tether above the barn door. Nyah has elephants around her, but to me she looks lonely—maybe because I know she misses her mother and her circus herd.

  Zaire’s playing is becoming almost agitated. She’s walking under the hanging barrel, lifting it with her trunk, and then letting it drop on its short tether until it slams hard against the barn with a piercing steel clang. She does it again and again.

  “Elephants should not be kept in captivity,” a lady says with a hint of anger in her voice. I’ve heard these conversations at the zoo before, and I always listen in. “They should be sent back to their natural habitat, not put on display.”

  “It says here that two of the elephants were part of a group rescued from a drought in Swaziland,” says another lady, reading the information posted on a sign.

  The two of them are leaning on the overlook railing a few feet away from me. One of them is holding a soda and a box of popcorn from the train station. The other wears a wide-brimmed sun hat and has smeared white sunscreen on her face and bare shoulders.

  “People need to let elephants alone,” says the first lady. “They are incredibly smart animals. Don’t you think they would migrate to find water if there was a drought and if humans didn’t interfere?”

  “It says their herd was going to be killed if they stayed,” says the lady in the hat, still reading the sign. “Maybe human interference saved their lives from other human interference.”

  The first lady makes a dissatisfied grunt and sips her soda. “Too bad we can’t ask the elephants what they think.”

  Yeah. Too bad I can see Nyah’s thoughts but I can’t ask her questions. And I think about how Nyah has never lived outside of captivity. Would she even know how to survive in the wild?

  Asha gets up from the dirt and saunters over to Zaire, who is still banging the barrel against the barn. Zaire entwines her trunk with Asha’s and then puts her trunk into her mother’s mouth—s
omething they do that seems to show affection or trust. Asha then lifts her trunk and presses the underside of it against Zaire’s. It calms her. I can imagine their communication—low and long and passing simultaneously through the air and the earth at their feet. I wonder if they talk about Swaziland.

  I glance back at Nyah, alone at the feeder. She reaches with her trunk for another clump of hay, and she sidesteps as she brings it to her mouth. Now she is facing my direction. She is aware of me. I feel it like a warm blanket. I wait and concentrate, hoping to feel the rumblings and see her thoughts, but nothing comes. I have to get closer to her and look into her eyes if I’m going to know any more of Nyah’s thoughts.

  And that’s when I spot Thomas on the lower sidewalk between the Grasslands and the Wild Kingdom Education Center. I push through the crowd and hurry down the hill to catch up with him.

  “Thomas!”

  Thomas sees me coming and waits for me, shielding his eyes from the sun. When I reach him, he says, “Mr. Bixly said you can’t go inside the barn anymore, Lex.”

  “I know,” I say. “Roger is going to talk to him about that.”

  “But,” Thomas continues like he didn’t hear the part about Roger, “he didn’t say anything about the back fences.”

  “Oh,” I say, feeling light and sunshine in his words.

  “And if my theory is correct, you only need to get close to her. Is that right?”

  I swallow and nod.

  Thomas takes in a big breath and sighs it all out. “She’s communicating with you, isn’t she?”

  I nod again.

  “I knew it!” Thomas smacks his leg with his hand. “How in the world? Humans can’t hear those low frequencies.”

  “I don’t know, Thomas. But I don’t hear sounds. I see pictures.”

  “Pictures, huh? Like telepathy?”

  I shrug. “If that means from her brain to mine, then yes.”