by Deb Caletti
It's like the old days, when I would wait for him, not knowing if he would ever appear. Sea boy and desert girl, the boy in the red jacket who was mourning something. Now I knew what. Now I would mourn too.
I wait and wait, and finally I hear the thwat-thwat of tennis shoes running on wood, see him, my Sebastian. "Jade!"
He's out of breath. "God, I thought you might not wait."
"I'm so sorry." I start to cry. He puts his arms around me. The hurt party is comforting the guilty one, and something is wrong in that. I can feel his heart thumping beneath the cotton of our T-shirts.
"It's not your fault."
"It is."
"No, it's not. It's mine. I'm the one who did this. I'm the one who's put us in this position. It's going to happen. Tess says it's the chance you take every time you get close to anyone in this situation."
"She's mad. She's furious, if I know her."
"At me. At herself."
"What are you going to do?"
I'm afraid I know the answer. I don't even want to ask.
"Mattie, Tess's sister, has another place. She's got a couple of rentals, where they like to vacation.
There's a renter in their place in New Mexico now, so it looks like Montana. Besides, it's by a lake."
"You shouldn't even be telling me."
"Jade. Look at me." He holds me away from him, takes my chin in his hand. "I love you."
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"I love you, too. Sebastian, I do."
"Jade, I want you to come. I want you to come with us."
The moment, it's as if it is suspended in midair. I look at him. Sea boy to my desert girl. He holds me with his eyes, and it is easy. So easy.
"Yes," I say.
"Yes? Are you kidding? Yes?" Sebastian grabs me to him. Kisses me hard. "I want you," he says.
"I want you, too."
"Oh, my God, I can't believe you said yes." He's talking fast now. "You said yes, oh, my God. I was so afraid you wouldn't. Couldn't. Oh, God, we've got to hurry."
"Okay," I say. I'm not sure what I feel. Sad, angry, excited, thrilled! Everything is colliding too fast. "What do we do?"
"We're leaving tonight."
"Okay," I say.
"Meet us back here. It's going to take us a while to pack. Say, midnight? Start of a new day. Start of a new life." "I'll be here."
"You should probably let them know. Your family. Talk to them, write a note, something. Make sure they know you're all right. That it's what you want. So no one has to come looking."
"I can handle that part."
"Jade, I love you. I've got to go." He kisses me again. "Bye. God, you said yes!" "Yes," I say.
This is what I do. This is what someone who is going to run away does, if you can call a legal adult a runaway. She walks to Dairy Queen. She steps into the coolness, where 270
everything is red and white and there are big plastic pictures of mountainous glops of ice cream covered in various mildly gruesome-looking sauces. Where there are two boys working behind the counter, wearing paper triangle hats and flinging rubber bands at each other to get her attention. She sits at a table across from a mother with a baby in a high chair, the baby with a chocolate-covered chin, and another child, sex indeterminate, holding a wobbling, heartbreak cone. It's going over, and when it does, the kid's gonna scream. Above all, she wonders if we feel more regret for the things we do or for the things we don't do.
I sit in that Dairy Queen for over two hours. I count how many people have Chocolate Fudge Supremes, how many have dipped cones (chocolate and butterscotch), how many have banana splits (fewer than you'd think), how many have Brownie Delights (a lot). I could tell you the figures if I hadn't thrown away the napkin with the pen slashes on it (pen borrowed from boy number one. Pen snitched from Horizon Home Mortgage by someone) on my way out the door.
I walk back to the bus stop, several miles. I count sidewalk tiles. Then lampposts. I count off the words one mother had said to her kid in Dairy Queen (One Blizzard, one Peanut Buster Parfait, neither on my survey). Justin, you are going to be the death 0/ me, I count, starting on my thumb until I end on my pinkie. I sit in the back of the bus, like the troublemakers do. I stretch my legs out on the seat. People pleaser? I say to Abe in my head. Ha!
It's just after eleven when I get home. Oliver is asleep, Mom is in her room with the light off, and Milo is curled up on the couch where he isn't supposed to be. The only one awake is 271
Dad, as I can tell from the the line of yellow light under the basement door.
I step carefully to my room. I avoid every creak in the floor, and I know where they all are. I knock on my doorframe three times, oh, so softly. My mother has put my backpack on my bed and I empty it. I stuff it full of clothes, summer things, which don't take much space, and a sweatshirt, which does, so I decide to wear it. Same with jeans. I think about taking a patron saint candle, realize it's stupid. I remove my wad of money from my underwear drawer, zip it into my pencil pouch. Address book. Small photo album. Picture taped on my computer of Hansa and Chai and Damian. Really, it's all I need. I sling my backpack over my shoulder. Creep back into the hall. But the light is on now in the bathroom. The door is open. There is the sound of peeing.
Floodgates.
Oliver appears, with his aboveground-mole eyes. He squinches at me.
"Flush, Oliver."
"I forgot. I'm asleep."
"You need to go before bed," I say.
"I did!"
"It sounded like Niagra Falls."
"I'm thinking I just have a too-happy bladder," he says.
I want to laugh; instead, a loss so great overtakes me, I almost cry. He shuffles down the hall.
His hair sticks up badly in the back. His pajamas have baseballs on them.
His back disappears into his room. The darkness swallows him up. And that's when I know I'm not going anywhere.
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Part Four
Toward a Lava-Lamp Sky
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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
There comes a time when an elephant clan must split up. Sometimes this comes after the death of a matriarch, when bonds weaken with the new leader. More often, it is a simple necessity during a drought or the feeding season, when the group is too large to successfully find nourishment, when it is better for their survival to break apart than to stay together. Sometimes the reasons are social--positive experiences in another clan may result in an individual's decision to "leave home," to establish themselves and become members in a new herd . . .
--Dr. Jerome R. Clade, The Fundamentals of Animal Behavior
"You know, even if you go to him sometime, there's the chance you won't stay together. Maybe a good chance. This is your first important relationship. The beginning of the story, not the final answer. If you went sometime, there'd be that possibility-- that you don't know the end result, but that that's okay anyway," Abe says.
"What do you mean, 'if'?" I say. "It seems . . . out of the question."
"If," Abe says. "It's a beautiful word. If is a key to any locked door."
I graduate with my class, wear the cap and gown, shake with one hand, take the diploma with the other, smile for the photo.
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I make a late-night confession to Jenna and Michael about my relationship with Sebastian, keeping my boundaries drawn about some parts, as Abe suggested. I cry, and Jenna hugs me, but it all seems to suggest a conclusion I don't feel. I basically live at the elephant house after graduation--between trips to the airport, that is. Good-bye to Jenna, heading to Colorado Christian University; good-bye to Akello, heading home to Uganda; good-bye to Michael, off to Johns Hopkins. I'm hollowed out, the one left behind. I realize that there is a stretch of freeway, a few miles between the airport and town, that is so laden with sadness and bittersweet joy, hundreds and thousands of comings and goings and the loss of ch
ange and moving on, so much emotion seeped into the pavement and the surrounding earth on those trips of dropping off departing loved ones, that it should be called the Zone of Heartbreak.
I started classes at the University of Washington in the fall. The large campus lined with cherry trees and brick pathways and ornate buildings studded with grimacing and grinning gargoyles was overwhelming at first. I read my map and handled it, except for one near attack when I walked into a class of three hundred students, stood at the top of the aisle, and felt like I might fall. Fall? Fail? I slept until eight, arrived late sometimes because I could, imagined I was one mere Copper River salmon in a sea of them, spawning and swimming upstream. I was happy to be indistinguishable. Happy to move because others were moving, following their direction. That way, I didn't have to think. I wouldn't have to think about Sebastian at that house on the lake, about Tess making pancakes on Sunday morning, about waking up to the smell of bacon and how much Bo was growing in my absence. I could concentrate on the professor's 277
voice booming from the microphone, If we take Williams literally, we may think he means that life itself is a process for discovering meaning ... I could focus on the words in thick textbooks and on formulas and diagrams instead of playing over and over again the sound of Sebastian's voice on the phone when he called me from Goat Haunt Lake, the crackling faraway sound of it, the What? I can barely hear yous. The I miss yous. If the person in front of me at the campus cafe reached for a dish of Jell-O, so would I. If I had allowed my mind to open to my own wants and desires, my insides would remember to keen over each of his sentences spoken over distance.
The pain of being without him--butterflies crashing against rocks. I would then remember that other phone call, those words: I can't come, Sebastian. His own: I knoiu. I understand.
My mother's single action on the phone that day was apparently enough to soothe her conscience.
She didn't pursue it further, which meant she would be no match for Tess. My mother and I made necessary peace. We didn't speak about it. We just let time do its little thawings. I didn't have enough energy to be angry, and she seemed sad, herself. I had thought it was because of our wobbly relationship, her loss of purpose after my graduation, leaving only Oliver for her to shadow. But then my father finished his train set.
"Come and see," he said. We all tromped down the stairs, Milo racing to get in front and making our passage down perilous. We stood in front of his miniature world, now completed. The tiny people in the tiny town, the cars, the shops, that stretch of road going out, out into the forest, to a house by a river. It was beautiful. Mom started to cry. The next day, he told us he would be moving out for a while. It would be a trial separation.
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They needed time to think. He had already found a house to rent. On the shores of the Snoqualmie River, on the east side, out by North Bend, where there was no big city and restaurants in every cuisine, where his commute would be over an hour each way, but where the trees got thick and the river tumbled wild and cold. He could fish there. He'd forgotten that when he was a kid, he'd liked to do that. He would teach us, too. Fishing, the expectation of good things.
"Are they getting a divorce, Jade?" Oliver asked.
Desert, cactus, lands from the beginning of time. Ancestors who survived, who were hardy and strong during every moment in the history of the earth.
"I don't know," I said.
"They can't get divorced. They have us."
"Oliver, there's something you need to know--are you listening? You know how to handle this.
You can handle anything that comes your way and be okay. No matter what."
"Flask of Healing."
I tapped his chest. "Here."
Delores took to baking. She'd bring in cookies and brownies and oat bars. Muffins and breads and cinnamon rolls.
"You're too thin," she'd say. And she'd leave a second plate on Damian's desk, sticky, gooey, enticing nourishment, sometimes still warm, covered in steamed-up Saran Wrap. She was taking care of the fatally ill again, the heartbroken. Jum had pulled through her last scare, but Damian had gotten word she wasn't eating again. Our elephants were flourishing, though. Onyx was as bonded to Delores as Flora to her tire. Hansa was growing large and strong, and Tombi and Bamboo had tossed a new tree trunk into the electrical fence in spirited enthusiasm.
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One day not long after my father had packed a few Hefty bags of belongings into his BMW and showed us his place for the first time (You have no furniture, Oliver had said. It's like camping, he had answered. In a house.), Damian calls me into his office.
"Jade. I just want to tell you that, first, I have really enjoyed coming to know you."
"No," I say. I know what he is telling me. But he can't. I refuse to hear it.
"But, Jade, I must."
"No. No, you can't."
"I have to."
"Everyone is leaving." I start to cry. I can't help it. Not Damian, too.
"Oh, little one," he says. He comes around from his desk, puts his arm around me. He is strong, from all those years of working with elephants, training them, caring for them, loving them.
"You can't go," I sob.
"I must go back to Jum. When you raise an animal, you love it like your own child. I know her thoughts, her needs. She wonders where I am, and I can't bear it."
"We need you too. Damian, we need you." My heart hurts. I don't know how much more hurt it can take.
"You know that elephants have your pain, my pain. They're not separate from us. Their bonds last a lifetime. I must go to her."
"No ..."
"You, you see?" He takes my hands, grasps them firmly. "You are not vulnerable anymore like you were when you first came. You are living up to your name."
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I am quiet. I don't know what he means.
"Jade," he says. "You don't know this? Jade, the substance-- its nature. One of the strongest materials. Stronger than steel."
"I don't feel strong," I say. He can't leave. He can't. It's too much.
"Ah, but you are. You needed your herd as a vulnerable calf, but now you are so much stronger.
Like Hansa!" He laughs, but I don't feel like laughing with him.
"You don't need your herd to protect you," he says. "But Jum, her herd is too small. Only my brother and his wife. I have money to buy her from Bhim and bring her home."
"I will miss you. You have given me so much." I am crying hard.
"And you, too, have given me. I am so proud. Now, you are a real mahout."
In the spring, the cherry blossoms rain down on the University of Washington campus like snow.
They lie on the brick paths in drifts, as the gargoyles grin in nice-weather mischief. The air is sweet with the perfume of a girl in a summer dress, the water of the lake sparkly like it's keeping a nice secret. The elephants are happy too. Rick Lindstrom, who looked funny at first behind Damian's desk, put all the things he'd learned in grad school to use. He added auditory stimulation (classical music, cowbells, chimes--Onyx vocalized like crazy at Mozart; Delores preferred Vivaldi), built an enrichment garden full of treats, had us all hang ice blocks with bits of frozen vegetables inside (heavy!). He brought in a backhoe to dig a mud wallow (a big ditch filled with water--Tombi liked the hose, too), and had Elaine and me drape one of the pine trees with bits of fruit, like
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it was Christmas. Pictures accumulated on the walls of the elephant house. First, the photos of Damian with all of us around his "Best Wishes" good-bye cake, and then photos sent from faraway, with exotic stamps on the envelopes. Damian, wearing a turban now, smiling broadly.
Jum, with her trunk around his waist; Jum, grabbing the hem of Damian's wife, Devi's, skirt. A new stone house. Damian with his brother. Jum in the river with Damian hugging her neck, his pant legs rolled up to his knobby knees.
I would drive Oliver out to visit Dad. We'd wind through the trees and bump down his gravel road. The river that h
is tiny house was on roared and churned, and you could hear the rocks under the water tumbling against each other. We would walk down the riverbank with him.
Sometimes we would just walk, not talk. Other times, we would ask him questions, and he would tell us things we didn't know. How as a child he wanted to be an astronaut; that at age eight he had fallen in love with his third-grade teacher, Mrs. Edwards; that he had taken art classes in college. He bought a bed. Then a couch, and a table and chairs. Self-help books, which I gave him a bunch of shit about, were stacked up, travel guides, too. He wasn't black-and-white to me anymore, nor was he hazy shades of gray. Instead, it was more like he was beginning to have bits of color; jigsaw pieces with fragments of pictures I hoped would one day make a whole.
Stereotypes are fast and easy, but they are lies, and the truth takes its time.
We'd drive home and Oliver and I would be both sad and quiet, until one day I'd had enough of the funeral and told Oliver we needed a french fry taste test. We stopped at a bunch of fast-food joints on the way home (five was all we could
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handle), ordered a large, and compared and contrasted. McDonald's--hot and soft and salty; Burger King--bumpier, crunchy; Wendy's--wide, thick; and so on. The winner: this little place called Hal's, where your face broke out from the grease just driving up to it. Every ride home from then on, we'd stop. Funerals are happier with fries.
My mom cried a lot and spent too much time closed up in her room. But right around the time the cherry blossoms started to fall, she came out. Spring, renewal, new life, second chances, air so delicious you wish you could drink it. She started seeing a counselor, got a job as a library assistant at Oliver's school. She made a friend there, Nita, and they went to a concert together--
Mom voted with Onyx and liked Mozart.
One day I come home from the elephants and no one is around. The doors and windows are open, Venetian blinds clack serenely against the sills.
"Mom!" I call. "Oliver!"
"Out here!" she yells.
"Sis! Come on! Come out! Hurry!"
I would have been alarmed, but his voice is excited. The kind of voice you get when the UPS