The Mourning Parade

by Dawn Reno Langley

  Forty-Five

  Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

  -Louise Erdrich

  Natalie quickly injected Peter with two more doses of anti-venom and lifted his arm above the wound, making sure it was elevated above the heart. Thankfully, he’d been wearing long sleeves, so the venom hadn’t gone directly into a vein. Still, if they hadn’t gotten back to the clinic as quickly as they had, he surely would have died. Satisfied he was safe, she flew back outside.

  As soon as Natalie came out onto the clinic stairs, Sophie pitched to the right and shivered. She lowered to the ground in slow motion, releasing a long, ragged sigh, as if she were very, very tired. Her sides heaved. Every breath became a struggle.

  Respiratory paralysis.

  “Sophie!” Natalie vaulted the stairs to the elephant’s side. In her hand, she held the giant syringe she’d asked the volunteers to fill with eight vials of anti-venom. She jabbed it into the elephant’s upper thigh near her chest and watched Sophie’s eye flicker. The elephant looked at Natalie, as if saying, I trust you.

  Holding her breath, Natalie placed her shaking right hand over Sophie’s heart and lowered her ear near the elephant’s mouth. Sophie’s breaths were shallow and short. Labored. Her limbs started convulsing uncontrollably.

  “Get me another eight vials. At least thirty thousand units. Now!”

  The blonde girl—Natalie couldn’t remember her name—ran back into the clinic where Peter laid on a cold steel gurney that had last been used as an operating table for a dog who’d been caught in barbed wire and needed 42 stitches. Natalie knew she should be in there with Peter. After all, weren’t human lives worth more than elephants’? Yet, through the clinic’s window she could see at least four people attending to Dr. Peter Hatcher. Out here in the muddy pathway lay the heroic elephant who had done all she could for a human who had not wanted her to live.

  Natalie angrily wiped away the tears that ran down her face unabated.

  The blonde girl popped back through the clinic doors and wordlessly shoved the refilled syringe into Natalie’s hand.

  “Hang in there, Sophie. Please.” Natalie jabbed the needle into the same area she’d just hit. Emptied the vial. Plugged in another. Repeated the procedure over and over.

  Sophie’s body quivered. Her breath came in big gulps, then one last, long shudder.

  Natalie froze. She scrambled over Sophie’s leg and flipped back her ear, searching blindly with her fingers for the ear artery. She placed her hand there, keeping as still as possible, holding her breath, hoping against hope she’d find a pulse. Each second felt like an eternity. She remained still, reminding herself the cardiac output in an elephant was only 25-35 beats a minute. In a healthy elephant. It would be much slower in Sophie’s state.

  “C’mon, Sophie,” she whispered. “Please, girl.”

  Still nothing.

  Natalie flipped the ear back. Sophie’s eyes closed. Her mouth hung open, tongue lolling. Her breathing stopped. Frantic, Natalie pounded under Sophie’s leg in the heart area, a vain attempt at CPR.

  “No, Sophie. No,” she told the elephant, as casually as if they’d been on one of their walks and Sophie had taken a wrong turn. “Sophie. No. No. No.”

  No response. No breath. No heartbeat.

  Natalie glanced around. Khalan and the nameless volunteer stood beside her. They didn’t know Sophie as well as she did, yet their faces reflected their sadness. She turned away.

  “No!” she screamed. “Oh God, Sophie, no!”

  She fell against Sophie’s legs, her head rubbing the elephant’s bristly skin, her arms around the legs she had often leaned against. “Goddamn you, Sophie. Get up. Look. Look! Get up. Get up!” She flailed at the elephant with fists that had no strength. She wailed and cried and screamed and sobbed until her throat felt raw. She slumped against the elephant’s huge body. Spent. Exhausted. Defeated.

  Natalie didn’t know how long she lay against her friend. When she finally opened her eyes, the sky had dimmed. She sensed she was not alone.

  She turned her head and saw Ali, his magnificent tusks dragged the ground near Sophie’s head. Next to him, Thaya stood, her trunk fondling Sophie’s as a human being would hold another human’s hand.

  A low, vibrant rumbling surrounded Natalie, a sort of hum, the kind of sound that soothes and calms and makes you feel the wonder of nature. Like a hymn. A lament. A dirge.

  She stood and watched the rest of the elephants moving silently down the road toward them. Ten of them. A long, graceful line of gray titans. A funeral parade. They made a half circle around Sophie, each coming to her, one at a time, using their trunks to smell her, lifting their feet, and touching her body with their sensitive foot pads.

  How many stories could be processed that way: where someone had come from, who their family was, what they ate, whether they had given birth, how old they were, how they had died?

  As they felt Sophie’s head, touched her feet, ran their trunks along her backbone, touched the spots where she’d been bit, they rumbled gently and snuffed through their trunks.

  They encircled Sophie, including Natalie in that circle, occasionally reaching out the wet tip of a trunk to touch her hair or her shoulder or her face, as if to comfort her. She let a new wave of tears wash her face, silently, and the herd also became silent for several moments. Then Ali and Thaya moved aside.

  Anurak came forward through the elephants, his eyes large and full of tears. He touched Sophie’s now-still ears, lifting them gently to rub his face with them. Behind him, Decha led the baby Apsara, then he disappeared around the corner of the clinic, as if he knew this wasn’t his place.

  Thaya and Pahpao rumbled as they sidled next to the baby, who lifted her head to Sophie’s leg and ran her tiny trunk along it. She bumped it with her forehead as if begging Sophie to rise, then backed off with a cry.

  Immediately, Thaya and Pahpao reached their trunks to encircle the baby like aunties comforting a niece who had lost her mother.

  “They’ll be your nannies now,” Natalie whispered as Apsara nestled beside her. “They’ll take care of you, little one.”

  Ali lifted his head, his trunk straight up in the air and rumbled strongly, loud and long. The sound vibrated in Natalie’s chest, moving her heart and stirring the breath that had stopped moving through her muscles. He’d been Sophie’s best friend. He had led this mourning parade to her.

  As he turned his massive, wrinkled, dove-grey body, Natalie stood. He paused for a moment and lowered his creviced head, his beautiful golden-brown eyes regarding her with a solemnity that felt both wise and compassionate. She reached her hand out to him, and he responded with his trunk. They touched for a brief second, her fingers to the finger-like growths at the end of his trunk. Gently. Softly. A salute, Natalie thought. An understanding of our common grief.

  Behind him, Thaya and Pahpao gathered Apsara into the herd and the rest of the elephants followed, each of them pausing briefly, touching Sophie’s body in their own individual way, giving her their respect, sharing their sadness.

  Together, the herd walked soundlessly and slowly toward the river, leaving Natalie with Sophie. Anurak hugged Natalie’s waist hard, then he, too, left her.

  It was only then that Natalie raised her head to the sky, letting the soft rain that had begun to fall wash her face.

  Forty-Six

  Three things cannot long be hidden:

  the sun, t
he moon and the truth.

  -Buddha

  “It’s only been two days. I think it’s going to take at least a couple more weeks before you start feeling back to yourself.” Natalie took the blood pressure cuff off Peter’s arm and sat back in the chair.

  It felt strange to be treating him in his cabin, seeing his clothes strewn around on the floor, smelling his morning breath, and feeling the cool smoothness of his skin as she took his vitals. No, that was an understatement. As she studied him now, pale and weak, lying back against the pillows, she wondered how she could have ever been intimidated by him. He was so thin and white that he was almost transparent.

  “I’ve got a question for you,” she said.

  He glanced up at her a bit fuzzily and reached for his glasses on the side table. “Shoot.”

  “Where have you been for the past . . . what is it? A month? Where did you and Karina go?”

  “Karina?”

  “You both left the same night. Where did you go?”

  “I didn’t leave with Karina. I left with Siriporn.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, Siriporn. He wanted to go to Bangkok. For the protests, you know? Karina wanted to go home, so we gave her a ride to the airport.” He adjusted his glasses, then fell back against the pillows. “Must admit I was curious. We had lots of, you know, conversations, Siriporn and I. Yes, conversations,” he said, addressing the surprise on her face. “Political conversations. He told me about all his beliefs. I wanted to know more, so we went to Bangkok together. We protested. Actually, got arrested.” He laughed a bit. A wheezy laugh. It was still hard for him to breathe.

  “Arrested?”

  “Yes, didn’t Mali tell you?”

  “No, I’ve been preoccupied with other things.” She slapped the blood pressure cuff onto the table and turned away. “Is he home?”

  “No, he stayed. Said something about continuing . . . I don’t know.” He wheezed again.

  A long pause. Natalie looked out the window. Her work was done here. She needed to be heading for Apsara’s enclosure.

  “So the day of the cobra . . . you had just come home.”

  “Yes. In fact, I wasn’t here for more than an hour when one of the kids ran up to the office looking for help. I had no clue what was going on, so I went out there.”

  Another pause. The warm breeze rustled through the windows and flipped the pages of a book on his bedside table.

  “When Sophie came, you yelled for Danny. Who’s that?” Peter closed his eyes and groaned a little.

  She had never been so grateful that someone’s eyes were closed.

  “Danny. That’s my son.”

  “Your son? Didn’t know you had a son.”

  If you hadn’t been so intent on destroying me, maybe you would have found that out, she thought. She rose from the chair and made for the door. “I have a few things to do. Talk to you later, okay?”

  “No, wait, wait. Come back here.” He patted the chair.

  Natalie shook her head and forced a shaky smile. She didn’t want to go back, didn’t want to sit on the chair. Didn’t want to talk. Couldn’t. Not to Peter. Not to anyone. If she was going to talk to anyone, it would have been Seth. But he wasn’t here, and part of her was glad he wasn’t, though she thought about him late at night. Missed him in a way that didn’t give her any heartache. She was glad she’d spoken to him, but she still didn’t know what the final film would be like. She’d come to the conclusion that it would be whatever Seth needed it to be, and she had to be okay with that.

  “You know, Natalie, we haven’t exactly had a friendship, but I feel like I can say something to you.” Hatcher pulled the sheet up to his chin and pointed at her. “You’re a very sad woman, Natalie DeAngelo, and I think it’s because of your Danny. Tell me about him.”

  It was a command. She didn’t do well with commands. She reached for the door again.

  “Sit, Natalie. Come, come. Sit. Tell me the story of your son. Tell me about Danny.”

  She shook her head. “I really don’t want to. Not now, Peter.” She’d repeated the story to Seth. She wasn’t ready to do it again, especially to a man she’d spent the better part of this year despising, the man responsible for Sophie’s death.

  He peered at her over the rims of his eyeglasses, then glanced away, smoothed his sheet, thought for a moment and turned back. “I understand, believe me. I know what it’s like to lose a child.”

  That caught her off guard. How could he know? He’d never had a child.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he continued, a slight rasp in his words. “You’re thinking I could not understand since I have not had a child myself. Well, you’re wrong. You’ve not heard me speak about my daughter, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t have one.” He stopped and took a deep breath. “Twelve years ago. A horrendous auto accident. My wife. My daughter.” He stopped again, searching for another breath, but this pause wasn’t because he couldn’t breathe. This appeared to be an emotional pause, not a physical thirst for air.

  “Yes, I was married when you read my dissertation. Happy. But when I had to rewrite it, I became angry. I threw myself into it. Was horrible to live with.” He took a deep breath and let it out shakily. “They went to a birthday party that night. I was too busy to go with them.” He polished his glasses with the corner of the sheet, gave himself a moment to compose his thoughts.

  “For years, I couldn’t talk about them. I sunk myself into work. I performed more emergency operations as the vet on call in North Yorkshire than anyone since World War II. Worked twenty-four hours a day sometimes. Surprisingly, it didn’t take away the memories to work that much.” He laughed, a hoarse and painful sound. “Even now, I can still see the flames that engulfed their car.”

  She let out a short, involuntary moan.

  “Yes, I saw the accident. That’s always been the worst part. Wish I hadn’t, but I did.”

  Natalie studied her fingertips instead of staring at Peter. Suddenly, he wasn’t the man she knew a month ago, and she didn’t know how to handle that. “You blamed me for the accident, didn’t you?”

  “I did. I could never point the finger at myself. I guess because it’s easier to blame someone else for something that . . . that . . . horrible. But now I know. It was an accident. No one’s fault.”

  She let his confession sink in, and when it did, she wordlessly reached for his hand.

  “Now, tell me,” he said softly. His tone kinder, gentler than it had ever been when he spoke to her.

  She watched his face as he listened to a shortened version of her story. She found it easier to tell this time, easier than telling Seth, and thought that maybe this is what Dr. Littlefield meant when she said, “You have to be the sailor, Natalie. You have to tell the albatross story over and over again. Lessen its power over you. Get used to the emotions. Dig deep into them. Expose them. Eventually, you’ll see the story no longer has control over you, is no longer something you fear.”

  When she finished, Hatcher placed his dry hand atop hers. Something in that cold, dry touch awakened her anger and lit another candle under her grief. Sophie’s life for his. Natalie’s story of grief would not include her best friend. Because of this man.

  Swallowing back a sob, she pointed at him, the man she’d just treated. “There was no one—no one, no human, no other animal—who was more humane than the elephant who saved your life. Sophie saved your life. And you wanted to take hers. You wanted to kill her! Do you remember that? Do you?”

  He hung his head. When he looked up again more than a minute later, tears ran down his pale cheeks. “I remember. I know, believe me.”

  “I fucking hope that you never forget that, Peter Hatcher. I hope you live the rest of your life thinking about how Sophie gave up her life for you. I hope you never forget it. Because I won’t.”

  He turned h
is head against the pillow and shut his eyes. “I won’t. Believe me, I won’t.”

  “Enough. We need to stop this. Nothing will come of two people hurting each other.” Andrew voice came from behind. “You both have been through enough pain. You strike out, thinking that others don’t understand. But you do. You both do. It’s time for you both to stop.”

  Natalie turned to look at him as he spoke and felt as though she’d had the life drained from her. She had no fight left.

  “I’m sorry, Natalie,” Peter said quietly. “I’m so sorry.”

  She shook her head slowly and didn’t respond.

  Beyond the cabin, an elephant trumpeted, then a very small one answered, reminding the three of them that there were many important lives to protect.

  Andrew stood, facing Peter and Natalie with a wry smile on his face. “You know, one of the reasons I started this sanctuary is because the best way to treat broken animals is with broken people. Each fixes the other.”

  He placed one hand on Peter’s arm and the other on Natalie’s shoulder. “The dogs here would be lost without you, Peter, and you, Natalie. Don’t you think your life has changed—and so had Sophie’s—as a result of coming into each other’s lives?”

  Natalie knew he was right. She rose and hugged him, then glanced at Peter and nodded. There was nothing more to say.

  Forty-Seven

  Outside the open window

  The morning air is all awash with angels.

  -Richard Purdy Wilbur

  Down the hill, the rooster and his chickens crowed and clucked. Apsara answered with a trumpet and shook her head, flapping her ridiculously large ears. Even at four months old, she’d already developed a bit of an attitude and that made her all the more lovable. The sanctuary crew each scheduled a moment in their days to come and visit her, sometimes to sit and watch, sometimes to take her for a walk, and most often, to share a food treat. The children took turns with Natalie and the mahouts to sleep with the calf at night. But the nannies determined who could see her and when. They took her into their embrace and kept her there, in the middle of their tight group, rebuking her when she misbehaved, saving her when she fell, loving her every hour of every day. As Natalie did.