by Gin Phillips
She does not let herself wonder.
She feels the small cup behind her, dripping.
7:06 p.m.
Looking over the elephants’ domain, Joan can see no animals. She sees only grass and dirt blanched in the moonlight. Her eye is drawn beyond it all—a fifth of a mile across the entire exhibit, maybe? When she has watched the elephants lumbering along, their habitat has appeared endless, but now, as she scans the shape of it, the space does not seem so large. The illusion of Africa persists only up to a thick barrier of pine trees, and past their Christmas-tree edges she sees the iron lines of the zoo train track in the moonlight. Beyond the track, in brief flashes through the trees, she can see streetlights, the lit-up letters of a Walgreens, a stream of cars easing around a curve.
They shock her, the cars. Driving past steadily, lights on, unhurried. Shouldn’t someone have put a stop to people headed out to buy toilet paper or grab a martini? Shouldn’t there be only orange cones and police tape and sirens and possibly tanks and black-armored trucks?
The cars driving by, unconcerned, are unbearable.
Her eyes go back to the hard curves of the train track. Its rails blink silver, only a gleam here and there, catching the moonlight. She focuses on the gleaming. Her uncle used to take her on picnics and fishing trips in the country, and it was a good thing, because if it had been up to her mother, Joan would never have gone anywhere but home, school, and the mall. In the countryside there was nothing but cows and farmland, and the dirt there was dotted with mica, which she could pull apart in thick silver sheets. She thought it must be worth something, but her uncle said no, only shiny, and she pretended that the pieces of mica were meteor fragments. So beautiful, that mica, a revelation. One time she filled a Ziploc bag with it, like a scientist with valuable specimens, and she brought it home to show her mother, who never went to the country—she and Joan’s uncle defied any kind of argument for genes or heredity, they were different creatures entirely. But on that day her mother was plucking her eyebrows, black little apostrophes all over the bathroom counter, and when Joan held out the mica, her mother said, Don’t bring rocks inside the house. Joan was still young enough that she did not give up. She tried to explain, You have to peel off the top layer, and it gets shinier, like treasure, just look under the dusty part, and her mother said something like It’s not actually worth anything, Joan, and of course Joan knew that. But she didn’t have the words to make her mother understand the wonder of it, the loveliness, and her mother wasn’t really listening anyway, and she wouldn’t even look inside the bag. Not a single glance. Her mother stood there, one hand pulling at her forehead, staring into the mirror as bits of her eyebrows floated down.
Joan looks away from the railroad track, rubbing her cheek against Lincoln’s head. He has never seen mica. She would like to show him how to peel it with a fingernail.
Then she hears a snap and a crackling sort of impact, and she is halfway to the ground—down on one knee—curling her body around Lincoln, before she realizes it was probably a branch or a nut. She turns in every direction, seeing nothing but light patches and dark patches and shadows and plants.
She stays low and quiet and watching.
Finally she stands. She cannot bear to consider everything that might happen, here on this spot of concrete. On the concrete ten feet in front of them. Or twenty feet ahead, under the shadows of the massive thatched roof.
She puts one foot in front of the other.
She looks again at the track, which is one smooth circle. Countless times the train has taken her and Lincoln so close to the outer fences that they could have hopped off—the train is so slow—and they could have pressed their hands against the iron or brick of the walls, and they could have been that close to outside.
She has been moving even as she considers the train track. She and Lincoln are still paralleling the elephant exhibit, drawing closer to the thatched pavilion of the snack bar. The speakers are playing “I Put a Spell on You,” and the sound of the singer is startling. She looks ahead, trying to spot the speakers, but she is not close enough yet.
“Can I walk?” whispers Lincoln, and the sound of his voice somehow surprises her as much as the music.
“You want to get down?”
She can count on one hand the number of times she remembers his actually asking to walk when she is holding him.
“Yes,” he says.
So she lowers him to the ground, keeping hold of his hand with her undamaged one. The relief she feels at being freed of his weight—the sudden lightness—is balanced by an emptiness. She tightens her fingers around his. He is stepping closer to the bamboo fencing, pulling her with him.
“What is that?” he asks.
She tries to follow the line of his pointing finger. The elephant exhibit looks astonishing at night—there is no denying it. The low-growing trees and the scrub grass seem to levitate over the swells of the hills, and there is a golden glow to the sand, and it strikes her as some alien landscape, like the moon or Mars.
“That plant?” she asks, noticing a shrub with the look of tentacles.
“No,” he says. “That thing on the ground.”
She looks again, and it takes her several seconds to make out the ink-stain shape on the ground, and she is even slower to recognize what it must be.
The men have killed an elephant.
Its body is wide and dark and solid, but the trunk is curving along the ground, snaking up, and there is a part of her that feels like it is separate from the rest of the body, still alive, struggling to break free and inch its way across the dirt. But it is not moving.
“What is it, Mommy?” Lincoln prods.
“The elephant,” she whispers. As the clouds shift overhead, she thinks she can see the fine hairs on its rough hide moving in the wind.
“Lying down?” says Lincoln.
“Yes.”
“Why is it lying down?”
She could tell him that the elephant is asleep. It is probably the kinder answer, but she does not want to say it. It is somehow insulting to him to lie straight to his face when he has made it through these hours with her, jawbone to jawbone, hand to hand, and also she wants to say the words to someone and he is the one who is here.
“It’s dead,” she says.
“Oh. Did the men kill it?” he asks.
“Yes.”
She cannot stop looking at it. Its tail is wormlike and pitiful.
“What’s its name?”
“I don’t know,” she answers. “What do you think its name was?”
He makes a hum, a considering kind of noise.
She lurches away, pulling him with her, speeding up, annoyed that she has wasted energy and time on the elephant instead of keeping her attention on all the angles and walls and hiding places around them, and he comes with her but his head is still turned toward the elephant. He likes to name things: he has a family of tiny toy rabbits in clothes. One is named Softball and another is named Baseball and there is a brother named Little Bunny No Ears—Muddles ate his ears off—and a sister named Suzie Cat. There once was a baby named Suzie Witch, but Muddles ate him entirely. He has a million plastic football players and a foldable cloth field, and he names and renames the players. One lineman is named Chewed Humpy. There is a receiver named Susan.
“Was?” Lincoln asks.
She has lost the thread of the conversation. “What?”
“Doesn’t he still have a name? Do you not have names when you’re dead?”
“I meant ‘is,’” she affirms. “What do you think his name is?”
“Marshmallow,” he says.
She tightens her grip on his hand.
When he plays with his football guys, he makes his quarterbacks yell out pep talks: Everybody play strong! Play fast! Do we make mean tackles? No! Do we make nice tackles? Yes!
He
is an exceptionally sweet child. It would be easy to hurt him.
He has stopped again. He’s twisted around toward the elephant. Or maybe a moth or a stray leaf has caught his interest.
“Lincoln,” she whispers, bending to his ear. “We have to keep walking. We can’t be looking at things that don’t matter.”
There is so much space out here. So many potential hiding places that she would never notice until someone took a step out and raised a weapon. She looks and looks everywhere, but she knows she cannot see it all.
If she thinks about it—about how much she cannot see—it gets hard to breathe.
Walk faster. Pay attention, but walk faster.
The elephant is yards behind them. They are nearly to the restaurant, with its pavilion and speakers, and another speaker is set into the fencing, she realizes as the music swells, obliterating everything else. Still, she stays pressed to the bamboo fence and the dark strip of grass that the lamplight does not reach. She tugs at Lincoln’s hand. She cannot stand being out here much longer. Not only can she not see everything, but with the music blaring—“Werewolves of London”—she cannot hear anything.
The restaurant is immediately to her right, and the thatched pavilion stretches toward her. But between her and the building is a swathe of illuminated concrete where normally children are running and falling and drinking from juice boxes. The pathways to all the various exhibits come together here, and it is a terrifying wide-open space. If she sets foot on that empty concrete, they will be exposed and she will be deaf to anything but wolf howls and the pounding of the keyboard.
The music is making her head throb.
She decides that they will walk up slightly farther to the turtle exhibit, where a huge tree spreads across the entire concrete walkway and they can cross the concrete under the shadow of the tree. Once she has made the decision, she is set on it, focused. They stay crouched, close to the fence, inching along, and she would not have been distracted except that the music pauses for a few seconds as the howling fades out and the next song begins.
In that moment of quiet, she hears the baby scream. She thinks it is a monkey at first, but then there is a hitch in the scream, a breath being gulped down, and she knows it is no animal. It is a gurgling, furious cry, and it is close. Close enough that she remembers being in bed, the house silent in the wee hours of the morning, Lincoln’s crib in the next room, ten feet away, back when she would wake a split second after he made the slightest sound of discontent, feet on the floor before her eyes were even open.
She jerks her head toward a bench that is a few feet ahead of them—a little viewing area for the elephants—expecting to see the long-haired mother huddled, still shushing the child, but the bench is empty.
Then the music has kicked back up, a disco beat obliterating everything else, and she can almost tell herself that she has imagined it—that her mind is playing tricks on her. But she knows. And she does not have to reach any new decisions: she is only keeping to her planned course as she approaches the bench, set in a zigzagged corner of the fencing, and there is nothing to it but iron framework and the solid shape of a metal trash can on one side.
She pauses, back hunched, still in shadows. There is no one here. There is obviously no one here, no baby, no mother. Lincoln is twisting his fingers in hers, not because he is trying to break free but because he is impatient. She feels him leaning forward, testing whether or not he can hurry her.
There is obviously no one here.
But she pulls Lincoln closer, lining up his back against her legs, and she moves them forward until she has her hands on the cool metal of the trash can, slightly sticky, and she flattens her palms and lifts the lid in one heave. She knows what she will find—even though she tells herself that it will not happen, she knows that it will—and, yes, when the lid is gone, she sees a baby screaming up at her.
She can barely hear it over the music, even as she watches its mouth move. The moonlight is dim but sufficient. Nestled a foot deep inside the can, the baby is on top of a blanket, which is covering most of the actual trash. It is small and soft and wriggling. It is Moses in a basket.
She sets the trash can cover on the concrete, and then she leans in, making shushing sounds that she cannot even hear herself. She looks at the small fingers, reaching. Hands patting. A head fuzzy with dark hair, not a newborn but only a few months old, loosely swaddled in a second blanket, some sort of pastel—green or yellow or white?—but kicked free enough that she can see its onesie, also pastel, and its fat thighs, but mostly she is mesmerized by its rage, its closed scrunched eyes and wrinkled forehead and stretched, open mouth that for all its efforts cannot compete with the speaker system.
That woman—or some woman—has left her child in the trash. In the trash.
It is unthinkable.
Lincoln is pulling at her hand, saying something. She has no idea what. She leans down closer.
“Say it in my ear,” she tells him.
“What is it, Mommy?” he screams, but still she can barely hear him.
He cannot see, she realizes. He is too short to see over the edge of the trash can, and he can hear nothing but the music, and she is standing here, frozen.
“Nothing,” she says, and she is not sure why she is lying to him.
“Then what are you looking at?”
She straightens again, looking at the baby. Then she notices that her hands are inside the trash can, reaching. She steps back.
“I thought I heard something,” she says.
The child’s mother must have panicked. Maybe she could see the gunmen coming or maybe she was simply weak or selfish, but she couldn’t quiet the child, and she gave up. She saved herself. She is likely tucked away safe and secure, leaving her child rolling around with empty soda cans and hamburger wrappers, and Joan hates her intensely. Her hands are, again, hovering over the trash can, and why is she not touching the baby?
Lincoln is tugging at her skirt again.
She cannot take her eyes from the child. It is not such an awful hiding place, once she gets past her immediate reaction to the trash can. If you can get over the fact that the woman has literally thrown her child away, it is a fairly brilliant spot. Right by the speakers, the child can scream as loud as it—is it a girl or a boy? surely she should not think of it as “it”—regardless, it can scream as loud as it wants and no one will hear. And the child will scream, of course, because it is alone and scared and probably hungry and there’s no soft warmth where its mother’s body should be, and babies judge so much by smell and it will smell the strangeness and filth and rot of the trash can. But the sound of the crying is blocked out and also the trash can is a crude kind of bassinet, walled in, a place the baby cannot crawl free of.
There could be rats or roaches in there, crawling into eyes and mouth. Roaches. It is not safe. It is a trash can. Lincoln is capable of walking, and this baby would weigh nothing. She could carry them both, even, briefly.
This disco music is ringing in her brain.
She reaches inside and runs her hand over the baby’s face, which is purplish-red even in the moonlight. Its skin is as soft as she expected. Its crying does not ease. It does turn its mouth to her and latch onto her thumb, and she lets it suck for a moment. There is a candy wrapper near its face, and she tosses it aside. The baby kicks a leg, and she sees a flash of something under a pale, soft thigh. Sliding a hand under, she finds a pacifier.
She wipes the pacifier on the inside of her arm and then offers it to the child, and there is another thing she remembers—the perfect O of a small mouth and the satisfying pull and slurp as a pacifier is accepted.
The baby sucks twice and then spits it out. It screams. She can already feel its weight settling into the crook of her arm.
Lincoln has not quit pulling at her. She looks down and he tugs her closer.
“I thought you said,” h
e yells into her ear, “that we couldn’t look at things that don’t matter.”
She straightens quickly, reorienting herself. She realizes she is illuminated—the same patch of light that shines on the baby is spreading across her arms. She has let go of Lincoln’s hand, too. It is the first time she has completely let go of him since the moment they climbed from the porcupine pen. And she was not watching him. If he had wandered off, she would not have seen. If the men were right here, guns aimed, she would not have seen.
She was not looking.
The baby is screaming, still.
She squats down, back in the shadows, her arm looping around her son.
“Yes,” she says to him. “You’re right.”
She has to be fast. She cannot do it otherwise. She half stands, keeping as low as possible, and she runs her hand over the baby’s head again. She slides her thumb over its mouth and lets it latch onto her—no teeth yet—and then she puts the pacifier into its mouth once more. She turns away quickly, wanting to believe the baby keeps hold of it this time. She reaches to the ground, picking up the trash can lid.
She eases the lid back into place. It is not as quick as she would like—she has to line up the edges exactly—and the whole time she stares off at a point in the darkness. For a moment the baby is a vague, pale flutter beneath her, and then the flutter is gone and there is only the dark dome of the trash can.
“Come on,” she says to Lincoln.
She squats down low to the ground again, taking a few steps, and already the music is slightly quieter, not pounding in her head. Another step and another step, and she just has to keep taking them and that is all, and she does not have to feel anything.
She only has to keep him safe.