It’s not like I don’t fit in at school because I’m the only kid without a mother. There are lots of kids missing parents, or kids who don’t talk about their parents, or kids whose parents are now living with new spouses and new kids. Still, I don’t really have friends at school. I sit at the lunch table on the far end, eating whatever my grandmother’s packed me, while the cool girls—who, I swear to God, call themselves the Icicles—chatter about how they are going to grow up and work for OPI and make up nail-polish color names based on famous movies: Magent-lemen Prefer Blondes; A Fuchsia Good Men. Maybe I’ve tried to join the conversation once or twice, but when I do, they usually look at me as if they’ve smelled something bad coming from my direction, their little button noses wrinkled, and then go back to whatever they were talking about. I can’t say I’m devastated by the way I’m ignored. I guess I have more important things on my mind.
The memories on the other side of my mother’s disappearance are just as spotty. I can tell you about my new bedroom at my grandma’s place, which had a big-girl bed—my first. There was a little woven basket on the nightstand, which was inexplicably filled with pink packets of Sweet’N Low, although there was no coffeemaker around. Every night, even before I could count, I’d peek inside to make sure they were still there. I still do.
I can tell you about visiting my father, at the beginning. The halls at Hartwick House smelled like ammonia and pee, and even when my grandma urged me to talk to him and I climbed up on the bed, shivering at the thought of being so close to someone I recognized and didn’t know at all, he didn’t speak or move. I can describe how tears leaked out of his eyes as if it were a natural and expected phenomenon, the way a cold can of soda sweats on a summer day.
I remember the nightmares I had, which weren’t really nightmares, but just me being awakened from a dead sleep by Maura’s loud trumpeting. Even after my grandma came running into my room and explained to me that the matriarch elephant lived hundreds of miles away now, in a new sanctuary in Tennessee, I had this nagging sense that Maura was trying to tell me something, and that if I only spoke her language as well as my mother had, I’d understand.
All I have left of my mother is her research. I pore over her journals, because I know one day the words will rearrange themselves on a page and point me toward her. She taught me, even in absentia, that all good science starts with a hypothesis, which is just a hunch dressed up in fancy vocabulary. And my hunch is this: She would never have left me behind, not willingly.
If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to prove it.
When I wake up, Gertie is draped over my feet, a giant dog rug. She twitches, running after something she can only see in her dreams.
I know what that feels like.
I try to get out of bed without waking her, but she jumps up and barks at the closed door of my bedroom.
“Relax,” I say, sinking my fingers into the thick fur at the ruff of her neck. She licks my cheek but doesn’t relax at all. She keeps her eyes fixed on the bedroom door, as if she can see what’s on the other side.
Which, given what I have planned for the day, is pretty ironic.
Gertie leaps off the bed, her wagging tail pounding the wall. I open the door and let her scramble downstairs, where my grandmother will let her out and feed her and start to cook breakfast for me.
Gertie came to my grandmother’s house a year after I did. Before that, she had lived at the sanctuary and she was best friends with an elephant named Syrah. She’d spend every day at Syrah’s side; and when Gertie got sick Syrah even stood guard over her, gently rubbing her with her trunk. It was not the first story of a dog and an elephant bonding, but it was a legendary one, written up in children’s books and featured on the news. A famous photographer even shot a calendar of unlikely animal friendships and made Gertie Ms. July. So when Syrah was sent away after the sanctuary closed, Gertie was just as abandoned as I was. For months, no one knew what had happened to her. And then one day, when my grandmother answered the doorbell, there was an animal rescue officer asking if we knew this dog, which had been found in our neighborhood. She still had her collar, with her name embroidered on it. Gertie was skinny and flea-bitten, but she started licking my face. My grandmother let Gertie stay, probably because she thought it would help me adjust.
If we’re going to be honest here—I have to tell you it didn’t work. I’ve always been a loner, and I’ve never really felt like I belong here. I’m like one of those women who read Jane Austen obsessively and still hope that Mr. Darcy might show up at the door. Or the Civil War reenactors, who growl at each other on battlefields now spotted with baseball fields and park benches. I’m the princess in an ivory tower, except every brick is made of history, and I built this prison myself.