There’s the conversation about mating for life.
There’s a glimpse I have of her laughing as Maura reaches her trunk over a fence and pulls her hair free from its ponytail. My mother’s hair is red. Not strawberry-blond and not orange, but the color of someone who’s burning up inside.
(Okay, so, maybe the reason I remember this incident is because I’ve seen a photo someone snapped at that very moment. But the smell of her hair—like cinnamon sugar—that’s a real memory that has nothing to do with a picture. Sometimes, when I really miss her, I eat French toast, just so that I can close my eyes and breathe in.)
My mother’s voice, when she was upset, wobbled like a heat mirage of asphalt in the summer. And she would hug me and tell me it was going to be all right, even though she had been the one to cry.
Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and find her watching me sleep.
She never wore rings. But she had a necklace that she never took off.
She used to sing in the shower.
She took me out on the ATV with her to watch the elephants, even though my father thought it was too dangerous for me to be in the enclosures. I rode on her lap, and she would lean down and whisper in my ear, This can be our secret.
We had matching pink sneakers.
She knew how to fold a dollar bill into an elephant.
Instead of reading me books at night, she told me stories: how she had seen an elephant free a baby rhino stuck in the mud; how a little girl whose best friend was an orphaned elephant left her family home to go to university and returned years later, to have that now fully grown elephant wrap a trunk around her and pull her close.
I remember my mother sketching, drawing the giant G clefs of elephant ears, which she would then mark with notches or tears to help her identify the individual. She would list behaviors: Syrah reaches for and removes plastic bag from Lilly’s tusk; given that vegetation is routinely carried in tusks, this suggests awareness of foreign object and subsequent cooperative removal … Even something as soft as empathy would be given the most academic treatment. It was part of being taken seriously in her field: not to anthropomorphize elephants, but to study their behavior clinically and, from that, to extrapolate the facts.
Me, I look at the facts I remember about my mother, and I guess at her behavior. I do the opposite of what a scientist should do.
I can’t help but think: If my mother met me now, would she be disappointed?
Virgil turns my mother’s wallet over in his hands. It is so fragile that the leather starts to crumble beneath his fingers. I see that, and I feel a stab in my chest, as if I’m losing her all over again. “This doesn’t necessarily mean that your mother was a victim of foul play,” Virgil says. “She could have lost the wallet the night she wound up unconscious.”
I fold my hands on the table. “Look, I know what you think—that she’s the one who put the wallet up in the tree, so she could disappear. But it’s pretty hard to climb a tree and hide a wallet when you’re knocked out cold.”
“If that’s what she was doing, why didn’t she leave it someplace it might actually be found?”
“And then what? Smash herself in the head with a rock? If she really wanted to disappear, why wouldn’t she have just run?”
Virgil hesitates. “There might have been extenuating circumstances.”
“Like?”
“Your mother wasn’t the only one injured that night, you know.”
Suddenly I understand what he’s saying: My mother may have been trying to make herself look like she was a victim when, in reality, she was the perp. My mouth goes dry. Of all the potential personas I’ve given my mother over the past decade, murderer wasn’t one of them. “If you really thought my mother was a killer, why didn’t you go after her when she disappeared?”
His mouth opens and closes around empty air. Bam, I think. “The death was ruled an accident,” he says. “But we did find a red hair at the scene.”
“That’s like saying you found a bimbo on The Bachelor. My mom wasn’t the only redhead in Boone, New Hampshire.”
“We found the hair inside the body bag of the deceased.”
“So, (a) that’s gross, and (b) big deal. I watch Law & Order: SVU. It just means that they had contact with each other. That probably happened ten times a day.”
“Or it could mean that hair got transferred during a physical altercation.”
“How did Nevvie Ruehl die?” I demand. “Did the medical examiner say the cause of death was homicide?”
He shakes his head. “He ruled it an accident, caused by blunt force trauma due to trampling.”