Bean, he said, his name for me. I can see you.
I knew he was lying, because he started walking away from my hiding spot.
I had dug myself into the banks of the pond the way the elephants did when my mother and I watched them playing, spraying each other with the hoses of their trunks or rolling like wrestlers in the mud to cool their hot skin.
I waited for my father to pass the big tree where Nevvie and Gideon would set dinner for the animals—cubes of hay and Blue Hubbard squash and entire watermelons. Enough to feed a small family, or a single elephant. As soon as he was in its shadow, I scrambled up from the bank where I’d been wallowing and ran forward.
It wasn’t easy. My clothes were caked with dirt; my hair was knotted in a rope down my back. My pink sneakers had been sucked into the muck of the pond. But I knew I was going to win, and a giggle slipped from my lips, like the squeal of helium from the neck of a balloon.
It was all that my father needed. Hearing me, he spun and raced toward me, hoping to cut me off before I could flatten my muddy handprints against the corrugated metal wall of that barn.
Maybe he would have reached me, too, if Maura hadn’t thundered from the tree cover, trumpeting so loudly that I froze. She swung her trunk and knocked my father across his face. He fell to the ground, clutching his right eye, which swelled within seconds. She danced nervously between us, so that my father had to roll out of the way or risk being crushed.
“Maura,” he panted. “It’s all right. Easy, girl—”
The elephant bellowed again, an air horn that left my ears ringing.
“Jenna,” my father said quietly, “don’t move.” And under his breath: “Who the hell let that elephant out of the barn?”
I started crying. I didn’t know if I was scared for me or for my father. But in all the times my mother and I had observed Maura, I’d never seen her act violent.
Suddenly the door of the barn slid open on its thick cable track, and my mother was standing in the massive doorframe. She took one look at my father, Maura, and me. “What did you do to her?” she asked him.
“Are you kidding? We were playing hide-and-seek.”
“You and the elephant?” As she spoke, my mother slowly moved between Maura and my father, so that he could safely get up.
“No, for Christ’s sake. Me and Jenna. Until Maura came out of nowhere and smacked me.” He rubbed his face.
“She must have thought you were trying to hurt Jenna.” My mother frowned. “Why on earth were you playing hide-and-seek in Maura’s enclosure?”
“Because she was supposed to be in the barn having foot care done.”
“No, just Hester.”
“Not according to the information that Gideon posted on the whiteboard—”
“Maura didn’t feel like coming in.”
“And I was supposed to know that how?”
My mother kept cooing to Maura, until the animal lumbered a distance away, still watching my father warily.
“That elephant hates everyone but you,” he muttered.
“Not true. Apparently, she likes Jenna.” Maura rumbled a response, approaching the tree line to graze, and my mother scooped me into her arms. She smelled of cantaloupe, the treat she must have been feeding Hester in the barn while the pads of the elephant’s feet were being soaked and scraped and treated for cracks. “For someone who screams at me for taking Jenna into the enclosures, you picked an interesting place to play games.”
“There weren’t supposed to be any elephants in this—Oh, for God’s sake. Never mind. I can’t win.” My father touched his hand to his head and winced.
“Let me take a look at that,” my mother said.
“I have a meeting with an investor in a half hour. I’m supposed to be explaining to him how safe it is to have a sanctuary in a populated area. And now I’ll be giving that speech with a black eye that was given to me by an elephant.”
My mother shifted me to one hip and touched his face, prodding gently. These moments, when we seemed like a pie before any of the pieces are eaten, were the best ones for me. They almost could erase the other moments.
“It could be worse,” my mother said, leaning against him.
I could see him, feel him, soften. It was the sort of observation my mother always tried to point out to me in the field: just the shift of body, the slide of the shoulders, that let you know there was no longer an invisible wall of fear. “Oh, really,” my father murmured. “How so?”
My mother smiled up at him. “I could have been the one to deck you,” she said. For the past ten minutes, I’ve been sitting on an examination table observing the mating behavior of the Fundamentally Alcoholic, Washed-Up Male and the Oversexed, Overblown Cougar.