Other kids started drawing right away. There were all sorts of families: Logan lived with his mom, alone. Yasmina had two dads. Sly had a baby brother, and then two older brothers, who had a mom that was different from his. There were various permutations of siblings, but it was clear that if there were extra people in the family, they were kids.
Me, I drew myself with five parents.
There was my father, with his glasses. My mother, with her flaming red ponytail. Gideon and Grace and Nevvie, all wearing khaki shorts and the red polo top that was the sanctuary uniform.
Miss Kate sat down next to me. “Who are all these people, Jenna? Are these your grandma and grandpa?”
“No,” I told her, pointing. “That’s my mommy and that’s my daddy.”
That led to my mother being pulled aside at pickup. “Dr. Metcalf,” Miss Harriet said, “Jenna seems to have a little trouble identifying her immediate family.”
She showed my mother the picture. “It looks completely accurate to me,” my mother replied. “All five adults take care of Jenna.”
“That isn’t the concern,” Miss Harriet said.
It was then that she pointed out the spider writing, my disastrously spelled attempts to label these people. There was MOM, holding one of my hands, and there was DAD, holding the other. Except DAD wasn’t the man I’d drawn with glasses. He was in a corner, nearly pushed off the page.
My happy little family unit was either wishful thinking or the uncanny observation of a three-year-old who saw more than anyone expected.
I’m going to find my mother—before Virgil can. Maybe I can save her from being arrested; maybe I can warn her. Maybe the two of us can run off together, this time. True, I’m going up against a private investigator who unravels mysteries for a living. But I know one thing he doesn’t.
My dream under the tree was what brought to the surface something I guess I’ve known all along. I know who gave my mother that necklace. I know why my parents were fighting back then. I know who, all those years ago, I wished was my dad.
Now I just have to find Gideon again.
PART II
Children are the anchors of a mother’s life.
—SOPHOCLES, Phaedra, fragment 612
ALICE
In the wild, we often didn’t realize an elephant was pregnant until she was about to deliver. The mammary glands would swell at about twenty-one months, but before that, short of doing a blood test or having witnessed a bull mating with a particular female nearly two years earlier, it was very hard to predict an impending birth.
Kagiso was fifteen, and we had only just recently figured out that she was going to have a calf. Every day, my colleagues would try to spot her, to see if she had delivered yet. For them, it was good fieldwork. But for me, it became a reason to get out of bed.
I did not yet know I was pregnant. All I knew was that I had been more tired than usual, listless in the heat. Research that had energized me before now seemed to be routine. If I did happen to witness something remarkable in the field, the first thought to cross my mind was I wonder what Thomas would have made of that.
I had told myself that my interest in him was due solely to the fact that he was the first colleague who hadn’t mocked my research. When Thomas left, it was with the feeling of a summer romance—a trinket that I could take out and examine for the rest of my life, the same way I might save a seashell from a beach vacation or the ticket from my first Broadway musical. Even if I’d wanted to see if this rickety frame of a one-night stand could bear the load of a full-fledged relationship, it wasn’t practical. He lived on a different continent; we both had our respective research.
But, as Thomas had pointed out in passing, it wasn’t like one of us studied elephants and one of us studied penguins. And due to the trauma of a life spent in captivity, there were often more deaths and grieving rituals to observe at elephant sanctuaries than there were in the wild. The opportunity to continue my research wasn’t limited to the Tuli Block.
After Thomas left for New Hampshire, we communicated through the secret code of scholarly articles. I sent him detailed notes about Mmaabo’s herd, which was still visiting her bones a month after her death. He sent back a story of the passing of one of his elephants, and how three of her companions stood in the barn stall where she’d collapsed, serenading her body for several hours. What I really meant when I wrote This might interest you was I miss you. What he really meant when he wrote Thought of you the other day was You are always on my mind.
It was almost as if there was a tear in the fabric I was made of, and he was the only color thread that would match to stitch it back up.