Read Larger Than Life (Novella) Online

Authors: Jodi Picoult

Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Literary, #Sagas

Larger Than Life (Novella) (6 page)

BOOK: Larger Than Life (Novella)
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I shake my head. “Just the milk.”

“How much has she drunk?”

“Gallons,” I say. “But it passes right through.” I hesitate. “Does anyone else … do
the others …?”

“Know about her? No.” He glances up and sees the question in my eyes. “I saw you walking
into camp with her, like she was a pet on a leash. I watched you tie her to the porch
last night.” He grins. “How’d that work out for you?”

Neo slips a jar from the pocket of his jacket: The label reads “Coconut Oil.” “This
should help with the diarrhea. Different animals need different fat and protein to
survive.
The coconut oil, it’s a substitute for the fat that would be in her mother’s milk,
and it won’t upset her stomach.”

“How do you know all this?”

He shrugs. “I grew up in the bush, and my grandmother was a healer. She knew to use
resin from the corkwood tree to treat a wound; she boiled roots from the bush willow
to cure infertility; she knew that chewing the root of the mothakolana tree helped
with a toothache. Once, when an elephant calf wandered into our village, she kept
him alive for two weeks. Milk went right through him, so she tried adding banana,
and rice, and butter, but the calf got sicker. She experimented with everything and
finally figured out that if she added coconut oil to fat-free baby formula, he would
keep it down.”

“What happened to the calf?”

“His herd came back for him,” Neo said. “But he would return to our village every
year at least once, looking for my grandmother.”

“That’s amazing!”

“It was amazing when he was tiny. It was terrifying when he was a ten-thousand-pound
bull.”

I watch him open the jar. “You just happened to have coconut oil lying around?”

“No. One of the other rangers, his wife uses it in her hair. He keeps a jar here for
her.”

The elephant struggles to her feet, bumping against Neo as he stands at the sink.
He dips his fingers into the coconut oil and slips them into her mouth; I hear her
slurping. I realize that he is no longer wearing his bandage. The scrapes on his hand
are red and raw, but they are already healing.

“If you want to help,” he suggests, “you can clean up a bit. No offense, but this
place looks like a sty.”

I open my mouth to argue but realize he is joking. Neo’s strong hand supports the
elephant as she greedily devours this new cocktail. “Don’t worry, little miss,” he
croons. “We’ll figure this out.”

Suddenly, my eyes are swimming with tears. I think of Anya, whispering about me to
the other researchers. Of my former boss, yelling as he said there was no place for
me at Madikwe. Of the injured calf I sat with all night there, whose last breath rattled
through me like a shiver. Of his mother, who abandoned him.

Neo tilts his head, a silent question.

“We,” I repeat. My voice breaks on the rocks of relief. “You said
we
.”

When the door of my cottage flies open at 5:00
A.M
. the calf is sleeping on Neo’s lap and I am sprawled facedown on the bed.

My eyes are gritty from lack of sleep, and my mouth is dry as bone. I squint at the
doorway, at the silhouette framed by the blaze of the early sun, but it isn’t until
Grant starts yelling at me that I realize the figure standing before me is my boss.
“Good God,” he says, staring at the calf. “I thought Anya was crazy when she told
me what she’d heard. What the hell are you thinking, Alice?”

His booming accusation wakes the calf, who pulls on the hem of my shirt as I scramble
upright. “Grant, hear me out. She’s a newborn. Her mother was slaughtered by poachers.
She was going to die if I didn’t do something.”

“Exactly. You’re here to observe nature, not to change it.”

As Grant’s voice escalates in volume, the calf leans against my hip as if she is giving
moral support, or maybe because she needs it. “If she’d been shot and was suffering,
we’d be allowed to call in someone from the wildlife department to put her out of
her misery. So why shouldn’t we be allowed to intervene to save her if the opportunity
presents itself?”

But Grant is hardly listening to my impassioned rant. He has folded his arms and is
frowning at Neo, who looks like he’s trying to sink through the floorboards.

For a man who came here unannounced last night and took charge—briskly mixing up a
concoction that actually nourished the calf, rolling up the soiled blankets and sheets
and setting them out back to be washed—Neo seems to be suddenly, surprisingly timid.
Like he could make himself invisible if he tried hard enough.

Then I realize why: Neo knows he doesn’t belong in the cottage of a researcher. Fraternization
between the rangers and the researchers simply doesn’t occur. It is why the rangers
have their own village; it is why we never invite Neo or the others to join us for
cards or a bottle of wine. It is why they are expected to get up and scout the reserve
at 3:30 A.M. while we sleep in till 5:00. We are the foreigners, and they are locals.
We have PhDs and book knowledge; they have grown up tracking animals from remarkable
distances and surviving in the bush. True, we are all part of the same team, but there
are invisible lines between us, and they are not meant to be crossed.

“Neo,” Grant says tightly. “I expected more from you.”

I bite my lip. It is one thing for Grant to reprimand me, but I can’t stand the thought
that I might have cost Neo his job.

I step forward, blocking Grant’s view of Neo. “With all due respect, Grant, I came
to Botswana to study elephant cognition as it is affected by trauma. This calf certainly
qualifies as a subject. In fact, given the money that’s been provided to me by the
university for my research, it would have been negligent for me to leave this calf
to die in the field without first examining the behavioral effects of having her mother
and aunts killed in front of her.”

I am blowing smoke. Obviously, if I’d truly been doing what I described, I would have
been observing the calf in the field, not bringing her to my cottage. And the truth
is, I would have rescued this baby even if my field of study had been migratory patterns
and watering holes. But Grant doesn’t have to know that. “I’m the one who asked Neo
for assistance,” I lie. “I wasn’t trying to break the rules, honestly. I was just
doing my job.”

Grant narrows his eyes. “The folks down in Madikwe warned me that you aren’t a team
player. You’re not going to get three strikes here before you’re out. Just two. Consider
this the first.”

As he speaks, the calf wobbles toward him. Her trunk pinches at the air, as if she’s
trying to catch a mosquito. She rifles through the front pocket of Grant’s khaki shirt
and pulls out his reading glasses.

Whatever vitriol Grant was about to hurl at me dissipates in a sigh. It is a fact
universally acknowledged that it’s impossible to stay furious in close proximity to
a newborn elephant.

Grant points at me. “You are solely responsible for this elephant.”

“Yes, sir,” I murmur.

“And you will release her into the wild to join a herd at some point in the next
month. If the herd rejects the calf, you will not intervene.”

I nod.

When Grant leaves, I collapse onto the bed. The calf begins to root beneath the covers.
“My mother was right. I should have studied primates,” I murmur.

“I doubt Lesego would agree with you,” Neo says.

“Lesego?”

“Don’t you think it’s time she had a name?” He walks toward the calf and brushes his
hand over her brow, a benediction. “In Tswana, it means ‘lucky.’ ”

He walks toward the door. The moment he puts his hand on the knob, I feel a jolt of
panic at the thought of handling this calf alone again.

“I’m assigned to take one of the trucks to Gaborone today for service. While I’m there,
I will pick up more formula and coconut oil. Cases. Because otherwise I fear there
might be a mutiny.”

“But you’re coming back,” I clarify—a statement, not a question.

He smiles, and the knot inside my chest unravels. “If that’s what you want, Alice.”

He is leaning against the door. His palm, pressed against the wood, is as pink as
mine. Last night, Neo had rubbed some of the coconut oil into his skin. I had watched
him flex his long fingers, lace them together, massage. I had wondered, for a fleeting
moment, if his skin was as warm as it looked.

Neo doesn’t wait for me to answer. Instead he opens the door, letting in a slice of
sunlight that cuts across the wooden floor. The calf, entranced, tries to stomp on
it.

“Neo,” I call out.

His grandmother was a healer, so maybe it is natural that such a talent would run
in the family. In his presence, it is easy for me to forget that this is a world where
horrible things can happen, when we least expect them.

He turns, but I cannot remember what I wanted to say. “Your name,” I improvise quickly.
“What does it mean in Tswana?”

He glances away, suddenly shy. “How would you say it …? Something to be given,” he
answers.

A gift
, I think, as Neo closes the door behind him.

We experience weeks full of firsts: the first time Lesego sleeps through the night.
The first time she eats a cookie. The first time she gets a bath. The first time she
sees a crested franklin and chases it into the rangers’ village before I can catch
up to her. The world is new to her, and as she gets stronger and bigger and the feedings
stretch further apart, her skin grows smoother and softer, and she gets the round
apple cheeks that Neo had said were a sign of good health.

For all intents and purposes, I am Lesego’s mother now, until I can provide her with
a surrogate. Grant assigns Neo to help me until Lesego is released. We are a tiny
herd, but we are all Lesego has.

I am a proud parent. I diligently mark her growth every few days, celebrating by feeding
Lesego a small prepackaged sponge cake when she crosses the three-foot mark. Neo and
I find toys for her—a broom, the inner tube from a bike tire, a spool of rope that
she manages to unravel and weave through the posts of each cottage porch, so that
the researchers’ village looks like a spiderweb.

The other scientists may not want to admit it, but they like having her around. Anya
takes pictures of Lesego to send home to her little sister. Paul, who has a fondness
for chocolate olivers and never misses a teatime, offers a biscuit to Lesego, and
now, whenever she sees him she breaks into a run and tries to search his pockets for
the treat. Even Grant comes around more than usual on the pretense of checking logbooks,
but he never leaves without seeing what Lesego is up to.

However, I am Lesego’s favorite. She follows me up and down the main road that leads
to our research office, waiting patiently outside and rumbling when I appear with
whatever book I’ve come for. When she walks behind me, she hitches her trunk to the
tail of my shirt. She knows she is not allowed inside the cottage, but she will sleep
outside only if she can see me directly. I wind up rearranging my bed in the center
of the room, and even then half the time I have to sleep beneath the stars with her
so she will not bellow and wake the entire camp. When she awakens, the first thing
I do is touch her around the mouth, like an elephant mother would, and let her reach
her trunk toward my own face to check in, too.

During these weeks, I try to call my own mother—twice. The first time she does not
answer; the second time, the circuits in Botswana are jammed and the call will not
go through. I take these failed attempts as a cosmic sign, and then I go back to my
cottage, where Neo is sitting on the porch wrapped in a blanket from my bed, with
Lesego by his side. The blanket trick is the only way I can leave to shower or go
to the bathroom or run an errand without her following me. I toss the fabric over
Lesego’s head, and by the time she extricates herself, I’m gone, and she settles down
with Neo and my scent on the blanket. Yet even then, Lesego keeps one ear out listening
for me to return.

BOOK: Larger Than Life (Novella)
10.9Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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