Nature of Jade (30 page)

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One day not long after my father had packed a few Hefty bags of belongings into his BMW and showed us his place for the first time (You have no furniture, Oliver had said. It's like camping, he had answered. In a house.), Damian calls me into his office.

"Jade. I just want to tell you that, first, I have really enjoyed coming to know you."

"No," I say. I know what he is telling me. But he can't. I refuse to hear it.

"But, Jade, I must."

"No. No, you can't."

"I have to."

"Everyone is leaving." I start to cry. I can't help it. Not Damian, too.

"Oh, little one," he says. He comes around from his desk, puts his arm around me. He is strong, from all those years of working with elephants, training them, caring for them, loving them.

"You can't go," I sob.

"I must go back to Jum. When you raise an animal, you love it like your own child. I know her thoughts, her needs. She wonders where I am, and I can't bear it."

"We need you too. Damian, we need you." My heart hurts. I don't know how much more hurt it can take.

"You know that elephants have your pain, my pain. They're not separate from us. Their bonds last a lifetime. I must go to her."

"No ..."

"You, you see?" He takes my hands, grasps them firmly. "You are not vulnerable anymore like you were when you first came. You are living up to your name."

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I am quiet. I don't know what he means.

"Jade," he says. "You don't know this? Jade, the substance-- its nature. One of the strongest materials. Stronger than steel."

"I don't feel strong," I say. He can't leave. He can't. It's too much.

"Ah, but you are. You needed your herd as a vulnerable calf, but now you are so much stronger.

Like Hansa!" He laughs, but I don't feel like laughing with him.

"You don't need your herd to protect you," he says. "But Jum, her herd is too small. Only my brother and his wife. I have money to buy her from Bhim and bring her home."

"I will miss you. You have given me so much." I am crying hard.

"And you, too, have given me. I am so proud. Now, you are a real mahout."

In the spring, the cherry blossoms rain down on the University of Washington campus like snow.

They lie on the brick paths in drifts, as the gargoyles grin in nice-weather mischief. The air is sweet with the perfume of a girl in a summer dress, the water of the lake sparkly like it's keeping a nice secret. The elephants are happy too. Rick Lindstrom, who looked funny at first behind Damian's desk, put all the things he'd learned in grad school to use. He added auditory stimulation (classical music, cowbells, chimes--Onyx vocalized like crazy at Mozart; Delores preferred Vivaldi), built an enrichment garden full of treats, had us all hang ice blocks with bits of frozen vegetables inside (heavy!). He brought in a backhoe to dig a mud wallow (a big ditch filled with water--Tombi liked the hose, too), and had Elaine and me drape one of the pine trees with bits of fruit, like

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it was Christmas. Pictures accumulated on the walls of the elephant house. First, the photos of Damian with all of us around his "Best Wishes" good-bye cake, and then photos sent from faraway, with exotic stamps on the envelopes. Damian, wearing a turban now, smiling broadly.

Jum, with her trunk around his waist; Jum, grabbing the hem of Damian's wife, Devi's, skirt. A new stone house. Damian with his brother. Jum in the river with Damian hugging her neck, his pant legs rolled up to his knobby knees.

I would drive Oliver out to visit Dad. We'd wind through the trees and bump down his gravel road. The river that his tiny house was on roared and churned, and you could hear the rocks under the water tumbling against each other. We would walk down the riverbank with him.

Sometimes we would just walk, not talk. Other times, we would ask him questions, and he would tell us things we didn't know. How as a child he wanted to be an astronaut; that at age eight he had fallen in love with his third-grade teacher, Mrs. Edwards; that he had taken art classes in college. He bought a bed. Then a couch, and a table and chairs. Self-help books, which I gave him a bunch of shit about, were stacked up, travel guides, too. He wasn't black-and-white to me anymore, nor was he hazy shades of gray. Instead, it was more like he was beginning to have bits of color; jigsaw pieces with fragments of pictures I hoped would one day make a whole.

Stereotypes are fast and easy, but they are lies, and the truth takes its time.

We'd drive home and Oliver and I would be both sad and quiet, until one day I'd had enough of the funeral and told Oliver we needed a french fry taste test. We stopped at a bunch of fast-food joints on the way home (five was all we could

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handle), ordered a large, and compared and contrasted. McDonald's--hot and soft and salty; Burger King--bumpier, crunchy; Wendy's--wide, thick; and so on. The winner: this little place called Hal's, where your face broke out from the grease just driving up to it. Every ride home from then on, we'd stop. Funerals are happier with fries.

My mom cried a lot and spent too much time closed up in her room. But right around the time the cherry blossoms started to fall, she came out. Spring, renewal, new life, second chances, air so delicious you wish you could drink it. She started seeing a counselor, got a job as a library assistant at Oliver's school. She made a friend there, Nita, and they went to a concert together--

Mom voted with Onyx and liked Mozart.

One day I come home from the elephants and no one is around. The doors and windows are open, Venetian blinds clack serenely against the sills.

"Mom!" I call. "Oliver!"

"Out here!" she yells.

"Sis! Come on! Come out! Hurry!"

I would have been alarmed, but his voice is excited. The kind of voice you get when the UPS

man drops off something large and unexpected on your doorstep.

They are in our tiny backyard. Mom has Mozart playing softly through a speaker, which is pointing out our kitchen window.

"My God, you guys. What are you doing?"

"Having a ritual," my Mom says. "My counselor says rituals are good. They help us move from one place to another, marking change in an important way. This is an Oliver ritual."

Here's what I see: our old rickety ladder, the one that Dad

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used to hang Christmas lights (with someone holding onto the legs), sitting on the small piece of back lawn. My mother and brother, beaming and grinning, my mother's forehead shiny with sweat. Milo with his tongue lolling out, panting as he lies on the grass in a bit of shade. And our fir tree. The previously ignored fir tree, save for the times it was cursed at for dropping needles on the roof, looking somehow majestic. Sporting gear hangs from its branches, same as the pine tree in the elephant enclosure with its frozen treats. All kinds of sporting gear. Football helmets and kneepads, shin guards and soccer shorts. A basketball jersey, warm-up pants, shoulder guards. A hockey stick is falling through several limbs. Balls of every variety sit under the tree like presents. Even a jock strap dangles from the tip of one branch. "Wow," I say.

"Look at the top!" Oliver is almost shouting.

"Well, not quite the top. As high as I could reach. Our uppermost point," Mom says.

A plastic protective sports cup, turned upside down. It has a pinecone on top, for extra decoration, I guess.

"The pinecone was my idea," Oliver says.

"We're celebrating the fact that Oliver need not do any more sports, if he doesn't choose to,"

Mom says.

"I wanted to burn it all, but Mom said no," Oliver says.

"We thought about burying it, but it seemed too morbid," Mom says.

I look at the tree. Take inventory. "Wait," I say. "What about karate?"

"I like karate," Oliver says.

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Not long after, during finals week, I get another call from Sebastian.

"Forgotten about me yet?" His voice crackles and snaps. "Never," I say.

"We're moving again," he says.

I lean against the warm stone of the library in the university's Red Square. My face has been tipped to the sun, soaking it in as I soak in his voice, but now I snap my chin down. Some guys in shorts and no shirts are running through the fountain, throwing soaked foam balls at each other.

"Tiffany?" I say.

"No. Mom says she's been quiet for a while. It's actually just so remote out here that Tess and I are at each other's throats. There's no FFECR, or any other meeting for her to attend, and no work for me. People have gun racks. Mattie's renter in Santa Fe got transferred. The only thing is, it's got a pool, which means we won't be able to let Bo out of our sight for two seconds. But anyway . . . Tess is nuts about the idea, because it's got a big arts community. Theater. I know I can't run forever. Sometime I'll have to go back. But for now . . . For now, this is where we'll be."

"Santa Fe," I say. The desert. An acceptance letter, sitting in an envelope tucked in my underwear drawer. It is a coincidence. A big coincidence. Maybe big enough that you could call it a sign.

We hang up, and that night at dinner, I tell Mom. And Abe, well, he was right. She could surprise me. "Jade, you need to go," she says.

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CHAPTER NINETEEN

And then, after the elephants separate for the good of the herd and each other, they will sometimes later reunite. There is no doubt they recognize each other, even after long periods apart. Mothers and daughters and sisters. New sons. They raise their trunks in salute, bump and dance in greeting, entwine their trunks in warm embrace. They bellow and trumpet sounds of joy and triumph . . .

--Dr. Jerome R. Clade, The Fundamentals of Animal Behavior

I travel through the Zone of Heartbreak, and decide I should rename it--the Zone of Bittersweet. I am both happy and sad, and the feelings go together like a pair of hands clasped. Mom drives, Oliver and Milo ride in back. I'd said good-bye already to Delores and Hansa and all of the elephants. I rubbed their trunks and gave them apples from my pockets. My heart broke to see their saggy behinds as I looked over my shoulder before leaving the elephant house. Abe had hugged me, gave me Dr. Kaninski's golf mug-- "Golfers Do It With Balls"--with a slip of paper inside, a referral to his friend and former college roommate in Sante Fe, Max Nelson, who plays kick ass rugby and has anxiety himself, the note said. I gave a last wave to Titus at Total Vid. I visited Dad before I left. I am proud of you, he'd said, his eyes filling, something I'd never seen before. And then I

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watched the elephants on my computer screen one last time, their swaying, prehistorically huge forms. I touched my fingers to the screen. We are all tied together, even if we don't want to be.

Animals and people. People and people. The trick is to face our necessary connections and disconnections. Humans, we need to go away from each other too, sometimes, same as they did.

Sometimes, humans need to go away to study elephants. In my bag was a textbook, The Fundamentals of Animal Behavior, for the class I was most excited about being enrolled in at NMU.

The night before I leave, I can barely sleep. I am so heavy with the ache of good-bye. That morning, I am full of hugs and good wishes and have a stomach that feels like it could explode with nerves. My heart, too, is newly filled and nearly breaking. Tears are there, just waiting. This is what sets them off: Oliver's hands in his lap, Milo's collar askew. Mom's profile. The speed-limit sign. I remember Saint Raphael in my bag, my one chosen traveling companion, patron saint of travelers and happy meetings. Patron saint of joy. Raphael merciful--le pido un viaje seguro y una vuelta feliz. Merciful Raphael--I ask you for a safe trip and a happy return.

I kiss Milo good-bye. I hug his beloved, furry self. He waits patiently in the car as Oliver and Mom walk me in to the airport. We all do mostly okay, until I have to leave them.

"Sis," Oliver cries.

"My girl," Mom says. Tears roll off her nose. "This. This is the hardest thing I've ever had to do, letting you go. Oh, God-- I almost forgot." She reaches into her purse. Hands me a small bag. "I was thinking about what you told me ... What Damian had said about your name." I reach my fingers through the tissue

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paper, pull out a necklace from which dangles a small jade elephant.

I don't hold back my tears, and I don't give a shit who's watching. Nature is never static, I understand. Change is ever-constant, clouds zipping across a sky. It is dynamic, complicated, tangled, mostly beautiful. A moving forward, something newly gained, means that something is lost, too. Left behind. It is something Mom knows, Dad knows, Tess knows, Damian Rama knows.

But I, like nature itself, am strong and resilient. Over the eons, pieces of me had been brave, and I can be brave too.

I put the necklace on, and we hug good-bye again. And when it is time to walk down that narrow airplane aisle, I breathe, in and out, slowing the heavy hand on my chest. I breathe and picture the desert. I picture deserts and savannahs, elephants and humans; change, taking place over thousands of years. My heart is breaking; my heart is rising. I picture the landing of that plane, firm and safe, the doors opening onto ground I would walk forward on, toward the backdrop of a new, wide, lava-lamp sky. I buckle my seat belt, read the plastic safety card, am comforted to see the old lady across the aisle, reading her Bible, a crocheted bookmark on her knees. We lift off, and I grip my armrests. I close my eyes and remember that we can hold too tight, we can fail to let go, we can let go too easily. I peer out the window, which feels cool to the touch. Below, my past life looks like Dad's train set. Tiny houses, small winding roads, water you could fit into a cup and drink.

We soar higher, climb. The miniature town below disappears the 288

as we lift above the clouds. Life and our love for others is a balancing act, I understand then; a dance between our instinct to be safe and hold fast, and our drive to flee, to run--from danger, toward new places to feed ourselves.