Still Life with Elephant (21 page)

I
T IS
an ironic universe that creates both the tiniest and the largest of creatures and then pits them against each other in a fragile arena of flesh and blood, where they must struggle until the death of one allows the other to survive.

Poor Abbie. The infinitesimally small bacteria were mounting a relentless war, and the pneumonia was staking its claim in her weakened lungs. It was all we could do just to help her maintain the small margin of life she had left. Matt checked on her every night, I handfed her, Richie massaged her and worked on her every day. We were a determined and grim bunch.

The irony wasn't lost on me. That Holly and I had been in a struggle, too. For Matt. For my home. For whatever had been important to me in my life. Unlike Abbie and her bacteria, Holly and I were equals in size, in strength, in determination, but though I fancied I had morals and ethics on my side, it was a struggle I apparently had lost.

 

Almost a month had passed, and I had spent every night with Abbie. I sang my songs to her and rubbed her ears and told her about the beautiful and troubled country that she had come from, knowing that she could never return to it. I told her about the gold plains and reeds, about wild birds that sat in the strangest-looking trees, how the sun shimmered through the bush during the day, leaving black dapples against the dried-out earth, and about the haunting calls that rang through the night. And I was certain she was listening.

I worked with Margo early in the mornings, reinforcing what she knew and even expanding her repertoire. She fully accepted my presence in the stall now and allowed me to stay close to her baby without rumbling her usual warnings. She had learned to trust me, although I still kept her bracelets on for my safety while I took care of Abbie.

I sat up every night, in the barn, watching over Abbie as she fought to breathe. I sang songs very softly to her as I fed her, and then remained quiet when I was finished, in order to let the two animals rest. I had never allowed myself such quiet. My initial panic at the stillness gave way to anxiety, to discomfort, and finally to a sort of uneasy compromise with the night. I made myself concentrate on Margo's deep breaths, on Abbie's shallow rasps. I forced myself to listen to their rumblings and squeaks, to the sounds of hay being chewed, to small animals rattling in the walls, the rain clattering against the metal roof. I listened to owls call outside and stomachs rumble inside, and the wind blow around the corners of the barn, and I wondered how I had missed so much of it before this. In the end, I made peace with all of it. I could hear my own breath, and my own thoughts, and finally, finally, I was all right with the stillness.

I spent all night either sleeping on a cot or checking on Abbie. Every morning I awoke to feed Margo before I left for home. My alarm clock was an elephant rumbling loudly for breakfast, after which Richie would wheel open the big barn doors, unlock the enclosure, and help me march Margo out into the warm summer sun. Abbie followed, with our assistance; Billy DuPreez had told Matt it was important that Abbie spend time in the sun. Richie and I would support her wobbly walk and weakened body with cotton ropes until we reached the sunny patch of ground that we had covered with straw. Abbie would drop down and nap there, next to Margo. Every morning, before I left, I would sponge Abbie down with cool water, and rub Vaseline on the tip of her trunk, so that it wouldn't get chafed raw by the mucus that poured from it. Every day I listened with a stethoscope to the rales in her lungs, not really sure what I was hearing, but hoping that it wouldn't suddenly change into something more ominous.

One night, as I fed her, and told her stories of Makuti, she squeaked and barked and touched my face with her trunk.

“I know,” I said to her. “You're a very brave little ellie.”

She pulled the bottle from my hand and held it out to me. “Thank you,” I said, and plugged it back into her mouth, “but you need it more than I do.”

The barn door creaked behind me, and I looked up. It was Matt. He managed to come every evening, after his practice closed for the day, to check on her. We usually acknowledged each other with a stony nod and then worked together without a word, doing what needed to be done, after which Matt would leave without much more than a curt good night. He was a very good vet, I knew that. He was fighting very hard to save Abbie, I knew that, too. And though I hated and resented him, I respected his skill and dedication. His absolute commitment to animals was one of the things that I had loved about him.

Tonight, he took the stethoscope I had left outside the enclosure and listened to Abbie's lungs. There was no expression on his face as he passed it along her side, then between her front legs. Next would be her temperature.

He held the thermometer up to the light and checked the digital readout before inserting it under her tail. I watched without comment, as I did every night. He waited a few minutes before checking it.

“Hmm,” he said to himself, furrowing his brow and resetting the thermometer for another try.

“What?” I asked him, but he didn't answer. He pursed his lips and took her temperature again. I looked away. If her temperature went any higher, I knew that it was the end, that the bacteria had won. The tiniest of the animal kingdom—were they animals?—Matt had called them pathogens—and they would have defeated her. Defeated us. These one-celled, minute, weak particles of life, these parasites that need flesh and blood to exist, could wind up winning the battle. I just couldn't watch Matt as he looked at the thermometer for the third time.

“Free beaver smoke,” he uttered.

I was staring at the far wall so I wouldn't see the numbers, but his words still filtered into my brain. I startled. “What?” I asked. “What did you just say?”

He was still kneeling over Abbie, and he looked up at me with tears in his eyes. “Oh, Neelie,” he said hoarsely, “her fever broke. It's totally normal. I really think she's going to come out of this.”

It took me a full minute to absorb his words.

She was going to live. She was going to be all right. My elephant child.

Tears of joy flowed down my face. I dropped to my knees and laid my head on hers and ran my hands over her face and wept.

“You saved her,” I said to Matt. “You did it.”

He took a slow, deep breath. “You did, too,” he said. “I never saw anyone work so hard over an animal.”

We looked down at Abbie. She was sleeping, taking long, regular breaths, her sides rising and falling in perfect rhythm.

“Thank you,” I said to Matt.

He put his hand on my shoulder and I left it there, and he looked at me with such hunger that I had to look down at Abbie again.

“I wanted to save her,” he said, “for you. Because it was so important to you.”

“Thank you,” I said again.

“Please—” he started, then he dropped to his knees and buried his face in his hands. His tears streamed through his fingers and left splotches on his trousers. I watched him cry. I watched the tears run through his hands and down his arms. I tried to summon my anger. “Please,” he said. “Please talk to me again.”

I took a deep breath. “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

I would let him tell me what he wanted to tell me. I would listen to him; I owed him at least that. And it was only because, in another of the universe's little ironies, in what could be the punch line for some twisted cosmic joke, Matt had finally given me a baby.

D
INERS MAKE
the best confessionals. The food is never good enough to be the focus of attention, the booths provide enough intimacy for talking, yet just enough public display to keep the conversation from getting too emotional. There is no starched waiter to fuss over you if you don't finish your meal, just an indifferent waitress who usually and correctly assumes you didn't eat because the food was awful. There is just enough murmuring in the background to mask declarations, apologies, denials, and explanations, as well as fill in those deadly excruciating silences that can inhibit a juicy tête-à-tête.

Plus you can order just about anything you want.

 

Matt and I decided to meet at the local diner.

He started with a hamburger and profuse apologies, the former of which he smothered in hot sauce. I started out like my Caesar salad—cool, crisp—then ultimately wilted into a blobby mess.

“It's been hell for me,” he said slowly. He stacked his French fries like Yule logs before covering them with a liberal sprinkling of salt. He always stacks his food in neat piles when he is nervous.

“It hasn't been a picnic for me, either,” I said, spearing an unappetizing, desiccated anchovy and laying it carefully across my napkin like an offering to the diner gods.

A little vein throbbed across his left temple. It's his tension vein, and it always puts in an appearance when things are getting emotionally difficult for him. I poked around at my salad, wondering where this was all going.

“First,” he said, “I want you to know that I really am sorry. I never meant to hurt you.”

I nodded. I had heard all that before. I was waiting for something new. Something that made it worthwhile to sit in an ancient aqua-and-red diner, on a ripped plastic seat that had duct tape holding it together, and eat crummy Caesar salad.

“I wanted to build up my practice, make a lot of money,” he started. “For you.”

I dropped my second anchovy. “Don't tell me you screwed around for me,” I enunciated in deadly tones, making sure to keep my voice low. There's only so much background noise a diner can produce, and I didn't want to compete with the lottery Quick Draw monitors to become the evening's entertainment.

“Listen to me,” he said, holding up a hand. “Please, let me explain.”

“Go ahead,” I said, crunching my way through the croutons strewn across the top of my salad. You can't mess up croutons too much.

“I don't even know how to start.” He took a deep breath. “I guess it was because I wanted to have a big practice.” He thought about his statement. “No, actually, Holly wanted a big practice.”

Yeah, I thought, of course it had to start with Holly-Grabitall.

“She came from this huge practice in Colorado, big surgery, four surgeons, full-time radiologist, huge,” he said wearily. “She kept telling me how we could do the same if only I had the guts. The ambition.”

“Guts,” I said encouragingly. “Okay.”

“We could be big, she said.” He picked up a French fry, lost in thought.

“Big?” I repeated.

“Yeah.” He ate the fry. Then another. I watched him and thought that, at this rate, we were going to be sitting here until the breakfast specials.

“It was the money,” he said softly. “She had this whole plan
worked out. I would take out a second mortgage and another loan and make her a partner for orchestrating the whole idea…” His voice was filled with pain. “She was so sure of things. She was so enthusiastic.”

I could see her, blonde and vivacious, with all that outdoor Colorado c'mon-guys-let's-ski-the-big-one enthusiasm.

He dropped his head. I lost him again. I picked at my salad. Was anything worth eating this salad?

“I thought I would keep it all a secret, and then, after we built the new building—”

“New building?” I interrupted, shocked at his words. “What new building? What was wrong with the old one?”

“Wasn't big enough,” he said. “I was going to tell you all about it. When we were finished. To surprise you. We were going to add on this whole…
wing
…” His voice cracked again. “I wanted you to be able to train horses, maybe open up an equestrian center, big indoor arena, with all the money we were going to make.” He dropped his head in his hands and gave a brief, broken sigh.

It brought the waitress back to our table. “Is everything all right?” She looked concerned that perhaps something might not be exactly appetizing about a dried-out burger with burnt onions, cold greasy fries, old coffee, and a droopy Caesar salad with anchovies that looked like leftover bait from a fishing contest.

“Everything's fine,” I reassured her. Matt never looked up.

“Does he want a refill on his coffee?” the waitress asked me.

“He's fine,” I said to her, and she left. “Go on,” I cued Matt. “Indoor arena.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Holly had these amazing plans. Investors, and movie-star clients that she was talking to all the time—”

“There are no movie stars around here,” I said.

“We were going to have a pet limo from the city. Take in boarding—a pet hotel, very posh. Offer them a week in the country. Like Pet Camp.” He gave me a “Wasn't that the craziest thing you've ever heard?” embarrassed grin.

“Pretty ambitious,” I said.

“So I went ahead,” he said. “I got myself in deeper and deeper—with the money and all.”

“So you did,” I said.

“And then we signed the contracts, and ordered all the equipment…” His eyes got a faraway look. He was seeing himself signing contracts.

“Yeah?” I encouraged, trying to bring him back to the diner.

“And—then I found out about Holly. Her secret.” His voice dropped. His eyes looked dead. “And then it all made sense.”

My heart skipped. Like knots tied in the dark, secrets always come undone. “What about her?” I asked.

He looked around, as though he were looking for someone to help him. He accidentally caught the waitress's eye, and she came bustling over again.

“Dessert?” she asked.

“No,” I said. She gave me a look and I tried to appease her. “But I'll have more coffee.” We waited for her to fill our cups with stale coffee.

“Holly?” I asked Matt after she was through. “What did you find out about Holly?” I wanted to know Holly's secret. Maybe he was going to say that Holly was an evil sorceress, or at least a vampire. That she hadn't come from Colorado at all, that she had come from some cave deep in the bowels of Transylvania, and that she bit him on the neck when he wasn't looking, sucked out his blood along with his common sense, and that he had been under a spell ever since.

“She's—she's—bipolar,” he said. “What they used to call manic-depressive. That's why her marriage broke up. That's why she lost her job in Colorado…” His eyes filled and he fought for control by minutely examining his burger. He took it apart and stacked it neatly on his plate, bun on one side, burnt onions on the other, gray burger in the middle. He cut it into four quadrants with his knife and fork. And then stacked them atop each other like poker chips. “She goes off the deep end because she's not compliant,” he said, his voice dark and empty now. “She won't stay on her medications. She gets
manic, out of control.” He leaned back in his seat, defeated. “She just created this whole fantasy about how we were going to pull it all off, and I got caught up in it.” He stopped and looked surprised that such a thing could have happened. “I got lost in it with her. I
believed
her. She told me that she was talking to these movie stars all the time!”

“Wow,” I said, “did she get any autographs?”

He gave me a weak smile. “She told me how we needed to build things quickly because they were so interested in her ideas. Spend money to make money, she said.”

“I might have understood the money part,” I said evenly. “Maybe. If you had come to me. But that doesn't answer how she got pregnant.”

I waited a long time for him to answer. To explain it to me. I didn't want to picture them together, but I couldn't help myself. I saw him taking Holly into his arms and pressing her into bed. Or maybe under the Christmas tree. I didn't want to picture it, but it was there, in front of me, superimposed over the pale-green romaine lettuce.

“We had a brief affair,” he said very softly. “She was so full of energy and enthusiasm, and wild and”—he looked away from me, his face flushed—“exciting. She never slept, she never ate. It was like she lived on sunlight. She was so dazzling. So magnetic—so—everything. And then”—he stopped here and I thought I heard a sob, a quick catch of voice and breath together—“she crashed.” He looked away. His eyes were filling. I couldn't watch. I just sat back in my seat and stared at my coffee cup.

So that was it. That was it. Holly was crazy. Holly was a manic vortex of insanity, spun out of control, like a centrifuge, her force pushing Matt away from me, away from his own good judgment and into the outer rims of the fantastical. But what had he been doing, dancing around the edge of it so willingly?

“You didn't have to sleep with her,” I said. “And you could have told me about the money.”

“Ah, Neelie,” he said. His eyes were rimmed with red now, and
he was barely able to look at me. He restacked his French fries into a rough log cabin. “You don't always listen.” A few fries fell over; he carefully restacked them “I wanted to tell you a million times, and wanted you to help me find a way out of it, but you”—his eyes finally met mine; hazel eyes, clouded with pain—“you never hear me.”

I was going to stand up and shout, “Don't blame this thing on me!” I was going to be indignant and righteous. I was going to call him a liar and stalk off in a huff. But, truth be told, he was right. I don't listen. I hadn't been there for him, and he had fallen. Instead of arguing with him, I sat mute from guilt, realizing he had stumbled and fallen and I hadn't been there at all.

He cleared his throat. “So—this is what I want to say.” He sat erect with purpose. “I will pay you back monthly, whatever amount your lawyer says, until you get everything you're entitled to.”

I sat back, still thinking,
I don't listen.
He was right. Then I realized he hadn't really so much apologized for the money thing as he had somehow made it partly my fault. And he hadn't apologized for getting Holly pregnant. Somehow that was Holly's fault. I looked into his eyes. They didn't seem sad to me so much as weak. Or maybe I had been the weak link. I looked for the answers in his eyes.

He shifted in his seat, trying, I knew, to figure out my steady gaze. Trying to figure out my silence. “I'll keep the practice going,” he said. “Holly is too unstable to work anymore, so I'm interviewing for a partner. Things are going pretty decent again, and I'll pay you back.”

“Okay,” I said, nodding my head. Then I thought of something. “What about the baby?” I asked. “How is Holly taking care of—what's the baby's name?”

“Isabella.” He looked inexorably sad. “Holly doesn't want her. Never did. And she's too sick to take care of her. She split. I don't even know where she is. Her parents are kind of filling in. But they don't want to.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“They're in their late seventies. Her father has Parkinson's. It's
too much for them. They want to retire to Arizona.” He paused, then gave me a significant look. “I was thinking—”

And I knew what he was going to say, my mind practically reciting it along with him, as he spoke: “I was thinking that maybe you would forgive me somehow and we could get back, and we could raise her together.”

I poked at my food while my mind split itself into two opposing voices. This was not how I wanted a baby. The baby is an innocent victim. But this wasn't how I wanted a baby. It's a little girl. Elephants adopt other elephants' babies. I am not an elephant.

I could barely look at him.

“Think it over, Neelie,” he said. “Please think it over before you give me an answer.”