The Life Before Her Eyes (24 page)

"I'll go," says the one who's not her daughter, the one who can think of nothing she'd want to do tonight without Nate Witt, anyway.

Her friend gives her a dirty look. "Thanks a lot, girlfriend," she says.

D
IANA FOLLOWED AN ARROW THAT SAID
ELLA THE ELEPHANT,
thinking she'd turn back toward the lion's den after she'd given Mr. McCleod and the old woman a good head start.

The path to Ella the elephant was scattered with peanut shells. A bit more kitsch. Diana imagined someone out there every morning emptying a bag of empty shells onto the dirt.

The sign and the path and the elephant were new since Diana had last been to the zoo. For decades there'd been no elephant at Briar Hill Park and Zoo, not since Diana had been a child.
That
elephant had also been named Ella, and she'd died under mysterious circumstances. One summer afternoon she'd simply collapsed under her own enormous weight, having never displayed a single symptom of disease.

Articles were written about Ella in the newspaper. There were photographs of her, dead, on the front page for days. Her legs and trunk were under her body, and she'd had her forehead pressed to the ground. She looked as if she'd fallen out of the sky.

Why had she died?

An investigation was ordered. The government got involved. Elephant experts were flown in from all over the world to study Ella's terrible carcass.

Not a heart attack. Not a blood clot Poisoning was suspected.

But who would have poisoned the elephant?

Someone who worked at the zoo?

Someone who visited the zoo?

A rumor sprang up that
children—teenagers
—had poisoned Ella, and whether there was any truth to it or not, Diana never knew, having been only nine or ten years old at the time. But the idea of it caught fire in Briar Hill, and the town, as if to punish its young, refused to replace the elephant. The signs pointing the way to the elephant pit were taken down, and that part of the zoo was closed off completely.

But now the elephant apparently was back. Diana could smell her. A sweetly acidic smell mixed with wet straw, foliage, shit. And she could feel the dirt path vibrate through the flimsy soles of her sandals, as if kettle drums were being played underground.

The elephant was stomping in the pit.

They'd planted tropical trees along the edge of the path since Diana had last walked it (how did they manage it in this climate?), and the leaves made a lush tunnel that bent lower and lower over the path until Diana could feel the fronds brushing the top of her head as she hurried along. A thick humidity was rising from the earth beneath the peanut shells, and there was a small swarm—a small gray cloud, like a brain—of gnats hovering in midair along the path.

Diana had to run through them with her hands covering her eyes.

When she was through the cloud and had uncovered her eyes, Ella was closer than she'd expected. She hadn't even planned to see the elephant. She'd wanted simply to walk to the end of the path, then hurry back toward the lion's den.

But there Ella was, only a few feet away from Diana, alone in the elephant pit.

She was standing in a shallow puddle of urine, and there was a steel ting around one of her ankles. A rusty chain was attached to one end of the ring, and the other end was attached to a steel post.

Diana stood sweating and still at the end of the tropical tunnel from which she'd emerged more quickly than she'd expected, staring at Ella.

Ella stared back.

Diana could still feel the earth vibrating dully under her feet, but the elephant
wasn't
stomping. The elephant was only standing, looking as though she hadn't moved in years.

Ella blinked, then turned her face away from Diana, then swooped her huge head back to look at Diana again.

There was no one else around.

Diana felt ashamed and as though she ought to speak if she were going to stand there and stare....

Ella's eyes were enormous, and glassy, and as full of suffering and hope as anything Diana had ever seen.

Diana cleared her throat. With no one but Ella to hear, what difference did it make if she spoke?

Ella shifted a bit, and the chain at her ankle scraped against the cement floor of the elephant pit.

Diana took a step forward and said, "How could I have forgotten you?"

H
ER DAUGHTER...

Diana had almost forgotten what she was doing, why she was at the zoo. She took a last look at Ella, who didn't move and didn't blink, whose eyes were full of loneliness and longing. Still, that vibration under the ground.

Diana lifted her hand to say good-bye, then turned and hurried back toward the jungle tunnel that had led her there.

When she was beneath the greenness of it again, the rumbling became even louder, and Diana stopped for a moment and turned to look back toward the pit, to the place from which the rumbling seemed to come.

It had to be some kind of underground machine. A generator that powered the whole zoo. Some kind of enormous furnace being stoked. Ella was still watching her, still hadn't
moved—but coming from her direction, there was the sound of a
herd
of elephants running through a jungle.

Neither girl has ever been to a lecture.

It takes place in the auditorium on campus where they were each taken, as little girls, to see the Nutcracker ballet.

The carpet is a rich aqua blue, and the ceiling above them is inlaid with gold. They sit with one of the girl's mothers, in a row not far from the front, a row of seats that has been roped off for those who work in the philosophy department.

The heavy velvet curtains have already been opened, revealing a stage with nothing but a podium on it. Beside the podium there is a small table with a pitcher of water and a single glass.

Tonight the auditorium is completely full. People who've come to hear the lecture have to stand along the walls because there are no seats left. The mumbling of the audience sounds like locomotion. It doesn't grow louder or quieter until the lights flash—off, on—and then the whole auditorium goes suddenly and obediently silent.

When Professor McFee steps out on the stage, there's immediate applause.

The applause goes on and on.

The professor looks happy but embarrassed. He nods into the applause as if it were a wind. He glances into the audience nervously.

He isn't a young man, but he has a child's eyes—darting and bright blue. He's wearing a suit, but it looks a bit rumpled, uncomfortable, as if it's hung in a closet for many years without being worn. He has a neatly trimmed beard and mustache with just a touch of gray.

When he puts the folder he's carrying onto the podium, the audience quits clapping, but there's still a feeling in the air like applause—goodwill, appreciation—before he has even spoken.

Professor McFee at the podium looks up, nervous, and says, "It's one of the greatest honors of my life to have been asked to give the Arthur M. Fuller lecture this year."

One of the girls—the one who wanted to come to the lecture in the first place—looks at the other and rolls her eyes.

But the other looks away from her, back to the man on the stage.

He begins by clearing his throat, looking down at his notes, then up at the audience, and then he says, "Many have asked the question Why is there evil? The question
I
want to ask tonight is, Why is there
good?
"

For the two hours of his lecture, one of the girls never again takes her eyes from the reddish light around this man, whose humility and brightness are greater than anything she's ever seen. Until this moment she didn't know such men existed in the world.

Professor McFee talks about good and evil as if he has thought a lot about them, as if he has spent a
lifetime
thinking about them, reading about them, wondering...

"Why," he asks, "are human beings capable, as no other animals seem to be, of
intentional evil
? Can it be so that human beings will therefore also be capable of
intentional good?

"If evil exists, as the Old Testament implies that it does, to test and strengthen the virtue of the good, to what high angel may we turn for guidance when faced with a choice for evil or good?"

A long pause.

"To the
conscience,
" he answers his own question, "which is
the mirror that can't be tarnished but must be located.
Conscience is the voice of God in the nature and heart of man...
"

One of the girls takes a pen and a piece of paper out of her purse and writes that down.

S
HE BEGAN TO RUN...

Out of the jungle tunnel littered with peanut shells and back into the clearing where she'd seen Mr. McCleod. Now there was no one there. Just the jeep with its blank-eyed driver and his female companion leaning awkwardly away from him as if she'd been jostled on a bumpy road and never propped back up.

And the natives, who didn't bother to look at her.

Diana ran toward the steps that led up to the lion's den, stumbling in her sandals, out of breath.

What if her daughter wasn't there?

She looked at her wrist, but she hadn't put her watch on this morning. Instead she had an armful of useless silver bracelets. What time could it have been? How long had she stopped to talk to Mr. McCleod? How long had she stood looking at Ella, the elephant? She looked at the sky, and the sun was directly in the center of it—noon—but could it have been only noon?

Of course...

Of course it was only noon.

The sun couldn't just stop like a dead watch in the sky.

It was only noon. They had
hours
until they were supposed to meet again at the entrance of the zoo.

But Diana continued hurrying up the stairs to the lion's den, feeling weak with breathlessness. Hot and tired. The glare of the summer sun on the tropical leaves of the African safari seemed so bright—brighter than the sun itself—that Diana
could hardly see. And there was a high whining coming from somewhere over her head and in her inner ear at the same time. She put her hand to her temple as she hurried up the stairs and tried to stop the pain there before it started, but when she did this she dropped her purse.

It fell tumbling behind her down the stairs, and Diana turned and watched it tumble, hoping it wouldn't spill...

But it did.

She saw her wallet fall out, a small shower of silver and copper coins, and then a tampon, and then—though she knew it couldn't have been—a clear plastic Baggie of marijuana.

It was wrapped up tightly with a rubber band, but even from where she was standing many steps above it, Diana could see the crushed, illegal leaves of it gleaming darkly in the sun.

"Mrs. McFee?"

Diana turned around fast to see Sister Beatrice standing above her, a black silhouette with wings. She could only blink up at her, because the sun shining behind Sister Beatrice was so brilliant and her dark robes only barely blocked it out. She was still carrying her load of manila folders and notebooks. They looked disorganized, unwieldy, as if they'd been dropped and picked back up and insufficiently reorganized.

"Oh," Diana said. "I—" She pointed to the stairs that rose behind Sister Beatrice in dusty stations. "I was just on my way ... there ... to find the girls."

"You dropped your purse," Sister Beatrice said.

"I know," Diana said, and smiled weakly. She felt afraid to move, to hurry toward the Baggie of marijuana, which would have been an admission of guilt.

But it wasn't hers.

It hadn't been hers for more than
two decades...

How—?

Sister Beatrice was looking at it. There was a tension around her eyes. A recognition.

"I found your girls," Sister Beatrice said. "They're not at the lion's den anymore. They've gone to look at the wolves."

Sister Beatrice pointed to the path that led back out of the African safari, and when she did, the manila folders in her arms shifted and a few papers flew loose from her grasp. They floated downward on the breeze, landing on the stairs at Diana's feet.

Diana bent over and picked them up, brushed a bit of dirt off of them, and then she put them neatly together and held them up to Sister Beatrice. "Here you go," Diana said, trying to sound helpful, obedient, a good student.

The nun reached out to take them quickly, but before she could snatch the papers out of Diana's hand, Diana saw the paper that was on top.

It had been folded into fourths, then very carefully smoothed flat again.

The large bold type was in a familiar font. Her daughter's name was written in blue pen in her daughter's familiar writing in the upper right-hand corner of the page.

Bethany Maria Anna Elizabeth was an orphan in a convent until I adopted her. Her favorite food is Froot Loops. Bethany Maria Anna Elizabeth does not like math tests or science as much as she likes ice cream! When she grows up she wants to be a mommy.

"Give me that," Sister Beatrice snapped.

"But," Diana blurted, trying to hold on to the piece of paper, "it's Emma's story, the one—"

Sister Beatrice managed to snatch the piece of paper out of Diana's hand, and when she had it again she stuffed it among the manila folders and other papers. Diana saw it disappear and knew she'd never get it back again. She looked up. Now she was only a foot or two away from Sister Beatrice's face, and she could see how angry the nun was. Her jaw was clenched. Her eyes were narrowed, as if she were about to make a threat.

"It was you," Diana said. A realization, but it wasn't an accusation. She was simply understanding something aloud and for the first time. "You changed Emma's story?" She looked up at Sister Beatrice, full of wonder.

"Oh,
shut up,
" Sister Beatrice said. She walked stiffly past Diana on the stairs. She hadn't said it loudly but had said it with such force that Diana felt, briefly, that it might have struck her dumb, that it might have been a curse, that she might never speak again.