The Wonders (12 page)

“What about Rhona? Should we visit her home as well?” Yuri, always the diplomat.

“We live in her home.”

“But this is not where she was born.”

“Then we should ask her. We are family now.”

Even though Christos was prone to grandiloquent statements, sometimes he said things that Leon knew to be true. This was one of them. They were family now. Leon's blood relatives were distant in space and distant in consciousness. The year of silence, when Susan had forbidden him to contact anyone, even family, had only shown him how little he missed his family, and probably they him. There was no bad feeling, only an emptiness, and that had begun to be filled by the people he spent each day with at Overington.

The two elephants still living at Rhona's, Maisie and Maximus, were free to roam, but sections of the grounds were cordoned off so that the vegetation had time to recover from their grazing. Both Maisie and Maximus seemed docile enough. Rhona said they were probably in their forties or fifties. Older than the Wonders.

Yuri said he had seen Maisie standing on her two front legs, then her two back legs, a trick she must have been taught in the circus. If you wore a hat outside and didn't keep your eyes peeled, Maximus would lift it from your head and blow it to the top of a tree. You might have to wait for a windy day to recover your headgear. If the breeze blew from the south, something to do with the orientation of the trees, a bandanna or ladies' broad-brimmed hat or beret from Rhona's parties of old had been
known to fly into the air and swoop incongruously onto the lawn or a flower bed.

“Oh, I used to love that hat!” Rhona exclaimed one time as she and Leon stood at the window watching a big creamy chiffon and straw concoction flip across the lawn. “I wore that to my cousin's second wedding in 2009.”

It was because of these pitiful remnants of the elephants' working life that the residents of Overington forgot the elephants were wild animals. Even when Maximus trumpeted right behind them and they shrieked at being startled, they didn't consider, or at least Leon didn't consider, that Maximus was actually speaking to them, trying to tell them something.

So when Maisie trampled the groundskeeper's car, Leon presumed there had been some mistake, or that Maisie had stumbled and fallen on the car, or that it was a practical joke and Rhona would produce a new car for the groundskeeper, who sat on the outside stairs of the house shocked and speechless at the sight of the steering wheel protruding from the windshield.

By the time Kathryn discovered the car and the groundskeeper, Maisie and Maximus had wandered off again. Kathryn shouted for someone to come. Leon ran out first, followed by Yuri and Christos. Rhona was on a call. When she emerged, she gasped at the scene of destruction. She stood staring at it for some time, lips pressed together. The groundskeeper had left the scene by then. He'd crab-walked over to Leon and Kathryn while Rhona was still inside, and he'd dropped his voice and muttered to them that he didn't want to have to sue but, really, who could put up with this. He'd seen that female one, the lady elephant, look straight at him as she punched a hole in the hood with her foot. It was terrifying. It was traumatic and he'd need time off and he wasn't sure if he'd ever recover and . . .

Kathryn hadn't bothered listening any further. She'd
walked away to talk to Yuri while Leon had to endure the man complaining for another five minutes about his pay and the responsibilities and no one warning him it would be a fucking zoo in here, he was a gardener and handyman, not an animal lover. Glad that Kathryn had missed that comment, Leon watched the man's mean hunched back as he shouldered into his cottage and slammed the door behind him. Once he had gone, Kathryn and Yuri returned to Leon's side.

Maximus and Maisie were still somewhere out on the grounds. It was the one day of the week that the elephant keeper had off.

“I'm worried she might have cut her foot on the glass.” Rhona peered at the ground, searching for traces of blood.

“Do we need an elephant therapist?” Christos took Rhona's hand and held it tight between his own hands. He knew, they all knew, how devoted she was to caring for the animals on the property. “What happened, do you think? Will she hurt us?”

Rhona sighed. “When I was a very small girl, one of the elephants at my father's circus went mad. Completely crazy. It trampled its trainer to death, tore down tents, pushed over vans and concession stands and afterward tried to throw itself repeatedly into a mass of barbed wire that the site occupier before us had left on the ground behind where we set up the big top. The elephant was trying to kill itself. The next day it did have to be put down because it had killed a man, so luckily those injuries from the barbed wire didn't cause it pain for too long.” Rhona was speaking slowly. “The thing is, everyone knew that the trainer was one of the cruelest men in the circus. He used an electric prod and a sharp pointed hook to beat the beast into doing what he wanted. It had huge scabs under its forelegs that the audience never saw but that must have caused it agony. He never fed it anything but subsistence food because he wanted more money for himself. He wouldn't get another elephant, even though that one was nearly
dying of loneliness. If you have ever heard a lonely elephant cry, you have heard the saddest sound in the world.”

“Oh,” Kathryn said. She turned and ran up the stairs into the main house. Rhona went on.

“Elephants are very like us, you know. The keeper tells a story about when there were only four hundred elephants left in Uganda. They were all young, their parents killed for their ivory. Teenage elephants had to become matriarchs. There were no bull elephants left, no male role models. So the young male elephants turned into juvenile delinquents, aggressive, attacking each other and other animals for no reason. Doesn't that remind you of human beings?”

“But Maisie, she is not a wild elephant,” Yuri said.

“No, and she and Maximus came from a good trainer, a man who was the son of a friend of my father's. From a different type of circus, not the Enchanted Circus kind. More . . . contemporary.” Rhona paused, but no one spoke. Leon knew what she meant—he'd read about the careless brutality of the Enchanted Circus.

Rhona continued. “Maisie's trainer, Frankie, adored his elephants, and he trained her and Maximus with rewards, not punishment. That's why they are such loving elephants. They grieved terribly when Frankie died. And they have a sense of humor because Frankie was a joker, and he made them laugh. Elephants can laugh, you know.”

“So why would she do this?”

Rhona looked at the cottage into which the groundskeeper had vanished. “You know that saying, an elephant never forgets. It's true. They don't forget people and what they've done. I'd trust Maisie every time over a human. I guess she can't tell us why she hates this man enough to destroy his car, so we'll have to take this as her sign.”

The shattered pieces of the windshield lay scattered in icy
blue chips at their feet. Leon picked up a thick fragment of glass. He held it up and angled it to catch the sunshine. When he first arrived at Overington and Rhona led him out to meet the animals she'd told him to hold his hand near Maximus's right ear. He was amazed to feel intense heat radiating from the great leathery muscular flap. For cooling, she'd explained. When he offered the elephants a handful of peanuts, Maisie's trunk reached to his palm and picked up the peanuts one by one with delicate precision, depositing a bubble of snot in the process. Her small eye framed by its stiff brush eyelashes gazed into him with the sympathy of an old wise woman. He couldn't imagine anyone but a sadist doing anything to hurt these animals.

The next day Rhona paid the groundskeeper for the car, gave him a substantial bonus and let him go. In the local tabloid the following week, the headline read
FREAK FARM HAS ROGUE ELEPHANT TOO. WHAT NEXT?

“Good,” Rhona said. “All the more mystique for us. We've got the permits, there's nothing anyone can do. Bring them on. And we'll find a good groundskeeper. I need staff we can love and who'll love us, all of us, human and animal. There's too much awfulness in the world without bringing it inside the house.”

Days like that, when she was their protective tiger, Leon felt safer than he had ever felt in his life. He had never been a confident man, but with part of his body replaced by a mechanical device, with a hole bored through his chest and arteries of transparent tubing, he had become aware of his vulnerability, his proximity to death every minute of every day. He had hidden in his dark apartment during the year of recovery, cautious about everything from sudden heart-shaking movement to the off chance someone might glimpse his altered body through a window. But now, thanks to Rhona, thanks to Overington and its loopy circus, he had entered a world where difference was celebrated rather than scorned.

L
EON WOKE TO
shouts and door slams strafing the settled air of the main Overington building. It was five thirty in the afternoon. He had been napping before dinner. He crept toward the common room and peeked around the corner. Minh, the doctor, was doing the same at the doorway of the opposite corridor. Christos materialized from his apartment. He strode straight to the middle of the room to confront Rhona and Kathryn.

“What is going on? I am trying to concentrate.”

“None of your fecking business!” Kathryn shouted. She started to walk toward her apartment but Rhona caught hold of her oversized overcoat and pulled her back to the fireplace.

“Don't you dare walk out on me like that, girl. I haven't finished. You are not slinking off until you apologize to him.”

“Fine. I'll do it in the morning.”

“No, you won't, because he won't be here. He's been fired.”

The sudden silence was broken by Christos. “Who has been fired?”

Ignoring him, Rhona picked up the department store bag from the couch and thrust it at Kathryn. “Here you are. Take it. Was this worth a man's livelihood?”

“I didn't fire him—you did. It's your responsibility.” Kathryn took the bag and bundled it under her arm.

“No, the security firm fired him because he called them in a panic when he lost you. When you slipped away and hid from him. Childish behavior!”

“I need some feckin' time on my own. I can't bear always being followed around by these guards. I don't even want this stupid hat.” She lifted the bag and emptied its contents of mauve tissue paper and crimson wool and ribbon onto the floor.

“Then come to me and I'll set it up.” Rhona stooped to gather the paper and hat and stuff them back into the bag. “Just don't run away. That man was terrified, and so was I when the security firm called me. Give me another heart attack and the whole circus will be over because I'll be in a goddamn coffin.”

Later that night, unable to sleep, Leon wandered out to the common room, where he found Rhona and Christos and Yuri curled up on chairs around a tray with a bottle of whiskey and a barrel of ice. Rhona looked exhausted. She poured another finger of whiskey and rattled the ice cubes around the glass before taking a sip.

“She was silly, sneaking away from her bodyguard like that, but I have to forgive her. The life she's had . . .”

She told them stories she had heard from Kathryn of growing up on a council estate—a public housing project—in Dublin, running with the local gang that supplied speed to the schools of the area. She was the youngest in the gang, a scrawny girl with the knowledge of every vacant flat, every lane and getaway route, the plate numbers of every unmarked district police car. Her mother worked two jobs: one for the council cleaning flats
for the elderly and disabled, the other serving drinks at the local pub. She was trying to get Kathryn and her brother out of there, to save the down payment for a flat or a house over on the other side of Dublin where they could start again without the influence of the gangs that ruled her children's lives.

It was already too late for Kathryn's brother. He was two years older than Kathryn, dealing speed and coke to the boys in a private school four suburbs away. He had three warrants out for his arrest by the time he was sixteen. When one of the private-school boys was caught snorting speed by his father, he apologized by informing on Kathryn's brother, setting up a buy. Two years in juvenile detention, the thinning of his body into something hard and long-muscled, then out and dealing again. Another arrest. Two more years. The lawyer who had been his best customer for cocaine saw him waiting on a bench outside the court for his trial, gave him a pat on the back and hurried off, gown flapping, shiny five-hundred-quid shoes tapping on the stone floor.

The few times Leon had heard mention of Kathryn's brother from her own mouth, she was heaping scorn on one of his moneymaking schemes.

“Where is your big brother now? Why haven't we met him?” Christos demanded once. He had introduced nine of his family members as guests to Overington so far. Two bulky shopkeeper brothers and their wives during an uncomfortable week that had Leon hiding in his room reading books, three cousins, a teenage niece. The oldest, his grandmother Yiayia Nina, arrived with a bagful of dolmades that leaked oil from her suitcase in a trail down the driveway. She stayed for three weeks in Christos and Yuri's apartment, cooking every day, wandering the garden every morning at dawn rubbing rosary beads through her wrinkled fingers and muttering her prayers. When she left, Christos
sobbed on the doorstep, waving at the blunt back of the limousine driving her away. He was always telling stories about himself and his family, everything down to the uncle who used to fondle Christos's penis when he was a boy. “I liked it,” Christos said. “It felt good, no one was hurt. He paid me in chocolate.”