“Jenna,” I ask, “can you run to the car and see if I left my sunglasses in there?”
She gets up, more than happy to escape this conversation.
“All right.” I wait for Virgil to meet my gaze. “I don’t know what you’re up to, but I don’t trust you.”
“Excellent. Then we feel exactly the same way about each other.”
“What are you not telling her?”
He hesitates, deciding whether or not to trust me, I’m sure. “The night the caregiver was found dead, Thomas Metcalf was nervous. Antsy. It could have been because his wife and daughter were missing at the time. And it could have been because he was already showing signs of a breakdown. But it also could have been a guilty conscience.”
I lean back, crossing my arms. “You think Thomas is a suspect. You think Alice is a suspect. Seems to me you think everyone’s to blame except yourself, for saying in the first place that the death was an accident.”
Virgil looks up at me. “I think Thomas Metcalf might have been abusing his wife.”
“That’s a damn good reason to run away,” I say, thinking out loud. “So you want to meet with him and try to get a reaction out of him.”
When Virgil shrugs, I know I’m right.
“Did you ever consider what that might do to Jenna? She already thinks her mother abandoned her. You’re going to take off her rose-colored glasses and show her that her father was a bastard, too?”
He shifts. “She should have thought of that before she hired me.”
“You’re really an ass.”
“That’s what I get paid for.”
“Then for all intents and purposes, you ought to be in a different tax bracket.” I narrow my gaze. “You and I know you’re not getting rich off this case. So what do you get out of it?”
“The truth.”
“For Jenna?” I ask. “Or for you, because you were too lazy to find it out ten years ago?”
A muscle tics in his jaw. For a second I think I’ve crossed the line, that he is going to get up and storm off. Before he can, though, Jenna reappears. “No sunglasses,” she says. She is still holding the stone, still fastened around her neck.
I know that some neurologists think that autistic kids have brain synapses so close together and firing in such quick succession that they cause hyperawareness; that one of the reasons children on the spectrum rock or stim is to help them focus instead of having all sensations bombard them at once. I think clairvoyance isn’t really all that much different. In all probability, neither is mental illness. I asked Gita, once, about her imaginary friends. Imaginary? she repeated, as if I were the one who was crazy, for not seeing them. And here’s the kicker—I understood what she was talking about, because I’d been there. If you notice someone talking to a person you can’t see, she may be a paranoid schizophrenic. But she may also just be psychic. The fact that you can’t see the other half of the conversation doesn’t mean it’s not truly happening.
That’s the other reason I don’t particularly want to visit Thomas Metcalf in a psychiatric facility: I just may be coming face-to-face with people who can’t control a natural gift I’d kill to have once again.
“You know how to get to the institution?” Virgil asks.
“Really,” Jenna says, “it’s really not such a great idea to visit my dad. He doesn’t always react well to people he doesn’t know.”
“I thought you said he doesn’t even recognize you sometimes. So who’s to say we’re not just old friends he’s forgotten?”
I see Jenna trying to work through Virgil’s logic, deciding if she should be protecting her father or trying to take advantage of his weak defenses.
“He’s right,” I say.
Virgil and Jenna are both shocked by my statement. “You agree with him?” Jenna asks.
I nod. “If your dad has anything to contribute about why your mother left that night, it might point us in the right direction.”
“It’s up to you,” Virgil says, noncommittal.
After a long moment, Jenna says, “The truth is, my mother’s all he ever talks about. How they met. What she looked like. When he knew he was going to ask her to get married.” She bites her lower lip. “The reason I said I didn’t want you to go to the institution is because I didn’t want to share that with you. With anyone. It’s, like, the only connection I have with my dad. He’s the one person who misses her as much as I do.”
When the universe calls, you don’t place it on hold. There is a reason I keep circling back to this girl. It’s either because of her gravitational pull or because she’s a drain I’m bound to be sucked down.
I offer my brightest smile. “Sugar,” I say, “I’m a sucker for a good love story.”
ALICE
The matriarch had died.
It was Mmaabo, who had slipped to the back of her herd yesterday, her movements laborious and jerky, before she sank down on her front knees and then toppled over. I had been up for thirty-six straight hours, observing. I noted how Mmaabo’s herd—her daughter Onalenna, who was her closest companion—had tried to lift her mother with her tusks and had managed to prop her on her feet, only to have Mmaabo fall over for good. How her trunk had reached toward Onalenna one last time before unfurling on the ground, like a skein of ribbon. How Onalenna and the others in the herd had made sounds of distress, had tried to prod their leader with their trunks and their bodies, pushing and pulling at Mmaabo’s corpse.
After six hours, the herd left the body. But almost immediately, another elephant approached. I thought it was a trailing member of Mmaabo’s herd but recognized the notched triangle on the left ear and the freckled feet of Sethunya, the matriarch of a different, smaller herd. Sethunya and Mmaabo were not related, but as Sethunya approached, she, too, got quieter, softer in her movements. Her head bowed, her ears drooped. She touched Mmaabo’s body with her trunk. She lifted her left rear foot and held it above Mmaabo’s body. Then she stepped over Mmaabo, so that her front legs and back legs straddled the fallen elephant. She began to sway back and forth. I timed this for six minutes. It felt like a dance, though there was no music. A silent dirge.
What did it mean? Why was an elephant not related to Mmaabo so profoundly affected by her death?
It had been two months since the death of Kenosi, the young bull who’d been caught in the snare, two months since I’d officially narrowed the focus of my postdoctoral work. While other colleagues working at the game reserve were studying the migration patterns of Tuli Block elephants and how they affected the ecosystem; or the effects of drought on the reproductive rate of elephants; or musth and male seasonality, my science was cognitive. It could not be measured with a geographic tracking device; it was not in the DNA. No matter how many times I recorded instances of elephants touching another elephant’s skull, or returning to the site where a former herd member died, the moment I interpreted that as grief, I was crossing a line animal researchers were not supposed to cross. I was attributing emotion to a nonhuman creature.
If anyone had ever asked me to defend my work, here’s what I would have said: The more complex a behavior is, the more rigorous and complicated the science behind it. Math, chemistry, that’s the easy stuff—closed models with discrete answers. To understand behavior—human or elephant—the systems are far more complex, which is why the science behind them must be that much more intricate.
But no one ever asked. I’m pretty sure my boss, Grant, thought this was a phase I was going through, and that sooner or later, I’d get back to science, instead of elephant cognition.
I had seen elephants die before, but this was the first time since I’d changed my research focus. I wanted every last detail to be noted. I wanted to make sure I didn’t overlook anything as too mundane; any action that I might learn later was critical to the way elephants mourn. To that end, I stayed there, sacrificing sleep. I marked down which elephants came to visit, identifying them by their tusks, their tail hair, the marks on their bodies, and sometimes even the veins on their ears, which had patterns as unique as our own thumbprints. I cataloged how much time they spent touching Mmaabo, where they explored. I wrote down when they left the body, and if they returned. I cataloged the other animals—impala, and one giraffe—that passed through the vicinity, unaware that a matriarch had fallen. But mostly, I stayed because I wanted to know if Onalenna would come back.
It took her nearly ten hours to return, and when she did, it was twilight and her herd was off in the distance. She stood quietly beside her mother’s corpse as night fell, immediate as a guillotine. Every now and then she would vocalize, to be answered by rumbles from the northeast—as if she needed to check in with her sisters, and to remind them she was still here.
Onalenna hadn’t moved in the past hour, which is probably why I was so startled by the arrival of a Land Rover, the headlights slicing through the dark. It startled Onalenna, too, and she backed away from her dead mother, her ears flapping in threat. “There you are,” Anya said, as she pulled her vehicle closer. She was another elephant researcher, who was studying how migratory routes had changed because of poaching. “You didn’t answer your walkie-talkie.”
“I turned the volume down. I didn’t want to disturb her,” I said, nodding toward the nervous elephant.
“Well, Grant needs you to do something.”
“Now?” My boss had been less than encouraging when I told him about shifting my focus to elephant grief. He hardly talked to me at all now. Did this mean he was coming around?
Anya looked at Mmaabo’s body. “When did it happen?”
“Almost twenty-four hours ago.”
“Have you told the rangers yet?”
I shook my head. I would, of course. They’d come down and cut the tusks off Mmaabo, to discourage poachers. But I thought, for a few more hours at least, her herd deserved to have time to grieve.
“When should I tell Grant to expect you?” Anya asked.
“Soon,” I said.
Anya’s vehicle slipped into the bush, becoming a tiny pinprick of light in the inky distance, like a firefly. Onalenna blew out, a huffing sound. She slipped her trunk into her mother’s mouth.
Before I could even record that behavior, a hyena trotted into the space in front of Mmaabo. The spotlight I had on the scene caught the bright white incisors as he opened his jaws. Onalenna rumbled. She reached out her trunk, which seemed too far from the hyena to do damage. But African elephants have an extra foot or so of trunk length that, like an accordion, can punch out at you when you least expect it. She popped that hyena so hard it went rolling away from Mmaabo’s corpse, whimpering.
Onalenna turned her heavy head toward me. She was secreting from her temporal glands, deep gray streaks.
“You’re going to have to let her go,” I said out loud, but I am not sure which one of us I was trying to convince.
I woke with a start when I felt the sun on my face, the first shards of daylight. My first thought was that Grant was going to kill me. My second thought was that Onalenna was gone. In her place were two lionesses, tearing at Mmaabo’s hindquarters. Above, a vulture swam through the sky in a figure eight, awaiting its turn.
I didn’t want to go back to camp; I wanted to sit by Mmaabo’s corpse to see if any other elephants would continue to pay their respects.
I wanted to find Onalenna and see what she was doing now, how the herd was behaving, who was the new de facto matriarch.
I wanted to know if she could turn grief off like a faucet, or if she still missed her mother. How long it took for that feeling to pass.