ALICE
There is no question that elephants understand death. They may not plan for it the way we do; they may not imagine elaborate afterlives like those in our religious doctrines. For them, grief is simpler, cleaner. It’s all about loss.
Elephants are not particularly interested in the bones of other dead animals, just other elephants. Even if elephants come across the body of another elephant that has been long dead, its remains picked apart by hyenas and its skeleton scattered, they bunch and get tense. They approach the carcass as a group, and caress the bones with what can only be described as reverence. They stroke the dead elephant, touching it all over with their trunks and their back feet. They will smell it. They might pick up a tusk or a bone and carry it for a while. They will place even the tiniest bit of ivory under their feet and gently rock back and forth.
The naturalist George Adamson wrote of how, in the 1940s, he had to shoot a bull elephant that was breaking into government gardens in Kenya. He gave the meat to locals and moved the rest of the carcass a half mile from the village. That night, elephants discovered the carcass. They took the shoulder blade and the femur and brought the bones back to the spot where the elephant had been shot. In fact, all of the great elephant researchers have documented death rituals: Iain Douglas-Hamilton, Joyce Poole, Karen McComb, Lucy Baker, Cynthia Moss, Anthony Hall-Martin.
And me.
I once saw a herd of elephants walking in the reserve in Botswana when Bontle, their matriarch, went down. When the other elephants realized she was in distress, they attempted to lift her with their tusks, trying to get her to stand. When that didn’t work, some of the young males mounted Bontle, again seeking to bring her back to consciousness. Her calf, Kgosi, who was about four at the time, put his trunk in her mouth, the way young elephants greet their mothers. The herd rumbled and the calf was making sounds that seemed like screams, but then they all got very quiet. At this point I realized she had died.
A few of the elephants moved toward the tree line, collecting leaves and branches, which they brought to cover Bontle. Others tossed dirt onto her body. The herd stood solemnly with Bontle’s body for two and a half days, leaving only to get water or food, and then returning. Even years later, when her bones had been bleached and scattered, her massive skull caught in the crook of a dry riverbank, the herd would stop when passing by, standing in silence for a few minutes. Recently, I saw Kgosi—now a big young male of eight years—approach the skull and stick his trunk in the spot where Bontle’s mouth would have been. Clearly these bones had general significance to him. But if you had seen it, I think you’d believe what I do: that he recognized that these particular bones had once been his mother.
JENNA
“Tell me again,” I demand.
Serenity rolls her eyes. We’ve been sitting in her living room for an hour while she goes over the details of a ten-second dream she had about my mother. I know it’s my mother because of the blue scarf, the elephant, and … well, because when you desperately want to believe something’s true, you can convince yourself of just about anything.
True, Serenity might have Googled me the minute I walked out the door, and concocted some crazy trance with a pachyderm. But if you Google “Jenna Metcalf,” it takes three pages before you get to any mention of my mother, and even then, it’s an article that only references me as her three-year-old daughter. There are too many other Jenna Metcalfs who have done too much with their lives, and my mother’s disappearance was too long ago. Also, Serenity didn’t know I was coming back for the scarf I left behind.
Unless she did, which proves she’s the real deal, right?
“Listen,” Serenity says, “I can’t tell you any more than what I already have.”
“But my mother was breathing.”
“The woman I dreamed about was breathing.”
“Did she, like, gasp? Make any sounds?”
“No. She was just lying there. It’s just … a sense I had.”
“She’s not dead,” I murmur, more to myself than to Serenity, because I like the way the words fill me up with bubbles, like my blood has been carbonated. I know I should be angry or upset getting even this loose proof that my mother might still be alive—and that she’s abandoned me for the past decade—but I’m too happy about the thought that if I play my cards right, I will see her again.
Then I can choose to hate her or I can ask her myself why she didn’t come for me.
Or I can just crawl into her arms and suggest we start from scratch.
All of a sudden, my eyes widen. “Your dream. It’s new evidence. If you tell the police what you told me, they’ll reopen my mother’s case.”
“Honey, there isn’t a detective in this country that’s going to take the dream of a psychic and write it up as formal evidence. It’s like asking the DA to call the Easter Bunny as a witness.”
“But what if it actually happened? What if what you dreamed was just a piece of the past, looping itself into your head?”
“That’s not how psychic information works. I once had a client come to me whose grandmother had passed. Her grandmother was a very strong presence, showing me the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, Chairman Mao, fortune cookies. It was like she was doing everything in her power to get me to say China. So I asked if her grandma had visited China, or been into feng shui or something like that, and the client said that didn’t sound like her grandma, it didn’t make sense. Then Grandma showed me a rose. I told the client, and she said, Gram was more of a wildflower girl. So I’m thinking, China … rose. China … rose. And the client looks up and says to me, Well, when she died, I inherited her whole set of china, and it’s got a rose pattern. Now, I have no idea why Grandma was showing me egg rolls instead of a gravy bowl with a rose on it. But that’s what I mean—an elephant might not really be an elephant. It could be standing in for something else.”
I look at her, confused. “But you’ve told me twice now that she’s not dead.”
Serenity hesitates. “Look, you should know that I don’t exactly have a perfect track record.”
I shrug. “Just because you screwed up once doesn’t mean you’ll screw up again.”
She opens her mouth, but then snaps it shut.
“Back when you used to find missing people,” I ask, “how did you do it?”
“I’d take a piece of clothing or a toy that belonged to the child. Then I’d go for a walk with the cops, trying to retrace the last few minutes where he was seen,” Serenity says. “And sometimes I’d get … something.”
“Like?”
“A flash in my head—of a street sign or type of landscape, or a make of car, or even once a goldfish bowl that turned out to be in the room where the kid was being locked up. But …” She shifts uneasily. “My psychic arteries may have hardened a little bit.”
I don’t know how a psychic could ever lose, if—as Serenity says—the information she gets might be a direct hit or might actually mean the exact opposite. It seems to me like the biggest career safety net ever. And yeah, maybe the elephant Serenity pictured is some metaphor for a huge obstacle my mother’s faced; but as Freud would probably say, maybe it’s really an elephant. There’s only one way to find out. “You have a car, right?”
“Yeah … what? Why?”
I walk across the living room, wrapping my mother’s scarf around my neck. Then I reach into one of the drawers I’d searched through when I first arrived, in which I’d seen a jangle of car keys. I toss them to Serenity and walk out the door of her apartment. I may not be psychic, but I know this much: She’s too curious about what that dream means not to follow.
Serenity drives a yellow VW Bug from the 1980s that has rusted through in a lacy pattern behind the passenger door. My bike is pretzeled into the backseat. I direct her on back roads and state highways, getting lost only twice, because you can cut through alleyways on a bike that you can’t cut through with a car. When we get to the Stark Nature Preserve, we are the only car parked in the lot. “Now are you going to tell me why you dragged me here?” she asks.
“This used to be an elephant sanctuary,” I tell her.
She looks out the window, as if she expects to still see one. “Here? In New Hampshire?”
I nod. “My dad was an animal behaviorist. He started the place, before he met my mom. Everyone thinks about elephants living in superhot places like Thailand and Africa, but they can adapt really well to cold, and even snow. When I was born he had seven elephants here that he’d rescued from zoos and circuses.”
“Where are they now?”
“The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee took them all, when this place shut down.” I look at the chain gate across the trailhead. “The land was sold back to the state. I was too little to remember when it happened.” I open the passenger door and get out of the car, glancing back to make sure that Serenity is following me. “We have to walk the rest of the way.”
Serenity looks down at her leopard-print flip-flops and then at the overgrown trail. “Where?”
“You tell me.”
It takes Serenity a moment to understand what I’m asking her to do. “Oh no,” she says. “Hell no.” She pivots on her heel and starts back to the car.
I grab her arm. “You told me you haven’t had a dream in years. But you dreamed about my mom. It’s not going to hurt to see if you get a flash of something, is it?”
“Ten years isn’t a cold case, it’s an ice trail. There’s nothing still here now that existed back when your mother disappeared.”
“I’m here,” I say.
Serenity’s nostrils flare.
“I know the last thing you want is to prove that your dream didn’t really mean anything at all,” I say. “But it’s kind of like winning the lottery, right? If you don’t buy a ticket, you never even have a chance.”
“I buy a goddamn ticket every week, and I’ve never won the Powerball,” Serenity mutters, but she steps over the chain and starts bushwhacking through the overgrown trail.
We walk in silence for a while, as insects zip past our heads and summer hums around us. Serenity walks with her hand brushing the browse; at one point she breaks off a leaf and sniffs it before moving on. “What are we looking for?” I whisper.
“I’ll tell you when I know.”
“It’s just that we’re practically off the grounds of the old sanctuary—”
“Do you or do you not want me to concentrate?” Serenity interrupts.
So I’m quiet for a few more minutes. But there’s something that’s been nagging at me for the whole car ride; it feels like a bone caught at the back of my throat. “Serenity?” I ask. “If my mother wasn’t alive and you knew that … would you lie to me and tell me she was?”
She stops and turns, hands on her hips. “Sugar, I don’t know you well enough to like you, much less protect your tender little teenage heart. I don’t know why your mother isn’t coming through to me. It could be because she’s alive, not dead. Or it could be, like I said, because I’m rusty. But I promise you … if I get any sense that your mother’s a spirit or even a ghost, I’ll tell you the truth.”
“A spirit or a ghost?”
“They’re two different things. You can thank Hollywood for making everyone think they’re one and the same.” She looks over her shoulder at me. “When the body expires, it’s over. Done. Elvis has left the building. But the soul is still intact. If you’ve led a decent life and you don’t have a lot of regrets, you may hang around for a bit, but sooner or later you’ll finish the transition.”
“Transition?”
“Cross over. Go to Heaven. Whatever you want to call it. If you go through that process, you become a spirit. But let’s say you’ve been a jerk in this lifetime and St. Peter or Jesus or Allah is going to judge your sorry ass and you’ll probably go to Hell or some other bad real estate in the afterlife. Or maybe you’re angry that you died young, or hell, maybe you don’t even realize you’re dead at all. For any one of those reasons, you might decide you aren’t quite ready to leave this world, or be dead yet. The problem is—you are dead. There’s no way around that. So you stay here, in limbo, as a ghost.”
We are walking again, side by side, through the thick brush. “So if my mother’s a spirit, she’s gone … somewhere else?”
“That’s right.”
“And if she’s a ghost, where is she?”
“Here. She’s part of this world, but not the same part you’re in.” Serenity shakes her head. “How do I explain this …” she mutters, then snaps her fingers. “I once saw a documentary about Disney animators. There are all these transparent layers with different lines and colors that stack on top of each other to make a single Donald Duck or Goofy. I think it’s like that, for ghosts. They’re another layer, laid over our own world.”
“How do you know all this?” I ask.
“It’s just what I’ve been told,” Serenity says. “It’s the tip of the iceberg, from what I can tell.”
I glance around, trying to see all these ghosts that must be hovering at the edges of my peripheral vision. Trying to feel my mother. Maybe it wouldn’t be all that bad, if she was dead but still somewhere close by. “Would I know it? If she was a ghost and she tried to talk to me?”
“You ever hear the phone ring, and pick it up, and just get dead air? That could be a spirit, trying to tell you something. They’re energy, so the easiest way for them to try to get your attention is by manipulating energy. Phone lines, computer glitches, turning lights on and off.”
“Is that how they communicate with you?”
She hesitates. “For me, it’s more like when I first tried contact lenses. I could never adjust, because I could tell there was something foreign in my eye that didn’t belong. It wasn’t uncomfortable—it just wasn’t part of me. That’s how it feels when I get information from the other side. Like an afterthought, except I’m not the one who’s thought it.”
“Kind of like you can’t help but hear it?” I ask. “Like a song you can’t stop humming?”
“I guess so.”
“I used to think I saw my mom all the time,” I say softly. “I’d be in a crowded place and I’d let go of my grandma’s hand and start running toward her, but I was never able to catch up.”
Serenity is staring at me with a strange look on her face. “Maybe you are psychic.”
“Or maybe missing someone and finding someone have the same symptoms,” I say.
Suddenly, she stops walking. “I’m feeling something,” she says dramatically.
I look around, but all I see is a small hummock of tall grass, a few trees, and a delicate mobile of monarch butterflies turning slowly overhead. “We’re nowhere near a sugar maple,” I point out.
“Visions are like metaphors,” Serenity explains.
“Which is pretty ironic, because that’s a simile,” I say.
“What?”
“Never mind.” I pull the blue scarf off my neck. “Wouldn’t it help if you held this?”
I pass it to her, but she rears away like it’s going to give her the plague. The thing is, I’ve already let go of it, and a gust of wind carries it skyward, a tiny tornado spiraling further and further away.
“No!” I scream, and like a shot, I run after it. It dips and rises, teasing me, caught on air currents, but never coming close enough for me to catch. After a few minutes, the scarf gets tangled in the branches of a tree, about twenty feet up. I find a foothold and try to shimmy up the tree, but there are no knots on the bark for toeholds. Frustrated, I fall down hard on the ground, tears stinging my eyes.
There’s so little I have of her.
“Here.”
I find Serenity crouched beside me, her hands laced together to give me a leg up.
I scratch my cheek and my arms as I climb; my fingernails break as I dig them into the bark. But I manage to get high enough to reach the first notch made by a branch. I scrabble around with my hand and feel dirt and twigs, the abandoned nest of an enterprising bird.
The scarf is caught on something. I pull, finally tugging it free. Leaves and sticks rain down on me, on Serenity. And something more substantial smacks me on the forehead as it falls to the ground.
“What the hell is that?” I ask, as I wrap my mother’s scarf around my neck again, and tie it tightly.
Serenity stares down at her palms, astounded. She hands me the thing that fell.
It’s a cracked black leather wallet with its contents still intact: thirty-three dollars. An old-style MasterCard with those Venn diagram circles. And a New Hampshire driver’s license, issued to Alice K. Metcalf.
It is evidence, real, honest to God evidence, and it’s burning a hole in the pocket of my shorts. With this, I can prove that my mother’s disappearance might not have been of her own free will. How far could she have gone without any money or credit cards?
“Do you know what this means?” I ask Serenity, who has gotten very quiet now that we’ve hiked back to her car and started driving into town. “The police can try to find her.”
Serenity glances at me. “It’s been ten years. It’s not as easy as that.”
“Yes, it is. New evidence equals a reopened case. Bam.”
“You think that’s what you want,” she says. “But you may be surprised.”
“Are you kidding me? This is what I’ve dreamed of for … well, as long as I can remember.”
She purses her lips. “Every time I used to ask my spirit guides questions about what it was like in their world, they’d make it clear there were some things I wasn’t supposed to know. I thought it was to protect some big cosmic secret about the afterlife … but eventually I realized it was to protect me.”
“If I don’t try to find her,” I tell her, “then I’ll spend my whole life wondering what would have happened if I did.”
She stops at a red light. “And if you find her—”
“When,” I correct.
“When you find her,” Serenity says, “are you going to ask her why she didn’t come looking for you all these years?” I don’t answer, and she turns away. “All I’m saying is if you want answers, you better be ready to hear them.”
I realize that she’s driving right past the police station. “Hey, stop,” I cry out, and she slams on the brakes. “We have to go in there and tell them what we found.”
Serenity pulls over to the curb. “We don’t have to do anything. I reported my vision to you. I even drove you all the way to that state park. And I’m happy you got what you wanted. But I personally do not need or want to become involved with the police.”
“So that’s it?” I say, stunned. “You throw information into someone else’s life like a grenade and you walk away before it explodes?”
“Don’t shoot the messenger.”
I don’t know why I’m surprised. I don’t know Serenity Jones at all, and I shouldn’t expect her to help me. But I’m sick and tired of people in my life abandoning me, and she will be just one more. So I do what is easiest, when I feel like I’m in danger of being left behind. I make sure I’m the one to walk away first. “No wonder people hated you,” I say.
At that, her head snaps up.
“Thanks for the vision.” I get out of the car, untangling my bike from the backseat. “Have a nice life.”
I slam the door shut, park my bike, and walk up the granite steps of the police station. I approach the dispatcher inside the glass booth. She is maybe a few years older than me, a recent high school grad, and she is wearing a shapeless polo shirt with a police logo on the chest, and too much black eyeliner. On the computer screen behind her, I can see that she’s been checking her Facebook page.
I clear my throat, which I know she can hear since there’s a little grid in the glass that separates us. “Hello?” I say, but she keeps typing.
I knock on the glass, and her eyes flicker toward mine. I wave to get her attention.
The phone rings, and she turns away from me as if I don’t matter at all and takes the call instead.
I swear—it’s kids like her who are giving my generation a really bad reputation.
A second dispatcher walks toward me. She is a squat older woman, shaped like an apple, with a frizzy blond perm. She has a name tag, POLLY. “Can I help you?”
“Yes,” I say, offering my most mature smile, because really, what adult is going to take a thirteen-year-old girl seriously when she says she wants to report a disappearance that happened a decade ago? “I’d like to talk to a detective.”
“What’s this about?”
“It’s kind of complicated,” I say. “Ten years ago an employee was killed at the old elephant sanctuary, and Virgil Stanhope was investigating it … and I … I really need to talk to him directly.”
Polly purses her lips. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”
“Jenna. Jenna Metcalf.”
She takes off her head mike and walks into a back room I cannot see.
I scour the wall of missing people and deadbeat dads. If my mother’s face had been plastered up there ten years ago, would I even be standing here now?
Polly reappears on my side of the glass wall, entering through a doorway that has a push-button combination lock on its knob. She leads me to a bank of chairs and sits me down. “I remember that case,” she says to me.
“So you know Detective Stanhope? I realize he’s not working here anymore, but I thought you might be able to tell me where he is now …”
“I’m not sure how you’re going to get in touch with him.” Polly puts her hand gently on my arm. “Virgil Stanhope is dead.”
The residential facility where my father has lived since Everything Happened is only three miles from my grandmother’s home, but I don’t go there very often. It’s depressing, because it (a) always smells like pee and (b) has cutouts of snowflakes or fireworks or jack-o’-lanterns taped to the windows as if the building houses kindergartners rather than the mentally ill.
The facility is called Hartwick House, which makes me think of a PBS drama and not the sad reality of superdrugged zombies watching the Food Network in the main lounge as aides bring around tiny cups of pills to keep them placid, or sandbag patients draped slack over the arms of wheelchairs as they sleep off ECT treatments. Most of the time when I go there, I don’t feel scared—just hideously depressed to think that my dad, who used to be seen in conservation circles as something of a savior, couldn’t manage to save himself.
Only once have I been really freaked out at Hartwick House. I was playing checkers with my dad in the lounge when a teenage girl with greasy ropes of hair burst through the double doors holding a kitchen knife. I have no idea where she got it; anything that could be considered a weapon—even shoelaces—is forbidden at Hartwick House or kept in cabinets with more security than Rikers Island. But anyway, she outsmarted the system, and she came through the double doors with her crazy gaze locked right on my face. Then she pulled back her arm, and the knife went flying through the air toward me.
I ducked. I slid, boneless, under the table. I covered my head with my arms and tried to make myself disappear while the burly aides tackled and sedated her, before carrying her back to her room.
You’d think a nurse or two would have come by to make sure I was okay, but they were occupied with the other residents, who were screaming and panicking in the aftermath. I was still shaking when I got enough courage to poke my head out and crawl into my seat again.
My father was not screaming or panicking. He was making his move. “King me,” he said, as if nothing at all had happened.
It took me a while to realize that in his world—wherever that was—nothing had happened. And that I couldn’t be mad at him for not caring if I had been carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey by a psycho teenager. You can’t blame someone if they honestly don’t understand that their reality isn’t the same as yours.
Today, when I get to Hartwick House, my father isn’t in the lounge. I find him sitting in his room, in front of the window. In his hands is a bright rainbow of embroidery floss, twisted into knots—and not for the first time I think that someone’s enterprising idea of therapy is another person’s frustrated hell. He glances up at me when I walk in, and he doesn’t go ballistic—which is a good sign that today, he’s not too agitated. I decide to use this to my advantage, and broach the topic of my mother.
I kneel in front of him, stilling his hands as they tug at the floss, tangling it even worse. “Dad,” I say, as I draw the orange thread through the loops of the other colors and drape it over his left knee. “What do you think would happen, if we found her?”
He doesn’t answer me.
I tug free the candy-apple-red thread. “I mean, what if she’s the only reason we’re broken?”
I let my hands grasp his, where they are clasped around two more strands of floss. “Why did you let her go?” I whisper, holding his gaze. “Why didn’t you ever tell the police she was missing?”
My father had a breakdown, sure, but he’s had moments of lucidity in the past ten years. Maybe no one would have taken him seriously if he said my mother was lost. But then again, maybe they would have.
Then, maybe, there would be a missing persons case to reopen. Then I wouldn’t have to start from scratch, trying to get the police to investigate a disappearance that they didn’t even know was a disappearance ten years ago, when it happened.
Suddenly the expression on my father’s face changes. The frustration melts like foam where the ocean hits sand, and his eyes light up. They are the same color as mine, a too-green that makes people uneasy. “Alice?” he says. “Do you know how to do this?” He lifts the handful of thread.
“I’m not Alice,” I tell him.
He shakes his head, confused.
I bite my lip, untangle the strands, and weave them to make a bracelet, a simple series of knots any day camper would know by heart. His hands flutter over mine like hummingbirds as I work. When I’m done, I unclip it from the safety pin that is fastened to his pants and tie it around his wrist, a bright bangle.
My father admires it. “You were always so good at this kind of thing,” he says, smiling up at me.
That’s when I realize why my father did not report my mother as a missing person. Maybe she wasn’t missing, not to him. He’s always been able to find her, in my face and my voice and my presence.
I wish it were that easy for me.