Small as an Elephant - Jennifer Richard Jacobson [19]
At least he wasn’t hungry anymore. In fact, he was pretty sure that if he ate anything right now, he’d throw up. To get away from the odor of a nearby restaurant with wide-open windows, Jack ducked into Sherman’s, a book- and gift shop. The store was packed with tourists, and twice he bumped into someone with his stuffed backpack. He couldn’t help it. His eyes were darting from face to face, searching for his mom, willing her to be here, willing the bartender to be wrong.
His mom would love this place: books and tchotchkes. He meandered through the crowd to the nonfiction section. He loved to read. In fact, it was one reason why being alone in the apartment didn’t freak him out. He could usually lose himself in a book or in comics in a way he couldn’t when he was watching TV or playing video games.
There were no books about elephants, only ones about Maine animals, so he wandered over to the fiction section. There, he picked up a book called Trouble — he was sure having enough of that — but the words swam before his eyes. He snapped it shut and placed it back on the shelf.
From the book section, he squeezed his way toward the shelves that held toys. Mostly, they were the kinds of toys that keep kids busy during long car trips — kids like him, who didn’t have DVD players. He turned his eyes away from the mechanical puzzles and the Mad Libs, saw a rack of plastic animals, and smiled. These were the types of toys he had liked best when he was younger.
He wrapped the fingers of his left hand around the neck of a plastic giraffe — so smooth to the touch. If he’d been alone in the store, he would have smelled the plastic. He searched for an elephant.
He thought he saw one in the corner of the rack, but it was a rhino. Jack held the rhino for a moment before putting it back. He remembered a story he’d read — a true story — about a mother elephant who tried to rescue a baby rhinoceros who was stuck in mud. The elephant was using her trunk to rock the baby loose, but the mother rhino didn’t understand. She thought the elephant was threatening her baby, and she charged, forcing the elephant to back away. The mama elephant would wait awhile and then go back and try to free the calf. She was charged time and time again, maimed, even — rhinos can be really fierce — but the elephant wouldn’t give up. She wouldn’t leave that baby to die.
Jack searched madly for an elephant and finally found one, a small one, walking on tiptoes the way elephants do. Even though it was a toy, he knew it was an African elephant: the highest point was not its shoulder but the center of its back. Its trunk was pointed up — a symbol of good luck, his art teacher had told him once when she’d examined his drawings. Jack held the baby elephant in both hands. Its wrinkled trunk lay against his splintered finger.
“May I help you?” asked a woman suddenly standing at his side.
“How much is this elephant?” he asked, knowing full well the cost was more than the coins he had in his pocket.
“I think the small size is two-fifty,” she said. “But I can check if you want.”
“That’d be great,” he said. Maybe they’d hold it for him.
As the woman walked away to check the price, Jack calculated the number of bottles he would have to find to purchase this elephant, remembering that there’d be tax. More than fifty. Even if he dug in trash cans, it was unlikely he’d be able to collect that many, and have money left over for food, too. Besides, he should probably be thinking about saving up for a bus ticket or something.
The elephant seemed to smile at him. He searched the rack for other elephants, but there were none. Just this baby.
A lone one. Like him.
Jack’s thoughts spun. The elephant was