Small as an Elephant - Jennifer Richard Jacobson [42]
Lydia was at York’s Wild Kingdom. She performed in a show and gave elephant rides to children. Jack had called his mother at work and begged her to put the animal park on the list. (The town of York was on their way!) But she had refused. She used the same old argument: they would be supporting the keeping of elephants in captivity, elephants who were forced to give people rides. His mom wouldn’t fund that.
When they had passed the exit and his mom had not turned off, he’d switched from hinting to pleading.
“Mom, I agree with you! But we don’t have to fund it. I don’t want to pay for a ride; I just want to see a real elephant again!”
His mother had been slowing the car down, going through a toll. “Someday you and I will go to Asia or Africa, Jack. Then you will see an elephant. In Maine, you will see puffins and lobsters — maybe even a moose!”
She’d made him feel like he was four. “So it’s OK to eat a lobster, but it’s not OK to look at an elephant?”
“All right, then, we won’t eat lobsters, either. We’ll do other things on the list.”
“I don’t care about the stupid list. It’s your list — not mine. There’s not one thing on that list that I want to do.”
“You are so stinking selfish, Jack Martel. Do you realize I spend every day of the week driving a hotel shuttle so you can have the things you want —?”
“Like what?”
“Like a computer, a cell phone, vacations. And now that I have a few days off to enjoy myself, you are determined to wreck it.”
He should have stopped there; he’d known that. He had felt the small storm brewing in his mother as she’d driven north, known she was becoming increasingly agitated, the way she often did before things went crazy. But he couldn’t stop himself.
“You’re the one who’s selfish. You’re the one who doesn’t take her medication so she’ll feel more ‘alive.’ Who goes off without —”
“Stop it, Jack! Stop it right now!” she’d screamed. She’d pulled over to the side of the road and had ripped up the list. “You’ve completely ruined this vacation. We’ll spend one night in Maine, and then we’re heading back home.”
They’d hardly talked again that night. Jack had cried silently, then dozed the rest of the way.
The next morning, she was gone.
And now he was starting to wonder if he would ever see her again.
He started to shake. It could have been chills from the sunburn, but he didn’t think so. It was as if thinking about the fight was searing the edges of his heart the way he and Nina used to sear the edges of maps to make them look old.
If only he could reverse time and take the whole argument back. If only he had said to himself, Shut up, Jack. She’s not herself — not her true self, and had stopped. If only he hadn’t wanted to see that elephant so badly.
Tears pushed against the backs of his eyeballs, and he reminded himself that it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
Nothing.
Not anymore.
And then the choir below sang a song he knew: “Morning Has Broken.” It was a song his mother sang, usually when she was feeling good: when the spinning had stopped and the sad times had stopped and for a while she would be her new-morning self. She would say, “I’m so, so sorry, Jackie.”
And he would say, “It’s OK, Mom. Really, look — I’m OK. We’re both OK.”
“Sweet the rain’s new fall.” Jack mouthed the words to the song.
And that’s when he knew. He knew the what next. He knew what he had to do. He couldn’t control what happened to him in the long run — whether he’d make it to Jamaica Plain or to the Bahamas . . . whether he’d be scooped up by DSS and handed over to his grandmother, or maybe even placed in foster care. But he did know this. He, Jack Martel, was going to York’s Wild Kingdom. He was going to see Lydia.
Not out of anger. It wasn’t his way of saying, “I don’t care what you want, Mom. I’m seeing this elephant.”
It was a way of going back to the beginning. To the beginning of the trip, before they had argued. To the beginning,