Grandpa Bill helps me down, making a step with his hands by intertwining his fingers together.
“Grab my neck, Lily,” he says. “I won’t let you fall.”
And I know he won’t. I circle his wrinkled old neck with both arms, holding on as Grandpa slowly lowers me to the ground.
“Whew,” I say. “That was . . . crazy!”
“Fun, right?”
“Um, I don’t know about fun, exactly. But at least I faced my fear, and gave it a try.”
“So, Lily, I have an idea,” says Grandpa Bill. “How about you star in the circus tonight? Kick off the first show of the evening by riding into the big top on Queenie Grace! The audience loves when an elephant starts the show.”
“That’s usually Grandma’s job,” I say.
“I’m sure she wouldn’t mind sharing the spotlight,” Grandpa says.
I look at the ground, toe the grass with my sneaker.
“Um . . . I don’t know, Grandpa. I’m kind of shy.”
“I know,” Grandpa Bill says. “But there’s no need to be. You’re a star, Lily! Show the world! Let your light shine!”
I shrug.
“I don’t know . . .”
He smiles, and like always, Grandpa Bill melts my heart like caramel in the sun.
“Okay,” I say. “I’ll do it, Grandpa. I’ll do it for you.”
Riding the elephant into the red-and-white-striped tent, filled with neighbors and friends and kids from school, I am jittery but proud. Wearing a shimmery pink shirt that Grandma Violet found for me, with my wild red hair tamed into a ponytail, I feel important. Special. Even pretty.
I see Dad’s face. He lights up, waves like crazy when he sees me. You’d think the sun rises and sets on Lily Rose Pruitt, the way my dad acts.
My mother, Trullia, must be in one of the trailers, getting all dressed up for her trapeze act, which involves lots of makeup, hair straightening with a hot iron, and a tight, glittery leotard.
Or maybe Trullia’s hanging out in the row of silver-submarine 1960s Airstream trailers that house interesting people like the bearded lady and the conjoined twins and the three men with small heads. Some people might call them “freaks,” but to me they’re just Mary and Harry and Larry and Wilmer and Herbert and Walt. Not a lot of circuses still have “freak shows” these days, but the Haas-Millard circus does. The “freaks” are a big attraction for this little circus. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll be a “freak,” too, on account of already being over five feet seven inches tall, and being related to the Giant. It might run in the family.
Grandpa Bill limps ahead of me and the elephant, hoisting a flag. The happy circus music starts; Queenie Grace plods into the tent. It’s warm in here and smells like roasted peanuts and buttery popcorn. The audience cheers and claps along to the tune. I wave like Grandpa taught me, smile like I’m not nervous, hold on tight. At least this time, there’s a saddle to keep me in place.
A sea of faces swims before me.
Like usual, my mother is nowhere in sight.
The story of my mother goes like this: I was three years old when she took off. She left me and Dad in her dust at Magic Mountain Campground, where we get to live rent-free in exchange for my dad being the maintenance guy. He keeps everything going, and I do mean everything.
And so she was gone, off to the circus she always loved. It’s been just Dad and me ever since.
Don’t get me wrong. I love my dad. I love West Virginia. I love Magic Mountain Campground and I love our cozy little cabin.
But what I don’t exactly love is that she could actually run away from her daughter. I don’t love that I get to see her face maybe once a year, if that, whenever the circus happens to be playing nearby.
And what I certainly don’t love is that she wasn’t watching me the day that Queenie Grace almost killed me.
Once upon a time, I almost died.
This is what I remember: gray, a high stretch of gray like an alive and stormy day. Acres of gray wrinkled skin, an entire crumpled landscape of elephant.
It smelled like a whole world full of wild. The dangerous eyes, a fierce shiny dark. The swishing tail, flappy ears, bristly rough hairs, the snuffling sounds of its breath, the swinging trunk.
I was six, with a bad case of asthma. I didn’t just breathe; I wheezed. Same as now.
My grandparents were visiting from Florida on account of a nearby gig, and my long-lost mom was along, too.
My grandparents’ rickety old motor home was parked in our yard, with the big hitch hooked up to the elephant trailer. (The trailer was painted in rainbow colors and excitement: The Amazing Queenie Grace and Her Best Friend, Bill the Giant!)
The elephant roamed free that day, its trunk sucking something from a huge bucket. My grandparents chatted in the cabin with my dad, and my mother was supposed to be watching me, except she was really drifting away like the smoke from her cigarette.
I was riding my brand-new pink bike with the bell, the white wicker basket, and the shiny silver spokes.
“Mommy!” I called. “Look at me! Watch!”
I was so proud that I could ride alone, no training wheels, no help.
“Mommy!” I called again. I rang the bell. I remember that I swerved so I wouldn’t run over a ladybug.
And then I fell. The bike tipped. Slivers of stones stuck sharp in my bony knees. I was bleeding. I began screaming, and this is the part where I really started to maybe not trust Trullia Pruitt.
Miss Trullia Lee Pruitt just kept on smoking. The tip of her cigarette glowed red against a sunset sky. Her frizzy hair made a silhouette, just a fuzzy dark outline of a mother, and her eyes floated far away in the sky.
“Help me!” I screamed. It was summer, dust dry in my mouth. My knees burned, my belly churned from the sight of blood. One of the bicycle pedals was still moving, round and round, spinning.
My mother did not answer. She did not move. But the elephant did.
The animal’s gray skin rippled and rolled, and it lumbered fast across the yard. Then it slowly lay down on the ground, arranged all that skin right beside me, so close I could feel its hot air on my face.
I held my breath, pulled my stinging knees tight to my chest. Curled up like a comma, everything paused. I could feel the weight, the heat. I could smell elephant, and it pushed even closer to my side. I thought I was going to die. I could not breathe right. My knees were bleeding, and my own mother was doing nothing.
Luckily for me, Grandpa Bill came into view, towering tall and thin, his head looming.
“Queenie Grace, roll away,” he said, in a quiet, calm voice.
And the elephant did. It rolled sluggishly and then it stood, flinging its trunk, snorting.
“Good girl,” crooned my grandpa. He patted the elephant’s back.
And then Grandpa Bill lifted me, pressing his clean white handkerchief lightly to each of my bleeding knees. Red bled through, blotches like flowers.
“Oh, Lily girl,” he said. “I’ll fix this.”
My grandfather held me close, my head pressed next to his heart, and he carried me inside.
Grandpa washed me up and got me some ice-cold lemonade, and he found some Minnie Mouse Band-Aids in the medicine cabinet. He covered my cuts and he cuddled me in the rocking chair. Grandpa Bill’s love was like a glove: fuzzy and snug and warm and soft. Grandma Violet kept stroking my head, and Dad kissed each knee.
But Trullia? All she did was cough. My mother coughed and coughed, a deep empty rattle where her heart should have been, and then she just strolled off the porch to smoke another cigarette.
She apparently didn’t have fear, didn’t even seem to be one bit afraid of her little girl being hurt.
I stayed far away from the elephant from that day on, and I think that’s when I started to be so scared of her. Grandpa tried so hard, every summer when I saw him, to push me past the fear, to make me brave, but it never worked. I stayed afraid . . . until today, anyway. Now, maybe I am brave.
“You need to forgive, Lily,” Dad always tells me. “Only when people forgive do they truly begin to live. You need to get over it, sweetheart.”
But that’s easy for him to say. My dad’s not a twelve-year-old girl whose mother ran off and joined the circus. I know it’s been hard for him, too, but at least he’s not a kid. Plus, he knew that Trullia was a circus girl from the moment they met.
And so I’m thinking about all this as I ride into the spotlight when all of a sudden the elephant breaks into a run. She bolts, thundering all the way across the tent, as I hold on for dear life.
The audience obviously thinks this is part of the show, and they applaud and cheer.
But they don’t know what I know from way up here: I have it again. The fear. The fear is back, and it’s worse than ever.