Natalie jumped and let loose an embarrassed yelp that sent birds fluttering through the trees.
Mali emerged from the shadows of a eucalyptus tree, laughing so hard and long that tears rolled down her face. She clapped her hands and tried to speak, but every time she opened her mouth, all she could do was giggle. Finally, she managed, “I’m so sorry, but if you could have seen your face . . .”
Natalie thought, but Mali’s laughter was contagious and exactly the remedy for the tension she’d been feeling.
When her laughing finally subsided, Mali took Natalie’s arm and looked up into Natalie’s face, her mouth still upturned in a smile. Wearing a dark turban on her head, a food-stained long-sleeved black shirt, and an ankle-length multicolored skirt with a pair of old, dusty flip-flops, Mali was still beautiful because of the light in her dark brown eyes.
“So, why are you here? Sophie misbehaving?” Mali asked casually as if it were no surprise to find Natalie here so early in the morning.
“We were having a conversation about how to fix the world’s problems,” Natalie answered, returning Mali’s grin. “Sophie has some wonderful ideas on how to achieve world peace, and she agrees with me that the economy could be fixed by printing some more money.”
“I quite agree with you, Dr. DeAngelo,” Mali said, sending herself into another peal of laughter.
Behind her, Sophie shuffled to the other side of her pen, favoring her leg a little but not acting as if she were in pain. Natalie stuck her notebook in her back pocket, determined to return later in the day to get a better look at Sophie’s wound.
“I was heading for the greenhouse to get some vegetables for lunch. Want to come?” Mali tugged Natalie’s arm.
Natalie nodded, grateful for the interruption, especially since Mali was the only person other than Andrew who’d been warm and welcoming.
They meandered down the path that wove through tall palm grasses, and Mali chatted about what she wanted to make for lunch and dinner, inane conversation that they would forget within an hour, yet Natalie felt a kinship she hadn’t felt with another woman for a long time. She hadn’t been close to anyone for more than a year.
Some of her best friends had opened up to the media, telling personal stories about Danny’s childhood and the strong connection he and Natalie had. They shared anecdotes about Stephen. Treasured moments. They betrayed her, cruelly depriving her of her private grief. She shuttered herself from all relationships after that, wouldn’t accept anyone’s apology. Yet no matter what she said or did—or what she didn’t say or didn’t do—every move she made, every time she went to a celebration instead of to church, every moment she spoke out about gun control, every story about her daily life found its way into news reports. Grieving mother. Well-known vet. Divorced. The media was fascinated with the woman who’d lost both her sons in a school shooting. They made her boys their salacious headlines. Nothing hurt her more.
Maybe now, in this place, where she was only Dr. Natalie DeAngelo, the vet, rather than Natalie DeAngelo, the mother of two of the Lakeview School shooting victims, she could relax. Here she was simply an American volunteer instead of a victim. She wasn’t the grieving mother here; she was simply Natalie.
And that’s the way she wanted to stay.
Suddenly they were walking under a huge green netting Natalie hadn’t even noticed until it replaced the blue sky. Mali walked ahead, into the midst of a huge nursery, at least an acre’s worth of tender, green plants. A pungent and spicy smell assaulted Natalie’s nostrils, damp and fermented, like the smell of a green lake overgrown with algae. Yet there was a biting fragrance to it so undeniably Thai that Natalie felt if she opened her mouth, she should have been able to take a bite out of the smell itself.
“How do you keep the elephants away from this?” They moved down the aisle between plants that ranged from barely-sprouted seedlings to fully grown vegetables ready to be harvested. “Surely this would be dessert for them.”
Mali picked a leaf off one plant, crushed it between her fingers and brought it to her nose. With a smile, she beckoned for Natalie to take a whiff. Spicy yet sweet. Pleasant.
“We have an extensive web of fencing around the perimeter of the compound.” Mali pointed outside the tent. “Andrew’s design. It’s been interesting to see the animals adapt to it, but they finally understand. Fence is bad. River is good. Before the fence, we never would’ve been able to raise these.” She wiggled her fingers at the thousands of plants in front of them: yellow squash blossoms, cilantro and basil, reddish-green tomatoes, some white gourds Natalie had never seen before, and dozens of glossy purple and red peppers. The food grown here obviously fed the dozens of people who worked and volunteered for the sanctuary, and probably supplemented the elephants’ diets, as well.
“The fence keeps them in and keeps others out.” Mali motioned again, clockwise to indicate the larger world, then counter clockwise to indicate the smaller world that constituted the sanctuary itself. “We have a small banana plantation and some rice paddies, too. The little boy you met—the one who doesn’t talk—his parents work the paddies for us.”
“Does he understand English?”
“Oh, Anurak understands English fine. I’ve been speaking English to him since he was a baby. His parents—my cousins—speak only Thai. They’re Karen, so he’s bilingual. A bright little guy.”
She continued walking down the aisles, deftly pinching leaves off various plants, releasing scents, some of which Natalie recognized: oregano, mint, cilantro. Some she did not. Mali plucked ripe peppers and long cucumbers, stretching her shirt out to create a makeshift basket.
“Can I give you some advice?” Mali’s clipped English accent seemed so out of sync with the way she dressed and the exotic tilt of her head.
Though the question came out of left field, Natalie felt she had no choice but to say, “Of course.”
“If you’re here for the elephants, you should speak with one of the mahouts. They’re the ones who know them best. Ask for help. Let yourself be taught. I respect your education and am certain everyone else does, as well, but the elephants will not know how many years you attended school. They’ll be able to sense your insecurity before you step into range of them. What they need to know is whether you can communicate with them, and that doesn’t happen overnight.” She gathered a colorful cornucopia of bright red, persimmon, and lemon yellow vegetables as if collecting summer flowers into a fragrant bouquet.
Natalie pulled out the bottom of her own shirt like she did as a kid in her grandmother’s garden, and Mali rewarded her with the heavy weight of a large head of broccoli and a royal purple eggplant. Then Mali glanced at Natalie sideways, her tongue caught between her teeth as if considering whether to finish her thought.
“My son—” Mali looked off past Natalie’s shoulder as if considering a thought. “He could help you. Siriporn is a mahout. He learned with my Karen cousins. And maybe it’ll keep him busy. He’s been spending far too many hours with the Red Shirts anyway.”
Natalie remembered the rally she and Andrew passed on the way from the airport. “He’s with the protestors?”
“My son is a dreamer,” Mali added a sarcastic lilt to the last word. “He thinks he can change the world and doesn’t realize how dangerous that is.”
Natalie’s smile melted from her lips, and she turned her head quickly so Mali wouldn’t witness the tears that had unexpectedly sprung into her eyes. She had no right to feel angry but a small knot of fury filled her chest.
‘My son.’
Mali had said it so easily. Nonchalantly. As if it was no big deal to have a son. As if he were no more important than one of her squash plants. She had said his name as if he angered her. Her eyes hadn’t warmed. She hadn’t added comments about his age or how he looked nor had she bragged about his talents. The tingles down Natalie’s neck were because of Mali’s omissions, and it wasn’t the first time she’d felt the emotion. Natalie experienced it every single time someone talked about a son or a daughter in a way that felt too casual to her. It infuriated her that parents took their children for granted though she knew deep down in the most logical part of herself that she was being irrational. In her very soul, she knew Mali would feel as much pain as Natalie did herself if she had experienced a loss like Natalie’s. But that part of her soul was tucked away safely and the emotions now coursing through her hovered right below the surface. They were the ones that protected her from the deepest part of her pain.
“ . . . I could send him to introduce himself to you at dinner tonight,” Mali continued. She had not stopped talking, Natalie knew, but even if someone had offered to give her boys back to her—unharmed—at that very second, she could not have repeated what Mali had said.
She turned back to Mali and forced a stiff smile.
“Do you have children?” Mali asked.
Natalie caught her breath, taken off guard by the unexpected question. “Yes,” she said softly. “Yes. I had two boys.”
It was Mali’s turn to pause. From the corner of her eye, Natalie felt the burn of her surprised stare. “Had?”
Unable to speak because of the strangling lump in her throat, Natalie nodded.
For a moment, they walked in silence, then Mali stopped and put a hand on Natalie’s forearm. “The Buddha said that ‘every day we are born again. What we do today matters most.’ Your boys would be proud of what you’re doing, Natalie.”
They stood on the path, Mali’s hand still on Natalie’s arm, its weight and warmth strangely comforting. Neither spoke. Memories of the boys filled Natalie’s mind. Christmases. First days at school. Silly little moments that meant nothing: a giggle in the middle of a supermarket aisle, the crazy cross-eyed look Stephen gave her one night when she washed him in the bathtub, the first word Danny learned. “Ducky,” he had said. “Ducky.”
“They would have been,” Natalie said, finally, and she put her own hand on top of Mali’s. “They would’ve been proud. Thank you for reminding me of that.”
Mali placed her fingers on her heart, then reached up to touch Natalie’s. “I might have gone to university to learn about people’s minds, but it’s their hearts that truly matter. We are mothers. I understand. Believe me.”
As they walked back to the pavilion where several women already stood at the cook-stoves, Natalie thought about Mali’s advice to learn from the mahouts. Was it necessary? After all, she wasn’t here to learn how to train an elephant. She was here to treat broken bones and diagnose illnesses and to possibly heal an aging matron with a horrible leg wound. That was what was exciting. Not elephant training. Other people could train animals. She was here to treat them.
But it was the right thing to do. The boys would have told her that.