Mali and Natalie sat at their favorite table near the elephants’ feeding station, sipping their morning tea and talking quietly, as had become their habit.
“Andrew began packing last night for Kenya,” Mali said. She stared straight forward, studying the rising mists in the meadow beyond. Her voice was quiet, almost as if in respect for the morning stillness around them. “I feel kind of guilty because I’m not happy about him leaving right now. Selfish, I guess. I worry about Sivad. She crawls up on Andrew’s leg whenever she can, screams for her Papa when he leaves eyesight. She prefers to ride on his hip rather than to walk with me. Her mother.”
She sipped her hot tea. Natalie didn’t feel the need to reply. She watched the far corner of the meadow where the mist shifted like silvery-green clouds and waited for Mali to continue.
“Each time he leaves, it’s harder on her. The last time he left she was barely two. She’s three now. She can count the days. She asks questions about where Papa is going. How can I explain to her, Natalie? What can you say to a child who really doesn’t understand logic? She thinks in emotions.” Mali took her teabag out of the cup, placed it carefully on the teaspoon on the table, and sighed.
“All children are like that.” Natalie’s voice was sandy, gritty. “When I first started the clinic, Stephen was in second grade, so we went to school every day on the bus, but I had to take Danny to pre-school, and he cried every single day. Broke my heart.” She’d just bought the clinic and had been so pleased with the new building and her name on the sign. She’d sent out more than a thousand invitations for the open house, yet only two special visitors really mattered: her sons.
“She’s so attached to him,” Mali continued. “I think this time will be the worst. She’s probably going to cry for days, like your Danny.” She wrapped her small hands around the cup and took a sip. She sat sideways on the bench seat, both legs tucked under her long, black skirt, and her eyes focused on the clouds near the mountaintops, as Natalie’s had been a moment ago. “The psychologist in me knows she’ll be fine as long as she has a solid base of love and self-respect and knows her father’s coming back,” Mali continues. “But the mother in me worries. I guess it’s true that it’s what we do.”
“I understand, believe me. It’s not going to be easy on you either.”
A long pause. Mali breathed noisily, a long inhale, then an even longer exhale. “You sound like you’ve got some experience with this kind of problem.”
“A little bit. Maybe.” Natalie turned away so Mali couldn’t see her face. The conversation was hitting too close to home. Her throat tightened.
“I’ve never asked you. What happened to your husband?”
The question took Natalie aback, but she knew Mali wasn’t probing. They were simply having a woman-to-woman conversation. It was safe. “He left,” she said with a shrug. “Disappeared one day, and we never heard from him again. My friends said he left with another woman, but I don’t know for sure. Don’t even know if he’s still alive.”
“Was he with you when your children passed away?”
It’s a simple question, a reasonable one, but it stopped Natalie for another long moment. “No, he’d already left.”
“And after?” Mali’s questions were phrased as if she’d been wondering how to ask, how to get Natalie to talk.
“If you’re asking whether he came home after the boys died . . .” The word still stuck in her throat a bit. “No, he didn’t.” Natalie clamped her teeth tight.
Talk about your feelings, Dr. Littlefield had told her. Don’t hold back. Your anger is poisonous. Let it out.
“He must be dead, then,” Mali said matter-of-factly. “No parent would stay away from their children’s funerals.”
Natalie loved Mali in that moment. “No normal person would,” she said, nodding emphatically. “I wouldn’t have thought a parent could desert the kids he’d helped raise, but he did. For that, and so much fucking more, I’ll never forgive him. But he’s got his own issues, so I’ve tried to understand.”
“Issues?”
It was Natalie’s turn to sip her tea. As she gathered her thoughts, she realized Mali might understand far more than many others, even those who knew Parker personally. “Yes. Big issues. He’s a narcissist.”
“Ah, that explains it. What’s the saying? He wined and dined you from the beginning, right?”
Natalie nodded again.
“And when you fell for him completely, he didn’t want you anymore?”
She remembered the moments when Parker coldly turned away from her, the moments when she needed him most. But he’d change his tune completely if she was the one to shut down. When she was angry or turned him away, he turned the charm back on full force, and she fell in love all over again.
“Jekyll and Hyde. I wonder sometimes how we could have had two kids together. By rights, we should’ve split up the first time he cheated on me. We all would’ve been better off.”
“But he would have had to concede defeat,” Mali said, clinking her wedding band against the cup for emphasis. “Narcissists always want to be the winner, the good guy, even though they’re anything but.”
“My kids didn’t deserve the way he treated them. And even though his . . . his disappearance from their lives hurt them both, I must say I wasn’t sad to see him go.” The truth was that Natalie spent years dreaming about what would be the magic elixir to make her family whole again, but she never shared that irrational longing with anyone. She may have harbored the emotion, but she couldn’t admit that obvious character flaw out loud. How could anyone love a person so devoid of love themselves?
“Can’t say that I blame you. My kids’ dad wasn’t much, but at least he was there. Then he died—heart attack. He’d smoked since he was ten. Siriporn was barely a teenager, but he stepped in and became the man of the house. I guess I’m the only one who still sees him as my baby.” Mali clucked her tongue and laughed softly from the back of her throat as if she knew how everyone else saw her and accepted it, but that wouldn’t change how she felt.
“Mine will always be my babies,” Natalie said. “Isn’t that the case for most mothers? Our babies are always our babies.”
Mali reached for Natalie’s hand and held it without saying a word. They sat there quietly. In the distance, an elephant trumpeted and a dog barked, as if in answer.
“I don’t know what I’d do if I lost a child.” Mali turned to face Natalie full on, her eyes filled with tears as if she knew exactly what had gone through Natalie’s mind. “I think that’s what gets to me most about working here. So many of these elephants had babies torn from them, and they mourn those babies like we do. I love Andrew, and I know his compassion runs so deeply that he’d lie down and die rather than give up his work, but there’s something about being a mother that he’ll never understand. The bulls have great memories, but their social connections are different. The matriarchs, they hold the herd together.”
Natalie choked back a sob and squeezed Mali’s hand.
“We don’t have to talk about it anymore, Natalie, but know that if you want to, I’m here. Okay?” Mali rose from the table and brushed herself off with a businesslike efficiency, as she might have when she had an office and clients who came to her for the same kind of advice she’d just given Natalie. “Now I think there will be a whole gaggle of hungry mahouts descending upon us momentarily, so I’d better start cooking some breakfast. You alright, my dear?”
Natalie forced a smile and nodded. Sometimes she felt as though she’d known Mali for years.
Mali’s crepe-soled shoes barely made a whisper as she walked away.
Halfway down the road, she heard a tree rustle behind her and turned to see Siriporn atop Ali. The silence of an elephant still surprised her.
“Sawahdee krup, Doctor Natalie!”
“Sawahdee khaa, Siriporn. Have you already had breakfast?”
“Thai people, we snacking a lot. We always eat. No worry.” He grinned. The brightness in his eyes must have been his father’s, and his crooked smile marked with a big dimple in the lower part of his right cheek was not Mali’s. Handsome. For a younger woman, he would be a great catch, yet he didn’t seem interested in any of the younger Thai women nor in the volunteers who always hung around, waiting for the mahouts to share some down time.
It was easy to return his smile.
They walked side by side for a while, he still riding on Ali, his legs astride the bull’s neck, and Natalie with one hand on the upper part of Ali’s leg. Though Ali’s skin was thick and wrinkled like dove-colored leather, she could still feel the muscles rippling beneath as he took one ponderous step after another. He looked down at her from beneath a long fringe of eyelashes, his mahogany-colored eye regarding her as if curious but completely confident he could take care of himself. She felt a great sense of peace when the big bull hovered silently nearby, as if she could trust him to take care of anything in that ponderous, quietly commanding way of his. She thought of him as the father of the herd, though only two of the elephants—the sisters—were actually related, and they weren’t his progeny. The elephants had all arrived at the sanctuary at different times, which was often problematic. Elephants didn’t automatically bond the way other animals did. Put a group of dogs together and one of them might not take to the pack, but most of them would be fine. Not the case with elephants, yet Ali got along with all of them. Even Sophie.
“Dr. Natalie?”
Glancing up, Natalie was temporarily blinded by the sun right behind Siriporn’s head. She shielded her eyes and squinted. Both elephant and mahout were silhouetted in the afternoon sun. A golden haze highlighted the trees in the distance.
“Can I ask question?” he continued.
“Of course.”
Natalie sensed him trying to put his words together in English. He needed patience, so she gave it to him, though she often thought he knew more than he let on. Sometimes it felt that he used language as an excuse that Mali didn’t understand him. Siriporn had chosen to start training to be a mahout early in life, so he was not regularly exposed to Mali’s English. Instead, he, like his father, uncles, and grandfathers, worked with elephants and maintained a traditional Thai lifestyle.
“Believing is important, no?” A shadow cast by the trees cut off the sunlight. Siriporn peered down at her earnestly.
“Yes, I think so. What are you trying to ask?”
“I . . . believe government wrong. Mother say I wrong. What you think?”
Natalie’s gaze fell to the little puffs of road dust her flip-flops kicked up. Each step, another tiny cloud. Right foot, then left, and right again. It dawned on her that she hadn’t been truly clean since the first day she’d arrived, but it didn’t matter anymore. There were far more important things to consider than whether you had dirt under your fingernails. She took a few more steps, considered how to answer Siriporn’s simple, yet extraordinarily complicated, question.
“Sometimes we need to make our own decisions,” she started, speaking slowly and thoughtfully. “But we always need to remember how our decisions will affect others. Especially those we love. Think about how elephants act, right? The herd always supports each other. They’re stronger when they act as one. They need that community, because they know each other and take care of each other, keep each other safe. Mothers always protect children; boys are independent. All together, they are supposed to learn how to govern themselves.” She checked herself and thought for a moment before continuing. “I think what I meant to say is that is how everyone wishes a government would operate, but the truth is that there are a lot of different kinds of governments. You know that.”
He nodded, his face solemn.
“I believe, as an American, that we should believe in our traditions and our country, as a whole, but I’m also the first one to question the government any time I feel that it could be doing a better job. That’s my right as an American.” Taking a deep breath, she thought, this is where I need to be really careful. “But it’s different in other countries. Look at China’s ability to curtail the Internet, and other places where the rules about who you can marry or what you can wear is legislated. People are jailed—and worse—for speaking out against their governments. Who would know better than you—and your family?”
“Mm mm . . .” Ali moved slowly, Siriporn’s body swayed with the movement of his elephant’s steps. “But if government hurt people we love, what then?”
She thought for another moment. “You’re Buddhist, right?”
He nodded and looked straight ahead. He knew where she was going with that question.
“You know the answer, then. We must think of others before ourselves,” Natalie said. She immediately wondered whether that answer was enough. The Buddhists she’d met were some of the most sensitive, thoughtful, and compassionate people she’d known. They thought long and hard about decisions that would affect other living beings. One of the reasons this country remained one of the most peaceful in the world was because the majority of its citizens were Buddhist. Yes, they weren’t perfect. Yes, they often argued, and even overthrew the government on occasion, but they believed in peace. And their belief system determined the way they dealt with each other. She admired them. Their philosophy remained one of the soundest and most sensible of any she’d known. They counted on each other as human beings rather than on a god they couldn’t see. That made them accountable, and though they had not written the golden rule, they lived by it. Every day.
Together, Siriporn and Ali and she walked down the rest of the road in silence until they came to Sophie’s enclosure. She trumpeted in welcome. Ali rumbled back. Siriporn lowered himself to the ground and for a moment, Natalie and he spoke silently with their eyes.
Then Siriporn said, “You are my friend, Dr. Natalie, like Ali is Sophie’s friend. Funny friends.” He laughed a little. “Girl and boy elephant do not live together. Boys live with boys. Mamas and sisters and daughters live together.”
Natalie returned his smile. He didn’t want or need any more than that, it seemed.
“Dr. Natalie, please help me explain how I feel to Mother. I don’t want hurt her.”
“I know, Siriporn.” Natalie fought the frustration of being caught in the middle. She sympathized with Mali as a mother, but she also understood Siriporn’s need to be his own man. “I’m not sure I can help you, though. I don’t understand the politics here completely. All I know is that your mother is worried about you.”
He watched Ali amble to Sophie’s enclosure. The elephants raised their trunks and explored each other briefly, then Ali leaned against the steel bars like a cat rubbing a scratching post. They knew their schedule. It was time for their daily walk to the mud pit.
Siriporn turned back to Natalie. “This my country. My people. We want freedom. Old king will die. People must rule people. Like America. America no want English king, yes?”
“Yes, that’s true, but I don’t think it’s the same, Siriporn. Your king is from your country. He lives here. During the American Revolution, a whole ocean separated the new land from England.”
In her peripheral vision, Natalie spotted Sophie bouncing her head against the bars, anxious to be free. This discussion had to wait.
“Listen, Siriporn, I’ll make you a deal. We can talk about this later, discuss the American Revolution all you want, but do me a favor, ok? Remember your mother loves you and don’t do anything crazy, alright?”
Sophie trumpeted. Natalie and Siriporn moved toward the gate to let her out, but before they opened it, Natalie put her hand on Siriporn’s. “Promise me?”
He paused, shifted a moment as though she had asked him something far too difficult to decide in a moment, but then he nodded.
As they walked to the mud pit with Sophie and Ali, Natalie realized that Siriporn’s promise had been given too quickly. She made a mental note to talk to him again. This time she would ask about his plans.
The elephants lumbered into the river and immediately submerged themselves. A cool breeze rattled a nearby breadfruit tree. She pulled out her notebook and settled beneath the tree, and within moments, became engrossed in the tangle of data she’d been amassing for weeks. It was time to make sense of all of it.