“This noodle soup is spicy,” Mali said. “The Thai cure for a hangover. Believe me, love, it’ll cure that pounding headache.” She mimicked the feeling by bulging her eyes and opening and closing her hands beside her head like a fireworks display. “And that queasy stomach.” She pointed to the bowl, and the smell wafting up practically burnt Natalie’s nose hairs.
“I’m going to puke,” she said. Never again would she drink liquor. Ever.
“You’re enjoying this a bit too much!” Natalie called, and instantly winced.
Mid-morning. Everyone at the sanctuary was either working or, like the kitchen staff, taking a break before the second part of their day began. Being alone at this time of day felt like a blessing, though Natalie hadn’t really raised her head high enough to acknowledge the peace and quiet since falling into bed in the wee hours of the morning.
She hadn’t even had the stomach to feed Sophie this morning, so she flagged down the other mahouts as they made their morning trek to the mud pits and asked Khalan to feed Sophie her bananas and squash breakfast. Siriporn had taken a few days off to go to some of his political meetings (in spite of a heated discussion with his mother), but Sophie seemed comfortable with Khalan now, so Natalie decided to trust him. She had no choice. She couldn’t have walked down the road if someone paid her this morning.
“I see you found the bottle,” Andrew chuckled as he straddled the bench beside her. “It wasn’t necessary to guzzle the whole bloody thing in one night.”
“I didn’t. Just half.” Natalie’s stomach lurched. He smelled like bananas and coffee. She closed her eyes and wished he’d go away.
“That’s enough to give anyone a hangover.” He chuckled again, then put a hand on her knee and forced her to look into his baggy blue eyes. “You’d better be back on your feet by tonight. I’m expecting company, and they’re going to want to meet you.”
The thought of carrying on a conversation with anyone right now elicited another moan from Natalie. She held her head in both of her hands, once again, and hoped he’d go away.
No such luck.
“Still have some of the bottle left, don’t you?”
She nodded. Even the slightest of movements made her feel like her brain had become untethered within her skull. Would the queasiness never leave?
“Drink a quick glass then. Hair of the dog!” He slapped the table, causing her to groan again, then he wheezed as he hefted himself off the bench and called for Mali.
“We’re going to have company tonight, and I want you there, Natalie, so get yourself together.”
Together he and Mali brainstormed a meal for the evening while Natalie sat there, still cradling her aching head in her hands. Each time they mentioned a new dish, her stomach lurched. Trying not to appear obvious, she slid her fingers into her ears and hoped they’d be done soon so she could figure out what to do next. She wished with every fiber of her being that could summon the ability to teleport herself back to her cabin. Unfortunately, she couldn’t.
Finally, Andrew and Mali left. Natalie glanced down into the brown soup once more. She lifted it and thought about it for a moment, then tilted the bowl and poured the stuff down her throat. Sour bile immediately arose, and she gagged, but forced herself to keep it down. She broke out into a sweat, but clamped her jaw closed, and sat with her hands tightly folded on the table.
Miraculously, about fifteen minutes later, the headache vanished and the queasiness abated. She was about to find Mali and declare her a goddess when she heard some childish laughter and a male voice coming up the road.
Craning her neck, she saw six of the kids who lived at the sanctuary—children of the kitchen staff and mahouts—and right in the middle of them, Peter Hatcher with a big smile on his face. Even from this distance, she heard the kids calling him “Khun Doctor, Khun Doctor,” a term of respect. She watched him lift one of the little boys into the air. The child giggled until he couldn’t catch his breath. Hatcher gazed up at the child and smiled from ear-to-ear. Natalie’s eyebrows arched in amazement. She had never seen this side of him before.
Because none of them knew she was watching, she felt granted an unspoken permission to be a voyeur. Taking advantage of it, she tucked her legs under her and wrapped her arms around her knees, feeling like that silly long-legged felt elf that almost every family owned among their Christmas decorations. Like the elf, she sat silently, a painted smile on her face, eyes wide open, and watched. She longed to be part of the imaginary world that children—no matter where they lived—created. A world that did not include pain or heartbreak or death. At that age (the children playing with Hatcher were no older than six), they didn’t know the incredible pains and heartache they would most certainly encounter later in life. Children that age were infinitely capable of reminding adults (even serious adults like Peter Hatcher) of what it took to embody happiness and joy and lightness in their lives.
True, she had never seen him smile and laugh as he did now. Though it might seem that he was the one in control of the children’s playtime, Natalie knew the children’s innocence stripped the scrim of anger away from his personality and temporarily replaced it with the carefree laughter she heard now.
Danny had giggled excitedly like those children. Yet he could be extremely logical and serious. When he was in the fourth grade, he told Natalie he thought the planet Pluto was actually the largest in the solar system.
Everyone had lied to him, he told her. “It looks small because it’s really far away,” he said in that breathless way he had when he was so excited his words tumbled over each other like puppies. “When you get up really close, it’s gigantic. Bigger than all the others put together! And you know who can prove it? Superman, that’s who. His planet, where he lived with his dad before they all blew up, it’s really close to Pluto. They go there all the time for vacations like we go to Disney World. Pluto’s really special, Mom,” he said seriously. “All the kids are blue and the parents are brown so you can tell them apart. But when Superman and his family go there, they’re green like Kryptonite. So you can tell them apart, too.”
When she cocked her head at his explanation, he’d giggled like crazy as if he’d pulled the biggest practical joke on her.
“Well, all parents are someone’s kids,” Natalie told him, “so wouldn’t they be blue, too?”
Danny paused, looked down at his black and white Converse Chucks as he slapped them together. He thought for a long and quiet moment. “When you have kids, you change color,” he finally said. “So that’s why some grownups act like kids—like Mr. Matheson. They never had kids.”
She shook the memory and watched Hatcher playing a rough and tumble game of soccer with the kids. But it wasn’t more than five minutes when the monsoon threatening the mountains and jungles with rumbles and thick, round, black clouds for the past couple of days suddenly arrived, unloading sheets of gray rain interspersed with cracks of thunder and tree-splitting lightning. The elephants had alerted every one of the storm days ago, giving the sanctuary enough time to put up their storm shutters and to lash everything down that might go flying. A twenty-pound object hurled by a gust of wind could kill someone. But the kids had continued playing their games, never paying attention to the shift in the wind. Now they screeched and cleaved to Hatcher as if he had become a magnet and the kids were flakes of steel. Natalie could see them moving into the clinic for only a moment more, then the rain became a wall that blocked her view.
She thought about heading for her cabin but knew she’d be thoroughly soaked no matter where she went. In spite of the rain, Sophie still needed to eat. She dashed for Sophie’s enclosure, soaked within seconds, her clothing stuck to her and her hair plastered to her head. Struggling to see through the streams of rain pouring down her face, she sidestepped torrents of rushing water that had already begun tearing ravines into the road that had only moments earlier looked like the surface of the moon. Could she still let Sophie wander freely for the afternoon, let her enjoy the rain? No. It took one heartbeat to decide against it. The lightning would strike the tallest object, sometimes an elephant. Ali’s right ear still showed the scorch marks of a near miss last year. Then there was Sophie’s PTSD. She’d easily spook if the thunder was amplified by the mountains around the sanctuary. Nope, not a good idea.
She’d guessed correctly. When she reached the enclosure, Sophie and several of the other elephants were huddled en masse under the roof. One of the younger elephants jogged back and forth, then turned around and around in anxious circles, despite the rest of the herd’s trumpets of admonishment. Obviously, Sophie wasn’t the only elephant with a history of pain.
It surprised her that the elephants had found their way to the enclosure. Where were their mahouts? And had they all suddenly decided to befriend Sophie?
Natalie moved into action, straight into the center of the group, speaking to each individual elephant in Thai, as a mahout would. Siriporn once told her that elephants possessed a designated devata or a deity that guarded him/her. In order to get the elephant to understand a mahout, that mahout meditated on the deity and gave that deity metta or universal love.
She focused, concentrating on each of the elephants and using her mahout commands to get them to move. She didn’t think about it, didn’t wonder whether they would understand her. She simply stepped into their line of sight and trusted them to follow her. If she had thought about the process as a doctor, or as a scientist, she would have called it insane, but through the months, she had seen it work. Sophie had become something of a therapist, sensing when Natalie was upset or frustrated. She’d lay her trunk over Natalie’s shoulder. Sometimes Natalie hadn’t realized herself that she’d become anxious, but Sophie knew. They had come to some type of understanding that deepened and became more natural as time went by.
“Thaya! Mai!” Natalie called the two younger females who were always together. They fed off each other and were now anxious about the ever-increasing storm. They pushed against the edges of the overhang and nudged the other elephants as if wanting to incite an escape. Natalie stepped in front of Thaya and gave the command to stop. “Hou! Hou!” She placed a hand on each female’s trunk, letting them get her scent, forcing herself to breathe slowly, calmly. She shushed them both, the universal sound for an animal to calm down and one the mahouts didn’t have to teach her.
As she passed by, she touched each of the other elephants. Five in all, milling around, eyes wide, ears flaring. Any one of them could charge at any moment. She had to trust that they wouldn’t. Remaining calm and confident was key. Again, she took a deep breath.
Sophie stood in her enclosure, her forehead pressed against the back wall, her butt facing the railing, as if begging for a release from the anxiety the other elephants raised. Natalie released the gate and quietly entered the pen. She worked her way over to Sophie’s good side, knowing that if Sophie saw her, it would help keep the elephant focused.
“Mai pen rai. Mai pen rai,” Natalie murmured. Siriporn would have rebuked her if he had heard her tell Sophie, “it’s okay, it’s okay,” but Natalie could think of nothing else to say to the distraught animal.
As she had so many times in the past couple of months, Natalie began singing “Michelle,” the Beatles song her mother had sung to her throughout her childhood, substituting that song for the traditional lullaby. It always worked. When the boys were little, Natalie sang it to them, substituting their names for “Michelle.” They loved it, even as they grew older, and so did Sophie. Natalie sang it over and over as the storm raged through the compound, roaming among the small group of elephants, touching each one of them, singing directly to each, keeping them engaged with her so that they wouldn’t notice the winds and the pouring rain. Surprisingly, the rest of the small herd seemed to find the song soothing as well.
Natalie stayed for two hours with the ellies, listening to the monsoon rattle through the mountains and, eventually, disappear into the jungle. Unsure whether it had truly ended, she sat for a while longer, wondering whether the worst of the storm had passed, but she had a feeling it was simply a lull in the action.
When the elephants drifted away from the enclosure one by one, Sophie finally lifted her head and began eating the fruits and vegetables Natalie offered her. Natalie had no idea what time it was, but it didn’t matter. She wanted nothing more than to retreat to her cabin and get into dry clothes.
She finished feeding Sophie, talking to her quietly all the while and promising the old girl that she’d be back later on that night. They took a short walk up the road and back again, Sophie ever vigilant as if the boogie man might pop out of the banana trees alongside the road. As they headed back to the enclosure, Natalie remembered Andrew’s comment earlier that they were to have company. She debated with herself about whether to head up to the administration building for dinner, but when her stomach growled nonstop, her hunger won the argument. Back to her cabin she went, where she took a quick shower and dressed.
Whoever these visitors were, they had experienced firsthand the weather challenges the sanctuary had to face. She wondered whether they’d understand the other challenges as clearly.