“But…” Even the cicadas pause their incessant chirping. The wind keeps silent. It stops playing with the tree branches and the leaves. Everything in these woods is listening. Everything seems to know the very same detail that I feel taking shape in my brain as I realize the light and shadows have not been playing tricks on me. “Roger says the person who led him to me was a…ghost.”
“Who says I’m a ghost?” Miss Amanda folds her arms, and her bangle bracelets jingle together. “Ghost is a right terrible word.”
“Why?” I didn’t know a ghost would have a preference for what they were called.
She tilts her head, considering. “Ghost sounds so…haunting.”
“But isn’t that what you’re doing here? Haunting the woods?”
“Now, would you really call this haunting?” Miss Amanda sweeps her arms wide and refers to the tea and biscuits, the patio furniture, the shiny silver trailer.
It’s actually the nicest little spot of color and pleasant smells that I could imagine. There’s nothing particularly haunting about any of it, except for the way Miss Amanda moves things without quite touching them.
“No, I guess not,” I say.
I tap my fingers against my bare knee. Now that I know Miss Amanda is the ghost from the night of the storm, I have questions. Several very important questions, in fact. Maybe she can tell me who I am and what happened to my family.
“Well, I’m not a ghost in my estimation,” Miss Amanda says. “I’m a misplaced spirit with some business to attend to.”
“The business with Mr. Bixly?” I ask.
“Well…I’ve lost something that I need to find.”
She’s lost something? I’ve lost a family, and that’s a pretty big thing to lose. All my questions begin spilling out, and I can’t stop them. “If you were here that night, did you see how I came to the zoo? Do you know who my family is? Do you know what happened to them?”
It feels like the wind, only a light breeze now, snatches every one of my questions and suspends them all in midair. Miss Amanda’s blue eyes are calm and clear and young-looking if I stare straight into them, but as soon as I do, I look away. I’m afraid I will see that confused look of hers again, and that it will mean she can’t remember. I focus on her hands, which are long and slender with wrinkles as soft as her flowing scarf.
“I’m sorry, Lexington Willow. I remember seeing the elephant wrap you up like a baby, protecting you from the wind and the rain and hiding you from view, but I didn’t see anyone with you. If you had family with you that night, they weren’t here when I saw you.”
I inhale a sharp breath of the green-scented air. I’ve known for a long time that my family is probably dead because of that tornado. Deep inside, I know I’ll probably never find out who they were. The wind’s silence on the subject has hinted at that.
I wonder what will happen if I take a sip of that cranberry spice tea from the cup in front of me. Can you drink tea prepared by a ghost? Can you trust a ghost you just met to tell the truth about what they saw seven years ago after a storm?
I half expect her tea to be impossible to drink. But I try it anyway. It’s real and cold, and the fruity spice tastes as good as it smells. It doesn’t take away my disappointment, but it’s sweet. Sweet and sour go well together sometimes.
“You know what, though?” Miss Amanda adds. “You sparked a memory by coming here and talking to me. Maybe if we keep talking, I can remember something else. I think my memories are all still in here somewhere, you see.” She taps the side of her head with her finger.
I take another sip and set the teacup back onto its saucer. I like this idea that I might be able to wake up her memories and set them loose.
“Does Frank Bixly know he’s doing business with a misplaced spirit?” I ask, lifting one of the biscuits from the plate. It may be ghost food, but I’m not worried about it anymore. I was clearly supposed to meet Miss Amanda. I bite into the biscuit. It is buttery soft, and it flakes apart in my mouth.
“Oh, Frank.” Miss Amanda sighs. “He’s a lonely one, now isn’t he?”
Frank Bixly? Lonely? I haven’t ever thought of Mr. Bixly as anything but the General Manager with lots of rules and lots to say. He lives in the only other residence on the zoo property—in a small house at the top of the zoo hill and west of the gift shop.
“I used to work at the Lexington Zoo before I…became misplaced,” she adds. “Frank knew me back then.”
It’s weird she doesn’t just say that Frank knew her when she was alive. But maybe ghosts who don’t like to be called ghosts also don’t like to be called dead.
“And did you live out here in the woods then?” I ask, imagining a version of Miss Amanda in life, watering flowers in the flower box and riding the bright red bicycle that’s leaning against the trailer.
Miss Amanda tilts her head like she’s considering, although I can’t understand why she would have to remember whether or not she lived here. I mean, we’re sitting on her patio furniture and drinking from her teacups, for heaven’s sake. Of course she lived here. The wind blows the striped pink awning overhead, and rosy hues flicker across Miss Amanda’s face.
“Darn if that awning didn’t weigh a ton when I tried to put it down in that dreadful storm.” Miss Amanda waves her arm at the poles supporting the awning.
“Wait…” I swallow a mouthful of buttery biscuit. “You were alive when the storm came?”
“I guess I must’ve been. Why would a misplaced spirit need to take down an awning?”
“But…you were a ghost when you showed Roger where to find me.”
“Misplaced spirit,” Miss Amanda corrects me.
“Sorry,” I say. “You were a misplaced spirit after the storm, when Roger was checking the railroad tracks and saw you.”
Miss Amanda nods. “I suppose that’s because the wind caught the canopy and the whole thing slammed down fast. Hit me on the head.” She straightens her hat again as if the memory knocked it crooked.
“So”—I try to avoid the words Miss Amanda seems to dislike so much—“you became a misplaced spirit that night?” I’ve often wondered if people can choose what they do and where they go after they die. If Miss Amanda stayed around the zoo, could my parents have done the same thing? “Then you hung around here so you could show Roger where I was?”
“Well…” Miss Amanda narrows her eyes in concentration. “I suppose.”
She presses her lips together and taps one finger against them. Her bracelets jingle in rhythm with the motion.
I look more carefully at the awning and the trailer and everything. It all looks new and undamaged. The trailer’s silver shines in the slanted sunlight as if someone has just washed and polished it. The awning isn’t broken or torn. How can this have been here for seven years and look so clean and new?
“I may have stayed around here for another reason,” Miss Amanda says. “Don’t get me wrong, darlin’. Of course I’d want to help find someone to take care of you and get you out of the elephant habitat. But that’s not why I’m still here.”
“It’s that business you have with Mr. Bixly?” I ask. “The something lost you need to find?”
She nods. “I hid something here that needs to be returned to someone. At least I think I hid it here.”
“Miss Amanda, that’s not very specific.” If there’s one thing I’ve learned well from Mrs. Leigh’s writing skills lessons, it’s the importance of being specific.
“Yes, well, I’m missing some important details. I don’t know about ghosts, and I don’t know about souls who have gone on to wherever it is they’re supposed to be. But for me, it’s like the creek rose too high and I can’t get across. I don’t have all the pieces, but I sure have to fix it. And I could use some help, if you’re willing.” She offers me the plate of biscuits, and I take another.
M
y head is spinning with thoughts of helping a ghost with scattered memories to remember things she forgot. Maybe she’ll remember seeing me with my family. Maybe she’ll know something about who I am.
The real reason I want to help her, though, the very real reason, is a 6,000-pound pachyderm who somehow reached into my mind and showed me Miss Amanda, these woods, and some elephants. And because I think it mattered a lot to Nyah that I come here to find Miss Amanda.
“I’ll help you,” I say.
Miss Amanda reaches across the table as if to pat my hand, but she stops, and I pull back at the same time. Maybe she knows her hand will go right through mine. I don’t want to find out if it will.
She smiles anyway. “Since you’ve been here, asking me about Frank Bixly, I remembered something I couldn’t before. We need to start with the gift shop. I think I hid it in the gift shop behind a loose board.”
“Hid what? What are we looking for?”
Miss Amanda’s eyes widen as the wind moves the branches, creating an opening for an angle of sunlight beneath the awning. It catches the blue from her scarf and her eyes at the same time.
“We’re looking for a lost treasure.”
I missed lunch with Roger at the Wild Eats Café. I never miss lunch with Roger. But it seems you don’t know how much time is passing when you have your first conversation with an actual ghost. Apparently, the odd shadows traveling over Miss Amanda’s striped pink awning happened because the sun was moving in its path across the sky, and I didn’t feel the time passing.
I left Miss Amanda at her silver trailer, promising to return soon, and promising to bring Fisher. I headed straight for the Giraffe Encounter’s blue roof to follow the fence line back to the parking lot, and that’s when I heard it—the music for the Birds of Prey show. The show is new, but I already know the schedule. The first show is at one o’clock. Somehow I sat and had tea and biscuits with Miss Amanda for more than three hours.
I don’t know what Roger will say about me missing our lunch. I mean, Roger doesn’t get mad, so I’m not worried about that. I think he’ll understand when I explain that I met the ghost. This will be big news. And I plan to tell him. I’ll explain what happened with the time and why I never showed up for lunch, just as soon as I take Fisher to see Miss Amanda. I’ll be extra careful not to stay so long this time.
I’m not very hungry after tea and biscuits with a ghost, but as I wait for the city bus’s one-twenty arrival, I buy two frozen lemonades with the six dollars I have left in my pocket. Vendors on the street corner don’t offer zoo staff discounts. At least I didn’t miss Fisher’s return when I was stuck in some weird time pocket at Miss Amanda’s trailer.
I am pretty lucky I ended up at the zoo where Fisher lives. We pretend we are the same age, Fisher and I. Since we have no idea when my birthday is or how old I am exactly, we decided I was born the same year as Fisher. That way, we can do things at the same time—like learning the same things for school (sort of), and being old enough to help with elephant training. Since I arrived at the zoo on June 9, that’s the day I chose for my birthday—it’s sort of an anniversary anyway. And that means I will be twelve next week.
Sometimes it feels like Fisher is older than me. It felt like he was the older one when he told those girls at Lexington Elementary to lay off or he’d bring the meanest baboon to their houses so it could eat their heads. Fisher and I both got sent home, but he’d shut those girls down. Other times it feels like I’m the older one—like when Fisher doesn’t know how to talk to his own mom or when he says he could never stay in the zoo all day like I do. It really sounds like whining.
Right now I feel like the older one. Because I know something Fisher doesn’t know, and I’m on a first-name basis with the zoo ghost.
The bus approaches from the other end of Wild Kingdom Avenue, and I step toward the curb, stretching myself as tall as I can for a glimpse of Fisher’s hat in the bus windows. The condensation from the no-longer-frozen lemonades drips icy water down my arms. The lemonades are still cold, though, and I think Fisher will appreciate that after playing baseball in this humid heat. The bus pulls up to the stop.
Suddenly, I wonder whether Fisher will believe me. Maybe it’s best to just take him into the woods and let him see this for himself.
“See you tomorrow, Slugger,” says the bus driver, chuckling, as Fisher appears at the front of the bus and starts down the steps. He’s covered in red baseball-diamond dirt, he’s carrying his soiled Kansas City Royals hat, and his hair is plastered to his head with sweat. He moves like he’s walking through something heavy. But he’s smiling.
Fisher waves at the bus driver, who waves back and pulls the doors shut. The bus creaks and growls and drives away.
“You look like you could use these,” I say, holding out the dripping lemonades.
“Wow, thanks.” Fisher takes one from me, removes the lid, and drinks for a long time.
“Did you have fun?”
“Mm-hmm,” he answers as he drinks. His eyes are closed and a drop of sweat carves a path from his forehead down the side of his face to his jaw, where it pauses and then drops to the ground.
“So you’re doing this every morning, huh?”
Fisher lowers the cup and wipes his forehead. “Yeah. Well, Monday through Friday anyway.”
“I guess it’s a good thing you like it.” I wait while Fisher has another drink.
Finally he says, “You know, it’s not the heat that’s the problem. It’s the air-conditioned bus. If you never felt the air-conditioning, the outside wouldn’t seem so bad. Your body gets used to one climate or the other. It’s the going back and forth that gets you.”
“Yeah.”
He points at the other lemonade in my hand. “Are you going to drink that?”
“No. It’s for you, if you want it.”
“Oh, I do.”
I hand it to him.
“Thanks!” He stacks the full cup into the empty one and starts walking in the direction of the long zoo parking lot and the front gate.
I stop at the edge of the grass. Fisher walks ahead toward the first row of cars until he realizes I’m not walking alongside him. He turns around. His backpack has slid off his shoulder, and he hasn’t bothered to pull it up again. It bangs awkwardly against his legs.
I smile. “Do you want to see something cool?”
His eyes widen. “Did you go into the woods? Did you figure out what Nyah was telling you?”
“I figured out something,” I say, still smiling. “But it’s better if I show you.”
“Now?”
“You got another baseball lesson to get to?”
Fisher bobs his head a little and shrugs, admitting that I’ve got a point. He may be tired and dirty from playing baseball all morning, but we both know if he goes home, his mom is going to give him work to do or send him to help his dad—which will result in Fisher taking out a lot of garbage from a lot of maintenance sheds.
Fisher follows me through the long grasses toward the trees. He coughs as our movement stirs up fresh clouds of bugs and weed dust.
“Please tell me it’s in the shade,” Fisher calls.
“It is.”
I stay within view of the fence line until we’re even with the Ape House roof and the chimps’ climbing poles. From there, we angle away from the zoo, deeper into the trees. I take Fisher past the fallen logs to the place where I noticed Miss Amanda’s scarf flowing in the breeze. My breath catches as we get closer. It’s still amazing and dreamlike to think of seeing and talking with a ghost. She’s not sitting outside this time, but as I step over the last fallen tree toward the spot where I had tea and biscuits only a half hour ago, I stop suddenly.
“Wow,” Fisher breathes. “Cool. What a wreck. How long do you think this has been here?”
My mouth is all cottony, and it�
�s hard to form words, but I manage. “About seven years.”
The silver trailer and its awning are not what I saw a half hour ago. The trailer is dented where something big, perhaps a tree trunk, long ago slammed into its side. The poles that held up the awning have been yanked from their holes and are twisted and rusty. The fabric that once was a striped pink awning dangles from the poles in shreds. It is now more brown and yellow than it is pink. The table and chairs where Miss Amanda and I sat are scattered around the clearing, upside down or on their sides. Most of the furniture is broken with bits of the wood missing.
“I don’t understand,” I whisper.
“Don’t you?” taunts the wind.
“Is this not what you wanted to show me?” Fisher is walking through the wreckage and lifts a piece of awning fabric off the rusted red bicycle.
“I…I don’t think we should touch this,” I say.
“Why not? What about inside this old trailer? Did you go in here?” Fisher’s eager face looks like I just gave him the best present in the world.
“No, Fisher. Stop.” My voice isn’t projecting right. It’s coming out all airy. Fisher doesn’t hear me, or else he doesn’t listen. He’s climbing the trailer steps and trying the door. I feel that flying-away feeling again, like the wind could take me at any moment and I don’t have anything to hold me down.
“Fisher! Stop!”
He stops, his hand frozen on the trailer door handle.
“This isn’t what I wanted to show you. Please don’t touch any of it.”
“Lex…” Fisher has that look he gets when he thinks I’m not making sense. He tilts his head slightly to the side, and his dark eyes reflect a blend of laughter with concern—how I imagine an older brother might look at a silly little sister who is about to cry.
“Lex, what’s wrong?” He drops his backpack to the ground. It settles into the mass of leaves and sticks with a crunch. He sits on the trailer step and stares at me, waiting for an explanation.
The Elephant's Girl Page 5
