The Elephant's Girl

by Celesta Rimington

  “And that’s why you can’t say anything to my mom about Miss Amanda. She will absolutely lose it. She believes in ghosts, but she doesn’t like the idea of them.”

  “I won’t tell her about Miss Amanda,” I say. “What do you think, though? Should we be worried about talking to Miss Amanda? She’s losing her memories, just like your mom’s friend.”

  “Nah,” Fisher says, stacking his baseball cards with his favorite Kansas City Royals pitcher on top. “It’s not the same at all. You didn’t know her before. She isn’t going to trap you into reminding her about her life, because you don’t know anything about her life, right?”

  “Right.” I think so. A tiny gnat of a thought buzzes in my brain, and I sort of wish I could swat it away. I completely lost track of time when I was with Miss Amanda’s ghost. I forgot about lunch with Roger, and I never forget that. I wonder if this losing track of time is how it started with Mrs. Leigh and her ghost friend.

  “Let’s have dessert and then go,” Fisher whispers. “While my mom was cooking dinner, I went back to the gift shop and propped open the employee entrance. Isabel was closing up and she didn’t notice.”

  “Nice work, Fisher!” I say with as much enthusiasm as I dare without drawing attention. I’d rather leave now, but Fisher never passes up food, and if we leave without dessert, everyone will be suspicious.

  The brownies and ice cream look good, but I prefer Mrs. Leigh’s green curry with chicken and red peppers to the ultra-sweet stuff, so I ask for dinner leftovers instead. Roger and Mr. Leigh change the subject from AZA elephant regulations and move on to paper lanterns, of all things.

  “No, I told them absolutely no balloons,” Mr. Leigh tells Roger. His arm is resting on the back of Mrs. Leigh’s chair, and she relaxes against him. “They want to do a special tribute and release a bunch of balloons, and we can’t have balloons near the animals.”

  “But isn’t there a risk with the paper lanterns as well?” Roger asks.

  Mr. Leigh finishes off his coffee and nods. “We’re working on the details. These are high-profile zoo donors who want to rent out the zoo for a family reunion, and we want to keep them happy while not putting animals at risk. Mrs. Ashby is one donor we definitely don’t want to offend, and she thinks she’s found biodegradable sky lanterns. The paper completely burns up and so does the fuel cell. All that’s left behind is a bit of cardboard when it’s finished.”

  Mrs. Leigh joins in. “We bought a box of them and thought we could try out a few, follow them, and see what’s left when they land. Honestly, I think we’ll be telling the Ashby family they can plant seeds of indigenous flowers for their special tribute.”

  “Well,” Roger says, nodding, “that might work.”

  Fisher finishes his ice cream and announces, “I think I left one of my baseball cards up by the gift shop. Is it okay if Lex goes with me to find it?”

  Brilliant.

  “It’s okay with me,” Roger says.

  Mrs. Leigh nods. “Clear your dishes and take out the trash first.”

  We take the trash to the dumpster behind the zookeeper’s residence and pull the lid down. Although most of our animals are inside enclosures, the many birds and squirrels will make a disaster with open garbage.

  It’s dark now, and the screeching hum of the cicadas has quieted. Without the constant mumble of the zoo crowds, the crickets have the nighttime stage and sing out strong. The air smells of rain-soaked concrete and the sour, earthy scent of layered damp leaves.

  We leave the gravel road and turn onto the main path up the hill. The African Grasslands are not far in the other direction, and I ache to see Nyah, but we’d be breaking about ten zoo rules if we went to the elephant barn. I’m not sure how many we’re going to break at the gift shop.

  “That was a good excuse you made in there,” I say.

  “Well, it wasn’t a lie,” Fisher says. “I really did leave one of my baseball cards at the gift shop. It gave us an actual reason. With how much my mom checks up on things, I figured I’d better make it real.”

  “Good plan,” I say, still wishing we could sneak inside the elephant barn first. I want to tell Nyah what I found in the trees today. I want to see what else she might show me if I can feel her low rumble and look into her eyes again. But in a few hours it will be morning, and Fisher and I can return to the barn when Thomas is there. I hope Nyah will come to the training gates.

  “Do you think Nyah knew about Miss Amanda and the treasure?” I ask, mostly to myself but loud enough that Fisher can hear.

  Fisher, who is ahead of me on the hill, turns around and holds his arms out like a great big I-don’t-know. “Lex, I’m still trying to figure out why you hear the wind and elephants speak at all.”

  “Elephant,” I correct him. “Only one.”

  “True. But that may change. Who knows?”

  “I have a theory about the wind and Nyah, if you want to hear it.”

  Fisher raises his eyebrows and waits for me to continue.

  “Well, I really met them both on the same night. I escaped one and found the other. So…maybe…”

  The crickets quiet for a moment as if they need to hear what I have to say. The wind is completely still.

  “Maybe losing my family and being alone taught me I had to stand up to the wind and find a friend. And it all just kind of stuck with me.”

  The lamppost light angles across Fisher’s face. He nods. “That actually makes a lot of sense.”

  And my heart squeezes a little as I realize how much I’m going to miss him when he goes to baseball camp. Even with all the animals and other people in the zoo, I’ll feel like Karana on her island when he leaves.

  I shake all that off for the moment.

  “I mean, I did survive the biggest tornado in Nebraska’s history in like forty years. That kind of thing could teach a person a few things.”

  “That’s true.” Fisher picks up a loose rock from the path and rolls it around in his fingers.

  An even bigger idea starts to take shape in my mind. I’m thinking of Karana in my book, and how she didn’t understand the language of the Aleuts, the strangers who came to her island to hunt. They didn’t understand her either.

  “Your mom speaks two languages because she had parents who spoke both Thai and English to her, right?”

  “Yeah. She still speaks Thai to my grandma sometimes.”

  “When your grandparents took all of you to visit Thailand a few years ago, you said you didn’t understand the language when you were there.”

  “Right. My mom didn’t teach me Thai when I was little. Only a few phrases.”

  “Okay, so I was thinking about how people learn to communicate when they’re young. Maybe I learned the wind’s language and Nyah’s language so easily because I was so close to it, and I was young when I heard it.”

  Fisher stops walking as we reach the top where the path curves in front of the main gates. His eyes widen. “It’s like the kids who go to Spanish immersion at school. The kindergartners pick it up really fast, because they’re young and they’re hearing a lot of Spanish. It’s like concentrated orange juice.”

  “Concentrated orange juice?”

  “Yeah!” Fisher looks like he’s discovered some secret of the universe. “A lot of strong stuff in a small container.”

  “Fisher, I’m still not…” I shake my head, not understanding him.

  Fisher drops the rock he’s been holding and gestures at the sky. “What is the strongest, most concentrated form of the wind?” His voice grows more intense and excited with every word. “A tornado, right? You were so close to wind in its most concentrated form that you barely escaped it. And you were young and really small. It was like…wind immersion.” A proud smile spreads across his face. “Instead of Spanish immersion—you had wind immersion.”

 
“And elephant immersion,” I add.

  The lampposts cast yellow light over the entrance building, and a bluish glow illuminates the inside of the gift shop. A single light is on in the upstairs office. Frank Bixly’s office.

  “What is Mr. Bixly doing at work so late?” Fisher asks.

  “If he catches us yanking up a floorboard…,” I begin, not sure how to finish. I’m not scared of Frank Bixly. I’m not scared of Roger hearing from Mr. Bixly that I pulled up a piece of the gift shop floor. I’m a little worried that Mr. Leigh might heap enough chores onto Fisher that he won’t have time to do much of anything with me. I’m worried Mrs. Leigh might give me a research paper about the history of wood floors in Nebraska.

  “He won’t catch us,” Fisher says. “Come on.”

  The employee entrance is propped open just as Fisher said. He left a small stick in the frame that kept the door from latching. He also left a baseball card tucked behind the door, making the story he told his mom true. I pick up the card. It’s not one of the Royals or the Dodgers. Fisher wouldn’t have left behind any of those. I hold it out to him.

  “Found it,” I say with a grin.

  We close the door behind us, holding the handle until the latch clicks softly. The last thing we need is for Mr. Bixly to come down from his office to investigate a noise.

  We navigate around the racks and displays by the dim glow of the blue security lights. Isabel and her team have cleaned things up nicely. The shirts on the round display tables are folded in uniform piles, organized by size and color. All the plush animals have been returned to their proper shelves. The floor is swept and mopped, erasing all the muddy stroller tracks and footprints. The whole place smells of pine and ammonia glass cleaner.

  Our loose floorboard thunks when I tap on it with my shoe. I get down on my hands and knees and feel around its edges. It lines up evenly against the other boards except where there’s a small chunk missing on one side, like a knothole. I can’t quite fit my finger all the way in it, and trying to pull it up without a good grip doesn’t work. Fisher tries with no luck.

  “Well,” Fisher says, rubbing his finger after pinching it in the knothole, “I thought about how to get in here, but I didn’t figure how to get the board out.”

  I stand up. “Isabel’s storeroom probably has a lot of things we could use.” I sneak to the back of the shop with Fisher behind me. Inside the storeroom, with the door closed behind us and the regular lights on overhead, we look through Isabel’s supply closet, careful not to move things around in a way she’ll notice. We find a screwdriver and a removable broom handle that could work but might be too big around. I grab one of the feather dusters with a skinny plastic handle that comes to a point.

  “Turn the lights off,” I tell Fisher before we leave the storeroom. This building has giant windows on every wall, and people can see inside from Bear Country to the Reptile House if they simply look up.

  I try using the end of the feather duster first. I place the end of the handle inside the knothole and lever it against the floor. It’s the right idea, but the plastic handle is not going to withstand the pressure. I remove it before I break it and try the screwdriver next. I place one end in the small hole and make another lever. The wood creaks, and bits of sealant around the floorboard crack along its edges, but the floorboard is stuck.

  Fisher and I look at each other, and I know he’s thinking the same thing. I had thought this board was loose enough that someone could simply lift it and hide something beneath it. If Miss Amanda ever hid something in here, the floor must’ve been resealed since then.

  Roger refinished the wood floor in the Old County Bank a few years ago. I still remember how bad it smelled and how smooth and shiny the top coat was. I should’ve known better when this board didn’t want to come up.

  Someone is going to discover damage to this floor. Even if we pound the board back down, it’s not going to look the same. I didn’t think it would be this hard to check underneath what felt and sounded like a very loose board. I imagined lifting the board out, retrieving Miss Amanda’s treasure, and replacing the board so that it looked undisturbed. This isn’t going right at all.

  “Maybe this isn’t what Miss Amanda meant.” I’m going over my conversation with her in my head. She definitely said loose board, and she said she’d hidden it in the gift shop. “Maybe we should walk around and see if it could be another board.”

  “We’ve gone this far with it,” Fisher says. “I say we keep at it.”

  “Okay.” I hand him the screwdriver. “But if we get caught and you get grounded from baseball camp, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Fisher jams the end of the screwdriver into the half-moon knothole and pushes down at an angle, shaking his head. “My grandma paid too much for that camp for my parents to not let me go. They won’t waste her money like that.”

  And suddenly, the board breaks free of the floor with a loud clatter as it flies up and tumbles sideways. The screwdriver also goes flying, but not before smashing down on Fisher’s fingers. He stifles a yell and falls into me, nearly knocking me over. I grab the board and the screwdriver and hold very still. I’ve no doubt that Mr. Bixly has heard us. The floor in the office above creaks with movement. Mr. Bixly’s desk chair rolls on its wheels and then stops. Then footsteps thump overhead with the weight of Frank Bixly.

  I give Fisher a we’re-dead look and point at the ceiling, mouthing, Bixly!

  Fisher shakes out his wounded hand and points at the hole we just made in the floor. I slide over to it on my stomach and plunge my hand into the opening without pausing to think what might be down there. We don’t have a flashlight, we can’t turn the overhead lights on, and Mr. Bixly is surely on his way to the stairs. So I drag my hand through years of dust and the sticky feel of what must be several spiderwebs. I find a few small things with my fingers, grab them in my fist, and yank them out. I have no idea what I’m pulling out of the floor, but I grab everything I touch and drop it into the bottom of my T-shirt, which I hold out from my body with my other hand.

  Mr. Bixly’s footsteps are near the top of the stairs now. If he comes down, he’ll end up by the cash registers. There’s no way Fisher and I can get to the employee door from here without running directly in front of the sales counter.

  Fisher is watching me grab things and drop them in the bottom of my T-shirt. He points at the side doors, the ones that are deadbolted and will set off an alarm if we open them. It might be our only option if we don’t want Mr. Bixly to see us. I’d rather get out without setting off the alarm, but I’d also like to avoid a visit to Mr. Bixly’s office with Roger and the Leighs. Mr. Bixly is their boss. He’s everybody’s boss.

  I pinch the last item I can feel through the opening. It’s paper. That’s the last thing. I’m sure I have everything there is to find. Fisher replaces the board, fitting it into the floor like the final piece of a puzzle. I brush the crumbly pieces of sealant away with the feather duster, and Fisher grabs the screwdriver. We tiptoe to the side doors. Fisher holds his hand poised over the deadbolt, ready to turn it. As soon as we push on these doors, the alarm will sound.

  But Mr. Bixly isn’t coming down the stairs. I hold up a finger to Fisher, telling him to wait. We watch the bottom of the staircase like it’s going to tell us what to do, but if we see Mr. Bixly step off that last step, it’ll be too late. I still don’t hear any footsteps, though.

  I’m holding the bottom of my T-shirt in my fist. Who knows what I have in here? I hope it isn’t a bunch of dead spiders. I’m sweating and cold at the same time. The pine and ammonia smell is now mixed with dust in my nose, and I’m going to sneeze. The miserable prickling in my nose moves higher and higher. My eyes water until Fisher is just a blur. He’s waving his hand at me, begging me not to sneeze. If only Mr. Bixly would just go back to his office. If only we could sneak across the front of the cash registers wi
thout him seeing us. If only we could go out the back doors. If only I could stop myself.

  I can’t.

  I smash my nose and mouth into the crook of my arm, but the sneeze still comes out like a squeaky explosion. I swallow some of the sneeze in my effort to silence it, and the air fills my throat and makes me cough.

  “Who’s down there?” Mr. Bixly grumbles, and he starts down the stairs.

  Fisher flips the deadbolt, slams into the doors, and we run out of them with the alarm blaring.

  Fisher and I run like prey animals. The police are surely coming, because they respond to security alarms. We go back the way we came, but just off the path in the dark spots where the lamppost light doesn’t reach. Those gift shop windows can see all. We scramble through the bushes and down the hill toward Fisher’s house. Before we reach the gravel road that leads to the zookeeper’s residence, Fisher turns into the surrounding trees. I have a hard time keeping up with him. All that practice running bases has paid off.

  The wind whirs in my ears. “Too bad you’re not as fast as me.”

  I run faster. I think of Nyah and what image she might show me if I could visit her in the barn. I think of the trees in the woods, and that makes me think of my tree. My treehouse.

  Fisher turns to look for me, but I’m right beside him now. Under cover of the trees and their shadows, we sneak around the zookeeper’s residence from behind. Roger and the Leighs might see us through the large living room windows if we go across the front. Once we’re past the house, we angle over the main path toward the African Grasslands. I can feel Fisher running beside me. He knows where I’m headed.

  My chest feels like it’s going to burst, but the wind pushes me from behind, and that makes it easier for a moment. I don’t know whether the wind means to help me or not. I think it’s just showing off. When we reach the clearing behind the Grasslands’ lower boundary, Fisher bolts ahead. He laughs as he passes me, his chest out, his shoes barely touching the earth.