Fisher and I glance at each other, and I grab onto Angus Fenn’s box with my free hand. After all I’ve done to find the Fenn fortune, we have to put it right back in the car with Mr. Bixly?
“Please come home with Frank, Lex,” says Roger’s voice. I picture him huddled around a phone with the Leighs. “It’s going to be okay.”
How can he possibly know that? I don’t think he knows that the box he found inside the old passenger car has a fortune in it, or that Fisher and I have it right now.
“Lex?” He sounds nervous.
“Yes?” I yell so I don’t have to get close to Mr. Bixly.
“You need to outrun this storm. That’s more important than anything else right now, okay?”
I bite my lip. Roger’s right, and he’s worried about me. It’s for this reason only that I decide to get into Mr. Bixly’s car. Not because Mr. Bixly points at us and then points at the seats inside the car, as though he’s commanding us to get in and sit.
A burning, pinching sensation at the corners of my eyes signals the tears I don’t want to fall.
Mr. Bixly puts the phone to his mouth and says, “They’re getting into the car. See you in a few minutes.”
I yank open the rear car door and slide across the seat, clutching Miss Amanda’s albums. Fisher stumbles in with the heavy box, gives me a look that says he’s not giving up, and shuts the door.
Mr. Bixly places his wide arm across the front seat and turns to talk to us. “I’ll take that box right up here, Fisher.”
Fisher scowls. “It’s too heavy for me to lift it over the seat,” he says. “You got us to get in the car, Mr. Bixly. Now drive. Storm’s coming.”
My mouth drops open. I’ve never heard Fisher talk like that.
Mr. Bixly checks his mirrors and talks as he pulls into traffic. “You kids don’t seem to understand something.”
I glare at Mr. Bixly, wishing I had some superpower to make him be quiet.
“It’s my job to oversee all aspects of the zoo,” Mr. Bixly says. “That’s what it means to be General Manager.”
“Does it mean you can steal things?” My words tumble out. I don’t care that he’s the General Manager. He’s wrong, and he should know it.
“I have responsibilities for all the zoo’s resources,” Mr. Bixly says calmly. He talks to me like I’m either five years old or stupid. I hate that. “And that includes donations to the zoo.”
“This box wasn’t a donation,” I say. “And I think you know that, or you wouldn’t have towed away Miss Amanda’s trailer.”
Mr. Bixly stops for a minute when I say that. Maybe I have a superpower to make him be quiet after all. Fisher looks at me with raised eyebrows, but gives me a little nod.
“Well, we will see what your…ahem,” Mr. Bixly clears his throat and looks at me in the rearview mirror. “We’ll see what Roger has to say about all this.”
Anger boils inside me. He was going to say “your dad,” but he stopped himself. I’m sure that’s what he was going to say. Mr. Bixly is awkward when he talks about Roger and me, because Roger isn’t my dad and I’m not Roger’s daughter. Years ago, I cried when Roger brought up adoption because it made everything so final, and I didn’t want to believe my family was definitely gone. But now I think my family is gone no matter what. And Roger hasn’t asked me about it again. Whenever Mr. Bixly stumbles over his words, it makes me think of that feeling of missing people you can’t remember—and now I’m thinking of Roger framing that photo of us in the train cab. Mr. Bixly shouldn’t be the one to make me think of these things.
I grit my teeth and refuse to look at the back of Mr. Bixly’s head or his rearview mirror anymore. I keep turning pages in the album for Fisher to see, pointing out the young Miss Amanda and finding pictures of Angus Fenn and his wife, Elle. And then I find a page in the photo album I haven’t seen before. But it’s still very familiar. It’s the image I saw in my head this afternoon when I looked into Nyah’s eyes at the Grasslands.
It’s Tendai getting a bath. The young woman with the baby strapped to her back sprays Tendai with a hose. Nyah showed me this memory of her mother with this woman who looks as comfortable with Tendai as I am with Nyah. The woman isn’t Fenn’s wife, the beautiful acrobat Elle, but she looks a little bit like her. All of a sudden, I can’t see the pictures very well anymore. It’s too dark.
Mr. Bixly’s car has turned onto the road that curves along the woods outside the zoo fences. We’ll reach the zoo parking lot soon, but maybe not soon enough. The greenish haze in the air has given way to darkness beneath heavy storm clouds that refuse to let the daylight through. The wind slams the side of the car, and it swerves from the force. Mr. Bixly keeps driving up the hill, but the wind thrashes like how I imagine ocean waves beat against the side of a ship. And I wish that Karana from my book and I were not alike in this one thing. Because the wind had it in for her, too.
The tornado-warning sirens start wailing, and Mr. Bixly drives his car right up over the zoo’s front curb, screeching to a halt before he hits the entrance gates. Fisher and I scramble out of the car with Miss Amanda’s albums and Angus Fenn’s box before Mr. Bixly opens his door.
“Get into the cart!” Mr. Bixly hollers over the sirens, walking faster than I’ve ever seen him move as he points to the lone golf cart parked outside the gift shop. There are often two or three golf carts parked there, but Isabel and her staff probably left in the larger ones. The remaining one has a front seat and two rear-facing seats.
“Hurry!” Mr. Bixly yells, motioning to us with frantic arms. And for the first time ever, I think Mr. Bixly looks worried instead of bossy.
Fisher and I slide into the rear seats of the golf cart as Mr. Bixly starts it up.
He zips around the lion pride statue and down the zoo hill toward Fisher’s house. The paved path is empty except for two keepers who dart out of a maintenance door and across the grass toward the Wild Kingdom Education Center.
The Education Center’s basement is the gathering place for storms like this. All guests still in the zoo would have been herded into the big room used for ambassador animal presentations, where rehabilitated animals educate people about their species. I know about the gathering place from Mr. Bixly’s zoo procedures training, but I’ve only had to go down to that room for storms twice in my life. This storm feels bigger than those did.
The wind whips my hair around my face and stings my neck and cheeks. I hold tight to the photo albums as leaves and small branches fly at the golf cart from the trees. The air is thick with the stormy smell of soil and wet concrete. Fisher holds on to the box with one hand and the bar at the rear of the golf cart with the other.
I glance at Mr. Bixly in the forward-facing seat as he speeds us toward the Wild Kingdom Education Center. He hasn’t even looked for Angus Fenn’s box since we left the car at the gates. I’m sure he’ll remember about the fortune once the danger is over, but by then I can tell Roger the truth about everything. Roger will help me find Eden Fenn and return her father’s fortune.
Suddenly, I want to see Roger so badly. I think of his strong arms and how safe they are, and I hope I don’t have to face this storm without him. It’s like the feeling I get when I’m with the elephants—like I belong to something bigger than myself and bigger than the zoo. Even bigger than the wind and everything the wind touches. And I think about Mr. Bixly not being able to say Roger is my dad and why that bothers me now.
And then I see him. Roger is coming out of the elephant barn door.
Mr. Bixly turns the golf cart sharply onto the path before the African Grasslands, and Fisher slides into me as I slam into the sidebar on my seat. Mr. Bixly hasn’t seen Roger. At least I don’t think he has, because he keeps driving crazy to outrun the storm.
“Roger!” I yell, waving at him frantically. I want him to know I’m all right. That I’m back in the zoo
.
Roger holds the metal door open as he walks out, but the enormous gusts snatch it open and slam it against the building. Just as quickly as it bangs open, the door rebounds and hits Roger hard. His face wrenches, and he grabs the side of his head as he falls to his knees. My tall, strong Roger.
And suddenly I’m seeing Miss Amanda in my imagination, as the storm rips her awning poles from the ground and slams them down hard.
“Roger!” I scream, smacking Mr. Bixly on the shoulder. “Mr. Bixly, stop!”
He stops, and I’m off the golf cart and scrambling to Roger before I know how I got there.
“I’m all right,” Roger says, just loud enough for me to hear over the bellowing storm. But he’s not all right. He looks dazed, and he’s holding his head and wrinkling up his face like the pain is splitting him open.
And then the sky really does split open, and a funnel snakes down from the clouds just beyond the trees behind Fisher’s house. I watch it descend lower and lower, from thick to thin, a wide mouth down to a deadly finger that will destroy everything it touches.
I try to help Roger stand, but I’m not strong enough.
“Leave the box!” Mr. Bixly is yelling at Fisher, “Leave it! We have to get you all inside!” Mr. Bixly gets on the other side of Roger and helps him to his feet. Fisher grabs the swinging door, and we hurry inside the elephant barn.
Thomas is by the side wall, throwing buckets of grooming tools and target poles into a closet and securing the door. The elephants have gathered behind the barrier fence inside the barn—their indoor refuge from the weather. They look like they’ve been here awhile. Animals know when a storm is coming.
“What happened?” Thomas asks, running over to us. Roger tries to speak, but all he can manage is a soft groan.
“The door hit Roger on the head!” I shout above the roar of the storm. The approaching wind sounds like a freight train about to burst through the barn wall.
“The tornado is here!” Fisher yells.
Roger’s arm presses down on me until I feel like my legs will buckle. Mr. Bixly has the other side of him, but I’m far too short for this. Thomas rushes to my side and ducks under Roger’s arm, supporting him.
“Where’s the safest place?” Mr. Bixly hollers, as though he’s never been in this part of the zoo.
“Lex knows,” says Thomas, looking at me like I know something more than he does. “Don’t you?”
With Roger supported by Thomas and Mr. Bixly, I run to the barrier fence. “Over here!” The barrier fence stands beneath the strongest beams of the building. All the fence poles run deep into the ground. Everything about the barrier fence must support and withstand the processes of elephant training.
The fence must support and withstand elephants.
Let’s see how it does with a tornado.
We help Roger sit on the floor by the fence. He leans against it and holds his head as the tornado roars outside the elephant barn. The building creaks and groans, and suddenly, with the sound of screeching metal and splintering wood, a section of the roof lifts away, and I’m looking straight into the black, swirling storm.
“Stop!” I yell in my mind at the wind. “Get back!”
The wind pulls on me and sucks my hair straight in front of my face.
“You haven’t been listening to me,” says the wind. “Pay attention now.”
I grab onto the fence behind us. I grab onto Roger.
“Nothing you say helps me!” My thoughts are screaming so hard that my head aches.
The twister roars louder.
“Done talking,” the wind growls.
The elephants trumpet and stamp their large feet—maybe they’re telling the wind to stop, too. Everyone is lined up against the fence, but I can hardly see them with the haze of flying debris and my hair blowing in my face. I think they’re holding on to the fence as tightly as I am.
Something new pulls at my hair. It feels different than the wind’s wildness. It’s coming from behind me. I turn and see the end of a trunk, the two fingers feeling for me. The brown and gold eyes peering at me from the face above belong to Nyah. This is what Thomas meant a moment ago. This is something I know from experience that no one else knows. I risk the tornado’s suction for a moment as I loosen my grip on the fence and turn myself around.
“Lex! Hold tight!” shouts Thomas.
Roger grabs on to me, his strong arm keeping me from losing my footing against the powerful wind.
“Open the gates!” I yell to Thomas, and reach for the latch on the nearest training gate. I unhook it and swing the door open. Nyah can reach her trunk through the opening more freely than through the barrier fence when the gates are closed. She wraps her trunk over my shoulder, feels my hair, my head. She does the same to Roger.
Somewhere in the commotion, Mr. Bixly is protesting. Thomas looks me in the eyes, watches Nyah wrap her trunk over me and Roger, and nods in understanding. “Open the training gates!” he yells to Mr. Bixly. “The small gates in the barrier fence! Open them!”
“But…they can reach through them!” yells Mr. Bixly.
“Exactly!” Thomas answers.
“They’re dangerous and they’re scared!” Mr. Bixly protests.
“You wanna take your chances against that”—Thomas jerks his head at the black twister outside the open roof—“all by yourself?”
Hoses fly from their hooks and boxes hurtle into the air as the twister pulls them from inside the barn. The elephants trumpet in alarm. Fisher manages to get a training gate open, and Zaire lowers herself to reach her trunk toward him. The twister’s suction is fierce, but I hold on to the barrier rails, and Nyah holds on to me and Roger, all 40,000 muscles in her trunk keeping us safe. Right next to us, Zaire has entwined her trunk under Fisher’s arms, and he’s gripping her tightly. Thomas must’ve yanked the other gates open, because Asha and Jazz have reached their trunks through, keeping Thomas and Mr. Bixly grounded as the building groans beneath the twister’s fury, and more of the roof is pulled away.
Just then, something appears in the barn doorway, moving into the training area from the hallway on the left. Completely unaffected by the force of the tornado, Miss Amanda walks calmly toward us.
“Roger!” I nod in Miss Amanda’s direction.
Roger and Fisher both see her. Fisher’s eyes are like large brown marbles, but I think his surprise is the same as mine. Even those of us who believe in ghosts don’t expect to see one in the middle of a twister.
I had hoped to see Miss Amanda again, but not this way. I can’t talk to her. I can’t tell her I found the Fenn fortune and saved her albums, but that it’s all surely lost again. We left it all behind at the golf cart.
Miss Amanda moves gracefully like always. Her wide-brimmed hat is tilted slightly on her head, as though she is walking in the woods on a clear, still day. Even the power of a tornado is not strong enough to deter a ghost. She’s standing in front of me now and bends toward me with her hand out. She wants to give me something. But first she looks intently at my face and then at the swirling mass of wind above the gaping hole in the roof.
Nyah hugs her trunk more firmly around me, and even through the force of the wind and the gnawing, raging sound of the twister it has become, I can feel the thumping pulse of her rumblings in my head.
I see brown earth beneath the blue-and-white sky. Elephant feet slog through mud and hold up their massive weight like solid tree trunks rooted into the earth. Elephant trunks reach high into the sky, reaching for branches, smelling and touching the wind. The rumbling in the earth and the voice of the wind speak at once, and they speak to each other. And I see myself, looking very much like the pictures Roger has of me when I first came to live with him. It’s my same face, my same curly hair. The young woman from Miss Amanda’s photo albums, the one in the picture giving Tendai a bath, is ho
lding me. She kisses me on the cheek, and the man who is with us lifts me onto his shoulders. We’re at the African Grasslands in this zoo. This zoo. We’re visiting Nyah, and Nyah knows who we are. She knows us all—from the circus. And we’re a family. She touches the man and woman with her trunk, smelling them, recognizing them.
And suddenly I remember them, too. Not everything. Not much. But enough. The feel of his hair in my hands and the smell of her soap as she kissed my cheek.
And as I notice again the similarities between the young woman’s face and the face of Elle the acrobat, as my past and my place in Nyah’s life are finally becoming clear to me, the wind roars and pulls harder, threatening to take away everything I love.
Nyah makes a trumpeting sound that startles me out of the warm images that are both her memories and mine. Miss Amanda looks between me and Nyah and says something I can’t hear.
“What?” I yell, but it’s swallowed up by the deafening storm.
Nyah trumpets again, and I believe she is showing me what I need to do. But it’s the warmth in Roger’s hand and the sight of Fisher wrapped up in Zaire’s trunk that opens my mouth.
“GET BACK!” I yell at the wind, staring down the sky above the open roof. Every time I’ve ever spoken to the wind or it has spoken to me is now like a jolt of electricity through me, and although my voice is no match for the twister’s destructive strength, my words have never felt more powerful. “You took one family from me, and you’re not taking another one! Leave. Them. Alone!”
Another rumbling vibration, like an overhead thunderclap you feel inside your own heartbeat, moves from Nyah into me. It’s an energy flowing through the earth and through Nyah, like it’s connecting elephants to it and to each other. I think this is how elephants communicate across long distances. Maybe it’s how they know when someone they love has died. It’s beyond anything human, but it’s about animals and people and life. This energy is too strong to stay in just the two of us, so it fills the air.
For a moment, the earth and the sky are speaking.
The Elephant's Girl Page 19
