“He’s not like the rest of his family. Sound familiar?”
Sawyer’s tongue ticks the top of his mouth. “Point taken. Is he there?”
“I’m here,” Otis says.
“Why are you doing this?” Sawyer asks.
“For Swifty...and because Lily is the bravest person I know, too.”
“We need money and a truck,” I say.
“Lily, maybe you can stay put?” Sawyer asks. “The petition on Facebook has close to three hundred thousand signatures. Walker’s will have to give up Swifty soon or they’ll go out of business. Can she hold on?”
When I look at Swifty, even though I don’t want to see it, it’s obvious her eyes have dimmed. “I don’t think so.”
“Give me twenty minutes then call back.”
“That fast?”
“Maybe. I have a lawyer on call, too, in case you need him.”
“Who are you?” Otis asks.
“Lily’s best friend. I’ll hunt you down if you let anything bad happen to her.”
I can’t help grinning. “I love you, Wonder Woman.”
“Lil? Charlie Hamilton gave me his phone number in case you called me. I can call him, give a message from you, if it’ll help?”
“We’ll keep it in mind,” I say. “Sawyer?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m proud of you.”
“I haven’t done it yet.”
“You will.”
42
We manage to get Swifty to her feet. With Flea’s help, the four of us circle the trailer for twenty minutes. We don’t want to make Swifty get back into the truck so Otis tucks both dog and calf beneath blankets. I call Sawyer back. He picks up halfway through the first ring.
“I have to read you some tweets.”
I put him on speaker. “Sawyer—”
“Tiger Decker is my hero,” Sawyer says. “#GoTigerGo #SaveSwifty #FreeSwifty.”
“I don’t want to be anyone’s hero.”
“Calling all fans and famous friends,” Sawyer reads. “Imperative! Sign Save Swifty petition. #FreeSwifty, #SaveSwifty. Lily? Swift Jones, THE VERIFIED SWIFT JONES, tweeted all of those.”
“I don’t understand what—”
“Lily,” Sawyer shouts, “Swift Jones has fifty million followers! Only a handful of singers, Katy Perry is one, have more. What you’re doing? It just skyrocketed to the moon. There’s no way Walker’s is going to be able to withstand this amount of pressure. Swift Jones, the Swift Jones, just buried them.”
It’s like my blood has turned to helium. “Otis?”
Otis looks like he’s trying to keep his feet on the ground, too. “He’s right. There’s a real chance.”
“We’ll call you back.” I hand Otis the phone. He dials then puts it on speaker.
“Wild Walker’s Circus,” a woman with a Spanish accent says.
“Carmen, transfer me to Tina or Max.”
“Otis?”
“Yeah.”
“Shit. Are you really with that girl?”
“I am.”
“Amigo, your parents are worried and pissed off.”
“I’m not surprised.”
“They’re in your father’s office,” she whispers. “Tina, Max, Howard and some crisis management lady named Tess.”
“Thanks, Carmen. I’ll talk to all of them, I guess.”
Circus music plays for about three seconds before the line is picked up. “Otis?” Max asks. “That you?”
“Yeah, Dad, it’s me.”
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“Then have you lost your mind?” Max demands.
“Saint Otis,” Howard drawls. “How’s the road trip?”
“Come home,” Tina says. “We can work through this. Just come home before more damage is done.”
“I hear you have Tess there. Has she told you that the singer Swift Jones tweeted her support for Tiger? She asked for all of her famous friends’ and fans’ help,” Otis says. “With over fifty million followers who are retweeting that message as we speak and adding their own support, it’ll be hard to survive the negative press if you don’t let Swifty go.”
“Otis, Tess here. Who knew when you put me on retainer that I’d end up working to get you out of the frying pan. Listen to me, son. Right now no one knows for sure that you’re with that girl.”
“Your point?” Otis asks.
“You can get out from under the grand larceny charges. Avoid prison. Kid, trust me, you don’t want to go to prison in Florida.”
“Maybe it’ll be good for him,” Howard says. “Character building.”
Otis shakes his head. “This isn’t about me. It’s about saving Swifty’s life.”
“Otis, it doesn’t matter anymore if the calf dies,” Tess says. “It’ll be Lily’s fault, not yours or Walker’s.”
Howard laughs. “We win either way.”
Otis closes his eyes like he’s absorbing a blow. “Is there anything I can say to make you give up your claim on the calf?”
“After all Howard has been through? How could you do this to your brother?” Tina asks.
“Get your ass home,” Max says. “Now!”
Otis ends the call. He twists the cheap phone, breaking it in half, and then pulls out the other phone Christine gave him.
I dial Sawyer. He answers immediately and I put him on speaker again.
“Well?” Sawyer asks.
“The Walker family won’t give up their claim,” I say. “We need a truck.”
“To go where?”
“Viv Hemming’s Elephant Sanctuary in Galton, Texas.”
“Will they take Swifty?”
“I don’t know. But Walker’s isn’t going to release Swifty, so they’re our only hope.”
“Are you going to call them?”
“No. We’re going to show up at their sanctuary if you can get us that truck,” Otis says.
Sawyer ticks his tongue on the roof of his mouth. “Okay. I talked to a guy in Glade, Florida, which is about ninety minutes from Cedar. He’s willing to bring you his van.”
“Can we trust him?”
“The Florida Youth Alliance oversees all the Gay-Bi-Trans clubs in the state. I told their outreach guy that I was moving to Cedar, wanted someone to contact from the nearest high school club. He gave me Wes Burnham’s number. He’s a senior on the football team—”
“So because he’s gay and plays football we can trust him?” Otis asks.
“I’d say it’s a fifty-fifty bet. Not great odds, but in Wes’s favor? No one wanted him on that team. He had to fight for what’s right. Plus, I offered him a serious amount of cash to help you and he said no. Actually, he told me to fuck off. That he was going to give you guys his money. Lily, it’s the best I can do.”
“It’s a huge risk,” I say to Otis. “Wes could call the police. And we might end up helping Uri find Christine.”
Otis chews his lower lip. “It’s too much of a risk for us to leave, given that by now the cops will be looking for our truck. Wes is our best chance at this point, our only hope.” He looks over at the trailer. Worry pinches his face. “I’ll talk to Christine, make sure she’s not here when Wes comes, that she has a fallback plan.”
I wait a beat, just in case Otis changes his mind. “Okay. Sawyer, can Wes pick up some things?”
“I can ask.”
“Bags of ice, warm blankets and a dozen bottles of Pedialyte. It’s the hydration stuff they give babies. As many hot water bottles as he can find and jugs of water.”
Otis gives Sawyer directions then hands me back the phone. I take it off speaker.
“Lily?” Sawyer says.
“Yeah?”
“You really okay?”
My hea
rt pounds like I’m about to leap off a cliff with no certainty that there’s water below. “Did I have a lisp?”
“What?”
“As a kid?”
My best friend ticks his tongue on the roof of his mouth. “No.”
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
My life is a long line of dominoes, each tile perfectly spaced, arranged in curves, diagonals, letters, images, spirals. It’s a new person...a new voice. The quotes are wrong, because they’re not coming from me. At least not the me I’ve been for eighteen years. I hold my breath, but the first domino falls anyway. The others follow in rapid succession until there’s only one piece of me left standing. And then it topples, too. There should be a sound when a carefully constructed life literally collapses into ruin. But there isn’t one. And no one is there to notice anything at all except me...and whoever the girl is who has invaded my brain.
“Lily?” Sawyer says.
“Give me a second.” I’ve imagined this moment much of my life. I thought it would be different. Tears. Screams. Accusations. Immediate hospitalization. But it’s strangely anticlimactic. Violet once punched me in the stomach so hard that I lost my breath. It’s like that, without the pain. I wait for my lungs to inflate, wait for my new normal to settle onto my shoulders. It’s heavy but bearable. It has to be bearable, because of Swifty.
Otis is staring at me. “Hey, Sawyer? Ask me questions seven and twelve from the test.” My voice sounds almost normal. I hear a chair squeak, rustling, then something hits the floor and shatters.
“‘Number seven. I can’t trust what I’m thinking because I don’t know if it’s real or not. A, Not at all. B, Just a little. C, Somewhat. D, Moderately. E, Quite a lot. F, All the time.’”
“D.”
“‘Number twelve. I talk to another person or other people inside my head that nobody else can hear. A, Not at all. B, Just a little. C, Somewhat. D, Moderately. E, Quite a lot. F, All the time.’”
I take a deep breath. “D.”
“Remember YouTube Emmy?” Sawyer asks.
“Yes.”
Sawyer’s tongue is ticking away again. He’s trying to figure out if he can convince me to give up, come home, get help. “I love you,” he finally says.
“I love you, too.” I hang up, lean back against the trailer’s steps. Otis slides next to me, puts an arm around my shoulder.
“I was never angry,” Otis says. “I just felt...powerless.”
I nod. “I know what that’s like.”
“So your mom? She just changed one day? She became a totally different person?”
“It happened slower than that,” I say. “But yes, in the end I didn’t know her.” Otis is quiet. I imagine that, in his mind, he’s spinning a cigarette over his knuckles trying to process something I’ve struggled my whole life to understand.
“Do you know what freaks me out the most?” he finally says.
“What?”
“That someday you might not be you. Even then? I’m still all in, because you’re the most incredible person I know.”
They’re the most heartwarming and heartbreaking words I’ve ever heard. I lean in. Kiss Otis. He kisses me back. It’s not hot and steamy, although I still really like kissing him. This time? It’s more like a pact.
“What are questions seven and twelve?” Otis asks.
I think about telling him what’s going on in my brain. That I’m pretty sure I’m following in Violet’s footsteps.
“Lily?”
I could tell him about YouTube Emmy. She was a twenty-year-old girl whose mother had schizophrenia. One night a full moon caught Emmy’s eye and she was instantly certain that she could fly to it if she just leaped over her twenty-fourth-floor balcony. Emmy immediately went to a doctor and began taking antipsychotic meds. Five years later, and she’s never had another hallucination. She has a job, a husband and a son.
Otis squeezes my hand. “You can tell me anything.”
I could tell him about the continuing education talk by Lucy. Her schizophrenia hit during college when voices in her head started making demands and threatening her if she didn’t follow their orders. After years of hospitalizations and failed attempts to find the right drugs, Lucy figured out how to discern between reality and her own delusions. She stopped fighting the voices—fighting always made things worse—and has a complex but good life.
But if I’m going to be honest, I’d also have to tell Otis that a lot of people with schizophrenia don’t have a happily-ever-after. Many never find the right medications. Some go off them because the side effects are worse than the illness. YouTube Hannah talked about her memory being so bad from the medications that she couldn’t recall her mornings during her afternoons. That could happen to me, too. I could forget Otis, Swifty. Sawyer. I could forget everything that ever meant anything to me.
I want to tell Otis that even if I end up with schizophrenia, there are some individuals who have one episode then never have another one. But it’s also true that between 20 and 40 percent of those that have continued episodes attempt suicide and up to 10 percent succeed. Lives are derailed. Families are shattered. Dreams end. The only promise with schizophrenia is that there’s both hope and despair.
I could tell Otis all these things, and someday soon I will, but for now this journey isn’t about me.
There’s a crunch of tires. Christine drives up to the trailer in a car that’s more rust than metal. Otis gets up and follows her inside to warn her that she may no longer be safe living in these woods if the van delivery goes awry. Five minutes later, Christine briskly descends the steps with a duffel bag slung over one shoulder. She gets into her car without looking at me, does a quick U-turn and speeds down the road. I add Christine to the growing list of people who might end up hurt by my choices.
43
After the sound of Christine’s tires fades away, Otis and I get beneath the blankets, sandwiching the calf between our bodies. We’re roasting. Sweat drips down our foreheads. But there’s no place else I want to be. My hand brushes Otis’s. He twines our fingers together, holds tight.
“Do you think Wes will show up?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Otis says, squeezing my hand. “You?”
“Yeah,” I say. We’re both kind of lying. “What application was Dr. Robertson talking about?”
“A five-year undergrad and veterinary medicine program. She wrote my letter of recommendation.”
Otis was looking for a way out. I hope that he’ll still get that chance.
“I wanted to quit being Walker’s publicist two years ago,” Otis says, “but I gave Christine every penny I’d saved. I needed more money to make school happen.” His sigh is ragged. “In retrospect, I should’ve just gotten a job waiting tables. It would’ve taken longer but been better than ignoring what went on with our animals.”
“If you hadn’t stayed, you wouldn’t have been there to help me, to help Swifty.”
Otis squeezes my hand tight. Despite the sweltering heat, I slowly drift off. When I wake it’s to Flea scampering out from beneath the blankets, barking at the dirt road. I scramble to my feet, Otis at my side, as a battered white van pitches over roots, coming toward us way too hot. Screeches fill the air as branches tear stripes down the vehicle’s sides. The van stops ten feet away, kicking up dust. Flea growls like he’s a German shepherd, instead of a thirty pounder with only one visible eye. I love that mutt.
A guy gets out of the van. He’s Mr. Matthews big with a toothpick clenched between his teeth. Beefy arms stretch a gold-and-red football jersey tight, and a baseball cap rests on his brush-cut hair. “You’re skinnier than you looked on TV,” he says. “But that hair is intense. You look like some kind of hot war goddess.”
My face burns, but not in a totally bad way. I go to push up my glasses, a nervous habit, and remember that they’re st
ill in the trailer.
“Where’s the elephant?”
I nod toward the pile of blankets, pull them back to reveal Swifty. She blinks but doesn’t move anything except the tip of her trunk. Flea growls like he’s a rabid rottweiler.
“That little dog gonna bite me?”
“Maybe,” Otis says. “He’s protective of Swifty.”
“Why you doing this?”
“Because if we’d left Swifty at Walker’s Circus she was going to die,” I say.
“She don’t look so hot right now.”
“She’s really sick,” I say. “That’s why we need to take her to a place that can help her.”
“Where’s that?”
My heart bashes against my chest. Maybe Sawyer was wrong. Maybe we can’t trust this guy. “Have you called the police?”
He kicks at the dirt like I just insulted him. “You nuts?”
“Some people think so,” I say.
The guy’s mouth splits into a grin, revealing a huge gap between his front teeth. “I’m Wes. Sawyer said you were on fire. You think you can save that baby elephant?”
“We’re going to try.”
Wes twists his mouth, the toothpick pointing sideways. “Pleased to meet you, Tiger.” He eyes Otis. “And you are?”
“Otis Walker.”
Wes frowns. “Walker as in Wild Walker’s Circus?”
“Yes,” Otis says.
“Don’t you feel like a prick? Going against your family?”
Otis doesn’t flinch. “No.”
Wes tosses Otis his keys. “Cash in the glove compartment is from my whole football team, not just me. Don’t worry, I didn’t tell them where I was meeting you, even though they’d never squeal. There’s also Pedialyte, ice, blankets, some junk food, Red Bull to keep you awake during your road trip, plus team shirts.” He reaches into the passenger seat and pulls out four hot water bottles and a jersey. “Tiger, if you get the chance to meet the real Swift Jones, who is tweeting up a storm about you and that calf, you give her this shirt, you hear? Tell her the Glade Panthers love her.”
I nod, because if I try to talk I’m going to cry. While Otis and Wes move the clean straw into the van, I heat a pot of water on Christine’s stove and fill the hot water bottles. When I come back out, the guys are walking Swifty slowly toward the vehicle. “Wow,” I say when I see inside it. The back windows have been spray painted black to ensure that Swifty will be hidden from other drivers. The paint is still wet in spots. The rows of bench seats are gone, replaced with a six-foot stack of wool blankets, lawn chairs, enough Pedialyte for ten elephant calves, jugs of water and the biggest cooler I’ve ever seen. Wes and Otis gently boost Swifty onto the fresh bed of straw. Otis places the warm water bottles along Swifty’s belly, then we cover her with blankets a foot thick, her sweet face peering up at all of us.
When Elephants Fly Page 27
