The Elephant in the Room

by Holly Goldberg Sloan

  Dial Books for Young Readers

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  First published in the United States of America by Dial Books for Young Readers,

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2021

  Copyright © 2021 by Holly Goldberg Sloan

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Sloan, Holly Goldberg, date, author.

  Title: The elephant in the room / Holly Goldberg Sloan.

  Description: New York : Dial Books for Young Readers, 2021. | Audience: Ages 10 and up. | Audience: Grades 4 and up. | Summary: Missing her mother, who has returned to Turkey to resolve an immigration problem, sixth grader Sila welcomes a very large distraction in her life when she helps a surprising new friend rescue a circus elephant.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020049193 (print) | LCCN 2020049194 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735229945 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781623361952 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735229969 (ebook)

  Subjects: CYAC: Friendship—Fiction. | Elephants—Fiction. | Separation (Psychology)—Fiction. | Emigration and immigration—Fiction. | Turkish Americans—Fiction.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.S633136 El 2021 (print) | LCC PZ7.S633136 (ebook) | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049193

  LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020049194

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  Cover art © 2021 by Julie Mcloughlin

  pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  For Rae, Abe, Sam, and Harlan

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  1.

  What Sila Tekin would remember about that afternoon was that she had been wearing her favorite shirt. It was nothing fancy. Just red with white stripes and blue stitching, but it fit perfectly, not too tight and not too loose. And it wasn’t only comfortable; it was lucky, because she had been wearing the shirt when she found a twenty-dollar bill on the sidewalk one afternoon while walking home from school. Sila had also bowled her highest score in August, and done well on a very hard math test while wearing the garment. Another time when she had on the shirt she’d spotted a two-foot-tall speckled owl sleeping high up in a tree in Hendricks Park. That was amazing.

  So the T-shirt was special. There was no question about it.

  At least not until Thursday, September 6, when Sila came through the front door of the apartment to find her parents in the kitchen. Her mom and dad were never there when she got home from school; they were always at work. Her mom’s eyes were red and puffy from crying and her nose looked like it was leaking water. Sila asked in Turkish, which was the language she spoke at home, “What’s going on?”

  Her father put his hand on his daughter’s shoulder. She could feel tension even in his fingertips. “We’ve had some bad news.”

  Sila’s ears started to buzz. One of her grandparents must have died. Her voice was shaky as she asked: “What’s happened? You have to tell me!”

  Sila’s mother, Oya, looked as if she was going to speak, only nothing came out except a long, dry exhale that had choking sounds mixed in. But then her father managed, “Your mother is going on a trip. She’ll be back soon. Very soon.”

  “A trip? Why?”

  “Legal things. Fixing paperwork.”

  Sila looked at her mother. “Where are you going?”

  “To Turkey.”

  Sila’s eyes moved from her mother to her father. They weren’t sick. No one had died. Health wasn’t the issue. Sila stared at her parents and could see they were trying to seem calm, but it looked as if their heads were going to explode.

  “I don’t understand. So what’s the bad news?”

  Her mother wiped her nose. “It’s immigration. There is a problem.”

  Sila’s parents went on to explain that Oya needed to return to the country she left as an adult and get a replacement for a document that had never been properly executed. Without fixing the situation, Oya was facing a court proceeding and even deportation. So she just needed to correct a clerical mistake. They had a plan.

  It didn’t sound to Sila like that big of a deal. Hadn’t her mother admitted she missed where she was born? Couldn’t going back to Turkey be a good thing? Didn’t Oya speak all the time about longing to see Sila’s grandparents? Wasn’t she always saying she missed the bread and the cheese and the tomatoes she’d grown up with?

  But this trip was forced on her. Maybe, Sila thought, anything that you are told to do isn’t as good as when you make the choice yourself.

  Everyone wants to be the boss of their own life.

  Sila had been born in Oregon. She was an American citizen. Her parents had lived in Eugene for almost fifteen years, but they were Turkish citizens. In Istanbul her mother had studied to be a librarian, but once they came to America she had taken work in the housekeeping department of the most expensive hotel on main street. She cleaned rooms five days a week, and if she was lucky, got overtime for a sixth day. That job had ended after fourteen years only last week. So much was in turmoil.

  These were the facts: Sila’s mother would be gone for eight days—two Sundays with six days sandwiched in between. Before Oya left, she cooked her husband’s and daughter’s favorite foods and then packed the refrigerator and the freezer tight with glass containers. While her mother buzzed around the oven and the stove, Sila tried to be helpful and cleaned the apartment. When she was finished, she clea
ned it all over again. She would have started on a third round but she went with her mother to shop for the gifts to bring for family and friends.

  Later that night Sila sat on her parents’ bed as Oya filled a large suitcase with wrapped presents. Once they were in place she had room for only three outfits, a week’s worth of underwear, and four pairs of socks. Her mother insisted this would be enough for the short time she would be traveling.

  Sila didn’t think so, but said nothing.

  Her parents took money from their savings and then more money from a credit card to finance the trip. Sila could see that her mom was nervous when she said goodbye. Oya pressed a blue glass evil eye on a chain into her daughter’s hand and told her to keep it with her at all times for protection. Sila didn’t think her mother believed in curses, but she looked pretty serious. It was, she knew, bad luck to be superstitious.

  Sila slipped the gold chain around her neck. She didn’t want to cry. Her mother whispered, “Eight days will go by so fast. You’ll see.”

  But the eight days had turned into eight months. Sila had hung a calendar on a wall in her room, and she put an X in the appropriate square every night before she went to bed. She then wrote the number of days her mother been gone. She was now on 237.

  Sila loved her father, but being apart from her mom was harder than anything she had ever known. She missed her so much that even her skin didn’t feel right. The air was pushing down on her arms in a new way and her feet somehow moved as if they were twice their former size.

  At first Sila’s dad, Alp, didn’t eat much. He wore the same shirt for three days in a row, and wasn’t shaving every morning. He spoke to his wife all the time, often trying to hide it from Sila. But she knew. She could hear her mother crying. On Skype. On the phone. Alp would be in the bedroom with the door shut, or even in the bathroom whispering as if Sila didn’t have ears.

  It took some time for them to get used to the fact that they were facing a crisis. It was sharp in the beginning and time turned it to something deep and dull and even more difficult. It turned into their new reality.

  One of the hardest things was that Sila kept expecting to see her mother everywhere. When she came into the kitchen she looked for her at the stove. Her mom should have been on the couch. In the front seat of the car. Coming out of the bathroom. Her mother was there in Sila’s head and her heart but not in the room.

  And who knew when she would be coming back?

  Waiting was what they did now.

  Oya Tekin had flown to a place Sila had only heard about, but never seen. Her mother had gone back to Turkey. She had waited in lines. She had called officials. She had shown her file over and over and over again, and was told it was a process, which took time. Every day Sila and her father woke up hoping that the necessary paperwork was at the embassy in Ankara. But there was no answer to the biggest question: When would Oya get what she needed to fly back across the ocean and then across a continent to the place she called home?

  In all the months that her mother had been gone, Sila had not once put on the red-and-white shirt with the blue stitching. The shirt had turned into a symbol for all the bad luck in the universe. Sila wanted to rip it apart and throw it away, but instead she stuffed the shirt into a plastic bag, which she jammed under the kitchen sink.

  As the days and then weeks and then months passed, Sila stopped spending time with her friends. She came straight home every day after school and stayed in her room with her family’s computer as a companion. Sila lost track of many of the things that she used to find fun, and clung to a very specific routine. She told no one about her situation. It wasn’t anyone’s business.

  Sila did chores with her father on weekends, taking the laundry downstairs to the room off the parking garage on Saturdays. She vacuumed the apartment on Sundays, because that’s what her mother had done.

  She and Alp had stretched out her mother’s home-cooked food for as long as possible, but it had been gone for months now. They tried to make meals the way they used to eat as a family, with vegetables, a salad, fish or chicken, and bread, but it was a lost cause. Mostly they ate scrambled eggs and toast for dinner.

  Her father always read as he consumed his food. He worked as a car mechanic at an independent repair shop, and Sila was sure he was one of the few people in the world to find an owner’s manual interesting. Sila just stared at the computer screen, keeping the sound on mute.

  The best part of the day was when her mother would appear online at the arranged time. They talked. They laughed. They tried not to cry. They worked to keep it light-hearted. It was amazing how much they spoke about the weather. It was a neutral subject that was ever changing. But maybe more to the point, there was nothing they could do about it. Is that why talking about rain felt safe?

  Because the time online was never enough. Once they had said goodbye the empty space would return. Sila and Alp didn’t speak much to each other after the calls. Waiting made silence easier to tolerate than voices. No one but Sila’s father understood, because no one else but him was feeling the same thing.

  The rest of the world was getting on with their lives.

  2.

  The only expensive thing in Apartment 207A at 2599 Cleary Road was an intricately woven carpet that Sila’s grandparents had shipped over from Istanbul. The Tekins’ living space was home to geometrically patterned tiles and hand-painted Iznik ceramics, and then a lot of stuff from thrift stores and garage sales and discount stores. Sila once loved it all. Now it looked like a collection of things that didn’t belong together.

  Sila had her own bedroom, but other people living in the same units on other floors in the building used the space as an office because the area was tiny and had no closet. There was one round window in Sila’s room, and it faced away from the street to the back, where railroad tracks were located. Sila had long ago grown so accustomed to the trains that she didn’t hear them anymore. It was, she decided, like the way you don’t see your own nose even though it’s in your field of vision. Your brain says it’s useless information.

  But since her mother had gone, Sila could hear every single train that rattled past. She watched through the glass and imagined all the people traveling and felt her stomach knot. They all had somewhere to go.

  It was a Saturday morning when Sila heard her father’s cell phone ring. She watched as he wrote something on the back of an envelope and said, “I can be there in the next hour.”

  Sila moved from her spot on a stool and looked down at the address. She’d never heard of the street. “Dad, where’s that?”

  “Someplace out of town. Off old Route 99. You should come with me. I’m going out there to look at a truck that won’t start.”

  “I’d rather stay here. I don’t like trucks.”

  “And I don’t like leaving you here alone for so long.”

  “Maybe you’ll fix it in a few minutes and be right back.”

  “I’m not asking you to go. I’m—”

  “Forcing me.”

  “Bring a book. It will be good for you to get out of the house.”

  “It’s an apartment.”

  “We’re leaving in twenty minutes.”

  Sila thought about putting up a fight but it wasn’t worth it. For either of them. Her father would make her go in the end anyway, so Sila went to the kitchen and put water in the bottle she took to school every day. She then filled three plastic ziplock bags with hard cheese, sunflower seeds, and stale pretzels (someone hadn’t shut the bag correctly, but since she and her father were both capable of that, she didn’t say anything).

  Sila stuffed the bags in her sweatshirt pocket. The last thing she did was retrieve a half-filled box of Junior Mints that she had been saving in her room. Her father could go forever fixing something and not need even a glass of water. They were different that way.

  Twenty minutes later, Sila and Alp were
driving out of town together on old Highway 99 North. It was surprising how good it felt to be moving. Sila wished they were going to travel like this for days with the radio on and the windows down heading across country until they reached the Atlantic Ocean. But even passing through twelve states and driving three thousand miles wouldn’t make a difference. They would still be a whole body of salt water from the person who mattered most in their lives.

  * * *

  It wasn’t very long before her father turned off the highway onto a narrow country road. There were no houses in sight, only fields with tall weeds that would come up past her knees. Sila wondered if there were snakes or rodents hiding in holes out in the meadows. She spotted what she thought was a hawk circling overhead and was curious what the bird saw that she couldn’t.

  Another five minutes passed, with only one other car going the other direction, when Sila’s dad turned onto a gravel drive. As they rounded a bend they could see a very high wall made of big rocks. It looked to Sila like something that would surround a castle. There were huge wooden gates that went across a driveway and connected to the stone barrier. This, according to the address on the piece of paper Sila’s father held in his hand, was where they were going. He stared at the wall. “Now, that took a lot of work.”

  “It looks so old.”

  “It’s beautiful—no?”

  “The wall goes on forever.”

  “Probably not forever. But yes, as far as we can see.”

  Sila felt a strange excitement as they approached. This place was filled with intrigue. Maybe they’d be here for hours and hours and hours. Maybe even days. But then dread took hold. That was the pattern now. What if her mother came home and no one was there? Being away from the apartment suddenly felt disloyal.

  They weren’t standing guard in the living room waiting for her.

  They weren’t near the computer.

  They were out in the world.

  Was there even good cell phone service this far out of town?

  Who knew what could happen?