The Elephant in the Room

by Holly Goldberg Sloan

“That’s why Mateo and I want to help.”

  “We’ll see. I haven’t said yes.”

  “But you haven’t said no. And that’s the start of the breaking-down-a-parent process.”

  * * *

  As far as Sila’s and Mateo’s parents were concerned the first obstacle was figuring out whether it would be safe for the kids to ride their bikes to Gio’s. The beginning of the trek would be on quiet streets with designated bike paths. That didn’t appear to be dangerous or confusing to navigate. However, once they were heading out of town onto the old highway, the kids would have to cycle on the shoulder, where there were broken and rough sections, or worse, nothing but loose gravel.

  It wasn’t practical to follow the kids in a car for a test run, so Mrs. Lopez said she’d bike out to Gio’s with Sila and Mateo. The truth of the matter was that the kids had no problem with the expedition, and the gravel areas on the old highway were their favorite part. The only one complaining once they arrived was Mateo’s mom, who kept saying “My butt is killing me.” Sila wasn’t even very sweaty. Mateo’s only issue was that he didn’t think his bike helmet fit right. Sila admitted hers didn’t feel right either. She thought Mateo knew what he was talking about when he said, “Maybe every bike helmet feels like it doesn’t fit right.”

  Once they were on the property the kids went to work with Gio, cleaning up the barn, refilling the water troughs, and putting out hay. Mrs. Lopez helped for the first half hour, but then excused herself to go to the farmhouse porch and return phone calls for work.

  Sila and Mateo decided to take a look at the poo pile. In only days it had undergone even more transformation, gaining new life. Yeasts, smuts, mildews, molds, and mushrooms had sprouted up. Wildflowers and snarls of blackberry were creeping up the dunghill. There were weeds and stinging nettles spreading in all directions, and fiddlehead ferns popping skyward.

  If something wasn’t done, Sila thought, the elephant wouldn’t be the biggest concern on the property: The menagerie of life that her poop brought would be the bigger issue.

  After they’d eaten lunch, they loaded into the golf cart and headed to the pond. Mateo and his mother stayed up on the hill as Gio walked Sila down to the water’s edge to see Veda again. Gio had a bag of peaches. While they fed the fruit to the elephant, Sila sang a Turkish folksong. It was something her mother had always sung for her. Sila figured it was the peaches, not her singing, but Veda started to rock from side to side, swaying in a way that could only mean contentment.

  * * *

  Watching from a distance, Rosa no longer had a question as to how her son should spend his summer. This experience would be more valuable than coding camp. But maybe more important, she thought as she stole a glance at her son, this possibility had all come from him. She wasn’t the guide.

  Once Mrs. Lopez agreed that Mateo could ride his bike with Sila out to Gio’s, her father had no choice but to give in as well. He and Sila decided to keep part of the summer plan from Oya. She knew about the elephant, and that they often went to visit Gio, but it was decided she didn’t need to hear other details. She didn’t need one more thing to worry about. Oya’s next appointment at the embassy in Ankara would be in sixty days. And that felt like an eternity.

  Sila sat in her room that night waiting for a train to pass. As she thought back on the day, she wondered why she hadn’t paid much attention to Mateo before she’d been put in the program at school with him. Of course she knew him, but not the way she did now. She hadn’t ever bothered to question why he didn’t talk in class or why he spent time alone. She had to admit to herself that she hadn’t ever cared. Now she had to ask herself why she hadn’t made more of an effort. He was quiet, but he had a lot to say.

  She wondered what were other things in her life that she ignored. Sila remembered reading that poor people gave a bigger percentage of their income to charity than wealthy people. Was that because people who didn’t have the money to be comfortable filling basic needs understood what that felt like? Did it make them more generous? Did her own pain and sorrow over her mother’s absence force her to be a bigger person? Were people more compassionate because of their own difficult experiences?

  The school year ended with the Facilitator giving Sila and Mateo each a gift certificate to the bookstore on Willamette Street and a container of sugar-candied peanuts. Sila was excited about both things.

  “I’m going to buy a bunch of books as soon as I can get my dad to take me over to the shop,” Sila said as they walked home. “But I’ll start the peanuts now.” She popped open the can and ate a handful. “They’re really good.”

  Mateo handed her his container. “Take mine. I don’t like peanuts with sugar.”

  Sila was pleased. “Okay, thanks!”

  The Facilitator had also given them each an envelope, addressed to their parents. Sila pulled hers out of her backpack. “Should we read the letters?”

  “Didn’t you say you were never again going to open anything not addressed to you?” Mateo asked.

  “Did I say that?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh. Well, I say a lot of things.”

  “That you don’t mean?”

  “I mean it when I say it, but I’m open to changing my mind,” she answered.

  Sila returned the letter to her backpack, but when she got to her apartment she decided to look inside the envelope. Her father wasn’t yet home from work. Sila closed the door to her room anyway for privacy.

  The letter read:

  Sila Tekin participated in a program to connect students who have been determined to fall outside the norm for communication and interaction skills. Sila is a very curious, very determined, very considerate girl. We have evaluated her as independent, sensitive, and empathetic. We see a bright future for your daughter.

  E. Pope, Director Children’s Outreach

  Sila folded the letter back up and returned it to the envelope. She couldn’t decide if the letter made her feel good or bad, so she hid it under the kitchen sink near her unlucky shirt. She knew that if it hadn’t been for “Connections,” she wouldn’t have come to know Mateo. But a new friend didn’t bring back her mother or keep her father from sleeping most nights in the living room with the TV on. The letter said she had a bright future, but would they have told her parents if she didn’t? “We see a lot of trouble ahead for your kid.” Would they have written that?

  School was officially done for the year.

  On Monday they would start at Gio’s.

  That was her focus now.

  30.

  Mateo left the letter from the Facilitator on the kitchen table. The envelope was addressed to his mother, not to him. After spending time with Waffles he took the snack that had been left for him on the counter and went up to his room. But instead of playing a video game, Mateo sat down on his bed and closed his eyes. He wasn’t a fan of bright light and yet he thought it was curious that when he was out at Gio’s, it didn’t bother him. He knew that when he was distracted the things that could make him uncomfortable were much easier to bear.

  This school year had been different.

  Sila was his friend.

  Having a friend could be a scary thing, because a friend could turn on you. That had happened in the past.

  He was worried about that now.

  When he heard his mother come in the back door from the garage, Mateo looked at the clock and saw that almost two hours had passed. He knew every sound of her homecoming. He recognized his mother’s computer bag being set down and then Waffles’s paws scurrying across the hardwood floor to greet her. There was the noise of the glass jar with the dog treats opening and closing, and the snap of Waffles’s jaws as he gobbled down the bone-shaped goody.

  Unlike Sila, he wasn’t very curious about what had been written by the Facilitator. Sitting in the library all of those days, he had never been sure what
to do. He had read his books and worked to not flap his hands or do something that might cause a disruption.

  Isn’t that what they wanted from him? To make things easier for the other kids?

  Mateo had feelings and thoughts and ideas about everything. In the past he had found that they were often ignored or treated as meaningless by people who didn’t understand how he expressed himself.

  He was different from a lot of kids, and he hadn’t changed in that room in the library.

  But Sila’s attitude toward him had.

  31.

  The bike ride wasn’t the same without Mateo’s mom trailing behind. In the beginning heading down Cleary Road together, Sila felt free. But once they were out on the shoulder of the old highway, the opposite thing happened and she was tense in a way that she didn’t remember. Mateo followed behind her, so she couldn’t see what he was up to. She worried that she might be going too slow or too fast at times.

  She was relieved when they were off the highway and on the back road with almost no traffic. Once she could see the gates to Gio’s, she turned to look at Mateo. He was pedaling standing up, and he called out as if they’d just won a major race, “We made it!” Maybe it had been stressful for him as well.

  Gio was waiting for them out front. He too seemed relieved. “I’m so glad to see you two! How was the ride?”

  Sila answered truthfully, “It was longer than I remember.”

  “Every day it will get shorter. Because you will come to know the route.” Gio turned to Mateo. “How’d you do?”

  “I need a new helmet.”

  Sila started to sigh with frustration, but then she realized she wasn’t his mother. She needed to be patient with the world. That’s what her father said when she complained about waiting for her mother. And she knew she would need patience to get to know Veda and not expect too much too quickly. Mateo didn’t have the same reactions to things as most kids. The key to their friendship was to not expect him to.

  Gio outlined the day. They would start by spending time at the pond with Veda. Then they would set about doing chores, which mostly consisted of cleaning up and organizing.

  At the pond, Veda came right up to Sila.

  “Good morning, Veda.”

  The elephant extended her trunk, and Gio handed Sila an apple from a large bag. Veda took it right from her hand. Sila spoke to her. “I missed you. And I thought about you a lot.”

  Veda’s large black eyes stayed focused on her.

  While Sila fed fruit to the elephant, Mateo took off to walk around the pond. He said he had measured his own stride, which he had decided to round up an inch and a half to thirty-six inches, or one yard. He was going around the pond counting his steps in order to calculate the size of the body of water. He called out, “Assigning numbers to objects is what allows us to compare things.”

  Veda turned to watch the boy. The elephant absorbed what happened around her in an amazing way, Sila thought.

  The sun was higher in the sky when they arrived back at the farmhouse. Gio went inside, and the kids headed to the barn to fetch work gloves and their wheelbarrows. Mateo looked up into the shadows and said, “What’s that?”

  Above their heads, obscured in darkness, a creature stared down with shiny eyes.

  Sila whispered, “Is it a rat?”

  “It’s too big to be a rat.”

  Mateo pulled a small flashlight from his pocket. Sila wondered if he always carried it or if this was part of his preparation for Gio’s. He pushed a button and a surprisingly powerful bluish light appeared. Mateo took a step closer to Sila and then aimed up at the rafter. The animal they now saw looked like a huge rodent wearing an enormous, shaggy fur jacket. But once the beam of light hit, a transformation occurred. The thick coat seemed to organize itself into a sphere of sharp wires.

  Sila’s mouth dropped open. “Is it a porcupine?”

  “I think so.”

  “Is it just one, or are there more?”

  Mateo moved the flashlight across the support beams as he said, “A family of porcupines is called a prickle.”

  “You’re making that up.”

  “I don’t make stuff up.”

  Sila didn’t answer, because in the time she’d known Mateo, she did realize he was intense about getting his facts right. Sila stared at the animal overhead. “She’s beautiful—in her own way.”

  “How do you know it’s a ‘she’?” Mateo asked.

  “I don’t. I’m just guessing. We better tell Gio.”

  The porcupine, like the weasel that Gio had found sleeping in the front seat of his old truck the day before, seemed to be part of the explosion that all started with the dung pile. The new wildlife made Gio very happy, but Veda’s waste mound, and the animals that came to be part of it, were clearly getting to be a problem. On the bright side, the elephant poop was a great fertilizer. There had to be a use for that.

  From that day forward, he had Sila and Mateo take the fresh elephant bricks to an area on the other side of the stone wall. They called this new area the Wasteland. It was Gio who started singing “I’m going to Wasteland, Wasteland, Memphis, Tennessee.” After that, Mateo repeated the line over and over and over again. It was, they discovered, taken from a Paul Simon lyric that Gio said was one of his wife’s favorite songs.

  Gio made calls to local plant nurseries and explained that he had what he believed to be some kind of miracle growing material, and that is how the Wasteland became a business. A woman showed up the next day with a pickup truck, and the kids helped her load the bed of the vehicle with Veda’s bricks. She gave them money before she drove off. At first they didn’t feel comfortable taking it, but Gio told them that saying thank you was the right and first response to any act of business.

  Sila and Mateo were put in charge of the fertilizer operation. They were helping with Veda’s food and signing for deliveries, and they were riding with Gio in the golf cart. All three of them were learning about elephant care. But also about the outdoors. And when Sila was busy, working hard outside in the sun, she was able to push the loneliness of missing her mother aside. She was able to take deep breaths and exhale.

  At the end of the first week as they got on their bikes to ride home Mateo said, “We are lucky to be here.”

  “You’re so right,” said Sila.

  She started to pedal off, and then turned to look over her shoulder and said, “Do you want to lead the way back home?”

  In seconds Mateo’s bike zoomed right past her. And Sila saw he was smiling big.

  Gio hired two more people to help at his property. A man named Carlos Flores came five days a week and was placed in charge of managing the enormous amount of hay that Veda ate. He also was put to work planting a garden in a flat area at the top of the hill behind the farmhouse. Sila and Mateo spent part of every day now tending the new seedlings. There were vegetables and sunflowers that had just started to grow there.

  Gio’s second full-time worker was named Klay Roker. He helped the kids collect Veda’s potent poo, most of which was hauled away on schedule twice a week and sold as fertilizer at a nursery in town. Carlos and Klay tried to keep Gio from doing too much of the heavy work. Each morning when the kids arrived they were given an assignment. Some days they would join Gio in the afternoon to watch Veda. Other times after they had helped in the barn, they were allowed to climb trees or explore the woods. On one hike they found a small cave. They went back with Gio and flashlights, but there wasn’t treasure inside, just dripping water and a lot of spiders.

  Gio taught Sila and Mateo to drive the golf cart, which had a trailer that could be attached to transport food and other equipment around the property. They learned to use saws and power tools. They were always busy, and even when the work for the day was tiring or repetitive, it felt great to be outside near the majestic elephant.

  32.

  I
t was on a Sunday night at the end of June when Gio phoned Alp to say there were friends for Veda arriving the next day. The kids should try to get to his place early.

  Sila asked, “What’s his definition of friends?”

  Her father shrugged. “I guess you’ll see.”

  The kids had only been on the property for five minutes before the buzzer at the gate rang. Gio called out from the front porch of the farmhouse, “They’re here!”

  Sila and Mateo exchanged looks, anxious to know who “they” were as the gates rolled open and a cargo van pulled in. A curly-haired man got out. He looked both energized and weary. It was a strange combination.

  Gio extended his hand. “I’m Gio. You must be Pip Rozaire.”

  “That’s me. I’ve been on the road for twenty hours. Stopped just for gas and to go to the bathroom. I was trying to give the phenicopters as little grief as possible.”

  Sila stared at him. Phenicopters? She’d been making a to-do list for the day and was holding a pad of paper. She wrote down the word phenicopters and put a question mark next to it.

  Pip opened the back of the transport vehicle, and the kids and Gio looked in to see blankets covering large dog crates. Sila thought it was strange that Gio would buy a bunch of dogs, but then the man pulled the cover off a crate and inside, sitting on a pile of shredded, damp towels, was a flamingo.

  The bird was jittery. So was Pip Rozaire, who for some reason addressed most of what he said to Sila. Maybe because she had the paper and pen.

  “The biggest thing you’re going to need is a lot of sand. And you’ve got to be prepared to water that sand a few times a day.”

  She wrote, We need lots of sand. Water it.

  Pip continued, “Otherwise, big problem. It’s wet sand they want. Now remember, flamingos can get their legs hurt pretty darn easily. They trip all the time. Real klutzes. And if something scares ’em, they take off running. When that happens, their legs tangle up and can even break. Flamingos with broken legs—not pretty. Exotic vet bills are not cheap. I hope there’s an exotic bird veterinarian around here. We have two in Vegas.”