You should know that today Veda is living a very good life in Oregon.
Attached to this email is a picture of the paperwork. We’re keeping the original because it goes in a notebook that doesn’t belong to us.
We are writing because we are hoping you can tell us if Veda came from the Larmen and Falls circus, and if she did, where Veda’s mother or father or other elephants such as sisters or brothers are today.
Family is very important. For people, but also for animals in the world.
It is a fact that the six animals with very important family structures are: Elephants. Wolves. Orca whales. Dolphins. Lions. And chimpanzees. We didn’t make up the list. It is in one of Mateo’s science books.
Thank you for your help. And thank you for caring about animals.
Sincerely, Sila Tekin & Mateo Lopez
P.S. We are sending this as an email, but we decided that we are printing out a copy of this letter and sending it the old-fashioned way with a stamp and an envelope. Many people don’t open email from strangers, but everyone opens a letter (we hope).
37.
Rosa Lopez made copies of everything Alp Tekin had given her, and sent it to her friend who was a specialist in immigration law. Then she started investigating Oya’s former employment situation at the Grand Hotel.
From what she knew, Oya Tekin had done nothing wrong as an employee. Many people believed you could sue if you were fired unfairly. But that wasn’t true. A law needed to have been broken in order to have a legitimate wrongful termination claim.
Rosa knew that there weren’t laws against a boss liking one employee better than another. However, there was a law called the Equal Pay Act to guarantee that women couldn’t do the same job as men and be paid less.
Rosa had been standing up for her son to receive accommodations in school because of his differences, and so she was used to fighting for people’s rights. She began by immediately filling out paperwork on behalf of Oya Tekin to open a case with the United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. While they started an official investigation, she then went one step further. She started the motions to file a case against the hotel.
The ball was rolling.
Rosa called Alp at work to let him know. She needed signatures from Oya, and they arranged a time for the women to speak. Rosa and Alp made the decision not to tell either Sila or Mateo any of the details. Bringing up all of the immigration problems seemed to only make both kids more anxious. They would let them know when there was real news to report. In the meantime, it was enough for the kids to be told that lawyers were now working for the Tekin family.
Sila checked her email six times that day, but there was no reply from Florida. On Monday she and Mateo rode their bikes back out to Gio’s, but didn’t mention the search or sending the message to the sanctuary.
There was no response on Monday, or Tuesday or Wednesday. On Thursday Sila re-sent the email with a new subject heading: SENDING THIS EMAIL A SECOND TIME HOPING PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE FOR AN ANSWER.
Two days later there was a reply!
Sila and Mateo,
My name is Annie Byrd and I work at the Elephant Sanctuary Center of West Florida (ESCWF). I’m sorry it took several days for me to answer your email. I get a lot of correspondence at the sanctuary, which is forwarded to me from the general information website.
One of the things that we have been working on here is a database for all the animals that were owned by Larmen and Falls. We are very close to having a full history. Of course, many of the elephants are no longer living. But every elephant that was once part of the show is now retired. Most are in Florida, only not all.
I was able to see that a female elephant was born during the time period that you asked about and named Veda, which is a Sanskrit word meaning “knowledge and wisdom.” This was probably given to her because their elephants were Indian, not African. The birth of the baby elephant was considered a wonderful event for the circus, and there is documentation in the Santa Fe newspaper (where the circus was located for part of that winter). The records for the circus show that when the elephant calf was twenty months old she was sold through Vincent Z. Doyle. So this would confirm she is the same elephant you tell us is in Oregon.
The mother of Veda is named Madhi, and she is one of the few elephants from Larmen and Falls that did not end up here in the Florida sanctuary. Madhi is living in Arizona. A company called Arizona Outdoor Wildlife Adventures, run by the Randolf family, is a sanctuary that is also a commercial business operating for animal viewing.
The father of your elephant was Paya. He died of natural causes four years ago here in Florida.
We are very glad to have this news of Veda and we will add it to her life story. Thank you for your inquiry and for your interest in elephants from the Larmen and Falls Circus.
Best regards,
Annie Byrd
Elephant Sanctuary Center of West Florida
* * *
“She’s in Arizona!” Sila exclaimed as soon as Mateo came out of his house.
“Who’s in Arizona?”
“Madhi’s in Arizona!”
“Oh.”
Then Mateo asked, “Who’s Madhi?”
“Veda’s mother. I want to go see her.”
“In Arizona?”
“Yes! Do you think we could talk to your mom? Do you think she’d want to do that?”
“Go to Arizona?”
“Yes!”
“To see an elephant?”
“Not just any elephant. Madhi. Veda’s mother!”
“You said that already.” Mateo thought for a moment. “No. I don’t think my mom wants to go to Arizona. She’s never expressed an interest in that. She said she wants to go to Paris.”
“You haven’t even asked!” Sila shouted.
“Your question was ‘do you think she would?’ It wasn’t ‘do you think you could ask her?’”
“Mateo, you’re not seeing the big picture!”
“You have a picture? I’d like to look at it.”
“Mateo, please.”
“Please what?”
Sila slumped into the handlebars of her bicycle. Mateo looked concerned. “Are you okay to ride out to Gio’s this morning?”
She realized she shouldn’t have jumped into conversation that way. She needed to stay in order, and not just when talking to Mateo. She hadn’t explained about the email from the sanctuary. By the time they reached Gio’s, she had figured out a different way to share the news.
“Gio, we found Veda’s mother. She’s in Arizona. We have an email from a woman who works for the sanctuary that takes care of the elephants from the circus where Veda was born.”
“Goodness,” Gio said. “You two are real detectives.”
“Technically we’re not,” Mateo answered. “We weren’t solving a crime.”
Sila piped up, “Unless you see all circuses with trained animals as a crime.”
Mateo looked from Sila to Gio. “In 1808 a farmer named Hachaliah Bailey bought one of the first elephants to be shipped to America. He wanted to have an elephant pull a plow instead of a horse.”
Gio looked intrigued. “I didn’t know that.”
Sila knew it was wrong to interrupt but worried that an in-depth history discussion was coming. She blurted out, “Veda’s mother is now in an animal sanctuary in Arizona. That’s what we found out!”
Gio’s head ping-ponged from Mateo to Sila. “You’re kidding!”
Mateo returned to what he wanted to share. “But the elephant ate too much and didn’t like pulling the plow.”
Gio told Sila he couldn’t take her and Mateo on a trip to Arizona. He didn’t feel comfortable leaving Veda, even though Carlos and Klay knew how to feed her and how to watch over the flamingos. He was interested in hearing more abou
t the elephants in Veda’s family, but he didn’t share the kids’ strong enthusiasm to see Madhi in person. Right now, he said, “he had his hands full.”
Sila tried not to show how disappointed she was.
She was used to hiding her feelings, or at least she thought she was.
38.
Time was endless when Sila was thinking about how long it had been since she’d seen her mother. But the summer days had passed at lightning speed. July was behind them. August was almost over. School was about to start. Spending the day at Gio’s would soon be in the past. Sila and Mateo wouldn’t ride bikes or push wheelbarrows. They wouldn’t drive the golf cart (they were experts now), or water sunflowers or pull weeds in the pumpkin patch with Carlos and Klay. They wouldn’t watch hawks soar overhead or see an elephant in a pond, showering herself with muddy water as insects buzzed in frenzied circles. They wouldn’t watch Veda call out to them when they arrived, stomping her feet with excitement and splashing the pond. Sila and Mateo wouldn’t eat tuna fish sandwiches together on the front porch of a farmhouse with a kind older man who loved bright colors, elephants, and them.
Before long the Oregon rain would descend with numbing frequency. Sila knew there was a reason, after all, that this part of the country was so green. The pines would hold on to their needles, but the other trees would change color, and leaves would drop to the muddy ground below. The longest day of summer in the Willamette Valley had nearly sixteen hours of sunlight. The shortest winter day had not much more than eight.
Winter would bring frost and icy morning roads and, on a handful of occasions, snow. Gio had paid to have the old barn insulated and heating installed in preparation for when Veda might not want to go out into the cold weather. For the first time Sila wanted time to slow down, not speed up.
Sila’s father spent the weekend before school started cleaning the apartment, organizing everything in their lives in a kind of frenzy that Sila found irritating. Didn’t he see how unhappy she was? It wasn’t just that she waited every day and every night to hear her mother’s voice. The problem was supposed to have been solved long ago, and now that the joy of the summer was behind her she didn’t know if she could stand it anymore. She knew money was tight but wished her father had taken her to a movie, or out for ice cream. Instead he’d bought a new mop at Home Depot and put wax on the kitchen floor. He asked if she wanted to get a haircut, and when she said no, he went and got one for himself. He tossed away the pile of junk mail by the back door and put the shower curtain and the small throw rugs into the washing machine. Everything was organized and clean. But none of that made her feel any better.
On Tuesday Sila pulled up the shade and looked out the window for a train, but she saw only the empty track. It was the first day of the new school year. She had slept through the early caravan of freight cars.
Sila turned away, and her eyes fell on the bulletin board by the door. Her pictures of her mom and dad and old friends from school were there, but these were surrounded by so many new shots from the summer. There were photos of Veda. And of the flamingos. Sila had pictures of owls and hawks and hummingbirds. There were photos of the garden. The barn. Even the dung pile.
But the one picture she focused on was of herself with Mateo and Veda. Gio had taken the shot and printed it out for her. The two kids were standing by the pond with the elephant in the background. And the only one looking into the camera lens was Veda. Sila was wearing shorts, and her legs appeared to be solid muscle. That’s what happens, she thought, when you push around a heavy wheelbarrow and ride a bicycle for two hours a day. She looked very tan in the picture but she knew it was mostly dust that came up off the road when they were biking. It stuck to her because she was sweating, and in the picture the terra-cotta color gave the impression that she was made of clay. She was laughing in the photo and her face looked joyous. Mateo’s expression was serious, but his hands had been caught midair flapping, which she knew meant he was as happy as she was.
Sila got out of bed and went to her bureau to retrieve Mrs. Gardino’s binder. She opened it and looked at what Gio’s wife, once her teacher, had saved. She turned the pages slowly, stopping to look at the picture Mateo had drawn and then moving on until she got to the poem she’d written followed by “The sweetest little girl in the world.” Sila exhaled. She was once sweet. But not anymore. Now she was, she decided, strong. It wasn’t how the world saw her but how she saw herself that felt important.
Sila went into the kitchen, opened the cabinet under the sink, and pulled out her once-favorite shirt. Back in her room she was confused that the shirt was larger than she remembered. It hadn’t grown in the last year. Had she shrunk? She stared at the fabric as if seeing it for the first time. The red, white, and blue was like a flag. There were no stars, but the bold colors said to her that she was, despite everything that had happened, an American. She loved where she lived and she wanted to be a part of her community.
She decided that she was going to wear it.
Sila was happy to see her friends Porter and Daisy and Nala, which surprised her. And what shocked her even more was that they were happy to see her. She hadn’t realized that her old friends were a comfort until they surrounded her in the hall. Why had she stopped seeing these girls? How had they drifted out of her life over the past year? She didn’t have much of an explanation. Things changed when her mother had gone overseas. Were they changing again? She was grateful that no one brought up the past. Today they were all starting anew as if she hadn’t drifted away.
Was that what the summer was for?
Was it a way to press reset on life?
Four hours later, when the bell rang for lunch break, Sila’s old friends seemed to appear out of nowhere to take up position at her elbows. They started down the wide hall moving toward the cafeteria as a group, the girls all talking at the same time. They were nearly at the entrance to the loud dining hall when Sila spotted Mateo. He was alone with a lunch bag in one hand and a book cradled to his chest in the other. She knew what was in that bag: a tuna fish sandwich, chips, and seven almonds. The book with the red cover in his other arm was about gravity.
Mateo had told her “the more massive the object, the greater the gravitational pull.”
Gravity was why the planets circled the sun.
The spheres were pulled in and reaped the benefits of the warmth.
This past summer Gio had shown her a different planet.
Veda had been the kids’ star.
Sila kept her eyes on Mateo. She thought he would never quit loving gravity. Did Mateo see her?
Sila turned to her old friends. “I’ll meet you in the cafeteria.” Porter reached out and caught hold of Sila’s arm. “We’ll just wait.” But Sila shook her off gently. “No. See you in there. I’m going to be a while.” The girls seemed to understand, and disappeared inside to eat as Sila made her way to Mateo.
“Hey, Mateo.”
She wasn’t surprised when he seemed startled to see her. He didn’t smile. Before, that would have bothered her. Now it didn’t.
“Do you want to eat lunch with me? We can sit in the cafeteria together. Either with some of the girls I used to hang out with or just the two of us by ourselves.”
“I’m going to eat outside,” Mateo said. “I like eating outdoors. It reminds me of being at Gio’s. Plus it’s too loud in there.”
“Yeah. Good idea.”
For a moment Mateo looked confused. “But I only have one sandwich.”
“That’s okay. I’ve got my own stuff for lunch.” She held up a brown paper sack.
“Is yours tuna fish?” Mateo asked.
“Yes. Actually, it is.”
The two kids found a spot on the steps just down from the double front doors of the main entrance. It was warm in the sun as Sila opened her paper sack and took out her sandwich. She knew that Mateo liked to eat in silence.
Sila closed her eyes and listened to the wind in the nearby maple trees. She made out the noise of street traffic, the roar of a motorcycle, and then the sound of a distant train, followed by two barking dogs. But all of that was interrupted when Mateo said, “I think your dad’s here.”
Sila opened her eyes to see her father’s car slide to the curb.
Both the passenger’s and the driver’s side doors opened at the same time. Sila dropped her sandwich to the ground when she saw who it was that got out. Then she started to run. She didn’t feel her feet on the ground as she raced down the walkway, over the grass, straight to the car.
She jumped into wide, outstretched arms, and the weight of her body knocked her mother against the car. Alp came around and tried to keep his daughter and wife upright as they stumbled to the grass laughing and crying.
Sila’s mother was home.
And just like that the endless wait was over.
39.
The case of Tekin vs. Grand Hotel Incorporated went before the Oregon court fourteen months later, and in a unanimous decision the largest civil judgment in the state’s history of labor dispute was awarded to Oya Tekin. She was given back pay for twenty-three months, and the right to return to her old job. But that wasn’t what was so significant about the verdict. The Grand Hotel was found to have acted to punish her for pointing out their inequality in labor practices, and for that Oya was awarded damages. The amount of money was so high because it was determined that a senior employee of the hotel had made contact with immigration services in what was interpreted to be an attempt to have her deported.
Oya did not return to her job. Instead, she went to work for the Bureau of Labor and Industries as an advisor on employee rights. With the money from the settlement, the Tekins set up a college fund for their daughter. They purchased a mechanic business for Alp. And they tried to buy an elephant.
The Elephant in the Room Page 14
