Larger Than Life Read online

  "Doctor," I correct.

  His eyes narrow. "Yes. Well."

  I'm not going to get into a pissing contest with the man who controls Lesego's fate. "What happens next?"

  "We'll get a bush vet dispatched as soon as we can, maybe by the end of the week. Your calf will be darted and flown to the facility in South Africa."

  He offers me a ride to a local hotel, but I am itching to get back to the game reserve to see Lesego. And, I suppose, to give Neo the good news.

  We know, at the reserve, when visitors arrive. They have to be radioed through the gate, even though it is another forty minutes of driving through the bush to reach the camp itself. So it is not a surprise to find Grant waiting for me when I pull in. "I did it," I say, triumphant. "It wasn't easy--it was the opposite of easy--but the vet will be here by Sunday, and Karen Trendler agreed to take her and--" When I see his expression, my sentence falls away, one syllable at a time, pebbles from the edge of a cliff. "Grant," I whisper. "What's wrong?"

  I am thinking of those little yellow telegrams.

  But Grant walks me to my hut, explaining on the way. Once she realized I had left, Lesego had stopped eating. No matter what Neo did to encourage her otherwise, she had refused. The calf had not eaten or drunk since I'd gone away--a full week now.

  "It's my fault," I murmur.

  "I called Dame Sheldrick's orphanage in Kenya," Grant says. "She started taking in orphaned calves in the nineteen seventies, when poaching became widespread in Tsavo. I figured if anyone could help us, it would be her. Alice ... her keepers rotate. No one person watches an elephant, because the calves get too attached." Grant stops walking and looks at me. "Before, if a keeper left for even a single day, the calf stopped eating. It started to mourn. Those first calves of hers," he says, "they died."

  At that, I break into a run. I fly down the path of the researchers' village toward my hut. A flashlight has been rigged to hang over the porch, where Neo sits with Lesego. His hand strokes the stark planes of her brow, the sunken cheeks. I can see the knobs of her spine. She has deteriorated so far, so fast.

  I've left her before, but for minutes at a time. How long had she waited for me before beginning to give up?

  Neo looks up at me, his face ravaged.

  "I'm back, Lesego," I croon to the calf. She struggles to get up, but she is too weak. Her eyes are dull, flat. Her skin sags, sallow, under her chin. I try to lift her head, but it is too heavy; instead, I curl my body around hers, as if I could will her my strength.

  As it turns out, you can love someone too much.

  Then, when they leave, your heart goes missing. And no one can survive that great a loss.

  "You're going to get better," I say fiercely. "You're going to a new home in South Africa." But even as I make this promise, I realize it's one I can't keep, unless I stay there with her. Be careful what you wish for, I think. When I'd walked her to Mpho's herd, I'd thought I could not live without her ... when all along, she was the one who could not live without me.

  I try to feed Lesego, but she is too weak to take any sustenance. And so, it happens just after 3:00 A.M. My cheek is pressed against Lesego's belly. One minute, I can feel life thrumming beneath her skin. And the next, it's gone.

  In Tswana, there are two ways to say goodbye. Tsamaya sentle means "go well." Sala sentle means "stay well." It depends on whether you are the one leaving or the one being left behind.

  Once, I came across an elephant herd grazing near a river. There was a calf that was testing its independence, that had wandered off maybe twenty or thirty yards. I was certain every female in that herd still knew his whereabouts, as surely as if he were emitting a radio signal. Suddenly, a crocodile popped out of the water, its jaws wide, its tongue a pink sponge. The calf's mother could not see this, because she was around the river bend. But somehow she knew that calf was in trouble, and she bolted--all nine thousand pounds of her--moving faster than an animal a fraction of her size. She was at the calf's side before I could even turn the ignition in my vehicle to try to scare off the crocodile. The elephant charged, shoving the baby out of the way so that it tumbled like a stone being skipped over the surface of the river. Then she grabbed the crocodile by the tail with her trunk, swung it over her head, and flung it so that it struck a tree and fell down dead.

  The calf scrambled beneath the safe haven of his mother.

  When you are truly, deeply scared, that's the only place you want to be.

  I am there when my mother opens her eyes for the first time, postsurgery. "These drugs," she said. "I'm seeing things."

  She looks small, wrapped in the hospital gown, with a bandage binding her chest. Two drains filled with pink fluid hang from the metal rungs of the bed; the tubes snake under the gauze. It is strange, seeing her like this, no longer strong or in control. But her face, without makeup, is still so beautiful that I find myself pushing my hair back from my own face, trying to make myself presentable.

  "Mom," I say, reaching for her hand. One finger glows red, pinched by a pulse-ox meter.

  "You look like hell," my mother says, and a laugh fizzes out of me, the carbonation of fear.

  "I could say the same about you," I tell her.

  I've been traveling for twenty-eight straight hours. It seems like ages since I marched into Grant's cramped office and told him that I was going home. You can ask me to leave the program, I said, or you can give me a leave of absence.

  How long? he asked.

  I don't know yet. And then I finally said it out loud: My mother is sick.

  You're a fixer, Grant mused. You're also a colossal pain in the ass. The thing is, it's the pains in the ass that change the world.

  The doctor told me it was a bilateral modified radical mastectomy. He said the tumor was large, and had spread to the muscles of the chest wall. After this would come more treatment--chemo or radiation--to kill the cancer cells that were still undetected and swimming through her bloodstream.

  My mother is silent for so long that I think she has drifted to sleep again. But when I look at her, I realize she is crying--and that it's something I've never seen her do. "I thought you wouldn't come," she says. "I thought I was getting what I deserved."

  I look down at her bandages, at the brown stain of Betadine creeping above the throat of the gauze, at the IV in the crook of her arm. "This is not what anyone deserves," I say.

  The first Western Union telegram had struck me like lightning. AM SICK. CANCER. COME HOME. XO MOM. It was the first contact I'd had from my mother in two years, with the exception of a card that contained a fifty-dollar bill for Christmas and another for my birthday. Of course, I had not called her, either; it was easy to fight the urge to call someone you thought had no desire to hear from you.

  Until she had no choice, that is.

  I think about the shot of tequila I took after reading the telegram, which still did not render the words invisible. How I'd driven like a maniac through the bush, with the wind in my face and the branches scratching my arms, desperately trying to feel anything except guilt.

  And then I had found Lesego.

  I think some part of my brain believed that if I could unread the words, if I could pretend that telegram had never arrived, then it would not be true. If I didn't talk about it, it wouldn't exist. I knew how science worked. If you did not look too closely you'd never see the malignant cells. After I got the telegram I did not respond to my mother or fly home because then I would have had to admit to myself that this was real. That my mother, whose disappointment I had feared and whose love I had chased, was not invincible.

  Maybe it is the jet lag, maybe it is remorse. I press my cheek to the scratchy white sheet and sob. I am crying for my mother. I am crying for Lesego. I'm crying for Neo. I'm crying for all the things we lose that we cannot get back. "You were right," I confess. "I never should have left Cambridge. I should have stayed at Harvard and studied those stupid monkeys and then you wouldn't have been mad at me for two years."