Larger Than Life (Novella) Read online

  When I was four years old and was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up, I repeatedly said I wanted to be either a doctor or one of Charlie’s Angels. My mother, in her infinite wisdom, somehow crossed these two careers and came up with scientist. She bought Dixie cups and marigold seeds and brought a bucket of dirt from the backyard. “What do plants need to grow, Alice?” she asked me.

  The way she tells the story, which she does—often—I was a genius, because even at that young age I came up with the answer of water and light. I’m pretty sure, in retrospect, she coaxed the answer out of me. Then she asked how we could prove it.

  We planted three seeds. One, which I watered daily, went on the windowsill in front of the kitchen sink, which had sunlight for ten hours every day. Another, which I also watered, went into the back of the hall closet, where there was no light. The third I set on the windowsill in my bedroom, which had tons of sunlight streaming through the glass—but I left this one dry.

  Every day at 4:00 P.M. my mother had me report my observations, and she recorded what I said in a small black journal. The plant in the closet did grow—but it never flowered. It looked like a creepy jungle vine. Nothing at all happened to the cup on my bedroom windowsill. The seed in the kitchen, however, grew and flowered. It had a gorgeous, bright yellow blossom that craved the attention of the sun. Each day it craned its stalk toward the light, much like the way I’d looked up to my mother when her hands pressed that seed into damp soil for the first time.

  My first stop is at the Department of Wildlife and National Parks in Gaborone, asking for permission to translocate an orphaned calf to Karen Trendler’s reserve in South Africa. As it turns out, however, even getting across the border between Botswana and South Africa is a nightmare, thanks to the 1985 raid by the South African military on the ANC offices in Gaborone that killed twelve people. I manage to score an appointment with the director of the wildlife department, a man named Wilhelm Otto with a distractingly thin mustache that looks like a residue of chocolate milk floating above his upper lip. Otto assures me this isn’t like taking a puppy on vacation. Elephants in Botswana, he says, belong to the state, and to move one across the border, international permission has to be obtained.

  I travel to Trendler’s reserve and explain the situation, hoping she will agree to take in another stray. The moment I mention that Lesego is a survivor of poaching I know I have her sympathy, since Trendler has spoken out publicly and forcefully against the killing of rhinos and elephants for ivory. On a handshake, she agrees to house Lesego, and then she introduces me to the other orphans—several rhinos and a vervet monkey and a hawk, even another elephant calf.

  She leaves the details, however, to me. So from the sanctuary I travel to Pretoria, chasing down a CITES wildlife export permit, and an import permit to South Africa, until I finally have a thick file stuffed with all the necessary paperwork to set Lesego’s transfer into motion. My final destination, seven days later, is the first place I’d gone—the Department of Wildlife in Gaborone. Wilhelm Otto calls me the Orphan Calf Lady and invites me into his office. As I wilt in the heat on the far side of his desk, he sifts through the stack of papers for ten minutes. At this rate, Lesego will be fully grown before she’s translocated, I think. Finally, Otto glances up at me. “T’s crossed and i’s dotted,” he pronounces. “Well done, Ms. Metcalf.”

  “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, pos
tsurgery. “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.”

  “You thought I was mad at you?” she said. “I thought you were mad at me. You never called or wrote.”

  “You never said goodbye,” I blurt out.

  In the long silence, I feel minuscule, petty.

  “I couldn’t go to that airport, Alice,” my mother sighs. “Not because I was angry. Because I didn’t trust myself to let you go.”

  Her hand rises from the bed and comes to rest heavy on my head. She strokes my hair. “For someone who knows so much about the brain,” my mother says, “you know absolutely nothing about the heart.”

  In the wild, a mother elephant and her daughter will stay together until one or the other dies. But there is one exception: In a year when there are limited resources—a drought, say, or a herd that has grown too big to sustain feeding all its members in a given area—the matriarch may make the decision to split the group. She will lead some of the elephants off in one direction, and her daughter will lead the rest on another route. They are still family, but they know that being together will bring about high mortality for the herd, that there is a better chance of survival when they aren’t competing for the same resources.

  But things change. When the land blossoms and the rivers run flush again, the mother and daughter reunite. It’s a celebration, a fanfare. There is trumpeting, roaring, touching, stroking. It’s like they have never been apart.

  Sometimes, when I sit in my mother’s hospital room, watching her do the spider crawling exercises along the wall to build her range of motion—or weeks later, when I drive her to her chemo treatments, I look out the window and see Africa. Gone are the dismal gray slush of mud season in New England and shivering fingers of the naked trees. Instead I picture the sun, squatting wide on the horizon just before it bursts on the pinprick of night. I watch the silhouettes of giraffes lope across the clearing, and I hear the giddy delight of the hyenas. I feel Lesego bumping up behind me, and I listen to the song of Neo’s voice.

  I had to learn how to be a mother before I realized how lucky I am to be a child. And since the doctors don’t know for sure how long that opportunity will last, I only let Africa breathe beneath my skin and on the backs of my eyelids. I don’t let myself pine for it. One day, I’ll go back. Today is not that day.

  Today, I will take care of her.

  And maybe, in the window boxes, plant marigolds.

  THE END

  If you enjoyed meeting Alice in Larger Than Life …

  You won’t want to miss Jodi Picoult’s new novel, Leaving Time.

  Coming in hardcover and eBook in October 2014.

  For more than a decade, Jenna Metcalf has never stopped thinking about her mother, Alice, who mysteriously disappeared in the wake of a tragic accident. Refusing to believe that she would have been abandoned as a young child, Jenna searches for her mother regularly online and pores over the pages of Alice’s old journals. A scientist who studied grief among elephants, Alice wrote mostly of her research among the animals she loved, yet Jenna hopes the entries will provide a clue to her mother’s whereabouts. As Jenna’s memories dovetail with the events in her mother’s journals, the story races to a mesmerizing finish. A deeply moving, gripping, and intelligent page-turner, Leaving Time is Jodi Picoult at the height of her powers.

  Read on for an excerpt …

  Jenna

  Some people used to believe that there was an elephant graveyard—a place that sick and old elephants would travel to die. They’d slip away from their herds and would lumber across the dusty landscape, like the titans we read about in seventh grade in Greek Mythology. Legend said the spot was in Saudi Arabia, that it was the source of a supernatural force, that it contained a book of spells to bring about world peace.

  Explorers who went in search of the graveyard would follow dying elephants for weeks, only to realize they’d been led in circles. Some of these voyagers disappeared completely. Some could not remember what they had seen, and not a single explorer who claimed to have found the graveyard could ever locate it again.

  Here’s why: The elephant graveyard is a myth.

  True, researchers have found groups of elephants that died in the same vicinity, many over a short period of time. My mother, Alice, would have said there’s a perfectly logical reason for a mass burial site: a group of elephants who died all at once due to lack of food or water, a slaughter by ivory hunters. It’s even possible that the strong winds in Africa could blow a scattering of bones into a concentrated pile. Jen
na, she would have told me, there’s an explanation for everything you see.

  There is plenty of information about elephants and death that is not fable but instead cold, hard science. My mother would have been able to tell me that, too. We would have sat, shoulder to shoulder, beneath the massive oak where Maura liked to shade herself, watching the elephant pick up acorns with her trunk and pitch them. My mother would rate each toss like an Olympic judge: 8.5 … 7.9. Ooh! A perfect 10.

  Maybe I would have listened. But maybe, too, I would have just closed my eyes. Maybe I would have tried to memorize the smell of bug spray on my mother’s skin, or the way she absentmindedly braided my hair, tying it off on the end with a stalk of green grass.

  Maybe the whole time I would have been wishing there really was an elephant graveyard, except not just for elephants. Because then I’d be able to find her.

  Alice

  When I was nine—before I grew up and became a scientist—I thought I knew everything, or at least I wanted to know everything, and in my mind there was no difference between the two. At that age, I was obsessed with animals. I knew that a group of tigers was called a streak. I knew that dolphins were carnivores. I knew that giraffes had four stomachs and that the leg muscles of a locust were a thousand times more powerful than the same weight of human muscle. I knew that white polar bears had black skin beneath their fur, and that jellyfish had no brains. I knew all these facts from the Time-Life monthly animal fact cards that I had received as a birthday gift from my pseudo-stepfather, who had moved out a year ago and now lived in San Francisco with his best friend, Frank, whom my mother called the other woman when she thought I wasn’t listening.

  Every month new cards arrived in the mail, and then one day, in October 1977, the best card of all arrived: the one about elephants. I cannot tell you why they were my favorite animals. Maybe it was my bedroom, with its green shag jungle carpet and the wallpaper border of cartoon pachyderms dancing across the walls. Maybe it was the fact that the first movie I’d ever seen, as a toddler, was Dumbo. Maybe it was because the silk lining inside my mother’s fur coat, the one she had inherited from her own mother, was made from an Indian sari and printed with elephants.