Larger Than Life (Novella) (10 page)

I had expected my mother to come to the party Dr. Yunque threw for me at Harvard to
wish me well as I left for South Africa, but she didn’t show up. I thought maybe she
would call instead and wish me a bon voyage. Yet in the month that had passed since
our fight in the lab, my mother had not reached out to me. Apparently, if I was going
to ruin
my life, I was going to do it alone.

I packed up my apartment in Cambridge without her help. I rented a storage unit instead
of asking for space in her garage. And I tried to think like a scientist, not a daughter—making
lists of all the times she had slighted me, all the things she had never said. Objectively—biologically—I
knew I was an adult, that I could survive without her approval or attention. There
was no reason she had to be part of my life, now that I was grown and independent.
But love, you know, isn’t science. My mother was prickly, mercurial, maddening, demanding,
infuriating—but she was still my mother. Somewhere behind the mask of dissatisfaction
was the woman who had built a laboratory in my bedroom when I was seven. And so in
one last-ditch attempt at reconciliation, the day before I flew to South Africa, I
left my mother a voice mail, telling her what flight I was on, and when it was departing.

I got to the airport early, lugging my one big suitcase to the ticket counter and
checking in hours before my flight. But I didn’t go through the security checkpoint.
I sat at a chair near the British Airways counter, scanning the features of every
person who stepped through the sliding glass doors.

Here was the great paradox that Darwin himself could not explain away: In spite of
the fact that excising my mother’s negative influence from my life would probably
make me happier, healthier, and therefore more evolutionarily viable, I couldn’t.
True, my mother could make me feel smaller than a mustard seed; a single glance from
her could make me question my every action and thought; and I could spend my entire
life running and never catch up to her grand expectations for what I should have been
or could have been—but she also had the power to make me feel like everything was
going to work out, simply by breathing the words. She was a part of me, and if you
carved away a part of yourself, you bled to death.

I waited in the ticket lounge for British Airways until my name was called over the
loudspeaker, a warning that the flight was going to leave without me.

My mother did not come to say goodbye.

In order to find Lesego a new home, I have to sneak out of the one we share. Grant
has given me leave for a week to travel to Karin Trendler’s sanctuary to see if she
will take the calf, and then to the necessary government departments to obtain the
permits to make it happen. But Lesego cannot go with me, which means that the last
person I have to encounter before leaving camp is Neo.

He knocks on the door, and when I open it, I am careful not to make eye contact. “The
bottle’s on the counter,” I instruct, as if I am giving orders to a nanny. “She was
a little gassy last night, but I think it’s just the aftereffects of the sedatives.
And feel free to eat the mangoes. They’re just going to go bad in this heat—”

“Alice,” he interrupts. “Are we going to talk?”

I look him in the eye. “We
are
talking,” I say evenly.

“I didn’t plan to love you. And by the time I knew I did, I couldn’t tell you what
you deserved to know.” He hesitates, his face shuttered. “I never wanted to hurt you.”

I gather the blanket from my bed. “There’s a lot of that going around, lately.”

Neo steps in front of me, blocking my path. “Sethunye grew up in my village. I’ve
known her my whole life. She’s what was expected of me.”

“Then what am I?”

His voice breaks. “You’re everything I dreamed,” he says. He reaches for me, and my
body sways into his. Neo’s eyes are closed, his forehead pressed to mine. “Please.
If you have any feelings for me, you’ll tell me what to say. What to do.”

“If you have any feelings for
me
,” I whisper, “you’ll let me go.”

As if my words are a key, his grasp on me unlocks. I push the blanket at Neo so that
he will not see the tears in my eyes. Then I step onto the porch, where Lesego is
dozing under the canopy. She gets up, logy, when she sees me.

“On three,” I say, the shorthand we’ve developed for this process where we cover the
calf with a blanket so I can make a clean getaway. “One, two …” I turn, to make sure
Neo is ready, but he is not holding out the blanket like a matador’s red flag. He
has buried his face in the cotton, surrounding himself with my scent, the same way
Lesego does when I disappear.

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.”