Small as an Elephant (6 page)

He hadn’t asked anyone in the supermarket if they’d seen his mom; the store was much bigger than he’d imagined, just like the island. Asking seemed silly — futile. Instead, he’d search for his mother the way he searched for information on anything at all back home: he’d find a computer, Google his mother’s name, and see what came up — an article mentioning an accident, say. He just needed to find a computer.

The library!
he suddenly thought. He could go to the library he’d passed the night before. Infused with new energy, Jack backtracked in that direction, avoiding Roberts Avenue, where he’d stolen the cans and bottles.

Another thought struck him. He could leave a message for his mom online! He’d write it on her YouPage. Tell her that he was in Bar Harbor. Maybe he’d even set a time and place to meet! It was such an obvious solution to the no-cell-phone problem. Why hadn’t he thought of it before?

Sure, she was probably a little crazed at the moment and might not have access to a computer, but who knew? Once when she and Jack were coming home from the Intown Inn, his mom had stopped at the library and rushed to the computers, where she researched everything she could find about grapefruit. At the time, her obsession was kind of embarrassing: she’d kept yelling out little unknown facts: “Jackie, did you know that a grapefruit is a cross between an orange and a pummelo? Have you ever eaten a pummelo?” But today the memory was a happy one — a hope he could hold on to.

By now he was practically running, but the sight of the library up ahead took all the air out of him, like a sucker punch.

It was closed.

Of course. It was Labor Day. All libraries closed on Labor Day. How could he have been so stupid? Gotten his hopes up like that? He threw his backpack on the ground. Then picked it up and threw it down again. And again.

“It’s Labor Day!” he shouted, as if his mom was right there and could hear him. Labor Day meant not only that all the libraries were closed, but also that his vacation, even if it hadn’t officially started, was almost officially over. Tomorrow was supposed to be his first day back at Curley Middle School. His mom had promised they would stop on the way home and buy the supplies he needed: new sneakers, binders, maybe even one of those electronic spell-checkers. No problem, she had said. Everything would be cheaper in Maine.

This time he threw his backpack at a tree, but the strap caught on his pinky finger. The pain was excruciating.

He sat down on the grass and held his hand against his belly.

He hated to accept it, but his pinky was probably broken. He had broken a toe once — banged it at the swimming pool near where his best friend, Nina, lived. As he’d hobbled to the doctor’s office, Jack’s mom had told him elephant jokes.

“Who does an elephant call when he breaks his toe?”

“Who?”

“The tow truck.”

That joke was so bad, Mom had probably made it up.

Jack closed his eyes and pictured a herd of elephants on the savanna. Walking in a long line or playing at a water hole. Why hadn’t he been born an elephant? He pictured himself playing with other elephants, spraying them with water from his trunk.

But he wasn’t an elephant, and he was not going to find his mother by lying on the lawn of the Jesup Memorial Library.

Dragging himself back to the town center, Jack recalled that Bar Harbor had lots of the types of shops and restaurants his mother would like. Which again made him hopeful; it would be like her to get waylaid in a place that had so many unusual things to see: tourmaline jewels, hand-painted sea chests, blueberry syrup. He might just walk into a shop and see her there.

Jack knew that it wasn’t supposed to be this way. That a mother wasn’t supposed to go off without telling her kid . . . and that her kid wasn’t supposed to be able to walk into a store and find her there coincidentally. He wished that things were different. That he could be the one hanging out in a store and that his mom would be the one to pop in and say, “What are you doing in here, Jack? I’ve been looking all over for you!”

Once, Nina had asked him why he was alone so much, and he had tried to tell her — tell her about his mom’s pinwheel times. How sometimes the air felt so still to her, like there wasn’t any oxygen or breezes to be found. These times made his mom so prickly, she could hardly sit still. And she crabbed a lot. So sometimes she stayed away because she didn’t think it was fair that she was being mean.

But then the wind would come, the air would be light, and she could, well, float! And even though the world looked the same to
him,
his mom said she could see things, magical things: lit pathways in the sky, a spiderweb that connected all living things. “You are connected to the elephants, Jack,” she’d say. Once, during a spinning time, she’d brought home every single flavor of ice cream the store had, and they’d done a taste test. (Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey was the best.)

Another time, she kept asking him, “What is the rarest color?” Jack had done a Google search, but he could only find answers to questions like,
What is the rarest eye color?
(green), and,
What is the rarest color of geckos?
(no one agrees). So he and his mother went to OfficeMax (where there would be lots and lots of little items) and began tallying the number of times they saw each color. The noncolors — black, white, and gray — were everywhere. Fuchsia and lime green were kind of rare, but the rarest of all was a brownish purple his mother named
sunken treasure.
From then on, they had searched for objects that were this rare color — more red than blue, more brown than red. It was weird: Once he knew this color existed, he
yearned
for it. And he felt stupidly happy when he saw it somewhere — in the bark of a tree, or in a picture in his social studies book.

One day, he’d come home from school and there was a bill from a foreign country sitting on his bed — he couldn’t remember where the bill was from, but he knew that the country wasn’t the part that mattered. It was the color. The bill was sunken treasure. Only one other person in the whole world would know that.

But Nina had said, “Why did she just leave the money on your bed? Why didn’t she give it to you herself? Why does she have to stay away from the apartment so much?” And because she didn’t understand, Jack didn’t tell her any more.

As Jack walked up and down Main Street in Bar Harbor, he read the signs:
THE ACADIA SHOP, COOL AS A MOOSE, BEN AND BILL’S CHOCOLATE EMPORIUM.
Outside Ben and Bill’s was a tall wooden lobster holding a triple-decker ice-cream cone in its claw. Two little kids were sitting in its lap. He knew his mother would love this place.

It was still fairly early in the morning, but already the shop was busy. Although there were chocolates of every kind, and although cotton candy hung from the chocolate racks, it was the ice cream that was in demand. It seemed that most of the customers in line were interested in trying the lobster ice cream, and the guy behind the counter was happy to give them a taste on tiny spoons. Jack hadn’t noticed his hunger before he walked into the shop, but now that he smelled the chocolate and saw all the ice cream and gelato flavors, he felt ravenous. How many tastes could he have? And what would happen if he tasted the ice cream but didn’t order anything?

If he could sample only one flavor, he didn’t want to waste it on something like lobster ice cream — what if he didn’t like it? Would the guy think it was strange if he tasted something he knew he’d love? Could he taste Chocolate Peanut-Butter Cookie Dough?

He bravely asked. Sure enough, the guy scooped it out without hesitation.

Jack held the wooden spoon in his mouth and simply let the ice cream melt off, trying to savor every sweet drop. He pressed the bit of cookie dough to the roof of his mouth and slowly chewed on a chocolate chip. Surely this way he’d feel like he’d eaten a whole cup.

But the little sample disappeared in seconds.

Did he dare ask for another?

“Could I taste Chewy Gooey?”

Again, he got a taste. Wow.

“May I help you?” the scooper asked a woman standing next to him.

“Oh,” said the woman. “This young man was here before me. Go ahead and take his order first.”

The scooper looked at Jack. “What’ll it be?”

Jack hadn’t chosen another flavor to sample, and he was clearly expected to get on with ordering an ice-cream cone. What should he do?

He looked from the woman to the guy. “It’s OK,” he said. “I haven’t made up my mind.”

The woman ordered butter-pecan ice cream. Jack flew out the door without even asking the guy if he’d seen his mother. But Bar Harbor was so crowded, so busy, that even if the guy had seen her, would he have remembered?

Only if she’s flying high,
he thought, then quickly pushed the thought away.

Jack walked up and down the sidewalk, dipping into stores, for much of the morning. In every shop he entered, he saw something that would have caught his mother’s interest: lobster salt-and-pepper shakers, a snow globe with a giant seagull looming over a sailboat, moose pajama pants. There were so many people (every now and then someone with blond hair would momentarily make his heart beat faster), and so many treasures his mom would love, he felt she
had
to be close by. So convinced was he that he visited several stores two or three times.

He had just decided to try looking at the village green, when he passed a bald guy who was wearing a
Geddy’s
T-shirt. His mom had that shirt! She had worn it so many times you could hardly read the name. He’d never asked her what it meant, but now it felt like this guy was walking around with a piece of his mother, a piece of code.

“Hey!” Jack yelled at the guy’s back. To his surprise, the man turned around. “What’s Geddy’s?”

“A bar — and a restaurant,” the man answered. “It’s right down there,” he said, pointing toward the water.

Had his mom mentioned it when they put Bar Harbor on the list of things to see? Probably. But she had talked of so many places in Maine, Jack had begun to let some of them roll over his ears. Especially when she’d ignored the one thing he really wanted to do.

He walked in the direction in which the man had pointed. Main Street dipped down a hill. On the right-hand side of the hill was a park with an amazing view of the ocean. There were all kinds of boats docked in the harbor: lobster boats, speedboats, even an enormous cruise ship. And a tall ship, the type of ship Jack had seen tucked inside a bottle. This ship had flags at the top of its four masts. Across the street from the park were more shops and restaurants, and sure enough, there was a sign that read
MEET ME AT GEDDY’S
.

This felt like such a lucky break. Surely, if his mom had come into Bar Harbor, she had gone there.

With one foot on the blue-carpeted steps that led up to the restaurant, Jack waited for a family to go in ahead of him. The hostess gathered menus and motioned for the family to follow her, and when they’d all turned away, Jack slipped past the hostess stand and headed up to the oval bar that stood smack in the center of a very long room.

He slid in between two stools, waiting to get the attention of the bartender, a young guy who reminded Jack of the college kids who worked at the Intown Inn during the summer. He’d known as soon as he approached the bar that his mother wasn’t there. Maybe it was the quiet, or the seeming dimness that had nothing at all to do with the red lights that glowed above the bar. He found himself staring at a baseball game on one of the four TVs until disappointment let go of his chest and he could breathe regularly again. He made himself look around to confirm what his heart already knew.

There was a young couple seated at one end of the bar, sharing a Red Bull, and a bookish woman typing on her laptop at the other. Every so often, she’d pause and take a bite of her salad. And there was a large, bearded man sitting close to where Jack was standing, holding a soda between both hands.

“Might as well sit up here,” said the bearded man, patting the stool beside him. “He’s going to be a while.”

The bartender was filling a large drink order for a waitress with long eyelashes, whose eyes opened and closed in a way that kind of reminded Jack of a llama. The bartender moved from making several green drinks with salt around the rim of the glasses to blending chocolaty drinks with whipped cream on top.

Jack slid up onto the stool and stared at the walls of the restaurant as if he’d never been in a bar that was covered with signs and license plates and other random junk like oars and stuff before. Truth was, he and his mom had been in lots of bars exactly like this one. Many a night, he’d stared at random words on the wall — words like
To become old and wise, one must first be young and stupid
— and wondered when they could finally go home. What was it about this place that made it so special to his mom?

The man next to him gave his shoulder a nudge. The bartender was waiting.

“Oh. Could I have a glass of water?” Jack asked.

“Sure,” said the bartender. “What happened to your hand?”

Jack looked down at his hand, resting on the edge of the shiny copper bar. He’d gotten so used to the steady pulsing of his finger that he’d almost forgotten about his injury. But that one finger was clearly larger than the rest, and bent at a slightly odd angle. It was black-and-blue between the knuckles.