Harvesting the Heart by Jodi Picoult

dragged me toward the elephants. African and Indian, they
were two different breeds but similar enough to live in the same zoo
space. They had wide bald foreheads and paper-thin ears, and their
skin was folded and soft and spread with wrinkles, like the saggy,
mapped neck of the old black woman who came to clean Saint
Christopher's. The elephants shook their heads and swatted at gnats
with their trunks. They followed each other from one end of their
habitat to the other, stopping at trees and examining them as if
they'd never seen them before. I looked at them and wondered what it
would be like to have one eye on each side of my body. I didn't know
if I'd like not being able to see things head-on.
    A
moat separated us from the elephants. My mother sat down on the hot
concrete and pulled off her high heels. She was not wearing
stockings. She hiked up her dress and waded into the knee-high water.
"It's lovely," she said, sighing. "But don't you come
in, Paige. Really, I shouldn't be doing this. Really, I could get in
trouble." She splashed me with the water, little bits of grass
and dead flies sticking to the white lace collar of my dress. She
sashayed and stomped and once almost lost her footing on the smooth
bottom. She sang tunes from Broadway shows, but she made up her own
lyrics, silly things about firm pachyderms and the wonder of Dumbo.
When the zoo guard came up slowly, unsure of how to confront a grown
woman in the elephant moat, my mother laughed and waved him away. She
stepped out of the water with the grace of an angel and sat down on
the concrete again. She pulled on her pumps, and when she stood,
there was a dark oval on the ground where her damp bottom had been.
She told me with the serious demeanor she'd used to tell me the
Golden Rule that sometimes one had to take chances.
    Several
times that day I found myself looking at my mother with a strange
tangle of feelings. I had no doubt that when my father called, she
would tell him we'd been at Saint Christopher's and that it had been
just as it always was. I loved being part of a conspiracy. At one
point I even wondered if the girlfriend I'd been seeing night after
night in my dreams was really just my own mother. I thought of how
convenient and wonderful that might be.
    We
sat on a low bench beside a lady who was selling a cloud of banana
balloons. My mother had been reading my thoughts. "Today,"
she said, "today let's say I'm not your mother. Today I'll just
be May. Just your friend May." And of course I didn't argue,
because this was what I had been hoping anyway,
and besides, she wasn't acting like
my mother, at least not the one I knew. We told the man cleaning out
the ape cage our white lie, and although he did not look up from his
work, one large, ruddy gorilla came forward and stared at us, a very
human exhaustion in her eyes, which seemed to say, Yes,
I believe you.
    The
last place we visited in the Lincoln Park Zoo was the penguin and
seabird house. It was dark and smelled of herring and was fully
enclosed. It sat partially under the ground to maintain its cool
temperature. The viewing area was a twisty hallway with windows
exposing penguins behind thick glass. They were striking in
their formal wear, and they tap-danced like society men on floes of
white ice. "Your father," May said, "looked no
different than that at our wedding." She leaned in close to the
glass. "In fact, I'd be hard-pressed to pick one groom from the
next. They're all the same, you know." And I said I did, even
though I had no idea what she was talking about.
    I
left her staring at a penguin that had slipped into the water
belly-up to do rolling, slow-motion calisthenics. I disappeared
around a bend, pulled toward the other half of the house, where the
puffins were. I didn't know what a puffin was, but I liked the way
the word sounded: soft and squashed and a little bit bruised, the way
your lips looked after you'd eaten wild blackberries. It was a long,
narrow walkway, and my eyes