like a photo with too bright a flash. My mother
is holding spun sugar on a cone, cotton candy. She raises her finger to her lips—
This is our secret
—and then tears off a tiny piece. When she touches it to my lips, the sugar dissolves.
My tongue curls around her finger and sucks hard.
Iswidi
, she tells me. Sweet. This is not my bottle; it’s not a taste I know, but it’s a
good one. Then she leans down and kisses my forehead.
Uswidi
, she says. Sweetheart.
I can’t be more than nine months old.
This is pretty amazing, really, because most kids trace their first memories to somewhere
between the ages of two and five. That doesn’t mean that babies are little amnesiacs—they
have memories long before they have language but, weirdly, can’t access them once
they start talking. Maybe the reason I remember the cotton candy episode is because
my mother was speaking Xhosa, which isn’t our language but one she picked up when
she was working on her doctorate in South Africa. Or maybe the reason I have this
random memory is as a trade-off my brain made—because I
can’t
remember what I desperately wish I could: details of the night my mother disappeared.
My mother was a scientist, and for a span of time, she even studied memory. It was
part of her work on post-traumatic stress and elephants. You know the old adage that
elephants never forget? Well, it’s fact. I could give you all my mother’s data, if
you want the proof. I’ve practically got it memorized, no pun intended. Her official
published findings were that memory is linked to strong emotion, and that negative
moments are like scribbling with permanent marker on the wall of the brain. But there’s
a fine line between a negative moment and a traumatic one. Negative moments get remembered.
Traumatic ones get forgotten, or so warped that they are unrecognizable, or else they
turn into the big, bleak, white
nothing
I get in my head when I try to focus on that night.
Here’s what I know:
1. I was three.
2. My mother was found on the sanctuary property, unconscious, about a mile south
of a dead body. This was in the police reports. She was taken to the hospital.
3. I am not mentioned in the police reports. Afterward, my grandmother took me
to stay at her place, because my father was frantically dealing with a dead elephant
caregiver and a wife who had been knocked out cold.
4. Sometime before dawn, my mother regained consciousness and vanished from the
hospital without any staff seeing her go.
5. I never saw her again.
Sometimes I think of my life as two train cars hitched together at the moment of my
mom’s disappearance—but when I try to see how they connect there’s a jarring on the
track that jerks my head back around. I know that I used to be a girl whose hair was
strawberry blond, who ran around like a wild thing while my mother took endless notes
about the elephants. Now I’m a kid who is too serious for her age and too smart for
her own good. And yet as impressive as I am with scientific statistics, I fail miserably
when it comes to real-life facts, like knowing that Wanelo is a website and not a
hot new band. If eighth grade is a microcosm of the social hierarchy of the human
adolescent (and to mymother, it certainly would have been), then reciting fifty named elephant herds in
the Tuli Block of Botswana cannot compete with identifying all the members of One
Direction.
It’s not like I don’t fit in at school because I’m the only kid without a mother.
There are lots of kids missing parents, or kids who don’t talk about their parents,
or kids whose parents are now living with new spouses and new kids. Still, I don’t
really have friends at school. I sit at the lunch table on the far end, eating whatever
my grandmother’s packed me, while the cool girls—who, I swear to God, call themselves
the Icicles—chatter about how they
is holding spun sugar on a cone, cotton candy. She raises her finger to her lips—
This is our secret
—and then tears off a tiny piece. When she touches it to my lips, the sugar dissolves.
My tongue curls around her finger and sucks hard.
Iswidi
, she tells me. Sweet. This is not my bottle; it’s not a taste I know, but it’s a
good one. Then she leans down and kisses my forehead.
Uswidi
, she says. Sweetheart.
I can’t be more than nine months old.
This is pretty amazing, really, because most kids trace their first memories to somewhere
between the ages of two and five. That doesn’t mean that babies are little amnesiacs—they
have memories long before they have language but, weirdly, can’t access them once
they start talking. Maybe the reason I remember the cotton candy episode is because
my mother was speaking Xhosa, which isn’t our language but one she picked up when
she was working on her doctorate in South Africa. Or maybe the reason I have this
random memory is as a trade-off my brain made—because I
can’t
remember what I desperately wish I could: details of the night my mother disappeared.
My mother was a scientist, and for a span of time, she even studied memory. It was
part of her work on post-traumatic stress and elephants. You know the old adage that
elephants never forget? Well, it’s fact. I could give you all my mother’s data, if
you want the proof. I’ve practically got it memorized, no pun intended. Her official
published findings were that memory is linked to strong emotion, and that negative
moments are like scribbling with permanent marker on the wall of the brain. But there’s
a fine line between a negative moment and a traumatic one. Negative moments get remembered.
Traumatic ones get forgotten, or so warped that they are unrecognizable, or else they
turn into the big, bleak, white
nothing
I get in my head when I try to focus on that night.
Here’s what I know:
1. I was three.
2. My mother was found on the sanctuary property, unconscious, about a mile south
of a dead body. This was in the police reports. She was taken to the hospital.
3. I am not mentioned in the police reports. Afterward, my grandmother took me
to stay at her place, because my father was frantically dealing with a dead elephant
caregiver and a wife who had been knocked out cold.
4. Sometime before dawn, my mother regained consciousness and vanished from the
hospital without any staff seeing her go.
5. I never saw her again.
Sometimes I think of my life as two train cars hitched together at the moment of my
mom’s disappearance—but when I try to see how they connect there’s a jarring on the
track that jerks my head back around. I know that I used to be a girl whose hair was
strawberry blond, who ran around like a wild thing while my mother took endless notes
about the elephants. Now I’m a kid who is too serious for her age and too smart for
her own good. And yet as impressive as I am with scientific statistics, I fail miserably
when it comes to real-life facts, like knowing that Wanelo is a website and not a
hot new band. If eighth grade is a microcosm of the social hierarchy of the human
adolescent (and to mymother, it certainly would have been), then reciting fifty named elephant herds in
the Tuli Block of Botswana cannot compete with identifying all the members of One
Direction.
It’s not like I don’t fit in at school because I’m the only kid without a mother.
There are lots of kids missing parents, or kids who don’t talk about their parents,
or kids whose parents are now living with new spouses and new kids. Still, I don’t
really have friends at school. I sit at the lunch table on the far end, eating whatever
my grandmother’s packed me, while the cool girls—who, I swear to God, call themselves
the Icicles—chatter about how they
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