The house was quiet after her mother died. Jane hated it. She missed the singular sounds of her mother’s movement, the way she slowly climbed the stairs and shuffled along the hallways in her slippers. Jane even missed the ugly sounds of the coughing. Most of all, though, she missed how it felt before she hated herself. She replayed all those recent afternoons when she’d avoided the sounds her mother’s sickness made, and instead closed her bedroom door. She would do anything to have those afternoons back. She didn’t bother with homework, but she did take up her old place on the couch—napping there after school and then, again, after dinner. Sleep was the only way she could turn off her mind.
Her father must have noticed that Jane didn’t do anything except sleep, and one evening, a few months after the funeral, he looked at her across the dinner table and he said, “Life goes on. She’d want us to be happy.” As far as Jane could remember, that was the last they’d spoken of the grief they all stumbled through alone.
Lance grew silent. Far quieter than a boy his age should be. He spent hours draped in an armchair in the family room, watching TV. He barely spoke to Jane.
Her father started smoking and spent evenings in his study, watching his fish and blowing rings of smoke up toward the ceiling. “You shouldn’t be near all this smoke,” he’d say when Jane was lonely after dinner and wanted to be near him. “I’ll come and find you later, tuck you in. We can talk then.” But he rarely remembered, and Jane eventually stopped trying. She felt like a shadow, visible, but of no substance, and it frightened her. It felt like fading away. Some days she thought she might just disappear.
Two years later her father was married again, and the only thing Jane had left of her mother was a pile of photos and some ugly antique furniture that traced the maternal line back for generations. Her father’s new wife was kind to Jane and Lance, but she hated to “wallow,” as she said, in the memories of their life before, of Jane’s father’s other wife.
When her father remarried, Jane and Lance lost their mother all over again, in Jane’s mind; by picking a new wife, he erased her mother further. The new wife moved into their house, opened the windows, banished the fish tank and aired out the smoky study in favor of a guest room and a small, barking dog. Soon, all the photos that included Jane’s mother were gone, piled into boxes in the attic with her books and the antique furniture Jane would inherit when she grew up and had a house of her own.
It was true that her father was happier, and his new wife was kind and funny and cooked dinners every night so they could sit around the table “like a family should.” Lance watched TV less, and smiled more, and all of this made Jane grateful. But she couldn’t push past the notion that this woman was an intruder in their house, in their lives, and that this new family they had formed was just a weak facsimile of what it should have been.
Jane was in graduate school before Lance began showing signs of his own sickness. Her master’s program in conservation biology was difficult. Jane struggled with math—the tricks of statistics and probability eluded her. She had to work hard, and this gave her a ready excuse to ignore her father’s calls, to listen to, but not return, his messages saying that Lance was seeing things that weren’t there and talking to empty corners. One message sounded as if her father were about to cry—a depth of emotion Jane hadn’t even seen from him after her mom died. That was the message saying that Lance was sent home from college because of a violent outburst and was under psychiatric care.
She’d never mentioned the conversation her mother tried to have about Lance, the one where Jane was supposed to agree to be a good big sister. And now she never would—being a responsible sister to a normal little boy was one thing, but Lance was an adult man now, with psychological issues. The calls and the urgency in her father’s voice made Jane increasingly desperate to flee.
Within days of arguing her thesis, Jane applied to the Elephant Foundation. Her adviser knew the foundation’s director, and Jane was hired. She went home for the first time in months to tell her dad. Lance was at home at the time, but Jane remembered the message her father left her, telling her they might have to put Lance in a home, right before her thesis was due, and how she’d listened to it once and then deleted it. Now she saw that her father’s face was pinched. He looked older than he should. At dinner one night, when his new wife was in the kitchen, filling plates with dessert, Jane told him she was leaving, soon, for Kenya.
“Wow,” he said, nodding. “That’s far away...but you’ll be happy.”
His blasé attitude made Jane illogically angry. It was her choice to leave, to go as far away from home as she could. She was the one leaving him, leaving Lance and the new wife. He should be angry, or sad. But he didn’t seem to care, and he didn’t beg her to stay. She’d always be just a small, annoying shadow in his smoky study, or a child with grief so big it made his new wife uncomfortable. Jane wasn’t surprised by his reaction, but the vicious rush of anger and the grief she tasted on her tongue stunned her. She’d almost forgotten it was there, secret tinder she kept hidden away.
“Before one, two years ago...this was green,” Muthega, the Kikuyu guide hired by the Elephant Foundation, told her when he parked the Land Rover and fumbled for the keys to her new front door. He’d waited on the airstrip of the tiny Narok airport for her plane to land, and he was standing there, in a khaki shirt with the foundation’s logo emblazoned on the chest pocket holding a handwritten sign with her name on it, when she’d disembarked. It made Jane laugh; there was only one other passenger on the little plane.
“Are you sure you’re here for me?” Jane had joked, but Muthega just nodded solemnly and hoisted her suitcase onto his shoulder.
Jane’s house in Narok was a two-room building, low and squat and slapped together with rough, gray concrete. Just to the south were the dusty streets and the warren of other flat-topped concrete buildings of Narok, but north was nothing but dry grassy savannah edging the Maasai Mara game reserve, and the distant line of trees that clung to the bank of the Mara River. The yard space around the house was bare dirt, with a little dry scrub grass and one lone pink bougainvillea that climbed the wall next to the front door and grasped the earth below it in a constant struggle for water.
Now Jane looked around the dry patch of land that was her new yard. The high concrete wall surrounding her plot of land distracted her. It was at least six feet tall, and the top edge glinted with shards of broken bottles.
“For thieves,” Muthega said, following her eyes with his own. “It can be dangerous for you here.”
Jane thought of the dingy little town they’d driven through to reach this house. It seemed quiet and charming, in a dusty way, not particularly dangerous. Anyway, she’d keep the gate locked, she told herself, and better to be safe than sorry. She didn’t dwell on the thought; she was desperate to get out into the bush.
Muthega’s job was to drive her to where the elephants were. He did his best to track their movements. Elephants are creatures of habit and in the dry season their daily range is somewhat limited. Once Jane tracked them long enough, she could calculate the specifics of different groups. And once she and Muthega had figured that out, they’d situate bush cameras in the areas the various elephant groups were likely to congregate. Timing was critical; once the wet season came, the elephant groups would migrate much farther afield and be nearly impossible to track. Muthega smoked cigarettes that smelled like burning rubber, but Jane was glad to have him around because he had watched the elephants in this area for years, and because he wore a rifle slung over his shoulder. It was for people, not game, he told Jane. It was the people who made her uneasy; it was people who she was here to combat. The presence of Muthega’s gun was comforting.
The foundation’s war on poaching was waged in three ways: the collection of DNA samples from elephant dung, which would help other researchers pinpoint sources of illegal ivory; the logging of traps, poacher sightings and slaughtered elephants on a GPS; and the placing of elephant cams in areas most heavily used by the animals. The foundation hadn’t tried the cameras here before, but there had been a successful pilot program