Uncle Jerry cupped his other hand on the top of my head, where it covered the whole thing. His thumb was warm on my ear, rubbing back and forth. My mother’s eyes never opened — they never even flickered. The liquid in the tubes was as clear as tap water, and you couldn’t tell whether it was going in or out of the bottles, one way or the other. They might have drained off all her blood, replaced it with the sugar water. The doctor said something more about cutting, but I didn’t catch his meaning. From my uncle’s yard, I listened to the elephants smashing through the woods. Their legs were as thick as the tree stumps they left behind. Where the trees had been, new houses were going up. On Sundays when the elephants didn’t come, I went into the woods with Marshall. We had contests throwing bricks across the unfinished floors. Aunt Christine said that if they had known a development was going in, Uncle Jerry never would have bought there. Stampeding elephants were fine with him, but he got restless with people around. He didn’t mind wolves or wild dogs either — his house was safe from them since they couldn’t slip under. It was deliberate that they lived on the last street before the woods started. They didn’t need more neighbors, they had enough. My uncle’s restlessness didn’t apply to me. He’d hold me on his lap and tell me how great my mother was, for hours. And how lucky I was, too, to have her. His eyes would fill up, and Aunt Christine always said that was the summer he started to look old. I went to the hospital with Uncle Jerry every day, and we’d stand by my mother’s bed and watch her sleep through the tangle of tubes. I wasn’t clear whether she was in heaven yet or not — steeped to her neck in warm blood, or out floating in the frozen blue ice-air — or just there on the bed resting, like it appeared, gathering her strength back so she could come home. But now there wasn’t a home. Someone else lived in the trailer, and all our things were sold except what we’d moved over to Uncle Jerry and Aunt Christine’s along with me. At the beach I built mounds in the sand and dug tunnels down through them that the incoming water swept into. I caught snails and green crabs and tied them together with strings of seaweed. My legs turned pink from the sun and got all caked up with sand and grit. When I got hot I dove head-first through the white foam of waves as they broke, and when I wanted to be alone I floated out on a raft and watched
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