The Elephant in the Room

ISBN-13: 9780735229945

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Penguin Young Readers Group

Publication Date: 03-02-2021

Pages: 256

Product Dimensions: 5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.10(d)

Age Range: 10 - 14 Years

Holly Goldberg Sloan was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and spent her childhood living in Holland; Istanbul, Turkey; Washington, D.C.; Berkeley, California; and Eugene, Oregon. After graduating from Wellesley College and spending some time as an advertising copywriter, she began writing family feature films, including Angels in the Outfield and Made in America. She is the author of the New York Times best sellers Counting by 7s and Short, among other novels.

Read an Excerpt

1.

What Sila Tekin would remember about that afternoon was that she had been wearing her favorite shirt. It was nothing fancy. Just red with white stripes and blue stitching, but it fit perfectly, not too tight and not too loose. And it wasn’t only comfortable; it was lucky, because she had been wearing the shirt when she found a twenty-dollar bill on the sidewalk one afternoon while walking home from school. Sila had also bowled her highest score in August, and done well on a very hard math test while wearing the garment. Another time when she had on the shirt she’d spotted a two-foot-tall speckled owl sleeping high up in a tree in Hendricks Park. That was amazing.

So the T-shirt was special. There was no question about it.

At least not until Thursday, September 6, when Sila came through the front door of the apartment to find her parents in the kitchen. Her mom and dad were never there when she got home from school; they were always at work. Her mom’s eyes were red and puffy from crying and her nose looked like it was leaking water. Sila asked in Turkish, which was the language she spoke at home, “What’s going on?”

Her father put his hand on his daughter’s shoulder. She could feel tension even in his fingertips. “We’ve had some bad news.”

Sila’s ears started to buzz. One of her grandparents must have died. Her voice was shaky as she asked: “What’s happened? You have to tell me!”

Sila’s mother, Oya, looked as if she was going to speak, only nothing came out except a long, dry exhale that had choking sounds mixed in. But then her father managed, “Your mother is going on a trip. She’ll be back soon. Very soon.”

“A trip? Why?”

“Legal things. Fixing paperwork.”

Sila looked at her mother. “Where are you going?”

“To Turkey.”

Sila’s eyes moved from her mother to her father. They weren’t sick. No one had died. Health wasn’t the issue. Sila stared at her parents and could see they were trying to seem calm, but it looked as if their heads were going to explode.

“I don’t understand. So what’s the bad news?”

Her mother wiped her nose. “It’s immigration. There is a problem.”

Sila’s parents went on to explain that Oya needed to return to the country she left as an adult and get a replacement for a document that had never been properly executed. Without fixing the situation, Oya was facing a court proceeding and even deportation. So she just needed to correct a clerical mistake. They had a plan.

It didn’t sound to Sila like that big of a deal. Hadn’t her mother admitted she missed where she was born? Couldn’t going back to Turkey be a good thing? Didn’t Oya speak all the time about longing to see Sila’s grandparents? Wasn’t she always saying she missed the bread and the cheese and the tomatoes she’d grown up with?

But this trip was forced on her. Maybe, Sila thought, anything that you are told to do isn’t as good as when you make the choice yourself.

Everyone wants to be the boss of their own life.

Sila had been born in Oregon. She was an American citizen. Her parents had lived in Eugene for almost fifteen years, but they were Turkish citizens. In Istanbul her mother had studied to be a librarian, but once they came to America she had taken work in the housekeeping department of the most expensive hotel on main street. She cleaned rooms five days a week, and if she was lucky, got overtime for a sixth day. That job had ended after fourteen years only last week. So much was in turmoil.

These were the facts: Sila’s mother would be gone for eight days—two Sundays with six days sandwiched in between. Before Oya left, she cooked her husband’s and daughter’s favorite foods and then packed the refrigerator and the freezer tight with glass containers. While her mother buzzed around the oven and the stove, Sila tried to be helpful and cleaned the apartment. When she was finished, she cleaned it all over again. She would have started on a third round but she went with her mother to shop for the gifts to bring for family and friends.

Later that night Sila sat on her parents’ bed as Oya filled a large suitcase with wrapped presents. Once they were in place she had room for only three outfits, a week’s worth of underwear, and four pairs of socks. Her mother insisted this would be enough for the short time she would be traveling.

Sila didn’t think so, but said nothing.

Her parents took money from their savings and then more money from a credit card to finance the trip. Sila could see that her mom was nervous when she said goodbye. Oya pressed a blue glass evil eye on a chain into her daughter’s hand and told her to keep it with her at all times for protection. Sila didn’t think her mother believed in curses, but she looked pretty serious. It was, she knew, bad luck to be superstitious.

Sila slipped the gold chain around her neck. She didn’t want to cry. Her mother whispered, “Eight days will go by so fast. You’ll see.”

But the eight days had turned into eight months. Sila had hung a calendar on a wall in her room, and she put an X in the appropriate square every night before she went to bed. She then wrote the number of days her mother been gone. She was now on 237.

Sila loved her father, but being apart from her mom was harder than anything she had ever known. She missed her so much that even her skin didn’t feel right. The air was pushing down on her arms in a new way and her feet somehow moved as if they were twice their former size.

At first Sila’s dad, Alp, didn’t eat much. He wore the same shirt for three days in a row, and wasn’t shaving every morning. He spoke to his wife all the time, often trying to hide it from Sila. But she knew. She could hear her mother crying. On Skype. On the phone. Alp would be in the bedroom with the door shut, or even in the bathroom whispering as if Sila didn’t have ears.

It took some time for them to get used to the fact that they were facing a crisis. It was sharp in the beginning and time turned it to something deep and dull and even more difficult. It turned into their new reality.

One of the hardest things was that Sila kept expecting to see her mother everywhere. When she came into the kitchen she looked for her at the stove. Her mom should have been on the couch. In the front seat of the car. Coming out of the bathroom. Her mother was there in Sila’s head and her heart but not in the room.

And who knew when she would be coming back?

Waiting was what they did now.

Oya Tekin had flown to a place Sila had only heard about, but never seen. Her mother had gone back to Turkey. She had waited in lines. She had called officials. She had shown her file over and over and over again, and was told it was a process, which took time. Every day Sila and her father woke up hoping that the necessary paperwork was at the embassy in Ankara. But there was no answer to the biggest question: When would Oya get what she needed to fly back across the ocean and then across a continent to the place she called home?

In all the months that her mother had been gone, Sila had not once put on the red-and-white shirt with the blue stitching. The shirt had turned into a symbol for all the bad luck in the universe. Sila wanted to rip it apart and throw it away, but instead she stuffed the shirt into a plastic bag, which she jammed under the kitchen sink.

As the days and then weeks and then months passed, Sila stopped spending time with her friends. She came straight home every day after school and stayed in her room with her family’s computer as a companion. Sila lost track of many of the things that she used to find fun, and clung to a very specific routine. She told no one about her situation. It wasn’t anyone’s business.

Sila did chores with her father on weekends, taking the laundry downstairs to the room off the parking garage on Saturdays. She vacuumed the apartment on Sundays, because that’s what her mother had done.

She and Alp had stretched out her mother’s home-cooked food for as long as possible, but it had been gone for months now. They tried to make meals the way they used to eat as a family, with vegetables, a salad, fish or chicken, and bread, but it was a lost cause. Mostly they ate scrambled eggs and toast for dinner.

Her father always read as he consumed his food. He worked as a car mechanic at an independent repair shop, and Sila was sure he was one of the few people in the world to find an owner’s manual interesting. Sila just stared at the computer screen, keeping the sound on mute.

The best part of the day was when her mother would appear online at the arranged time. They talked. They laughed. They tried not to cry. They worked to keep it light-hearted. It was amazing how much they spoke about the weather. It was a neutral subject that was ever changing. But maybe more to the point, there was nothing they could do about it. Is that why talking about rain felt safe?

Because the time online was never enough. Once they had said goodbye the empty space would return. Sila and Alp didn’t speak much to each other after the calls. Waiting made silence easier to tolerate than voices. No one but Sila’s father understood, because no one else but him was feeling the same thing.

The rest of the world was getting on with their lives.

2.

The only expensive thing in Apartment 207A at 2599 Cleary Road was an intricately woven carpet that Sila’s grandparents had shipped over from Istanbul. The Tekins’ living space was home to geometrically patterned tiles and hand-painted Iznik ceramics, and then a lot of stuff from thrift stores and garage sales and discount stores. Sila once loved it all. Now it looked like a collection of things that didn’t belong together.

Sila had her own bedroom, but other people living in the same units on other floors in the building used the space as an office because the area was tiny and had no closet. There was one round window in Sila’s room, and it faced away from the street to the back, where railroad tracks were located. Sila had long ago grown so accustomed to the trains that she didn’t hear them anymore. It was, she decided, like the way you don’t see your own nose even though it’s in your field of vision. Your brain says it’s useless information.

But since her mother had gone, Sila could hear every single train that rattled past. She watched through the glass and imagined all the people traveling and felt her stomach knot. They all had somewhere to go.

It was a Saturday morning when Sila heard her father’s cell phone ring. She watched as he wrote something on the back of an envelope and said, “I can be there in the next hour.”

Sila moved from her spot on a stool and looked down at the address. She’d never heard of the street. “Dad, where’s that?”

“Someplace out of town. Off old Route 99. You should come with me. I’m going out there to look at a truck that won’t start.”

“I’d rather stay here. I don’t like trucks.”

“And I don’t like leaving you here alone for so long.”

“Maybe you’ll fix it in a few minutes and be right back.”

“I’m not asking you to go. I’m—”

“Forcing me.”

“Bring a book. It will be good for you to get out of the house.”

“It’s an apartment.”

“We’re leaving in twenty minutes.”

Sila thought about putting up a fight but it wasn’t worth it. For either of them. Her father would make her go in the end anyway, so Sila went to the kitchen and put water in the bottle she took to school every day. She then filled three plastic ziplock bags with hard cheese, sunflower seeds, and stale pretzels (someone hadn’t shut the bag correctly, but since she and her father were both capable of that, she didn’t say anything).

Sila stuffed the bags in her sweatshirt pocket. The last thing she did was retrieve a half-filled box of Junior Mints that she had been saving in her room. Her father could go forever fixing something and not need even a glass of water. They were different that way.

Twenty minutes later, Sila and Alp were driving out of town together on old Highway 99 North. It was surprising how good it felt to be moving. Sila wished they were going to travel like this for days with the radio on and the windows down heading across country until they reached the Atlantic Ocean. But even passing through twelve states and driving three thousand miles wouldn’t make a difference. They would still be a whole body of salt water from the person who mattered most in their lives.

It wasn’t very long before her father turned off the highway onto a narrow country road. There were no houses in sight, only fields with tall weeds that would come up past her knees. Sila wondered if there were snakes or rodents hiding in holes out in the meadows. She spotted what she thought was a hawk circling overhead and was curious what the bird saw that she couldn’t.

Another five minutes passed, with only one other car going the other direction, when Sila’s dad turned onto a gravel drive. As they rounded a bend they could see a very high wall made of big rocks. It looked to Sila like something that would surround a castle. There were huge wooden gates that went across a driveway and connected to the stone barrier. This, according to the address on the piece of paper Sila’s father held in his hand, was where they were going. He stared at the wall. “Now, that took a lot of work.”

“It looks so old.”

“It’s beautiful—no?”

“The wall goes on forever.”

“Probably not forever. But yes, as far as we can see.”

Sila felt a strange excitement as they approached. This place was filled with intrigue. Maybe they’d be here for hours and hours and hours. Maybe even days. But then dread took hold. That was the pattern now. What if her mother came home and no one was there? Being away from the apartment suddenly felt disloyal.

They weren’t standing guard in the living room waiting for her.

They weren’t near the computer.

They were out in the world.

Was there even good cell phone service this far out of town?

Who knew what could happen?

3.

Alp pushed a button on a call box next to the wooden gates. Right away they heard sharp chirping sounds coming from the trees. Out the windshield Sila could see a small flock of red finches against the gray Oregon sky. The sight of the little birds felt hopeful.

Her father’s focus was on the intercom. He pressed the button on the box again, and a voice finally said: “Hello . . .”

“It’s Alp Tekin. I’ve come about your truck.”

A buzzer sounded and then the wooden gates started to roll open. Sila noticed that they had sturdy metal wheels on the bottom and big, dark metal hinges. Alp drove forward, and up ahead they could see a large, old pink farmhouse, a weathered barn, and an ancient-looking windmill that probably pumped water at one time but was now a lasting monument to a different era. Sila noticed that the front porch was surrounded by interesting overgrown plants. A lot of them were exotic, not like stuff that she’d seen wild in Oregon. “I didn’t know you could grow palm trees here . . .”

Alp stared at the sago palms. They were tucked around one side of the farmhouse as if drawing warmth from the building. “Me neither.”

“How come the plants don’t die when it snows?”

He must not have known the answer, because he said, “Where your mom and I grew up in Turkey, there were places with palm trees.”

“Yeah, but you guys love pine trees. I think palms are better.”

“Is something better because you don’t see it all the time?”

When her dad offered up his ideas they usually came out as questions.

Maybe her mother right now was sitting in a grove of palm trees. Sila saw that image in her mind’s eye. It was strangely comforting.

The door to the pink farmhouse opened and an old man came out. He had mostly gray hair, a full white beard, and he was wearing a lemon-yellow jacket. Sila tried to remember if she’d ever seen her father in a yellow jacket. It was possible that he had a raincoat that color. The boys at her school must have thought that bright colors were only for highway workers, because almost everything they wore was blue, gray, brown, or black. Sila looked over at her dad. He had on jeans and a gray shirt. It was as if there were some kind of secret dress code they were all following, she thought. But not this old guy.

Sila’s dad leaned out the open window on his side of the car. “I brought my daughter. This is Sila. I hope that’s okay.”

Sila had been taught that it was important to make a good first impression. It was also (according to her mom, who had made a lot of the rules) necessary to make a good second, third, and fourth impression, which was another way to say that her daughter needed to have good manners all the time. Sila tried to smile, but the corners of her mouth had lost whatever natural will they once possessed to turn upward. At least her teeth didn’t stick to her lips. She’d been eating pretzels and her mouth felt salty and dry.

The older man spoke in a voice that Sila thought sounded like gravel. It was rocky like the road to his farmhouse and there was crunch in his words.

“I’m Gio. Nice to meet you two. My truck’s in the barn. Drove it in there to give it a break from the rain. The thing’s got enough rust spots. Now I can’t get it started. Should we go take a look?”

Many times when Alp went to fix a car or truck, it was on the side of the road, or stuck somewhere, like in the mud. He didn’t mind working in the wet weather, but Sila thought the look on his face said he was glad that Gio’s broken vehicle was under cover. It was late spring and in Oregon that meant that the sky could open up in a downpour at any moment that would last for hours.

Sila swallowed a few times to get rid of the pretzel pieces that were lodged around her mouth between her teeth. Her plan had been to stay in her father’s car while he worked, but then she heard the old man’s voice: “Are you coming with us?”

Sila looked up at him. She thought of all the excuses for why she was going to stay in the car and was surprised to hear herself say, “Okay. Sure.”

Alp lifted his toolbox and they both followed Gio. Sila thought the old man moved pretty fast considering his right knee didn’t bend in the same way as his left knee did. One of the rules when she went with her dad on work trips was to approach everyone she met not just with respect but also with caution. You shouldn’t trust someone, she had been taught, until you really knew the person.

Gio pushed opened the barn’s large double doors and Sila and Alp followed him inside. An old blue pickup was parked in the middle of the cavernous space. Sila wondered if at one time the barn had housed pigs and cows and chickens. She also imagined ponies and geese and sheep. Instead there were just a lot of spiderwebs.

Alp went to work looking under the hood of the truck, and Sila was unsure if she should wait at his side or whether the old man expected her to talk to him. Then she heard, “I went to the bakery on Route 99 this morning. I have donuts. Would you like one?”

Sila sat on the front porch of the farmhouse and Gio brought out a plate with a jelly-filled cruller, a chocolate-glazed thug, and a large cinnamon twist. Sila took her time making her choice, but in the end she went for the cinnamon twist because it was the biggest thing on the plate and if her mouth was full she wouldn’t be expected to talk.

Gio went back inside and returned minutes later with a cup of coffee for himself and a glass of milk for Sila. They ate donuts in silence until all three were gone. Sila was surprised she didn’t feel uncomfortable. The man in the yellow jacket didn’t seem to care about talking. It was a huge relief.

Sila’s mother had said it wasn’t good manners to stare at your phone if you were with someone else, so Sila resisted the temptation. She drank what was left of the milk and watched the birds in the trees. Gio sipped his coffee. Finally Sila said, “So, did you build that stone wall?”

“I did not.”

“The barn is so big. But you don’t have any animals.”

“I don’t.”

“Are you a farmer?”

“I was thinking of farming when I bought this place. But I haven’t done that. I’ve only been out here for a few months.”

Gio took another sip of his coffee and then he sat back and told her about the last eight months of his life.

4.

“For almost thirty years I worked as a carpenter, but then a place called Chinook Modular Housing opened up off River Road. You’re too young to remember when all that land was a blueberry farm.”

Sila nodded.

“Well, they plowed under the bushes and built an assembly plant. I took a job out there. We made housing units—Chinook mobile homes.”

“How do you build a mobile home?”

“The things start as big metal skeletons that are shipped from China. Those pieces get welded together. After that, a wooden frame goes on, which was my part. Then plumbers and electricians come on board. Once that happened my crew would start all over again on another unit. For sixteen years I built the same thing, the same way, with the same materials, five days a week.”

Sila took a moment to imagine what his job was like. “Was it boring?”

Gio laughed. “I could put the thing together with my eyes closed. Well, almost. It wasn’t exciting. But I worked out of the rain. And it took some skill.”

“Were you allowed to listen to music?”

“We did do that.”

“Did you like the other people you worked with?”

“We were a good group. We had a bowling league and a book club. We needed things to talk about besides each other. We didn’t want to spend too much time gossiping.”

“My teacher last year said that gossip is telling stories that you don’t know are true. But most of the stuff kids repeated was true. So does that make it gossip?”

“Hard to say. I think of gossip as being mean.”

Sila managed a half smile. “I agree.”

“Anyway, at one point a bunch of us at work decided to play the lottery.”

Sila repeated the slogan she’d heard on local television commercials: “Powerball and Mega Millions. Hey! Somebody’s gotta win.”

“That’s right. Our friend Corey was in charge. Twenty-four of us put in money and Corey bought tickets every week. It was too much trouble after a while picking all the numbers, so we used an online program that chose random ones, but we always used the number twenty-four. Because that was us. Twenty-four Chinook workers. Well, we played the lottery for six years, four months, and three days . . .”

Gio stopped to take a sip of his coffee. His eyes had lit up, and Sila realized she was holding her breath as she waited. He swallowed his coffee and continued, “When one wet, foggy Saturday—it was October twenty-fourth of this past year—we had the winning ticket.”

Sila couldn’t help but be excited. “You won!”

“We did.”

“Was it a ton of money?”

“It was. Even split twenty-four ways. It was the largest jackpot in the state’s history. No one had won for eighteen weeks. The prize kept rolling over, getting bigger and bigger.”

“Did you freak out when you heard the news?”

“I didn’t believe it at first. It felt like a dream. Or a crazy hoax or scam someone was playing on us. My friend Rosa called me crying. She worked in accounting. I thought her cat had died. She’d been really worried about that cat. But she was happy-crying.”

“I guess it sounds the same.”

“Especially when all you hear is someone having trouble breathing. It was a weekend and no one was at work, but we all jumped into cars and met in the Chinook parking lot. We were screaming and shaking and falling all over each other. Dee Dee Pratt even fainted. There are more than a hundred and fifty people who are employed out there, but we were the lucky ones. I can tell you for a fact that come Monday the other workers really weren’t that happy for us.”

“Maybe they felt left out.”

“It was like someone died. They walked around with their heads down, trying to smile but really filled with grief. Even the president of the company, a guy named Ronnie Roberts, didn’t come in for three days. That’s how much it shook people up. And yes, of course they were mad that they weren’t part of our lottery group.”

Sila nodded. “I guess for once everyone at work was talking about the same thing.”

It looked to Sila as if Gio was enjoying telling his story. She wondered if he’d spent the last eight months keeping what had happened private from anyone not directly involved. She felt no envy as she listened, and was happy when he continued, “Three weeks after the Big Saturday, all of us, except a welder named Duncan Maynard, had quit our jobs. Duncan said he really liked installing windows and he didn’t care that he had a ton of money heading his way.”

“I wonder if he got treated differently at work after that.”

“I’m sure he did. The day we got the check we took a group photo in front of the Chinook Modular Housing sign. I’ve got it right here.”

Gio pulled his phone from his coat pocket and scrolled to a picture. He held it up for Sila. She squinted at the screen.

“Which one is Duncan Maynard?”

Gio pointed to a man in the front. Sila looked carefully. “He’s got the biggest smile.”

Gio turned the phone back around. “You’re right. I never noticed that. Most of us weren’t getting a lot of sleep back then. We were still in shock.”

“Well, he looks happy.”

“He does. And he was the only one not going anywhere.”

Gio put the phone back in his coat pocket and continued, “All I wanted that day was for my wife, Lillian, to be alive. She believed in playing the lottery more than I did. I’ve never been much of a gambler. But Lillian thought it was a fun thing to do. So she’s the reason I was even part of it.”

Sila’s voice was small: “And she’s not around now?”

“She passed away over four years ago.”

Sila knew it wasn’t polite to ask too many personal questions, but she wanted to know more. “What happened to her?”

“She was healthy until just after her sixty-first birthday when she got a sore shoulder. Then the pain moved to her back. We thought she’d pulled a muscle, or slept on her side funny. But it didn’t go away. She wasn’t someone who complained about stuff, so I forgot she even had a problem. After that, maybe a month later, she started to cough. It was winter and everyone was hacking away all the time. We just thought she had a bad cold.”

Gio stopped abruptly and put down his coffee cup. When he started to speak again Sila heard the words spill out fast and dull. “She had lung cancer. She fought. It won.”

“I’m sorry. . . .”

“Me too.”

After a while Gio went back to talking. “So Lillian never knew I won the money. She worked hard her whole life, and she never got to see any of this. She always wanted to live on a farm. She liked to garden. She wanted a house with a second floor. She said she’d like a barn. That’s why I’m here. It’s for her.”

Gio looked out onto the tall pines trees.

“Did you and your wife—”

“Lillian.”

“Did you and Lillian have kids?”

“No. But she was always around young people. She taught second grade at Harriet Beecher Stowe Elementary School.”

Sila’s mouth opened and she looked wide-eyed at Gio. “Wait. What’s your last name?”

“Gardino.”

“So you were married to Mrs. Gardino?”

“I was.”

“She was my second-grade teacher!”

“No kidding!”

“She was my favorite!”

Sila impulsively reached over and touched his hand. “I think about her all the time.”

When she looked at Gio she realized his eyes were turning liquid.

5.

They heard the sound of an engine starting. Gio seemed to collect himself as the pickup truck emerged from the barn. “Your dad’s got the old engine running again.” Only moments later Alp cut the motor and got out of the vehicle.

“Your truck’s working, but it won’t stay that way. There’s a problem with the alternator. It needs to be replaced, and then the fuel line should come out. I could have the parts shipped to me. That would take about ten days. If you’re interested I can get you a price.”

“You call and let me know what it will cost, but plan on doing it.”

Sila looked at the old man in the lemon-yellow jacket and brightened. “So we’ll have to come back.”

She could see that Gio Gardino seemed to also feel as if not being able to fix the truck was some kind of good news. Gio took his checkbook out of his pocket and paid Alp, saying, “Sila, I enjoyed our chat. But I feel bad that I spent the whole time talking about myself.”

“That’s okay,” Sila said.

“But I didn’t learn enough about you. Except of course that you are a good listener.”

Alp answered for her, “Sila likes books and animals.”

Sila grumbled, “We’re not allowed to have pets at our apartment, which is why we don’t have a dog.”

“What’s your favorite animal?” Gio