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We bought durian from the street vendor, fruit like a spiky football and stinking of dirty feet. I'd promised it to Sadie; at eleven she was old enough to be intrigued by food that smelled foul and tasted delicious.

Our last night in Bangkok. Two weeks of islands and temples and I'd mostly gotten over my chronic sadness: my little brother, Sadie's father, up in Quentin and Sadie knowing exactly why; her crazy mom Kelli already out of the picture, doing time for selling meth across state lines. So in the tradition of maiden aunts who care for their broken siblings' broken children, I'd stepped in, starting our new life by buying two tickets as far as we could go. Thailand.

In Thailand, just me and Sadie, it was great -- nobody to catch my whiff of talc and thinning skin. Bangkok was hot; the streets of Banglamphu, where we stayed, teemed with young travelers from around the globe bursting with freedom. Kao San Road at night exploded into carnival, cacophony, world beat. Unemployed elephants paraded, their teak forests in the north burning from the wars in Burma and the Japanese deforestation. And Sadie, becoming a teenager so fast -- she was one of those big girls -- sucked it in and blossomed and ate odd food and craved durian, stinky as the few small canals that still remained on Bangkok's side streets. Durian, sweet as rosewater custard.

We sat at a café table in the gutters of the street barricaded from cars for the night, sipping smoothies and holding our noses as we spooned the durian's soft flesh from its hard shell. Around us, a festival of night, light, color -- Kao San Road a mélange of the world's youngest girls with no bras and almost no shirts; guys so built that even I, lost so deeply in my head, had to look; the whores not yet as sad as the shadows behind their eyes said they'd become in months.

On Kao San Road, print shops charged next-to-nothing for business cards that read No Home, No Job, No Money, No Worries. So tempting: to homeschool Sadie, the two of us wandering the world avoiding American adolescence and American middle age. I leaned back in my chair and waited for a miracle.

The durian sent its stench out beyond the table. Sadie bravely continued eating. Through the throng, from behind a crowd of young Brits, a mahout -- a Thai elephant keeper who lived with his animal throughout its life -- rode his young male towards us, his bare heels clinging and directing behind the animal's ears. Unemployed elephants with nothing left to do but come to the cities to entertain the tourists, their mahouts scrambling to feed their vast appetites.

The elephant paused at our table, his long trunk sniffed and stretched for the durian. Sadie handed him a morsel of fruit, he took it delicately with his prehensile trunk. "Hello, Elephant," she said. I looked up at the mahout, bare-chested and wiry in the heat of Bangkok night. And the mahout looked at me.

I gave Sadie, eleven and big for her age, 100 baht for our smoothies and made her promise to return -- instantly -- to our guest house next door. I stood on my chair. I stood on the café table. I mounted the elephant behind the mahout. I took a deep breath. Sadie nodded me on. In the north, teak forests burned, and back at our home, fires burned too. But the elephant's back rolled an endless, sideways figure-eight beneath my thighs.