Leaving Time: A Novel

by Jodi Picoult

  The elephant reaches down for something leather-bound I cannot quite make out, which is tucked beneath the woman’s hip—a book? An ID badge holder? I’m amazed at the dexterity the animal has, flipping it open. Then it places its trunk on the woman’s chest again, almost like a stethoscope, before slipping silently into the forest.

  I wake up with a start, disoriented and surprised to be thinking of elephants, wondering at the storm that still seems to be filling my head. But it’s not thunder, it’s someone banging on the front door.

  I already know who it’s going to be as I get up to open it.

  “Before you freak out, I’m not here to try to convince you to find my mother,” Jenna Metcalf announces, pushing past me into my apartment. “It’s just that I left something behind. Something really important …”

  I close the front door, rolling my eyes when I see that ridiculous bicycle parked in my foyer again. Jenna starts looking around the space where we had been sitting a few hours ago, ducking beneath the coffee table and poking around under the chairs.

  “If I’d found something I would have contacted you—”

  “I doubt it,” she says. She starts opening up drawers where I keep my stamps, my secret stash of Oreos, and my take-out menus.

  “Do you mind?” I say.

  But Jenna is ignoring me, her hand stuck between the cushions of the couch. “I knew it was here,” she says with obvious relief, and like floss, she pulls out the blue scarf from my dream and winds it around her neck.

  Seeing it, three-dimensional and close enough to touch, makes me feel a little less crazy—I had only been incorporating a scarf this kid had been wearing into my subconscious. But there’s other information in that dream that makes no sense: the onion-skin wrinkles of an elephant’s hide, the ballet of its trunk. Plus something else that I had not realized until this moment: The elephant had been checking to see if the woman was inhaling and exhaling. The animal had left—not because the woman had stopped breathing but because she still was.

  I don’t know how I know this, I just do.

  My whole life, this is how I’ve defined the paranormal: can’t understand it, can’t explain it, can’t deny it.

  You cannot be a born psychic and not believe in the power of signs. Sometimes it’s the traffic that makes you miss your flight, which winds up crashing into the Atlantic. Sometimes it’s the single rose that blooms in a garden full of weeds. Or sometimes it’s the girl you dismissed, who haunts your sleep.

  “Sorry I bothered you,” Jenna says. “Or whatever.”

  She is already halfway out the door when I hear my voice calling her name. “Jenna. This is probably crazy. But,” I say, “was your mother in the circus or something? A zookeeper? I … I don’t know why, but there’s something important about elephants?”

  I haven’t had a true psychic thought in seven years. Seven years. I tell myself this one is coincidence, luck, or the aftereffects of the burrito I had for lunch.

  When she turns around, her face is washed with an expression that’s equal parts shock and wonder.

  I know, in that moment, that she was meant to find me.

  And that I am going to find her mother.

  ALICE

  There is no question that elephants understand death. They may not plan for it the way we do; they may not imagine elaborate afterlives like those in our religious doctrines. For them, grief is simpler, cleaner. It’s all about loss.

  Elephants are not particularly interested in the bones of other dead animals, just other elephants. Even if elephants come across the body of another elephant that has been long dead, its remains picked apart by hyenas and its skeleton scattered, they bunch and get tense. They approach the carcass as a group, and caress the bones with what can only be described as reverence. They stroke the dead elephant, touching it all over with their trunks and their back feet. They will smell it. They might pick up a tusk or a bone and carry it for a while. They will place even the tiniest bit of ivory under their feet and gently rock back and forth.

  The naturalist George Adamson wrote of how, in the 1940s, he had to shoot a bull elephant that was breaking into government gardens in Kenya. He gave the meat to locals and moved the rest of the carcass a half mile from the village. That night, elephants discovered the carcass. They took the shoulder blade and the femur and brought the bones back to the spot where the elephant had been shot. In fact, all of the great elephant researchers have documented death rituals: Iain Douglas-Hamilton, Joyce Poole, Karen McComb, Lucy Baker, Cynthia Moss, Anthony Hall-Martin.

  And me.

  I once saw a herd of elephants walking in the reserve in Botswana when Bontle, their matriarch, went down. When the other elephants realized she was in distress, they attempted to lift her with their tusks, trying to get her to stand. When that didn’t work, some of the young males mounted Bontle, again seeking to bring her back to consciousness. Her calf, Kgosi, who was about four at the time, put his trunk in her mouth, the way young elephants greet their mothers. The herd rumbled and the calf was making sounds that seemed like screams, but then they all got very quiet. At this point I realized she had died.

  A few of the elephants moved toward the tree line, collecting leaves and branches, which they brought to cover Bontle. Others tossed dirt onto her body. The herd stood solemnly with Bontle’s body for two and a half days, leaving only to get water or food, and then returning. Even years later, when her bones had been bleached and scattered, her massive skull caught in the crook of a dry riverbank, the herd would stop when passing by, standing in silence for a few minutes. Recently, I saw Kgosi—now a big young male of eight years—approach the skull and stick his trunk in the spot where Bontle’s mouth would have been. Clearly these bones had general significance to him. But if you had seen it, I think you’d believe what I do: that he recognized that these particular bones had once been his mother.

  JENNA

  “Tell me again,” I demand.

  Serenity rolls her eyes. We’ve been sitting in her living room for an hour while she goes over the details of a ten-second dream she had about my mother. I know it’s my mother because of the blue scarf, the elephant, and … well, because when you desperately want to believe something’s true, you can convince yourself of just about anything.

  True, Serenity might have Googled me the minute I walked out the door, and concocted some crazy trance with a pachyderm. But if you Google “Jenna Metcalf,” it takes three pages before you get to any mention of my mother, and even then, it’s an article that only references me as her three-year-old daughter. There are too many other Jenna Metcalfs who have done too much with their lives, and my mother’s disappearance was too long ago. Also, Serenity didn’t know I was coming back for the scarf I left behind.

  Unless she did, which proves she’s the real deal, right?

  “Listen,” Serenity says, “I can’t tell you any more than what I already have.”

  “But my mother was breathing.”

  “The woman I dreamed about was breathing.”

  “Did she, like, gasp? Make any sounds?”

  “No. She was just lying there. It’s just … a sense I had.”

  “She’s not dead,” I murmur, more to myself than to Serenity, because I like the way the words fill me up with bubbles, like my blood has been carbonated. I know I should be angry or upset getting even this loose proof that my mother might still be alive—and that she’s abandoned me for the past decade—but I’m too happy about the thought that if I play my cards right, I will see her again.

  Then I can choose to hate her or I can ask her myself why she didn’t come for me.

  Or I can just crawl into her arms and suggest we start from scratch.

  All of a sudden, my eyes widen. “Your dream. It’s new evidence. If you tell the police what you told me, they’ll reopen my mother’s case.”

  “Honey, there isn’t a detective in this country that’s going to take the dream of a psychic and write it up as formal evidence
. It’s like asking the DA to call the Easter Bunny as a witness.”

  “But what if it actually happened? What if what you dreamed was just a piece of the past, looping itself into your head?”

  “That’s not how psychic information works. I once had a client come to me whose grandmother had passed. Her grandmother was a very strong presence, showing me the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, Chairman Mao, fortune cookies. It was like she was doing everything in her power to get me to say China. So I asked if her grandma had visited China, or been into feng shui or something like that, and the client said that didn’t sound like her grandma, it didn’t make sense. Then Grandma showed me a rose. I told the client, and she said, Gram was more of a wildflower girl. So I’m thinking, China … rose. China … rose. And the client looks up and says to me, Well, when she died, I inherited her whole set of china, and it’s got a rose pattern. Now, I have no idea why Grandma was showing me egg rolls instead of a gravy bowl with a rose on it. But that’s what I mean—an elephant might not really be an elephant. It could be standing in for something else.”

  I look at her, confused. “But you’ve told me twice now that she’s not dead.”

  Serenity hesitates. “Look, you should know that I don’t exactly have a perfect track record.”

  I shrug. “Just because you screwed up once doesn’t mean you’ll screw up again.”

  She opens her mouth, but then snaps it shut.

  “Back when you used to find missing people,” I ask, “how did you do it?”

  “I’d take a piece of clothing or a toy that belonged to the child. Then I’d go for a walk with the cops, trying to retrace the last few minutes where he was seen,” Serenity says. “And sometimes I’d get … something.”

  “Like?”

  “A flash in my head—of a street sign or type of landscape, or a make of car, or even once a goldfish bowl that turned out to be in the room where the kid was being locked up. But …” She shifts uneasily. “My psychic arteries may have hardened a little bit.”

  I don’t know how a psychic could ever lose, if—as Serenity says—the information she gets might be a direct hit or might actually mean the exact opposite. It seems to me like the biggest career safety net ever. And yeah, maybe the elephant Serenity pictured is some metaphor for a huge obstacle my mother’s faced; but as Freud would probably say, maybe it’s really an elephant. There’s only one way to find out. “You have a car, right?”

  “Yeah … what? Why?”

  I walk across the living room, wrapping my mother’s scarf around my neck. Then I reach into one of the drawers I’d searched through when I first arrived, in which I’d seen a jangle of car keys. I toss them to Serenity and walk out the door of her apartment. I may not be psychic, but I know this much: She’s too curious about what that dream means not to follow.

  Serenity drives a yellow VW Bug from the 1980s that has rusted through in a lacy pattern behind the passenger door. My bike is pretzeled into the backseat. I direct her on back roads and state highways, getting lost only twice, because you can cut through alleyways on a bike that you can’t cut through with a car. When we get to the Stark Nature Preserve, we are the only car parked in the lot. “Now are you going to tell me why you dragged me here?” she asks.

  “This used to be an elephant sanctuary,” I tell her.

  She looks out the window, as if she expects to still see one. “Here? In New Hampshire?”

  I nod. “My dad was an animal behaviorist. He started the place, before he met my mom. Everyone thinks about elephants living in superhot places like Thailand and Africa, but they can adapt really well to cold, and even snow. When I was born he had seven elephants here that he’d rescued from zoos and circuses.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee took them all, when this place shut down.” I look at the chain gate across the trailhead. “The land was sold back to the state. I was too little to remember when it happened.” I open the passenger door and get out of the car, glancing back to make sure that Serenity is following me. “We have to walk the rest of the way.”

  Serenity looks down at her leopard-print flip-flops and then at the overgrown trail. “Where?”

  “You tell me.”

  It takes Serenity a moment to understand what I’m asking her to do. “Oh no,” she says. “Hell no.” She pivots on her heel and starts back to the car.

  I grab her arm. “You told me you haven’t had a dream in years. But you dreamed about my mom. It’s not going to hurt to see if you get a flash of something, is it?”

  “Ten years isn’t a cold case, it’s an ice trail. There’s nothing still here now that existed back when your mother disappeared.”

  “I’m here,” I say.

  Serenity’s nostrils flare.

  “I know the last thing you want is to prove that your dream didn’t really mean anything at all,” I say. “But it’s kind of like winning the lottery, right? If you don’t buy a ticket, you never even have a chance.”

  “I buy a goddamn ticket every week, and I’ve never won the Powerball,” Serenity mutters, but she steps over the chain and starts bushwhacking through the overgrown trail.

  We walk in silence for a while, as insects zip past our heads and summer hums around us. Serenity walks with her hand brushing the browse; at one point she breaks off a leaf and sniffs it before moving on. “What are we looking for?” I whisper.

  “I’ll tell you when I know.”

  “It’s just that we’re practically off the grounds of the old sanctuary—”

  “Do you or do you not want me to concentrate?” Serenity interrupts.

  So I’m quiet for a few more minutes. But there’s something that’s been nagging at me for the whole car ride; it feels like a bone caught at the back of my throat. “Serenity?” I ask. “If my mother wasn’t alive and you knew that … would you lie to me and tell me she was?”

  She stops and turns, hands on her hips. “Sugar, I don’t know you well enough to like you, much less protect your tender little teenage heart. I don’t know why your mother isn’t coming through to me. It could be because she’s alive, not dead. Or it could be, like I said, because I’m rusty. But I promise you … if I get any sense that your mother’s a spirit or even a ghost, I’ll tell you the truth.”

  “A spirit or a ghost?”

  “They’re two different things. You can thank Hollywood for making everyone think they’re one and the same.” She looks over her shoulder at me. “When the body expires, it’s over. Done. Elvis has left the building. But the soul is still intact. If you’ve led a decent life and you don’t have a lot of regrets, you may hang around for a bit, but sooner or later you’ll finish the transition.”

  “Transition?”

  “Cross over. Go to Heaven. Whatever you want to call it. If you go through that process, you become a spirit. But let’s say you’ve been a jerk in this lifetime and St. Peter or Jesus or Allah is going to judge your sorry ass and you’ll probably go to Hell or some other bad real estate in the afterlife. Or maybe you’re angry that you died young, or hell, maybe you don’t even realize you’re dead at all. For any one of those reasons, you might decide you aren’t quite ready to leave this world, or be dead yet. The problem is—you are dead. There’s no way around that. So you stay here, in limbo, as a ghost.”

  We are walking again, side by side, through the thick brush. “So if my mother’s a spirit, she’s gone … somewhere else?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And if she’s a ghost, where is she?”

  “Here. She’s part of this world, but not the same part you’re in.” Serenity shakes her head. “How do I explain this …” she mutters, then snaps her fingers. “I once saw a documentary about Disney animators. There are all these transparent layers with different lines and colors that stack on top of each other to make a single Donald Duck or Goofy. I think it’s like that, for ghosts. They’re another layer, laid over our own world.”
/>   “How do you know all this?” I ask.

  “It’s just what I’ve been told,” Serenity says. “It’s the tip of the iceberg, from what I can tell.”

  I glance around, trying to see all these ghosts that must be hovering at the edges of my peripheral vision. Trying to feel my mother. Maybe it wouldn’t be all that bad, if she was dead but still somewhere close by. “Would I know it? If she was a ghost and she tried to talk to me?”

  “You ever hear the phone ring, and pick it up, and just get dead air? That could be a spirit, trying to tell you something. They’re energy, so the easiest way for them to try to get your attention is by manipulating energy. Phone lines, computer glitches, turning lights on and off.”

  “Is that how they communicate with you?”

  She hesitates. “For me, it’s more like when I first tried contact lenses. I could never adjust, because I could tell there was something foreign in my eye that didn’t belong. It wasn’t uncomfortable—it just wasn’t part of me. That’s how it feels when I get information from the other side. Like an afterthought, except I’m not the one who’s thought it.”

  “Kind of like you can’t help but hear it?” I ask. “Like a song you can’t stop humming?”

  “I guess so.”

  “I used to think I saw my mom all the time,” I say softly. “I’d be in a crowded place and I’d let go of my grandma’s hand and start running toward her, but I was never able to catch up.”

  Serenity is staring at me with a strange look on her face. “Maybe you are psychic.”

  “Or maybe missing someone and finding someone have the same symptoms,” I say.

  Suddenly, she stops walking. “I’m feeling something,” she says dramatically.

  I look around, but all I see is a small hummock of tall grass, a few trees, and a delicate mobile of monarch butterflies turning slowly overhead. “We’re nowhere near a sugar maple,” I point out.