Leaving Time: A Novel

by Jodi Picoult

  Gideon swerves, braking. He looks like I’ve slapped him across the face. “Jenna … I loved your mother,” he swears. “I was trying to protect her. I wanted to marry her. I wanted to take care of you. And the baby.”

  All the air in the car is gone, just like that. It’s like a seal of plastic has been placed over my nose and mouth.

  Maybe I’ve heard him wrong. Maybe he said he would have taken care of me, the baby. Except he didn’t.

  Gideon slows the car to a stop and looks into his lap. “You didn’t know,” he murmurs.

  In one move, I press down on my seat belt latch and open the passenger door. I start to run.

  I can hear the door slam behind me—it’s Gideon, coming after me.

  I enter the first building I can find, a diner, and run past the hostess to the back, where the restrooms usually are. In the ladies’ room I lock the door, climb onto the sink, and slide open the narrow window cut into the wall beside it. I can hear voices outside the ladies’ room, Gideon begging someone to come in and get me. I shimmy through the window, drop down on the lid of the closed Dumpster in the alley behind the diner, and bolt.

  I race through the woods. I don’t stop until I am on the outskirts of town. Then, for the first time in a day and a half, I turn on my cell phone.

  I have a signal, three bars. I have forty-three messages from my grandmother. But I ignore them and dial Serenity’s number.

  She picks up on the third ring, and I’m so grateful, I burst into tears. “Please,” I say. “I need help.”

  ALICE

  Sitting in the attic of the African barn, I wondered—not for the first time—if I was the one who was crazy.

  By then, Thomas had been home for five months. Gideon had painted over the walls again. There were drop cloths on the floor, and cans of paint lining the edges, but otherwise, the space was empty. No evidence remained of the break from reality that had swallowed my husband whole. At times, I was able to convince myself that I had imagined the entire episode.

  It was pouring today. Jenna had been so excited to leave for school in her new rubber boots, which were fashioned to look like ladybugs. They had been a gift from Grace and Gideon for her second birthday. Because of the weather, the elephants had chosen to stay in their barns. Nevvie and Grace were folding and stuffing envelopes for a fund-raising campaign. Thomas was on his way home from New York City, where he’d been meeting with officials from Tusk.

  Thomas never told me where he’d gone for treatment, just that it wasn’t in this state, and he had driven there when he realized that the first center he’d planned on checking into was now closed. I didn’t know whether or not to believe him, but he seemed like himself again, and if I had doubts, I kept them quiet. I did not ask to see the books, or to second-guess him. The last time I had done that, I’d nearly been strangled.

  He had come back from his recuperation with new medication, and with checks from three private investors. (Had they been inpatients, too? I wondered, but I didn’t really care, as long as their checks didn’t bounce.) He took over the reins of running the sanctuary as if he’d never left. But if that transition was flawless, his reintegration into our marriage was not. Although he hadn’t had a manic or a depressive episode for months, I still could not trust him, and he knew it. We were circles in a Venn diagram, Jenna caught at our overlap. Now, when he spent long hours in his office, I couldn’t help but wonder if he was hiding gibberish like he’d written before. When I asked him if he felt stable, he accused me of turning on him and started locking the door. It was a vicious cycle.

  I dreamed about leaving. Taking Jenna and running away. I would pick her up at preschool—and just keep driving. Sometimes I was even brave enough to say it out loud, when Gideon and I found time to be together.

  I didn’t do it, though, because I suspected Thomas knew I was sleeping with Gideon. And I didn’t know which a court would find better equipped to parent: the father with a mental illness or the mother who had betrayed him.

  It had been months since Thomas and I had slept together. I would pour my glass of wine at 7:30, just after Jenna had been put to bed, and would read on the couch until I fell asleep. My interactions with him were limited to polite conversation in front of Jenna when she was awake and heated arguments while she slept. I still took Jenna into the enclosures with me—after her close call as a baby, she had learned her lesson; and how could a child grow up in an elephant sanctuary without feeling comfortable around elephants? Thomas still thought this was an accident waiting to happen, when, in reality, I was more afraid of my daughter being left alone with him. One night, after I’d taken Jenna with me inside the fences again, he grabbed my arms so hard that bruises formed. “What judge would think of you as a fit mother?” he hissed.

  Suddenly I realized he wasn’t just talking about Jenna in the enclosures. And that I wasn’t the only one thinking of sole custody.

  It was Grace who suggested that maybe it was time for Jenna to go to a preschool program. She was nearly two and a half now, and the only social interaction she had came from adults and elephants. I seized on the idea, because it would give me three hours a day when I didn’t have to worry about Jenna being left with Thomas.

  If you had asked me who I was then, I could not have told you. The mother who dropped Jenna off in town with a lunch box full of carrots and sliced apples? The researcher who submitted her paper on Maura’s grief to academic journals, praying over each file before pushing the Send button? The wife in a little black dress who stood beside Thomas at a Boston cocktail party, clapping enthusiastically when he took the microphone to talk about elephant conservation? The woman who bloomed in the arms of a lover, as if he were the only sunlight left in the world to feed her?

  Three-quarters of my life, I felt like I was playing a role, like I could walk offstage and stop pretending. And the minute I was out of the public eye, I wanted to be with Gideon.

  I was a liar. I was hurting people who did not even know they were being hurt. And I still was not strong enough to stop myself.

  But an elephant sanctuary is a very busy place, with very little privacy. Particularly when you are having an affair and both of your spouses work there, too. There were a few frantic couplings in the outdoors, and one so sudden behind the door of the Asian barn that we’d played Russian roulette, forgoing protection for the mercy of each other’s bodies. So perhaps it wasn’t irony—just desperation—that led me to find a secure, secluded place for our trysts—a spot that Thomas would never venture, and that Nevvie and Grace would never think to look.

  The door opened, and like always, my breath caught just in case. Gideon stood in a downpour, twisting an umbrella so that it pinched shut. He left it propped against the metal railing of the spiral staircase and stepped into the room.

  I had spread a drop cloth on the floor while I was waiting for him. “It’s a monsoon out there,” Gideon huffed.

  I stood up and began to unbutton his shirt. “Then we ought to get you out of these wet clothes,” I said.

  “How long?” he asked.

  “Twenty minutes,” I said. It was as long as I thought I could disappear and not be missed. To his credit, Gideon never complained and never tried to keep me. We moved inside the parameters of our fences. Even a little freedom was better than none.

  I pressed up against him, resting my head on his chest. I closed my eyes as he kissed me, lifting me so that I could wrap my legs around him. Over his shoulder, through the sheer plastic that had never been replaced, I watched the rain stream down in sheets, a cleansing.

  I don’t really know how long Grace was standing in the doorway at the top of the stairs, watching us, holding her umbrella down so that it did no good at all to shield her from the storm.

  The phone call had come from Jenna’s school. She was running a fever; she’d thrown up. Could someone come get her?

  Grace would have gone herself. But she thought I’d want to know. She could not find me in the African barn,
which was where I’d told her I was headed. She saw Gideon’s red umbrella. Maybe, she thought, he’d know where I was.

  I sobbed. I apologized. I begged her to forgive Gideon, not to tell Thomas.

  I gave Gideon back.

  And I retreated into my research again, because I could not work with any of them. Nevvie would not speak to me. Grace couldn’t, without dissolving into tears. And Gideon knew better. I held my breath, expecting them to give Thomas their notice, any day. And then I realized they wouldn’t. Where else would the three of them find jobs taking care of elephants together? This was their home, maybe more than it ever had been mine.

  I began to plan my escape. I’d read stories about parents who kidnapped their own children. Who dyed their hair and spirited them across borders with fake IDs and new names. Jenna was young enough to grow up with only the faintest memories of this life. And I, well, I could find something else to do.

  I would never publish again. I couldn’t without risking being found by Thomas, who would then take Jenna away from me. But if anonymity kept us safe, wasn’t it worth it?

  I went so far as to pack a duffel with Jenna’s clothing and mine, and to hold back a few dollars here and there, until I had a couple hundred tucked into the lining of my computer sleeve. That, I hoped, was enough to buy us a start on a new life.

  On the morning that I intended to make our escape, I had run through the steps in my mind a thousand times.

  I would dress Jenna in her favorite overalls, and her pink sneakers. I would feed her a waffle, her favorite, cut into sticks so that she could dip it in maple syrup. I would let her pick one stuffed animal to take in the car with her to school, like usual.

  But we would not go to school. We would just pass the building and get on the highway, and be long gone before anyone thought to question it.

  I had run through the steps in my mind a thousand times, but that was before Gideon burst into the cottage clutching a note in his hand, asking me if I’d seen Grace, his eyes begging for the answer to be yes.

  She had written it by hand. She said by the time he found this, it would be too late. The note, I later found out, was waiting in the bathroom on the counter when Gideon woke up. It was weighed down with a cairn of stones, a small and perfect pyramid, maybe even the same kind that Grace had stuffed in her pockets before she lay herself down on the bottom of the Connecticut River, not two miles from the spot where her husband was fast asleep.

  SERENITY

  Poltergeist is one of those German words, like zeitgeist or schadenfreude, that everyone thinks they know but no one really understands. The translation is “noisy ghost,” and it’s legitimate; they are the loud bullies of the psychic world. They have a tendency to attach themselves to teenage girls who dabble in the occult or who have wild mood swings, both of which attract angry energy. I used to tell my clients that poltergeists are just plain pissed off. They’re often the ghosts of women who were wronged or men who were betrayed, people who never got a chance to fight back. That frustration manifests itself in biting or pinching the inhabitants of a house, cupboards banging or doors slamming, dishes whizzing across a room, and shutters opening and closing. In some cases, too, there is a connection to one of the elements: spontaneous winds that blow paintings off walls. Fires that break out on the carpets.

  Or a deluge of water.

  Virgil wipes his eyes with the tail of his shirt, trying to take this all in. “So you think we were just chased out of that house by a ghost.”

  “A poltergeist,” I say. “But why split hairs?”

  “And you think it’s Grace.”

  “It makes sense. She drowned herself because her husband was cheating on her. If anyone’s going to come back and haunt as a water poltergeist, it would be her.”

  Virgil nods, considering that. “Nevvie seemed to think her daughter was still alive.”

  “Actually,” I point out, “Nevvie said her daughter would be back soon. She didn’t specify in what form.”

  “Even if I wasn’t completely wiped out from pulling an all-nighter, this would be hard for me to wrap my head around,” Virgil admits. “I’m used to hard evidence.”

  I reach over and grasp the edge of his shirt, wring it out on the ground. “Yeah,” I say sarcastically. “I guess this doesn’t count as hard evidence.”

  “So Gideon fakes Nevvie’s death, and she winds up in Tennessee in a house that belonged to her daughter at some point.” He shakes his head. “Why?”

  I can’t answer that. But I don’t have to, because my phone starts to ring.

  I rummage in my purse and finally locate it. I know that number.

  “Please,” Jenna says. “I need help.”

  “Slow down,” Virgil says, for the fifth time.

  She swallows, but her eyes are red from crying and her nose is still running. I rummage in my bag for a tissue and can find only a lens cloth for cleaning sunglasses. I offer her that instead.

  The directions she gave us were a teenager’s directions: You pass a Walmart, and somewhere there’s a left. And a Waffle House, I’m pretty sure the turn is after the Waffle House. Honestly, it’s a miracle that we managed to find her at all. When we did, she was behind a service station’s chain-link fence and Dumpster, halfway up a tree.

  Jenna, goddammit, where are you? Virgil yelled, and only after she heard his voice did her face poke through the branches and the leaves, a small moon in a green field of stars. She climbed gingerly down the trunk, until she lost her footing and fell into Virgil’s arms. I’ve got you, he told her; he hasn’t let go of her yet.

  “I found Gideon,” Jenna says, her voice hitched and uneven.

  “Where?”

  “At the sanctuary.”

  She starts crying again. “At first I started to think that maybe he hurt my mom,” she says, and I see Virgil’s finger’s flex on her shoulders.

  “Did he touch you?” Virgil asks. I am thoroughly convinced that, if Jenna gives a positive response, Virgil would kill Gideon with his bare hands.

  She shakes her head. “It was just … a feeling.”

  “Good thing you listened to your gut, sugar,” I say.

  “But he said he never saw my mother, after the night she was taken to the hospital.”

  Virgil presses his lips together. “He could be lying through his teeth.”

  Jenna’s eyes fill again. It makes me think of Nevvie, and the room that would not stop weeping. “He said my mom was having a baby. His baby.”

  “I know my psychic powers are a little off,” I murmur, “but I did not see that coming.”

  Virgil lets go of Jenna and starts pacing. “That’s motive.” He starts muttering, working through a time line in his head. I watch him tick off points on his fingers, shake his head, start over, and finally, grimly, turn to her. “There’s something you need to know. While you were with Gideon in the sanctuary, Serenity and I were with Nevvie Ruehl.”

  Her head snaps up. “Nevvie Ruehl’s dead.”

  “No,” Virgil corrects. “Someone wanted us to think Nevvie Ruehl was dead.”

  “My father?”

  “Your dad wasn’t the one who found the trampled body. That was Gideon. He was sitting with her when the medical examiner and the cops arrived.”

  She wipes her eyes. “But there was still a body.”

  I look down at the ground, waiting for Jenna to connect the dots.

  When she does, the arrow points in a different direction than I expect. “Gideon didn’t do it,” she insists. “I thought that, too, at first. But she was pregnant.”

  Virgil takes a step forward. “Exactly,” he says. “That’s why Gideon wasn’t the one to kill her.”

  Before we leave, Virgil goes to use the restroom at the service station, and Jenna and I are left alone. Her eyes are still bloodshot. “If my mom is … dead …” She lets her voice trail off. “Could she wait for me?”

  People like to think that they can reunite with a loved one who’s passed. But t
here are so many layers to the afterlife; it’s like saying that you’re bound to run into someone because you both live on planet Earth.

  However, I think Jenna’s had enough bad news for one day. “Sugar, she might be here with you right now.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “The spirit world is modeled on the real world, and the real things we’ve seen. You might go into your grandmother’s kitchen and she’ll be down there making coffee. You may be making your bed and she walks by the open door. But every now and then, the edges will blur, because you’re inhabiting the same space. You’re like oil and vinegar in the same container.”

  “So,” she says, her voice cracking. “I don’t ever really get her back.”

  I could lie to her. I could tell her what everyone wants to hear, but I won’t. “No,” I tell Jenna. “You don’t.”

  “And what happens to my dad?”

  I can’t answer that for her. I don’t know if Virgil will try to prove that Thomas was the one who killed his wife that night. Or if it would even stick, given the poor man’s mental state.

  Jenna sits on the picnic table and draws her knees up to her chest. “I had this friend once, Chatham, who always talked about Paris like it was practically Heaven. She wanted to go to the Sorbonne for college. She was going to stroll down the Champs-Élysées; she was going to sit at a café and watch skinny French women walking down the street, all that stuff. Her aunt surprised her by taking her there on a business trip when she was twelve. When Chatham came home, I asked her if it was all it was cracked up to be, and you know what she said? ‘It was kind of like any other city.’ ” Jenna shrugs. “I didn’t think it would feel like this, when I got here.”

  “To Tennessee?”

  “No. To … the end, I guess.” She looks up at me, her eyes brimming with tears. “Just because I know now that she didn’t want to leave me behind doesn’t make it easier, you know? Nothing’s changed. She’s not here. I am. And I still feel empty.”