Leaving Time: A Novel

by Jodi Picoult

  There was a moment, before everything went wrong, before the sanctuary had failed and Thomas had gotten sick, when we had been happy together. He had held our newborn in his arms, speechless. He had loved me, and he had loved her.

  “She’ll be amazing,” Thomas says, answering his own rhetorical question.

  “Yes,” I say, my voice thick. “She will.”

  At the motel, I take off my shoes and my jacket and pull the shades tight. I sit down on the swivel chair at the desk and stare into the mirror. This is not the face of someone at peace. In fact, I do not at all feel the way I thought I would if I ever received a call that my daughter had been found. This was supposed to be what I needed to stop straddling the distance between reality and what-if. But I still feel rooted. Stuck.

  The blank face of the television mocks me. I do not want to turn it on. I don’t want to listen to newscasters telling me of some new horror in the world, of the limitless supply of tragedy.

  When there is a knock on the door, I startle. I don’t know anyone in this town. It could only be one thing.

  They’ve come for me, after all, because they know what I did.

  I take a deep breath, resolved. It’s all right, really. I was expecting this. And no matter what happens, I know where Jenna is now. The babies in South Africa are under the care of people who know how to raise them. Really, I am ready to go.

  But when I open the door, the woman with pink hair is standing on the threshold.

  Cotton candy, that’s what it looks like. I used to feed it to Jenna, who had such a sweet tooth. In Afrikaans, it’s called spook asem. Ghost breath.

  “Hello,” she says.

  Her name. It’s something like Tranquility … Sincerity…

  “I’m Serenity. I met you earlier today.”

  The woman who had found Jenna’s remains. I stare at her, wondering what she could possibly want. A reward, maybe?

  “I know I said I found your daughter,” she begins, her voice shaking. “But I lied.”

  “Detective Mills said you brought him a tooth—”

  “I did. But the thing is, Jenna found me first. A little over a week ago.” She hesitates. “I’m a psychic.”

  Maybe it is the stress of having seen my daughter’s bones interred; maybe it is realizing that Thomas has the good fortune to be trapped in a place where none of this ever happened; maybe it is the twenty-two hours of flying and the jet lag I’m still battling. For all of these reasons, rage rises in me like a geyser. I plant my hands on Serenity’s arms and shove her. “How dare you?” I say. “How dare you make light of the fact that my daughter’s dead?”

  She topples back, caught off guard by my physical attack. Her giant purse spills onto the floor between us.

  She falls to her knees, sweeping the contents back inside. “That’s the last thing I’d ever do,” she says. “I came to tell you how much Jenna loved you. She didn’t realize she was dead, Alice. She thought you’d left her behind.”

  What this hack is doing is deadly, dangerous. I’m a scientist, and what she’s saying is not possible, but it can still wreak havoc with my heart.

  “What did you come here for?” I say, bitter. “Money?”

  “I could see her,” the woman insists. “I could talk to her, and touch her. I didn’t know Jenna was a spirit; I thought she was a teenage girl. I watched her eat and laugh and ride a bike and check the voice mail on her cell phone. She looked and sounded as real to me as you do, right now.”

  “Why you?” I hear myself ask. “Why would she have come to you?”

  “Because I was one of the few who noticed her, I guess. Ghosts are all around us, talking to each other and checking into hotels and eating at McDonald’s and doing what you and I would ordinarily do—but the only people who see them are the ones who can suspend disbelief. Like little children. Mentally ill folks. And psychics.” She hesitates. “I think she came to me because I could hear her. But I think she stayed because she knew—even if I didn’t—that I could help her find you.”

  I am crying now. I cannot see clearly. “Go away. Just go away.”

  She gets to her feet, about to say something, and then on second thought just inclines her head and starts walking down the hall.

  Glancing at the floor, I see it. A small piece of paper, something that fell from her purse that she accidentally left behind.

  I should close the door. I should go inside. But instead I crouch down and pick it up: this tiny, origami elephant.

  “Where did you get this?” I whisper.

  Serenity stops moving. She turns, so that she can see what I am holding. “From your daughter.”

  Ninety-eight percent of science is quantifiable. You can do research until you are exhausted; you can count repetitive or self-isolating or aggressive behaviors until your vision blurs, you can cross-reference those behaviors as indicators of trauma. But you will never be able to explain what makes an elephant leave a beloved tire behind on the grave of its best friend; or what finally makes a mother step away from her dead calf. That is the 2 percent of science that can’t be measured or explained. And yet that does not mean it doesn’t exist.

  “What else did Jenna say?” I ask.

  Slowly, Serenity takes a step toward me. “Lots of things. How you worked in Botswana. How you had sneakers that matched hers. How you took her into the elephant enclosures, and how angry it made her father. How she never stopped looking for you.”

  “I see,” I say, closing my eyes. “And did she also tell you I’m a murderer?”

  By the time Gideon and I reached the cottage, the front door was wide open, and Jenna was gone. I could not breathe; I could not think.

  I ran into Thomas’s office, thinking maybe he had the baby in there. But Thomas was alone, his head pillowed on his arms, a confetti of spilled pills and a half-empty bottle of whiskey on the desk beside him.

  My relief at seeing him passed out without my daughter nearby faded as I realized I still had no idea where Jenna was. Just like before: She had awakened, and found me missing. Her worst nightmare, now morphing into mine.

  Gideon was the one who had a plan; I could not think clearly. He radioed Nevvie, who was making the night rounds, and when she didn’t answer we split up to search. He headed for the Asian barn; I ran into the African enclosure. This was a déjà vu, so similar to the last time Jenna went missing that I was not surprised when I saw Nevvie standing just inside the African fence. Do you have the baby? I cried.

  It was pitch black, and the clouds moved across the moon, so that the little I could make out was silvered and erratic, like an old movie whose frames don’t quite fit together. But I noticed the way she froze when I said the word baby. The way her mouth curved into a smile as sharp as a blade. How does it feel, she asked, to lose your daughter?

  I looked around wildly, but it was too dark to see more than a few feet in front of me. Jenna! I screamed, but there was no answer.

  I grabbed Nevvie. Tell me what you did with her. I tried to shake the answers out of her. And the whole time, she just smiled and smiled.

  Nevvie was strong, but I finally got my hands around her throat. Tell me, I shouted at her. She gasped, twisted. If it was dangerous to walk in the enclosures in the day, because of the holes the elephants dug for water, then it was an absolute minefield at night—but I didn’t care. All I wanted were answers.

  We stumbled forward; we stumbled back. And then I tripped.

  Lying on the ground was Jenna’s small, bloody body.

  The sound that a heart makes, when it is breaking, is raw and ugly. And anguish, it’s a waterfall.

  How does it feel to lose your daughter?

  Rage poured through me, coursed through my body, lifting me as I lunged for Nevvie. You did this to her, I yelled, even as, silently, I thought: No. I did.

  Nevvie was stronger than me, fighting for her life. I was fighting for my child’s death. And then I was falling into an old water hole. I tried to grab on to Nevvie, to any
thing, before the world went black.

  The next part, I can’t remember. Although God knows I have tried every day for the past ten years.

  When I came to, it was still dark out, and my head was throbbing. Blood ran down my face and the back of my neck. I crawled out of the water hole I had pitched into, too dizzy to stand, getting my bearings on my hands and knees.

  Nevvie stared up at me, the top of her skull cracked open.

  And the body of my child, it was missing.

  I cried, backing away, shaking my head, trying to unsee the empty spot where Jenna had been. I scrambled to my feet and ran. I ran because I had lost my daughter, two times over. I ran because I could not remember if I had killed Nevvie Ruehl. I ran until the entire world turned upside down, and I woke up in the hospital.

  • • •

  “The nurse was the one who told me Nevvie was dead—and that Jenna was missing,” I say to Serenity, who is sitting on the swiveling desk chair while I perch on the edge of the bed. “I didn’t know what to do. I had seen my daughter’s body, but I couldn’t tell anyone that I’d seen it, because then they would have known I had killed Nevvie, and they would have arrested me. I thought maybe Gideon had found Jenna and moved her, but then he also would have seen that I’d killed Nevvie—and I didn’t know if he’d already called the police.”

  “But you didn’t kill her,” Serenity tells me. “The body was trampled.”

  “After.”

  “She could have fallen, like you did, and struck her head. And even if you’d been the one to make that happen, the police would have understood.”

  “Until they found out that I was sleeping with Gideon. And if I lied about that, I could be lying about everything.” I look down at my lap. “I panicked. It was stupid to run, but I did. I just wanted to clear my head, to think through what I should do. All I could see was how selfish I’d been, and what it had cost me: the baby. Gideon. Thomas. The sanctuary. Jenna.”

  Mom?

  I am staring past the face of Serenity Jones into the mirror behind the motel desk. But instead of seeing her pink updo, the hazy reflection is a messy auburn French braid.

  It’s me, she says.

  I draw in my breath. “Jenna?”

  Her voice leaps, triumphant. I knew it. I knew you were alive.

  That’s all it takes to make me admit what I ran from a decade ago, what made it possible to run in the first place. “I knew you weren’t,” I whisper.

  Why did you leave?

  Tears fill my eyes. “That night, on the ground, I saw your … I knew you were gone. I would never have left otherwise. I would have spent forever trying to find you. But it was too late. I couldn’t save you, so I tried to save myself.”

  I thought you didn’t love me.

  “I loved you.” I gasp. “So, so much. But not very well.”

  In the mirror behind the motel desk, behind the chair where Serenity is sitting, the image crystallizes. I see a tank top. The tiny gold hoops in her ears.

  I swivel the desk chair so that Serenity is facing the mirror.

  Her forehead is broad and her chin is pointed, like Thomas’s. She has the freckles that were the bane of my existence at Vassar. Her eyes are exactly the same shape as mine.

  She has grown up beautiful.

  Mom, she says. You loved me perfectly. You kept me here long enough to find you.

  Could it be as simple as that? Could love be not grand gestures or empty vows, not promises meant to be broken, but instead a paper trail of forgiveness? A line of crumbs made of memories, to lead you back to the person who was waiting?

  It wasn’t your fault.

  That is when I break down. I don’t think, until she speaks the words, that I knew how badly I needed to hear them.

  I can wait for you, my girl says.

  I meet her gaze in the mirror. “No,” I say. “You waited long enough. I love you, Jenna. I always have and I always will. Just because you leave someone doesn’t mean you ever let them go. Even when you couldn’t see me, you knew deep down I was still there. And even when I can’t see you,” I say, my voice breaking, “I’ll know that, too.”

  The minute I say this, I no longer see her face—just Serenity’s reflection, next to mine. She seems shocked, empty.

  But Serenity isn’t looking at me. She’s gazing at a vanishing point in the mirror, where Jenna is now walking, lanky and angular, all elbows and knees that she will never grow into. As she gets smaller and smaller, I realize that she’s not heading away from me but moving toward someone.

  I don’t recognize the man who is waiting for her. He has close-cropped hair and wears a blue flannel shirt. It’s not Gideon; I’ve never met this person before. But when he holds up a hand in greeting, Jenna waves back, excited.

  I do recognize the elephant standing beside him, however. Jenna stops in front of Maura, who wraps her trunk around my baby, giving her the embrace I can’t, before they all turn and walk away.

  I watch. I keep my eyes wide open, until I cannot see her anymore.

  JENNA

  Sometimes, I go back and visit her.

  I go during the in-between time, when it’s not night and it’s not morning. She always wakes up when I come. She tells me about the orphans who have arrived at the nursery. She talks about the speech she gave to the wildlife service last week. She tells me about a calf that has adopted a little dog as a friend, just like Syrah did with Gertie.

  I think of these as the bedtime stories I missed.

  My favorite is a true tale about a man from South Africa who was called the Elephant Whisperer. His real name was Lawrence Anthony, and, like my mother, he did not believe in giving up on elephants. When two particularly wild herds were going to be shot for the destruction they’d caused, he saved them and brought them to his game reserve to be rehabilitated.

  When Lawrence Anthony died, the two herds traveled through the Zululand bush for more than half a day and stood outside the wall that bordered his property. They had not been near the house in over a year. The elephants stayed for two days, silent, bearing witness.

  No one can explain how the elephants knew that Anthony had died.

  I know the answer.

  If you think about someone you’ve loved and lost, you are already with them.

  The rest is just details.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Although this book is fiction, the plight of elephants worldwide is, sadly, not. Poaching for the commercial ivory trade has been increasing, due to widespread poverty in Africa and the growing market for ivory in Asia. There are documented cases in Kenya, Cameroon, and Zimbabwe; in the Central African Republic; in Botswana and Tanzania; and in the Sudan. There’s a rumor that Joseph Kony funded his Ugandan resistance army with the illegal sale of ivory poached from the Democratic Republic of Congo. Most illegal shipments are sent across badly regulated borders to ports in Kenya and Nigeria, and shipped to Asian countries like Taiwan and Thailand and China. Although Chinese officials say that they have banned the trade of ivory products, Hong Kong authorities recently seized two shipments of illegal ivory from Tanzania whose value totaled more than $2 million. Not long before this writing, forty-one elephants were killed in Zimbabwe by poisoning their water hole with cyanide, netting $120,000 worth of ivory.

  You can tell that an elephant society is being poached when the population dynamic becomes skewed. At the age of fifty, the tusk of a male elephant will weigh more than seven times that of a female, so males are always the first targets. Then poachers come for the females. The matriarch is the largest, often with the heaviest tusks—and when matriarchs are killed, they are not the only casualties. You have to figure in the number of calves that are left behind. Joyce Poole and Iain Douglas-Hamilton are among the experts who have worked with elephants in the wild and who have dedicated themselves to stopping poaching and spreading awareness of the effects of the illegal ivory trade, including the disintegration of elephant society. Current estimates are that 38,000 elephant
s are being slaughtered each year in Africa. At this rate, elephants on that continent will all be gone in less than twenty years.

  Yet poaching is not the only threat to elephants. They are captured for sale to elephant-back safaris, zoos, and circuses. Back in the 1990s in South Africa, when the elephant population grew too high, there was systematic culling. Entire families were darted from helicopters with scoline, which paralyzed them but did not render them unconscious. So they were fully aware as humans landed on the ground and moved systematically through the herd, shooting each elephant behind the ear. Eventually the hunters realized that the calves would not leave their mothers’ bodies, so they were staked to the corpses while the hunters got them ready for translocation. Some were sold abroad to circuses and zoos.

  It is those elephants that are sometimes lucky enough to end their lives of captivity at places like The Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee. Although Thomas Metcalf’s New England Elephant Sanctuary is a fictional one, The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee is, fortunately, real. Moreover, the fictional elephants I created were all based on the true, heartbreaking stories of elephants from the Tennessee sanctuary. Like Syrah in this book, Tarra the elephant had a constant canine companion. Wanda’s real-life counterpart—Sissy—survived a flood. Lilly was based on Shirley, who endured a ship fire and an attack that left her with a badly broken hind leg, due to which she still moves awkwardly. Olive and Dionne, seen together throughout the book, are pseudonyms for the inseparable Misty and Dulary. Hester, the African elephant with an attitude, is based on Flora, who was orphaned in Zimbabwe as a result of mass culling. These ladies are the lucky ones—residents of only a handful of sanctuaries in the world dedicated to allowing elephants who have lived and worked in captivity to retire in peace. Their stories are only a tiny sample of those of countless elephants who are still being mistreated by circuses or kept in adverse conditions at zoos.