Leaving Time

by Jodi Picoult

  I gasped. “Thomas! She’s walking!”

  His face was buried in the curve of my neck. His hand covered my breast.

  “Thomas,” I said, shoving him away. “Look.”

  He backed off, annoyed. His eyes were nearly black behind his glasses, and even though he didn’t say anything, I could hear him clearly: How dare you? But then Jenna tumbled into his lap, and he scooped her up and kissed her forehead and each cheek. “What a big girl,” he said, as Jenna babbled against his shoulder. He set her down on the ground, pointing her in my direction. “Was it a fluke or a new skill?” he asked. “Should we run the experiment again?”

  I laughed. “This girl is doomed, having two scientists as parents.” I held out my arms. “Come back to me,” I coaxed.

  I was speaking to my daughter. But I might as well have been pleading to Thomas as well.

  A few days later, when I was helping Grace prepare meals for the Asian elephants, I asked her if she ever argued with Gideon.

  “Why?” she said, suddenly guarded.

  “It just seems like you get along so well,” I replied. “It’s a little daunting.”

  Grace relaxed. “He doesn’t put the toilet seat down. Drives me crazy.”

  “If that’s his only flaw, I’d say you’re incredibly lucky.” I raised a cleaver, chopping a melon in half, focusing my attention on the juice that bled out of it. “Does he ever keep secrets from you?”

  “Like what he’s getting me for my birthday?” She shrugged. “Sure.”

  “I don’t mean those kinds of secrets. I mean the kind that make you think he’s hiding something.” I put down the knife and looked her in the eye. “The night the calf died … you saw Thomas in his office, didn’t you?”

  We had never talked about it. But I knew Grace must have seen him, rocking back and forth in his chair, his eyes empty, his hands shaking. I knew that was why she had refused to leave Jenna alone with him.

  Grace’s gaze slid away from mine. “Everyone’s got their demons,” she murmured.

  I knew, from the way she said it, that this was not the first time she had seen Thomas that way. “It’s happened before?”

  “He always bounces back.”

  Was I the only person at the sanctuary who didn’t know? “He told me it was just once—after his parents died,” I said, my face hot. “I thought marriage was a partnership, you know? For better or for worse. In sickness and in health. Why would he lie to me?”

  “Keeping a secret isn’t always lying. Sometimes it’s the only way to protect the person you love.”

  I scoffed. “You only say that because you haven’t been on the receiving end.”

  “No,” Grace said softly. “But I’ve been the one who keeps the secret.” She began to shovel peanut butter into the empty bellies of the halved melons, her hands quick and practiced. “I love taking care of your daughter,” she added, a non sequitur.

  “I know. I’m grateful.”

  “I love taking care of your daughter,” Grace repeated, “because I’m never going to have one of my own.”

  I looked at her, and in that moment, she reminded me of Maura—there was a shadow in her eyes that I’d noticed before, that I’d chalked up to youth and insecurity, but that actually may have been the loss of something she never really had. “You’re still young,” I said.

  Grace shook her head. “I have PCOS,” she clarified. “It’s a hormone thing.”

  “You could get a surrogate. You could adopt. Have you talked to Gideon about the alternatives?” She just stared at me, and I understood: Gideon didn’t know. This was the secret she had been keeping from him.

  Suddenly Grace grabbed my arm, so tightly that it hurt. “You won’t tell?”

  “No,” I promised.

  She settled, picking up her knife again to start cutting. We worked in silence for a few moments, and then Grace spoke again. “It’s not that he doesn’t love you enough to tell you the truth,” she said. “It’s that he loves you too much to risk it.”

  That night, after Thomas slipped into the cottage after midnight, I pretended to be asleep when he poked his head into the bedroom. I waited until I heard the shower running, and then I got out of bed and walked out of the cottage, careful not to wake Jenna. In the dark, as my eyes adjusted, I ran past Grace and Gideon’s cottage, where the lights were off. I thought of them twined together in bed, with an infinitesimal space between them at every point they touched.

  The spiral staircase was painted black, and I banged my shin against it before I realized I had already reached the far edge of the African barn. Moving silently—I didn’t want to wake the elephants and have them send out an inadvertent alert—I crept up the stairs, biting my lip against the pain. At the top, the door was locked, but one master key opened everything at the sanctuary, so I knew I’d be able to get inside.

  The first thing I noticed was that, as Thomas had said, the moonlit view was remarkable. Although Thomas hadn’t installed the plate-glass windows, he had cut out rough openings and covered them with a sheet of clear plastic. Through them, I could see every acre of the sanctuary, illuminated by the grace of the full moon. I could easily imagine a viewing platform, an observatory, a way for the public to see the amazing animals we sheltered without us having to disturb their natural habitat or make them part of a display, like they’d been in zoos and circuses.

  Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe Thomas was just trying to do what he’d said: save his business. I turned, feeling along the wall until I could locate the light switch. The room flooded, so bright that for a moment I couldn’t see.

  The space was empty. There was no furniture, no boxes, no tools, not even a stick of wood. The walls had been painted a blinding white, along with the ceiling and the floor. But scrawled on every inch were letters and numbers, written over and over in a looping code.

  C14H19NO4C18H16N6S2C16H21NO2C3H6N2O2C189H285N55O57S.

  It was like walking into a church and finding occult symbols written in blood on the walls. My breath caught in my throat. The room was closing in on me, the numbers shimmering and blending into each other. I realized, as I sank down onto the floor, this was because I was crying.

  Thomas was sick.

  Thomas needed help.

  And although I was not a psychiatrist, although I didn’t have experience with any of this, it did not look like depression to me.

  It just looked … crazy.

  I stood up and backed out of the room, keeping the door unlocked. I didn’t have much time. But instead of going to our cottage, I went to the one shared by Gideon and Grace and knocked on the door. Grace answered wearing a man’s T-shirt, her hair tousled. “Alice?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  My husband is mentally ill. This sanctuary is dying. Maura lost her calf.

  You pick.

  “Is Gideon here?” I asked, when I knew that he was. Not everyone had a husband who sneaked off in the middle of the night to write gibberish on the ceiling and floor and walls of an empty room.

  He came to the door in a pair of shorts, his torso bare, a shirt in hand. “I need your help,” I said.

  “One of the elephants? Is something wrong?”

  I didn’t answer, just turned on my heel and started to walk toward the African barn again. Gideon fell into step beside me, pulling the T-shirt over his head. “Which girl is it?”

  “The elephants are fine,” I said, my voice shaking. We had reached the base of the spiral staircase. “I need you to do something, and I need you to not ask me any questions. Can you handle that?”

  Gideon took one look at my face and nodded.

  I climbed as if I were headed to my own execution. In retrospect, maybe I was. Maybe this was the first step to a long and fatal fall. I opened the door so that Gideon could see the interior.

  “Holy shit,” he breathed. “What is this?”

  “I don’t know. But you have to paint over it before morning.” Just like that, the threads of self-restraint snapped,
and I doubled over, unable to breathe, unable to stem the tears anymore. Gideon immediately reached for me, but I backed away. “Hurry,” I choked out, and I ran down the stairs, back to my cottage, where I found Thomas just opening the door of the bathroom, a cloud of steam haloing his body.

  “Did I wake you?” he asked, and he smiled, that crooked smile that had made me hang on his words in Africa, that I saw whenever I closed my eyes.

  If I had any chance of saving Thomas from himself, then I had to make him believe I wasn’t the enemy. I had to make him believe that I believed in him. So I pasted what I hoped was a similar smile on my face. “I thought I heard Jenna cry.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “Fast asleep,” I told Thomas, swallowing around the wishbone of truth caught in my throat. “It must have been a nightmare.”

  I had lied to Gideon when he asked what was written on the wall. I did know.

  It wasn’t a random string of letters and numbers. It was chemical formulas for drugs: anisomycin, U0126, propanolol, D-cycloserine, and neuropeptide Y. I had written about them in an earlier paper, when I was trying to find links between elephant memory and cognition. These were compounds that—if given quickly after a trauma—interacted with the amygdala to keep a memory from being coded as painful or upsetting. Using rats, scientists had successfully been able to eliminate the stress and fear caused by certain memories.

  You can imagine the implications for that—and recently, some medical professionals had. Controversies had sprung up around hospitals that wanted to administer drugs like this to rape victims. Beyond the practical issue of whether or not the blocked memory actually would stay blocked forever, there was a moral issue: Could a traumatized victim actually give permission to be given the drug, if by definition she was traumatized and unable to think clearly?

  What had Thomas been doing with my paper, and how did it tie in to plans to raise money for the sanctuary? But then, maybe it didn’t. If Thomas truly had snapped, he might see relevance in the clues of a crossword puzzle; he might see meaning in the weatherman’s forecast. He would be constructing a reality full of causal links that were, to the rest of us, unrelated.

  It had been a long time, but the conclusion of my paper was that there was a reason the brain had evolved in a way that allowed a memory to be red-flagged. If memories protected us from future dangerous situations, was it in our best interests to chemically forget them?

  Would I ever unsee that room, looped with the graffiti of chemical formulas? No, not even after Gideon had painted it white again. And maybe that was for the best, because it reminded me that the man I thought I had fallen in love with was not the one who came into the kitchen this morning, whistling.

  I had plans. I wanted to get Thomas help. But no sooner had he left for the observation deck than Nevvie showed up with Grace. “I need your help moving Hester,” Nevvie said, and I remembered that I’d promised her we could try to put the two African elephants together today.

  I could have postponed it, but then Nevvie would have asked why. And I didn’t feel like talking about last night.

  Grace held out her arms for Jenna, and I thought about our conversation yesterday. “Did Gideon—” I began.

  “He finished,” she said, and that was all I needed to know.

  I followed Nevvie out to the African enclosures, peeking at the upstairs level of the barn, with its sheet of plastic and the overpowering smell of fresh paint. Was Thomas in there, even now? Was he angry, to find his handiwork destroyed? Devastated? Indifferent?

  Did he suspect me of doing it?

  “Where are you today?” Nevvie asked. “I asked you a question.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t sleep well last night.”

  “Do you want to take down the fence or drive her forward?”

  “I’ll get the gate,” I said.

  We had built a hot-wire fence to separate Hester from Maura when we realized Maura was pregnant. To tell the truth, if either elephant had wanted to get to the other side, she could have easily torn it down. But these two had not been together long enough to bond before they were separated. They were acquaintances, not friends. They had no great affection for each other yet. Which is why I didn’t think Nevvie’s idea was going to work.

  In Tswana, there is a saying: Go o ra motho, ga go lelwe. Where there is support, there is no grief. You see this in the wild, when elephants mourn the death of a herd member. After a while, a few elephants will peel off to go to a watering hole. Others will investigate the brush for sustenance. It comes down to one or two elephants left behind—usually the daughters or young sons of the fallen elephant—who are reluctant to resume their daily lives. But the herd always comes back for them. It may be en masse, it may be just an emissary or two. They vocalize with “let’s go” rumbles and angle their bodies to encourage the mourning elephants to join them. Eventually, they all do. But Hester was not Maura’s cousin or sister. She was just another elephant. Maura had no incentive to listen to her, no more than I might have followed a complete stranger who walked up to me and suggested we go to lunch.

  While Nevvie drove off in the ATV in search of Hester, I disconnected the fence controller and unwound the wire, creating an open gate. I waited until I heard the engine revving and spotted the elephant following Nevvie placidly. She was a sucker for watermelon, and there was a whole one on the ATV for her that would be placed closer to Maura.

  I hopped on the vehicle as we drove to the site of the calf’s grave, where Maura still stood, her shoulders sloped and her trunk dragging on the ground. Nevvie cut the engine, and I hopped off, setting the food for Hester a distance away from Maura. We had brought a treat for Maura, too, but unlike Hester, she did not touch hers.

  Hester speared the watermelon on her tusk and let the juice drip into her mouth. Then she curled her trunk around the melon, plucked it from the ivory skewer, and crushed it between her jaws.

  Maura didn’t acknowledge her presence, but I could see her spine stiffen at the sound made by Hester’s crunching. “Nevvie,” I said quietly, climbing onto the ATV again. “Turn on the engine.”

  Lightning fast, Maura pivoted and thundered toward Hester, her head shaking and her ears flapping. Dirt chuffed, a cloud of intimidation. Hester squealed and threw back her trunk, just as willing to stand her ground.

  “Go,” I said, and Nevvie angled the ATV so that Hester was headed off before she could get close to Maura. Maura didn’t even turn toward us as we shepherded Hester away, to the other side of the hot-wire fence. She faced the raw, dark grave of the calf, which stretched like a yawn across the earth.

  Sweating, my heart still pounding from the confrontation, I let Nevvie lead Hester deeper into the African enclosure while I reaffixed the wire joints, crimped them closed, and reattached the battery clamps. Nevvie drove up again a few minutes later, as I was finishing.

  “Well,” I said. “I told you so.”

  I took advantage of the fact that Grace was still watching Jenna and stopped off at the African barn to talk to Thomas. Climbing the spiral staircase, I heard no sound from inside the space. It made me wonder if Thomas had found the whitewashed walls and if that had been enough to snap him back to equilibrium. But when I reached the door, the knob turned in my hand and I stepped into the room to find one wall entirely covered with the same symbols I’d seen last night, and another wall half finished. Thomas stood on a chair, writing so furiously I thought the plaster might burst into flame. I felt as if my skeleton had turned to stone. “Thomas,” I said. “I think we need to talk.”

  He glanced over his shoulder, so absorbed in his work that he hadn’t even heard me come in. He didn’t seem embarrassed, or surprised. Just disappointed. “It was going to be a surprise,” he said. “I was doing it for you.”

  “Doing what?”

  He stepped off the chair. “It’s called molecular consolidation theory. It’s been proven that memories stay in an elastic state before they are chemically encoded by the brain. Di
sturb that process, and you can alter the way the memory is recalled. To date, the only scientific successes have occurred when the inhibitors are given immediately after the trauma. But let’s say the trauma’s already past. What if we could regress the mind back to that moment, and give the drug. Would the trauma be forgotten?”

  I stared at him, completely lost. “That’s not possible.”

  “It is if you can go back in time.”

  “What?”

  He rolled his eyes. “I’m not building a TARDIS, a time machine,” Thomas said. “That would be insane.”

  “Insane,” I repeated, the word breaking on the jetty of a sob.

  “It’s not literal bending of the fourth dimension. But you can alter perception for an individual, so that time is effectively reversed. You take them back to the stress, through an altered consciousness, and have them reexperience the emotional trauma long enough for the drug to do its job. And here’s the part that’s a surprise for you. Maura, she’s going to be the subject.”

  At the sound of the elephant’s name, my gaze snapped to his. “You aren’t touching Maura.”

  “Not even if I can fix her? If I can make her forget her calf’s death?”

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t work that way, Thomas—”

  “But what if it did? What if there were implications for humans? Imagine the work that could be done with veterans who suffer from PTSD. Imagine if the sanctuary cemented its name as a critical research facility. We could get seed money from the Center for Neural Science at NYU. And if they agree to partner with me, the media attention could bring in investors to offset the loss of revenue the calf had been projected to bring in. I could win a Nobel.”

  I swallowed. “What makes you think you can regress a mind?”

  “I was told I could.”

  “By whom?”

  He reached into his back pocket and took out a piece of paper with the letterhead of the sanctuary at the top. Written on it was a phone number I recognized. I had called it last week, when my credit card was declined at Gordon’s.

  Welcome to Citibank MasterCard.