Leaving Time

by Jodi Picoult

  Beneath the customer service hotline number was a list of anagrams for the words Account Balance:

  Cabal cannot cue; banal ceca count, accentual bacon, cabala once cunt, canal beacon cut, cab unclean coat, lacuna ant bocce, nebula coca cant, a cab nuance clot, a cab cannot clue, a cable can count, a conceal can but, cabal can’t cue on, anal acne cub cot, ban ocean lac cut, cabal act once nu, actual can be con.

  The last words were circled so deeply that the paper had begun to disintegrate. “You see? It’s in code. Actual can be con.” Thomas’s eyes burned into mine as if he were explaining the meaning of life. “What you see is not what you believe.”

  I stepped toward him, until we were standing only inches apart. “Thomas,” I whispered, holding my palm up to his cheek. “Baby. You’re sick.”

  He grasped my hand, a lifeline. Until then I hadn’t realized how hard I was trembling. “Damn right I’m sick,” he muttered, squeezing so hard that I twisted in pain. “I’m sick of you doubting me.” He leaned so close that I could see the ring of orange around his pupils, and the pulse in his temple. “I am doing this for you,” he said, biting off each word, spitting them in my face.

  “I’m doing this for you, too,” I cried, and I ran out of the airless room and down the spiral stairs.

  Dartmouth College was sixty-five miles south. They had a state-of the-art hospital there. And it happened to have the closest inpatient psychiatric facility to Boone. I don’t know what made the psychiatrist agree to see me, considering I did not have an appointment and there was a waiting room full of people with equally pressing issues. All I could think, as I clutched Jenna against me and sat across from Dr. Thibodeau, was that the receptionist must have taken one look at me and thought I was feeding her a line. Husband, my ass, she probably thought, staring at my wrinkled uniform, my unwashed hair, my crying baby. She’s the one who’s in crisis.

  I had spent a half hour telling the doctor what I knew of Thomas’s history, and what I had seen last night. “I think the pressure’s broken him,” I said. Out loud, the words swelled like garish balloons. They took up all the space in the room.

  “It’s possible that what you’re describing are symptoms of mania,” the doctor said. “It’s part of bipolar illness—which we used to call manic-depressive disorder.” He smiled at me. “Being bipolar is like being forced to take LSD. It means your sensations and emotions and creativity are at their peak, but also that the highs are higher and the lows are lower. You know what they say—if a manic does something bizarre and it turns out to be right, he’s brilliant. If it turns out to be wrong, he’s crazy.” Dr. Thibodeau smiled at Jenna, who was gumming one of his paperweights. “The good news is, if that’s what’s actually going on with your husband, it’s treatable. The medications we put people on to control these mood swings bring them back to center. When Thomas realizes that he’s living not a reality but just a manic episode, he’s going to swing in the other direction and get very depressed, because he isn’t the man he thought he was.”

  That makes two of us, I thought.

  “Has your husband harmed you?”

  I thought of the moment he grabbed my hand, how I heard the crunch of bones and cried out. “No,” I said. I had betrayed Thomas enough; I would not do this, too.

  “Do you think he might?”

  I stared down at Jenna. “I don’t know.”

  “He needs to be evaluated by a psychiatrist. If it is bipolar disorder, he may need time in the hospital to be stabilized.”

  Hopeful, I glanced at the doctor. “So you can bring him here?”

  “No,” Dr. Thibodeau said. “Institutionalizing someone is a stripping of personal rights; we can’t take him by force unless he’s hurt you.”

  “Then what am I supposed to do?” I asked.

  The doctor met my gaze. “You’re going to have to convince him to come in voluntarily.”

  He gave me his card and told me to call him when I felt Thomas was ready to become an inpatient. During the drive back to Boone, I thought about what I could possibly say to convince Thomas to go to the hospital in Lebanon. I could tell him Jenna was sick, but then why wouldn’t we go to her pediatrician one town over? Even if I said I’d found him a donor or a neuroscientist interested in his experiment, it would only get him in the door. The minute we checked in at the psychiatric reception desk, he’d know what I was actually doing.

  I came to the conclusion that the only way to get Thomas to voluntarily check in to a psychiatric ward was to make him see, simply and honestly, that this was best for him. That I still loved him. That we were in this together.

  Fortified, I drove into the sanctuary, parked at the cottage, and carried a sleepy Jenna inside. I settled her on the couch and then went back to close the door I’d left ajar.

  When Thomas grabbed me from behind, I screamed. “You scared me,” I said, turning in his arms, trying to read his expression.

  “I thought you left me. I thought you took Jenna, and that you weren’t coming back.”

  I ran my hand through his hair. “No,” I swore. “I would never.”

  When he kissed me, it was with the desperation of a man who is trying to save himself. When he kissed me, I believed that Thomas was going to be fine. I believed that maybe I would never have to call Dr. Thibodeau, that this was the beginning of Thomas’s sway to center. I told myself that I could believe all of this, no matter how unfounded or unlikely, without realizing how much that made me like Thomas.

  There is something else about memory, something Thomas hadn’t brought up. It’s not a video recording. It’s subjective. It’s a culturally relevant account of what happened. It doesn’t matter if it’s accurate; it matters if it’s important in some way to you. If it teaches you something you need to learn.

  For a few months, it seemed as if life at the sanctuary was settling back to normal. Maura took extended walks away from her calf’s grave before returning to settle down there each night. Thomas began to work in his home office again, instead of constructing the observation deck. We left it locked and boarded up, like a ghost village. A grant he’d written for funding months ago came in unexpectedly, giving us a little breathing room for supplies and salaries.

  I began to compare my notes about Maura and her grief to those about the other elephant mothers I’d seen lose calves. I spent hours walking with Jenna, at a toddler’s pace; I pointed to wildflowers by color, to teach her new words. Thomas and I argued about whether it was safe for her, in the enclosures. I loved those arguments, for their simplicity. Their sanity.

  One lazy afternoon, when Grace was sitting for Jenna in the stagnant heat, I was doing a trunk wash in the Asian barn with Dionne. We trained the elephants in this behavior, so that we could test for TB: We’d fill a syringe with saline, flush it into a nostril, and get the elephant to lift her trunk as high as possible. Then we’d hold a gallonsize Ziploc bag over the trunk as she lowered it and the fluid drained out. The sample was collected in a container and sent off to the lab. Some elephants hated the process; Dionne was one of the easier ones. So perhaps my guard was down, and that’s why I didn’t notice Thomas suddenly striding into the barn. He grabbed me by the neck, dragging me away from the elephant so that she couldn’t reach us through the metal bars.

  “Who’s Thibodeau?” Thomas yelled, smacking my head against the steel so hard that my vision blurred.

  I honestly didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “Thi … bo … deau,” Thomas repeated. “You must know. His card was in your wallet.” His hand was a vise around my throat. My lungs felt like they were on fire. I clawed at his fingers, at his wrists. He pressed a small white rectangle close to my face. “Ring a bell?”

  I could barely see anything but stars at the edges of my vision. Still, somehow, I was able to make out the logo for the Dartmouth-Hitchcock hospital. The psychiatrist I’d seen, the one who had given me his card. “You want to lock me away,” Thomas accused. “You’re trying to steal my res
earch. You’ve probably already called NYU to take credit, but the joke’s on you, Alice, because you don’t have the code to dial in to the colloquium’s private conference line, and not knowing that flags you as an impostor—”

  Dionne was bellowing, crashing against the reinforced bars of the barn. I tried to explain; I tried to speak. Thomas slammed me harder against the steel, and my eyes rolled upward.

  Suddenly there was air, and light, and I was falling to the cement floor, gasping as my chest filled with fire. I rolled to my side to see Gideon punching Thomas so hard that his head arced backward and blood bloomed from his nose and mouth.

  I scrambled to my feet and ran out of the barn. I did not get very far before my legs gave out beneath me, but to my surprise I didn’t fall. I wound up caught in Gideon’s arms. He stared at my throat, touched a finger to the red necklace made by Thomas’s hands. He was so gentle, like silk over a scar, that something inside me snapped.

  I shoved at him. “I didn’t ask for your help!”

  He let go of me, surprised. I staggered away from him, avoiding the spot where I knew Grace had taken Jenna swimming, and made my way to the cottage. I went right to Thomas’s office, where he had been spending his time keeping the books and updating the files of the individual elephants. On his desk was a ledger we used to record all our income and expenses. I sat down and flipped through the first few pages, marking the deliveries of hay and the payments for veterinary care, the lab bills and the produce contract. Then I skipped to the end.

  C14H19NO4C18H16N6S2C16H21NO2C3H6N2O2C189H285N55O57S.C14H19NO4C18H16N6S2C16H21NO2C3H6N2O2C189H285N55O57S.C14H19NO4C18H16N6S2C16H21NO2C3H6N2O2C189H285N55O57S.

  I put my head down on the desk and cried.

  I wrapped a gauzy blue scarf around my neck and went to sit with Maura near the calf’s grave. I had been there for maybe an hour when Thomas approached, on foot. He stood on the other side of the fence, hands in his pockets. “I just wanted to tell you I’m going away for a while,” he said. “It’s somewhere I’ve been before. They can help me.”

  I didn’t look at him. “I think that’s a good idea.”

  “I left the contact information on the kitchen counter. But they won’t let you talk to me. It’s … part of the way they do things.”

  I did not think I’d need Thomas while he was gone. We had been running this sanctuary in his absence even when he had been on the premises.

  “Tell Jenna …” He shook his head. “Well. Don’t tell Jenna anything, except that I love her.” Thomas took a step forward. “I know it’s not worth much, but I’m sorry. I’m not … I’m not me right now. That’s not an excuse. But it’s all I have.”

  I didn’t watch him leave. I sat with my arms wrapped tight around my legs. Twenty feet away, Maura picked up a fallen branch with a paintbrush of pine needles at the end and began to sweep the ground in front of her.

  She did this for several minutes and then started to walk away from the grave. After moving a few yards, she turned and looked at me. Then she walked a bit, and paused, waiting.

  I got to my feet and followed.

  It was humid; my clothes stuck to my skin. I couldn’t speak; my throat hurt that bad. The ends of the scarf I wore moved like butterflies on my shoulders in the hot breath of the breeze. Maura moved slowly and deliberately, until she reached the hot-wire fence. In the distance on the far side, she stared longingly at the pond.

  I didn’t have tools or gloves. I didn’t have anything I needed to disable the electric fence. But I pried the box open with my fingernails and disengaged the batteries. I used all my strength to untie the makeshift gate I’d wired weeks before, even though the wire bit into my fingers and my hands grew slick with blood. Then I dragged the fence open, so that Maura could walk through.

  She did, but paused at the edge of the pond.

  We didn’t come all this way for nothing. “Let’s go,” I rasped, and I kicked off my shoes and waded into the water.

  It was cold and clear, deliciously fresh. My shirt and scarf stuck to my skin, and my shorts ballooned around my thighs. I ducked underwater, letting my hair fall out of its ponytail, and resurfaced, kicking to stay afloat. Then I flicked a handful of water at Maura.

  She took two steps back and then reached her trunk into the pond and sprayed a stream over my head like a rain shower.

  Her movement was so calculated, so unexpected—and so playful, after weeks of despair, that I laughed out loud. It didn’t sound like my voice. It was stripped and ragged, but it was joy.

  Maura gingerly waded into the pool, rolling to her left side and then to her right, tossing a spray of water over her back and then over me again. It reminded me of the herd I had taken Thomas to watch in the water hole in Botswana, back when I thought my life would be different than it had turned out to be. I watched Maura splash and roll, buoyed by the water, lighter than she’d been in a long time, and very slowly I let myself float, too.

  “She’s playing,” Gideon said, from the far bank. “That means she’s letting go.”

  I had not realized he was here; I had not known we were being watched. I owed Gideon an apology. I had not asked to be rescued, true, but that did not mean I didn’t need saving.

  I felt silly, unprofessional. Swimming across the pool, I left Maura to her own devices and emerged dripping, unsure of what to say. “I’m sorry,” I offered. “I shouldn’t have said what I said to you.”

  “How are you?” Gideon asked, concerned.

  “I’m …” I paused, because I didn’t know the answer. Relieved? Nervous? Scared? Then I smiled a little. “Wet.”

  Gideon grinned, taking my cue. He held out his empty hands. “I don’t have a towel.”

  “I didn’t know I would be swimming. Maura seemed to need a little encouragement.”

  He held my gaze. “Maybe she just needed to know someone was there for her.”

  I stared at him, until Maura sprayed us both with a fine mist. Gideon jumped away from the stream of cold water. But to me, it felt like a baptism. Like starting over.

  That night I called a staff meeting. I told Nevvie and Grace and Gideon that Thomas would be visiting investors abroad for a while and that we would have to run the sanctuary without him. I could tell none of them believed me, but they pitied me enough to pretend. I gave Jenna ice cream for dinner, just because, and put her to sleep in my bed.

  Then I went to the bathroom and unwound the scarf from my neck, where it had dried in wrinkles after my swim with Maura. There was a string of fingerprints, dark as South Sea pearls, ringing my throat.

  A bruise is how the body remembers it’s been wronged.

  Padding down the hall in the dark, I found the Post-it note that Thomas had left in the kitchen. MORGAN HOUSE, he had printed, in his linear, architectural handwriting. STOWE, VT. 802-555-6868.

  I picked up the phone and dialed. I didn’t need to talk to him, but I did want to know that he’d gotten there safely. That he was going to be all right.

  The number you have dialed is no longer in service. Please check the number and dial again.

  So I did. And then I went to the computer in Thomas’s office and looked up Morgan House on the Internet, only to find it listed as the name of a professional poker player in Vegas, and a halfway home for pregnant teens in Utah. There was no inpatient facility anywhere by that name.

  VIRGIL

  We’re going to miss the goddamned flight.

  Serenity booked the tickets by phone. They cost as much as my rent. (When I told her that there was no way I could afford to pay her right now, Serenity just waved away my embarrassed concern. Sugar, she said, that is why God created credit cards.) Then we drove eighty-five miles per hour down the highway to the airport, because the flight to Tennessee left in an hour. Since we didn’t have luggage, we raced to the automatic ticket machines, hoping to avoid the line of people checking baggage. Serenity’s ticket spit out, no problem, with a free drink coupon. When I entered my confirmation code, though, I got a
flashing message: SEE TICKET AGENT.

  “Are you shitting me?” I mutter, looking at the line. On the loudspeaker, I hear flight 5660 to Nashville being announced, leaving from Gate 12.

  Serenity looks at the escalator that leads to the TSA checkpoint. “There’ll be another flight eventually,” she says.

  But by then, who knows where Jenna will be, and if she’ll have gotten to Gideon first. And if Jenna’s come to the same conclusion I have—that Gideon could have been responsible for her mother’s disappearance, and possible death—who knows what he’ll do to keep her from telling the rest of the world what he did.

  “Get on that flight,” I say. “Even if I don’t make it. It’s going to be just as important to find Jenna as it is to find Gideon, because if she finds him first, it could be bad.”

  Serenity must hear the urgency in my voice, because she nearly flies up the escalator and is swallowed by the queue of sullen travelers removing their shoes and belts and laptops.

  The line for the ticket counter is not getting any shorter. I shift from foot to foot, impatient. I check my watch. Then I tear away from the pack like a tiger that’s been unleashed and cut to the front of the line. “Excuse me,” I say. “I’m about to miss my flight.”

  I’m expecting outrage, shock, swearing. I even have a ready excuse about my wife being in labor. But before anyone can complain, an airline employee intercepts me. “You can’t do that, sir.”

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her. “But my flight’s leaving right now—”

  She looks like she’s well past the age for mandatory retirement, and sure enough, she says, “I’ve been working here since probably before you were born. So I can tell you unequivocally: Rules are rules.”

  “Please. It’s an emergency.”

  She looks me in the eye. “You don’t belong here.”

  Beside me, the next guy in line is summoned to an agent. I consider tackling him and taking his place. But instead, I look at the old woman, the lie about my pregnant wife caught between my teeth. Yet I hear myself say, “You’re right. I don’t. But I’m trying like hell to get there because someone I care about is in trouble.”