Leaving Time

by Jodi Picoult

  I slide an arm around her. “It’s no small feat, finishing a journey,” I tell her. “But no one ever mentions that once you get there, you still have to turn around and head all the way home.”

  Jenna dashes her hand across her eyes. “If it turns out Virgil is right, I want to see my dad before he goes to jail.”

  “We don’t know that he’ll—”

  “It wasn’t his fault. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

  She says this with such conviction that I realize it isn’t necessarily what she believes. Just what she needs to.

  I pull her closer and let her cry for a little while against my shoulder. “Serenity,” Jenna asks, her voice muffled against my shirt. “Will you let me talk to her whenever I need to?”

  There’s a reason people are dead. Back when I could be a medium, I’d only do two spirit communications at most for a client. I wanted to help people through their grief, not be 1-800-Dial-the-Dead.

  When I was good at this, when I had Lucinda and Desmond to protect me from the spirits that needed me to do their bidding, I knew how to put up walls. That’s what kept me from being awakened in the middle of the night by a conga line of spirits who needed to get a message to the living. It let me use my Gift on my terms instead of theirs.

  Now, though, I would trade my privacy if it meant that I could connect with spirits again. I would never do a fake reading for Jenna—she deserves better than that—so there’s no way I could possibly give her what she wants.

  But all the same, I look her in the eye and say, “Of course.”

  • • •

  Suffice it to say that the trip home is long, hellish, and silent. We wouldn’t be able to get on a plane without permission from Jenna’s guardian, because she’s a minor, and so we wind up driving through the night. I listen to the radio to keep myself awake, and then Virgil starts talking, somewhere around the Maryland border. He glances back first, to make sure Jenna is still fast asleep.

  “Say she’s dead,” Virgil says. “What do I do?”

  It’s a surprise conversation starter. “You mean Alice?”

  “Yeah.”

  I hesitate. “I guess you figure out for sure who did it, and you go after them.”

  “I’m not a cop, Serenity. And now it turns out that I probably never should have been.” He shakes his head. “All this time I thought it was Donny who fucked up. But it turns out it was me.”

  I glance at him.

  “I mean, it was a clusterfuck at the sanctuary that day. No one knew how to secure a crime scene when there were wild animals roaming around. Thomas Metcalf was off his gourd, although we didn’t know it at first. There were missing people who hadn’t been reported as missing. One of them was an adult female. That’s all I was looking for. So I made an assumption, when I found an unconscious body that was dirty and covered with blood. I told the paramedics that it was Alice, and they took her off to the hospital and admitted her under that name.” He turns, looking out the window, so that his profile is traced by the passing headlights of other cars. “She didn’t have ID. I should have followed up. Why can’t I remember what she looked like when I saw her? Was the hair blond or red? Why didn’t I pay attention?”

  “Because you were focused on getting her medical attention,” I say. “Don’t beat yourself up. You didn’t try to mislead anyone,” I point out, thinking of my own recent career as a swamp witch.

  “That,” he says, “is where you’re wrong.” He turns to me. “I buried evidence. That red hair that was found on Nevvie’s body? When I saw it in the ME’s report, I didn’t know it belonged to Alice—but I did know it meant the case was more than an accidental death. Still, I let my partner convince me that the public just wanted to feel safe, that a trampling was bad enough, but a murder would be even worse. So I made that page of the ME’s report disappear, and just like Donny had said—I became a hero. I was the youngest guy to get promoted to detective, did you know that?” He shakes his head.

  “What did you do with the page?”

  “I put it in my pocket the morning of my detective ceremony. And then I got into my car and drove over a cliff.”

  I jam on the brakes. “You did what?”

  “First responders thought I was a goner. I guess I flatlined, but apparently I managed to fuck that up, too. Because I woke up in rehab, with a shitload of OxyContin in my veins, and enough pain to kill ten men who were way stronger than me. Needless to say, I didn’t go back to the job. IA doesn’t look too kindly on guys who have a death wish.” He looks at me. “So now you know who I really am. I couldn’t stand the thought of pretending to be the good guy for the next twenty years, when I knew I wasn’t one. At least now when I tell people I’m an alcoholic loser, I’m not lying to them.”

  I think of Jenna, hiring a fraud of a psychic and an investigator with secrets of his own. I think of all the mounting evidence that Alice Metcalf is the body that was recovered from the sanctuary ten years ago, and how not once was I able to sense that.

  “I have to tell you something, too,” I confess. “Remember how you kept asking me if I could communicate with Alice Metcalf’s spirit? And I said no, which probably meant she wasn’t dead?”

  “Yeah. Guess your Gift might need recalibrating.”

  “It needs more than that. I haven’t had a syllable of psychic communication since I gave Senator McCoy the wrong information about his son. I am used up. Done. Dry. This stick shift has more paranormal talent than I do.”

  Virgil starts to laugh. “You’re telling me you are a hack?”

  “It’s worse. Because I wasn’t always.” I look at him. There is a green mask around his eyes, a reflection from the mirror, as if he is some kind of superman. But he isn’t. He’s flawed, and scarred, and battle-weary, just like me. Just like all of us.

  Jenna lost her mother. I lost my credibility. Virgil lost his faith. We’ve all got missing pieces. But for a little while, I believed that, together, we might be whole.

  We cross into Delaware. “I don’t think she could have picked two worse people to help her if she tried.” I sigh.

  “That’s all the more reason,” Virgil says, “to make it right.”

  ALICE

  I did not go to Georgia for Grace’s funeral.

  She was buried in a family plot beside her father. Gideon went, and Nevvie, of course—but the reality of running an animal sanctuary meant someone had to stay behind to take care of the animals, no matter how pressing the reason to leave. In the horrible week that it had taken for Grace’s body to wash ashore—a week when Gideon and Nevvie still held out hope that she was alive somewhere—we had all been pitching in to cover for her. Thomas would interview for a new caregiver, but that wasn’t a hire that could be made quickly. And now, with our staff below half capacity, it meant that Thomas and I were working round the clock.

  When Thomas told me that Gideon had come back to the sanctuary after the funeral, I was not presumptuous enough to believe that he had returned because of me. I did not know, really, what to expect. We’d had a year of secrets, a year of bliss. What had happened to Grace was the punishment, the payment due.

  Except nothing had happened to Grace. Grace had been the one to make it happen.

  I did not want to think about that, so instead I buried myself in cleaning the barns until the floors were sparkling, in creating new enrichment toys for the Asian elephants. I cut back the brush that had begun to overgrow the fence at the north end of the African enclosure. That would have been Gideon’s job, I thought, even as I wielded the hedge trimmers. I kept myself moving, so that I could not think about anything except the task in front of me.

  I did not see Gideon until the next morning, when he was driving an ATV with a load of hay into the same barn where I was making medicine balls out of apples for that day’s feeding. I dropped the knife and ran to the doorway, my hand raised to call him closer, but at the last minute I stepped back into the shadows.

  Really, what could I pos
sibly say to him?

  I watched for a few minutes as he unloaded the hay, his arms flexing as he stacked the bales into a pyramid. Finally, gathering my courage, I stepped out into the sunshine.

  He paused, then set down the bale he had been holding. “Syrah’s limping again,” I said. “If you get a chance, can you take a look?”

  He nodded, not meeting my gaze. “What else do you need me to do?”

  “The air conditioner in the office is broken. But it’s not a priority.” I crossed my arms tightly. “I’m so sorry, Gideon.”

  Gideon kicked the hay, creating a haze of dust between us. He looked at me for the first time since I’d approached. His eyes were so bloodshot that it looked as if something had burst inside him. I thought maybe it was shame.

  I reached out, but he ducked so that my fingers only grazed him. Then he turned his back on me and grabbed another bale of hay.

  I blinked at the sun in my eyes as I returned to the kitchen in the barn. To my shock, Nevvie stood in the spot I’d been minutes before, using a spoon to scoop peanut butter into the apples I had cored.

  Neither Thomas nor I had expected Nevvie to return anytime soon. After all, she had just buried her child. “Nevvie … you’re back?”

  She did not look up at me as she worked. “Where else would I be?” she said.

  • • •

  A few days later, I lost my own daughter.

  We were in the cottage, and Jenna was crying because she did not want to lie down and rest. Lately, she had been afraid to fall asleep. Instead of a nap, Jenna called it the Leaving Time. She was certain that if she closed her eyes, I would not be here again when she opened them, and no matter what I did or said to convince her otherwise, she sobbed and fought her exhaustion until her body triumphed over her will.

  I tried singing to her, rocking her. I folded dollar bills into origami elephants, which usually distracted her enough to stop the crying. She finally drifted off the only way she could these days—with my body curled around hers like a snail’s shell, a protective home. I had just extricated myself from that position when Gideon knocked at the door. He needed help erecting a hot-wire fence so that he could regrade parts of the African enclosure. The elephants liked to dig for fresh water, but the holes they created were dangerous to the elephants themselves and to us on our ATVs and on foot. You could fall into one and snap your leg or strike your head; you could break an axle on your vehicle.

  Hot wire was a two-person job, particularly with the African elephants. One of us would have to string the fence while the other pushed the animals back with a vehicle. I was reluctant to go with him for two reasons: I didn’t want Jenna to wake up and have her worst fear—that I was indeed gone—realized, and I didn’t know where my relationship with Gideon stood right now. “Get Thomas,” I suggested.

  “He went into town,” Gideon said. “And Nevvie’s doing a trunk wash on Syrah.”

  I looked at my daughter, fast asleep on the couch. I could have awakened her and taken her with me, but it had taken so long to get her to sleep, and Thomas—if he found out—would have been furious, as usual. Or I could have given Gideon twenty minutes of my time, tops, and returned before Jenna roused.

  I chose the latter, and it took only fifteen minutes—that’s how fast and how smoothly we worked in tandem. Our synchronicity made my heart hurt; I had so much I wanted to say to him.

  “Gideon,” I said, as we finished. “What can I do?”

  His gaze slid away. “Do you miss her?”

  “Yes,” I whispered. “Of course I do.”

  His nostrils flared, and his jaw seemed made of stone. “That’s why we can’t do this anymore,” he muttered.

  I could not breathe. “Because I’m sorry Grace is gone?”

  His shook his head. “No,” he said. “Because I’m not.”

  His mouth contorted, twisted around a sob, and he fell to his knees. He buried his face against my stomach.

  I kissed the crown of Gideon’s head and wrapped my arms around him. I held him so tightly that he could not fall apart.

  Ten minutes later, I raced back to the cottage on the ATV to find the front door was open. Maybe I had forgotten to close it, in my haste. That’s what I was thinking, anyway, when I walked inside and realized Jenna was gone.

  “Thomas,” I yelled, racing outside again. “Thomas!”

  He had to have her; he had to have her. This was my prayer, my litany. I thought about the moment she had awakened and found me missing. Had she cried? Panicked? Gone to find me?

  I had been so sure I’d taught her about safety, that she was capable of learning, that Thomas was wrong about her getting hurt. But now I looked at the enclosures, at the gaps in the railing that a toddler could so easily crawl through. Jenna was three now. She knew her way. What if she’d wandered out the door and through the fencing?

  I radioed for Gideon, who came immediately when he heard the terror in my voice. “Check the barns,” I begged. “Check the enclosures.”

  I knew that these elephants had worked with humans in zoos and circuses, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t charge someone who invaded their domain. I also knew that elephants preferred the lower voices of males—I always tried to make my voice huskier when I spoke to them. Since high-pitched voices are nervous voices, elephants associate female pitches with anxiety. And a child’s voice would fall into that category.

  I knew a man once who owned property high up in the game reserve, who had gone bushwhacking with his two little girls and found himself surrounded by a wild elephant herd. He told his daughters to roll themselves up in a ball and be as small as possible. No matter what happens, he said, do not lift your head. Two large females came forward to smell the girls and pushed against them a little bit, but they did not injure a hair on the head of either child.

  But I would not be there to tell Jenna to get into a tiny ball. And she would be fearless, because she’d seen me interact with the elephants.

  I drove the ATV into the closest enclosure, the African one, because I did not think Jenna could have gotten too far. I raced past the barn and the pond and the high spot where the elephants sometimes went in the cool mornings. I stood at the top of the highest ridge and took out my binoculars and tried to spot movement as far as my eye could see.

  I spent twenty minutes driving around, tears in my eyes, wondering how I would explain to Thomas that our daughter was missing—and then Gideon’s voice crackled on the radio. “I’ve got her,” he said.

  He told me to meet him at the cottage, and there I found my baby on Nevvie’s lap, sucking on a Popsicle, all sticky palms and cherry lips. “Mama,” Jenna said, holding it out to me. “I scream.”

  But I couldn’t look at her. I was too busy focusing on Nevvie, who seemed oblivious to the fact that I was so angry I was shaking. Nevvie’s hand rested on my daughter’s head like a blessing. “Someone woke up crying,” she said. “Looking for you.”

  It was not an excuse. It was an explanation. If anything, I was the one to blame, because I had left my baby alone.

  Suddenly I knew I wouldn’t yell, and I wouldn’t reprimand Nevvie for taking my daughter away without asking me first.

  Jenna had needed a mother, and I hadn’t been there. Nevvie had needed a child, so that she could still parent someone.

  At the time, it seemed a match made in Heaven.

  The strangest behavior I have ever witnessed among elephants happened in the Tuli Block, on the bank of a dry riverbed during a prolonged drought, in an area where many different animals passed. The night before, lions had been sighted. That morning, there was a leopard on the bank above. But the predators had gone, and an elephant named Marea had given birth.

  It was a normal birth—the herd protected her during labor by facing outward; they trumpeted in ecstasy when the calf arrived; and Marea managed to get him up on his feet by balancing him against her leg. She dusted him and introduced him to the herd, each family member touching the baby and checkin
g in.

  All of a sudden an elephant named Thato began to walk up the length of the dry riverbed. Now, she was an acquaintance of this herd, but not a member of it. I have no idea what she was doing alone, away from the rest of her own family. As she came by the newborn calf, she wrapped her trunk around his neck and began to lift him.

  We see all the time how a mother might try to lift her newborn to get him moving, by sliding her trunk beneath his belly or between his legs. But it is not normal to pick a calf up by the neck. No mother would do that intentionally. The little calf was slipping out of the grasp of Thato’s trunk as she walked away. The more he slipped, the higher she lifted, trying to keep that baby in her grip. Finally he fell, slamming hard to the ground.

  That was the catalyst that spurred the herd to action. There was rumbling and trumpeting and chaos, and the family members touched the newborn to make sure he was all right, to prove that in fact he had not been hurt. Marea gathered him close and pulled him between her legs.

  There was so much about this situation I did not understand. I’d seen elephants pick up babies when they were in the water, to keep them from drowning. I’d seen elephants lift babies that were lying down to get them to stand on their feet. But I had never seen an elephant try to carry off a calf, like a lioness with a cub.

  I didn’t know what made Thato think she could get away with kidnapping another’s calf. I didn’t know if that was her intent, or if she scented the lion and the leopard and felt he was in danger.

  I didn’t know why the herd did not react when Thato tried to take the calf. She was older than Marea, for sure, but she was not a member of the family.

  We named that baby Molatlhegi. In Tswana, it means, “the lost one.”

  The night after I almost lost Jenna, I had a nightmare. In my dream, I was sitting near the spot where Molatlhegi had nearly been taken by Thato. As I watched, the elephants moved to higher ground, and water began to trickle down the dry throat of the riverbed. The water gurgled, running deeper and faster, until it splashed over my feet. On the far side of the river I saw Grace Cartwright. She stepped into the water fully clothed. She reached down to the riverbed, picked up a smooth stone, and tucked it into her shirt. She did this over and over, filling her pants, her coat pockets, until she could barely bend and stand again.