Leaving Time

by Jodi Picoult

  I shake my head. I just needed to see them with my own eyes.

  I thank her and walk back to my car again. I start driving aimlessly, because really, I have no idea where I go from here.

  I think about the airline passenger en route to Tennessee, who buried his nose in his magazine when I started to have a conversation with Virgil. Which, to him, would have sounded like a crazy lady ranting.

  I consider the time we all visited Thomas at Hartwick House—how the patients could easily see Jenna and Virgil, but the nurses and orderlies had spoken only to me.

  I remember the very first day I met Jenna, when my client Mrs. Langham bolted. What was it she’d overheard me saying to Jenna? That if she didn’t leave immediately, I was going to call the cops. But of course, Mrs. Langham couldn’t see Jenna, plain as day, in my foyer. She would have thought my words had been directed at her.

  I realize I have pulled into a familiar neighborhood. Virgil’s office building is across the street.

  I park and get out of the Bug. It’s so hot today that the asphalt is swimming beneath my feet. It’s so hot that the dandelions in the cracks of the sidewalk have collapsed.

  The air in the building smells different. Mustier, older. The pane of glass in the door is cracked, but I never noticed before. I walk up to the second floor, to Virgil’s office. It is locked, dark. Posted on the door is a sign: FOR RENT. CALL HYACINTH PROPERTIES, 603-555-2390.

  My head buzzes. It’s like the beginning of a migraine, but I think it is actually the sound of everything I know, everything I believed, being challenged.

  I’d always thought there was a great divide between a spirit and a ghost—the former had made it smoothly to the next plane of existence; the latter had something anchoring it to this world. The ghosts I had met before were stubborn. Sometimes they did not realize they were dead. They’d hear the noises of people living in “their” houses, and assume they were the ones being haunted. They had agendas and disappointments and anger. They were trapped, and so I took it upon myself to help them get free.

  But that was when I had the ability to recognize them for what they were.

  I’d always thought there was a great divide between a spirit and a ghost—I just didn’t realize how small the gap was between the dead and the living.

  From my purse, I take the ledger that Jenna had signed when she first came to my apartment. There’s her name, the adolescent cursive round as a string of bubbles. There is the address, 145 Greenleaf.

  The residential neighborhood is exactly as it was three days ago, when Virgil and I had come to talk to Jenna, only to find that she didn’t live at this address. Now I realize that it’s entirely possible she did. It’s just that the current owners wouldn’t know that.

  The same mother I spoke with before answers the doorbell. Her little boy still clings like a barnacle to her leg. “You again?” she says. “I already told you, I don’t know that girl.”

  “I know. I’m sorry to bother you again. But I’ve had some … bad news recently about her. And I’m trying to make sense of some things.” I rub my temples with my hands. “Can you just tell me when you bought your house?”

  Behind me is the soundtrack of summer: children screaming as they squeal down a Slip’n Slide next door, a dog howling behind a fence, the drone of a ride-on lawn mower. In the distance is the calliope song of the ice cream truck. This street, it’s teeming with life.

  The woman looks like she’s about to shut the door in my face, but something in my voice must stop her and make her reconsider. “Two thousand,” she says. “My husband and I weren’t married yet. The woman who lived here had D-I-E-D.” She glances down at her son. “We don’t like to talk about that sort of thing in front of him, if you know what I mean. He has an overactive imagination, and sometimes it keeps him up at night.”

  People are always afraid of things they don’t understand, so they dress them up in ways that are understandable. An overactive imagination. A fear of the dark. Maybe even mental illness.

  I crouch down so that I am face-to-face with her son. “Who do you see?” I ask.

  “A grandma,” he whispers. “And a girl.”

  “They’re not going to hurt you,” I tell him. “And they’re real, no matter what anyone says. They just want to share your house, like when other kids at school want to share your toys.”

  His mother yanks him away. “I’m calling 911,” she huffs.

  “If your son had been born with blue hair, even though there had never been blue hair in your family tree, and even though you didn’t understand how any baby could have blue hair because you’d never come across it in your life … would you still love him?”

  She starts to close the door, but I put my hand on it, pressing back to keep it open. “Would you?”

  “Of course,” she says tightly.

  “This isn’t any different,” I tell her.

  Back in my car, I pull the ledger out of my purse and flip to the last page. Very slowly, like stitches being pulled, Jenna’s entry disappears.

  As soon as I tell the desk sergeant that I’ve found human remains, I am ushered into a back room. I give the detective—a kid named Mills, who looks like he has to shave only twice a week, tops—as much information as I can. “If you look in your files, you’ll find a case from 2004 that involved a death there, back when it was an elephant sanctuary. I think this might be a second fatality.”

  He looks at me curiously. “And you know this … why?”

  If I tell him I am a psychic, I’m going to wind up in a room next to Thomas at the mental institution. Either that or he’ll slap handcuffs on me, sure I am a crackpot ready to confess to committing a homicide.

  But Jenna and Virgil had seemed completely real to me. I had believed everything they said, when they spoke to me.

  Goodness, child, isn’t that what a psychic is supposed to do?

  The voice in my head is faint but familiar. That southern drawl, the way the sentence rises and falls like music. I would know Lucinda anywhere.

  An hour later, I am escorted to the nature preserve by two officers. Escorted is a fancy word for stuffed in the back of a cop car because no one trusts you. I hike through the tall grass, off the beaten path, the way Jenna used to do. The policemen carry shovels and sifter screens. We pass the pond where we found Alice’s necklace, and after doubling back on a loop, I find the spot where the purple mushrooms have erupted beneath the oak tree.

  “Here,” I say. “This is where I found the tooth.”

  The cops have brought along a forensic expert. I don’t know what he does—soil analysis, maybe, or bones, or both—but he plucks the head off one of the mushrooms. “Laccaria amethystina,” he pronounces. “It’s an ammonia fungus. It grows on soil that has a high concentration of nitrogen.”

  Goddamn Virgil, I think. He was right. “It only grows here,” I tell the expert. “Nowhere else in the preserve.”

  “That’s consistent with a shallow grave.”

  “An elephant calf was also buried here,” I say.

  Detective Mills raises his brows. “You’re just a font of information, aren’t you?” The forensic expert directs two of the other officers, the ones who drove me here, to start digging systematically.

  They begin on the other side of the tree, across from where Jenna and Virgil and I were yesterday, heaps of dirt shaking through the sifters to catch whatever decomposed fragments they might be lucky enough to unearth. I sit in the shade of the tree, watching the pile of soil rise higher. The policemen roll up their sleeves; one has to jump into the hole to toss the dirt out.

  Detective Mills sits down beside me. “So,” he says. “Tell me again what you were doing here when you found the tooth?”

  “Having a picnic,” I lie.

  “By yourself?”

  No. “Yes.”

  “And the elephant calf? You know about that because …?”

  “I’m an old friend of the family,” I say. “It’s why I also kno
w that the Metcalfs’ child was never found. I think that girl deserves a burial, don’t you?”

  “Detective?” One of the policemen waves Mills toward the pit that he’s been digging. There is a gash of white in the dark soil. “It’s too heavy to move,” he says.

  “Then dig around it.”

  I stand at the edge of the pit as the policemen swipe the dirt away from the bone by hand, like children making a sand castle when the water keeps rushing in to destroy their work. Finally, a shape emerges. The eye sockets. The holes where the tusks would have grown. The honeycomb skull, chipped off at the top. The symmetry, like a Rorschach blot. What do you see?

  “I told you so,” I say.

  After that, no one doubts my word. The dig systematically moves in quadrants, counterclockwise. In Quadrant 2, they find only a piece of rusted cutlery. In Quadrant 3, I am listening to the rhythmic pull and swish of soil being lifted and tossed when suddenly the noise stops.

  I look up and see one of the policemen holding the small fan of a broken rib cage.

  “Jenna,” I murmur, but all I hear in response is the wind.

  For days, I try to find her on the other side. I imagine her upset and confused, and worst of all, alone. I beg Desmond and Lucinda to reach out to Jenna, too. Desmond tells me that Jenna will find me when she is ready. That she has a lot to process. Lucinda reminds me that the reason my spirit guides had been silent for seven years was because part of my journey was to believe in myself again.

  If that’s true, I ask her, then how come now I can’t talk to the one damn spirit I want to?

  Be patient, Desmond says. You have to find what’s lost.

  I have forgotten how Desmond is always full of New Age crypto-quotes like that. But instead of being annoyed by it, I just thank him for the advice, and wait.

  I call Mrs. Langham and offer her a free reading to compensate for my rudeness. She’s reluctant, but she is the kind of woman who walks through Costco just to eat the samples in lieu of paying for lunch out, so I know she will not turn me down. When she comes, for the first time I actually manage to talk to her husband, Bert, instead of faking it. And it turns out he’s just as much of a jerk in the afterlife as he was when he was living. What does she want from me now? he gripes. Always bitching. For Christ’s sake, I thought she’d leave me alone when I finally died.

  “Your husband,” I tell her, “is a selfish, unappreciative ass who would prefer that you stop hounding him.” I repeat, verbatim, what he said.

  Mrs. Langham is quiet for a moment. And then she replies, “That sounds exactly like Bert.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “But I loved him,” she says.

  “He doesn’t deserve it,” I tell her.

  When she comes back a few days later, to get advice on finances and important decisions—she brings a friend. That friend calls her sister. Before I know it, I have clients again, more than I can squeeze into my calendar.

  But I make time for a lunch break every afternoon, and I spend it at Virgil’s grave. It wasn’t all that hard to find, since there is only a single cemetery in Boone. I bring him things I think he’d like: egg rolls, Sports Illustrated, even Jack Daniel’s. I pour the last over the grave. It will probably kill the weeds, at least.

  I talk to him. I tell him about how the newspapers all credited me for helping the police locate Jenna’s remains. How the story of the sanctuary’s demise was splayed across the front pages like Boone’s own version of Peyton Place. I tell him that I was a person of interest until Detective Mills proved that I was in Hollywood, taping one of my shows, the night that Nevvie Ruehl died.

  “Do you talk to her?” I ask him, one afternoon when the sky is swollen with rain clouds. “Have you found her yet? I’m worried about her.”

  Virgil hasn’t responded to me, either. When I ask Desmond and Lucinda about it, they say that if Virgil’s crossed over, he may not yet understand how to visit the third dimension again. It takes a great deal of energy and focus. There’s a learning curve.

  “I miss you,” I say to Virgil, and I mean it. I’ve had colleagues who pretend they like me but are really just jealous; I’ve had acquaintances who wanted to hang out with me because I was invited to Hollywood shindigs; but I have never really had many true friends. Certainly not one who was such a skeptic yet still accepted me unconditionally.

  Most of the time I’m in the cemetery alone, except for the caretaker, who walks around with a weed whacker and a pair of Beats headphones. Today, though, there’s something going on near the fence line. I see a small gathering of people. A funeral, maybe.

  I realize that I know one of the men at the grave site. Detective Mills.

  He recognizes me immediately. It’s one of the perks of having pink hair. “Ms. Jones,” he says. “Good to see you again.”

  I smile at him. “You, too.” Glancing around, I realize there are not as many people here as I first thought. A woman in black, two more cops, and the caregiver, who is patting down the freshly turned earth on a tiny wooden casket.

  “It’s nice of you to come today,” he says. “I’m sure Dr. Metcalf appreciates the support.”

  At the sound of her name, the woman turns around. Her pale, pinched face is framed by a lion’s mane of red hair. It is like seeing Jenna again, in the flesh—a bit older, with a few more emotional scars.

  She holds out her hand, this woman I tried so desperately to locate, who has literally landed in my path. “I’m Serenity Jones,” I say. “I’m the one who found your daughter.”

  ALICE

  There is not very much left of my baby.

  I know, as a scientist, that a body in a shallow grave is more likely to decompose. That predators will scavenge away bits and pieces of the skeleton. That the remains of a child are porous, with more collagen, and more likely to decay in acidic soil. Still, I am not prepared for what I see when I view the tangle of narrow bones, like a parlor game of pickup sticks. A spine. A skull. One femur. Six phalanges.

  The rest is gone.

  I will be honest: I almost did not come back. There was a part of me waiting for the other shoe to drop; a niggling feeling that this was a trap to walk into, that I would be handcuffed when I stepped off the plane. But this was my baby. This was the closure I’d been waiting for, for years. How could I not go?

  Detective Mills took care of all the arrangements, and I flew in from Johannesburg. I watch Jenna’s coffin being lowered into the screaming mouth of the earth, and I think, This is still not my daughter.

  After the brief interment, Detective Mills asks if he can get me something to eat. I shake my head. “I’m exhausted,” I say. “I’m going to get some rest.” But instead of heading back to the motel, I take the rental car to Hartwick House, where Thomas has lived for ten years now.

  “I’m here to visit Thomas Metcalf,” I tell the front desk nurse.

  “And you are?”

  “His wife,” I say.

  She looks at me, astonished.

  “Is there a problem?” I ask.

  “No.” She recovers. “It’s just that he rarely has visitors. He’s down the hall, third room on the left.”

  There is a sticker on Thomas’s door, a smiley face. I push the door open to see a man sitting by the window, his hands curled around a book in his lap. At first I am sure there has been a mistake—this is not Thomas. Thomas doesn’t have white hair; Thomas isn’t hunched over, with narrow shoulders and a sunken chest. But then he turns around, and a smile transforms him, so that the features of the man I remember ripple just beneath this new surface.

  “Alice,” he says. “Where on earth have you been?”

  It is such a direct question, and such a ludicrous one given all that has passed, that I laugh a little. “Oh,” I say. “Here and there.”

  “There’s so much to tell you. I don’t even know where to start.”

  Before he can begin, however, the door opens again and an orderly walks in. “I hear you’ve got a visitor, Thomas. W
ould you like to go down to the community room?”

  “Hello,” I say, introducing myself. “I’m Alice.”

  “I told you she’d come,” Thomas adds, smug.

  The orderly shakes his head. “I’ll be damned. I have heard a lot about you, ma’am.”

  “I think Alice and I would prefer to talk in private,” Thomas says, and I feel a knot in the pit of my stomach. I had hoped that a decade might dull the sharp edges of the conversation we need to have, but I had been naïve.

  “No problem,” the orderly says, winking at me as he backs out of the room.

  This is the moment when Thomas will ask me what happened that night at the sanctuary. When we will pick up from the awful, electric spot where we left off. “Thomas,” I say, falling on my sword. “I am so, so sorry.”

  “You should be,” he replies. “You’re second author on the paper. I know your work is important to you, and far be it from me to curb that, but you should understand better than anyone the need to be the first to publish before someone else steals your hypothesis.”

  I blink at him. “What?”

  He hands me the book he’s holding. “For God’s sake, be careful. There are spies all over the place.”

  The book is by Dr. Seuss. Green Eggs and Ham.

  “This is your article?” I ask.

  “It’s encoded,” Thomas whispers.

  I had come here hoping to find someone else who was a survivor, someone who might be able to take the worst night of my life and help me shoulder the memory. Instead, I found Thomas so trapped by the past that he can’t accept the future.

  Maybe that is healthier.

  “Do you know what Jenna did today?” Thomas says.

  Tears spring to my eyes. “Tell me.”

  “She took all the vegetables she doesn’t like to eat out of the refrigerator and said she was going to give them to the elephants. When I told her they were good for her, she said this was just an experiment and the elephants were her control group.” He grins at me. “If she’s this smart at three, what will she be like at twenty-three?”