Leaving Time: A Novel (22 page)

“The truth.”

“For Jenna?” I ask. “Or for you, because you were too lazy to find it out ten years ago?”

A muscle tics in his jaw. For a second I think I’ve crossed the line, that he is going to get up and storm off. Before he can, though, Jenna reappears. “No sunglasses,” she says. She is still holding the stone, still fastened around her neck.

I know that some neurologists think that autistic kids have brain synapses so close together and firing in such quick succession that they cause hyperawareness; that one of the reasons children on the spectrum rock or stim is to help them focus instead of having all sensations bombard them at once. I think clairvoyance isn’t really all that much different. In all probability, neither is mental illness. I asked Gita, once, about her imaginary friends.
Imaginary?
she repeated, as if
I were the one who was crazy, for not seeing them. And here’s the kicker—I understood what she was talking about, because I’d
been
there. If you notice someone talking to a person you can’t see, she may be a paranoid schizophrenic. But she may also just be psychic. The fact that
you
can’t see the other half of the conversation doesn’t mean it’s not truly happening.

That’s the other reason I don’t particularly want to visit Thomas Metcalf in a psychiatric facility: I just may be coming face-to-face with people who can’t control a natural gift I’d kill to have once again.

“You know how to get to the institution?” Virgil asks.

“Really,” Jenna says, “it’s really not such a great idea to visit my dad. He doesn’t always react well to people he doesn’t know.”

“I thought you said he doesn’t even recognize
you
sometimes. So who’s to say we’re not just old friends he’s forgotten?”

I see Jenna trying to work through Virgil’s logic, deciding if she should be protecting her father or trying to take advantage of his weak defenses.

“He’s right,” I say.

Virgil and Jenna are both shocked by my statement. “You
agree
with him?” Jenna asks.

I nod. “If your dad has anything to contribute about why your mother left that night, it might point us in the right direction.”

“It’s up to you,” Virgil says, noncommittal.

After a long moment, Jenna says, “The truth is, my mother’s all he ever talks about. How they met. What she looked like. When he knew he was going to ask her to get married.” She bites her lower lip. “The reason I said I didn’t want you to go to the institution is because I didn’t want to share that with you. With
anyone
. It’s, like, the only connection I have with my dad. He’s the one person who misses her as much as I do.”

When the universe calls, you don’t place it on hold. There is a reason I keep circling back to this girl. It’s either because of her gravitational pull or because she’s a drain I’m bound to be sucked down.

I offer my brightest smile. “Sugar,” I say, “I’m a sucker for a good love story.”

The matriarch had died.

It was Mmaabo, who had slipped to the back of her herd yesterday, her movements laborious and jerky, before she sank down on her front knees and then toppled over. I had been up for thirty-six straight hours, observing. I noted how Mmaabo’s herd—her daughter Onalenna, who was her closest companion—had tried to lift her mother with her tusks and had managed to prop her on her feet, only to have Mmaabo fall over for good. How her trunk had reached toward Onalenna one last time before unfurling on the ground, like a skein of ribbon. How Onalenna and the others in the herd had made sounds of distress, had tried to prod their leader with their trunks and their bodies, pushing and pulling at Mmaabo’s corpse.

After six hours, the herd left the body. But almost immediately, another elephant approached. I thought it was a trailing member of Mmaabo’s herd but recognized the notched triangle on the left ear and the freckled feet of Sethunya, the matriarch of a different, smaller herd. Sethunya and Mmaabo were not related, but as Sethunya approached, she, too, got quieter, softer in her movements. Her head bowed, her ears drooped. She touched Mmaabo’s body with her trunk. She lifted her left rear foot and held it above Mmaabo’s body. Then she stepped over Mmaabo, so that her front legs and back legs straddled the fallen elephant. She began to sway back and forth. I
timed this for six minutes. It felt like a dance, though there was no music. A silent dirge.

What did it mean? Why was an elephant not related to Mmaabo so profoundly affected by her death?

It had been two months since the death of Kenosi, the young bull who’d been caught in the snare, two months since I’d officially narrowed the focus of my postdoctoral work. While other colleagues working at the game reserve were studying the migration patterns of Tuli Block elephants and how they affected the ecosystem; or the effects of drought on the reproductive rate of elephants; or musth and male seasonality, my science was cognitive. It could not be measured with a geographic tracking device; it was not in the DNA. No matter how many times I recorded instances of elephants touching another elephant’s skull, or returning to the site where a former herd member died, the moment I interpreted that as grief, I was crossing a line animal researchers were not supposed to cross. I was attributing emotion to a nonhuman creature.

If anyone had ever asked me to defend my work, here’s what I would have said: The more complex a behavior is, the more rigorous and complicated the science behind it. Math, chemistry, that’s the easy stuff—closed models with discrete answers. To understand behavior—human or elephant—the systems are far more complex, which is why the science behind them must be
that
much more intricate.

But no one ever asked. I’m pretty sure my boss, Grant, thought this was a phase I was going through, and that sooner or later, I’d get back to science, instead of elephant cognition.

I had seen elephants die before, but this was the first time since I’d changed my research focus. I wanted every last detail to be noted. I wanted to make sure I didn’t overlook anything as too mundane; any action that I might learn later was critical to the way elephants mourn. To that end, I stayed there, sacrificing sleep. I marked down which elephants came to visit, identifying them by their tusks, their tail hair, the marks on their bodies, and sometimes even the veins on their ears,
which had patterns as unique as our own thumbprints. I cataloged how much time they spent touching Mmaabo, where they explored. I wrote down when they left the body, and if they returned. I cataloged the other animals—impala, and one giraffe—that passed through the vicinity, unaware that a matriarch had fallen. But mostly, I stayed because I wanted to know if Onalenna would come back.

It took her nearly ten hours to return, and when she did, it was twilight and her herd was off in the distance. She stood quietly beside her mother’s corpse as night fell, immediate as a guillotine. Every now and then she would vocalize, to be answered by rumbles from the northeast—as if she needed to check in with her sisters, and to remind them she was still here.

Onalenna hadn’t moved in the past hour, which is probably why I was so startled by the arrival of a Land Rover, the headlights slicing through the dark. It startled Onalenna, too, and she backed away from her dead mother, her ears flapping in threat. “There you are,” Anya said, as she pulled her vehicle closer. She was another elephant researcher, who was studying how migratory routes had changed because of poaching. “You didn’t answer your walkie-talkie.”

“I turned the volume down. I didn’t want to disturb her,” I said, nodding toward the nervous elephant.

“Well, Grant needs you to do something.”

“Now?” My boss had been less than encouraging when I told him about shifting my focus to elephant grief. He hardly talked to me at all now. Did this mean he was coming around?

Anya looked at Mmaabo’s body. “When did it happen?”

“Almost twenty-four hours ago.”

“Have you told the rangers yet?”

I shook my head. I would, of course. They’d come down and cut the tusks off Mmaabo, to discourage poachers. But I thought, for a few more hours at least, her herd deserved to have time to grieve.

“When should I tell Grant to expect you?” Anya asked.

“Soon,” I said.

Anya’s vehicle slipped into the bush, becoming a tiny pinprick of
light in the inky distance, like a firefly. Onalenna blew out, a huffing sound. She slipped her trunk into her mother’s mouth.

Before I could even record that behavior, a hyena trotted into the space in front of Mmaabo. The spotlight I had on the scene caught the bright white incisors as he opened his jaws. Onalenna rumbled. She reached out her trunk, which seemed too far from the hyena to do damage. But African elephants have an extra foot or so of trunk length that, like an accordion, can punch out at you when you least expect it. She popped that hyena so hard it went rolling away from Mmaabo’s corpse, whimpering.

Onalenna turned her heavy head toward me. She was secreting from her temporal glands, deep gray streaks.

“You’re going to have to let her go,” I said out loud, but I am not sure which one of us I was trying to convince.

I woke with a start when I felt the sun on my face, the first shards of daylight. My first thought was that Grant was going to kill me. My second thought was that Onalenna was gone. In her place were two lionesses, tearing at Mmaabo’s hindquarters. Above, a vulture swam through the sky in a figure eight, awaiting its turn.

I didn’t want to go back to camp; I wanted to sit by Mmaabo’s corpse to see if any other elephants would continue to pay their respects.

I wanted to find Onalenna and see what she was doing now, how the herd was behaving, who was the new de facto matriarch.

I wanted to know if she could turn grief off like a faucet, or if she still missed her mother. How long it took for that feeling to pass.

Grant was punishing me, plain and simple.

Out of all the colleagues that my boss could have picked to babysit some New England asshole that was coming here for a week’s visit, he chose me. “Grant,” I said. “It’s not every day we lose a matriarch. You have to recognize how critical this is to my research.”

He looked up from his desk. “The elephant’s still going to be dead a week from now.”

If my research wouldn’t sway Grant, maybe my schedule would. “But I’m already supposed to take Owen out today,” I told him. Owen was the bush vet; we were collaring a matriarch for a new study that was being done by a research team from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Or in other words:
I am busy
.

Grant looked up at me. “Fantastic!” he said. “I’m sure this fellow would love to see you do the collaring.” And so, I found myself sitting at the entrance of the game reserve, waiting for Thomas Metcalf of Boone, New Hampshire, to arrive.

It was always a hassle when visitors came. Sometimes they were the fat cats who sponsored a collar for GPS monitoring, and wanted to come with their wives and their business buddies to play the politically correct version of the Great White Hunter game—instead of killing elephants, they watched a vet dart one so it could be collared, and then toasted their magnanimousness with G & T sundowners. Sometimes it was a trainer from a zoo or a circus, and when that was the case, they were almost always idiots. The last guy I’d had to squire around in my Land Rover for two days was a keeper at the Philadelphia Zoo, and when we saw a six-year-old bull secreting from its temporal glands, he insisted the baby was coming into musth. No matter how I argued with him (I mean,
really
? A six-year-old male just cannot come into musth!), he assured me that he was right.

I’ll admit, when Thomas Metcalf pried himself out of the African taxi (which is an experience in and of itself, if you haven’t been in one before), he did not look the way I expected. He was about my age, with small, round glasses that steamed up when he stepped into the humidity, so that he fumbled to grab the handle of his suitcase. He looked me over, from my messy ponytail to my pink Converse sneakers. “Are you George?” he said.

“Do I
look
like a George?” George was one of my colleagues, a student none of us ever thought would finish his PhD. In other words, the butt of all the jokes—that is, until I started studying elephant grief.

“No. I mean, I’m sorry. I was expecting someone else.”

“Sorry to disappoint you,” I said. “I’m Alice. Welcome to the Northern Tuli Block.”

I led him to the Land Rover, and we started winding along the unmarked, dusty paths that looped through the reserve. As we rolled along, I recited the spiel we give visitors. “The first elephants were recorded here in roughly
A.D
. 700. In the late eighteen hundreds, when guns were supplied to local chiefs, it affected the elephant population dramatically. By the time the Great White Hunters arrived, the elephants were almost gone. It wasn’t until the game reserve was founded that the numbers increased. Our research staff is in the field seven days a week,” I said. “Although we are all involved in different research projects, we also take care of core monitoring—observing the breeding herds and their associations, identifying the individuals in each, tracking their activity and their habitat, determining home range, doing census once a month, recording births and deaths, estrus and musth; collecting data on bull elephants, recording rainfall—”