Leaving Time: A Novel (27 page)

I’m walking along the state highway when I hear a car crunching on the gravel behind me. It’s Serenity, of course. She pulls up and swings open the passenger door. “Let me at least drive you home,” she says.

I peer into the car. The good news is that Virgil isn’t in it. But that doesn’t mean I feel like a heart-to-heart with Serenity, where she tries to convince me that Virgil is just doing his job. Or worse, that he may be right.

“I like walking,” I tell her.

There is a run of flashing lights, and a cop car pulls up behind Serenity.

“Great,” she says and sighs. And to me: “Get in the goddamn car, Jenna.”

The cop is young enough to still have zits, and a flat top as manicured as the eighteenth green at a golf course. “Ma’am,” he says. “Is there a problem?”

“Yes,” I say, at the same time Serenity says, “No.”

“We’re fine,” I add.

Serenity grits her teeth. “Honey, get in the car.”

The cop frowns. “I beg your pardon?”

With a loud sigh, I climb into the VW. “Thanks anyway,” Serenity
says, and she puts on her left signal and pulls into traffic doing about six miles an hour.

“At this rate I’d get home faster if I
did
walk,” I mutter.

I poke through the trash that litters her car: ponytail scrunchies, gum wrappers, Dunkin’ Donuts receipts. An ad for a sale at Jo-Ann fabric, even though to my knowledge she is not crafty in the least. A half-eaten granola bar. Sixteen cents and a dollar bill.

Absently, I take the dollar bill and start folding it in the shape of an elephant.

Serenity glances at me as I flip and crease and press. “Where’d you learn how to do that?”

“My mother taught me.”

“What were you, a savant?”

“She taught me in absentia.” I look at her. “You’d be surprised how much you can learn from someone who’s completely disappointed you.”

“How’s your eye?” Serenity asks, and I almost laugh, it’s such a perfect transition.

“Hurts.” I take the finished elephant and prop it in the little nook that has the radio controls. Then I shrink down in my seat, pressing my shoes against the dashboard. Serenity has a fuzzy blue steering wheel cover meant to look like a monster, and an ornate cross hanging from her rearview mirror. They seem about as far apart on the belief scale as humanly possible, and it gets me thinking: Can a person hold tightly to two thoughts that look, at first sight, as if they’d cancel each other out?

Could my mother
and
my father both be blamed for what happened ten years ago?

Could my mom leave me behind but still love me?

I glance at Serenity, with her violently pink hair, and the too-tight leopard-print jacket, which makes her look like a human sausage. She is singing a Nicki Minaj song, and getting all the lyrics wrong, and the radio isn’t even on. It’s easy to make fun of someone like her, but I love that she doesn’t apologize for herself: not when she curses in front of me; not when people in elevators stare at her makeup style (which I’d
say is pretty much geisha-meets-clown); not even when—it should be noted—she made a colossal mistake that cost her a career. She may not be very happy, but she is happy to
be
. It’s more than I can say about myself. “Can I ask you a question?” I say.

“Sure, sugar.”

“What’s the meaning of life?”

“Well, Christ on a cracker, girl. That’s not a question. That’s a philosophy. A question is,
Hey, Serenity, can we swing through a McDonald’s?
”

I’m not letting her off the hook that easily. I mean, someone who talks to spirits all the time can’t just chat about the weather and baseball. “Didn’t you ever
ask
?”

She sighs. “Desmond and Lucinda, my spirit guides, said all the universe wants from us is two things: Don’t do any intentional harm to yourself or anyone else, and get happy. They told me humans make it more complicated than it needs to be. I thought for sure they were feeding me a line. I mean, there’s got to be more to it than
that
. But if there is, I guess I’m not supposed to know it yet.”

“What if the meaning of my life is to find out what happened to
hers
?” I ask. “What if that’s the only thing that will make me happy?”

“Are you so sure it will?”

Because I don’t want to answer, I turn on the radio. By now, we’re on the outskirts of town, anyway, and Serenity drops me off at the rack where I’ve locked up my bike. “You want dinner, Jenna? I make a mean Chinese take-out order.”

“Thanks but no thanks,” I say. “My grandmother’s expecting me.”

I wait for her to drive off, so she can’t see that I’m not going home.

It takes another half hour to bike to the sanctuary, and twenty minutes to hike through the uneven brush to the spot with the purple mushrooms. My cheekbone is still throbbing as I lie back on the lush grass and listen to the wind play through the branches overhead. It’s the hour that’s the seam between day and night.

Probably I have a concussion, because I fall asleep for a while. It’s dark when I wake up, and I don’t have a light on my bike, and I’ll
probably be grounded for missing dinner. But it’s worth it, because I have been dreaming about my mother.

In my dream, I was really little, in nursery school. My mother had insisted that I go because it wasn’t normal for a three-year-old to be socialized only with adult animal behaviorists and a bevy of elephants. My class had taken a field trip to meet Maura; afterward, the other kids painted strangely shaped animals that the teachers enthused about no matter how biologically inaccurate they were:
It’s so gray! How creative to make
two
trunks! Well done!
My elephant paintings were not only precise but detailed—I put the notch in Maura’s ear, the same way my mother did when she sketched the elephant; I made the hair on her tail kinky, when every other kid in my class had completely overlooked its presence. I knew exactly how many toenails she had on each foot (three on the back foot, four on the front). My teachers, Miss Kate and Miss Harriet, said I was like a tiny little Audubon, although I had no idea what that meant at the time.

Other than that, I was a mystery to them: I didn’t watch television, so I had no idea who the Wiggles were. I couldn’t tell the Disney princesses apart. Most of the time the teachers took the quirks of my upbringing in stride—I mean, this was nursery school, not SAT prep. But one day, in preparation for the holidays, we were given sheets of fancy white paper and told to draw a picture of our family. We were then going to make a macaroni frame, spray it with gold paint, and put this inside as a gift.

Other kids started drawing right away. There were all sorts of families: Logan lived with his mom, alone. Yasmina had two dads. Sly had a baby brother, and then two older brothers, who had a mom that was different from his. There were various permutations of siblings, but it was clear that if there were extra people in the family, they were kids.

Me, I drew myself with five parents.

There was my father, with his glasses. My mother, with her flaming red ponytail. Gideon and Grace and Nevvie, all wearing khaki shorts and the red polo top that was the sanctuary uniform.

Miss Kate sat down next to me. “Who are all these people, Jenna? Are these your grandma and grandpa?”

“No,” I told her, pointing. “That’s my mommy and that’s my daddy.”

That led to my mother being pulled aside at pickup. “Dr. Metcalf,” Miss Harriet said, “Jenna seems to have a little trouble identifying her immediate family.”

She showed my mother the picture. “It looks completely accurate to me,” my mother replied. “All five adults take care of Jenna.”

“That isn’t the concern,” Miss Harriet said.

It was then that she pointed out the spider writing, my disastrously spelled attempts to label these people. There was
MOM
, holding one of my hands, and there was
DAD
, holding the other. Except
DAD
wasn’t the man I’d drawn with glasses.
He
was in a corner, nearly pushed off the page.

My happy little family unit was either wishful thinking or the uncanny observation of a three-year-old who saw more than anyone expected.

I’m going to find my mother—before Virgil can. Maybe I can save her from being arrested; maybe I can warn her. Maybe the two of us can run off together, this time. True, I’m going up against a private investigator who unravels mysteries for a living. But I know one thing he doesn’t.

My dream under the tree was what brought to the surface something I guess I’ve known all along. I know who gave my mother that necklace. I know why my parents were fighting back then. I know who, all those years ago, I
wished
was my dad.

Now I just have to find Gideon again.

In the wild, we often didn’t realize an elephant was pregnant until she was about to deliver. The mammary glands would swell at about twenty-one months, but before that, short of doing a blood test or having witnessed a bull mating with a particular female nearly two years earlier, it was very hard to predict an impending birth.

Kagiso was fifteen, and we had only just recently figured out that she was going to have a calf. Every day, my colleagues would try to spot her, to see if she had delivered yet. For them, it was good fieldwork. But for me, it became a reason to get out of bed.

I did not yet know I was pregnant. All I knew was that I had been more tired than usual, listless in the heat. Research that had energized me before now seemed to be routine. If I did happen to witness something remarkable in the field, the first thought to cross my mind was
I wonder what Thomas would have made of that
.

I had told myself that my interest in him was due solely to the fact that he was the first colleague who hadn’t mocked my research. When Thomas left, it was with the feeling of a summer romance—a trinket that I could take out and examine for the rest of my life, the same way I might save a seashell from a beach vacation or the ticket from my first Broadway musical. Even if I’d wanted to see if this rickety frame of a one-night stand could bear the load of a full-fledged relationship,
it wasn’t practical. He lived on a different continent; we both had our respective research.

But, as Thomas had pointed out in passing, it wasn’t like one of us studied elephants and one of us studied penguins. And due to the trauma of a life spent in captivity, there were often more deaths and grieving rituals to observe at elephant sanctuaries than there were in the wild. The opportunity to continue my research wasn’t limited to the Tuli Block.

After Thomas left for New Hampshire, we communicated through the secret code of scholarly articles. I sent him detailed notes about Mmaabo’s herd, which was still visiting her bones a month after her death. He sent back a story of the passing of one of his elephants, and how three of her companions stood in the barn stall where she’d collapsed, serenading her body for several hours. What I really meant when I wrote
This might interest you
was
I miss you
. What he really meant when he wrote
Thought of you the other day
was
You are always on my mind
.

It was almost as if there was a tear in the fabric I was made of, and he was the only color thread that would match to stitch it back up.

One morning when I was tracking Kagiso, I realized that she was no longer walking with her herd. I began to search the vicinity, and found her a half mile away. Through my binoculars I spotted the tiny form at her feet, and I raced to a vantage point where I could better see.

Unlike most elephants giving birth in the wild, Kagiso was alone. Her herd was not there, celebrating with a cacophony of trumpets and a pandemonium of touching, like a family reunion where all the elderly aunties rush to pinch the cheeks of a newborn. Kagiso wasn’t celebrating, either. She was pushing at the still calf with her foot, trying to get it to stand. She reached down with her trunk and twined it with the baby’s, which slipped limp out of her grasp.

I had seen births before where the calf was weak and shaky, where it took longer than the usual half hour to get it up on its feet and stumbling along beside its mom. I squinted, trying to see if there was
any rise and fall to the chest of the calf. But really all I needed to examine was the set of Kagiso’s head, the sag of her mouth, the wilt of her ears. Everything about her looked deflated. She knew already, even if I didn’t.

I had a sudden flash of Lorato, charging down the hill to protect her grown son when he was shot.

If you are a mother, you must have someone to take care of.

If that someone is taken from you, whether it is a newborn or an individual old enough to have offspring of its own, can you still call yourself a mother?

Staring at Kagiso, I realized that she hadn’t just lost her calf. She had lost herself. And although I had studied elephant grief for a living, although I had seen numerous deaths in the wild before and had recorded them dispassionately, the way an observer should—now, I broke down and started to cry.