Leaving Time: A Novel (35 page)

The terminal is in the middle of the city, and I’m surprised by the amount of activity and noise. It’s like walking into a headache. There are men wearing bolo ties and tourists nursing bottles of water and people playing the guitar for coins in front of storefronts. Everyone seems to be wearing cowboy boots.

Immediately I fade back into the air-conditioned terminal and find a map of Tennessee. Hohenwald—where the sanctuary is located—is southwest of the city, about an hour and a half away. I’m guessing it’s not a big tourist destination, so there’s no public transport out there. And I’m not stupid enough to hitchhike. Is it possible that getting this last eighty miles will be harder than the thousand before it?

For a little while, I stand in front of the giant map of Tennessee that is on the wall, wondering why American kids never study geography, because if they did maybe I’d have a working knowledge of this state. I take a deep breath and walk out of the bus station, downtown, wandering in and out of stores selling western attire and restaurants with live music. There are also cars and trucks parked along the streets. I look at the license plates—a lot are probably rentals. But some have baby car seats inside, or CDs scattered on the floor—the detritus of an owner.

Then I start reading bumper stickers. There are some I expect (
AMERICAN BY BIRTH
,
SOUTHERN BY THE GRACE OF GOD
) and some that make me feel sick to my stomach (
SAVE A DEER
,
SHOOT A QUEER
). But I am looking for hints, clues, the way Virgil might have looked. Something that will tell me more about the family who owns that vehicle.

Finally, on one pickup truck, I find a sticker that says
PROUD OF MY COLUMBIA HONOR STUDENT
! This is a jackpot on two counts: There is a flatbed I can hide in, and Columbia—according to the map at the Greyhound terminal—is en route to Hohenwald. I put my foot on the rear bumper, ready to hoist myself into the flatbed and lie down when no one is looking.

“What are you doing?”

I’ve been so busy canvassing the people on the street to see if they are paying attention, I don’t see the little boy sneak up behind me. He is probably about seven years old, and he is missing so many of his teeth that the remaining ones look like headstones in a graveyard.

I crouch down, thinking of all the babysitting I’ve done over the years. “I’m playing hide-and-seek. Wanna help?”

He nods.

“Cool. But that means you have to keep a secret. Can you do that? Can you not tell your mom or dad that I’m hiding here?”

The boy jerks his chin up and down, emphatic. “Then do I get to have a turn?”

“Totally,” I promise, and I hike myself into the flatbed.

“Brian!” a woman calls, huffing as she runs around the corner, a teenage girl sulking behind her with her arms crossed. “Get over here!”

The metal bed is as hot as the surface of the sun. I can literally feel the blisters forming on my palms and the backs of my legs. I poke my head up the tiniest bit, so that I can make eye contact with him, and I put my finger to my pursed lips, the universal sign for
Ssssh
.

His mother is closing in on us, so I lie down and cross my arms and hold my breath.

“My turn next,” Brian says.

“Who are you talking to?” his mother demands.

“My new friend.”

“I thought we talked about lying,” she says, and she unlocks the cab door.

I feel bad for Brian, not just because his mother doesn’t believe him, but because I have no plans to give him a turn at hide-and-seek. I’ll be long gone by then.

Someone inside slides open the back window of the truck cab for ventilation. Through it, I can hear the radio as Brian and his sister and his mom head down the interstate toward, I hope, Columbia, Tennessee. I close my eyes as the sun bakes me and pretend I am on a beach, not a slab of metal.

The songs that come on are about driving trucks like this one, or
about girls with hearts of gold who’ve been done wrong. They all sound the same to me. My mother had an aversion to banjos so strong it bordered on allergy. I remember her turning off the radio every time a singer had the slightest twang in her voice. Could a woman who hated country-western music have chosen to make a new home within striking distance of the Grand Ole Opry? Or had she used that dislike as a smoke screen, figuring that anyone who knew her would never expect her to settle down in the heart of country-westernland?

As I bob along in the flatbed, I think:

It’s really not a stretch to say that, for elephants, mating is a song and dance.

As in all communication for those animals, vocalizations are paired with gestures. On an ordinary day, for example, a matriarch might make a “let’s go” rumble, but at the same time she will position her body in the direction she wants to take the herd.

The sounds of mating are more complicated, however. In the wild we hear the pulsing, guttural musth rumbles of males—deep and low, puttering, what you might imagine if you drew a bow made of hormones against an instrument of anger. Males might produce a musth rumble when they are challenged by another male, when they’re surprised by an approaching vehicle, when they are searching for mates. The sounds differ from elephant to elephant and are accompanied by ear waves and frequent urine dribbling.

When a musth male is vocalizing, the whole herd of females will start to chorus. Those sounds attract not just the male who started the conversation but all the eligible bachelors, so that the females in estrus now have the chance to choose the most attractive mate—and by this I don’t mean the one with the best comb-over but rather the male who is most likely to survive—a healthy, older elephant. A female that doesn’t like a particular male might run away from him, even if he has
already mounted her, to find someone better. But, of course, that presumes there’s someone better to be found.

For this reason, several days before she comes into estrus, a female gives an estrus roar—a powerful call that brings even more boys to the yard, and thus a greater range of mates from which to select. Finally, when she allows herself to be mated, she sings an estrus song. Unlike the musth rumbles of males, these songs are lyrical and repetitive, throaty purrs that rise quickly and then trail off. The female flaps her ears loudly and secretes from her temporal glands. After the mating, the other females in her family join in, a symphony of roars and rumbles and trumpets like those they’d make at any other socially exciting moment—a birth, or a reunion.

We know that when male whales sing, those who have the most complex songs are the ones who get the females. On the contrary, in the elephant world, a musth male will mate with anyone he can; it’s the female who sings, and it’s out of biological necessity. A female elephant is in estrus for only six days, and the only available males may be miles away. Pheromones don’t work at those distances, so she has to do something else to attract potential mates.

It has been proven that whale songs are passed down from generation to generation, that they exist in all the oceans of the world. I have always wondered if the same holds true for elephants. If the calves of elephants learn the estrus song from their older female relatives during mating season, so that when it’s their own turn, they know how to sing to attract the strongest, fiercest males. If, by doing this, the daughters learn from their mothers’ mistakes.

Here’s what I haven’t told you: Once before, in my heyday as a psychic, I lost the ability to communicate with spirits.

I was doing a reading for a young college girl who wanted me to reach out to her deceased dad. She brought along her mother, and they had their own tape recorders, so that each could replay whatever happened at our session. For an hour and a half, I put his name out there; I struggled to connect. And the only thought that came into my head was that this man had killed himself with a gun.

Other than that: silence.

Exactly like what I get now, when I try to connect with the dead. Anyway, I felt horrible. I was charging these women for ninety minutes of nothing. And although I didn’t offer a money-back guarantee, I had never in my life as a psychic come up so dry before. So I apologized.

Upset about the outcome, the girl burst into tears and asked to use the restroom. As soon as she left, her mother—who had been largely silent during this entire experience—told me about her husband, and the secret she had not confided to her daughter.

He had indeed committed suicide, using a shotgun. He’d been a very well-known college basketball coach in North Carolina who’d had an affair with one of the boys on his team. When his wife discovered this, she told him she wanted a divorce, and that she would ruin
his professional career unless he paid her to keep quiet. He refused and said he truly cared about the boy. So she told her husband he could have his new paramour, but she would sue him for every cent he had, and would still go public with what he’d done to her. That was the cost of love, she said.

He walked downstairs into their basement and blew his brains out.

At his funeral, as she was saying her last good-bye in private, she said,
You son of a bitch. Don’t think I’ll forgive you now that you’re dead. Good riddance
.

Two days later the daughter called me to say that the strangest thing had happened. The recording she had made was completely blank. Although there had been dialogue between us during the session, all you could hear on the playback was a hissing sound. And even stranger: The same thing was true of the recording that had been made by her mother.

It was clear to me that the dead husband had heard his wife loud and clear at the funeral, and had taken her at her word. She didn’t want anything to do with him, and so he stayed away from us all. Permanently.

Talking to spirits is a dialogue. It takes two. If you’re trying hard and coming up empty, it’s either because of a spirit who
won’t
communicate or because of a medium who
can’t
.

“It does not work like a faucet,” I snap, trying to put some distance between myself and Virgil. “I can’t turn it on and off.”

We are in the parking lot outside of Gordon’s Wholesale, processing the information we just received about Grace Cartwright’s suicide. I have to admit, it wasn’t what I was expecting to hear, but Virgil is convinced that this is an integral piece of the puzzle. “Let me get this straight,” he says soberly. “I’m saying to you that I’m willing to actually admit that psychic powers aren’t a load of bullshit. I’m saying to you that I’m willing to give your … talent … a chance. And you won’t even try?”

“Fine,” I say, frustrated. I lean against the front bumper of my car, shaking out my shoulders and arms the way a swimmer does at the starting block. Then I close my eyes.

“You can do it here?” Virgil interrupts.

I crack open my left eye. “Isn’t that what you had in mind?”

His face reddens. “I guess I thought you’d need … I don’t know. A tent or something.”

“I can manage without my crystal ball and tea leaves, too,” I say drily.

I haven’t admitted to either Jenna or Virgil that I can no longer communicate with spirits. I’ve let them believe that the acts of stumbling over Alice’s wallet and necklace on the grounds of the old elephant sanctuary were not flukes but actual psychic moments.

I may have even convinced myself of that. So I close my eyes and think,
Grace. Grace, come talk to me
.

That’s how I used to do it.

But I’m getting nothing. It’s as empty and static as the time I tried to contact that North Carolina basketball coach who’d killed himself.

I glance at Virgil. “You get anything?” I ask. He’s typing away on his phone, searching for Gideon Cartwright in Tennessee.

“Nope,” he admits. “But if I were him I’d be using an alias.”

“Well, I’m not getting anything, either,” I tell Virgil, and this is, for once, the truth.

“Maybe you should do it … louder.”

I put my hand on my hip. “Do I tell you how to do your job?” I say. “It’s sometimes like this, for suicides.”