Leaving Time: A Novel (39 page)

I came to the conclusion that the only way to get Thomas to voluntarily check in to a psychiatric ward was to make him see, simply and honestly, that this was best for him. That I still loved him. That we were in this together.

Fortified, I drove into the sanctuary, parked at the cottage, and carried a sleepy Jenna inside. I settled her on the couch and then went back to close the door I’d left ajar.

When Thomas grabbed me from behind, I screamed. “You scared me,” I said, turning in his arms, trying to read his expression.

“I thought you left me. I thought you took Jenna, and that you weren’t coming back.”

I ran my hand through his hair. “No,” I swore. “I would never.”

When he kissed me, it was with the desperation of a man who is trying to save himself. When he kissed me, I believed that Thomas was going to be fine. I believed that maybe I would never have to call Dr. Thibodeau, that this was the beginning of Thomas’s sway to center. I told myself that I could believe all of this, no matter how unfounded or unlikely, without realizing how much that made me like Thomas.

There is something else about memory, something Thomas hadn’t brought up. It’s not a video recording. It’s subjective. It’s a culturally relevant account of what happened. It doesn’t matter if it’s accurate;
it matters if it’s important in some way to
you
. If it teaches you something you need to learn.

For a few months, it seemed as if life at the sanctuary was settling back to normal. Maura took extended walks away from her calf’s grave before returning to settle down there each night. Thomas began to work in his home office again, instead of constructing the observation deck. We left it locked and boarded up, like a ghost village. A grant he’d written for funding months ago came in unexpectedly, giving us a little breathing room for supplies and salaries.

I began to compare my notes about Maura and her grief to those about the other elephant mothers I’d seen lose calves. I spent hours walking with Jenna, at a toddler’s pace; I pointed to wildflowers by color, to teach her new words. Thomas and I argued about whether it was safe for her, in the enclosures. I loved those arguments, for their simplicity. Their sanity.

One lazy afternoon, when Grace was sitting for Jenna in the stagnant heat, I was doing a trunk wash in the Asian barn with Dionne. We trained the elephants in this behavior, so that we could test for TB: We’d fill a syringe with saline, flush it into a nostril, and get the elephant to lift her trunk as high as possible. Then we’d hold a gallonsize Ziploc bag over the trunk as she lowered it and the fluid drained out. The sample was collected in a container and sent off to the lab. Some elephants hated the process; Dionne was one of the easier ones. So perhaps my guard was down, and that’s why I didn’t notice Thomas suddenly striding into the barn. He grabbed me by the neck, dragging me away from the elephant so that she couldn’t reach us through the metal bars.

“Who’s Thibodeau?” Thomas yelled, smacking my head against the steel so hard that my vision blurred.

I honestly didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Thi … bo … deau,” Thomas repeated. “You must know. His card was in
your
wallet.” His hand was a vise around my throat. My
lungs felt like they were on fire. I clawed at his fingers, at his wrists. He pressed a small white rectangle close to my face. “Ring a bell?”

I could barely see anything but stars at the edges of my vision. Still, somehow, I was able to make out the logo for the Dartmouth-Hitchcock hospital. The psychiatrist I’d seen, the one who had given me his card. “You want to lock me away,” Thomas accused. “You’re trying to steal my research. You’ve probably already called NYU to take credit, but the joke’s on you, Alice, because you don’t have the code to dial in to the colloquium’s private conference line, and not
knowing
that flags you as an impostor—”

Dionne was bellowing, crashing against the reinforced bars of the barn. I tried to explain; I tried to speak. Thomas slammed me harder against the steel, and my eyes rolled upward.

Suddenly there was air, and light, and I was falling to the cement floor, gasping as my chest filled with fire. I rolled to my side to see Gideon punching Thomas so hard that his head arced backward and blood bloomed from his nose and mouth.

I scrambled to my feet and ran out of the barn. I did not get very far before my legs gave out beneath me, but to my surprise I didn’t fall. I wound up caught in Gideon’s arms. He stared at my throat, touched a finger to the red necklace made by Thomas’s hands. He was so gentle, like silk over a scar, that something inside me snapped.

I shoved at him. “I didn’t ask for your help!”

He let go of me, surprised. I staggered away from him, avoiding the spot where I knew Grace had taken Jenna swimming, and made my way to the cottage. I went right to Thomas’s office, where he had been spending his time keeping the books and updating the files of the individual elephants. On his desk was a ledger we used to record all our income and expenses. I sat down and flipped through the first few pages, marking the deliveries of hay and the payments for veterinary care, the lab bills and the produce contract. Then I skipped to the end.

C14H19NO4C18H16N6S2C16H21NO2C3H6N2O2C189H285N55O57S.C14H19NO4C18H16N6S2C16H21NO2C3H6N2
O2C189H285N55O57S.C14H19NO4C18H16N6S2C16H21NO2C3H6N2O2C189H285N55O57S.

I put my head down on the desk and cried.

I wrapped a gauzy blue scarf around my neck and went to sit with Maura near the calf’s grave. I had been there for maybe an hour when Thomas approached, on foot. He stood on the other side of the fence, hands in his pockets. “I just wanted to tell you I’m going away for a while,” he said. “It’s somewhere I’ve been before. They can help me.”

I didn’t look at him. “I think that’s a good idea.”

“I left the contact information on the kitchen counter. But they won’t let you talk to me. It’s … part of the way they do things.”

I did not think I’d need Thomas while he was gone. We had been running this sanctuary in his absence even when he had been on the premises.

“Tell Jenna …” He shook his head. “Well. Don’t tell Jenna anything, except that I love her.” Thomas took a step forward. “I know it’s not worth much, but I’m sorry. I’m not … I’m not
me
right now. That’s not an excuse. But it’s all I have.”

I didn’t watch him leave. I sat with my arms wrapped tight around my legs. Twenty feet away, Maura picked up a fallen branch with a paintbrush of pine needles at the end and began to sweep the ground in front of her.

She did this for several minutes and then started to walk away from the grave. After moving a few yards, she turned and looked at me. Then she walked a bit, and paused, waiting.

I got to my feet and followed.

It was humid; my clothes stuck to my skin. I couldn’t speak; my throat hurt that bad. The ends of the scarf I wore moved like butterflies on my shoulders in the hot breath of the breeze. Maura moved slowly and deliberately, until she reached the hot-wire fence. In the distance on the far side, she stared longingly at the pond.

I didn’t have tools or gloves. I didn’t have anything I needed to
disable the electric fence. But I pried the box open with my fingernails and disengaged the batteries. I used all my strength to untie the makeshift gate I’d wired weeks before, even though the wire bit into my fingers and my hands grew slick with blood. Then I dragged the fence open, so that Maura could walk through.

She did, but paused at the edge of the pond.

We didn’t come all this way for nothing. “Let’s go,” I rasped, and I kicked off my shoes and waded into the water.

It was cold and clear, deliciously fresh. My shirt and scarf stuck to my skin, and my shorts ballooned around my thighs. I ducked underwater, letting my hair fall out of its ponytail, and resurfaced, kicking to stay afloat. Then I flicked a handful of water at Maura.

She took two steps back and then reached her trunk into the pond and sprayed a stream over my head like a rain shower.

Her movement was so calculated, so unexpected—and so
playful
, after weeks of despair, that I laughed out loud. It didn’t sound like my voice. It was stripped and ragged, but it was joy.

Maura gingerly waded into the pool, rolling to her left side and then to her right, tossing a spray of water over her back and then over me again. It reminded me of the herd I had taken Thomas to watch in the water hole in Botswana, back when I thought my life would be different than it had turned out to be. I watched Maura splash and roll, buoyed by the water, lighter than she’d been in a long time, and very slowly I let myself float, too.

“She’s playing,” Gideon said, from the far bank. “That means she’s letting go.”

I had not realized he was here; I had not known we were being watched. I owed Gideon an apology. I had not asked to be rescued, true, but that did not mean I didn’t need saving.

I felt silly, unprofessional. Swimming across the pool, I left Maura to her own devices and emerged dripping, unsure of what to say. “I’m sorry,” I offered. “I shouldn’t have said what I said to you.”

“How are you?” Gideon asked, concerned.

“I’m …” I paused, because I didn’t know the answer. Relieved? Nervous? Scared? Then I smiled a little. “Wet.”

Gideon grinned, taking my cue. He held out his empty hands. “I don’t have a towel.”

“I didn’t know I would be swimming. Maura seemed to need a little encouragement.”

He held my gaze. “Maybe she just needed to know someone was there for her.”

I stared at him, until Maura sprayed us both with a fine mist. Gideon jumped away from the stream of cold water. But to me, it felt like a baptism. Like starting over.

That night I called a staff meeting. I told Nevvie and Grace and Gideon that Thomas would be visiting investors abroad for a while and that we would have to run the sanctuary without him. I could tell none of them believed me, but they pitied me enough to pretend. I gave Jenna ice cream for dinner, just because, and put her to sleep in my bed.

Then I went to the bathroom and unwound the scarf from my neck, where it had dried in wrinkles after my swim with Maura. There was a string of fingerprints, dark as South Sea pearls, ringing my throat.

A bruise is how the body remembers it’s been wronged.

Padding down the hall in the dark, I found the Post-it note that Thomas had left in the kitchen.
MORGAN HOUSE
, he had printed, in his linear, architectural handwriting.
STOWE
,
VT
.
802-555-6868
.

I picked up the phone and dialed. I didn’t need to talk to him, but I did want to know that he’d gotten there safely. That he was going to be all right.

The number you have dialed is no longer in service. Please check the number and dial again
.

So I did. And then I went to the computer in Thomas’s office and looked up Morgan House on the Internet, only to find it listed as the name of a professional poker player in Vegas, and a halfway home for pregnant teens in Utah. There was no inpatient facility anywhere by that name.

We’re going to miss the goddamned flight.

Serenity booked the tickets by phone. They cost as much as my rent. (When I told her that there was no way I could afford to pay her right now, Serenity just waved away my embarrassed concern.
Sugar
, she said,
that is why God created credit cards
.) Then we drove eighty-five miles per hour down the highway to the airport, because the flight to Tennessee left in an hour. Since we didn’t have luggage, we raced to the automatic ticket machines, hoping to avoid the line of people checking baggage. Serenity’s ticket spit out, no problem, with a free drink coupon. When I entered my confirmation code, though, I got a flashing message:
SEE TICKET AGENT
.

“Are you shitting me?” I mutter, looking at the line. On the loudspeaker, I hear flight 5660 to Nashville being announced, leaving from Gate 12.

Serenity looks at the escalator that leads to the TSA checkpoint. “There’ll be another flight eventually,” she says.

But by then, who knows where Jenna will be, and if she’ll have gotten to Gideon first. And if Jenna’s come to the same conclusion I have—that Gideon could have been responsible for her mother’s disappearance, and possible death—who knows what he’ll do to keep her from telling the rest of the world what he did.

“Get on that flight,” I say. “Even if I don’t make it. It’s going to be
just as important to find Jenna as it is to find Gideon, because if she finds him first, it could be bad.”

Serenity must hear the urgency in my voice, because she nearly flies up the escalator and is swallowed by the queue of sullen travelers removing their shoes and belts and laptops.

The line for the ticket counter is not getting any shorter. I shift from foot to foot, impatient. I check my watch. Then I tear away from the pack like a tiger that’s been unleashed and cut to the front of the line. “Excuse me,” I say. “I’m about to miss my flight.”

I’m expecting outrage, shock, swearing. I even have a ready excuse about my wife being in labor. But before anyone can complain, an airline employee intercepts me. “You can’t do that, sir.”