Leaving Time: A Novel (43 page)

The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee has a nice little downtown storefront with big pictures on the walls of all their animals, plus plaques that give the history of each elephant. It’s weird, seeing the names of the elephants that used to be at the New England Sanctuary. I pause the longest at the picture of Maura, the elephant my mother liked the most. I stare at it so hard that the image starts to blur.

There is a table full of books you can buy, and Christmas ornaments, and bookmarks. There’s a basket full of stuffed elephants. There is a looping video of a bunch of Asian elephants making sounds like a New Orleans swing band, and another of two elephants playing in a fire hose, just like city kids when the hydrants get turned on in the summer. Another, smaller video player explains protected contact. Instead of using bull hooks or negative reinforcement, which is pretty much how the elephants had lived most of their lives, the sanctuary caregivers use positive reinforcement for training. There is always a barrier between the caregiver and the elephants—not just to give the caregiver safety but to relax the animal, who can always walk away if she doesn’t want to participate. It’s been that way since 2010, and it’s really helped, the video says, with elephants that have serious trust issues with humans as a result of free contact.

Free contact. So that’s what it’s called when you can go right into
an enclosure, like my mother and our caregivers used to do. I wonder if the death at our sanctuary, and the debacle that followed, led to the change.

Only two other visitors are in the welcome center with me—both wearing fanny packs and Tevas with socks. “We don’t actually offer tours of the facility,” an employee explains. “Our whole philosophy is to let the elephants live out their lives being elephants, instead of being on display.” The tourists nod, because it’s the politically correct thing to do, but I can tell they’re disappointed.

Me, I’m on the prowl for a map. Downtown Hohenwald is no more than a single block, and there is no hint of the twenty-seven hundred acres of sweeping elephant vista anywhere nearby. Unless the animals are all shopping at the dollar store, I don’t know where they’re hiding out.

I slip out the front door before the tourists do and wander around back to the small employee parking lot. There are three cars and two pickup trucks. None have any logos on the doors for The Elephant Sanctuary; they could belong to just anyone. But I lean close to the passenger-side windows of each car and peek inside to see if there’s anything to identify the vehicles’ owners.

One belongs to a mom; there are sippy cups and Cheerios all over the floor.

Two are owned by dudes: fuzzy dice, hunting catalogs.

At the first pickup truck, though, I hit pay dirt. Flapping out of the driver’s visor is a sheaf of papers, with the logo of The Elephant Sanctuary at the top.

There’s a messy cloud of hay in the back of the pickup, which is a good thing, because it’s so damn hot that bare metal would have practically branded me. I stow away in the flatbed, which is quickly becoming my favored mode of transport.

Less than an hour later, I’m bouncing down a road to a high metal gate with an electronic opening mechanism. The driver—a woman—punches in a code so that the gate opens. We drive about a hundred feet before we hit a second gate, at which she does the same thing.

As she drives, I try to get the lay of the land. The sanctuary is enclosed by a normal chain-link fence, but the interior corral is made of steel pipes and cable. I can’t remember what our facility was like, but this one is pristine and orderly. Land stretches out forever—hills and forests, ponds and grasslands, punctuated by several big barns. Everything is so green it makes my eyes hurt.

When the truck pulls up to one of the barns, I flatten myself, hoping that I will not be seen as the driver gets out. I hear the door slam, and footsteps, and then the happy trumpet of an elephant as this caregiver walks into the barn.

I’m out of that truck like a rocket. I duck along the far wall of the barn, following the heavy cabled fence until I see my first elephant.

It’s African. I may not be an expert like my mom, but I know that much. I can’t tell if it’s a male or a female from this position, but it’s freaking
huge
. Although maybe that’s redundant, when you’re talking about elephants and you’re only separated by three feet and some steel.

Speaking of steel—there’s metal on the elephant’s tusks. Sort of like they were dipped in gold at the tips.

Suddenly the elephant shakes its head, flapping its ears and releasing a cloud of reddish dust between us. It’s loud and unexpected; I fall back, coughing.

“Who let you in?” a voice accuses.

I turn around to find a man towering over me. His hair is nearly shaved to his scalp; his skin is mahogany. His teeth are, by contrast, almost electroluminescent. I think he’s going to grab me by my collar and drag me physically out of the sanctuary, or call the guards or whoever else keeps trespassers out of this place, but instead, his eyes get wide and he stares at me as if I just apparated before him. “You look just like her,” he whispers.

I had not expected it to be so easy to find Gideon. But then again, maybe after traveling a thousand miles to get here, I deserved a cosmic break.

“I’m Jenna—”

“I know,” Gideon says, looking around me. “Where is she? Alice?”

Hope is a balloon, always just a breath away from being deflated. “I was hoping she was
here
.”

“You mean she didn’t come with you?” The disappointment on his face—well, it is like I am looking into a mirror.

“Then you don’t know where she is?” I say. My knees feel weak. I can’t believe I’ve come all this way, and have found him, and it’s all for nothing.

“I tried to cover for her, when the police came. I didn’t know what happened out there, but Nevvie was dead, and Alice was missing … so I told the cops I assumed she had taken you and run off,” he says. “That was her plan all along.”

All of a sudden, my body is infused with light.
She wanted me; she wanted me; she wanted me
. But somewhere between plotting her future and executing it, things had gone horribly wrong for my mother. Gideon, who was supposed to be the key to the lock, the antidote that would reveal the secret message, is just as clueless as I am. “Weren’t
you
part of that plan?”

He looks at me, trying to gauge how much I know about his relationship with my mother. “I thought I was, but she never tried to contact me. She disappeared. Turned out, I was a means to an end,” Gideon admits. “She loved me. But she loved you so much more.”

I have forgotten where I am until that moment, when the elephant in front of us lifts its trunk and trumpets. The sun is beating down on my scalp. I am dizzy, like I’ve been drifting in the ocean for days and just sent off my last flare, only to realize that the rescue boat I was so sure I saw was a trick of the light. The elephant, with its fancy plated tusks, makes me think of a merry-go-round horse I had been scared of as a child. I don’t even know when or where my parents might have taken me to a carnival, but those terrifying wooden stallions, with their frozen manes and their gnashing teeth, had made me cry.

I feel like doing that now, too.

Gideon keeps staring at me, and it’s weird, like he is trying to see underneath my skin or riffle through the folds of my brain. “I think
there’s someone you should meet,” he says, and he starts walking the fence line.

Maybe this has been a test. Maybe he needed to see that I was truly devastated before he would take me to my mother. I don’t let myself hope, but as I follow him I move faster and faster.
What if, what if, what if
.

We walk for what feels like thirty miles in the ridiculous heat. My shirt is soaked through with sweat by the time we climb the hill and I see, at its crest, another elephant. He doesn’t have to tell me it’s Maura. When she places her trunk delicately along the top edge of the fencing, the fingers opening and closing gently like the head of a rose, I know she remembers me the same way I remember her—at some internal, visceral level.

My mother is really, truly not here.

The elephant’s eyes are dark and hooded, her ears translucent in the sun, so that I can see the highway maps of veins running through them. Heat radiates from her skin. She looks leathery, primitive, cretaceous. The accordion folds of her trunk roll upward like a wave to reach over the fence toward me. She blows in my face, and it smells like summer and straw.

“This is why I stayed,” Gideon says. “I thought one day Alice would come to check on Maura.” The elephant reaches out and curls her trunk around his forearm. “She had a really hard time, when she first got here. Wouldn’t leave the barn. She stayed in her stall, her face pressed into the corner.”

I thought of the long entries in my mother’s journals. “You think she felt guilty about the trampling?”

“Maybe,” Gideon says. “Maybe it was fear of punishment. Or maybe she missed your mother, too.”

The elephant rumbles, like a car running its engine. The air around me vibrates.

Maura picks up a pine log that is lying on its side. She scrapes her tusk along the edge of it, then lifts it with her trunk and presses it against the heavy steel fence. She scratches at the bark again, dropping the tree and rolling it beneath her foot. “What is she doing?”

“Playing. We cut down trees for her, so that she can strip off the bark.”

After about ten minutes, Maura lifts the log as if it is a toothpick and raises it as high as the fence. “Jenna,” Gideon cries. “Move!”

He shoves me, landing on top of me, a few feet away from where the log has crashed down, exactly in the spot where I was standing.

His hands are warm on my shoulders. “You all right?” he asks, helping me to my feet, and then he smiles. “The last time I held you, you were only two feet tall.”

But I pull away from him to crouch down and stare at this gift I’ve been given. It’s about three feet long by ten inches wide, a hefty club. Maura’s tusks have created patterns—lines that cross and grooves that intersect without rhyme or reason.

Unless, that is, you’re looking carefully.

With my finger I trace the lines.

With a little imagination, I can make out a
U
and an
S
. That knot waves the wood grain like a
W
. On the other side of the log, a semicircle is caught in between two long scrapes:
I-D-I
.

Sweetheart
, in Xhosa.

Gideon may not think my mother ever came back, but I’m beginning to believe she’s all around me.

Just then, my stomach grumbles so loud I sound like Maura. “You’re starving,” Gideon says.

“I’m okay.”

“I’m getting you something to eat,” he insists. “I know that’s what Alice would have wanted me to do.”

“Okay,” I say, and we walk back to the barn I had first seen when I arrived in the pickup truck. His car is a big black van, and he has to move a box of tools from the passenger seat before I can sit down.

As we are driving, I can feel Gideon still sneaking glances at me. It’s like he’s trying to memorize my face or something. That’s when I realize that he’s wearing the red shirt and cargo shorts that were the uniform at the New England Elephant Sanctuary. Everyone at The Elephant Sanctuary here in Hohenwald wears straight khaki.

It doesn’t make sense. “How long did you say you’ve worked here?”

“Oh,” he says. “Years.”

What are the odds that, in a sanctuary twenty-seven hundred acres large, I would run into Gideon first, instead of any other person?

Unless, of course, he made sure I did.

What if I hadn’t found Gideon Cartwright? What if he’d found
me
?

I am thinking like Virgil, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, in terms of self-preservation. Sure, I’d set out all determined to find Gideon. But now that I have, I am wondering if it was such a great idea. I can taste fear, like a penny on my tongue. For the first time, it occurs to me that maybe Gideon had something to do with my mother’s disappearance.

“Do you remember that night?” he asks. It’s like he pulled the thread out of my mind.

I picture Gideon driving my mother away from the hospital, pulling over, and wrapping his hands around her throat. I picture him doing the same thing to me.

I force myself to keep my voice steady. I think of how Virgil would do this, if he were trying to get information from a suspect. “No. I was a baby; I guess I slept through most of it.” I stare at him. “Do
you
?”

“Unfortunately, yes. I wish I could forget.”

We are almost in town by now. The ribbon of residences whizzing by starts to give way to box stores and gas stations.

“Why?” I blurt out. “Because you were the one who killed her?”

Gideon swerves, braking. He looks like I’ve slapped him across the face. “Jenna … I loved your mother,” he swears. “I was trying to protect her. I wanted to marry her. I wanted to take care of you. And the baby.”

All the air in the car is gone, just like that. It’s like a seal of plastic has been placed over my nose and mouth.