Leaving Time: A Novel (34 page)

Thomas hadn’t had another depressive episode since then that he’d told me about, but to be honest, I hadn’t asked, either. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer.

Shaking, I backed out of the room and closed the door. I picked up Jenna, who quieted immediately, and carried her to the bed I shared with a stranger, who happened to be the father of my child. Against all odds, I fell immediately into a deep, velvet sleep, my daughter’s tiny hand caught like a fallen star in my own.

When I woke up, the sun was a scalpel, and a fly was buzzing in my ear. I brushed at my temple, willing it to go away, only to realize it wasn’t a fly, and I couldn’t get rid of it. It was the distant sound of construction equipment, the backhoe we used to do landscaping work in the sanctuary.

“Thomas,” I called, but he didn’t answer. I scooped up Jenna, who was awake and smiling now, and carried her into his office. Thomas was at his desk, his face pressed to the blotter, completely unconscious. I watched his back rise and fall twice to make sure he was alive, then bundled Jenna into a sling on my back, the way I had learned from the African women who cooked at the camp in the reserve. I left the cottage, climbed on an ATV, and headed toward the northern edge of the sanctuary, where I had left Maura last night.

The first thing I noticed was the hot wire. Maura paced back and forth in front of it, trumpeting and raging, jerking her head and tusking at the ground, coming as close to that wire as she could without it shocking her. Through all of these aggressive gestures, she never took her eye off her calf.

Which was chained onto a large wooden pallet beside Nevvie—who was directing Gideon where to dig a grave.

I drove the ATV through the gate, past Maura, and skidded to a stop a foot away from Nevvie. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

She glanced at me, and at the baby on my back, and with one look let me know what she thought of my mothering skills. “What we always
do when an elephant dies. The necropsy samples were already taken this morning by the vet.”

Blood roared in my ears. “You separated a grieving mother from her calf?”

“It’s been three days,” Nevvie said. “This is for her own good. I’ve been with mothers who see their calves suffer, and it breaks them. It happened to Wimpy, and it will happen again, if we don’t do something about it. Is that what you want for Maura?”

“What I want for Maura is for her to make the decision when it’s time to let go,” I shouted. “I thought that was the whole philosophy of this sanctuary.” I turned my face to Gideon, who had stopped digging with the construction equipment and was standing awkwardly to the side. “Did you even
ask
Thomas?”

“Yes,” Nevvie said, lifting her chin. “He said he trusted me to know what to do.”

“You don’t know anything about how a mother grieves for her calf,” I said. “This isn’t mercy. It’s cruelty.”

“What’s done is done,” Nevvie argued. “The sooner Maura doesn’t have to see that calf, the sooner she’ll forget what happened.”

“She will
never
forget what happened,” I promised. “And neither will I.”

Not much later, Thomas woke up subdued, his old self. He gave Nevvie a dressing-down for taking matters into her own hands, neatly erasing his own responsibility in the situation for giving her permission when he was not in a sound mental state to do so. He wept, apologizing to me, and to Jenna, for letting the demons in. Nevvie, miffed, disappeared for the rest of the afternoon. Gideon and I removed the straps and the chains from the calf’s body, although we did not attempt to slide him off the pallet. The moment I turned off the electricity on the hot wire, Maura tore it away as if it were made of straw and rushed toward her son. She stroked him with her trunk, backed up to him with her hind legs. She stood beside him for another forty-five minutes, and then slowly lumbered into the birch forest, away from the calf.

I waited ten minutes, listening for her return, but it didn’t happen. “Okay,” I said.

Gideon climbed onto the backhoe and bit into the earth beneath the oak tree where Maura liked to rest. I strapped the calf’s body onto the pallet again, so that he could be lowered into the grave when it was deep enough. I took a shovel Gideon had brought and began to cover the body with dirt, a tiny gesture to add to the fill that Gideon was scooping with the excavator.

By the time I patted down the overturned earth on top of the grave, rich as coffee grounds, my hair had fallen from its ponytail and perspiration ringed my underarms and soaked my back. I was sore and exhausted, and the emotion I’d pushed away for the past five hours suddenly rushed over me, knocking me off my feet. I fell to my knees, sobbing.

All of a sudden Gideon was there, his arms around me. He was a big man, taller and broader than Thomas; I leaned into him the way you press your cheek to solid ground after falling a great distance. “It’s okay,” he said, although it wasn’t. I couldn’t bring Maura’s baby back. “You were right. We never should have separated her from the calf.”

I pulled back. “Then why did you?”

He looked me in the eye. “Because sometimes when I think for myself, I get into trouble.”

I could feel his hands on my shoulders. I could smell the salt of his sweat. I looked at his skin, dark against mine.

“Thought you might need this,” Grace said. She was holding a jug of iced tea.

I did not know when Grace had come walking up; I did not know what she thought, to find her husband comforting me. It was nothing more than that, yet we still jumped apart, as if we had something to hide. I wiped my eyes with the hem of my shirt as Gideon reached out for the jug.

Even when Gideon left, his hand in Grace’s, I could feel the heat of his palms on me. It made me think of Maura standing over her calf, trying to be a haven when, clearly, it was already too late.

When you’re a kid, most people actively go out of their way to not notice you. Businessmen and businesswomen don’t look because they’re wrapped up in their phone calls or texts or sending emails to their bosses. Mothers turn away because you’re a glimpse into the future, when their sweet little porker of a baby will become another antisocial teenager, plugged into music and incapable of holding a conversation beyond grunts. The only folks who actually look me in the eye are lonely old ladies or little kids who want attention. For this reason, it’s incredibly easy to hop on a Greyhound without ever buying a ticket, which is pretty awesome, because who has $190 lying around? I just hang out near the ragged edges of a family that can’t keep itself together—there’s a shrieking baby and a boy who’s about five with his thumb jammed in his mouth, and a teenager texting so fast that I think her Galaxy is going to burst into flames. When the boarding call to Boston is made, and the frazzled parents try to count the luggage
and
their offspring, I follow their older daughter onto the bus like I belong with them.

No one stops me.

I know the driver is going to count heads before he pulls out of the station, so I immediately go to the bathroom and lock myself inside. I stay there until I can feel the wheels rolling, until Boone, NH, is an afterthought. Then I slip into the rear seat of the bus, the one no
one ever wants because it smells like the urinal cake, and pretend to be fast asleep.

Let’s talk for just a second about the fact that my grandmother is going to ground me until I’m, oh, sixty. I left her a note, but I’ve purposely turned off my phone because I don’t really want to hear her reaction when she finds it. If she thinks that my Internet searches for my mom are ruining my life, she’s not going to be thrilled to hear that I’m stowing away on a bus, bound for Tennessee, so that I can track her in person.

I’m a little pissed at myself, actually, for not thinking to do this before. Maybe it was my father’s anger—totally out of character for a guy who spends most of his time virtually catatonic—that jogged my memory. Whatever it was, something fell into place so that I would remember Gideon, and how important he was to me and my mother. The way my father had reacted to the pebble necklace was like a jolt of electricity, lighting up neurons that had simmered quietly for years, so that banners waved and neon signs flashed in my mind:
Pay attention
. It’s true that even if I
had
remembered Gideon before now, I still wouldn’t have been able to figure out where he had gone ten years ago. But I do know somewhere he stopped along the way.

When my mother disappeared and my father’s business was revealed to be bankrupt, the elephants were sent to The Elephant Sanctuary in Hohenwald, Tennessee. All you have to do is a quick Google search to read about how their board of directors—hearing about the New England sanctuary’s plight—had scrambled to find space to house the homeless animals. Accompanying the elephants was the only employee who’d been left behind: Gideon.

I didn’t know if the sanctuary had hired him to continue caring for our animals or if he had dropped the elephants off and moved on. If he had reunited with my mother. If they still held hands when they thought no one was looking.

See, that’s the other thing about people who think kids are invisible: They forget to be careful around you.

I know it’s stupid, but there was a big part of me that was hoping Gideon was there and had no idea where my mom was, in spite of the
fact that this was the reason I was currently wedged on a bus with my sweatshirt hood drawn tight so no one would try to make eye contact with me, just so I could find this out. I couldn’t really handle the thought that my mother had spent the past ten years happy. I didn’t wish her dead and I didn’t wish her life to be miserable. But, I mean, shouldn’t
I
have been part of that equation?

Anyway, I had run through the possible scenarios in my head:

That, of course, was the worst scenario of all. There was only one that was even more grim; it was so dark that I had let my imagination
peek through a crack in its door, only to slam it shut before it spilled into every corner of my mind:

Like I said, I’m not even going to think about that possibility, just in case—as Serenity says—the energy sent out into the universe by a random thought can actually bring about an outcome.

I don’t think that it will take Virgil long to figure out where I’ve gone, or to come to the same conclusion I have—that Gideon is the connection to my mother, maybe the reason she ran away, maybe even the link to the accidental death that may not be an accident. And I feel a little bad about not telling Serenity where I’m headed. But then, she reads people for a living; I hope she can figure out that I have every intention of coming back.

Just not alone.

There are connections to be made in Boston, New York, and Cleveland. At each stop, I get off the bus holding my breath, certain that this is the one where I will find a cop waiting to take me home. But that would require my grandmother to report me missing, and let’s face it, she doesn’t have a great track record for that.

I keep my phone turned off because I don’t want her calling, or Virgil, or Serenity. I follow the same pattern at each bus terminal, looking for a family that might not notice me dangling from its fringe. I sleep, on and off, and play games with myself: If I see three consecutive red cars on I-95, it means my mother will be happy to see me. If I see a VW Beetle before I finish counting to 100, it means she ran away because she didn’t have a choice. If I see a hearse, it means she’s dead, and that’s why she never came back to me.

I don’t see any hearses, just in case you’re wondering.

One day, three hours, and forty-eight minutes after I leave Boone,
New Hampshire, I find myself at the bus station in Nashville, Tennessee, stepping into a wave of heat that hits me like a knockout punch.