Leaving Time

by Jodi Picoult

  “She mentioned something about taking Jenna somewhere so she’d be safe.”

  “Sounds like she trusts you,” Donny said. “How does that play out with your wife?”

  “My wife is gone,” Gideon answered. “Nevvie is all the family I have—had—left.”

  I stopped walking as we approached the massive barn. Five elephants milled in the enclosure behind it, shifting beside each other like storm clouds, their quiet rumbles shaking the ground beneath our feet. I had the uncanny sense that they understood every single word we’d been saying.

  It made me think of Thomas Metcalf.

  Donny faced Gideon. “Is there anyone you can think of who’d want to hurt Nevvie? Anyone human, that is?”

  “Elephants, they’re wild animals. They’re not our pets. Anything could have happened.” Gideon reached a hand toward the metal bars of the fence as one of the elephants stuck her trunk through it. She sniffed at his fingers, then picked up a rock and chucked it at my head.

  Donny laughed. “Look at that, Virg. She doesn’t like you.”

  “They need to be fed.” Gideon slipped inside, and the elephants began to trumpet, knowing what was coming.

  Donny shrugged and kept walking. I wondered if I was the only one who noticed that Gideon had not really answered his question.

  “Go away, Abby,” I shout; at least I think I’m shouting, because my tongue feels about ten sizes too big for my mouth. “I told you, I’m not drinking.”

  This is, technically, true. I’m not drinking. I’m drunk.

  But my landlady is still knocking, or maybe that’s a jackhammer. At any rate, it won’t stop, so I haul myself up from the floor, where I guess I passed out, and yank open the door of my office.

  I’m having a hard time focusing, but the person in front of me definitely isn’t Abby. She is only five feet tall, and she’s wearing a backpack and a blue scarf around her neck that makes her look like Isadora Duncan or Frosty the Snowman or something. “Mr. Stanhope,” she says. “Virgil Stanhope?”

  Spread across Thomas Metcalf’s desk were reams of paper covered with tiny symbols and numbers, like some kind of code. There was a diagram on it, too, one that looked like an octagonal spider made with jointed arms and legs. I’d practically failed the course in high school, but it looked like chemistry to me. As soon as we entered, Metcalf scrambled to roll the paper up. He was sweating, although it wasn’t really all that hot outside. “They’re missing,” he said, frantic.

  “We’re going to do everything in our power to find them—”

  “No, no. My notes.”

  I may not have been to a lot of crime scenes at that point in my career, but I still thought it was strange that a guy whose wife and kid were missing seemed to care less about them than about some pieces of paper.

  Donny looked at the piles on the desk. “Aren’t they right there?”

  “Obviously not,” Metcalf snapped. “Obviously I’m talking about the pages that aren’t here.”

  The papers were some weird sequence of numbers and letters. It could have been a computer program; it could have been a satanic code. It was the same kind of writing I had seen earlier on the wall. Donny glanced at me and raised his brow. “Most guys would be pretty concerned about their missing family, considering that an elephant killed someone here last night.”

  Metcalf continued to sift through the stacks of paper and books, moving them from left to right as he cataloged them mentally. “Which is why I’ve told her a thousand times not to bring Jenna into the enclosures—”

  “Jenna?” Donny repeated.

  “My daughter.”

  He hesitated. “You and your wife have been fighting a lot, haven’t you?”

  “Who told you that?” he scoffed.

  “Gideon. He said you upset Alice last night.”

  “I upset her?” Thomas replied.

  I stepped forward, as Donny and I had discussed. “Mind if I use the bathroom?”

  Metcalf waved me to a small room down the hall. Inside was a newspaper article, yellowed and curling in a broken frame, about the sanctuary. There was a picture of Thomas and a pregnant woman, smiling at the camera with an elephant lurking behind them.

  I opened the medicine cabinet and sorted through Band-Aids, Neosporin, Bactine, Advil. There were three prescription bottles, all recent refills, with Thomas’s name on them: Prozac, Abilify, Zoloft. Antidepressants.

  If what Gideon said about the mood swings was true, it would make sense for Thomas to be on medication.

  I flushed the toilet for good measure, and by the time I came back into the office, Metcalf was pacing around the perimeter of the room like a caged tiger. “I don’t mean to tell you how to do your job, Detective,” he said, “but I’m the injured party, not the one who did the injuring. She ran off with my daughter and my life’s work. Shouldn’t you be looking for her, instead of grilling me?”

  I stepped forward. “Why would she steal your research?”

  He sank down in his desk chair. “Because she’s done it before. Multiple times. She’s broken into my office to get my notes.” He unrolled the long scroll on his desk. “This does not leave this room, gentlemen … but I am on the verge of a major breakthrough in the field of memory. It’s well established that memories are elastic before they’re encoded by the amygdala, but my research proves that each time the memory is recalled, it returns to that mutable state. That suggests memory loss can indeed happen after memory retrieval, if there’s a pharmacological roadblock that disrupts protein synthesis in the amygdala … Imagine if you could erase traumatic memories with chemical agents years after the fact. It would completely change the way we treat post-traumatic stress. And it would make Alice’s behavioral work on grief look like conjecture instead of science.”

  Donny looked over his shoulder at me. Wacko, he mouthed. “And your daughter, Dr. Metcalf? Where was she when you walked in on your wife?”

  “Asleep,” he said, his voice breaking. Turning away from us, Metcalf cleared his throat. “It’s blatantly clear that the one place my wife is not is in this study … which begs the question—why are you still here?”

  “Officer Stanhope,” Donny said pleasantly, “why don’t you go tell MCU to wrap it up, while I ask Dr. Metcalf just a few more questions?”

  I nodded, deciding that Donny Boylan was the unluckiest son-of-a-bitch on the police force. Somehow, we’d come to certify a reported death caused by elephant trampling and instead had uncovered a domestic dispute between a nut job and his wife—one which may or may not have resulted in two missing persons and maybe even a homicide. I started walking toward the area where the crime scene investigators were still cataloging useless crap when suddenly all the hair stood up on the back of my neck.

  When I turned around, the seventh elephant was staring me down from the other side of a very flimsy portable electric fence.

  She was huge, this close. Her ears were pinned back against her head, and her trunk dragged on the ground. Sparse hair sprouted from the bony ridge of her brow. Her eyes, they were soulful and brown. She bellowed, and I fell back, even though there was a fence between us.

  She trumpeted again, louder this time, and moved away. Then she stopped, after a few steps, and turned to look at me. She did the same thing two more times.

  It was almost as if she was waiting for me to follow.

  When I didn’t move, the elephant returned and reached delicately between the electric lines of the fencing. I could feel hot breath huffing from the end of her trunk; I could smell hay and dust. I held my breath, and she touched my cheek, as gently as a whisper.

  This time, when she started to move, I followed, keeping the fence between us, until the elephant made a sharp turn and started to walk away from me. She moved into a valley, and the moment before she disappeared from view, she glanced back at me again.

  In high school, we used to cut across cow pastures as shortcuts. They were protected by electric fences. We’d leap, then grab the w
ire and soar over. As long as we let go before our feet touched the ground, we wouldn’t get a shock.

  I started to run, hurdling the wire. At the last moment my shoe dragged on the dirt and my hand was shocked numb. I fell, rolling in the dust, and then scrambled upright, racing toward the spot where the elephant had disappeared.

  About four hundred yards away, I found the elephant standing over the body of a woman.

  “Holy fuck,” I whispered, and the elephant rumbled. When I took a step forward, her trunk shot out, whacking me on the shoulder and knocking me down. I had no doubt that was a warning; she could have swatted me halfway across the sanctuary if she’d really wanted.

  “Hey, girl,” I said softly, making eye contact. “I can tell you want to take care of her. I want to take care of her, too. You just have to let me get a little closer. I promise, she’ll be okay.”

  As I kept talking, the elephant’s posture relaxed. The ears pinned against her head fluttered forward; her trunk curled over the woman’s chest. With a delicacy I would never have imagined in an animal so big, she lifted her massive feet and stepped away from the body.

  In that moment I really got it; I understood why the Metcalfs had started this sanctuary and why Gideon wouldn’t blame one of these creatures for killing his relative. I understood why Thomas would try to understand the brains of these animals. There was something I could not put my finger on—not just a complexity, or a connection, but an equality, as if we both knew we were on the same side here.

  I nodded at the elephant, and I swear to God, she nodded back at me.

  Maybe I was naïve; maybe I was just an idiot—but I knelt beside that elephant, close enough for her to crush me if she wanted to, and felt for the woman’s pulse. She had dried blood matting her scalp and her face; her features were purple and swollen. She was totally unresponsive … and she was alive.

  “Thank you,” I said to the elephant, because it was clear to me, anyway, that she had been protecting this woman. I looked up, but the animal had disappeared, slipping silently into the fringe of trees beyond this little valley.

  I hauled the body into my arms and started to sprint toward the MCU investigators. In spite of what Thomas Metcalf had said, Alice hadn’t run away with his daughter, or his precious research. She was right here.

  Once, when I went on a bender, I had a hallucination that I was playing poker with Santa Claus and a unicorn that kept cheating. Suddenly the Russian mafia burst into the room and started beating on St. Nick. I ran away, climbing up the fire escape before they could get me, too. The unicorn was right beside me, and when we got to the roof of the building, he told me to jump off and fly. I came to at that moment because my cell phone rang, and I had one leg over the edge, as if I was freaking Peter Pan. There but for the grace of God, I thought. I poured all the booze in my place down the sink drain that morning.

  I was sober for three days.

  During that time a new client asked me to get pictures of her husband, who she thought was cheating on her with another woman. He disappeared for hours at a time on weekends, saying he was going to the hardware store, and never returned with a single purchased item. He had started to erase messages on his cell phone. He seemed, she said, like he wasn’t the man she had married.

  I tracked the guy one Saturday to—of all places—a zoo. He was with a woman, all right—one who happened to be about four years old. The girl ran up to the fence at the elephant enclosure. Immediately, I thought of the animals I’d seen at the sanctuary, roaming free through the vast acreage, not cooped up in a little concrete pen. The elephant was rocking back and forth as if it were moving to music none of us could hear. “Daddy,” the little girl said. “It’s dancing!”

  “I once saw an elephant peel an orange,” I said casually, remembering a visit to the sanctuary after the caregiver’s death. It had been one of Olive’s behaviors; she rolled the tiny fruit under her massive front foot until it split, then delicately unraveled the peel with her trunk. I nodded at the man—my client’s husband. I happened to know they didn’t have any children. “Cute kid,” I said.

  “Yeah,” he replied, and I could hear the wonder in his voice that comes when you find out you’re having a baby, not when your child is four. Unless, of course, you have only just discovered that you’re her dad.

  I had to go home and tell my client that her husband wasn’t two-timing her with another woman but that he had a whole life she had not known about.

  Was it any wonder that night I dreamed of finding Alice Metcalf’s unconscious body, and of the vow I’d made that elephant, which I never did keep: I promise, she’ll be okay.

  And that was when my run of sobriety ended.

  I can’t remember all the details about the eight hours or so after I found Alice Metcalf, because so much happened in such a short amount of time. She was brought by ambulance to the local hospital, still unconscious. I gave instructions to the paramedics who accompanied her to call us the minute she came to. We asked cops from neighboring towns to help complete a sweep of the elephant sanctuary, because we didn’t know if Alice Metcalf’s daughter was still out there. At about 9:00 P.M., we swung by the hospital, only to be told that Alice Metcalf was still out cold.

  I thought we should arrest Thomas as a person of interest. Donny said that wasn’t possible, since we didn’t know if any crime had been committed. He said that we’d have to wait for Alice to wake up and tell us herself what had happened, and if Thomas had anything to do with her head injury or the kid’s disappearance or Nevvie’s death.

  We were still at the hospital waiting for her to regain consciousness when Gideon called, panicked. Twenty minutes later, we accompanied him to the sanctuary enclosure, shining flashlights into the dark, where Thomas Metcalf was standing in his bare feet and bathrobe, trying to secure chains around the front legs of an elephant. She kept trying to rip away from her restraints; a dog was barking and nipping at him, attempting to stop him. Metcalf kicked the dog in the ribs, and it whimpered away on its belly. “It’ll only take a few minutes to get the U0126 into her system—”

  “I don’t know what the hell he’s doing,” Gideon said, “but we do not chain elephants here.”

  The elephants were rumbling, an unholy earthquake that shuddered across the ground and up my legs.

  “You’ve got to get him out of there,” Gideon muttered, “before the elephant gets hurt.”

  Or vice versa, I thought.

  It took an hour to talk Thomas out of the enclosure. It took another thirty minutes for Gideon to get close enough to the terrified animal to remove the shackles. We handcuffed Metcalf, which seemed awfully fitting, and brought him to a psychiatric hospital sixty miles south of Boone. For a while, during the drive, we were out of the range of cell phone coverage, which is why it wasn’t until an hour later I got the message that Alice Metcalf was awake.

  By then, we had been on the job for sixteen hours.

  “Tomorrow,” Donny pronounced. “We’ll interview her first thing. Neither one of us is going to be any good right now.”

  And so began the biggest mistake of my life.

  Sometime between midnight and 6:00 A.M., Alice signed herself out of Mercy hospital and disappeared off the face of the earth.

  • • •

  “Mr. Stanhope,” she says. “Virgil Stanhope?”

  When I open the door, the kid speaks the word like an accusation, as if being named Virgil is equivalent to having an STD. Immediately all my defenses kick in. I’m not Virgil and haven’t been for a long time. “You’ve got the wrong person.”

  “Didn’t you ever wonder what happened to Alice Metcalf?”

  I peer more closely at her face, which is still kind of blurry, thanks to the amount I’ve drunk. Then I squint. This must be another hallucination. “Go away,” I slur.

  “Not until you admit that you’re the guy who dropped my mother off, unconscious, at a hospital ten years ago.”

  Just like that, I’m stone-cold so
ber, and I know who this is standing before me. Not Alice, and not just a hallucination. “Jenna. You’re her daughter.”

  The light that washes over that girl’s face looks like the kind of thing you see in paintings in cathedrals, the sort of art that breaks your heart even as you stare at it. “She told you about me?”

  Alice Metcalf had not told me anything, of course. She wasn’t at the hospital when I went back there the morning after the trampling to take her statement. All the nurse could tell me was that she’d signed her own paperwork for discharge, and that she mentioned someone named Jenna.

  Donny took that as proof that Gideon’s story had been the legitimate one, that Alice Metcalf had run off with her daughter as she’d been hoping to. Given the fact that her husband was a whack job, that seemed like a happy ending. At the time, Donny had been two weeks shy of retirement, and I knew he wanted to clear out the paperwork on his desk—including the caregiver’s death at the New England Elephant Sanctuary. It was an accident, Virgil, he said emphatically, when I pushed him to dig deeper. Alice Metcalf is not a suspect. She’s not even a missing person, until someone reports it.

  But nobody ever did. And when I tried to, I was stonewalled by Donny, who told me that if I knew what was good for me, I’d just let this one go. When I argued that he was making the wrong call here, Donny lowered his voice. “I’m not the one making it,” he said cryptically.

  For a decade, there were things about that case that didn’t sit right with me.

  Yet now, ten years later, here is the proof that Donny Boylan was right all along.

  “Holy shit,” I say, rubbing my temples. “I can’t believe this.” I let the door fall back so that Jenna walks in, wrinkling her nose at the crumpled fast-food wrappers on the floor and the smell of stale smoke. With a shaking hand, I pull a cigarette from my shirt pocket and light up.

  “Those things will kill you.”

  “Not fast enough,” I mutter, drawing in for that kick of nicotine. I swear, sometimes that’s the only thing that keeps me alive another day.