Leaving Time

by Jodi Picoult

  “My God,” the Cougar says. “What happened?”

  Virgil looks just as baffled as she is. “What the fuck?” he mouths.

  I hiccup, louder, “I just want to find my m-mother.” Through damp eyes, I look at Tallulah. “I don’t know where else to go.”

  Virgil gets into character, slinging an arm around my shoulders. “Her mom disappeared years ago. Cold case. We don’t have much to work with.”

  Tallulah’s face softens. I have to admit, it makes her look less like Boba Fett. “You poor kid,” she says and then she turns her adoring eyes on Virgil. “And you—helping her out like this? You’re one of a kind, Vic.”

  “We need a buccal swab. I’ve got a hair that may or may not have been her mother’s, and I want to try to match the mitochondrial DNA. At least it would be a starting point for us.” He glances up. “Please, Lulu. Help an old … friend?”

  “You’re not so old,” she purrs. “And you’re the only person I ever let call me Lulu. You got the hair with you?”

  He hands her the bag he found at the evidence room.

  “Great. We’ll get started on the kid’s sequencing right away.” She pivots, rummaging in a cabinet for a paper-wrapped packet. I am sure it’s going to be a needle, and that terrifies me because I hate needles, so I start shaking. Virgil catches my eye. You’re overacting, he whispers.

  But he figures out pretty quick that I’m seriously terrified, because my teeth start chattering. I can’t tear my eyes away from Tallulah’s fingers as she rips the sterile packaging away.

  Virgil reaches for my hand and holds on tight.

  I can’t remember the last time I held someone’s hand. My grandmother’s, maybe, to cross the street a thousand years ago. But that was duty, not compassion. This is different.

  I stop shivering.

  “Relax,” Tallulah says. “It’s only a big Q-tip.” She snaps on a pair of rubber gloves and a mask, and instructs me to open my mouth. “I’m just going to rub this on the side of your cheek. It won’t hurt.”

  After about ten seconds, she removes the swab and sticks it into a little vial, which she labels. Then she does the whole thing again.

  “How long?” Virgil asks.

  “A few days, if I move heaven and earth.”

  “I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “I do.” She walks her fingers up the crook of his arm. “I’m free for lunch.”

  “Virgil isn’t,” I blurt out. “You told me you have a doctor’s appointment, remember?”

  Tallulah leans in to whisper, although—unfortunately—I hear every word. “I still have my hygienist scrubs if you want to play doctor.”

  “If you’re late, Victor,” I interrupt, “you won’t be able to get a refill on your Viagra.” I hop off the table, grab Virgil’s arm, and pull him out of the room.

  We are laughing so hard as we round the corner of the hallway that I think we might collapse before we make it outside. In the sunshine, we lean against the brick wall of Genzymatron Labs, trying to catch our breath. “I don’t know whether I should kill you or thank you,” Virgil says.

  I look at him sideways and put on my huskiest Tallulah voice. “Well … I’m free for lunch.”

  That just makes us laugh harder.

  And then, when we stop laughing, we both remember at the same time why we’re here, and that neither of us really has something to laugh about. “Now what?”

  “We wait.”

  “For a whole week? There has to be something else you can do.”

  Virgil looks at me. “You said your mother kept journals.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “Could be something relevant in there.”

  “I’ve read them a million times,” I say. “They’re research about elephants.”

  “Then maybe she mentioned her coworkers. Or any conflicts with them.”

  I slide down along the brick wall, so that I am sitting on the cement walkway. “You still think my mother is a murderer.”

  Virgil crouches down. “It’s my job to be suspicious.”

  “Actually,” I say, “it used to be your job. Your job right now is to find a missing person.”

  “And then what?” Virgil replies.

  I stare at him. “You would do that? You would find her for me, and then take her away again?”

  “Look,” Virgil says and sighs. “It’s not too late. You can fire me and leave and I swear to you, I’ll forget about your mother and what crimes she may or may not have committed.”

  “You’re not a cop anymore,” I remind him. And that gets me thinking about how skittish he was at the police department, how we had to sneak around, instead of walking in the front door and saying hello to his colleagues. “Why aren’t you a cop anymore?”

  He shakes his head, and suddenly he’s closed off, sealed shut. “None of your damn business.”

  Just like that, everything changes. It seems impossible that we were laughing a few minutes ago. He’s six inches away from me and he might as well be on Mars.

  Well. I should have expected it. Virgil doesn’t really care about me; he cares about solving this case. Suddenly uncomfortable, I walk in silence toward his truck. Just because I’ve hired Virgil to figure out my mother’s secrets doesn’t give me the liberty to know all of his.

  “Look, Jenna—”

  “I get it,” I interrupt. “This is strictly business.”

  Virgil hesitates. “Do you like raisins?”

  “Not really.”

  “Then how about a date?”

  I blink at him. “I’m a little young for you, creeper.”

  “I’m not hitting on you. I’m telling you the pickup line I used on Tallulah, when she was cleaning my teeth and I asked her out.” Virgil pauses. “In my defense, I was completely trashed at the time.”

  “That’s a defense?”

  “You got anything better I can use as an excuse?”

  Virgil grins, and just like that, he’s back, and whatever I said to upset him doesn’t crackle between us anymore. “I see your point,” I reply, trying to sound nonchalant. “That is possibly the worst pickup line I have ever heard in my life.”

  “Coming from you, that’s really saying something.”

  I look up at Virgil and smile. “Thanks for that,” I reply.

  I will admit to you that my memory is sometimes fuzzy. Things that I chalk up to nightmares might actually have happened. Things that I think I know for sure may change, over time.

  Take the dream I had last night about my father playing hide-and-seek, which I am pretty sure was not a dream but a reality.

  Or that memory I have of my mother and father, talking about animals that mate for life. Although it’s true I can recall every single word, the actual voices are less clear.

  It’s my mom, definitely. And it must be my dad.

  Except sometimes, when I see his face, it’s not.

  ALICE

  Grandmothers in Botswana tell their children that if you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, you must go together. Certainly this is true of the villagers I have met. But it might surprise you to know that it is also true of elephants.

  Elephants are often seen checking in with others in their herd by rubbing against an individual, stroking with a trunk, putting that trunk in a friend’s mouth after that individual has suffered a stressful experience. But in Amboseli, researchers Bates, Lee, Njiraini, Poole, et al. decided to scientifically prove that elephants are capable of empathy. They categorized moments when elephants seemed to recognize suffering in or threat to another elephant and took action to change that: by working cooperatively with other elephants, or protecting a young calf that couldn’t take care of itself; by babysitting another’s calf or comforting it by allowing it to suckle; by assisting an elephant that had become stuck or had fallen down, or that needed a foreign object, like a spear or snare wire, removed.

  I did not get a chance to conduct a study on the scale of the one at Amboseli,
but I have my own anecdotal evidence of elephant empathy. There was a bull in the game reserve that we nicknamed Stumpy because, as a youngster, he had lost a large part of his trunk in a noose-shaped wire snare. He didn’t have the ability to break off branches or twirl the grass with his trunk like spaghetti, cutting it off with his toenails to put in his mouth. For most of his life, even when he was an adolescent, his herd would feed him. I’ve seen elephants create a definitive plan to get a calf up the steep bank of a riverbed—a series of coordinated behaviors that includes some of the herd breaking down the bank to make less of a grade, and others guiding the baby from the water, and more still helping to pull her out. But you could argue that there’s an evolutionary advantage to keeping Stumpy or that calf alive.

  It gets more interesting, though, when there is not an evolutionary advantage to empathetic behavior. When I was in Pilanesberg, I watched an elephant come across a rhino calf that was stuck in the mud of a watering hole. The rhinos were distressed, and that in turn upset the elephant, which stood around trumpeting and rumbling. Somehow, she managed to convince the rhinos that she had practice doing this, and to just get out of the way and let her take over. Now, in the great ecological sphere of things, it was not beneficial to the elephant to rescue a rhino baby. And yet she went in and lifted the baby with her trunk, even though the rhino mother charged her each time she tried. She risked her own life for the offspring of a different species. Likewise, in Botswana, I saw a matriarch come upon a lioness that was stretched out beside an elephant path while her cubs played in the middle of it. Normally, if an elephant sees a lion it will charge—it recognizes the animal as a threat. But this matriarch waited very patiently for the lioness to collect her cubs and move away. True, the cubs were no threat to this elephant, but one day they would be. Right then, however, they were just someone’s babies.

  And yet, empathy has its limits. Although elephant calves are allomothered by all females in the herd, if the biological mother dies, her baby usually will, too. An orphaned calf that is still milk-fed will not move away from its mother’s fallen body. Eventually, the herd will have to make a decision: stay with the grieving baby, and run the risk of not feeding their own calves or getting to water … or leave, and consider the certain death collateral damage. It’s quite disturbing to watch, actually. I’ve witnessed what looks like a good-bye ceremony, where the herd touches the calf, where they rumble their distress. And then they move away, and the baby dies of starvation.

  Yet once in the wild I saw something different. I came across an isolated calf that had been left behind at a watering hole. Now, I don’t know the circumstances—if its mother had died or if the calf had gotten disoriented and wandered off. At any rate, an unrelated herd came by at the same time a hyena trotted in from a different direction. The calf was fair game for the hyena—unprotected, luscious. However, the matriarch of that passing herd had a calf of her own, maybe a tiny bit older. She saw the hyena scoping out the abandoned calf and chased the hyena off. The calf ran over to her and tried to nurse, but she pushed him away and started to move on.

  For the record, this is normal behavior. Why, from a Darwinian standpoint, would she limit the resources of a calf with her own genetic makeup by nursing an unrelated baby? Although there are records of adoption within herds, the majority of allomothers will not nurse an orphaned calf; there just is not enough milk to go around without compromising their own biological offspring. Moreover, this elephant was not related; the matriarch had no biological ties to the orphaned calf.

  That baby, however, let out the most desperate, lonely cry.

  The matriarch was a good hundred feet ahead of him at this point. She froze, spun, and charged the calf. It was shocking and terrifying, and yet that baby stood his ground.

  The matriarch grabbed him with her trunk and tucked him fiercely between the playpen of her massive legs, walking off with him. For the next five years, every time I saw that calf, he was still part of this new family.

  I would argue that there is a special empathy elephants have for mothers and children—either their own species’s or another’s. That relationship seems to hold a precious significance and a bittersweet knowledge: An elephant seems to understand that if you lose a baby, you suffer.

  SERENITY

  My mother, who had not wanted me to showcase my Gift, lived long enough for the world to hail me as a successful psychic. I brought her to my set in L.A. to meet her favorite soap star, from the original Dark Shadows, who came on my show for a reading. I bought her a little bungalow near my Malibu home, with enough room for her to have a vegetable garden and orange trees. I took her to film premieres and award shows and shopping on Rodeo Drive. Jewelry, cars, vacations—I could give her anything she wanted—but I couldn’t predict the cancer that eventually consumed her.

  I watched my mother shrink away, until she finally passed. When she did she weighed seventy-five pounds and looked like she would break in a strong wind. I had lost my father years ago, but this was different. I was the best actress in the world—fooling the public into thinking that I was happy and rich and successful, when in reality I knew that a fundamental piece of me was gone.

  My mother’s passing made me a better psychic. I understood viscerally, now, how people would grasp at the threads I could give them, in an attempt to sew shut the gap where a loved one had been ripped away. In my dressing room at the studio, I would look in the mirror and pray for my mother to come to me. I bargained with Desmond and Lucinda to show me something. I was a psychic, dammit. I deserved a sign, to know that wherever she was on the other side, she was all right.

  For three years, I got messages from hundreds of spirits trying to contact loved ones here on earth … but not a single syllable came through from my own mom.

  Then one day, I got into my Mercedes to drive home and went to toss my purse on the passenger seat and it landed in my mother’s lap.

  My first thought was: I am having a stroke.

  I stuck out my tongue. There was something I’d read once in a viral email about diagnosing a stroke and not being able to stick out your tongue, or maybe it was having it flop to one side. I couldn’t remember.

  I felt for my mouth, to see if it was drooping.

  “Can I say a simple sentence?” I said out loud. Yes, fool, I thought. You just did.

  I swear on all that’s holy, I was a practicing, celebrated psychic, but when I saw my mother sitting there, I was certain I was dying.

  My mother was just looking at me, smiling, not saying a word.

  Heatstroke, I thought, still not taking my eyes off her, but it wasn’t all that hot.

  Then I blinked. And she was gone.

  In the aftermath, I thought of a lot of things. That if I’d been on the 101, I probably would have caused a multicar pileup. That I would have traded everything I owned to hear her speak one more time.

  That she did not look the way she had when she died, feeble and brittle and birdlike. She was the mother I remembered from my childhood, the one strong enough to carry me when I was sick and scold me when I was being a pain in the ass.

  I have never seen my mother again, although it’s not for lack of trying. But I learned something that day. I believe we’ve lived many times and have been reincarnated many times, and a spirit is the amalgam of all the lifetimes in which that soul existed. But when a spirit approaches a medium, it comes back with one particular personality, one particular form. I used to think spirits manifested in a certain way so that the living person could recognize them. Yet after my mother came to me, I realized that they come back in the way they want to be remembered.

  You may hear this and feel skeptical. You’d be right to feel that way. Skeptics keep the swamp witches at bay; or so I thought, before I became one myself. If you haven’t had a personal experience with the paranormal, you should question what you’re being told.

  This is what I would have said to a skeptic, had they approached me the day I saw my mother in the passe
nger seat: She was not translucent or shimmering or milky white. She was as solid to me as the guy who took my parking ticket minutes later when I pulled out of the garage. It was as if I’d Photoshopped a memory of my mother into the here-and-now, a trick of mechanics, like those videos where the dead Nat King Cole sings with his daughter. No question about it—my mother was as real as the steering wheel under my shaking hands.

  But doubt has a way of blooming like fireweed. Once it takes hold, it’s nearly impossible to eradicate. It’s been years since a spirit has come to me for help. If a skeptic said to me right now, Who do you think you’re kidding? I suppose I’d say, Not you. And certainly not me.

  The kid at the Genius Bar who is supposed to be helping me has the people skills of Marie Antoinette. She grunts as she turns on my ancient MacBook and lets her fingers tickle the keyboard. She doesn’t make eye contact. “What’s wrong?” she asks.

  For starters? I’m a professional psychic with no connection to the spirit world; I missed my last two rent payments; I stayed up till 3:00 A.M. last night watching a Dance Moms marathon; and the only way I could get into these pants today was by wearing Spanx.

  Oh, and my computer’s broken.

  “When I try to print something,” I say, “nothing happens.”

  “What do you mean, nothing happens?”

  I stare at her. “What do people usually mean when they say that?”

  “Does your screen turn black? Does anything come out of the printer? Do you get an error message? Did you document anything?”

  I have a theory about Gen Y, these narcissistic twenty-somethings. They don’t want to wait their turn. They don’t want to work their way up the ladder. They want what they want now—in fact, they’re sure they deserve it. Young people like this, I believe, are soldiers who died in Vietnam, and have been reincarnated. The timing’s right, if you do the math. These kids are still pissed about getting killed in a war they didn’t believe in. Being rude is just another way of saying: Kiss my twenty-five-year-old ass.