Leaving Time

by Jodi Picoult

  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:

  1. Gideon was working at the sanctuary and was living with my mother, who’d taken on an alias, like Mata Hari or Euphonia Lalique or something equally mysterious, so that she could remain hidden. (Note: I didn’t really want to think about what she would be hiding from. My father, the law, me—none of those were options I felt like exploring.) Gideon would recognize me at first glance, of course, and take me to my mother, who would dissolve in an implosion of joy and beg forgiveness and tell me she’d never stopped thinking of me.

  2. Gideon was no longer working at the sanctuary, but given that the elephant community is a pretty small one, there was still some contact information for him in the files. I would show up on his doorstep, and my mother would answer the door, and then you can fill in the rest from scenario 1.

  3. I finally found Gideon, wherever he was, but he told me he was sorry—that he had no idea what had happened to my mother. That yes, he had loved her. That yes, she had wanted to run away from my father with him. Maybe even that the death of Nevvie was somehow tied to this star-crossed love affair. But that in the long years I had spent growing up, it simply had not worked out between them, and she had left him the same way she left me.

  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:

  4. Through Gideon, I locate my mother. But there is no joy, no reunion, no wonder. There’s just resignation, as she sighs and says, I wish you hadn’t found me.

  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.

  The terminal is in the middle of the city, and I’m surprised by the amount of activity and noise. It’s like walking into a headache. There are men wearing bolo ties and tourists nursing bottles of water and people playing the guitar for coins in front of storefronts. Everyone seems to be wearing cowboy boots.

  Immediately I fade back into the air-conditioned terminal and find a map of Tennessee. Hohenwald—where the sanctuary is located—is southwest of the city, about an hour and a half away. I’m guessing it’s not a big tourist destination, so there’s no public transport out there. And I’m not stupid enough to hitchhike. Is it possible that getting this last eighty miles will be harder than the thousand before it?

  For a little while, I stand in front of the giant map of Tennessee that is on the wall, wondering why American kids never study geography, because if they did maybe I’d have a working knowledge of this state. I take a deep breath and walk out of the bus station, downtown, wandering in and out of stores selling western attire and restaurants with live music. There are also cars and trucks parked along the streets. I look at the license plates—a lot are probably rentals. But some have baby car seats inside, or CDs scattered on the floor—the detritus of an owner.

  Then I start reading bumper stickers. There are some I expect (AMERICAN BY BIRTH, SOUTHERN BY THE GRACE OF GOD) and some that make me feel sick to my stomach (SAVE A DEER, SHOOT A QUEER). But I am looking for hints, clues, the way Virgil might have looked. Something that will tell me more about the family who owns that vehicle.

  Finally, on one pickup truck, I find a sticker that says PROUD OF MY COLUMBIA HONOR STUDENT! This is a jackpot on two counts: There is a flatbed I can hide in, and Columbia—according to the map at the Greyhound terminal—is en route to Hohenwald. I put my foot on the rear bumper, ready to hoist myself into the flatbed and lie down when no one is looking.

  “What are you doing?”

  I’ve been so busy canvassing the people on the street to see if they are paying attention, I don’t see the little boy sneak up behind me. He is probably about seven years old, and he is missing so many of his teeth that the remaining ones look like headstones in a graveyard.

  I crouch down, thinking of all the babysitting I’ve done over the years. “I’m playing hide-and-seek. Wanna help?”

  He nods.

  “Cool. But that means you have to keep a secret. Can you do that? Can you not tell your mom or dad that I’m hiding here?”

  The boy jerks his chin up and down, emphatic. “Then do I get to have a turn?”

  “Totally,” I promise, and I hike myself into the flatbed.

  “Brian!” a woman calls, huffing as she runs around the corner, a teenage girl sulking behind her with her arms crossed. “Get over here!”

  The metal bed is as hot as the surface of the sun. I can literally feel the blisters forming on my palms and the backs of my legs. I poke my head up the tiniest bit, so that I can make eye contact with him, and I put my finger to my pursed lips, the universal sign for Ssssh.

  His mother is closing in on us, so I lie down and cross my arms and hold my breath.

  “My turn next,” Brian says.

  “Who are you talking to?” his mother demands.

  “My new friend.”

  “I thought we talked about lying,” she says, and she unlocks the cab door.

  I feel bad for Brian, not just because his mother doesn’t believe him, but because I have no plans to give him a turn at hide-and-seek. I’ll be long gone by then.

  Someone inside slides open the back window of the truck cab for ventilation. Through it, I can hear the radio as Brian and his sister and his mom head down the interstate toward, I hope, Columbia, Tennessee. I close my eyes as the sun bakes me and pretend I am on a beach, not a slab of metal.


  The songs that come on are about driving trucks like this one, or about girls with hearts of gold who’ve been done wrong. They all sound the same to me. My mother had an aversion to banjos so strong it bordered on allergy. I remember her turning off the radio every time a singer had the slightest twang in her voice. Could a woman who hated country-western music have chosen to make a new home within striking distance of the Grand Ole Opry? Or had she used that dislike as a smoke screen, figuring that anyone who knew her would never expect her to settle down in the heart of country-westernland?

  As I bob along in the flatbed, I think:

  1. Banjos actually are kind of cool.

  2. Maybe people change.

  ALICE

  It’s really not a stretch to say that, for elephants, mating is a song and dance.

  As in all communication for those animals, vocalizations are paired with gestures. On an ordinary day, for example, a matriarch might make a “let’s go” rumble, but at the same time she will position her body in the direction she wants to take the herd.

  The sounds of mating are more complicated, however. In the wild we hear the pulsing, guttural musth rumbles of males—deep and low, puttering, what you might imagine if you drew a bow made of hormones against an instrument of anger. Males might produce a musth rumble when they are challenged by another male, when they’re surprised by an approaching vehicle, when they are searching for mates. The sounds differ from elephant to elephant and are accompanied by ear waves and frequent urine dribbling.

  When a musth male is vocalizing, the whole herd of females will start to chorus. Those sounds attract not just the male who started the conversation but all the eligible bachelors, so that the females in estrus now have the chance to choose the most attractive mate—and by this I don’t mean the one with the best comb-over but rather the male who is most likely to survive—a healthy, older elephant. A female that doesn’t like a particular male might run away from him, even if he has already mounted her, to find someone better. But, of course, that presumes there’s someone better to be found.

  For this reason, several days before she comes into estrus, a female gives an estrus roar—a powerful call that brings even more boys to the yard, and thus a greater range of mates from which to select. Finally, when she allows herself to be mated, she sings an estrus song. Unlike the musth rumbles of males, these songs are lyrical and repetitive, throaty purrs that rise quickly and then trail off. The female flaps her ears loudly and secretes from her temporal glands. After the mating, the other females in her family join in, a symphony of roars and rumbles and trumpets like those they’d make at any other socially exciting moment—a birth, or a reunion.

  We know that when male whales sing, those who have the most complex songs are the ones who get the females. On the contrary, in the elephant world, a musth male will mate with anyone he can; it’s the female who sings, and it’s out of biological necessity. A female elephant is in estrus for only six days, and the only available males may be miles away. Pheromones don’t work at those distances, so she has to do something else to attract potential mates.

  It has been proven that whale songs are passed down from generation to generation, that they exist in all the oceans of the world. I have always wondered if the same holds true for elephants. If the calves of elephants learn the estrus song from their older female relatives during mating season, so that when it’s their own turn, they know how to sing to attract the strongest, fiercest males. If, by doing this, the daughters learn from their mothers’ mistakes.

  SERENITY

  Here’s what I haven’t told you: Once before, in my heyday as a psychic, I lost the ability to communicate with spirits.

  I was doing a reading for a young college girl who wanted me to reach out to her deceased dad. She brought along her mother, and they had their own tape recorders, so that each could replay whatever happened at our session. For an hour and a half, I put his name out there; I struggled to connect. And the only thought that came into my head was that this man had killed himself with a gun.

  Other than that: silence.

  Exactly like what I get now, when I try to connect with the dead. Anyway, I felt horrible. I was charging these women for ninety minutes of nothing. And although I didn’t offer a money-back guarantee, I had never in my life as a psychic come up so dry before. So I apologized.

  Upset about the outcome, the girl burst into tears and asked to use the restroom. As soon as she left, her mother—who had been largely silent during this entire experience—told me about her husband, and the secret she had not confided to her daughter.

  He had indeed committed suicide, using a shotgun. He’d been a very well-known college basketball coach in North Carolina who’d had an affair with one of the boys on his team. When his wife discovered this, she told him she wanted a divorce, and that she would ruin his professional career unless he paid her to keep quiet. He refused and said he truly cared about the boy. So she told her husband he could have his new paramour, but she would sue him for every cent he had, and would still go public with what he’d done to her. That was the cost of love, she said.

  He walked downstairs into their basement and blew his brains out.

  At his funeral, as she was saying her last good-bye in private, she said, You son of a bitch. Don’t think I’ll forgive you now that you’re dead. Good riddance.

  Two days later the daughter called me to say that the strangest thing had happened. The recording she had made was completely blank. Although there had been dialogue between us during the session, all you could hear on the playback was a hissing sound. And even stranger: The same thing was true of the recording that had been made by her mother.

  It was clear to me that the dead husband had heard his wife loud and clear at the funeral, and had taken her at her word. She didn’t want anything to do with him, and so he stayed away from us all. Permanently.

  Talking to spirits is a dialogue. It takes two. If you’re trying hard and coming up empty, it’s either because of a spirit who won’t communicate or because of a medium who can’t.

  “It does not work like a faucet,” I snap, trying to put some distance between myself and Virgil. “I can’t turn it on and off.”

  We are in the parking lot outside of Gordon’s Wholesale, processing the information we just received about Grace Cartwright’s suicide. I have to admit, it wasn’t what I was expecting to hear, but Virgil is convinced that this is an integral piece of the puzzle. “Let me get this straight,” he says soberly. “I’m saying to you that I’m willing to actually admit that psychic powers aren’t a load of bullshit. I’m saying to you that I’m willing to give your … talent … a chance. And you won’t even try?”

  “Fine,” I say, frustrated. I lean against the front bumper of my car, shaking out my shoulders and arms the way a swimmer does at the starting block. Then I close my eyes.

  “You can do it here?” Virgil interrupts.

  I crack open my left eye. “Isn’t that what you had in mind?”

  His face reddens. “I guess I thought you’d need … I don’t know. A tent or something.”

  “I can manage without my crystal ball and tea leaves, too,” I say drily.

  I haven’t admitted to either Jenna or Virgil that I can no longer communicate with spirits. I’ve let them believe that the acts of stumbling over Alice’s wallet and necklace on the grounds of the old elephant sanctuary were not flukes but actual psychic moments.

  I may have even convinced myself of that. So I close my eyes and think, Grace. Grace, come talk to me.

  That’s how I used to do it.

  But I’m getting nothing. It’s as empty and static as the time I tried to contact that North Carolina basketball coach who’d killed himself.

  I glance at Virgil. “You get anything?” I ask. He’s typing away on his phone, searching for Gideon Cartwright in Tennessee.

  “Nope,” he admits. “But if I were him I’d be using an alias.”

  “Well, I’m
not getting anything, either,” I tell Virgil, and this is, for once, the truth.

  “Maybe you should do it … louder.”

  I put my hand on my hip. “Do I tell you how to do your job?” I say. “It’s sometimes like this, for suicides.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like they’re embarrassed by what they’ve done.” Suicides, almost by definition, are all ghosts—stuck earthbound because they are desperate to apologize to their loved ones or because they are so ashamed of themselves.

  It gets me thinking about Alice Metcalf again. Maybe the reason I haven’t been able to communicate with her is that, like Grace, she killed herself.

  Immediately I push that thought away. I’ve let Virgil’s expectations go to my head; the reason I haven’t been able to contact Alice—or any other potential spirit, for that matter—has a hell of a lot more to do with me than it does with them.

  “I’ll try again later,” I lie. “What is it you want from Grace, anyway?”

  “I want to know what made her kill herself,” he says. “Why would a happily married woman with a steady job and a family, put stones in her pockets, and walk into a pond?”

  “Because she wasn’t a happily married woman,” I reply.

  “And we have a winner,” Virgil says. “You find out your husband is sleeping with someone else. What do you do?”

  “Take a blessed moment and glory in the fact that at least I walked down the aisle at some point?”

  Virgil sighs. “No. You confront him, or you run away.”

  I unravel that thought. “What if Gideon wanted a divorce and Grace said no? What if he killed her and tried to make it look like a suicide?”