Leaving Time

by Jodi Picoult

  “The medical examiner would have figured out right away during the autopsy if it was a homicide rather than a suicide.”

  “Really? Because I was under the impression that law enforcement doesn’t always make the most legitimate rulings when it comes to cause of death.”

  Virgil ignores my jab. “What if Gideon was planning to run away with Alice and Thomas found out about it?”

  “You had Thomas signed into the psychiatric ward before Alice disappeared from the hospital.”

  “But he very well could have been fighting with her earlier that night, so that she ran into the enclosures. Maybe Nevvie Ruehl was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She tried to stop Thomas, and instead, he stopped her. Meanwhile Alice ran, knocked her head into a branch, and passed out a mile away from them. Gideon met her at the hospital and they worked out a plan—one that took her far away from her angry husband. We know that Gideon accompanied the elephants to their new home. Maybe Alice slipped away and met him there.”

  I fold my arms, impressed. “That’s brilliant.”

  “Unless,” Virgil muses, “it went down another way. Say Gideon told Grace he wanted a divorce so he could run off with Alice. Grace, devastated, committed suicide. The guilt over Grace’s death made Alice rethink their plan—but Gideon wasn’t willing to let her desert him. Not alive, anyway.”

  I think about that for a moment. Gideon could have come to the hospital and convinced Alice that her baby was in trouble—or told her any lie that would have made her leave abruptly with him. I’m not stupid—I watch Law & Order. So many murders happen because the victim trusts the guy who comes to the door, or asks for help, or offers a ride. “Then how did Nevvie die?”

  “Gideon killed her, too.”

  “Why would he kill his own mother-in-law?” I ask.

  “You’re kidding, right?” Virgil says. “Isn’t that every guy’s fantasy? If Nevvie heard that Gideon and Alice were sleeping together, she probably was the one who started the fight.”

  “Or maybe she never touched Gideon. Maybe she went after Alice in the enclosure. And Alice ran away to save herself, and passed out.” I glance at him. “Which is what Jenna has been saying all along.”

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Virgil says and scowls.

  “You should call her. She might remember something about Gideon and her mother.”

  “We don’t need Jenna’s help. We just have to get to Nashville …”

  “She doesn’t deserve to be left behind.”

  For a moment Virgil looks like he’s going to argue. Then he reaches for his phone and stares down at it. “Do you have her number?”

  I called her once, but it was from home, not my cell. I don’t have her number with me. Unlike Virgil, however, I know where to look for it.

  We drive to my apartment. He glances with longing at the bar that we have to walk past to access the staircase. “How do you resist?” he murmurs. “It’s like living above a Chinese restaurant.”

  Virgil stands in the doorway as I rummage through the stack of mail on my dining room table to find the ledger that I make my clients sign. Jenna, of course, was the most recent acquisition. “You can come in, you know,” I say.

  It takes me another moment to locate the phone, which is hiding underneath a kitchen towel on the counter. I pick it up and punch Jenna’s number in, but the phone doesn’t seem to have a dial tone.

  Virgil is looking at the photograph on my mantel—me sandwiched between George and Barbara Bush. “Nice of you to go slumming with the likes of Jenna and me,” he says.

  “I was a different person back then,” I reply. “Besides, celebrity isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. You can’t see it in the photo, but the president’s hand is on my ass.”

  “Could’ve been worse,” Virgil murmurs. “Could’ve been Barbara’s.”

  I try Jenna’s number again, but nothing happens. “Weird. There’s something wrong with my line,” I tell Virgil, who pulls his cell phone from his pocket.

  “Let me try,” he suggests.

  “Forget it. I can’t get cell service here unless I’m wearing tinfoil on my head and hanging from the fire escape. The joys of country living.”

  “We could use the phone at the bar,” Virgil offers.

  “The hell with that,” I say, imagining myself trying to pry him away from a whiskey. “You used to be a beat cop before you were a detective, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  I stuff the ledger into my purse. “Then you can direct us to Greenleaf Street.”

  The neighborhood where Jenna lives is like a hundred other neighborhoods: lawns trimmed neatly in patchwork squares, houses dressed in red and black shutters, dogs yapping behind invisible fences. Little kids ride their bikes up and down the sidewalk as I pull the car to the curb.

  Virgil glances at Jenna’s front yard. “You can tell a lot about a person from their house,” he muses.

  “Like what?”

  “Oh, you know. A flag often means they’re conservative. If they drive a Prius, they’re going to be more liberal. Half the time it’s bullshit, but it’s an interesting science.”

  “Sounds a lot like a cold reading. And I’m pretty sure it’s about as accurate.”

  “Well, for what it’s worth—I guess I didn’t expect Jenna to grow up so … white bread. If you know what I mean.”

  I do. The cul-de-sac, the meticulous houses, the recycling bins stacked at the curb, the 2.4 children in each yard—it feels so Stepford. There’s something unsettled about Jenna, something ragged at the edges, that does not belong here.

  “What’s her grandmother’s name?” I ask Virgil.

  “How the fuck would I know?” he says. “But it doesn’t matter; she works during the day.”

  “Then you should stay here,” I suggest to Virgil.

  “Why?”

  “Because I have less of a chance of Jenna slamming the door in my face if you’re not with me,” I say.

  Virgil may be a pain in the butt, but he isn’t stupid. He slouches in the passenger seat. “Whatever.”

  So I walk solo up the cobblestone pathway to the front door. It’s mauve, and there’s a little wooden heart nailed to the front of it, painted with the words WELCOME FRIENDS. I ring the doorbell, and a moment later it swings open by itself.

  At least that’s what I think, until I realize that there’s a tiny kid standing in front of me, sucking his thumb. He’s maybe three, and I am not all that good with small humans. They make me think of rodents, chewing your good leather shoes and leaving crumbs and droppings behind. I’m so stunned by the thought that Jenna has a sibling—one that was apparently born after she moved in with her grandmother—that I can’t even find the words to say hello.

  The kid’s thumb comes out of his mouth, like the plug from a dike, and not surprisingly, the waterworks start.

  Immediately a young woman comes running and scoops him into her arms. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I didn’t hear the doorbell. Can I help you?”

  She is screaming this, of course, because the kid is wailing even louder. And she’s already glaring at me, as if I actually did physical harm to her kid. Meanwhile, I’m trying to figure out who this woman is and what she is doing in Jenna’s home.

  I offer my prettiest television smile. “I guess I came at a bad time,” I say. Loudly. “I’m looking for Jenna?”

  “Jenna?”

  “Metcalf?” I say.

  The woman jostles her kid on her hip. “I think you have the wrong address.”

  She starts to close the door, but I wedge my foot inside it, digging in my purse for that ledger. It opens easily to the back page, where Jenna has written, in her loopy teenager handwriting, 145 Greenleaf Street, Boone.

  “One forty-five Greenleaf Street?” I ask.

  “You’ve got the right place,” she answers, “but there’s no one here by that name.”

  She shuts the door in my face, and I stare down at the ledger in my hand. Stunned,
I walk back to the car and slip inside, toss the ledger at Virgil. “She played me,” I tell him. “She gave me a fake address.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t want me to send junk mail.”

  “Or maybe she didn’t trust you,” Virgil suggested. “She doesn’t trust either of us. And you know what that means.” He waits until I glance up at him. “She’s a step ahead of us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s smart enough to have figured out why her dad reacted the way he did. She must already know about her mother and Gideon; and she’s doing exactly what we should have done an hour ago.” He reaches over and turns the key in the ignition. “We’re going to Tennessee,” Virgil says, “because a hundred bucks says Jenna’s already there.”

  ALICE

  Dying of grief is the ultimate sacrifice, but it is not evolutionarily feasible. If grief were that overwhelming, a species would simply be erased. That’s not to say there haven’t been cases in the animal kingdom. I knew of a horse that had died suddenly, and its long-term stablemate followed shortly after. There was a pair of dolphins that had worked in tandem at a theme park; when the female passed away, the male swam in circles with his eyes closed for weeks.

  After Maura’s baby died, her pain was written all over her face and in the way she moved her body gingerly, as if the friction of the air against it was excruciating. She isolated herself in the vicinity of the grave; she wouldn’t come into the barn at night. She didn’t have the solace of her family around her, to bring her back to the world of the living.

  I was determined not to let her be a casualty of her own sorrow.

  Gideon affixed to the fence a giant bristled brush that had been a gift from the public works department when it purchased a new street sweeper, an enrichment tool that Maura would have previously loved to rub up against. But Maura didn’t even glance in the direction of the hammering when he was installing it. Grace tried to cheer Maura up by giving her red grapes and watermelon, her favorite foods—but Maura stopped eating. The vacancy of her stare, the way she seemed to take up less material space than she had before—it made me think of Thomas, staring down at the blank book in his office three nights after the calf’s death. Physically present, but mentally somewhere else.

  Nevvie thought we should let Hester into the enclosure to see if she could console Maura, but I didn’t think it was the right time yet. I had seen matriarchs charge elephants in their own herd—close relatives—if they got too close to a calf that was alive. Who knew what Maura, in her grief, would do to protect a calf that was dead? “Not yet,” I told Nevvie. “As soon as I see that she’s ready to move on.”

  It was academically interesting, recording how a lone elephant would rebound from loss, without a herd to support her. It was also heartbreaking. I spent hours cataloging Maura’s behavior, because that was my job. I would take Jenna with me whenever Grace couldn’t keep an eye on her, because Thomas was so busy himself.

  Whereas the rest of us were still moving in slow motion, trapped by the viscous sadness that surrounded Maura, Thomas had snapped back into a model of efficiency. He was so focused and energized that I wondered if I’d just hallucinated the image of him catatonic at his desk the night after the calf died. The money he’d been counting on from donors who were excited about a baby elephant’s arrival would no longer materialize, but he had a new idea to sustain funding, and that consumed him.

  If I was going to be honest, I didn’t mind picking up the slack of running the sanctuary while Thomas was busy. Anything was better than the shock of seeing him the way he’d been—broken and unreachable. That Thomas—the one who had apparently existed before I knew him—was one I didn’t ever want to see again. I hoped that maybe I was the necessary ingredient in that equation, that my presence was enough to keep his depression from returning in the future. And because I was unwilling to be the trigger that might set Thomas off, I was willing to do whatever he wanted or needed. I was going to be his biggest cheerleader.

  Two weeks after the calf died—which is how I’d started marking time—I drove to Gordon’s Wholesale to pick up our weekly order. But when I went to pay with our credit card, it was declined.

  “Run it again,” I suggested, but it didn’t make a difference.

  Embarrassed—it wasn’t a state secret that the sanctuary was always low on funding—I told Gordon I’d just drive to an ATM and pay him in cash.

  When I tried, however, the machine wouldn’t spit out any money. ACCOUNT CLOSED, the screen read. I ducked inside the bank and asked to speak to a manager. Surely there was a mistake.

  “Your husband withdrew the money in that account,” the woman told me.

  “When?” I asked, dumbfounded.

  She checked her computer. “Last Thursday,” she told me. “The same day he applied for a second mortgage.”

  My face burned. I was Thomas’s wife. How could he make decisions like this without talking to me about them? We had seven elephants whose diet was going to be seriously depleted without this week’s produce delivery. We had three employees who expected to be paid on Friday. And as far as I could tell, we no longer had any money.

  I didn’t go back to Gordon’s Wholesale. Instead, I drove home, snapping Jenna out of her car seat so fast that she started to cry. I burst through the door of the cottage, calling for Thomas, who didn’t answer. I found Grace cutting up squash in the Asian barn, and Nevvie pruning wild grapevines, but neither of them had seen Thomas.

  By the time I walked back home, Gideon was waiting. “You know anything about a nursery shipment?” he asked.

  “Nursery?” I repeated, thinking of babies. Of Maura.

  “Yeah, like plants.”

  “Don’t accept the delivery,” I said. “Stall them.” Just then Thomas walked past us, waving the truck through the gates.

  I handed Gideon the baby and grabbed Thomas by the arm. “Do you have a minute?”

  “Actually,” he said, “I don’t.”

  “I think you do,” I countered, and I dragged him inside to his office, closing the door for privacy. “What’s on that truck?”

  “Orchids,” Thomas said. “Can’t you picture it? A field of purple orchids stretching out to the Asian barn?” He grinned. “I dreamed about it.”

  He’d bought a truckload of exotic flowers that we didn’t need, because of a dream? Orchids would not grow in this soil. And they were not cheap. That delivery was money thrown away.

  “You bought flowers … when our credit card’s been shut off and our bank account has been drained?”

  To my shock, Thomas’s face glowed. “I didn’t just buy flowers. I invested in the future. I don’t know why I haven’t thought of it before, Alice,” he said. “The storage space above the African barn? I’m going to make it an observation deck.” He was talking so fast that his words tangled, like yarn rolling out of his lap. “You can see everything from up there. The whole property. I feel like I’m king of the world when I look out the window. Imagine ten windows. A wall of glass. And big donors coming to watch the elephants from that deck. Or renting out the space for functions—”

  It wasn’t a bad idea. But it was an ill-timed one. We didn’t have any extra funds to allocate to a renovation project. We barely had enough to cover operating expenses for the month. “Thomas. We can’t afford that.”

  “We can if we don’t hire anyone to do the building.”

  “Gideon doesn’t have time to—”

  “Gideon?” He laughed. “I don’t need Gideon. I can do it myself.”

  “How?” I asked. “You don’t know anything about construction.”

  He turned on me, feral. “You don’t know anything about me.”

  As I watched him walk out the office door, I thought that might just be true.

  I told Gideon that there had been a mistake, that the orchids needed to be returned. I am still not sure how he managed this miracle, but he ca
me back with the refunded money in hand, which went directly to Gordon’s Wholesale for our crates of cabbage and thick-necked squash and overripe melons. Thomas didn’t even seem to realize that his orchids were gone; he was too busy hammering and sawing in the old attic space above the African barn from dawn to dusk. And yet every time I asked to see his progress, he snapped at me.

  Maybe, I thought scientifically, this was Thomas’s reaction to grief. Maybe he was throwing himself into a project so that he wouldn’t think about what we’d lost. To that end, I decided the best way to snap him out of his folly was to help him remember what he still had. So I cooked elaborate meals, even though I’d never really mastered more than macaroni and cheese. I packed picnics and brought Jenna to the African barn, and enticed Thomas to join us for lunch. One afternoon, I asked him about his project. “Let me peek,” I begged. “I won’t tell anyone anything until it’s done.”

  But Thomas shook his head. “It’ll be worth the wait,” he promised.

  “I could help you. I’m good at painting …”

  “You’re good at a lot of things,” Thomas said, and he kissed me.

  We had been having a lot of sex. After Jenna went to sleep, Thomas would come back from the African barn and shower, then slip into bed beside me. Our lovemaking was almost desperate—if I was trying to escape the memory of Maura’s calf, Thomas seemed to be trying to keep himself tethered to something. It was almost as if I didn’t matter, as if any body beneath him would have done the job—but I couldn’t place blame, since I was using Thomas, too, to forget. I’d fall asleep, exhausted, and in the middle of the night, when my hand inched across the sheets to find him, he would be gone again.

  At first, on the picnic, I kissed him back. But then his hand slid under my shirt, fumbling with the clasp of my bra. “Thomas,” I whispered. “We’re in public.”

  Not only were we sitting in the shadow of the African barn, where any of the employees might pass by, but Jenna was staring at us. She pulled herself to her feet and stumbled toward us, a tiny zombie.