Leaving Time

by Jodi Picoult

  “Jenna,” Serenity says softly, “it would be the blind leading the blind.”

  “What have you got to lose?”

  She barks a frustrated little laugh. “Oh, let’s see. My self-respect? My peace of mind?”

  “My trust?” Jenna says.

  Serenity meets my gaze over the kid’s head. Help me, she seems to be saying.

  I understand why Jenna needs this: Otherwise, it’s not a complete circle, it’s a line, and lines unravel and send you off in directions you never intended to go. Endings are critical. It’s why, when you’re a cop and you tell parents their kid was just found in a car crash, they want to know exactly what happened—if there was ice on the road; if the car swerved to avoid the tractor-trailer. They need the details of those last few moments, because it is all they will have for the rest of their lives. It’s why I should have told Lulu I did not want to go out with her ever again, because until I do, there will still be a sliver of hope in the door that she can wedge herself into. And it’s why Alice Metcalf has haunted me for a decade.

  I’m the guy who will never turn off a DVD, no matter how crappy the movie. I cheat and read the last chapter of a book first, in case I drop dead before I finish it. I don’t want to be left hanging, wondering what will happen for eternity.

  Which is kind of interesting, because it means that I—Virgil Stanhope, the master of practicality and the Grand Poobah of proof—must believe at least a tiny bit in some of the metaphysical fluff Serenity Jones peddles.

  I shrug. “Maybe,” I say to Serenity, “she has a point.”

  ALICE

  One reason infants can’t remember events when they are very small is that they don’t have the language to describe them. Their vocal cords simply aren’t equipped, until a certain age, which means instead they use their larynxes for emergency situations only. In fact, there is a direct projection that goes from the amygdala of an infant to his voice box, which can make that baby cry very quickly in a situation of extreme distress. It’s such a universal sound that studies have been done showing that just about every other human—even college-age boys who have no experience with babies—will try to provide assistance.

  As the child grows, the larynx matures and is capable of speech. The sound of crying changes as babies turn two or three, and as it does, people not only become less likely to want to help them but actually respond to the sound with feelings of annoyance. For this reason, children learn to “use their words”—because that’s the only way they can get attention.

  But what happens to that original projection, the nerve that runs from the amygdala to the larynx? Well … nothing. Even as vocal cords grow up around it like heliotrope, it stays where it was, and is very rarely used. Until, that is, someone leaps out from beneath your bed at right at sleepaway camp. Or you turn a corner in a dark alley and a raccoon jumps into your path. Or any other moment of complete and abject terror. When that happens, the “alarm” sounds. In fact, the noise you’ll make is one you probably could not replicate voluntarily if you tried.

  SERENITY

  Back when I was good at this kind of thing, if I wanted to contact someone in particular who had passed, I’d rely on Desmond and Lucinda, my spirit guides. I imagined them as telephone operators connecting to a direct office line, because it was so much more efficient than having an open house and sorting through the hordes to find the individual I was hoping to speak to.

  That’s called open channeling: You put out your shingle, open for business, and brace yourself. It’s a little like a news conference, with everyone shouting out questions at once. It’s hell for the medium, incidentally. But I suppose it’s no worse than putting out feelers and having no one show up.

  I ask Jenna to find me a place that she thinks was special to her mother, and so the three of us trek back to the elephant sanctuary grounds, hiking to a spot where a giant oak with arms like a titan presides over a patch of purple mushrooms. “I come here sometimes to hang out,” Jenna said. “My mom used to bring me.”

  It’s almost ethereal, the way the mushrooms create a little magic carpet. “How come these don’t grow everywhere?” I ask.

  Jenna shakes her head. “I don’t know. According to my mom’s journals, it’s where Maura’s calf was buried.”

  “Maybe it’s nature’s way of remembering,” I guess.

  “More like it’s the extra nitrates in the soil,” Virgil mutters.

  I shoot him a sharp glance. “No negativity. Spirits can feel that.”

  Virgil looks like he’s about to have a root canal. “Should I just go over there or something?” He points off into the distance.

  “No, we need you. This is about energy,” I say. “That’s how spirits manifest.”

  So we all sit down, Jenna nervous, Virgil reluctant, and me—well—desperate. I close my eyes and wing a little prayer to the powers that be: I will never ask for my Gift again, if you let me do this one thing for her.

  Maybe Jenna is right; maybe her mother has been trying to communicate with her all along, but until now, she was unwilling to accept the fact that Alice was dead. Maybe she’s finally ready to listen.

  “So,” Jenna whispers. “Should we hold hands?”

  I used to have clients who would ask how they could tell their loved ones that they missed them. You just did, I would say. It really is that easy. So this is what I tell Jenna to do. “Tell her why you want to talk to her.”

  “Isn’t that obvious?”

  “To me, maybe not to her.”

  “Well.” Jenna swallows. “I don’t know if you can miss someone you can barely remember, but that’s how I feel. I used to make up stories about why you hadn’t been able to come back to me. You were captured by pirates, and you had to sail around the Caribbean looking for gold, but every night you looked at the stars and thought, At least Jenna’s seeing them, too. Or you had amnesia, and you lived every day trying to find clues about your past, like all these tiny arrows that would point you back to me. Or you were on a secret mission for the country, and you couldn’t reveal who you were without blowing your cover, and when you finally came home and flags were waving and crowds were cheering I’d get to see you as a hero. My English teachers said I had the most amazing imagination, but they didn’t understand, it wasn’t make-believe to me. It was so real that sometimes it hurt, like a stitch in your side when you run too hard, or the ache in your legs when you have growing pains. But I guess it turns out that maybe you couldn’t come to me. So I’m trying to get to you.”

  I look at her. “Anything?”

  Jenna takes a deep breath. “No.”

  What would make Alice Metcalf, wherever she is, stop and listen?

  Sometimes the universe gives you a gift. You see a girl, terrified that her mother is gone forever, and you finally understand what needs to be done.

  “Jenna.” I gasp. “Can you see her?”

  She jerks her head around. “Where?”

  I point. “Right there.”

  “I don’t see anything,” she says, near tears.

  “You have to focus …”

  Even Virgil is leaning forward now, squinting.

  “I can’t …”

  “Then you’re not trying hard enough,” I snap. “She’s getting brighter, Jenna—that light, it’s swallowing her. She’s leaving this world. This is your last chance.”

  What would make a mother pay attention?

  Her child’s cry.

  “Mom!” Jenna shrieks until her voice is hoarse, until she’s bent forward in the field of violet mushrooms. “She’s gone?” Jenna sobs, frantic. “She’s really gone?”

  I crawl forward to put my arm around her, wondering how to explain that I never really saw Alice at all, that I lied to get Jenna to pour her heart into that one desperate word. Virgil gets to his feet, scowling. “It’s all crap, anyway,” he mutters.

  “What’s this?” I ask.

  I reach for the sharp object that has poked into my calf, making me wince
. It’s buried under the heads of the mushrooms, invisible, until I dig through their roots and find a tooth.

  ALICE

  All this time, I’ve said that elephants have an uncanny ability to compartmentalize death, without letting grief cripple them permanently.

  But there is an exception.

  In Zambia, a calf that had been orphaned by poaching began to hang around with a bunch of young bulls. Just as teenage males will walk up to each other and punch each other on the shoulder to say hello while girls hug, the behavior of these male elephants was very different from what a young female elephant might have experienced otherwise. They tolerated her hanging around because they could mate with her—like Anybodys in West Side Story—but they didn’t really want her there. She calved when she was only ten years old, and since she had no mother to guide her and no practice being an allomother in a breeding herd, she treated that baby the way she had been treated by the bulls. When the baby fell asleep beside her, she would get up and walk away. The calf would wake up and start bellowing for its mother, but she would ignore the cries. By contrast, in a breeding herd, if a baby squeals, at least three females rush to touch it all over and see if it is okay.

  In the wild, a young female is an allomother long before she bears her own offspring. She has fifteen years to practice being a big sister to the calves that are born to the herd. I’d seen calves approach young female elephants to suckle for comfort, even though the juveniles did not have breasts or milk yet. But the young female would put her foot forward, the way her mother and aunties did, and proudly pretend. She could act like a mother without having any of the real responsibility until she was ready. But when there is no family to teach a young female to raise her own calf, things can go horribly awry.

  When I was working in Pilanesberg, this story repeated itself. There, young bulls that had been translocated began to charge vehicles. They killed a tourist. More than forty white rhino were found dead in the reserve before we realized that these subadult males were the ones who’d attacked them—highly aggressive behavior that was far from normal.

  What is the common denominator for the odd behavior of the young female elephant that didn’t care about her own calf and the belligerent pack of teenage bulls? Certainly there was a lack of parental guidance. But was that the only issue at play? All those elephants had seen their families killed in front of them, as a result of culling.

  The grief that I have studied in the wild, where a herd loses an old matriarch, for example, must be contrasted to the grief that comes from observing the violent death of a family member—because the long-term effects are so markedly different. After a natural death, the herd encourages the grieving individual to eventually move on. After a mass killing by humans, there is—by definition—no herd left for support.

  To date, the animal research community has been reluctant to believe that elephant behavior might be affected by the trauma of watching one’s family being killed. I think this isn’t scientific objection as much as it is political shame—after all, we humans have been the perpetrators of this violence.

  At the very least, it is crucial when studying the grief of elephants to remember that death is a natural occurrence. Murder is not.

  JENNA

  “It’s from Maura’s calf,” I tell Virgil, as we wait in the same room where we met Tallulah two hours ago. That’s what I keep telling myself. Because it’s really too hard to think about the alternative.

  Virgil turns the tooth over in his hand. It makes me think of the descriptions of elephants rubbing their feet over tiny bits of ivory in my mother’s journals, the ones my grandmother took from me. “It’s too small to be from an elephant,” he says.

  “There are other animals around, too, you know. Fisher cats. Raccoons. Deer.”

  “I still think we should take it to the police,” Serenity says.

  I can’t look her in the eye. She’s explained her little trick, that my mother had never appeared (as far as she knew, anyway). But for some reason this only makes me feel worse.

  “We will,” Virgil agrees. “Eventually.”

  The door opens, and an air-conditioned breeze slices between us. Tallulah enters, looking pissed. “This is getting ridiculous. I don’t work for you exclusively, Vic. I’m doing you a favor—”

  He holds out the tooth. “I swear to God, Lu, if you do this I will never ask for anything again. We may have found the remains of Alice Metcalf. Forget the blood in the shirt. If you can find DNA in this—”

  “I don’t need to,” Tallulah says. “This tooth doesn’t belong to Alice Metcalf.”

  “I told you it came from an animal,” I mutter.

  “No, it’s human. I worked in a dental office for six years, remember? It’s a second molar, I could tell you that in my sleep. But it’s a deciduous tooth.”

  “What’s that?” Virgil asks.

  Tallulah hands it back to him. “It belonged to a kid. Probably one under the age of five.”

  The pain that erupts in my mouth is like nothing I’ve ever felt. It’s a cavern with lava inside. It’s stars, exploding where my eyes were. It’s a raw, shimmering nerve.

  It’s what happened.

  When I wake up, my mother is gone, just like I knew would happen all along.

  It is why I don’t like to close my eyes, because when you do, people disappear. And if people disappear, you don’t know for sure that they are ever coming back.

  I can’t see my mother. I can’t see my father. I start to cry, and then someone else, someone different, picks me up. Don’t cry, she whispers. Look. I have ice cream.

  She shows me: It is the chocolate kind on a stick that I cannot eat fast enough, so it melts all over my hands and turns them the same color as Gideon’s. I like when that happens, because then we match. She puts on my jacket, and my shoes. She tells me we are going on an adventure.

  Outside, the world seems too big, like the way it feels when I close my eyes to go to sleep and worry that no one will ever find me again in all the darkness. That’s when I start to cry, and my mother always comes. She lies down with me on the couch, until I stop thinking about how the night has swallowed us, and by the time I remember to start thinking about it again the sun is back.

  But tonight my mother doesn’t come. I know where we are going. It’s the place where I run in the grass sometimes, and where we go to watch the elephants. But I’m not supposed to be in here anymore. My father shouts about it. A cry swells in my throat, and I think it’s going to come out, but she bounces me on her hip and says, Now, Jenna, you and I, we’re just going to play a game. You love games, don’t you?

  And I do. I love games.

  I can see the elephant in the trees, playing hide-and-seek. I think maybe that is the game we are going to play. It’s funny to think of Maura being It. I giggle, wondering if she will tag us with her trunk.

  That’s better, she says. That’s my good girl. That’s my happy girl.

  But I am not her good girl or her happy girl. I belong to my mother.

  Lie down, she tells me. Lie on your back and look up at the stars. Let’s see if you can find the elephant in the spaces between them.

  I like games, so I try. But all I see is the night, like a bowl knocked upside down, and the moon falling out. What if the bowl drops and traps me? What if I’m hidden, and my mother can’t find me?

  I start to cry.

  Ssh, she says.

  Her hand comes over my mouth and pushes down. I try to get away, because I do not like this game. In her other hand she holds a big rock.

  For a while I am asleep, I think. I dream my mother’s voice. All I can see are the trees leaning together, like they are trying to tell secrets, as Maura bursts through them.

  And then I am somewhere else, outside, above, around, watching a picture of myself like when my mother puts on movies of me as a baby and I see myself on TV, even though I am still here. I am being carried, and there’s a bounce to it, and we go a long way. When Maura
puts me down she rubs me with her back foot, and I think she would have been so good at hide-and-seek after all, because she is so gentle. When she pats me with her trunk, it is the way my mother taught me to touch the baby bird that fell out of its nest this spring, like I am pretending to be the wind.

  Everything is soft: the secret of her breath on my cheek, the paintbrush branches she covers me with, like a blanket to keep me warm.

  One minute Serenity is standing in front of me, and the next she’s gone. “Jenna?” I hear her say, and then she’s black-and-white, dappled like static.

  I’m not in the lab. I’m not anywhere.

  Sometimes the connection was crystal clear, and sometimes it was like being on a cell phone in the mountains, where you only catch every third word, Serenity had said.

  I try to listen, but I’m only getting bits and pieces, and then the line goes dead.

  ALICE

  They never found her body.

  I had seen it with my own eyes, and yet by the time the police got there, Jenna was gone. I read it in the newspapers. I couldn’t tell them that I had seen her, lying there on the ground in the enclosure. I couldn’t contact the police at all, of course, because then they would come for me.

  So I scrutinized Boone from eight thousand miles away. I stopped journaling, because every day was another day I didn’t have my child. I worried that by the time I reached the end of the book, the canyon between who I used to be and who I was now would be so broad that I wouldn’t be able to see the far side. I saw a therapist for a while, lying about the circumstances of my sadness (a car accident) and using a fake name (Hannah, a palindrome, a word that means the same thing even if you turn it inside out). I asked him if it was normal after the disappearance of a child to still hear her crying in the night, and to wake up to that imaginary sound. I asked him if it was normal to wake up and, for a few glorious seconds, to believe she was on the other side of the wall, still sleeping. He said, It is normal for you, and that’s when I stopped seeing him. What he should have said is: Nothing will ever be normal again.