Leaving Time: A Novel (25 page)

“My father died last year,” Thomas said. “I still look for him in crowds.”

“I’m sorry.”

He shrugged. “I think grief is like a really ugly couch. It never goes away. You can decorate around it; you can slap a doily on top of it; you can push it to the corner of the room—but eventually, you learn to live with it.”

Somehow, I thought, elephants had taken it a step further. They didn’t grimace every time they entered the room and saw that couch. They said,
Remember how many good memories we had here?
And they sat, for just a little while, before moving elsewhere.

Maybe I started crying; I can’t remember. But Thomas was so close now that I could smell the soap on his skin. I could see the sparks of orange in his eyes. “Alice. Who have you lost?”

I froze. This wasn’t about me. I wouldn’t let him make it that way.

“Is that why you push people away?” he whispered. “So they can’t get close enough to hurt you when they’re gone?”

This virtual stranger knew me better than anyone else in Africa. He knew me better than I knew myself. What I was really researching was not how elephants deal with loss but how humans can’t.

And because I did not want to let go, because I didn’t know how, I wrapped my arms around Thomas Metcalf. I kissed him in the shade of the baobab tree, with its upside-down roots in the air, with its bark that could be cut a hundred times and still heal itself.

The walls of the institution where my father lives are painted purple. It makes me think of Barney, that giant, creepy dinosaur, but apparently some very renowned psychologist wrote an entire PhD dissertation about which color inspires healing, and this was right at the top of the list.

The nurse on duty looks straight at Serenity when we walk in, which I guess makes sense, because we appear to be a family unit—if a dysfunctional one. “Can I help you?”

“I’m just here to see my dad,” I say.

“Thomas Metcalf,” Serenity adds.

I know several of the nurses here; this one I haven’t met, which is why she doesn’t recognize me. She puts a clipboard on the counter so that I can sign us in, but before I do, I hear my father’s voice, shouting somewhere down the hall. “Dad?” I call out.

The nurse looks bored. “Name?” she says.

“Sign us in and meet me in Room 124,” I tell Serenity, and I start to run. I can feel Virgil falling into step beside me.

“Serenity Jones,” I hear her say, and then I throw open the door to my dad’s room.

He is fighting against the grip of two burly orderlies. “For the love of God, let me go,” he yells, and then he spies me. “Alice! Tell them who I am!”

There’s a broken radio that looks like it’s been hurled across the room, its wires and transistors draped across the floor like a robot autopsy. The trash can has been overturned, and there are crumpled paper pill cups and tangles of masking tape and the peel of an orange scattered around. In my father’s hand is a box of breakfast cereal. He’s holding on to it like it’s a vital organ.

Virgil stares at my dad. I can only imagine what he’s seeing: a man with wild snowy hair and pretty lousy personal grooming habits, who’s skinny and fierce and completely off his rocker. “He thinks you’re Alice?” Virgil says under his breath.

“Thomas,” I soothe, stepping forward. “I’m sure the gentlemen will understand if you calm down.”

“How can I calm down when they’re trying to steal my research?”

By now, Serenity has come through the doorway, too, stopping dead at the struggle. “What’s going on?”

The orderly with a blond buzz cut glances up. “He got a little agitated when we tried to throw out the empty cereal box.”

“If you stop fighting, Thomas, I’m sure they’ll let you keep your … your research,” I say.

To my surprise, that’s all it takes for my dad to go limp. Immediately the orderlies release him, and he sinks back in the chair, clutching that stupid box to his chest. “I’m all right now,” he mutters.

“Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs,” Virgil murmurs.

Serenity shoots him a sharp glare. “Thank you so much,” she says pointedly to the orderlies, as they pick up the trash that’s all over the floor.

“No problem, ma’am,” one replies, as the other pats my dad on the shoulder.

“You take it easy, bro,” he says.

My dad waits until they leave and then stands and grabs my arm. “Alice, you cannot imagine what I’ve just discovered!” His eyes focus suddenly past me, on Virgil and Serenity. “Who are they?”

“Friends of mine,” I say.

That seems to be good enough. “Look at this.” He points to the box. There is a bright cartoon of something that might be a turtle and
might be a cucumber with legs, saying in a thought bubble:
DID YOU KNOW
 …

… that crocodiles can’t stick out their tongues?

… that honeybees have hair on their eyes to help them collect pollen?

… Anjana, a chimp at a rescue facility in South Carolina, has raised white tiger cubs, leopard, and lion cubs—bottle-feeding and playing with the babies?

… Koshik, an elephant, can accurately speak six Korean words?

“Of course he’s not
speaking
six words,” my father says. “He’s imitating the keepers. I Googled the scientific paper this morning after that imbecile Louise finally got off the computer because she’d reached the next level of Candy Crush. What’s fascinating is that he apparently learned to communicate for social reasons. He was kept apart from other elephants, and the only interaction he had socially was with human caregivers. You know what this means?”

I glance at Serenity and shrug. “No, what?”

“Well, if there’s documented proof that an elephant learned to imitate human speech, can you imagine the implications for how we think about elephants’ theory of mind?”

“Speaking of theories,” Virgil says.

“What’s your field of study?” my father asks him.

“Virgil does … retrieval work,” I improvise. “Serenity’s interested in communication.”

He brightens. “Through what medium?”

“Yes,” Serenity says.

My father looks baffled for a moment but then forges on. “Theory of mind covers two critical ideas: that you have an awareness of being a unique being, with your own thoughts and feelings and intentions … and that this is true for other beings, and that they don’t know what you’re thinking or vice versa until these things are communicated. The evolutionary benefit, of course, of being able to predict the behavior of others based on that is enormous. For example, you can pretend to be injured, and if someone doesn’t know you’re faking, they will bring you food and take care of you and you don’t have to do any work. Humans aren’t born with this ability—we develop
it. Now, we know that for theory of mind to exist, humans have to use mirror neurons in the brain. And we know that mirror neurons fire when the task involves understanding others through imitation—and when acquiring language. If Koshik the elephant is doing that, doesn’t it also stand to reason that the other things mirror neurons signify in humans—like empathy—are also present in elephants?”

When I hear him talk, I realize how incredibly smart he must have been, before. I realize what made my mother fall in love with him.

That reminds me why we’re here.

My father turns to me. “We need to get in touch with the authors of the paper,” he muses. “Alice, can you imagine the implications for my research?” He reaches for me—I feel Virgil tense up—and hugs me, swinging me in a circle.

I know he thinks I’m my mother. And I know it’s totally creepy. But you know, sometimes it’s just nice to be hugged by my dad, even if the reasons are all wrong.

He puts me down, and I have to admit, I haven’t seen him look this fired up in a while.

“Dr. Metcalf,” Virgil says, “I know this is really important to you, but I wonder if you might have time to answer a few questions about the night your wife disappeared.”

My father’s jaw tightens. “What are you talking about? She’s right here.”

“That’s not Alice,” Virgil replies. “That’s your daughter, Jenna.”

He shakes his head. “My daughter is a child. Look, I don’t know what you’re playing at, but—”

“Stop agitating him,” Serenity interjects. “You’re not going to get anything out of him if he’s upset.”

“Out of me?” my father’s voice rises. “You’re here to steal my research, too?” He advances on Virgil, but Virgil grabs my hand and pulls me between them, so that my father cannot help but see me.

“Look at her face,” he urges. “
Look
at her.”

It takes five seconds for my dad to respond. And let me tell you, five seconds is a really long time. I stand there, watching his nostrils
flare with every breath and his Adam’s apple climb up and down the ladder of his throat.

“Jenna?” my father whispers.

For just a fraction of a second, when he looks at me, I know that he’s not seeing my mother. That I’m—what did he say?—a unique being, with my own thoughts and feelings and intentions. That I
exist
.

And then he’s crushing me against him again, but this is different—protective and amazed and tender, as if he could shield me from the rest of the world, which is ironically all I’ve ever done for him. His hands span my back like wings.

“Dr. Metcalf,” Virgil says, “about your wife—”

My father holds me at arm’s length and glances in the direction of Virgil’s voice. That’s all it takes to break whatever glass thread has been spun between us. When he turns to me again, I know he’s not seeing me at all. In fact, he’s not even looking at my face.

His gaze is fixated on the tiny pebble hanging from a chain around my neck.

Slowly, he lifts the pendant with his fingers. He turns it over so that the mica glitters. “My wife,” he repeats.

His fist tightens on the chain, snapping it off my neck. The necklace falls to the floor between us as my father slaps me so hard that I go flying across the room.

“You fucking bitch,” he says.

I have a story that is not one of my own but was told to me by Owen the bush vet. A few years ago, researchers were darting in a communal area. They had targeted one specific female, and shot the M99 dart from a vehicle. She dropped, as expected. But the herd bunched very tightly around the female, preventing the other rangers from driving them away. They couldn’t get to her to put on the collar, so they waited a bit to see what would happen.

Two concentric circles formed around the fallen female. The outer circle stood with their backsides to her, facing out at the vehicles, impassive. But there was an inner circle behind them that the researchers could not quite see, blocked as they were by the bulky bodies on the front line. They could hear rustling, and movement, and the snapping of branches. Suddenly, as if on cue, the herd stepped away. The elephant that had been darted lay on her side, covered with broken branches and a huge pile of soil.

After birth, a calf is dusted by its mother to cover the smell of blood, which is a huge attraction for predators. But there was no blood on this female elephant. I’ve heard, too, that the reason elephants might cover a corpse is to mask the death smell—but again, I don’t believe it. Elephant noses are so incredibly sensitive, there is no way they would have mistaken an elephant that had been darted for one that was no longer alive.

I have of course seen elephants dust and cover dead companions or calves that did not survive. It often seems to be a behavior reserved for deaths that are unexpected or somehow aggressive. And the deceased does not necessarily have to be an elephant. A researcher who came to the reserve via Thailand told a story of an Asian bull that was part of an elephant-back safari company. He had killed the mahout who had trained him and cared for him for fifteen years. Now, the bull was in musth—which in Hindi means “madness.” In musth, brainpower takes a backseat to hormones. Yet after the attack the bull got very still and backed away, as if he knew he had done something wrong. Even more interesting were the female elephants, which covered the mahout with dirt and branches.

The week before I left Botswana forever, I had been putting in long hours. I observed Kagiso with her dead calf; I was writing up notes from the death of Mmaabo. One hot day, I got out of the jeep to stretch my legs, and I lay down beneath the baobab tree where I had last been with Thomas.