Leaving Time: A Novel (26 page)

I am not a light sleeper. I do not do stupid things, like get out of the Land Rover in spots that are heavily trafficked by elephants. I do not even remember closing my eyes. But when I awakened, my pad and pencil were somewhere on the ground and my mouth and eyes were gritty with dirt. There were leaves in my hair and branches piled on top of me.

The elephants that had covered me were nowhere to be found when I awakened, which was probably a good thing. I could just as easily have been killed as partially buried alive. I had no explanation for my deep, comatose nap, for my lapse of judgment, except that I was
not
myself. I was more than myself.

I’ve always found it ironic that the elephants which found me sleeping assumed I was dead, when in reality I was full of life. Approximately ten weeks along, to be exact.

Once, on my TV show, I had on a doctor who talked about hysterical strength—the life-and-death moments when people do extraordinary things, like lifting a car off a loved one. The common denominator was a high-stress situation that triggered adrenaline, which in turn led to someone transcending the limits of what his or her muscles should be capable of doing.

I had seven guests that day. Angela Cavallo, who had lifted a 1964 Chevy Impala off her son Tony; Lydia Angyiou, who had wrestled a polar bear in Quebec when it was coming after her seven-year-old son during a game of pond hockey; and DeeDee and Dominique Proulx, twelve-year-old twins who had pushed a tractor off their grandfather when it toppled over on a steep slope. “It was, like, crazy,” DeeDee told me. “We went back and tried to move the tractor, after. We couldn’t budge it an inch.”

It’s what I’m thinking about when Thomas Metcalf smacks Jenna across the face. One minute, I’m watching like a spectator, and the next, I’m shoving him away and diving against all principles of space and gravity so that Jenna lands in my arms. She looks up at me, as surprised as I am to find herself in my embrace. “I’ve got you,” I tell her fiercely, and I realize I mean it, in every interpretation.

I am not a mother, but maybe that’s what I’m supposed to be right now for this girl.

Virgil, for his part, smacks Thomas so hard that he falls back into the chair. A nurse and one of the orderlies burst into the room, having heard the crash. “Grab him,” the nurse says, and Virgil moves aside as the orderly restrains Thomas. She glances at us, on the floor. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” I say, as Jenna and I stand.

The truth is, I’m not all right, and neither is she. She’s gingerly touching the spot where she was slapped, and me, I feel like I’m going to throw up. Have you ever felt like the air was too heavy or gotten an inexplicable chill? That’s somatic intuition. I used to be a pretty good empath—I could walk into a room as if I were dipping my toe into bathwater to test it for energy, and know if it was good or bad, if a murder had gone down there or if there was sadness coating the walls like layers of paint. For whatever it’s worth, there’s some weird shit swirling around Thomas Metcalf.

Jenna is trying hard to hold it together, but I can see the sheen of tears in her eyes. From across the room, Virgil pushes off the wall, clearly agitated. His jaw is so tight I can tell he’s fighting to not unleash a stream of curses at Thomas Metcalf. He blows out of the room, a tornado.

I look at Jenna. She stares at her father as if she has never seen him before; and maybe that’s true, in a way. “What do you want to do?” I murmur.

The nurse glances at us. “I think we’ll sedate him, for a while. Might be best if you come back later.”

I wasn’t asking
her
, but that’s all right. Maybe it even makes it easier for Jenna to leave her father, who still hasn’t apologized. I slip my arm through hers and pull her tight against me, tugging her out of the room. As soon as I cross the threshold, it’s easier to breathe.

There’s no sign of Virgil in the hallway, or even in the front foyer. I lead Jenna past other patients, who stare at her as we pass. At least their caregivers have the grace to pretend they don’t see her fighting back her sobs, her cheek red and swollen.

Virgil paces in front of my car. He looks up when he sees us. “We shouldn’t have come here.” He grasps Jenna’s chin and turns
her face so that he can see the damage. “You’re going to have a hell of a shiner.”

“Great,” she says, glum. “Should be fun explaining that to my grandma.”

“Tell her the truth,” I suggest. “Your dad’s not stable. If he decked you, it wouldn’t be out of character—”

“I already knew that before we came,” Virgil blurts out. “I knew Metcalf was violent.”

Jenna and I face him. “What?” she asks. “My dad isn’t violent.”

Virgil just raises an eyebrow.
“Was,”
he repeats. “Some of the most psychopathic guys I’ve ever met are domestic abusers. They’re charming as all get-out when they’re in public; in private, they’re animals. There was some indication during the investigation that your dad was abusive to your mother. Another employee mentioned it. Clearly your father thought you were Alice, back there. Which means—”

“That my mom might have run away to protect herself,” Jenna says. “She might have had absolutely nothing to do with Nevvie Ruehl’s death.”

Virgil’s cell phone starts to ring. He answers it, hunching forward so that he can hear the call. He nods and walks a few feet away.

Jenna looks up. “But that still doesn’t explain where my mom went or why she didn’t try to come for me.”

Out of the blue, I think:
She’s stuck
.

I still don’t know if Alice Metcalf is dead, but she is certainly acting the way an earthbound spirit would—like a ghost who’s afraid of being judged for her behavior while living.

I’m saved from answering Jenna by the return of Virgil. “My parents were happily married,” Jenna tells him.

“You don’t call the love of your life a fucking bitch,” Virgil says frankly. “That was Tallulah at the lab. The mitochondrial DNA from your cheek swab was a match to the hair from the evidence bag. Your mother was the redhead in close proximity to Nevvie Ruehl before she died.”

To my surprise, Jenna seems annoyed by this information, rather than upset. “Look, could you make up your mind? Is it my mother
who’s the crazed killer, or is it my father? Because I’m getting whiplash bouncing back and forth between your theories.”

Virgil looks at Jenna’s injured eye. “Maybe Thomas went after Alice, and she ran into the enclosure to escape. Nevvie was there doing whatever she was supposed to be doing that night for her job. She got in the way, and was killed in the process by Thomas. Feeling guilty about a murder is a pretty good trigger to lose your grasp on reality and wind up in an institution …”

“Yeah,” Jenna says sarcastically. “And then he cued the elephant to come walk back and forth on top of Nevvie so it would
look
like she was trampled. Because, you know, they’re trained to do that.”

“It was dark. The elephant could have stepped on the body accidentally—”

“Twenty or thirty times? I read the autopsy report, too. Plus, you don’t have any evidence of my father being inside those enclosures.”

“Yet,” Virgil says.

If Thomas Metcalf’s room made me queasy, then being between these two makes me feel like my head is going to explode. “Too bad Nevvie’s gone,” I say cheerfully. “She’d be a great resource.”

Jenna takes a step toward Virgil. “You know what I think?”

“Does it matter? Because you and I both know you’re going to tell me anyway …”

“I think that you’re so busy accusing everyone else that night so you don’t have to admit that
you’re
the one to blame for a crappy investigation.”

“And I think
you’re
a spoiled little shit who isn’t actually brave enough to open Pandora’s box and see what’s inside.”

“You know what?” Jenna yells. “You’re fired.”

“You know what?” Virgil shouts back. “I quit.”

“Good.”

“Fine.”

She turns on her heel and starts running.

“What am I supposed to do?” he asks me. “I said I’d find her mom. I didn’t say she’d like the results. God, that kid drives me up a freaking wall.”

“I know.”

“Her mother probably stayed away because she’s such a pain in the ass.” He grimaces. “I don’t mean that. Jenna’s right. If I’d trusted my instincts ten years ago, we’d never be here.”

“The question is, would Alice Metcalf?”

We both think about that for a moment. Then he glances at me. “One of us should go after her. And by
one of us
, I mean
you
.”

I take my keys out of my purse and unlock the car. “You know, I used to filter the information I got from spirits. If I thought it was going to be painful to my client, or upsetting, I’d leave the message out of my reading. Just pretend I never heard it. But eventually I realized it wasn’t my business to judge the information I was getting. It was just my job to relay it.”

Virgil squints. “I can’t tell if you’re agreeing with me.”

I slide into the driver’s seat, turn on the ignition, and roll down my window. “I’m just saying that you don’t have to be the ventriloquist. You’re the dummy.”

“You just wanted to be able to say that to my face.”

“A little bit,” I confess. “But I’m trying to tell you to stop being invested in where this is leading, and stop trying to steer it. Just follow where it goes.”

Virgil shades his eyes in the direction Jenna went. “I don’t know if Alice is a victim who ran to save her life, or a perp who took someone else’s life. But the night we were called to the sanctuary, Thomas was upset about Alice stealing his research. Kind of like he was today.”

“You think that’s why he tried to kill her?”

“No,” Virgil says. “I think
that
was because she was having an affair.”

I have never seen a better mother than an elephant.

I suppose that if humans were pregnant for two years, the investment might be enough to make us all better mothers. A baby elephant can do no wrong. He can be naughty, he can steal food from his mother’s mouth, he can move too slowly or get stuck in mud, and still, his mother is patient beyond belief. Babies are the most precious things in an elephant’s life.

The protection of the calves is the responsibility of the entire herd. They cluster, with the babies walking in the middle. If they pass one of our vehicles, the baby is on the far side, with the mother forming a shield. If the mother has another daughter, six to twelve years old, they often sandwich the baby between them. Often, that sibling will come up to the vehicle, shaking her head to threaten you, as if to say,
Don’t you dare; that’s my little brother
. When it’s the height of the day and nap time, babies sleep under the canopies of their mothers’ massive bodies, because they are more susceptible to sunburn.

The term given to the way babies are brought up in elephant herds is
allomothering
, a fancy word for “It takes a village.” Like everything else, there is a biological reason to allow your sisters and aunts to help you parent: When you have to feed on 150 kilograms of food a day and you have a baby that loves to explore, you can’t run after him
and
get all the nutrition you need to make milk for him. Allomothering
also allows young cows to learn how to take care of a baby, how to protect a baby, how to give a baby the time and space it needs to explore without putting it in danger.

So theoretically you could say an elephant has many mothers. And yet there is a special and inviolable bond between the calf and its birth mother.

In the wild, a calf under the age of two will not survive without its mother.

In the wild, a mother’s job is to teach her daughter everything she will need to know to become a mother herself.

In the wild, a mother and daughter stay together until one of them dies.