Leaving Time: A Novel (37 page)

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 came 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.

I gasped. “Thomas! She’s walking!”

His face was buried in the curve of my neck. His hand covered my breast.

“Thomas,” I said, shoving him away. “
Look
.”

He backed off, annoyed. His eyes were nearly black behind his glasses, and even though he didn’t say anything, I could hear him clearly:
How dare you?
But then Jenna tumbled into his lap, and he scooped her up and kissed her forehead and each cheek. “What a big girl,” he said, as Jenna babbled against his shoulder. He set her down on the ground, pointing her in my direction. “Was it a fluke or a new skill?” he asked. “Should we run the experiment again?”

I laughed. “This girl is doomed, having two scientists as parents.” I held out my arms. “Come back to me,” I coaxed.

I was speaking to my daughter. But I might as well have been pleading to Thomas as well.

A few days later, when I was helping Grace prepare meals for the Asian elephants, I asked her if she ever argued with Gideon.

“Why?” she said, suddenly guarded.

“It just seems like you get along so well,” I replied. “It’s a little daunting.”

Grace relaxed. “He doesn’t put the toilet seat down. Drives me crazy.”

“If that’s his only flaw, I’d say you’re incredibly lucky.” I raised a cleaver, chopping a melon in half, focusing my attention on the juice that bled out of it. “Does he ever keep secrets from you?”

“Like what he’s getting me for my birthday?” She shrugged. “Sure.”

“I don’t mean those kinds of secrets. I mean the kind that make you think he’s hiding something.” I put down the knife and looked her in the eye. “The night the calf died … you saw Thomas in his office, didn’t you?”

We had never talked about it. But I knew Grace must have seen him, rocking back and forth in his chair, his eyes empty, his hands shaking. I knew that was why she had refused to leave Jenna alone with him.

Grace’s gaze slid away from mine. “Everyone’s got their demons,” she murmured.

I knew, from the way she said it, that this was not the first time she had seen Thomas that way. “It’s happened before?”

“He always bounces back.”

Was I the only person at the sanctuary who didn’t know? “He told me it was just once—after his parents died,” I said, my face hot. “I thought marriage was a partnership, you know? For better or for worse. In sickness and in health. Why would he lie to me?”

“Keeping a secret isn’t always lying. Sometimes it’s the only way to protect the person you love.”

I scoffed. “You only say that because you haven’t been on the receiving end.”

“No,” Grace said softly. “But I’ve been the one who keeps the secret.” She began to shovel peanut butter into the empty bellies of the halved melons, her hands quick and practiced. “I love taking care of your daughter,” she added, a non sequitur.

“I know. I’m grateful.”

“I love taking care of your daughter,” Grace repeated, “because I’m never going to have one of my own.”

I looked at her, and in that moment, she reminded me of Maura—there was a shadow in her eyes that I’d noticed before, that I’d chalked up to youth and insecurity, but that actually may have been the loss of something she never really had. “You’re still young,” I said.

Grace shook her head. “I have PCOS,” she clarified. “It’s a hormone thing.”

“You could get a surrogate. You could adopt. Have you talked to Gideon about the alternatives?” She just stared at me, and I understood:
Gideon didn’t know
. This was the secret she had been keeping from him.

Suddenly Grace grabbed my arm, so tightly that it hurt. “You won’t tell?”

“No,” I promised.

She settled, picking up her knife again to start cutting. We worked
in silence for a few moments, and then Grace spoke again. “It’s not that he doesn’t love you enough to tell you the truth,” she said. “It’s that he loves you too much to risk it.”

That night, after Thomas slipped into the cottage after midnight, I pretended to be asleep when he poked his head into the bedroom. I waited until I heard the shower running, and then I got out of bed and walked out of the cottage, careful not to wake Jenna. In the dark, as my eyes adjusted, I ran past Grace and Gideon’s cottage, where the lights were off. I thought of them twined together in bed, with an infinitesimal space between them at every point they touched.

The spiral staircase was painted black, and I banged my shin against it before I realized I had already reached the far edge of the African barn. Moving silently—I didn’t want to wake the elephants and have them send out an inadvertent alert—I crept up the stairs, biting my lip against the pain. At the top, the door was locked, but one master key opened everything at the sanctuary, so I knew I’d be able to get inside.

The first thing I noticed was that, as Thomas had said, the moonlit view was remarkable. Although Thomas hadn’t installed the plate-glass windows, he had cut out rough openings and covered them with a sheet of clear plastic. Through them, I could see every acre of the sanctuary, illuminated by the grace of the full moon. I could easily imagine a viewing platform, an observatory, a way for the public to see the amazing animals we sheltered without us having to disturb their natural habitat or make them part of a display, like they’d been in zoos and circuses.

Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe Thomas was just trying to do what he’d said: save his business. I turned, feeling along the wall until I could locate the light switch. The room flooded, so bright that for a moment I couldn’t see.

The space was empty. There was no furniture, no boxes, no tools, not even a stick of wood. The walls had been painted a blinding white,
along with the ceiling and the floor. But scrawled on every inch were letters and numbers, written over and over in a looping code.

C14H19NO4C18H16N6S2C16H21NO2C3H6N2O2C189H285N55O57S.

It was like walking into a church and finding occult symbols written in blood on the walls. My breath caught in my throat. The room was closing in on me, the numbers shimmering and blending into each other. I realized, as I sank down onto the floor, this was because I was crying.

Thomas was sick.

Thomas needed help.

And although I was not a psychiatrist, although I didn’t have experience with any of this, it did not look like depression to me.

It just looked … crazy.

I stood up and backed out of the room, keeping the door unlocked. I didn’t have much time. But instead of going to our cottage, I went to the one shared by Gideon and Grace and knocked on the door. Grace answered wearing a man’s T-shirt, her hair tousled. “Alice?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

My husband is mentally ill. This sanctuary is dying. Maura lost her calf
.

You pick.

“Is Gideon here?” I asked, when I knew that he was. Not everyone had a husband who sneaked off in the middle of the night to write gibberish on the ceiling and floor and walls of an empty room.

He came to the door in a pair of shorts, his torso bare, a shirt in hand. “I need your help,” I said.

“One of the elephants? Is something wrong?”

I didn’t answer, just turned on my heel and started to walk toward the African barn again. Gideon fell into step beside me, pulling the T-shirt over his head. “Which girl is it?”

“The elephants are fine,” I said, my voice shaking. We had reached the base of the spiral staircase. “I need you to do something, and I need you to not ask me any questions. Can you handle that?”

Gideon took one look at my face and nodded.

I climbed as if I were headed to my own execution. In retrospect, maybe I was. Maybe this was the first step to a long and fatal fall. I opened the door so that Gideon could see the interior.

“Holy shit,” he breathed. “What
is
this?”

“I don’t know. But you have to paint over it before morning.” Just like that, the threads of self-restraint snapped, and I doubled over, unable to breathe, unable to stem the tears anymore. Gideon immediately reached for me, but I backed away. “Hurry,” I choked out, and I ran down the stairs, back to my cottage, where I found Thomas just opening the door of the bathroom, a cloud of steam haloing his body.

“Did I wake you?” he asked, and he smiled, that crooked smile that had made me hang on his words in Africa, that I saw whenever I closed my eyes.