Leaving Time: A Novel (42 page)

“You should tell him,” I repeated. “Because he deserves to know.”

The next morning, two wonderful things happened. Syrah got up, seemingly over her colic, and wandered with a bouncing Gertie into the Asian enclosure. And the fire department dropped off a gift: a used fire hose that they wanted to donate, since they’d recently upgraded their equipment.

Gideon, who had gotten even less sleep than I had, seemed to be in a terrific mood. If Grace had taken my advice and spoken to him about her secret, he either had taken it well or was too happy about Syrah’s recovery to let the news affect him. At any rate, he certainly didn’t seem to be thinking twice about my awkward exit the night before. He hefted the hose over his shoulder. “The girls are going to love this,” he said, grinning. “Let’s test it out.”

“I have a million things to do,” I replied. “And so do you.”

I was being a bitch. But if that created a wall between us, that was safer.

The vet returned to examine Syrah and gave her a clean bill of health. I buried myself in the office, checking accounts, trying to figure out where I could borrow from Peter to pay Paul, so that the vet’s bill would be covered. Jenna sat at my feet, coloring the photos in old newspapers with her crayons. Nevvie had taken one of the trucks into town for a tune-up, and Grace was cleaning out the African barn.

It wasn’t until Jenna tugged on my shorts and told me she was hungry that I realized hours had passed. I made her peanut butter and jelly, cutting the sandwich into squares just the right size for her hands. I took off the crusts, saving them in my pocket for Maura. And then I heard the sound of someone dying.

Grabbing Jenna, I started to run toward the African barn—where the sounds were coming from. I had a series of concussive, thunderous thoughts:
Maura and Hester are fighting. Maura is injured. One of the elephants has hurt Grace
.

One of the elephants has hurt Gideon
.

I threw open the barn door to find Hester and Maura in their stalls, with the retractable bars that separated the two wide open. In this big expanse, they were frolicking, dancing, chortling in the artificial rain of the fire hose. As Gideon sprayed them, they turned in circles and squealed.

They weren’t dying. They were having the time of their lives.

“What are you
doing
?” I yelled, as Jenna kicked to get out of my arms. I set her on the ground, and she immediately began to jump in puddles on the cement.

Gideon grinned, waving the fire hose through the bars, back and forth. “Enrichment,” he said. “Look at Maura. Have you ever seen her acting crazy like this?”

He was right; Maura seemed to have lost all vestiges of grief. She was shaking her head and stomping in the spray, throwing her trunk up every time she sang out.

“Is the furnace fixed?” I asked. “And the oil changed in the ATV? Have you taken down the fence in the African enclosure or stumped the northwest field? Did you regrade the slope of the pond in the Asian enclosure?” It was a laundry list of all the things we needed to do.

Gideon twisted the nozzle of the hose, so that the water slowed to a trickle. The elephants trumpeted and turned, waiting for more. Hoping.

“That’s what I thought,” I said. “Jenna, honey, come on.” I started toward her, but she ran away from me, splashing in another puddle.

Gideon’s mouth flattened. “Hey, boss,” he said, and he waited for me to turn.

As soon as I did, he twisted the nozzle so that the spray hit me square in the chest.

It was frigid and shocking, so forceful that I staggered backward, pushing my sopping hair out of my face and looking down at my drenched clothing. Gideon angled the hose so that it struck the elephants instead. He grinned. “You need to chill out,” he said.

I lunged for the hose. He was bigger than me, but I was faster. I turned the spray on Gideon until he held his hands up in front of his face. “Okay!” He laughed, choking on the stream. “Okay! I give up!”

“You started it,” I reminded him, as his hands tried to wrestle the nozzle away from me. The hose wriggled like a snake between us, and we were faith healers, fighting for a moment of the divine. Slippery, soaked, Gideon finally managed to wrap his arms around me, trapping my hands between us so that the spray hit our feet and I couldn’t hold the nozzle anymore. It fell to the ground, swiveling in a semicircle before it came to rest, spraying a fountain toward the elephants.

I was laughing so hard I was out of breath. “Okay, you win. Let me go,” I gasped.

I was temporarily blinded; my hair was plastered to my face. Gideon pushed it away, so that I could see him smiling. His teeth, they were impossibly white. I couldn’t take my eyes off his mouth. “I don’t think so,” he said, and he kissed me.

The shock was even more intense than that first blast of the hose. I froze, for only a heartbeat. And then my arms were around his waist, my palms hot against the damp skin of his back. I ran my hands over the landscape of his arms, the valleys where the muscles joined together. I drank from him like I’d never seen a well this deep.

“Wet,” Jenna said. “Mama wet.”

She stood beneath us, one hand patting each of our legs. Until that moment, I had completely forgotten about her.

As if I didn’t have enough to be ashamed of.

For the second time, I ran away from Gideon as if my life were being threatened. Which, I guess, was the truth.

For the next two weeks I avoided Gideon, relaying messages instead through Grace or Nevvie, making sure I was not alone with him in a barn or enclosure at any time. I left him notes in the kitchens of the barns, lists of what needed to be done. Instead of meeting up with Gideon at the end of the day, I sat with Jenna on the floor of the cottage, playing with puzzles and blocks and stuffed animals.

One night, Gideon radioed from the hay barn. “Dr. Metcalf,” he said. “We have a situation.”

I could not remember the last time he had referred to me as Dr. Metcalf. Either this was a reaction to the coldness I’d been sending out in waves or there was a true and urgent problem. I settled Jenna between my legs on the ATV and drove past the Asian barn, where I knew Grace would be preparing the evening meals. “Can you watch her?” I asked. “Gideon said it was urgent.”

Grace reached for a bucket, turning it over to make a step stool.
“Come on up here, pumpkin,” she said. “See those apples? Can you hand them to me one at a time?” She glanced over her shoulder at me. “We’re fine,” she said.

I drove up to the hay barn to find Gideon in a standoff with Clyde, who supplied our bales. Clyde was a guy we trusted; too often farmers tried to unload their moldy hay on us because they figured it was just elephants, so what was the difference? He had his arms folded across his chest. Gideon stood with one foot braced on a hay bale. Only half the load had been moved into storage from Clyde’s truck.

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

“Clyde says that he won’t take a check, because the last one bounced. But I can’t seem to find any of the spare cash, and until I do, Clyde isn’t inclined to let me unload the rest of the bales,” Gideon said. “So maybe you’ve got a solution.”

The reason the last check bounced was that we didn’t have any money. The reason there was no spare cash was that I’d used it to pay for produce this week. If I wrote another check, this one would bounce, too—I had used the last of the funds in our account to pay the vet’s bill.

I didn’t know how I was going to pay for groceries for my daughter next week, much less hay for the elephants.

“Clyde,” I said. “We’re going through a rough patch.”

“So’s the whole country.”

“But we have a relationship,” I replied. “You and my husband have been in business together for years, right?”

“Yeah, and he always managed to pay me.” He frowned. “I can’t let you have the hay for nothing.”

“I know. And I can’t let the elephants starve.”

I felt like I was in quicksand. Slowly, but surely, I was bound to drown. What I needed to do was fund-raise, but I barely had time for it. My research had been long forgotten; I hadn’t touched it in weeks. I could barely stay ahead of operations without trying to gauge the interest of new donors.

Interest.

I looked at Clyde. “I’ll pay you ten percent more if you give me the hay now and let me settle with you next month.”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because whether or not you want to admit it, Clyde, we have a history, and you owe us the benefit of the doubt.”

He didn’t owe us anything. But I was hoping the guilt of being the straw that broke the sanctuary’s back would be enough to make him pretend otherwise.

“Twenty percent,” Clyde bargained.

I shook his hand. Then I climbed into the truck and began to haul the hay bales.

An hour later, Clyde drove away, and I sat down on the edge of a bale. Gideon was still working, his back flexing as he stacked the bales for more efficient storage, lifting them higher than I physically could manage.

“So,” I said. “You’re just going to pretend I’m not here?”

Gideon didn’t turn around. “Guess I learned from a master.”

“What was I supposed to do, Gideon? Do you have the answer? Because believe me, I want to hear it.”

He faced me, his hands resting lightly on his hips. He was sweating; bits of chaff and straw were caught on his forearms. “I’m sick of being your fall guy. Return the orchids. Get hay for free. Turn fucking water into wine. What’s next, Alice?”

“Should I not have paid the vet, then, when Syrah was sick?”

“I don’t know,” he said brusquely. “I don’t care.”

He pushed past me as I stood up. “Yes, you do,” I called, running after him, wiping my hand across my eyes. “I didn’t ask for any of this, you know. I didn’t want to run a sanctuary. I didn’t want to worry about sick animals and paying salaries and going bankrupt.”

Gideon stopped in the doorway. His silhouette was framed by the light as he turned. “So what
do
you want, Alice?”

When was the last time anyone asked me that?

“I want to be a scientist,” I said. “I want to make people see how much elephants can think, and can feel.”

He walked forward, filling my field of vision. “And?”

“I want Jenna to be happy.”

Gideon took one more step. He was so close now that his question drew across the bow of my neck, making my skin sing. “And?”

I had stood my ground before a charging elephant. I had risked my scientific credibility to follow my gut instinct. I had packed up my life and started over. But looking into Gideon’s face and telling the truth was the most courageous thing I had ever done. “I want to be happy, too,” I whispered.

Then we were tumbling, over the uneven steps of the hay bales, into a nest of straw on the floor of the barn. Gideon’s hands were in my hair and under my clothes; my gasp became his next breath. Our bodies were landscapes, maps burned into our palms where we touched. When he moved in me, I knew why: Now, we would always find our way back home.

Afterward, with hay scratching my back and my clothes tangled around my limbs, I started to speak.

“Don’t,” Gideon said, touching his fingers to my lips. “Just don’t.” He rolled onto his back. My head lay pillowed on his arm at a pulse point. I could feel every beat of his heart.

“When I was little,” he told me, “my uncle got me a Star Wars figurine. It was signed by George Lucas, still in the box. I was, I don’t know, maybe six or seven. My uncle told me not to take it out of the packaging. That way, one day, it would be worth something.”

I tilted my chin so I could look at him. “Did you take it out of the packaging?”

“Shit, yeah.”

I burst out laughing. “I thought you were going to tell me you had it on a shelf somewhere. And that you were willing to use it to pay for the hay.”

“Sorry. I was a kid. What kid plays with a toy in a box?” His smile faded a little. “So I slipped it out of the box in a way that no one would notice, if they didn’t look too closely. I played with that Luke Skywalker figure every day. I mean, it went to school with me. Into the
bathtub. It slept next to me. I loved that thing. And yeah, it might not have been as valuable that way, but it meant the world to me.”

I knew what he was saying: that the untouched collector’s item might have been worth something, but all those stolen moments were priceless.

Gideon grinned. “I’m really glad I took you off the shelf, Alice.”

I punched him in the arm. “You make me sound like a wallflower.”

“If the shoe fits …”

I rolled on top of him. “Stop talking.”

He kissed me. “I thought you’d never ask,” he said, and his arms closed around me again.

The stars squinted at us by the time we walked out of the barn. There was still straw in my hair and dirt on my legs. Gideon didn’t look much better. He climbed on the ATV, and I sat behind him, my cheek pressed against his back. I could smell myself on his skin.

“What do we say?” I asked.

He looked over his shoulder. “We don’t,” he replied, and he started the engine.

Gideon stopped at his cottage first, getting off the ATV. The lights were out; Grace was still with Jenna. He did not risk touching me there, out in the open, but he stared at me. “Tomorrow?” he asked.

That could have meant anything. We could have been arranging a time to move the elephants, to clean the barn, to change the spark plugs on the truck. But what he was really asking was if I would go back to avoiding him, the way I did before. If this would happen again.

“Tomorrow,” I repeated.

A minute later, I reached my own cottage. I parked the ATV and climbed off, trying to straighten the nest of my hair and to brush off my clothes. Grace knew I had been up at the hay barn, but I didn’t just look like I’d been unloading bales. I looked like I’d been through a war. I rubbed my hand over my mouth, wiping away Gideon’s kiss, leaving only excuses.

When I opened the door, Grace was in the living room. So was Jenna. And holding her, with a smile on his face that could light up a galaxy, was Thomas. Spying me, he passed our daughter to Grace and reached for a package on the coffee table. Then he came closer, his eyes wide and clear. He handed me an overturned plant with its gnarled roots serving as blooms, just as he had done two years ago when I first arrived at the Boston airport. “Surprise,” he said.