Leaving Time Read online

  This is the sanctuary, not the wild, my mother says. It’s not like she got between a mother and a calf. They’re used to people.

  My father yells back: They are not used to toddlers!

  Suddenly a pair of warm arms closes around me. She smells of powder and limes, and her lap is the softest place I know. “They’re mad,” I whisper.

  “They’re scared,” she corrects. “It sounds the same.”

  Then she starts to sing, close to my ear, so that her voice is the only one I hear.

  Virgil has a plan, but the place he wants to go is too far away for me to bike, and I’m still not getting in a car with him. As we walk out of the diner, I agree to meet him at his office the next morning. The sun’s swinging low, using a cloud as a hammock. “How do I know you won’t be blitzed tomorrow, too?” I ask.

  “Bring a Breathalyzer,” Virgil suggests drily. “I’ll see you at eleven.”

  “Eleven’s not the morning.”

  “It is for me,” he replies, and he starts walking down the road toward his office.

  By the time I get back home, my grandmother is draining carrots in a colander. Gertie, curled up in front of the refrigerator, beats her tail twice on the floor, but that’s all the hello I’m getting. When I was little, my dog used to practically knock me down if I came back after a trip to the bathroom; that’s how happy she was to see me again. I wonder if, as you get older, you stop missing people so fiercely. Maybe growing up is just focusing on what you’ve got, instead of what you don’t.

  There’s a sound like footsteps overhead. When I was little I was sure my grandmother’s house was haunted; I was always hearing stuff like that. My grandmother assured me it was rusty pipes or the house settling. I used to wonder how something made of brick and mortar could settle, when I seemed incapable of doing just that.

  “So,” my grandmother says, “how was he?”

  For a second I freeze, wondering if she’s been having me followed. How ironic would that be—my grandma tracking me as I’m tracking down my mom with a private investigator? “Um,” I reply. “A little under the weather.”

  “I hope you don’t catch whatever he has.”

  Unlikely, I think, unless being a drunk is contagious.

  “I know you think the sun rises and sets on Chad Allen, but even if he’s a good teacher, he’s an irresponsible parent. Who leaves their baby alone for two days?” my grandmother mutters.

  Who leaves their baby alone for ten years?

  I’m so wrapped up in thinking about my mom that it takes me an extra beat to remember that my grandmother still believes I have been sitting for Carter, Mr. Allen’s freaky, alien-headed kid, who she now thinks has a cold. And he’s going to be my excuse tomorrow, too, when I go back to see Virgil. “Well, he wasn’t alone. He had me.”

  I follow my grandmother into the dining room, taking the time to snag two clean glasses and the carton of orange juice from the refrigerator. I force down a few bites of fish sticks, chewing methodically, before I hide the rest of my meal under the mashed potatoes. I’m just not hungry.

  “What’s wrong?” my grandmother asks.

  “Nothing.”

  “I’ve spent an hour making this dinner for you; the least you can do is eat it,” she says.

  “How come there wasn’t a search for her?” I blurt out and then cover my mouth with my napkin, as if I can stuff the words back inside.

  Neither of us wants to pretend she doesn’t know who I’m talking about. My grandmother goes very still. “Just because you don’t remember, Jenna, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.”

  “Nothing happened,” I say. “Not for ten years. Don’t you even care? She’s your daughter!”

  She gets up and dumps her plate—which is still mostly full—into the kitchen trash.

  All of a sudden I feel the way I felt that day when I was tiny, and chased that butterfly down a hill toward the elephants, and realized I had made a colossal tactical error.

  All these years I thought my grandmother didn’t talk about what had happened to my mother because it was too hard for her. Now, I wonder if she didn’t talk about what had happened because it would be too hard for me.

  I know, before she speaks, what she is going to say. And I don’t want to hear it. I run upstairs with Gertie at my heels and slam my bedroom door, then bury my face in the fur at my dog’s neck.

  It takes about two minutes before the door opens. I don’t glance up, but I can feel her there, all the same. “Just say it,” I whisper. “She’s dead, isn’t she?”

  My grandmother sits down on the mattress. “It’s not that simple.”

  “Yes, it is.” Suddenly I am crying even though I don’t want to be. “Either she is, or she isn’t.”

  But even as I challenge my grandmother, I understand it’s not that simple. Logic says that if I have been right—if my mother never would have willingly left me—then she would have come for me. Which, obviously, she didn’t.

  It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure that one out.

  And yet. If she were dead, wouldn’t I know it? I mean, don’t you hear those stories all the time? Wouldn’t I feel like a piece of me was gone?

  A little voice inside me says, Don’t you?

  “When your mother was little, whatever I told her to do, she would choose the opposite,” my grandmother says. “I asked her to wear a dress to her high school graduation, she showed up in cutoff shorts. She’d point to two haircuts in a magazine and ask which I liked better; then she’d choose the one I didn’t. I suggested she study primates at Harvard; she picked elephants in Africa.” My grandmother looks down at me. “She was also the smartest person I have ever met. Smart enough to outwit any policeman, if she wanted to. So if she was alive, and had run away, I knew I couldn’t trap her into coming home. If I started putting her face on milk cartons and setting up a hotline, she would only run farther away, faster.”

  I wonder if this is true. If my mother has only been playing a game. Or if it’s my grandmother who’s been fooling herself.

  “You said you filed a missing persons report. What happened?”

  She takes my mother’s scarf from the back of my desk chair, runs it through the sieve of her fist. “I said I went to file a missing persons report,” my grandmother says. “I went three times, in fact. But I never stepped inside the front door.”

  I stare at her, stunned. “What? You never told me that!”

  “You’re older now. You deserve to know what happened.” She sighs. “I wanted answers. At least I thought I did. And I knew you would, when you were older. But I couldn’t bring myself to go inside. I was afraid to hear what the police might find.” She looks at me. “I don’t know what would have been worse. Learning Alice was dead and couldn’t come home, or learning she was alive and didn’t want to. Nothing they told me was going to be good news. There wasn’t going to be a happily ever after here. There was just going to be you and me; and I thought the sooner we moved on, the sooner we could both start over.”

  I think of what Virgil had hinted at this afternoon—the third option that my grandmother hasn’t considered: that perhaps my mother had run away not from us but from a murder charge. I guess that’s not exactly something you want to hear about your daughter, either.

  I don’t think of my grandmother as old, really, but when she gets up off the bed, she looks her age. She moves slowly, like all of her is aching, and stands silhouetted in the doorway. “I know what you look up on your computer. I know you never stopped asking what happened.” Her voice is as thin as the seam of light that surrounds her body. “Maybe you’re braver than I am.”

  There is one entry in my mother’s journals that feels like a hairpin turn, a moment where, if she hadn’t reversed direction, she would have become someone entirely different.

  Maybe even someone here.

  She was thirty-one, working in Botswana on her postdoc. There is a vague reference to some bad news from home, and how she had taken a l