Leaving Time: A Novel Read online

  Welcome to Citibank MasterCard.

  Beneath the customer service hotline number was a list of anagrams for the words Account Balance:

  Cabal cannot cue; banal ceca count, accentual bacon, cabala once cunt, canal beacon cut, cab unclean coat, lacuna ant bocce, nebula coca cant, a cab nuance clot, a cab cannot clue, a cable can count, a conceal can but, cabal can’t cue on, anal acne cub cot, ban ocean lac cut, cabal act once nu, actual can be con.

  The last words were circled so deeply that the paper had begun to disintegrate. “You see? It’s in code. Actual can be con.” Thomas’s eyes burned into mine as if he were explaining the meaning of life. “What you see is not what you believe.”

  I stepped toward him, until we were standing only inches apart. “Thomas,” I whispered, holding my palm up to his cheek. “Baby. You’re sick.”

  He grasped my hand, a lifeline. Until then I hadn’t realized how hard I was trembling. “Damn right I’m sick,” he muttered, squeezing so hard that I twisted in pain. “I’m sick of you doubting me.” He leaned so close that I could see the ring of orange around his pupils, and the pulse in his temple. “I am doing this for you,” he said, biting off each word, spitting them in my face.

  “I’m doing this for you, too,” I cried, and I ran out of the airless room and down the spiral stairs.

  Dartmouth College was sixty-five miles south. They had a state-of the-art hospital there. And it happened to have the closest inpatient psychiatric facility to Boone. I don’t know what made the psychiatrist agree to see me, considering I did not have an appointment and there was a waiting room full of people with equally pressing issues. All I could think, as I clutched Jenna against me and sat across from Dr. Thibodeau, was that the receptionist must have taken one look at me and thought I was feeding her a line. Husband, my ass, she probably thought, staring at my wrinkled uniform, my unwashed hair, my crying baby. She’s the one who’s in crisis.

  I had spent a half hour telling the doctor what I knew of Thomas’s history, and what I had seen last night. “I think the pressure’s broken him,” I said. Out loud, the words swelled like garish balloons. They took up all the space in the room.

  “It’s possible that what you’re describing are symptoms of mania,” the doctor said. “It’s part of bipolar illness—which we used to call manic-depressive disorder.” He smiled at me. “Being bipolar is like being forced to take LSD. It means your sensations and emotions and creativity are at their peak, but also that the highs are higher and the lows are lower. You know what they say—if a manic does something bizarre and it turns out to be right, he’s brilliant. If it turns out to be wrong, he’s crazy.” Dr. Thibodeau smiled at Jenna, who was gumming one of his paperweights. “The good news is, if that’s what’s actually going on with your husband, it’s treatable. The medications we put people on to control these mood swings bring them back to center. When Thomas realizes that he’s living not a reality but just a manic episode, he’s going to swing in the other direction and get very depressed, because he isn’t the man he thought he was.”

  That makes two of us, I thought.

  “Has your husband harmed you?”

  I thought of the moment he grabbed my hand, how I heard the crunch of bones and cried out. “No,” I said. I had betrayed Thomas enough; I would not do this, too.

  “Do you think he might?”

  I stared down at Jenna. “I don’t know.”

  “He needs to be evaluated by a psychiatrist. If it is bipolar disorder, he may need time in the hospital to be stabilized.”

  Hopeful, I glanced at the doctor. “So you can bring him here?”

  “No,” Dr. Thibodeau said. “Institutionalizing someone is a stripping of personal rights; we can’t take him by force unless he’s hurt you.”

  “Then what am I supposed to do?” I asked.

  The doctor met my gaze. “You’re going to have to convince him to come in voluntarily.”

  He gave me his card and told me to call him when I felt Thomas was ready to become an inpatient. During the drive back to Boone, I thought about what I could possibly say to convince Thomas to go to the hospital in Lebanon. I could tell him Jenna was sick, but then why wouldn’t we go to her pediatrician one town over? Even if I said I’d found him a donor or a neuroscientist interested in his experiment, it would only get him in the door. The minute we checked in at the psychiatric reception desk, he’d know what I was actually doing.

  I came to the conclusion that the only way to get Thomas to voluntarily check in to a psychiatric ward was to make him see, simply and honestly, that this was best for him. That I still loved him. That we were in this together.

  Fortified, I drove into the sanctuary, parked at the cottage, and carried a sleepy Jenna inside. I settled her on the couch and then went back to close the door I’d left ajar.

  When Thomas grabbed me from behind, I screamed. “You scared me,” I said, turning in his arms, trying to read his expression.

  “I thought you left me. I thought you took Jenna, and that you weren’t coming back.”

  I ran my hand through his hair. “No,” I swore. “I would never.”

  When he kissed me, it was with the desperation of a man who is trying to save himself. When he kissed me, I believed that Thomas was going to be fine. I believed that maybe I would never have to call Dr. Thibodeau, that this was the beginning of Thomas’s sway to center. I told myself that I could believe all of this, no matter how unfounded or unlikely, without realizing how much that made me like Thomas.

  There is something else about memory, something Thomas hadn’t brought up. It’s not a video recording. It’s subjective. It’s a culturally relevant account of what happened. It doesn’t matter if it’s accurate; it matters if it’s important in some way to you. If it teaches you something you need to learn.

  For a few months, it seemed as if life at the sanctuary was settling back to normal. Maura took extended walks away from her calf’s grave before returning to settle down there each night. Thomas began to work in his home office again, instead of constructing the observation deck. We left it locked and boarded up, like a ghost village. A grant he’d written for funding months ago came in unexpectedly, giving us a little breathing room for supplies and salaries.

  I began to compare my notes about Maura and her grief to those about the other elephant mothers I’d seen lose calves. I spent hours walking with Jenna, at a toddler’s pace; I pointed to wildflowers by color, to teach her new words. Thomas and I argued about whether it was safe for her, in the enclosures. I loved those arguments, for their simplicity. Their sanity.

  One lazy afternoon, when Grace was sitting for Jenna in the stagnant heat, I was doing a trunk wash in the Asian barn with Dionne. We trained the elephants in this behavior, so that we could test for TB: We’d fill a syringe with saline, flush it into a nostril, and get the elephant to lift her trunk as high as possible. Then we’d hold a gallonsize Ziploc bag over the trunk as she lowered it and the fluid drained out. The sample was collected in a container and sent off to the lab. Some elephants hated the process; Dionne was one of the easier ones. So perhaps my guard was down, and that’s why I didn’t notice Thomas suddenly striding into the barn. He grabbed me by the neck, dragging me away from the elephant so that she couldn’t reach us through the metal bars.

  “Who’s Thibodeau?” Thomas yelled, smacking my head against the steel so hard that my vision blurred.

  I honestly didn’t know what he was talking about.

  “Thi … bo … deau,” Thomas repeated. “You must know. His card was in your wallet.” His hand was a vise around my throat. My lungs felt like they were on fire. I clawed at his fingers, at his wrists. He pressed a small white rectangle close to my face. “Ring a bell?”

  I could barely see anything but stars at the edges of my vision. Still, somehow, I was able to make out the logo for the Dartmouth-Hitchcock hospital. The psychiatrist I’d seen, the one who had given me his card. “You want to lock me away,”