Leaving Time: A Novel Read online

  What do you do with these facts? Well, you start by using them to rule things out. The very first Web search I did, at age eleven, was to go to the Social Security Death Index database and search its index for my mother’s name.

  She was not listed as deceased, but that doesn’t tell me enough. She could be alive, or she could be living under a different identity. She could be dead and unidentified, a Jane Doe.

  She was not on Facebook or Twitter, or Classmates.com, or the alumni network of Vassar, her college. Then again, my mother was always so absorbed in her work and her elephants, I don’t imagine she would have had much time for those distractions.

  There were 367 Alice Metcalfs in online phone directories. I called two or three a week, so my grandmother wouldn’t freak out when she saw the long-distance charges on the phone bill. I left a lot of messages. There was one very sweet old lady in Montana who wanted to pray for my mom, and another woman who worked as a producer at an L.A. news station who promised to bring the story to her boss as a human-interest piece, but none of the people I called were my mother.

  The book had other suggestions, too: searching prison databases, trademark applications, even the genealogy records of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. When I tried those, I didn’t get any results. When I Googled “Alice Metcalf,” I got too many—more than 1.6 million. So I narrowed it down by searching for “Alice Kingston Metcalf Elephant Grief,” and got a listing of all her scholarly research, most of it done prior to 2004.

  On the sixteenth page of the Google search, however, was an article in an online psychology blog about the grieving process of animals. Three paragraphs into it, Alice Metcalf was quoted as saying, “It’s egotistical to think that humans have a monopoly on grief. There is considerable evidence that elephants mourn the loss of those they love.” This was a tiny sound bite, unremarkable in many ways, something she’d said a hundred times before in other journals and scholarly papers.

  But this blog entry was dated 2006.

  Two years after she disappeared.

  Although I’ve searched the Internet for a year, I have not found any other proof of my mother’s existence. I don’t know if the date on the online article was a typo, if they were quoting my mother from years earlier, or if my mother—apparently alive and well in 2006—is still alive and well.

  I just know I found it, and that’s a start.

  • • •

  In the spirit of leaving no stone unturned, I haven’t limited my search to the suggestions in So You Want to Be a PI? I posted on missing persons Listservs. I once volunteered at a carnival to be a hypnotist’s subject in front of a crowd of people eating corn dogs and blooming onions, hoping he’d release the memories jammed inside me, but all he told me was that, in a past life, I was a scullery maid at a duke’s palace. I went to a free seminar on dream lucidity at the library, figuring I could transfer some of those skills to my stubborn locked mind, yet it turned out to be all about journaling and not much else.

  Today, for the first time, I’m going to a psychic.

  There are a few reasons I haven’t been before. First, I didn’t have enough money. Second, I didn’t have any idea where to find a reputable one. Third, it wasn’t very scientific, and if my mother, in absentia, had taught me anything, it was to believe cold, hard facts and data. But then two days ago, when I was restacking my mother’s notebooks, a bookmark fell out of one.

  It wasn’t a bookmark, really. It was a dollar, origami-folded in the shape of an elephant.

  All of a sudden, I could remember my mother with her hands flying over a bill, creasing and folding, flipping and reversing, until I stopped my toddler crying and stared, riveted, by the tiny toy she had made me.

  I had touched the little elephant as if I expected it to disappear in a puff of smoke. And then my eye fell on the open page of the journal, a paragraph that suddenly stuck out like it was written in neon:

  I always get the funniest expressions from colleagues when I tell them that the best scientists understand that 2–3 percent of whatever it is they are studying is simply not quantifiable—it may be magic or aliens or random variance, none of which can be truly ruled out. If we are to be honest as scientists … we must admit there may be a few things that we are not supposed to know.

  I took that as a sign.

  Everyone else on the planet would rather look at a folded masterpiece than the original flat piece of paper, but not me. Me, I had to start from the beginning. So I spent hours gingerly unfolding my mother’s handiwork, pretending I could still feel the heat of her fingertips on the bill. I went step by step, as if I were performing surgery, until I could refold the dollar the way she had; until I had a small herd of six new tiny green elephants marching across my desk. I kept testing myself all day, too, to make sure I had not forgotten, and every time I succeeded I flushed with pride. I fell asleep that night picturing a dramatic, movie-of-the-week moment when I finally found my missing mother and she didn’t know it was me, until I fashioned a dollar bill into an elephant in front of her eyes. And then she hugged me. And did not let go.

  You’d be surprised at how many psychics are listed in the local yellow pages. New Age Spirit Guides, Psychic Advice from Laurel, Pagan Priestess Tarot Readings, Readings by Kate Kimmel, The Phoenix Rising—Advice on Love, Wealth, Prosperity.

  Second Sight by Serenity, Cumberland Street, Boone.

  Serenity didn’t have a big ad or a 1-800 number or a last name, but she was within biking distance of my house, and she was the only one who promised to do a reading for the bargain price of ten dollars.

  Cumberland Street is in a part of town that my grandmother always tells me to stay away from. It’s basically an alley with a bankrupt convenience store that’s been boarded up, and a hole-in-the-wall bar. Two wooden placards sit on the sidewalk, one advertising two-dollar shots before 5:00 P.M. and another, which reads: TAROT, $10, 14R.

  What is 14R? An age requirement? A bra size?

  I’m nervous about leaving my bike on the street, since I don’t have a lock for it—I never have to lock it up at school or on Main Street or anywhere else I normally go—so I haul it into the corridor to the left of the bar entrance and drag it up the stairs, which smell like beer and sweat. At the top is a small foyer. One door is labeled 14R and has a sign on the front: READINGS BY SERENITY.

  The foyer walls are covered with peeling velveteen wallpaper. Yellow stains bloom on the ceiling, and it smells like too much potpourri. There’s a rickety side table propped up on a phone book for balance. On it is a china dish filled with business cards: SERENITY JONES, PSYCHIC.

  There’s not much room for me and a bike in the little foyer. I jostle it in a stilted half circle, trying to lean it against the wall.

  I can hear the muffled voices of two women on the other side of the interior door. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to knock, to tell Serenity I’m here. Then I realize that if she is any good at her job, she must already know.

  Just in case, though, I cough. Loudly.

  With the bike frame balanced against my hip, I press my ear against the door.

  You’re troubled by a very big decision.

  There is a gasp, a second voice. How did you know?

  You have serious doubts that what you decide is going to be the right path.

  The other voice, again: It’s been so hard, without Bert.

  He’s here now. And he wants you to know that you can trust your heart.

  There is a pause. That doesn’t sound like Bert.

  Of course not. That was someone else who’s watching over you.

  Auntie Louise?

  Yes! She says you were always her favorite.

  I can’t help it; I snort. Way to recover, Serenity, I think.

  Maybe she’s heard me laugh, because there’s no more conversation coming from the other side of the door. I lean closer to listen more carefully, and knock the bike off balance. Stumbling to keep my footing, I trip over my mother’s scarf,