Leaving Time: A Novel Read online

  Gideon swerves, braking. He looks like I’ve slapped him across the face. “Jenna … I loved your mother,” he swears. “I was trying to protect her. I wanted to marry her. I wanted to take care of you. And the baby.”

  All the air in the car is gone, just like that. It’s like a seal of plastic has been placed over my nose and mouth.

  Maybe I’ve heard him wrong. Maybe he said he would have taken care of me, the baby. Except he didn’t.

  Gideon slows the car to a stop and looks into his lap. “You didn’t know,” he murmurs.

  In one move, I press down on my seat belt latch and open the passenger door. I start to run.

  I can hear the door slam behind me—it’s Gideon, coming after me.

  I enter the first building I can find, a diner, and run past the hostess to the back, where the restrooms usually are. In the ladies’ room I lock the door, climb onto the sink, and slide open the narrow window cut into the wall beside it. I can hear voices outside the ladies’ room, Gideon begging someone to come in and get me. I shimmy through the window, drop down on the lid of the closed Dumpster in the alley behind the diner, and bolt.

  I race through the woods. I don’t stop until I am on the outskirts of town. Then, for the first time in a day and a half, I turn on my cell phone.

  I have a signal, three bars. I have forty-three messages from my grandmother. But I ignore them and dial Serenity’s number.

  She picks up on the third ring, and I’m so grateful, I burst into tears. “Please,” I say. “I need help.”

  ALICE

  Sitting in the attic of the African barn, I wondered—not for the first time—if I was the one who was crazy.

  By then, Thomas had been home for five months. Gideon had painted over the walls again. There were drop cloths on the floor, and cans of paint lining the edges, but otherwise, the space was empty. No evidence remained of the break from reality that had swallowed my husband whole. At times, I was able to convince myself that I had imagined the entire episode.

  It was pouring today. Jenna had been so excited to leave for school in her new rubber boots, which were fashioned to look like ladybugs. They had been a gift from Grace and Gideon for her second birthday. Because of the weather, the elephants had chosen to stay in their barns. Nevvie and Grace were folding and stuffing envelopes for a fund-raising campaign. Thomas was on his way home from New York City, where he’d been meeting with officials from Tusk.

  Thomas never told me where he’d gone for treatment, just that it wasn’t in this state, and he had driven there when he realized that the first center he’d planned on checking into was now closed. I didn’t know whether or not to believe him, but he seemed like himself again, and if I had doubts, I kept them quiet. I did not ask to see the books, or to second-guess him. The last time I had done that, I’d nearly been strangled.

  He had come back from his recuperation with new medication, and with checks from three private investors. (Had they been inpatients, too? I wondered, but I didn’t really care, as long as their checks didn’t bounce.) He took over the reins of running the sanctuary as if he’d never left. But if that transition was flawless, his reintegration into our marriage was not. Although he hadn’t had a manic or a depressive episode for months, I still could not trust him, and he knew it. We were circles in a Venn diagram, Jenna caught at our overlap. Now, when he spent long hours in his office, I couldn’t help but wonder if he was hiding gibberish like he’d written before. When I asked him if he felt stable, he accused me of turning on him and started locking the door. It was a vicious cycle.

  I dreamed about leaving. Taking Jenna and running away. I would pick her up at preschool—and just keep driving. Sometimes I was even brave enough to say it out loud, when Gideon and I found time to be together.

  I didn’t do it, though, because I suspected Thomas knew I was sleeping with Gideon. And I didn’t know which a court would find better equipped to parent: the father with a mental illness or the mother who had betrayed him.

  It had been months since Thomas and I had slept together. I would pour my glass of wine at 7:30, just after Jenna had been put to bed, and would read on the couch until I fell asleep. My interactions with him were limited to polite conversation in front of Jenna when she was awake and heated arguments while she slept. I still took Jenna into the enclosures with me—after her close call as a baby, she had learned her lesson; and how could a child grow up in an elephant sanctuary without feeling comfortable around elephants? Thomas still thought this was an accident waiting to happen, when, in reality, I was more afraid of my daughter being left alone with him. One night, after I’d taken Jenna with me inside the fences again, he grabbed my arms so hard that bruises formed. “What judge would think of you as a fit mother?” he hissed.

  Suddenly I realized he wasn’t just talking about Jenna in the enclosures. And that I wasn’t the only one thinking of sole custody.

  It was Grace who suggested that maybe it was time for Jenna to go to a preschool program. She was nearly two and a half now, and the only social interaction she had came from adults and elephants. I seized on the idea, because it would give me three hours a day when I didn’t have to worry about Jenna being left with Thomas.

  If you had asked me who I was then, I could not have told you. The mother who dropped Jenna off in town with a lunch box full of carrots and sliced apples? The researcher who submitted her paper on Maura’s grief to academic journals, praying over each file before pushing the Send button? The wife in a little black dress who stood beside Thomas at a Boston cocktail party, clapping enthusiastically when he took the microphone to talk about elephant conservation? The woman who bloomed in the arms of a lover, as if he were the only sunlight left in the world to feed her?

  Three-quarters of my life, I felt like I was playing a role, like I could walk offstage and stop pretending. And the minute I was out of the public eye, I wanted to be with Gideon.

  I was a liar. I was hurting people who did not even know they were being hurt. And I still was not strong enough to stop myself.

  But an elephant sanctuary is a very busy place, with very little privacy. Particularly when you are having an affair and both of your spouses work there, too. There were a few frantic couplings in the outdoors, and one so sudden behind the door of the Asian barn that we’d played Russian roulette, forgoing protection for the mercy of each other’s bodies. So perhaps it wasn’t irony—just desperation—that led me to find a secure, secluded place for our trysts—a spot that Thomas would never venture, and that Nevvie and Grace would never think to look.

  The door opened, and like always, my breath caught just in case. Gideon stood in a downpour, twisting an umbrella so that it pinched shut. He left it propped against the metal railing of the spiral staircase and stepped into the room.

  I had spread a drop cloth on the floor while I was waiting for him. “It’s a monsoon out there,” Gideon huffed.

  I stood up and began to unbutton his shirt. “Then we ought to get you out of these wet clothes,” I said.

  “How long?” he asked.

  “Twenty minutes,” I said. It was as long as I thought I could disappear and not be missed. To his credit, Gideon never complained and never tried to keep me. We moved inside the parameters of our fences. Even a little freedom was better than none.

  I pressed up against him, resting my head on his chest. I closed my eyes as he kissed me, lifting me so that I could wrap my legs around him. Over his shoulder, through the sheer plastic that had never been replaced, I watched the rain stream down in sheets, a cleansing.

  I don’t really know how long Grace was standing in the doorway at the top of the stairs, watching us, holding her umbrella down so that it did no good at all to shield her from the storm.

  The phone call had come from Jenna’s school. She was running a fever; she’d thrown up. Could someone come get her?

  Grace would have gone herself. But she thought I’d want to know. She could not find me in the African barn,