Leaving Time: A Novel Read online

  Then she began to walk deeper into the river’s current.

  I knew how deep the water got, and how quickly that could happen. I tried to yell to Grace, but I couldn’t make a sound. When I opened my mouth, a thousand stones poured out.

  And then suddenly I was the one in the water, weighted down. I felt the current pull my hair free from its braid; I struggled for air. But with every breath I was swallowing pebbles—agate and spiky calcite, basalt and slate and obsidian. I looked up at the watercolor sun as I sank.

  I woke up, panicking, Gideon’s hand pressed against my mouth. Fighting him, I kicked and rolled, until he was at one side of the bed and I was at the other and there was a barricade between us of the words we should have said but didn’t.

  “You were screaming,” he said. “You were going to wake the whole camp.”

  I realized that the first bloody streaks of dawn were in the sky. That I had fallen asleep, when I only meant to steal a few moments.

  When Thomas woke, an hour later, I was back in the living room of the cottage, sleeping on the couch, my arm flung over Jenna’s tiny body as if nothing could possibly get past me to take her away, as if there was no way I would ever let her wake up and find me absent. He glanced at me, seemingly unconscious, and stumbled into the kitchen in search of coffee.

  Except I wasn’t actually asleep when he passed by. I was thinking about how my nights had been dark and dreamless my whole life, except for one notable exception, when my imagination kicked into overdrive and every midnight hour was a pantomime of my greatest fears.

  The last time that happened, I’d been pregnant.

  JENNA

  My grandmother stares at me as if she’s seeing a ghost. She grabs me tight, running her hands over my shoulders and my hair as if she needs to do an inventory. But there’s a viciousness in her touch, too, as if she is trying to hurt me just as badly as I’ve hurt her. “Jenna, my God, where have you been?”

  I kind of wish I’d taken Serenity or Virgil up on their offer to drive me home, to smooth the path between my grandmother and me. Right now, it’s like Mount Kilimanjaro has sprung up between us.

  “I’m sorry,” I mutter. “I had to do some … stuff.” I use Gertie as an excuse to break away from her. My dog starts licking my legs like there’s no tomorrow, and when she jumps up on me, I bury my face in the ruff at her neck.

  “I thought you had run away,” my grandmother says. “I thought maybe you were doing drugs. Drinking. There are stories on the news all the time about girls who get kidnapped, good girls who make the mistake of telling a stranger what time it is when they ask. I was so worried, Jenna.”

  My grandmother is still wearing her meter maid uniform, but I can see that her eyes are red and her skin is too pale, like she hasn’t slept. “I called everyone. Mr. Allen—who told me that you haven’t been babysitting for his son, because his wife and baby are visiting her mother in California … the school … your friends—”

  Horrified, I stare at her. Who the hell did she call? Short of Chatham, who doesn’t even live here anymore, there’s no one I hang around with. Which means my grandmother contacting a random kid to find out if I’m at her house having a sleepover is even more humiliating.

  I don’t think I can go back to school in the fall. I don’t know if I can go back in the next twenty years. I’m mortified, and I’m mad at her, because it’s hard enough to be a loser whose mother’s dead and whose father killed her in a fit of crazy without becoming the laughingstock of the eighth grade.

  I push Gertie away from me. “Did you call the police, too?” I ask. “Or is that still a sticking point for you?”

  My grandmother’s hand comes up as if she’s going to hit me. I cringe; this would be the second time this week I’ve been hit by someone who is supposed to love me.

  But my grandmother never touches me. She has raised her hand to point upstairs. “Go to your room,” she tells me. “And don’t come out until I say you can.”

  Because it’s been two and a half days since I last showered, the bathroom is my first stop. I run the water in the tub so hot that a curtain of steam fills the tiny room, and the mirrors fog up, so that I don’t have to look at myself as I strip off my clothes. Then I sit in the tub, my knees pulled up to my chest, and let the water keep running until it is almost level with the edge.

  Taking a huge breath, I slide down the slope of the tub so that I am lying on the very bottom. I cross my arms, coffin-style, and open my eyes as wide as I can.

  The shower curtain—pink with white flowers—looks like a kaleidoscope. There are bubbles that escape from my nose periodically, like little kamikaze warriors. My hair fans around my face like seaweed.

  And this is how I found her, I imagine my grandmother saying. Like she’d just fallen asleep underneath the water.

  I picture Serenity sitting with Virgil at my funeral, saying that I look so peaceful. I figure Virgil might even go home afterward and tip a glass—or six—in my honor.

  It’s getting harder to not burst upright. The pressure on my chest is so strong I have a quick flash of my ribs snapping, my chest caving in. My eyes have stars dancing in front of them, underwater fireworks.

  In the minutes before it happened, was this how my mother felt?

  I know she did not drown, but her chest was crushed; I’ve read the autopsy report. Her skull was cracked; was she struck in the head before that? Did she see the blow coming? Did time slow down and sound move in waves of color; could she feel the motion of blood cells at the thin skin of her wrists?

  I just want, once, to share something she felt.

  Even if it’s the last thing I feel.

  When I am certain that I am going to implode; that it is time to let the water rush into my nostrils and fill me so I sink like a stricken ship, my hands grab the lip of the tub and haul the rest of me into the air.

  I gasp, and then I cough so violently that there is blood in the water. My hair mats my face, and my shoulders convulse. I lean over the side of the tub, chest pressed against the porcelain, and I vomit into the trash can.

  Suddenly I remember being in a tub when I was tiny, when I could barely sit up by myself without toppling over like an egg. My mother would sit behind me, propping me in the V of her body. She would soap herself and then soap me. I slipped like a minnow through her hands.

  Sometimes she sang. Sometimes she read journal articles. I sat in the circle of her legs, playing with rubber cups in a rainbow of colors—filling them, dumping them over my head and her knees.

  I realize then that I’ve already felt something my mother felt.

  Loved.

  • • •

  What do you think it was like for Captain Ahab, in the seconds before that harpoon line wrenched him out of the boat? Did he say to himself, Well, bummer, but that damn whale was worth it?

  When Javert finally realized that Valjean had something he himself didn’t—mercy—did he shrug and find a new obsession, like knitting or Game of Thrones? No. Because without Valjean to hate, he didn’t know who he was anymore.

  I’ve spent years looking for my mom. And now, all signs are starting to point to the fact that I couldn’t have found her if I’d crawled every inch of this earth. Because she left it, ten years ago.

  Dead is so final. So done.

  But I’m not crying, like I thought I would, not anymore. And there’s the tiniest green shoot of relief breaking through the wasteland of my thoughts: She did not willingly leave me behind.

  Then there’s the fact that the person who killed her is most likely my own father. I don’t know why this is less of a shock to me. Maybe because I don’t remember my father at all. He was already gone when I knew him, living in a world his own brain had created. And since I’d already lost him once, I don’t feel like I’m losing him again.

  My mom, though, that’s different. I had wanted. I had hoped.

  Virgil is all about crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s, because so much has been