Leaving Time: A Novel Read online

  I know it’s my fault. I know I’m the one who asked Serenity to help me find my mother; who got Virgil on board. This is what curiosity gets you. You might live on top of the biggest toxic waste dump on the planet, but if you never dig, then all you ever know is that your grass is green and your garden is lush.

  “People don’t realize how hard it is,” she says. “When my clients used to come to me, asking to talk to Uncle Sol or their beloved grandma, all they were focusing on was the hello, the chance to say what they didn’t say when the person was alive. But when you open a door, you have to close it behind you. You might say hello, but you also wind up saying good-bye.”

  I face her. “I wasn’t asleep. When you and Virgil were talking, in the car? I heard everything you said.”

  Serenity freezes. “Well, then,” she says. “I guess you know I’m a fraud.”

  “You aren’t, though. You found that necklace. And the wallet.”

  She shakes her head. “I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

  I think about this for a moment. “But isn’t that what being psychic is?”

  I can tell that she never thought about it that way. One man’s coincidence is another’s connection. Does it matter if it’s gut feeling, like Virgil says, or psychic intuition, if you still get what you’re searching for?

  She pulls a blanket up from the floor to cover her feet, and casts it wide so it will cover me, too. “Maybe,” she concedes. “Still, it’s nothing like what it used to be. Other people’s thoughts—they just were suddenly there in my head. Sometimes the connection was crystal clear, and sometimes it was like being on a cell phone in the mountains, where you only catch every third word. But it was more than stumbling over something shiny in the grass.”

  We are cuddled under a blanket that smells like Tide and Indian food, and rain is striking the windows from outside. I realize this is very close to the image I’d conjured earlier, of what my life would have been like if my mother had survived.

  I glance at Serenity. “Do you miss it? Hearing from people who are gone?”

  “Yes,” she admits.

  I lean my head on her shoulder. “Me, too,” I say.

  ALICE

  Gideon’s arms were the safest place in the world. When I was with him, I forgot: how Thomas’s highs and his lows scared the hell out of me; how every morning started with an argument and every night ended with my husband locked in his office with his secrets and the shadows of his mind. When I was with Gideon I could pretend that the three of us were the family I had hoped to be.

  Then I found out we would be four.

  “It’s going to be okay,” he’d promised when I told him the news, although I did not believe him. He couldn’t tell the future. He could just, I hoped, be mine.

  “Don’t you see?” Gideon had said, lit from within. “We were meant to be together.”

  Maybe we were, but what a price to pay. His marriage. Mine. Grace’s life.

  Still, we dreamed out loud in Technicolor. I wanted to take Gideon back to Africa with me, so he could see these incredible animals before they had been broken by humans. Gideon wanted to move south, where he’d come from. I resurrected my dream of running away with Jenna, but this time, I imagined that he would come with us. We pretended to be racing forward, but we didn’t move an inch, because of the trapdoors that threatened to swallow us: He had to tell his mother-in-law; I had to tell my husband.

  But we had a deadline, because it was getting very hard to hide the changes to my body.

  One day, Gideon found me working at the Asian barn. “I told Nevvie about the baby,” he said.

  I froze. “What did she say?”

  “She told me I should have everything I deserve. Then she walked away from me.”

  Just like that, this wasn’t a fantasy anymore. It was real, and it meant that if he had been brave enough to confront Nevvie, I had to be brave enough to confront Thomas.

  I did not see Nevvie all day, or Gideon, either, for that matter. I tracked Thomas’s whereabouts and followed him around from enclosure to enclosure; I cooked him dinner. I asked him to help me do a foot soak on Lilly, when normally I would have asked Gideon or Nevvie for assistance. Instead of avoiding him, as I’d been doing for months, I talked to him about the applications he’d received for a new caregiver and asked him if he’d made a decision yet to hire anyone. I lay down with Jenna until she fell asleep and then went to his office and started to read an abstract, as if it was normal for us to share the space.

  I thought he might tell me to get lost, but Thomas smiled at me, an olive branch. “I forgot how nice it used to be,” he said. “You and me working side by side.”

  Resolve is like porcelain, isn’t it? You can have the best intentions, but the moment there’s a hairline crack, it is only a matter of time before you go to pieces. Thomas poured himself a tumbler of scotch, and another one for me. I left mine sitting on the desk.

  “I’m in love with Gideon,” I said bluntly.

  His hands went still on the decanter. Then he picked up his glass and finished the shot. “You think I’m blind?”

  “We’re leaving,” I told him. “I’m pregnant.”

  Thomas sat down. He buried his face in his hands and started to weep.

  I stared for a moment, torn between comforting him and hating myself for being the one to reduce him to this, a broken man with a failing sanctuary, a cheating wife, and a mental illness.

  “Thomas,” I begged. “Say something.”

  His voice hitched. “What did I do wrong?”

  I knelt in front of him. I saw, in that instant, the man whose glasses had fogged in the steamy heat of Botswana, the man who had met me at the airport clutching the roots of a plant. The man who had a dream and had invited me to take part in it. I had not seen that man for a very long time. But was it because he’d disappeared? Or because I’d stopped looking?

  “You did nothing,” I replied. “It was me.”

  He reached out, grasping my shoulder with one hand. With the other, he smacked me so hard across the face that I tasted blood.

  “Whore,” he said.

  Clutching my cheek, I fell backward. I backed away from him as he advanced toward me, scrambling to get out of the room.

  Jenna was still asleep on the couch. I raced toward her, determined to take her with me as I walked out the door this last time. I could buy clothes and toys and anything else she needed later. But Thomas grabbed my wrist, wrenching it behind me, so that I fell again and he reached our child first. He picked up her small body, and she curled into him. “Daddy?” she sighed, still caught in the web between dreams and truth.

  He wrapped his arms around her, turning so that Jenna was no longer facing me. “You want to go?” Thomas said. “Be my guest. But you want to take my daughter with you? Over my dead body.”

  He smiled at me then, a terrible, terrible smile. “Or better yet,” he said. “Over yours.”

  She would wake up, and I would be gone. Her worst fear, come true. I’m sorry, baby, I said silently to Jenna. Then I ran for help, leaving her behind.

  VIRGIL

  Even if I’d been able to find the body that was buried ten years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to get a court order. I don’t know what I was thinking I’d resort to, shy of sneaking into a graveyard, Frankenstein-style, to dig up a corpse that I had assumed was Nevvie Ruehl. But before a body is released to a funeral home, the medical examiner does the autopsy. And the autopsy would have had a DNA sample taken by the state lab, stored somewhere in FTA card files for posterity.

  No way in hell am I going to be able to get the state lab to cough up evidence to me, now that I’m a civilian. Which means I have to find someone they would give it to. So a half hour later, I’m leaning on the ledge of the evidence room at the Boone PD, sweet-talking Ralph again. “You’re back?” He sighs.

  “What can I say? I missed you desperately. You haunt my dreams.”

  “I alrea