Leaving Time: A Novel Read online

  There was a moment, before everything went wrong, before the sanctuary had failed and Thomas had gotten sick, when we had been happy together. He had held our newborn in his arms, speechless. He had loved me, and he had loved her.

  “She’ll be amazing,” Thomas says, answering his own rhetorical question.

  “Yes,” I say, my voice thick. “She will.”

  At the motel, I take off my shoes and my jacket and pull the shades tight. I sit down on the swivel chair at the desk and stare into the mirror. This is not the face of someone at peace. In fact, I do not at all feel the way I thought I would if I ever received a call that my daughter had been found. This was supposed to be what I needed to stop straddling the distance between reality and what-if. But I still feel rooted. Stuck.

  The blank face of the television mocks me. I do not want to turn it on. I don’t want to listen to newscasters telling me of some new horror in the world, of the limitless supply of tragedy.

  When there is a knock on the door, I startle. I don’t know anyone in this town. It could only be one thing.

  They’ve come for me, after all, because they know what I did.

  I take a deep breath, resolved. It’s all right, really. I was expecting this. And no matter what happens, I know where Jenna is now. The babies in South Africa are under the care of people who know how to raise them. Really, I am ready to go.

  But when I open the door, the woman with pink hair is standing on the threshold.

  Cotton candy, that’s what it looks like. I used to feed it to Jenna, who had such a sweet tooth. In Afrikaans, it’s called spook asem. Ghost breath.

  “Hello,” she says.

  Her name. It’s something like Tranquility … Sincerity…

  “I’m Serenity. I met you earlier today.”

  The woman who had found Jenna’s remains. I stare at her, wondering what she could possibly want. A reward, maybe?

  “I know I said I found your daughter,” she begins, her voice shaking. “But I lied.”

  “Detective Mills said you brought him a tooth—”

  “I did. But the thing is, Jenna found me first. A little over a week ago.” She hesitates. “I’m a psychic.”

  Maybe it is the stress of having seen my daughter’s bones interred; maybe it is realizing that Thomas has the good fortune to be trapped in a place where none of this ever happened; maybe it is the twenty-two hours of flying and the jet lag I’m still battling. For all of these reasons, rage rises in me like a geyser. I plant my hands on Serenity’s arms and shove her. “How dare you?” I say. “How dare you make light of the fact that my daughter’s dead?”

  She topples back, caught off guard by my physical attack. Her giant purse spills onto the floor between us.

  She falls to her knees, sweeping the contents back inside. “That’s the last thing I’d ever do,” she says. “I came to tell you how much Jenna loved you. She didn’t realize she was dead, Alice. She thought you’d left her behind.”

  What this hack is doing is deadly, dangerous. I’m a scientist, and what she’s saying is not possible, but it can still wreak havoc with my heart.

  “What did you come here for?” I say, bitter. “Money?”

  “I could see her,” the woman insists. “I could talk to her, and touch her. I didn’t know Jenna was a spirit; I thought she was a teenage girl. I watched her eat and laugh and ride a bike and check the voice mail on her cell phone. She looked and sounded as real to me as you do, right now.”

  “Why you?” I hear myself ask. “Why would she have come to you?”

  “Because I was one of the few who noticed her, I guess. Ghosts are all around us, talking to each other and checking into hotels and eating at McDonald’s and doing what you and I would ordinarily do—but the only people who see them are the ones who can suspend disbelief. Like little children. Mentally ill folks. And psychics.” She hesitates. “I think she came to me because I could hear her. But I think she stayed because she knew—even if I didn’t—that I could help her find you.”

  I am crying now. I cannot see clearly. “Go away. Just go away.”

  She gets to her feet, about to say something, and then on second thought just inclines her head and starts walking down the hall.

  Glancing at the floor, I see it. A small piece of paper, something that fell from her purse that she accidentally left behind.

  I should close the door. I should go inside. But instead I crouch down and pick it up: this tiny, origami elephant.

  “Where did you get this?” I whisper.

  Serenity stops moving. She turns, so that she can see what I am holding. “From your daughter.”

  Ninety-eight percent of science is quantifiable. You can do research until you are exhausted; you can count repetitive or self-isolating or aggressive behaviors until your vision blurs, you can cross-reference those behaviors as indicators of trauma. But you will never be able to explain what makes an elephant leave a beloved tire behind on the grave of its best friend; or what finally makes a mother step away from her dead calf. That is the 2 percent of science that can’t be measured or explained. And yet that does not mean it doesn’t exist.

  “What else did Jenna say?” I ask.

  Slowly, Serenity takes a step toward me. “Lots of things. How you worked in Botswana. How you had sneakers that matched hers. How you took her into the elephant enclosures, and how angry it made her father. How she never stopped looking for you.”

  “I see,” I say, closing my eyes. “And did she also tell you I’m a murderer?”

  By the time Gideon and I reached the cottage, the front door was wide open, and Jenna was gone. I could not breathe; I could not think.

  I ran into Thomas’s office, thinking maybe he had the baby in there. But Thomas was alone, his head pillowed on his arms, a confetti of spilled pills and a half-empty bottle of whiskey on the desk beside him.

  My relief at seeing him passed out without my daughter nearby faded as I realized I still had no idea where Jenna was. Just like before: She had awakened, and found me missing. Her worst nightmare, now morphing into mine.

  Gideon was the one who had a plan; I could not think clearly. He radioed Nevvie, who was making the night rounds, and when she didn’t answer we split up to search. He headed for the Asian barn; I ran into the African enclosure. This was a déjà vu, so similar to the last time Jenna went missing that I was not surprised when I saw Nevvie standing just inside the African fence. Do you have the baby? I cried.

  It was pitch black, and the clouds moved across the moon, so that the little I could make out was silvered and erratic, like an old movie whose frames don’t quite fit together. But I noticed the way she froze when I said the word baby. The way her mouth curved into a smile as sharp as a blade. How does it feel, she asked, to lose your daughter?

  I looked around wildly, but it was too dark to see more than a few feet in front of me. Jenna! I screamed, but there was no answer.

  I grabbed Nevvie. Tell me what you did with her. I tried to shake the answers out of her. And the whole time, she just smiled and smiled.

  Nevvie was strong, but I finally got my hands around her throat. Tell me, I shouted at her. She gasped, twisted. If it was dangerous to walk in the enclosures in the day, because of the holes the elephants dug for water, then it was an absolute minefield at night—but I didn’t care. All I wanted were answers.

  We stumbled forward; we stumbled back. And then I tripped.

  Lying on the ground was Jenna’s small, bloody body.

  The sound that a heart makes, when it is breaking, is raw and ugly. And anguish, it’s a waterfall.

  How does it feel to lose your daughter?

  Rage poured through me, coursed through my body, lifting me as I lunged for Nevvie. You did this to her, I yelled, even as, silently, I thought: No. I did.

  Nevvie was stronger than me, fighting for her life. I was fighting for my child’s death. And then I was falling into an old water hole. I tried to grab on to Nevvie, to any