Leaving Time: A Novel Read online

  “Visions are like metaphors,” Serenity explains.

  “Which is pretty ironic, because that’s a simile,” I say.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” I pull the blue scarf off my neck. “Wouldn’t it help if you held this?”

  I pass it to her, but she rears away like it’s going to give her the plague. The thing is, I’ve already let go of it, and a gust of wind carries it skyward, a tiny tornado spiraling further and further away.

  “No!” I scream, and like a shot, I run after it. It dips and rises, teasing me, caught on air currents, but never coming close enough for me to catch. After a few minutes, the scarf gets tangled in the branches of a tree, about twenty feet up. I find a foothold and try to shimmy up the tree, but there are no knots on the bark for toeholds. Frustrated, I fall down hard on the ground, tears stinging my eyes.

  There’s so little I have of her.

  “Here.”

  I find Serenity crouched beside me, her hands laced together to give me a leg up.

  I scratch my cheek and my arms as I climb; my fingernails break as I dig them into the bark. But I manage to get high enough to reach the first notch made by a branch. I scrabble around with my hand and feel dirt and twigs, the abandoned nest of an enterprising bird.

  The scarf is caught on something. I pull, finally tugging it free. Leaves and sticks rain down on me, on Serenity. And something more substantial smacks me on the forehead as it falls to the ground.

  “What the hell is that?” I ask, as I wrap my mother’s scarf around my neck again, and tie it tightly.

  Serenity stares down at her palms, astounded. She hands me the thing that fell.

  It’s a cracked black leather wallet with its contents still intact: thirty-three dollars. An old-style MasterCard with those Venn diagram circles. And a New Hampshire driver’s license, issued to Alice K. Metcalf.

  It is evidence, real, honest to God evidence, and it’s burning a hole in the pocket of my shorts. With this, I can prove that my mother’s disappearance might not have been of her own free will. How far could she have gone without any money or credit cards?

  “Do you know what this means?” I ask Serenity, who has gotten very quiet now that we’ve hiked back to her car and started driving into town. “The police can try to find her.”

  Serenity glances at me. “It’s been ten years. It’s not as easy as that.”

  “Yes, it is. New evidence equals a reopened case. Bam.”

  “You think that’s what you want,” she says. “But you may be surprised.”

  “Are you kidding me? This is what I’ve dreamed of for … well, as long as I can remember.”

  She purses her lips. “Every time I used to ask my spirit guides questions about what it was like in their world, they’d make it clear there were some things I wasn’t supposed to know. I thought it was to protect some big cosmic secret about the afterlife … but eventually I realized it was to protect me.”

  “If I don’t try to find her,” I tell her, “then I’ll spend my whole life wondering what would have happened if I did.”

  She stops at a red light. “And if you find her—”

  “When,” I correct.

  “When you find her,” Serenity says, “are you going to ask her why she didn’t come looking for you all these years?” I don’t answer, and she turns away. “All I’m saying is if you want answers, you better be ready to hear them.”

  I realize that she’s driving right past the police station. “Hey, stop,” I cry out, and she slams on the brakes. “We have to go in there and tell them what we found.”

  Serenity pulls over to the curb. “We don’t have to do anything. I reported my vision to you. I even drove you all the way to that state park. And I’m happy you got what you wanted. But I personally do not need or want to become involved with the police.”

  “So that’s it?” I say, stunned. “You throw information into someone else’s life like a grenade and you walk away before it explodes?”

  “Don’t shoot the messenger.”

  I don’t know why I’m surprised. I don’t know Serenity Jones at all, and I shouldn’t expect her to help me. But I’m sick and tired of people in my life abandoning me, and she will be just one more. So I do what is easiest, when I feel like I’m in danger of being left behind. I make sure I’m the one to walk away first. “No wonder people hated you,” I say.

  At that, her head snaps up.

  “Thanks for the vision.” I get out of the car, untangling my bike from the backseat. “Have a nice life.”

  I slam the door shut, park my bike, and walk up the granite steps of the police station. I approach the dispatcher inside the glass booth. She is maybe a few years older than me, a recent high school grad, and she is wearing a shapeless polo shirt with a police logo on the chest, and too much black eyeliner. On the computer screen behind her, I can see that she’s been checking her Facebook page.

  I clear my throat, which I know she can hear since there’s a little grid in the glass that separates us. “Hello?” I say, but she keeps typing.

  I knock on the glass, and her eyes flicker toward mine. I wave to get her attention.

  The phone rings, and she turns away from me as if I don’t matter at all and takes the call instead.

  I swear—it’s kids like her who are giving my generation a really bad reputation.

  A second dispatcher walks toward me. She is a squat older woman, shaped like an apple, with a frizzy blond perm. She has a name tag, POLLY. “Can I help you?”

  “Yes,” I say, offering my most mature smile, because really, what adult is going to take a thirteen-year-old girl seriously when she says she wants to report a disappearance that happened a decade ago? “I’d like to talk to a detective.”

  “What’s this about?”

  “It’s kind of complicated,” I say. “Ten years ago an employee was killed at the old elephant sanctuary, and Virgil Stanhope was investigating it … and I … I really need to talk to him directly.”

  Polly purses her lips. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

  “Jenna. Jenna Metcalf.”

  She takes off her head mike and walks into a back room I cannot see.

  I scour the wall of missing people and deadbeat dads. If my mother’s face had been plastered up there ten years ago, would I even be standing here now?

  Polly reappears on my side of the glass wall, entering through a doorway that has a push-button combination lock on its knob. She leads me to a bank of chairs and sits me down. “I remember that case,” she says to me.

  “So you know Detective Stanhope? I realize he’s not working here anymore, but I thought you might be able to tell me where he is now …”

  “I’m not sure how you’re going to get in touch with him.” Polly puts her hand gently on my arm. “Virgil Stanhope is dead.”

  The residential facility where my father has lived since Everything Happened is only three miles from my grandmother’s home, but I don’t go there very often. It’s depressing, because it (a) always smells like pee and (b) has cutouts of snowflakes or fireworks or jack-o’-lanterns taped to the windows as if the building houses kindergartners rather than the mentally ill.

  The facility is called Hartwick House, which makes me think of a PBS drama and not the sad reality of superdrugged zombies watching the Food Network in the main lounge as aides bring around tiny cups of pills to keep them placid, or sandbag patients draped slack over the arms of wheelchairs as they sleep off ECT treatments. Most of the time when I go there, I don’t feel scared—just hideously depressed to think that my dad, who used to be seen in conservation circles as something of a savior, couldn’t manage to save himself.

  Only once have I been really freaked out at Hartwick House. I was playing checkers with my dad in the lounge when a teenage girl with greasy ropes of hair burst through the double doors holding a kitchen knife. I have no idea where she got it; anything that could be considered a weapon—even shoelaces—is f