Leaving Time(105)

As she drives, I try to get the lay of the land. The sanctuary is enclosed by a normal chain-link fence, but the interior corral is made of steel pipes and cable. I can’t remember what our facility was like, but this one is pristine and orderly. Land stretches out forever—hills and forests, ponds and grasslands, punctuated by several big barns. Everything is so green it makes my eyes hurt.

When the truck pulls up to one of the barns, I flatten myself, hoping that I will not be seen as the driver gets out. I hear the door slam, and footsteps, and then the happy trumpet of an elephant as this caregiver walks into the barn.

I’m out of that truck like a rocket. I duck along the far wall of the barn, following the heavy cabled fence until I see my first elephant.

It’s African. I may not be an expert like my mom, but I know that much. I can’t tell if it’s a male or a female from this position, but it’s freaking huge. Although maybe that’s redundant, when you’re talking about elephants and you’re only separated by three feet and some steel.

Speaking of steel—there’s metal on the elephant’s tusks. Sort of like they were dipped in gold at the tips.

Suddenly the elephant shakes its head, flapping its ears and releasing a cloud of reddish dust between us. It’s loud and unexpected; I fall back, coughing.

“Who let you in?” a voice accuses.

I turn around to find a man towering over me. His hair is nearly shaved to his scalp; his skin is mahogany. His teeth are, by contrast, almost electroluminescent. I think he’s going to grab me by my collar and drag me physically out of the sanctuary, or call the guards or whoever else keeps trespassers out of this place, but instead, his eyes get wide and he stares at me as if I just apparated before him. “You look just like her,” he whispers.

I had not expected it to be so easy to find Gideon. But then again, maybe after traveling a thousand miles to get here, I deserved a cosmic break.

“I’m Jenna—”

“I know,” Gideon says, looking around me. “Where is she? Alice?”

Hope is a balloon, always just a breath away from being deflated. “I was hoping she was here.”

“You mean she didn’t come with you?” The disappointment on his face—well, it is like I am looking into a mirror.

“Then you don’t know where she is?” I say. My knees feel weak. I can’t believe I’ve come all this way, and have found him, and it’s all for nothing.

“I tried to cover for her, when the police came. I didn’t know what happened out there, but Nevvie was dead, and Alice was missing … so I told the cops I assumed she had taken you and run off,” he says. “That was her plan all along.”

All of a sudden, my body is infused with light. She wanted me; she wanted me; she wanted me. But somewhere between plotting her future and executing it, things had gone horribly wrong for my mother. Gideon, who was supposed to be the key to the lock, the antidote that would reveal the secret message, is just as clueless as I am. “Weren’t you part of that plan?”

He looks at me, trying to gauge how much I know about his relationship with my mother. “I thought I was, but she never tried to contact me. She disappeared. Turned out, I was a means to an end,” Gideon admits. “She loved me. But she loved you so much more.”

I have forgotten where I am until that moment, when the elephant in front of us lifts its trunk and trumpets. The sun is beating down on my scalp. I am dizzy, like I’ve been drifting in the ocean for days and just sent off my last flare, only to realize that the rescue boat I was so sure I saw was a trick of the light. The elephant, with its fancy plated tusks, makes me think of a merry-go-round horse I had been scared of as a child. I don’t even know when or where my parents might have taken me to a carnival, but those terrifying wooden stallions, with their frozen manes and their gnashing teeth, had made me cry.

I feel like doing that now, too.

Gideon keeps staring at me, and it’s weird, like he is trying to see underneath my skin or riffle through the folds of my brain. “I think there’s someone you should meet,” he says, and he starts walking the fence line.

Maybe this has been a test. Maybe he needed to see that I was truly devastated before he would take me to my mother. I don’t let myself hope, but as I follow him I move faster and faster. What if, what if, what if.

We walk for what feels like thirty miles in the ridiculous heat. My shirt is soaked through with sweat by the time we climb the hill and I see, at its crest, another elephant. He doesn’t have to tell me it’s Maura. When she places her trunk delicately along the top edge of the fencing, the fingers opening and closing gently like the head of a rose, I know she remembers me the same way I remember her—at some internal, visceral level.

My mother is really, truly not here.

The elephant’s eyes are dark and hooded, her ears translucent in the sun, so that I can see the highway maps of veins running through them. Heat radiates from her skin. She looks leathery, primitive, cretaceous. The accordion folds of her trunk roll upward like a wave to reach over the fence toward me. She blows in my face, and it smells like summer and straw.

“This is why I stayed,” Gideon says. “I thought one day Alice would come to check on Maura.” The elephant reaches out and curls her trunk around his forearm. “She had a really hard time, when she first got here. Wouldn’t leave the barn. She stayed in her stall, her face pressed into the corner.”