Leaving Time(106)

I thought of the long entries in my mother’s journals. “You think she felt guilty about the trampling?”

“Maybe,” Gideon says. “Maybe it was fear of punishment. Or maybe she missed your mother, too.”

The elephant rumbles, like a car running its engine. The air around me vibrates.

Maura picks up a pine log that is lying on its side. She scrapes her tusk along the edge of it, then lifts it with her trunk and presses it against the heavy steel fence. She scratches at the bark again, dropping the tree and rolling it beneath her foot. “What is she doing?”

“Playing. We cut down trees for her, so that she can strip off the bark.”

After about ten minutes, Maura lifts the log as if it is a toothpick and raises it as high as the fence. “Jenna,” Gideon cries. “Move!”

He shoves me, landing on top of me, a few feet away from where the log has crashed down, exactly in the spot where I was standing.

His hands are warm on my shoulders. “You all right?” he asks, helping me to my feet, and then he smiles. “The last time I held you, you were only two feet tall.”

But I pull away from him to crouch down and stare at this gift I’ve been given. It’s about three feet long by ten inches wide, a hefty club. Maura’s tusks have created patterns—lines that cross and grooves that intersect without rhyme or reason.

Unless, that is, you’re looking carefully.

With my finger I trace the lines.

With a little imagination, I can make out a U and an S. That knot waves the wood grain like a W. On the other side of the log, a semicircle is caught in between two long scrapes: I-D-I.

Sweetheart, in Xhosa.

Gideon may not think my mother ever came back, but I’m beginning to believe she’s all around me.

Just then, my stomach grumbles so loud I sound like Maura. “You’re starving,” Gideon says.

“I’m okay.”

“I’m getting you something to eat,” he insists. “I know that’s what Alice would have wanted me to do.”

“Okay,” I say, and we walk back to the barn I had first seen when I arrived in the pickup truck. His car is a big black van, and he has to move a box of tools from the passenger seat before I can sit down.

As we are driving, I can feel Gideon still sneaking glances at me. It’s like he’s trying to memorize my face or something. That’s when I realize that he’s wearing the red shirt and cargo shorts that were the uniform at the New England Elephant Sanctuary. Everyone at The Elephant Sanctuary here in Hohenwald wears straight khaki.

It doesn’t make sense. “How long did you say you’ve worked here?”

“Oh,” he says. “Years.”

What are the odds that, in a sanctuary twenty-seven hundred acres large, I would run into Gideon first, instead of any other person?

Unless, of course, he made sure I did.

What if I hadn’t found Gideon Cartwright? What if he’d found me?

I am thinking like Virgil, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing, in terms of self-preservation. Sure, I’d set out all determined to find Gideon. But now that I have, I am wondering if it was such a great idea. I can taste fear, like a penny on my tongue. For the first time, it occurs to me that maybe Gideon had something to do with my mother’s disappearance.

“Do you remember that night?” he asks. It’s like he pulled the thread out of my mind.

I picture Gideon driving my mother away from the hospital, pulling over, and wrapping his hands around her throat. I picture him doing the same thing to me.

I force myself to keep my voice steady. I think of how Virgil would do this, if he were trying to get information from a suspect. “No. I was a baby; I guess I slept through most of it.” I stare at him. “Do you?”

“Unfortunately, yes. I wish I could forget.”

We are almost in town by now. The ribbon of residences whizzing by starts to give way to box stores and gas stations.

“Why?” I blurt out. “Because you were the one who killed her?”

Gideon swerves, braking. He looks like I’ve slapped him across the face. “Jenna … I loved your mother,” he swears. “I was trying to protect her. I wanted to marry her. I wanted to take care of you. And the baby.”

All the air in the car is gone, just like that. It’s like a seal of plastic has been placed over my nose and mouth.

Maybe I’ve heard him wrong. Maybe he said he would have taken care of me, the baby. Except he didn’t.

Gideon slows the car to a stop and looks into his lap. “You didn’t know,” he murmurs.

In one move, I press down on my seat belt latch and open the passenger door. I start to run.

I can hear the door slam behind me—it’s Gideon, coming after me.

I enter the first building I can find, a diner, and run past the hostess to the back, where the restrooms usually are. In the ladies’ room I lock the door, climb onto the sink, and slide open the narrow window cut into the wall beside it. I can hear voices outside the ladies’ room, Gideon begging someone to come in and get me. I shimmy through the window, drop down on the lid of the closed Dumpster in the alley behind the diner, and bolt.

I race through the woods. I don’t stop until I am on the outskirts of town. Then, for the first time in a day and a half, I turn on my cell phone.