Leaving Time(111)

“I have to tell you something, too,” I confess. “Remember how you kept asking me if I could communicate with Alice Metcalf’s spirit? And I said no, which probably meant she wasn’t dead?”

“Yeah. Guess your Gift might need recalibrating.”

“It needs more than that. I haven’t had a syllable of psychic communication since I gave Senator McCoy the wrong information about his son. I am used up. Done. Dry. This stick shift has more paranormal talent than I do.”

Virgil starts to laugh. “You’re telling me you are a hack?”

“It’s worse. Because I wasn’t always.” I look at him. There is a green mask around his eyes, a reflection from the mirror, as if he is some kind of superman. But he isn’t. He’s flawed, and scarred, and battle-weary, just like me. Just like all of us.

Jenna lost her mother. I lost my credibility. Virgil lost his faith. We’ve all got missing pieces. But for a little while, I believed that, together, we might be whole.

We cross into Delaware. “I don’t think she could have picked two worse people to help her if she tried.” I sigh.

“That’s all the more reason,” Virgil says, “to make it right.”





ALICE




I did not go to Georgia for Grace’s funeral.

She was buried in a family plot beside her father. Gideon went, and Nevvie, of course—but the reality of running an animal sanctuary meant someone had to stay behind to take care of the animals, no matter how pressing the reason to leave. In the horrible week that it had taken for Grace’s body to wash ashore—a week when Gideon and Nevvie still held out hope that she was alive somewhere—we had all been pitching in to cover for her. Thomas would interview for a new caregiver, but that wasn’t a hire that could be made quickly. And now, with our staff below half capacity, it meant that Thomas and I were working round the clock.

When Thomas told me that Gideon had come back to the sanctuary after the funeral, I was not presumptuous enough to believe that he had returned because of me. I did not know, really, what to expect. We’d had a year of secrets, a year of bliss. What had happened to Grace was the punishment, the payment due.

Except nothing had happened to Grace. Grace had been the one to make it happen.

I did not want to think about that, so instead I buried myself in cleaning the barns until the floors were sparkling, in creating new enrichment toys for the Asian elephants. I cut back the brush that had begun to overgrow the fence at the north end of the African enclosure. That would have been Gideon’s job, I thought, even as I wielded the hedge trimmers. I kept myself moving, so that I could not think about anything except the task in front of me.

I did not see Gideon until the next morning, when he was driving an ATV with a load of hay into the same barn where I was making medicine balls out of apples for that day’s feeding. I dropped the knife and ran to the doorway, my hand raised to call him closer, but at the last minute I stepped back into the shadows.

Really, what could I possibly say to him?

I watched for a few minutes as he unloaded the hay, his arms flexing as he stacked the bales into a pyramid. Finally, gathering my courage, I stepped out into the sunshine.

He paused, then set down the bale he had been holding. “Syrah’s limping again,” I said. “If you get a chance, can you take a look?”

He nodded, not meeting my gaze. “What else do you need me to do?”

“The air conditioner in the office is broken. But it’s not a priority.” I crossed my arms tightly. “I’m so sorry, Gideon.”

Gideon kicked the hay, creating a haze of dust between us. He looked at me for the first time since I’d approached. His eyes were so bloodshot that it looked as if something had burst inside him. I thought maybe it was shame.

I reached out, but he ducked so that my fingers only grazed him. Then he turned his back on me and grabbed another bale of hay.

I blinked at the sun in my eyes as I returned to the kitchen in the barn. To my shock, Nevvie stood in the spot I’d been minutes before, using a spoon to scoop peanut butter into the apples I had cored.

Neither Thomas nor I had expected Nevvie to return anytime soon. After all, she had just buried her child. “Nevvie … you’re back?”

She did not look up at me as she worked. “Where else would I be?” she said.

? ? ?

A few days later, I lost my own daughter.

We were in the cottage, and Jenna was crying because she did not want to lie down and rest. Lately, she had been afraid to fall asleep. Instead of a nap, Jenna called it the Leaving Time. She was certain that if she closed her eyes, I would not be here again when she opened them, and no matter what I did or said to convince her otherwise, she sobbed and fought her exhaustion until her body triumphed over her will.

I tried singing to her, rocking her. I folded dollar bills into origami elephants, which usually distracted her enough to stop the crying. She finally drifted off the only way she could these days—with my body curled around hers like a snail’s shell, a protective home. I had just extricated myself from that position when Gideon knocked at the door. He needed help erecting a hot-wire fence so that he could regrade parts of the African enclosure. The elephants liked to dig for fresh water, but the holes they created were dangerous to the elephants themselves and to us on our ATVs and on foot. You could fall into one and snap your leg or strike your head; you could break an axle on your vehicle.