Leaving Time(113)

All of a sudden an elephant named Thato began to walk up the length of the dry riverbed. Now, she was an acquaintance of this herd, but not a member of it. I have no idea what she was doing alone, away from the rest of her own family. As she came by the newborn calf, she wrapped her trunk around his neck and began to lift him.

We see all the time how a mother might try to lift her newborn to get him moving, by sliding her trunk beneath his belly or between his legs. But it is not normal to pick a calf up by the neck. No mother would do that intentionally. The little calf was slipping out of the grasp of Thato’s trunk as she walked away. The more he slipped, the higher she lifted, trying to keep that baby in her grip. Finally he fell, slamming hard to the ground.

That was the catalyst that spurred the herd to action. There was rumbling and trumpeting and chaos, and the family members touched the newborn to make sure he was all right, to prove that in fact he had not been hurt. Marea gathered him close and pulled him between her legs.

There was so much about this situation I did not understand. I’d seen elephants pick up babies when they were in the water, to keep them from drowning. I’d seen elephants lift babies that were lying down to get them to stand on their feet. But I had never seen an elephant try to carry off a calf, like a lioness with a cub.

I didn’t know what made Thato think she could get away with kidnapping another’s calf. I didn’t know if that was her intent, or if she scented the lion and the leopard and felt he was in danger.

I didn’t know why the herd did not react when Thato tried to take the calf. She was older than Marea, for sure, but she was not a member of the family.

We named that baby Molatlhegi. In Tswana, it means, “the lost one.”


The night after I almost lost Jenna, I had a nightmare. In my dream, I was sitting near the spot where Molatlhegi had nearly been taken by Thato. As I watched, the elephants moved to higher ground, and water began to trickle down the dry throat of the riverbed. The water gurgled, running deeper and faster, until it splashed over my feet. On the far side of the river I saw Grace Cartwright. She stepped into the water fully clothed. She reached down to the riverbed, picked up a smooth stone, and tucked it into her shirt. She did this over and over, filling her pants, her coat pockets, until she could barely bend and stand again.

Then she began to walk deeper into the river’s current.

I knew how deep the water got, and how quickly that could happen. I tried to yell to Grace, but I couldn’t make a sound. When I opened my mouth, a thousand stones poured out.

And then suddenly I was the one in the water, weighted down. I felt the current pull my hair free from its braid; I struggled for air. But with every breath I was swallowing pebbles—agate and spiky calcite, basalt and slate and obsidian. I looked up at the watercolor sun as I sank.

I woke up, panicking, Gideon’s hand pressed against my mouth. Fighting him, I kicked and rolled, until he was at one side of the bed and I was at the other and there was a barricade between us of the words we should have said but didn’t.

“You were screaming,” he said. “You were going to wake the whole camp.”

I realized that the first bloody streaks of dawn were in the sky. That I had fallen asleep, when I only meant to steal a few moments.

When Thomas woke, an hour later, I was back in the living room of the cottage, sleeping on the couch, my arm flung over Jenna’s tiny body as if nothing could possibly get past me to take her away, as if there was no way I would ever let her wake up and find me absent. He glanced at me, seemingly unconscious, and stumbled into the kitchen in search of coffee.

Except I wasn’t actually asleep when he passed by. I was thinking about how my nights had been dark and dreamless my whole life, except for one notable exception, when my imagination kicked into overdrive and every midnight hour was a pantomime of my greatest fears.

The last time that happened, I’d been pregnant.





JENNA




My grandmother stares at me as if she’s seeing a ghost. She grabs me tight, running her hands over my shoulders and my hair as if she needs to do an inventory. But there’s a viciousness in her touch, too, as if she is trying to hurt me just as badly as I’ve hurt her. “Jenna, my God, where have you been?”

I kind of wish I’d taken Serenity or Virgil up on their offer to drive me home, to smooth the path between my grandmother and me. Right now, it’s like Mount Kilimanjaro has sprung up between us.

“I’m sorry,” I mutter. “I had to do some … stuff.” I use Gertie as an excuse to break away from her. My dog starts licking my legs like there’s no tomorrow, and when she jumps up on me, I bury my face in the ruff at her neck.

“I thought you had run away,” my grandmother says. “I thought maybe you were doing drugs. Drinking. There are stories on the news all the time about girls who get kidnapped, good girls who make the mistake of telling a stranger what time it is when they ask. I was so worried, Jenna.”

My grandmother is still wearing her meter maid uniform, but I can see that her eyes are red and her skin is too pale, like she hasn’t slept. “I called everyone. Mr. Allen—who told me that you haven’t been babysitting for his son, because his wife and baby are visiting her mother in California … the school … your friends—”

Horrified, I stare at her. Who the hell did she call? Short of Chatham, who doesn’t even live here anymore, there’s no one I hang around with. Which means my grandmother contacting a random kid to find out if I’m at her house having a sleepover is even more humiliating.