Leaving Time(121)

“Maybe it’s nature’s way of remembering,” I guess.

“More like it’s the extra nitrates in the soil,” Virgil mutters.

I shoot him a sharp glance. “No negativity. Spirits can feel that.”

Virgil looks like he’s about to have a root canal. “Should I just go over there or something?” He points off into the distance.

“No, we need you. This is about energy,” I say. “That’s how spirits manifest.”

So we all sit down, Jenna nervous, Virgil reluctant, and me—well—desperate. I close my eyes and wing a little prayer to the powers that be: I will never ask for my Gift again, if you let me do this one thing for her.

Maybe Jenna is right; maybe her mother has been trying to communicate with her all along, but until now, she was unwilling to accept the fact that Alice was dead. Maybe she’s finally ready to listen.

“So,” Jenna whispers. “Should we hold hands?”

I used to have clients who would ask how they could tell their loved ones that they missed them. You just did, I would say. It really is that easy. So this is what I tell Jenna to do. “Tell her why you want to talk to her.”

“Isn’t that obvious?”

“To me, maybe not to her.”

“Well.” Jenna swallows. “I don’t know if you can miss someone you can barely remember, but that’s how I feel. I used to make up stories about why you hadn’t been able to come back to me. You were captured by pirates, and you had to sail around the Caribbean looking for gold, but every night you looked at the stars and thought, At least Jenna’s seeing them, too. Or you had amnesia, and you lived every day trying to find clues about your past, like all these tiny arrows that would point you back to me. Or you were on a secret mission for the country, and you couldn’t reveal who you were without blowing your cover, and when you finally came home and flags were waving and crowds were cheering I’d get to see you as a hero. My English teachers said I had the most amazing imagination, but they didn’t understand, it wasn’t make-believe to me. It was so real that sometimes it hurt, like a stitch in your side when you run too hard, or the ache in your legs when you have growing pains. But I guess it turns out that maybe you couldn’t come to me. So I’m trying to get to you.”

I look at her. “Anything?”

Jenna takes a deep breath. “No.”

What would make Alice Metcalf, wherever she is, stop and listen?

Sometimes the universe gives you a gift. You see a girl, terrified that her mother is gone forever, and you finally understand what needs to be done.

“Jenna.” I gasp. “Can you see her?”

She jerks her head around. “Where?”

I point. “Right there.”

“I don’t see anything,” she says, near tears.

“You have to focus …”

Even Virgil is leaning forward now, squinting.

“I can’t …”

“Then you’re not trying hard enough,” I snap. “She’s getting brighter, Jenna—that light, it’s swallowing her. She’s leaving this world. This is your last chance.”

What would make a mother pay attention?

Her child’s cry.

“Mom!” Jenna shrieks until her voice is hoarse, until she’s bent forward in the field of violet mushrooms. “She’s gone?” Jenna sobs, frantic. “She’s really gone?”

I crawl forward to put my arm around her, wondering how to explain that I never really saw Alice at all, that I lied to get Jenna to pour her heart into that one desperate word. Virgil gets to his feet, scowling. “It’s all crap, anyway,” he mutters.

“What’s this?” I ask.

I reach for the sharp object that has poked into my calf, making me wince. It’s buried under the heads of the mushrooms, invisible, until I dig through their roots and find a tooth.





ALICE




All this time, I’ve said that elephants have an uncanny ability to compartmentalize death, without letting grief cripple them permanently.

But there is an exception.

In Zambia, a calf that had been orphaned by poaching began to hang around with a bunch of young bulls. Just as teenage males will walk up to each other and punch each other on the shoulder to say hello while girls hug, the behavior of these male elephants was very different from what a young female elephant might have experienced otherwise. They tolerated her hanging around because they could mate with her—like Anybodys in West Side Story—but they didn’t really want her there. She calved when she was only ten years old, and since she had no mother to guide her and no practice being an allomother in a breeding herd, she treated that baby the way she had been treated by the bulls. When the baby fell asleep beside her, she would get up and walk away. The calf would wake up and start bellowing for its mother, but she would ignore the cries. By contrast, in a breeding herd, if a baby squeals, at least three females rush to touch it all over and see if it is okay.

In the wild, a young female is an allomother long before she bears her own offspring. She has fifteen years to practice being a big sister to the calves that are born to the herd. I’d seen calves approach young female elephants to suckle for comfort, even though the juveniles did not have breasts or milk yet. But the young female would put her foot forward, the way her mother and aunties did, and proudly pretend. She could act like a mother without having any of the real responsibility until she was ready. But when there is no family to teach a young female to raise her own calf, things can go horribly awry.