Leaving Time(123)

Lie down, she tells me. Lie on your back and look up at the stars. Let’s see if you can find the elephant in the spaces between them.

I like games, so I try. But all I see is the night, like a bowl knocked upside down, and the moon falling out. What if the bowl drops and traps me? What if I’m hidden, and my mother can’t find me?

I start to cry.

Ssh, she says.

Her hand comes over my mouth and pushes down. I try to get away, because I do not like this game. In her other hand she holds a big rock.


For a while I am asleep, I think. I dream my mother’s voice. All I can see are the trees leaning together, like they are trying to tell secrets, as Maura bursts through them.

And then I am somewhere else, outside, above, around, watching a picture of myself like when my mother puts on movies of me as a baby and I see myself on TV, even though I am still here. I am being carried, and there’s a bounce to it, and we go a long way. When Maura puts me down she rubs me with her back foot, and I think she would have been so good at hide-and-seek after all, because she is so gentle. When she pats me with her trunk, it is the way my mother taught me to touch the baby bird that fell out of its nest this spring, like I am pretending to be the wind.

Everything is soft: the secret of her breath on my cheek, the paintbrush branches she covers me with, like a blanket to keep me warm.


One minute Serenity is standing in front of me, and the next she’s gone. “Jenna?” I hear her say, and then she’s black-and-white, dappled like static.

I’m not in the lab. I’m not anywhere.

Sometimes the connection was crystal clear, and sometimes it was like being on a cell phone in the mountains, where you only catch every third word, Serenity had said.

I try to listen, but I’m only getting bits and pieces, and then the line goes dead.





ALICE




They never found her body.

I had seen it with my own eyes, and yet by the time the police got there, Jenna was gone. I read it in the newspapers. I couldn’t tell them that I had seen her, lying there on the ground in the enclosure. I couldn’t contact the police at all, of course, because then they would come for me.

So I scrutinized Boone from eight thousand miles away. I stopped journaling, because every day was another day I didn’t have my child. I worried that by the time I reached the end of the book, the canyon between who I used to be and who I was now would be so broad that I wouldn’t be able to see the far side. I saw a therapist for a while, lying about the circumstances of my sadness (a car accident) and using a fake name (Hannah, a palindrome, a word that means the same thing even if you turn it inside out). I asked him if it was normal after the disappearance of a child to still hear her crying in the night, and to wake up to that imaginary sound. I asked him if it was normal to wake up and, for a few glorious seconds, to believe she was on the other side of the wall, still sleeping. He said, It is normal for you, and that’s when I stopped seeing him. What he should have said is: Nothing will ever be normal again.

? ? ?

In 1999, on the day I first learned of the cancer bleaching the life out of my mother, I’d driven blindly through the bush trying to outrun the news. To my shock, I’d found five elephant carcasses with their trunks cut away—and one very devastated, very frightened calf.

Her trunk was limp, her ears translucent. She could not have been more than three weeks old. But I had not known how to care for her, and her story did not end happily.

Neither did my mother’s. I took a six-month leave of absence from my postdoctoral research to be with her until she passed away. When I returned to Botswana, I was all alone in the world, and threw myself into my work to avoid my grief—only to realize that these great, gracious elephants treated death so matter-of-factly. They did not find themselves thinking in circles: wondering why I had not called home on Mother’s Day; questioning why I had always argued with my mother, instead of telling her how much I modeled myself on her self-sufficiency; proclaiming I was too busy with my work or too broke to fly home for Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, my birthday. Those spiraling thoughts were killing me, each turn of the screw sinking me into a quicksand of guilt. Almost by accident, I began to study the grief of elephants. I told myself all sorts of excuses about why this was of visceral academic importance. But really, all I wanted to do was learn from the animals, which made it look so easy.

When I came back to Africa to heal from the second loss of my life, it was during a time when poaching was on the rise. The killers had gotten smarter. Where they used to shoot the oldest matriarchs and bulls with the biggest tusks, they now randomly targeted a youngster, knowing that would make the herd bunch together in defense, which of course made it easier for poachers to kill en masse. For a long time no one wanted to admit that the elephants in South Africa were at risk again, but they were. Elephants in bordering Mozambique were being poached heavily, and the orphaned calves ran terrified back into the Kruger.

It was one of those calves that I found while I was hiding in South Africa. Her mother, a victim of poaching, had been shot in the shoulder and collapsed with a festering wound. The calf, which refused to leave her mother’s side, was surviving by drinking her urine. I knew as soon as I found them in the bush that the mother would have to be euthanized. I knew, too, this would lead to the death of her daughter.

I wasn’t about to let that happen again.