Leaving Time(125)

Now, I have something to add to that. When you’re asleep, you think there’s a whole other world that feels completely real while you are dreaming it.

Serenity.

I struggle to turn around so that I can see her. But I am suddenly so light and weightless that I don’t even have to move, I just think and I’m where I need to be. I blink, and I can see her.

Unlike me, unlike Tallulah, unlike Jenna, her body has not dissipated or flickered. She is rock solid.

Serenity, I think, and her head turns.

“Virgil?” she whispers.

The last thought I have before I am gone completely is that in spite of what Serenity’s said—in spite of what I had believed—she’s not a lousy psychic. She’s a f*cking great one.





ALICE




I lost two babies, you know. One whom I knew and loved, and one I never met. I knew before I ran from the hospital that I had miscarried.

Now I have more than a hundred babies who consume every waking moment of my life. I have become one of those brittle, busy people who emerge from suffering like a tornado, turning so fast that we do not even realize how much self-destruction we’re causing.

The worst part of my day is when it is over. If I could, I would be a caretaker, sleeping in the nursery with the calves. But someone needs to be the public face of Msali.

People here know I used to do research in the Tuli Block. And that I lived, for a brief while, in the States. But most people don’t connect the academic I used to be to the activist I am now. I have not been Alice Metcalf for a long time.

As far as I’m concerned, she is dead, too.


When I wake up, I am screaming.

I do not like to sleep, and if I must, I want it to be thick and dreamless. For this reason I usually work myself to the bone, and pass out for two or three hours each night. I think about Jenna every day, every moment, but I have not thought about Thomas or Gideon for a long time. Thomas, I know, is still living in an institution. And a drunken Google search one night during the rainy season revealed that Gideon joined the army, and died in Iraq when an IED went off in a crowded public square. I printed out the newspaper article that talked about the posthumous Medal of Honor he had been awarded. He was buried at Arlington. I thought if I ever went back to the States, I might visit to pay my respects.

I lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, letting myself come back to this world slowly. Reality is frigid; I have to dip one toe at a time and grow accustomed to the shock before wading in further.

My gaze falls on the one remnant of my past life that I have with me in South Africa. It is a club roughly two and a half feet long, maybe eight inches wide. Made from a length of a young tree; the bark has been stripped away in random swirls and stripes. It’s quite beautiful, like a native totem, but if you stare at it long enough, you would swear that there’s a message to be decoded.

The Elephant Sanctuary in Tennessee, which became the home for our animals, had a website that let me track their progress, and also raised awareness of the work they were doing with elephants that had suffered in captivity. About five years ago, they held a Christmas auction to raise money. An elephant who had recently died had loved to pass the time by stripping trees of their bark in the most unlikely, delicate patterns; pieces of her “artwork” were being sold as donations.

I knew right away that this was Maura. I had watched her do this very thing dozens of times, pinning the logs we gave her for playtime against the bars of the barn stall, dragging her tusks to peel away the silver birch, the crusted pine.

It wasn’t odd for the Msali Elephant Orphanage in South Africa to want to support the sanctuary’s cause. They never knew I was the woman behind the check that was mailed; or that, when I received the item along with a picture of the elephant I had known so well—R.I.P. Maura written delicately across the top—I had cried for an hour.

For the past five years, that cylinder of wood has been hanging on the wall across from my bed. But as I watch now, it falls off the wall, hits the floor, and breaks into two clean halves.

At that moment, my phone rings.

“I’m looking for Alice Metcalf,” a man says.

My hands turn to ice. “Who’s calling?”

“Detective Mills from the Boone Police Department.”

So this is it. So now everything has caught up with me. “This is Alice Metcalf,” I murmur.

“Well, ma’am, with all due respect, you are one tough person to find.”

I close my eyes, waiting to be blamed.

“Ms. Metcalf,” the detective says, “we’ve found the body of your daughter.”





SERENITY




One minute I am standing in a room at a private laboratory with three other people, and the next, I’m alone in that same room, on my hands and knees looking for a tooth that has fallen.

“Can I help you?”

I jam the tooth into my pocket and turn to find a bearded man in a white coat. I approach him hesitantly, tap him hard on the shoulder. “You’re really here.”

He recoils, rubbing his collarbone, looking at me like I’m crazy. Maybe I am. “Yes, but why are you? Who let you in?”

I am not about to tell him my suspicion: that the “person” who had let me in was an earthbound spirit, a ghost. “I’m looking for an employee named Tallulah,” I say.