Leaving Time(130)

I blink at him. “What?”

He hands me the book he’s holding. “For God’s sake, be careful. There are spies all over the place.”

The book is by Dr. Seuss. Green Eggs and Ham.

“This is your article?” I ask.

“It’s encoded,” Thomas whispers.

I had come here hoping to find someone else who was a survivor, someone who might be able to take the worst night of my life and help me shoulder the memory. Instead, I found Thomas so trapped by the past that he can’t accept the future.

Maybe that is healthier.

“Do you know what Jenna did today?” Thomas says.

Tears spring to my eyes. “Tell me.”

“She took all the vegetables she doesn’t like to eat out of the refrigerator and said she was going to give them to the elephants. When I told her they were good for her, she said this was just an experiment and the elephants were her control group.” He grins at me. “If she’s this smart at three, what will she be like at twenty-three?”

There was a moment, before everything went wrong, before the sanctuary had failed and Thomas had gotten sick, when we had been happy together. He had held our newborn in his arms, speechless. He had loved me, and he had loved her.

“She’ll be amazing,” Thomas says, answering his own rhetorical question.

“Yes,” I say, my voice thick. “She will.”


At the motel, I take off my shoes and my jacket and pull the shades tight. I sit down on the swivel chair at the desk and stare into the mirror. This is not the face of someone at peace. In fact, I do not at all feel the way I thought I would if I ever received a call that my daughter had been found. This was supposed to be what I needed to stop straddling the distance between reality and what-if. But I still feel rooted. Stuck.

The blank face of the television mocks me. I do not want to turn it on. I don’t want to listen to newscasters telling me of some new horror in the world, of the limitless supply of tragedy.

When there is a knock on the door, I startle. I don’t know anyone in this town. It could only be one thing.

They’ve come for me, after all, because they know what I did.

I take a deep breath, resolved. It’s all right, really. I was expecting this. And no matter what happens, I know where Jenna is now. The babies in South Africa are under the care of people who know how to raise them. Really, I am ready to go.

But when I open the door, the woman with pink hair is standing on the threshold.

Cotton candy, that’s what it looks like. I used to feed it to Jenna, who had such a sweet tooth. In Afrikaans, it’s called spook asem. Ghost breath.

“Hello,” she says.

Her name. It’s something like Tranquility … Sincerity…

“I’m Serenity. I met you earlier today.”

The woman who had found Jenna’s remains. I stare at her, wondering what she could possibly want. A reward, maybe?

“I know I said I found your daughter,” she begins, her voice shaking. “But I lied.”

“Detective Mills said you brought him a tooth—”

“I did. But the thing is, Jenna found me first. A little over a week ago.” She hesitates. “I’m a psychic.”

Maybe it is the stress of having seen my daughter’s bones interred; maybe it is realizing that Thomas has the good fortune to be trapped in a place where none of this ever happened; maybe it is the twenty-two hours of flying and the jet lag I’m still battling. For all of these reasons, rage rises in me like a geyser. I plant my hands on Serenity’s arms and shove her. “How dare you?” I say. “How dare you make light of the fact that my daughter’s dead?”

She topples back, caught off guard by my physical attack. Her giant purse spills onto the floor between us.

She falls to her knees, sweeping the contents back inside. “That’s the last thing I’d ever do,” she says. “I came to tell you how much Jenna loved you. She didn’t realize she was dead, Alice. She thought you’d left her behind.”

What this hack is doing is deadly, dangerous. I’m a scientist, and what she’s saying is not possible, but it can still wreak havoc with my heart.

“What did you come here for?” I say, bitter. “Money?”

“I could see her,” the woman insists. “I could talk to her, and touch her. I didn’t know Jenna was a spirit; I thought she was a teenage girl. I watched her eat and laugh and ride a bike and check the voice mail on her cell phone. She looked and sounded as real to me as you do, right now.”

“Why you?” I hear myself ask. “Why would she have come to you?”

“Because I was one of the few who noticed her, I guess. Ghosts are all around us, talking to each other and checking into hotels and eating at McDonald’s and doing what you and I would ordinarily do—but the only people who see them are the ones who can suspend disbelief. Like little children. Mentally ill folks. And psychics.” She hesitates. “I think she came to me because I could hear her. But I think she stayed because she knew—even if I didn’t—that I could help her find you.”

I am crying now. I cannot see clearly. “Go away. Just go away.”

She gets to her feet, about to say something, and then on second thought just inclines her head and starts walking down the hall.