Leaving Time(17)

I don’t know how I know this, I just do.

My whole life, this is how I’ve defined the paranormal: can’t understand it, can’t explain it, can’t deny it.

You cannot be a born psychic and not believe in the power of signs. Sometimes it’s the traffic that makes you miss your flight, which winds up crashing into the Atlantic. Sometimes it’s the single rose that blooms in a garden full of weeds. Or sometimes it’s the girl you dismissed, who haunts your sleep.

“Sorry I bothered you,” Jenna says. “Or whatever.”

She is already halfway out the door when I hear my voice calling her name. “Jenna. This is probably crazy. But,” I say, “was your mother in the circus or something? A zookeeper? I … I don’t know why, but there’s something important about elephants?”

I haven’t had a true psychic thought in seven years. Seven years. I tell myself this one is coincidence, luck, or the aftereffects of the burrito I had for lunch.

When she turns around, her face is washed with an expression that’s equal parts shock and wonder.

I know, in that moment, that she was meant to find me.

And that I am going to find her mother.





ALICE




There is no question that elephants understand death. They may not plan for it the way we do; they may not imagine elaborate afterlives like those in our religious doctrines. For them, grief is simpler, cleaner. It’s all about loss.

Elephants are not particularly interested in the bones of other dead animals, just other elephants. Even if elephants come across the body of another elephant that has been long dead, its remains picked apart by hyenas and its skeleton scattered, they bunch and get tense. They approach the carcass as a group, and caress the bones with what can only be described as reverence. They stroke the dead elephant, touching it all over with their trunks and their back feet. They will smell it. They might pick up a tusk or a bone and carry it for a while. They will place even the tiniest bit of ivory under their feet and gently rock back and forth.

The naturalist George Adamson wrote of how, in the 1940s, he had to shoot a bull elephant that was breaking into government gardens in Kenya. He gave the meat to locals and moved the rest of the carcass a half mile from the village. That night, elephants discovered the carcass. They took the shoulder blade and the femur and brought the bones back to the spot where the elephant had been shot. In fact, all of the great elephant researchers have documented death rituals: Iain Douglas-Hamilton, Joyce Poole, Karen McComb, Lucy Baker, Cynthia Moss, Anthony Hall-Martin.

And me.

I once saw a herd of elephants walking in the reserve in Botswana when Bontle, their matriarch, went down. When the other elephants realized she was in distress, they attempted to lift her with their tusks, trying to get her to stand. When that didn’t work, some of the young males mounted Bontle, again seeking to bring her back to consciousness. Her calf, Kgosi, who was about four at the time, put his trunk in her mouth, the way young elephants greet their mothers. The herd rumbled and the calf was making sounds that seemed like screams, but then they all got very quiet. At this point I realized she had died.

A few of the elephants moved toward the tree line, collecting leaves and branches, which they brought to cover Bontle. Others tossed dirt onto her body. The herd stood solemnly with Bontle’s body for two and a half days, leaving only to get water or food, and then returning. Even years later, when her bones had been bleached and scattered, her massive skull caught in the crook of a dry riverbank, the herd would stop when passing by, standing in silence for a few minutes. Recently, I saw Kgosi—now a big young male of eight years—approach the skull and stick his trunk in the spot where Bontle’s mouth would have been. Clearly these bones had general significance to him. But if you had seen it, I think you’d believe what I do: that he recognized that these particular bones had once been his mother.





JENNA




“Tell me again,” I demand.

Serenity rolls her eyes. We’ve been sitting in her living room for an hour while she goes over the details of a ten-second dream she had about my mother. I know it’s my mother because of the blue scarf, the elephant, and … well, because when you desperately want to believe something’s true, you can convince yourself of just about anything.

True, Serenity might have Googled me the minute I walked out the door, and concocted some crazy trance with a pachyderm. But if you Google “Jenna Metcalf,” it takes three pages before you get to any mention of my mother, and even then, it’s an article that only references me as her three-year-old daughter. There are too many other Jenna Metcalfs who have done too much with their lives, and my mother’s disappearance was too long ago. Also, Serenity didn’t know I was coming back for the scarf I left behind.

Unless she did, which proves she’s the real deal, right?

“Listen,” Serenity says, “I can’t tell you any more than what I already have.”

“But my mother was breathing.”

“The woman I dreamed about was breathing.”

“Did she, like, gasp? Make any sounds?”

“No. She was just lying there. It’s just … a sense I had.”

“She’s not dead,” I murmur, more to myself than to Serenity, because I like the way the words fill me up with bubbles, like my blood has been carbonated. I know I should be angry or upset getting even this loose proof that my mother might still be alive—and that she’s abandoned me for the past decade—but I’m too happy about the thought that if I play my cards right, I will see her again.