Leaving Time(28)

When I turned around, the seventh elephant was staring me down from the other side of a very flimsy portable electric fence.

She was huge, this close. Her ears were pinned back against her head, and her trunk dragged on the ground. Sparse hair sprouted from the bony ridge of her brow. Her eyes, they were soulful and brown. She bellowed, and I fell back, even though there was a fence between us.

She trumpeted again, louder this time, and moved away. Then she stopped, after a few steps, and turned to look at me. She did the same thing two more times.

It was almost as if she was waiting for me to follow.

When I didn’t move, the elephant returned and reached delicately between the electric lines of the fencing. I could feel hot breath huffing from the end of her trunk; I could smell hay and dust. I held my breath, and she touched my cheek, as gently as a whisper.

This time, when she started to move, I followed, keeping the fence between us, until the elephant made a sharp turn and started to walk away from me. She moved into a valley, and the moment before she disappeared from view, she glanced back at me again.

In high school, we used to cut across cow pastures as shortcuts. They were protected by electric fences. We’d leap, then grab the wire and soar over. As long as we let go before our feet touched the ground, we wouldn’t get a shock.

I started to run, hurdling the wire. At the last moment my shoe dragged on the dirt and my hand was shocked numb. I fell, rolling in the dust, and then scrambled upright, racing toward the spot where the elephant had disappeared.

About four hundred yards away, I found the elephant standing over the body of a woman.

“Holy f*ck,” I whispered, and the elephant rumbled. When I took a step forward, her trunk shot out, whacking me on the shoulder and knocking me down. I had no doubt that was a warning; she could have swatted me halfway across the sanctuary if she’d really wanted.

“Hey, girl,” I said softly, making eye contact. “I can tell you want to take care of her. I want to take care of her, too. You just have to let me get a little closer. I promise, she’ll be okay.”

As I kept talking, the elephant’s posture relaxed. The ears pinned against her head fluttered forward; her trunk curled over the woman’s chest. With a delicacy I would never have imagined in an animal so big, she lifted her massive feet and stepped away from the body.

In that moment I really got it; I understood why the Metcalfs had started this sanctuary and why Gideon wouldn’t blame one of these creatures for killing his relative. I understood why Thomas would try to understand the brains of these animals. There was something I could not put my finger on—not just a complexity, or a connection, but an equality, as if we both knew we were on the same side here.

I nodded at the elephant, and I swear to God, she nodded back at me.

Maybe I was na?ve; maybe I was just an idiot—but I knelt beside that elephant, close enough for her to crush me if she wanted to, and felt for the woman’s pulse. She had dried blood matting her scalp and her face; her features were purple and swollen. She was totally unresponsive … and she was alive.

“Thank you,” I said to the elephant, because it was clear to me, anyway, that she had been protecting this woman. I looked up, but the animal had disappeared, slipping silently into the fringe of trees beyond this little valley.

I hauled the body into my arms and started to sprint toward the MCU investigators. In spite of what Thomas Metcalf had said, Alice hadn’t run away with his daughter, or his precious research. She was right here.


Once, when I went on a bender, I had a hallucination that I was playing poker with Santa Claus and a unicorn that kept cheating. Suddenly the Russian mafia burst into the room and started beating on St. Nick. I ran away, climbing up the fire escape before they could get me, too. The unicorn was right beside me, and when we got to the roof of the building, he told me to jump off and fly. I came to at that moment because my cell phone rang, and I had one leg over the edge, as if I was freaking Peter Pan. There but for the grace of God, I thought. I poured all the booze in my place down the sink drain that morning.

I was sober for three days.

During that time a new client asked me to get pictures of her husband, who she thought was cheating on her with another woman. He disappeared for hours at a time on weekends, saying he was going to the hardware store, and never returned with a single purchased item. He had started to erase messages on his cell phone. He seemed, she said, like he wasn’t the man she had married.

I tracked the guy one Saturday to—of all places—a zoo. He was with a woman, all right—one who happened to be about four years old. The girl ran up to the fence at the elephant enclosure. Immediately, I thought of the animals I’d seen at the sanctuary, roaming free through the vast acreage, not cooped up in a little concrete pen. The elephant was rocking back and forth as if it were moving to music none of us could hear. “Daddy,” the little girl said. “It’s dancing!”

“I once saw an elephant peel an orange,” I said casually, remembering a visit to the sanctuary after the caregiver’s death. It had been one of Olive’s behaviors; she rolled the tiny fruit under her massive front foot until it split, then delicately unraveled the peel with her trunk. I nodded at the man—my client’s husband. I happened to know they didn’t have any children. “Cute kid,” I said.

“Yeah,” he replied, and I could hear the wonder in his voice that comes when you find out you’re having a baby, not when your child is four. Unless, of course, you have only just discovered that you’re her dad.