Leaving Time(34)

HIM: Swans.

HER: Too easy. And not true! A quarter of black swans cheat on their mates.

HIM: Wolves.

HER: They’ve been known to mate with another wolf if their mate is kicked out of the pack or isn’t able to breed. That’s circumstance, not true love.

HIM: I should have known better than to fall for a scientist. Your idea of a Valentine’s heart probably has an aorta.

HER: Is it a crime to be biologically relevant?



She sits up and pins him onto the ground, so that now he is lying beneath her and her hair swings over his face. It looks like they’re fighting, but they are both smiling.

HER: Do you know a vulture caught cheating on his mate will be attacked by others?

HIM: Is that supposed to scare me?

HER: I’m just saying.

HIM: Gibbons.

HER: Oh, come on. Everyone knows gibbons are unfaithful.



He rolls, so that now he is on top, looking down at her.

HIM: Prairie voles.

HER: Only because of the oxytocin and vasopressin released in their brains. It’s not love. It’s chemical commitment.



Slowly, she grins.

HER: You know, now that I think about it … there is one species that’s completely monogamous. The male anglerfish, which is a tenth the size of the girl of his dreams, follows her scent, bites her, and hangs on until his skin fuses into hers and her body absorbs his. They mate for life. But it’s a really short life, if you’re the guy in the relationship.

HIM: I’d fuse to you.



He kisses her.

HIM: Right at the lips.



When they laugh, it sounds like confetti.

HER: Fine. If it shuts you up about this once and for all.



They stop talking for a little while. I hold my palm over the ground. I have seen Maura lift her rear foot inches above the dirt, moving it slowly back and forth like she is rolling it over an invisible stone. My mother says that she can hear the other elephants when she does that; that they talk even when we don’t hear them. I wonder if that’s what my parents are doing now: speaking without sound.

When my father’s voice comes again, it sounds like the string on a guitar that is pulled so tight, you can’t tell if it is music or crying.

HIM: Do you know how a penguin picks his mate? He finds a perfect pebble, and gives it to the female he has his eye on.



He hands my mother a small stone. Her hand closes around it.


Most of my mother’s journals from her time in Botswana are stuffed chock-full of data: the names and movements of elephant families trekking across the Tuli Block; dates when males came into musth and females calved; hourly logs of the behavior of animals who do not care or do not know they are being watched. I read each entry, but instead of seeing elephants, I picture the hand that wrote the notes. Was there a cramp in her fingers? A callus where the pencil pressed too hard against the skin? I put together the clues of my mother the same way she shuffled and reshuffled the observations of her elephants, trying to make a bigger picture from the smallest details. I wonder if it was just as frustrating for her, to get glimpses but never the whole mystery revealed. I guess a scientist’s job is to fill in the gaps. Me, though, I look at a puzzle and can only see the single missing piece.

I am starting to think Virgil feels the same way, and I have to admit, I don’t exactly know what that says about either of us.

When he says he’ll take the job, I don’t quite trust him. It’s hard to believe a guy who is so hungover that he looks like he’s having a stroke when he tries to put on his jacket. I figure my best bet is to make sure that he remembers this conversation, which means getting him out of his office and sober. “Why don’t we talk over some coffee?” I suggest. “I passed a diner on my way here.”

He grabs his car keys, but that’s not happening. “You’re drunk,” I say. “I’m driving.”

He shrugs, going along with it until we walk out the entryway of the building, and he sees me unlock my bike.

“What the f*ck is that?”

“If you don’t know, you’re drunker than I thought,” I say, and I climb on the seat.

“When you said you’d drive,” Virgil mutters, “I assumed you had a car.”

“I’m thirteen,” I point out and gesture at the handlebars.

“Are you kidding? What is this, 1972?”

“You can run alongside instead if you want,” I say, “but with the headache I’m guessing you have, I’d take Door Number One instead.”

Which is how we wind up arriving at the diner with Virgil Stanhope sitting on my mountain bike, his legs spread, while I stand up between them and pedal.

We seat ourselves at a booth. “How come there weren’t any flyers?” I say.

“Huh?”

“Flyers. With my mom’s face on them. How come no one set up a command center at a crappy Holiday Inn conference room and manned a telephone bank for tips?”

“I told you already,” Virgil replies. “She was never a missing person.”

I just stare at him.

“Okay, correction: If your grandmother actually filed a missing persons report, it got lost in the shuffle.”

“You’re saying I grew up without a mother because of human error?”