Leaving Time(35)

“I’m saying I did my job. Someone else didn’t do theirs.” He looks at me over the edge of his mug. “I was called in to the elephant sanctuary because there was a dead body there. It was ruled an accident. Case closed. When you’re a cop, you don’t try to make messes. You just clean up the spills.”

“So you’re basically admitting you were too lazy to care that one of your witnesses for the case had disappeared.”

He scowls. “No, I was making the assumption that your mother left of her own free will, or else I would have heard otherwise. I assumed she was with you.” Virgil narrows his eyes. “Where were you when your mother was found by the cops?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes she left me with Nevvie during the day, but not at night. I just remember eventually being with my grandma, at her place.”

“Well, I should start by talking to her.”

I shake my head immediately. “No way. She’d kill me if she knew I was doing this.”

“Doesn’t she want to know what happened to her daughter?”

“It’s complicated,” I say. “I think maybe it hurts her too much to keep dragging it up. She’s from that generation that just puts on a stiff upper lip or whatever and soldiers through the bad stuff and pretends it never happened. Whenever I used to cry for my mom, my grandma tried to distract me—with food, or a toy, or with Gertie, my dog. And then one day when I asked she said, She’s gone. But the way she said it, it sounded like a knife. So I learned pretty fast to stop asking.”

“What took you so long to come forward? Ten years isn’t just a cold case. It’s a freaking Arctic wasteland.”

A waitress walks by, and I signal to her, trying to get her attention, since Virgil needs coffee if he’s going to be of any use to me. She doesn’t see me at all.

“That’s what it’s like to be a kid,” I say. “No one takes you seriously. People look right through you. Even if I’d been able to figure out where to go when I was eight or ten … even if I’d managed to get myself to the police station … even if you hadn’t left your job and the sergeant at the front desk told you a kid wanted to get you to reopen a closed case … what would you have done? Would you have let me stand in front of your desk talking while you smiled and nodded and didn’t pay attention? Or told your cop buddies about the girl who showed up and wanted to play detective?”

Another waitress bustles out of the kitchen, and a wedge of noises—frying, banging, clattering—squawks through the swinging door. This one, at least, comes right toward us. “What can I get you?” she asks.

“Coffee,” I say. “A whole pot.” She looks at Virgil, snorts, and retreats. “It’s like that old saying,” I tell him. “If no one hears you, are you even talking?”

The waitress brings us two cups of coffee. Virgil hands me the sugar even though I haven’t asked for it. I meet his gaze, and for a moment, I can see through the haze of the booze, and I am not sure if I’m comforted by what I see, or a little scared. “I’m listening now,” he says.


The list of what I remember about my mother is embarrassingly short.

There’s that moment where she fed me cotton candy: Uswidi. Iswidi.

There’s the conversation about mating for life.

There’s a glimpse I have of her laughing as Maura reaches her trunk over a fence and pulls her hair free from its ponytail. My mother’s hair is red. Not strawberry-blond and not orange, but the color of someone who’s burning up inside.

(Okay, so, maybe the reason I remember this incident is because I’ve seen a photo someone snapped at that very moment. But the smell of her hair—like cinnamon sugar—that’s a real memory that has nothing to do with a picture. Sometimes, when I really miss her, I eat French toast, just so that I can close my eyes and breathe in.)

My mother’s voice, when she was upset, wobbled like a heat mirage of asphalt in the summer. And she would hug me and tell me it was going to be all right, even though she had been the one to cry.

Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and find her watching me sleep.

She never wore rings. But she had a necklace that she never took off.

She used to sing in the shower.

She took me out on the ATV with her to watch the elephants, even though my father thought it was too dangerous for me to be in the enclosures. I rode on her lap, and she would lean down and whisper in my ear, This can be our secret.

We had matching pink sneakers.

She knew how to fold a dollar bill into an elephant.

Instead of reading me books at night, she told me stories: how she had seen an elephant free a baby rhino stuck in the mud; how a little girl whose best friend was an orphaned elephant left her family home to go to university and returned years later, to have that now fully grown elephant wrap a trunk around her and pull her close.

I remember my mother sketching, drawing the giant G clefs of elephant ears, which she would then mark with notches or tears to help her identify the individual. She would list behaviors: Syrah reaches for and removes plastic bag from Lilly’s tusk; given that vegetation is routinely carried in tusks, this suggests awareness of foreign object and subsequent cooperative removal … Even something as soft as empathy would be given the most academic treatment. It was part of being taken seriously in her field: not to anthropomorphize elephants, but to study their behavior clinically and, from that, to extrapolate the facts.