Leaving Time(36)

Me, I look at the facts I remember about my mother, and I guess at her behavior. I do the opposite of what a scientist should do.

I can’t help but think: If my mother met me now, would she be disappointed?


Virgil turns my mother’s wallet over in his hands. It is so fragile that the leather starts to crumble beneath his fingers. I see that, and I feel a stab in my chest, as if I’m losing her all over again. “This doesn’t necessarily mean that your mother was a victim of foul play,” Virgil says. “She could have lost the wallet the night she wound up unconscious.”

I fold my hands on the table. “Look, I know what you think—that she’s the one who put the wallet up in the tree, so she could disappear. But it’s pretty hard to climb a tree and hide a wallet when you’re knocked out cold.”

“If that’s what she was doing, why didn’t she leave it someplace it might actually be found?”

“And then what? Smash herself in the head with a rock? If she really wanted to disappear, why wouldn’t she have just run?”

Virgil hesitates. “There might have been extenuating circumstances.”

“Like?”

“Your mother wasn’t the only one injured that night, you know.”

Suddenly I understand what he’s saying: My mother may have been trying to make herself look like she was a victim when, in reality, she was the perp. My mouth goes dry. Of all the potential personas I’ve given my mother over the past decade, murderer wasn’t one of them. “If you really thought my mother was a killer, why didn’t you go after her when she disappeared?”

His mouth opens and closes around empty air. Bam, I think. “The death was ruled an accident,” he says. “But we did find a red hair at the scene.”

“That’s like saying you found a bimbo on The Bachelor. My mom wasn’t the only redhead in Boone, New Hampshire.”

“We found the hair inside the body bag of the deceased.”

“So, (a) that’s gross, and (b) big deal. I watch Law & Order: SVU. It just means that they had contact with each other. That probably happened ten times a day.”

“Or it could mean that hair got transferred during a physical altercation.”

“How did Nevvie Ruehl die?” I demand. “Did the medical examiner say the cause of death was homicide?”

He shakes his head. “He ruled it an accident, caused by blunt force trauma due to trampling.”

“I may not remember a lot about my mom, but I know she wasn’t five thousand pounds,” I say. “So let me toss out a different scenario. What if Nevvie went after her? And one of the elephants saw the whole thing and retaliated?”

“They do that?”

I wasn’t sure. But I remembered reading in my mother’s journals about elephants that held grudges, that might wait years to even the score against someone who’d harmed them or someone they cared about.

“Besides,” Virgil said, “you just told me that your mother left you in Nevvie Ruehl’s care. I doubt she would have let Nevvie babysit if she thought the woman was dangerous.”

“I doubt my mom would have let Nevvie babysit if she also wanted to murder her,” I point out. “My mom didn’t kill her. It just doesn’t add up. There were a dozen cops swarming around that night; based on pure probability, chances are one of them was a redhead. You don’t know if that hair belongs to my mother.”

Virgil nods. “But I know how to find out.”


Here’s one more thing I remember: Inside, my parents are fighting. How can you do that? my father accuses. Make this all about you.

I am sitting on the floor, crying, but no one seems to hear me. I won’t move, because moving is what led to all the shouting. Instead of staying on the blanket and playing with the toys my mother had brought into the elephant enclosure, I had chased a yellow butterfly as it flew a dotted line across the sky. My mother had had her back to me; she was recording her observations. And just then, my father had driven by, and had seen me heading downhill, where the butterfly went … and where elephants happened to be standing.

This is the sanctuary, not the wild, my mother says. It’s not like she got between a mother and a calf. They’re used to people.

My father yells back: They are not used to toddlers!

Suddenly a pair of warm arms closes around me. She smells of powder and limes, and her lap is the softest place I know. “They’re mad,” I whisper.

“They’re scared,” she corrects. “It sounds the same.”

Then she starts to sing, close to my ear, so that her voice is the only one I hear.


Virgil has a plan, but the place he wants to go is too far away for me to bike, and I’m still not getting in a car with him. As we walk out of the diner, I agree to meet him at his office the next morning. The sun’s swinging low, using a cloud as a hammock. “How do I know you won’t be blitzed tomorrow, too?” I ask.

“Bring a Breathalyzer,” Virgil suggests drily. “I’ll see you at eleven.”

“Eleven’s not the morning.”

“It is for me,” he replies, and he starts walking down the road toward his office.

By the time I get back home, my grandmother is draining carrots in a colander. Gertie, curled up in front of the refrigerator, beats her tail twice on the floor, but that’s all the hello I’m getting. When I was little, my dog used to practically knock me down if I came back after a trip to the bathroom; that’s how happy she was to see me again. I wonder if, as you get older, you stop missing people so fiercely. Maybe growing up is just focusing on what you’ve got, instead of what you don’t.