Leaving Time(39)

Lorato, the matriarch—the mother of Kenosi—came charging down the hill toward where her son was stumbling around, bleeding. The only obstacle in her way was my mother’s vehicle.

My mother knew not to get between an elephant and her calf, even if that calf was thirteen years old. She threw the Land Rover into reverse and zoomed backward, leaving a clear path between Kenosi and Lorato.

Before the matriarch could get there, however, Wilkins took a second shot, and this one hit its mark.

Lorato stopped on a dime. This is what my mother wrote:


She reached out to Kenosi, stroking his body from tail to trunk, paying special attention to the spot where the snare wire had cut into his hide. She stepped over his massive bulk, standing above him the way a mother would protect her calf. She was secreting from her temporal glands, dark streaks marking the sides of her head. Even as the bull herd moved away, even as Lorato’s breeding herd joined her and reached out to touch Kenosi, she refused to move. The sun fell, the moon rose, and still she stood, unable or unwilling to leave him.

How do you say good-bye?

That night, there were meteor showers. It seemed to me that even the sky was weeping.


Two pages later in the journal, my mother had composed herself enough to write about what had happened with the objectivity of a scientist:

Today I saw two things I never thought I would see.

First, the good: Because of Wilkins’s behavior, the researchers in the reserve have now been given the right to euthanize an elephant on our own, if necessary.

Second, the devastating: A female elephant whose baby wasn’t a baby anymore by any means still returned with a fury when he was in distress.

Once a mother, always a mother.



That’s what my mom scrawled at the bottom of the page.

What she didn’t write was that this was the day she narrowed her study on trauma and elephants to the effects of grief instead.

Unlike my mother, I don’t think what happened to Kenosi was tragic. When I read it, actually, it makes me feel like I’m filled with sparks from those meteor showers she talks about.

After all, the last thing Kenosi saw, before he closed his eyes forever, was his mother coming back to him.


The next morning, I wonder if it’s time to tell my grandmother about Virgil.

“What do you think?” I ask Gertie. Certainly it would be easier to get a lift to his office, instead of having to bike all the way across town. So far all I have to show for my search are calf muscles that rival a ballerina’s.

My dog thumps her tail against the wooden floor. “Once for yes, twice for no,” I say, and Gertie cocks her head. I hear my grandmother call for me—it’s the second time—and I clatter down the stairs to find her standing at the counter, shaking cereal into a bowl for my breakfast.

“I overslept. No time for anything hot today. Although why you can’t feed yourself at the age of thirteen, I have no idea,” she huffs. “I’ve seen goldfish with better survival skills than you.” She hands me a milk carton and unplugs her cell phone from its charger. “Take the recycling out before you leave for your sitting job. And for God’s sake brush your hair before you go. It looks like there’s a woodland creature nesting inside.”

This is not the same woman who came into my room last night with all her defenses down. This is not the same woman who admitted to me that she, too, is still consumed by thoughts of my mother.

She digs in her purse. “Where are the car keys? I swear I have the first three signs of Alzheimer’s …”

“Grandma … what you said last night …” I clear my throat. “About me being brave enough to search for my mom?”

She shakes her head, so slightly that if I weren’t staring so hard at her, I might have missed it. “Dinner’s at six,” she announces, in a voice that lets me know this conversation is over, before I really ever had a chance to get it started.


To my surprise, Virgil looks as comfortable in the police station as a vegetarian at a barbecue festival. He doesn’t want to use the front door; we have to sneak in the back after an officer has buzzed himself in. He doesn’t want to chat up the desk sergeant or the dispatchers. There’s no grand tour: This is where my locker was; this is where we kept the donuts. I’d been under the impression that Virgil left this job because he wanted to, but I’m beginning to wonder if maybe he did something to get fired. This much I know: There’s something he’s not telling me.

“See that guy?” Virgil says, pulling me around the bend of a hallway so that I can peek at the man sitting at the desk of the evidence room. “That’s Ralph.”

“Um, Ralph looks like he’s a thousand years old.”

“He looked like he was a thousand years old back when I was still working here,” Virgil says. “We used to say he’d become just as fossilized as the stuff he watches over.”

He takes a deep breath and walks down the corridor. The evidence room has a half door, with the top open. “Hey, Ralph! Long time no see.”

Ralph moves as if he’s underwater. His waist pivots, then his shoulders, and finally his head. Up close, he has as many wrinkles as the elephants in the photos clipped to my mother’s journal entries. His eyes are as pale as apple jelly, and look to be about the same consistency. “Well,” Ralph says, so slowly that it sounds like whaaaaale. “Rumor has it that you walked into the cold case evidence room one day and never came out.”