Leaving Time(41)

He glances at me. “Because we got what we came for.”

“I meant the police department. Didn’t you want to be a detective?”

“Apparently not as much as you do,” Virgil murmurs.

“I think I deserve to know what I’m getting for my money.”

He snorts. “A bargain.”

He backs up too fast, and one of the boxes tumbles over. The storage bags inside spill out, so I unbuckle my seat belt and twist around, trying to right the mess. “It’s hard to tell what’s evidence and what’s your trash,” I say. The tape has peeled off one of the brown paper bags, and the evidence inside has fallen into a nest of McDonald’s fish fillet wrappers. “This is gross. Who eats fifteen fish fillets?”

“It wasn’t all at once,” Virgil says.

But I’m barely listening, because my hand has closed around the evidence that was dislodged. I pivot forward, still holding the tiny pink Converse sneaker.

Then I look down at my feet.

I’ve had pink Converse high-tops for as long as I can remember. Longer. They’re my one indulgence, the only items of clothing I ever ask my grandmother for.

I’m wearing them in every photograph of me as an infant: propped up against a clan of teddy bears, sitting on a blanket with a pair of huge sunglasses balanced on my nose; brushing my teeth at the sink, naked except for those shoes. My mother had a pair, too—old, beaten ones that she had kept from her college days. We did not wear identical dresses or have the same haircut; we didn’t practice putting on makeup. But in this one small thing, we matched.

I still wear my sneakers, practically every day. They’re kind of like a good-luck charm, or maybe a superstition. If I haven’t taken mine off, then maybe … well. You get it.

The roof of my mouth feels like a desert. “This was mine.”

Virgil looks at me. “You’re sure?”

I nod.

“Did you ever run around barefoot when you were in the sanctuary with your mother?”

I shake my head. That was a rule; no one went inside without footwear. “It wasn’t like a golf course,” I said. “There were knobs of grass and thicket and bush. You could trip in the holes that the elephants dug.” I turn the tiny shoe over in my hand. “I was there, that night. And I still don’t know what happened.”

Had I gotten out of bed and wandered into the enclosures? Had my mom been looking for me?

Am I the reason she’s gone?

My mother’s research comes thundering into my head. Negative moments get remembered. Traumatic ones get forgotten.

Virgil’s face is unreadable. “Your father told us you were asleep,” he says.

“Well, I didn’t go to sleep wearing shoes. Someone must have put them on me and tied the laces.”

“Someone,” Virgil repeats.


Last night, I dreamed about my father. He was creeping through the tall grass near the pond in the sanctuary enclosure, calling my name. Jenna! Come out, come out, wherever you are!

We were safe out here, because the two African elephants were inside the barn having their feet examined. I knew that home base in this game was the wide wall of the barn. I knew that my father always won, because he could run faster than me. But this time, I was not going to let him.

Bean, he said, his name for me. I can see you.

I knew he was lying, because he started walking away from my hiding spot.

I had dug myself into the banks of the pond the way the elephants did when my mother and I watched them playing, spraying each other with the hoses of their trunks or rolling like wrestlers in the mud to cool their hot skin.

I waited for my father to pass the big tree where Nevvie and Gideon would set dinner for the animals—cubes of hay and Blue Hubbard squash and entire watermelons. Enough to feed a small family, or a single elephant. As soon as he was in its shadow, I scrambled up from the bank where I’d been wallowing and ran forward.

It wasn’t easy. My clothes were caked with dirt; my hair was knotted in a rope down my back. My pink sneakers had been sucked into the muck of the pond. But I knew I was going to win, and a giggle slipped from my lips, like the squeal of helium from the neck of a balloon.

It was all that my father needed. Hearing me, he spun and raced toward me, hoping to cut me off before I could flatten my muddy handprints against the corrugated metal wall of that barn.

Maybe he would have reached me, too, if Maura hadn’t thundered from the tree cover, trumpeting so loudly that I froze. She swung her trunk and knocked my father across his face. He fell to the ground, clutching his right eye, which swelled within seconds. She danced nervously between us, so that my father had to roll out of the way or risk being crushed.

“Maura,” he panted. “It’s all right. Easy, girl—”

The elephant bellowed again, an air horn that left my ears ringing.

“Jenna,” my father said quietly, “don’t move.” And under his breath: “Who the hell let that elephant out of the barn?”

I started crying. I didn’t know if I was scared for me or for my father. But in all the times my mother and I had observed Maura, I’d never seen her act violent.

Suddenly the door of the barn slid open on its thick cable track, and my mother was standing in the massive doorframe. She took one look at my father, Maura, and me. “What did you do to her?” she asked him.