Leaving Time(65)

She sighs. “Desmond and Lucinda, my spirit guides, said all the universe wants from us is two things: Don’t do any intentional harm to yourself or anyone else, and get happy. They told me humans make it more complicated than it needs to be. I thought for sure they were feeding me a line. I mean, there’s got to be more to it than that. But if there is, I guess I’m not supposed to know it yet.”

“What if the meaning of my life is to find out what happened to hers?” I ask. “What if that’s the only thing that will make me happy?”

“Are you so sure it will?”

Because I don’t want to answer, I turn on the radio. By now, we’re on the outskirts of town, anyway, and Serenity drops me off at the rack where I’ve locked up my bike. “You want dinner, Jenna? I make a mean Chinese take-out order.”

“Thanks but no thanks,” I say. “My grandmother’s expecting me.”

I wait for her to drive off, so she can’t see that I’m not going home.

It takes another half hour to bike to the sanctuary, and twenty minutes to hike through the uneven brush to the spot with the purple mushrooms. My cheekbone is still throbbing as I lie back on the lush grass and listen to the wind play through the branches overhead. It’s the hour that’s the seam between day and night.

Probably I have a concussion, because I fall asleep for a while. It’s dark when I wake up, and I don’t have a light on my bike, and I’ll probably be grounded for missing dinner. But it’s worth it, because I have been dreaming about my mother.

In my dream, I was really little, in nursery school. My mother had insisted that I go because it wasn’t normal for a three-year-old to be socialized only with adult animal behaviorists and a bevy of elephants. My class had taken a field trip to meet Maura; afterward, the other kids painted strangely shaped animals that the teachers enthused about no matter how biologically inaccurate they were: It’s so gray! How creative to make two trunks! Well done! My elephant paintings were not only precise but detailed—I put the notch in Maura’s ear, the same way my mother did when she sketched the elephant; I made the hair on her tail kinky, when every other kid in my class had completely overlooked its presence. I knew exactly how many toenails she had on each foot (three on the back foot, four on the front). My teachers, Miss Kate and Miss Harriet, said I was like a tiny little Audubon, although I had no idea what that meant at the time.

Other than that, I was a mystery to them: I didn’t watch television, so I had no idea who the Wiggles were. I couldn’t tell the Disney princesses apart. Most of the time the teachers took the quirks of my upbringing in stride—I mean, this was nursery school, not SAT prep. But one day, in preparation for the holidays, we were given sheets of fancy white paper and told to draw a picture of our family. We were then going to make a macaroni frame, spray it with gold paint, and put this inside as a gift.

Other kids started drawing right away. There were all sorts of families: Logan lived with his mom, alone. Yasmina had two dads. Sly had a baby brother, and then two older brothers, who had a mom that was different from his. There were various permutations of siblings, but it was clear that if there were extra people in the family, they were kids.

Me, I drew myself with five parents.

There was my father, with his glasses. My mother, with her flaming red ponytail. Gideon and Grace and Nevvie, all wearing khaki shorts and the red polo top that was the sanctuary uniform.

Miss Kate sat down next to me. “Who are all these people, Jenna? Are these your grandma and grandpa?”

“No,” I told her, pointing. “That’s my mommy and that’s my daddy.”

That led to my mother being pulled aside at pickup. “Dr. Metcalf,” Miss Harriet said, “Jenna seems to have a little trouble identifying her immediate family.”

She showed my mother the picture. “It looks completely accurate to me,” my mother replied. “All five adults take care of Jenna.”

“That isn’t the concern,” Miss Harriet said.

It was then that she pointed out the spider writing, my disastrously spelled attempts to label these people. There was MOM, holding one of my hands, and there was DAD, holding the other. Except DAD wasn’t the man I’d drawn with glasses. He was in a corner, nearly pushed off the page.

My happy little family unit was either wishful thinking or the uncanny observation of a three-year-old who saw more than anyone expected.

I’m going to find my mother—before Virgil can. Maybe I can save her from being arrested; maybe I can warn her. Maybe the two of us can run off together, this time. True, I’m going up against a private investigator who unravels mysteries for a living. But I know one thing he doesn’t.

My dream under the tree was what brought to the surface something I guess I’ve known all along. I know who gave my mother that necklace. I know why my parents were fighting back then. I know who, all those years ago, I wished was my dad.

Now I just have to find Gideon again.





PART II


Children are the anchors of a mother’s life.



—SOPHOCLES, Phaedra, fragment 612





ALICE




In the wild, we often didn’t realize an elephant was pregnant until she was about to deliver. The mammary glands would swell at about twenty-one months, but before that, short of doing a blood test or having witnessed a bull mating with a particular female nearly two years earlier, it was very hard to predict an impending birth.