Leaving Time(81)

I felt Gideon’s hand on my back. It was partly comfort, partly reverence. “Breathe,” he instructed.


After thirty-six hours, the vultures came. They circled overhead like witches on their brooms. Every time they swooped, Maura would flap her ears and bellow, scaring them off. That night, it was the fisher cats. Their eyes flashed neon green as they crept closer to the calf’s body. Maura, coming out of her trance as if a switch had been flipped, ran at them with her tusks to the ground.

Thomas had given up asking me to come home. Everyone had given up asking me. I would not leave until Maura was ready to leave. I would be her herd, and remind her that she still had to live, even if her calf couldn’t.

The irony did not escape me: I was playing the role of the elephant, while Maura was acting rather human by refusing to stop grieving her dead son. One of the most amazing things about elephants mourning in the wild is their ability to grieve hard, but then truly, unequivocally, let go. Humans can’t seem to do that. I’ve always thought it’s because of religion. We expect to see our loved ones again in the next life, whatever that might be. Elephants don’t have that hope, only the memories of this life. Maybe that’s why it is easier for them to move on.

Seventy-two hours postdelivery, I tried to imitate the “let’s go” rumble I’d heard a thousand times in the wild and to point myself in that direction, like an elephant would. Maura ignored me. By now, I could barely stand, and my vision was blurred. I hallucinated a bull elephant breaking through the fence, only to realize that it was an ATV approaching. On it rode Nevvie and Gideon. Nevvie looked at me and shook her head. “You’re right, she’s a mess,” Nevvie said to Gideon. And then to me: “You’re going back home. Your girl needs you. If you don’t want to leave Maura alone, I’ll stay with her.”

Because Gideon didn’t trust me to hang on to him without falling asleep, I did not climb behind him on the ATV. I sat in the circle of his arms, the way a child might have done, and nodded off until he parked in front of our cottage. Embarrassed, I leaped off the vehicle, thanked him quickly, and walked inside.

To my surprise, Grace was asleep on the couch beside Jenna’s crib—which was in the middle of the living room, since we didn’t have space for a nursery. I woke her and told her to go home with Gideon, and then I went down the hall to Thomas’s office.

Like me, he was wearing the clothes he’d been wearing three days ago. He was bent over a ledger, so engrossed in what he was studying that he didn’t notice I was there. A bottle of prescription medicine was spilled on its side on the desk, and a depleted bottle of whiskey sat sentinel beside him. I thought he might have fallen asleep working, but when I got closer I saw that his eyes were wide open, glassy, sightless.

“Thomas,” I said softly, “let’s go to sleep.”

“Can’t you see I’m busy?” he said, so loud that, in the other room, the baby started to cry. “Shut the f*ck up!” he yelled, and he lifted his book and threw it at the wall behind me. I ducked, then bent down to retrieve it. The pages fell open before me.

Whatever had engrossed Thomas so deeply … it wasn’t this book. This was an empty journal, one blank page following the next.

I understood now why Grace had not felt comfortable leaving the baby alone with him.

It was not until after we’d had our wedding ceremony in the Boone Town Hall that I found bottles of pills, lined up like foot soldiers in Thomas’s dresser. Depression, he’d told me when I asked. After his father—his last surviving parent—had died, he could not muster the strength to get out of bed. I had nodded, trying to be compassionate. I was less unnerved by the news of his clinical despair than I was about the fact that I had entered into marriage with someone so quickly I did not even know his parents were both deceased.

Thomas hadn’t had another depressive episode since then that he’d told me about, but to be honest, I hadn’t asked, either. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer.

Shaking, I backed out of the room and closed the door. I picked up Jenna, who quieted immediately, and carried her to the bed I shared with a stranger, who happened to be the father of my child. Against all odds, I fell immediately into a deep, velvet sleep, my daughter’s tiny hand caught like a fallen star in my own.


When I woke up, the sun was a scalpel, and a fly was buzzing in my ear. I brushed at my temple, willing it to go away, only to realize it wasn’t a fly, and I couldn’t get rid of it. It was the distant sound of construction equipment, the backhoe we used to do landscaping work in the sanctuary.

“Thomas,” I called, but he didn’t answer. I scooped up Jenna, who was awake and smiling now, and carried her into his office. Thomas was at his desk, his face pressed to the blotter, completely unconscious. I watched his back rise and fall twice to make sure he was alive, then bundled Jenna into a sling on my back, the way I had learned from the African women who cooked at the camp in the reserve. I left the cottage, climbed on an ATV, and headed toward the northern edge of the sanctuary, where I had left Maura last night.

The first thing I noticed was the hot wire. Maura paced back and forth in front of it, trumpeting and raging, jerking her head and tusking at the ground, coming as close to that wire as she could without it shocking her. Through all of these aggressive gestures, she never took her eye off her calf.