Leaving Time(82)

Which was chained onto a large wooden pallet beside Nevvie—who was directing Gideon where to dig a grave.

I drove the ATV through the gate, past Maura, and skidded to a stop a foot away from Nevvie. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

She glanced at me, and at the baby on my back, and with one look let me know what she thought of my mothering skills. “What we always do when an elephant dies. The necropsy samples were already taken this morning by the vet.”

Blood roared in my ears. “You separated a grieving mother from her calf?”

“It’s been three days,” Nevvie said. “This is for her own good. I’ve been with mothers who see their calves suffer, and it breaks them. It happened to Wimpy, and it will happen again, if we don’t do something about it. Is that what you want for Maura?”

“What I want for Maura is for her to make the decision when it’s time to let go,” I shouted. “I thought that was the whole philosophy of this sanctuary.” I turned my face to Gideon, who had stopped digging with the construction equipment and was standing awkwardly to the side. “Did you even ask Thomas?”

“Yes,” Nevvie said, lifting her chin. “He said he trusted me to know what to do.”

“You don’t know anything about how a mother grieves for her calf,” I said. “This isn’t mercy. It’s cruelty.”

“What’s done is done,” Nevvie argued. “The sooner Maura doesn’t have to see that calf, the sooner she’ll forget what happened.”

“She will never forget what happened,” I promised. “And neither will I.”


Not much later, Thomas woke up subdued, his old self. He gave Nevvie a dressing-down for taking matters into her own hands, neatly erasing his own responsibility in the situation for giving her permission when he was not in a sound mental state to do so. He wept, apologizing to me, and to Jenna, for letting the demons in. Nevvie, miffed, disappeared for the rest of the afternoon. Gideon and I removed the straps and the chains from the calf’s body, although we did not attempt to slide him off the pallet. The moment I turned off the electricity on the hot wire, Maura tore it away as if it were made of straw and rushed toward her son. She stroked him with her trunk, backed up to him with her hind legs. She stood beside him for another forty-five minutes, and then slowly lumbered into the birch forest, away from the calf.

I waited ten minutes, listening for her return, but it didn’t happen. “Okay,” I said.

Gideon climbed onto the backhoe and bit into the earth beneath the oak tree where Maura liked to rest. I strapped the calf’s body onto the pallet again, so that he could be lowered into the grave when it was deep enough. I took a shovel Gideon had brought and began to cover the body with dirt, a tiny gesture to add to the fill that Gideon was scooping with the excavator.

By the time I patted down the overturned earth on top of the grave, rich as coffee grounds, my hair had fallen from its ponytail and perspiration ringed my underarms and soaked my back. I was sore and exhausted, and the emotion I’d pushed away for the past five hours suddenly rushed over me, knocking me off my feet. I fell to my knees, sobbing.

All of a sudden Gideon was there, his arms around me. He was a big man, taller and broader than Thomas; I leaned into him the way you press your cheek to solid ground after falling a great distance. “It’s okay,” he said, although it wasn’t. I couldn’t bring Maura’s baby back. “You were right. We never should have separated her from the calf.”

I pulled back. “Then why did you?”

He looked me in the eye. “Because sometimes when I think for myself, I get into trouble.”

I could feel his hands on my shoulders. I could smell the salt of his sweat. I looked at his skin, dark against mine.

“Thought you might need this,” Grace said. She was holding a jug of iced tea.

I did not know when Grace had come walking up; I did not know what she thought, to find her husband comforting me. It was nothing more than that, yet we still jumped apart, as if we had something to hide. I wiped my eyes with the hem of my shirt as Gideon reached out for the jug.

Even when Gideon left, his hand in Grace’s, I could feel the heat of his palms on me. It made me think of Maura standing over her calf, trying to be a haven when, clearly, it was already too late.





JENNA




When you’re a kid, most people actively go out of their way to not notice you. Businessmen and businesswomen don’t look because they’re wrapped up in their phone calls or texts or sending emails to their bosses. Mothers turn away because you’re a glimpse into the future, when their sweet little porker of a baby will become another antisocial teenager, plugged into music and incapable of holding a conversation beyond grunts. The only folks who actually look me in the eye are lonely old ladies or little kids who want attention. For this reason, it’s incredibly easy to hop on a Greyhound without ever buying a ticket, which is pretty awesome, because who has $190 lying around? I just hang out near the ragged edges of a family that can’t keep itself together—there’s a shrieking baby and a boy who’s about five with his thumb jammed in his mouth, and a teenager texting so fast that I think her Galaxy is going to burst into flames. When the boarding call to Boston is made, and the frazzled parents try to count the luggage and their offspring, I follow their older daughter onto the bus like I belong with them.