Leaving Time(88)

She starts to close the door, but I wedge my foot inside it, digging in my purse for that ledger. It opens easily to the back page, where Jenna has written, in her loopy teenager handwriting, 145 Greenleaf Street, Boone.

“One forty-five Greenleaf Street?” I ask.

“You’ve got the right place,” she answers, “but there’s no one here by that name.”

She shuts the door in my face, and I stare down at the ledger in my hand. Stunned, I walk back to the car and slip inside, toss the ledger at Virgil. “She played me,” I tell him. “She gave me a fake address.”

“Why would she do that?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t want me to send junk mail.”

“Or maybe she didn’t trust you,” Virgil suggested. “She doesn’t trust either of us. And you know what that means.” He waits until I glance up at him. “She’s a step ahead of us.”

“What do you mean?”

“She’s smart enough to have figured out why her dad reacted the way he did. She must already know about her mother and Gideon; and she’s doing exactly what we should have done an hour ago.” He reaches over and turns the key in the ignition. “We’re going to Tennessee,” Virgil says, “because a hundred bucks says Jenna’s already there.”





ALICE




Dying of grief is the ultimate sacrifice, but it is not evolutionarily feasible. If grief were that overwhelming, a species would simply be erased. That’s not to say there haven’t been cases in the animal kingdom. I knew of a horse that had died suddenly, and its long-term stablemate followed shortly after. There was a pair of dolphins that had worked in tandem at a theme park; when the female passed away, the male swam in circles with his eyes closed for weeks.

After Maura’s baby died, her pain was written all over her face and in the way she moved her body gingerly, as if the friction of the air against it was excruciating. She isolated herself in the vicinity of the grave; she wouldn’t come into the barn at night. She didn’t have the solace of her family around her, to bring her back to the world of the living.

I was determined not to let her be a casualty of her own sorrow.

Gideon affixed to the fence a giant bristled brush that had been a gift from the public works department when it purchased a new street sweeper, an enrichment tool that Maura would have previously loved to rub up against. But Maura didn’t even glance in the direction of the hammering when he was installing it. Grace tried to cheer Maura up by giving her red grapes and watermelon, her favorite foods—but Maura stopped eating. The vacancy of her stare, the way she seemed to take up less material space than she had before—it made me think of Thomas, staring down at the blank book in his office three nights after the calf’s death. Physically present, but mentally somewhere else.

Nevvie thought we should let Hester into the enclosure to see if she could console Maura, but I didn’t think it was the right time yet. I had seen matriarchs charge elephants in their own herd—close relatives—if they got too close to a calf that was alive. Who knew what Maura, in her grief, would do to protect a calf that was dead? “Not yet,” I told Nevvie. “As soon as I see that she’s ready to move on.”

It was academically interesting, recording how a lone elephant would rebound from loss, without a herd to support her. It was also heartbreaking. I spent hours cataloging Maura’s behavior, because that was my job. I would take Jenna with me whenever Grace couldn’t keep an eye on her, because Thomas was so busy himself.

Whereas the rest of us were still moving in slow motion, trapped by the viscous sadness that surrounded Maura, Thomas had snapped back into a model of efficiency. He was so focused and energized that I wondered if I’d just hallucinated the image of him catatonic at his desk the night after the calf died. The money he’d been counting on from donors who were excited about a baby elephant’s arrival would no longer materialize, but he had a new idea to sustain funding, and that consumed him.

If I was going to be honest, I didn’t mind picking up the slack of running the sanctuary while Thomas was busy. Anything was better than the shock of seeing him the way he’d been—broken and unreachable. That Thomas—the one who had apparently existed before I knew him—was one I didn’t ever want to see again. I hoped that maybe I was the necessary ingredient in that equation, that my presence was enough to keep his depression from returning in the future. And because I was unwilling to be the trigger that might set Thomas off, I was willing to do whatever he wanted or needed. I was going to be his biggest cheerleader.

Two weeks after the calf died—which is how I’d started marking time—I drove to Gordon’s Wholesale to pick up our weekly order. But when I went to pay with our credit card, it was declined.

“Run it again,” I suggested, but it didn’t make a difference.

Embarrassed—it wasn’t a state secret that the sanctuary was always low on funding—I told Gordon I’d just drive to an ATM and pay him in cash.

When I tried, however, the machine wouldn’t spit out any money. ACCOUNT CLOSED, the screen read. I ducked inside the bank and asked to speak to a manager. Surely there was a mistake.

“Your husband withdrew the money in that account,” the woman told me.