Leaving Time(89)

“When?” I asked, dumbfounded.

She checked her computer. “Last Thursday,” she told me. “The same day he applied for a second mortgage.”

My face burned. I was Thomas’s wife. How could he make decisions like this without talking to me about them? We had seven elephants whose diet was going to be seriously depleted without this week’s produce delivery. We had three employees who expected to be paid on Friday. And as far as I could tell, we no longer had any money.

I didn’t go back to Gordon’s Wholesale. Instead, I drove home, snapping Jenna out of her car seat so fast that she started to cry. I burst through the door of the cottage, calling for Thomas, who didn’t answer. I found Grace cutting up squash in the Asian barn, and Nevvie pruning wild grapevines, but neither of them had seen Thomas.

By the time I walked back home, Gideon was waiting. “You know anything about a nursery shipment?” he asked.

“Nursery?” I repeated, thinking of babies. Of Maura.

“Yeah, like plants.”

“Don’t accept the delivery,” I said. “Stall them.” Just then Thomas walked past us, waving the truck through the gates.

I handed Gideon the baby and grabbed Thomas by the arm. “Do you have a minute?”

“Actually,” he said, “I don’t.”

“I think you do,” I countered, and I dragged him inside to his office, closing the door for privacy. “What’s on that truck?”

“Orchids,” Thomas said. “Can’t you picture it? A field of purple orchids stretching out to the Asian barn?” He grinned. “I dreamed about it.”

He’d bought a truckload of exotic flowers that we didn’t need, because of a dream? Orchids would not grow in this soil. And they were not cheap. That delivery was money thrown away.

“You bought flowers … when our credit card’s been shut off and our bank account has been drained?”

To my shock, Thomas’s face glowed. “I didn’t just buy flowers. I invested in the future. I don’t know why I haven’t thought of it before, Alice,” he said. “The storage space above the African barn? I’m going to make it an observation deck.” He was talking so fast that his words tangled, like yarn rolling out of his lap. “You can see everything from up there. The whole property. I feel like I’m king of the world when I look out the window. Imagine ten windows. A wall of glass. And big donors coming to watch the elephants from that deck. Or renting out the space for functions—”

It wasn’t a bad idea. But it was an ill-timed one. We didn’t have any extra funds to allocate to a renovation project. We barely had enough to cover operating expenses for the month. “Thomas. We can’t afford that.”

“We can if we don’t hire anyone to do the building.”

“Gideon doesn’t have time to—”

“Gideon?” He laughed. “I don’t need Gideon. I can do it myself.”

“How?” I asked. “You don’t know anything about construction.”

He turned on me, feral. “You don’t know anything about me.”

As I watched him walk out the office door, I thought that might just be true.


I told Gideon that there had been a mistake, that the orchids needed to be returned. I am still not sure how he managed this miracle, but he came back with the refunded money in hand, which went directly to Gordon’s Wholesale for our crates of cabbage and thick-necked squash and overripe melons. Thomas didn’t even seem to realize that his orchids were gone; he was too busy hammering and sawing in the old attic space above the African barn from dawn to dusk. And yet every time I asked to see his progress, he snapped at me.

Maybe, I thought scientifically, this was Thomas’s reaction to grief. Maybe he was throwing himself into a project so that he wouldn’t think about what we’d lost. To that end, I decided the best way to snap him out of his folly was to help him remember what he still had. So I cooked elaborate meals, even though I’d never really mastered more than macaroni and cheese. I packed picnics and brought Jenna to the African barn, and enticed Thomas to join us for lunch. One afternoon, I asked him about his project. “Let me peek,” I begged. “I won’t tell anyone anything until it’s done.”

But Thomas shook his head. “It’ll be worth the wait,” he promised.

“I could help you. I’m good at painting …”

“You’re good at a lot of things,” Thomas said, and he kissed me.

We had been having a lot of sex. After Jenna went to sleep, Thomas would come back from the African barn and shower, then slip into bed beside me. Our lovemaking was almost desperate—if I was trying to escape the memory of Maura’s calf, Thomas seemed to be trying to keep himself tethered to something. It was almost as if I didn’t matter, as if any body beneath him would have done the job—but I couldn’t place blame, since I was using Thomas, too, to forget. I’d fall asleep, exhausted, and in the middle of the night, when my hand inched across the sheets to find him, he would be gone again.

At first, on the picnic, I kissed him back. But then his hand slid under my shirt, fumbling with the clasp of my bra. “Thomas,” I whispered. “We’re in public.”

Not only were we sitting in the shadow of the African barn, where any of the employees might pass by, but Jenna was staring at us. She pulled herself to her feet and stumbled toward us, a tiny zombie.