Leaving Time(9)

Her eyes glint when she hears that. “For you,” she says, “I’ll make an age exception.” She opens the door wider, revealing a normal living room, with a couch and a coffee table and a television set. It looks like my grandmother’s house, which is a little disappointing. Nothing about this screams psychic. “You got a problem?” she asks.

“I guess I was kind of expecting a crystal ball and a beaded curtain.”

“You have to pay extra for those.”

I look at her, because I’m not sure if she’s kidding. She sits down heavily on the couch and gestures at a chair. “What’s your name?”

“Jenna Metcalf.”

“All right, Jenna,” she says and sighs. “Let’s get this over with.” She hands me a ledger and asks me to put down my name, address, and phone number.

“How come?”

“Just in case I need to communicate with you afterward. If a spirit has a message, or whatnot.”

I bet more likely it’s to send me emails advertising 20 percent off my next reading, but I take the leather-bound book and sign in. My palms are sweating. Now that the moment’s here, I’m having second thoughts. The worst-case scenario is that Serenity Jones turns out to be a hack, another dead end when it comes to the mystery of my mother.

No. The worst-case scenario is that Serenity Jones turns out to be a talented psychic, and I learn one of two things: that my mother willingly abandoned me, or that my mother’s dead.

She takes the tarot deck and begins to shuffle it. “What I’m about to tell you during this reading might not make sense right now. But remember the information, because one day, you might hear something and realize what the spirits were trying to tell you today.” She says this the same way flight attendants tell you how to buckle and release the latch on your seat belt. Then she hands the deck to me, to cut into three piles. “So what do you want to know? Who’s got a crush on you? If you’re going to get an A in English? Where you should apply to college?”

“I don’t care about any of that.” I hand the deck back, unbroken. “My mother disappeared ten years ago,” I say, “and I want you to help me find her.”


There is one passage in my mother’s field research journals that I know by heart. Sometimes, when I am bored in class, I even write it in my own notebook, trying to replicate the loops of her handwriting.

It’s from her time in Botswana, when she was a postdoc studying elephant grief in the Tuli Block, and she recorded the death of an elephant in the wild. This happened to be the calf of a fifteen-year-old female named Kagiso. Kagiso had given birth just after dawn, and the calf was either born dead or died very shortly afterward. This was not, according to my mother’s notes, unusual for an elephant having her first calf. What was strange was how Kagiso reacted.

TUESDAY

0945 Kagiso standing beside calf in broad sunlight, in open clearing. Strokes its head and lifts its trunk. No movement from calf since 0635.

1152 Kagiso threatens Aviwe and Cokisa when the other females come to investigate body of calf.

1515 Kagiso continues to stand over body. Touches calf with her trunk. Tries to lift it.



WEDNESDAY

0636 Worried about Kagiso, who has not been to watering hole.

1042 Kagiso kicks brush over body of calf. Breaks off branches to use as cover.

1546 Brutally hot. Kagiso goes to watering hole and returns to remain in vicinity of calf.



THURSDAY

0656 Three lionesses approach; begin to drag off calf’s carcass. Kagiso charges; they run east. Kagiso stands over body of calf, bellowing.

0820 Still bellowing.

1113 Kagiso remains standing over dead calf.

2102 Three lions feed on calf carcass. Kagiso nowhere in sight.



At the bottom of the page, my mother had written this:

Kagiso abandons body of her calf after keeping vigil for three days.

There is much documented research about how an elephant calf under the age of two will not survive if it’s orphaned.

There’s nothing written, yet, about what happens to the mother who loses her baby.



My mother did not know at the time she wrote this that she was already pregnant with me.


“I don’t do missing people,” Serenity says, in a voice that doesn’t allow even a sliver of but.

“You don’t do kids,” I say, ticking one of my fingers. “You don’t do missing people. What exactly do you do?”

She narrows her eyes. “You want energy alignment? No problem. Tarot? Step right up. Communicating with someone who’s passed? I’m your girl.” She leans forward, so I understand, in no uncertain terms, that I’ve hit a brick wall. “But I do not do missing people.”

“You’re a psychic.”

“Different psychics have different gifts,” she says. “Precognition, aura reading, channeling spirits, telepathy. Just because I’ve been given a taste doesn’t mean I get the whole smorgasbord.”

“She vanished ten years ago,” I continue, as if Serenity hasn’t spoken. I wonder if I should tell her about the trampling, or the fact that my mother was brought to the hospital, and decide not to. I don’t want to feed her the answers. “I was only three.”

“Most missing people disappear because they want to,” Serenity says.