Leaving Time(91)

Maybe I was overreacting. Maybe Thomas was just trying to do what he’d said: save his business. I turned, feeling along the wall until I could locate the light switch. The room flooded, so bright that for a moment I couldn’t see.

The space was empty. There was no furniture, no boxes, no tools, not even a stick of wood. The walls had been painted a blinding white, along with the ceiling and the floor. But scrawled on every inch were letters and numbers, written over and over in a looping code.

C14H19NO4C18H16N6S2C16H21NO2C3H6N2O2C189H285N55O57S.

It was like walking into a church and finding occult symbols written in blood on the walls. My breath caught in my throat. The room was closing in on me, the numbers shimmering and blending into each other. I realized, as I sank down onto the floor, this was because I was crying.

Thomas was sick.

Thomas needed help.

And although I was not a psychiatrist, although I didn’t have experience with any of this, it did not look like depression to me.

It just looked … crazy.

I stood up and backed out of the room, keeping the door unlocked. I didn’t have much time. But instead of going to our cottage, I went to the one shared by Gideon and Grace and knocked on the door. Grace answered wearing a man’s T-shirt, her hair tousled. “Alice?” she said. “What’s wrong?”

My husband is mentally ill. This sanctuary is dying. Maura lost her calf.

You pick.

“Is Gideon here?” I asked, when I knew that he was. Not everyone had a husband who sneaked off in the middle of the night to write gibberish on the ceiling and floor and walls of an empty room.

He came to the door in a pair of shorts, his torso bare, a shirt in hand. “I need your help,” I said.

“One of the elephants? Is something wrong?”

I didn’t answer, just turned on my heel and started to walk toward the African barn again. Gideon fell into step beside me, pulling the T-shirt over his head. “Which girl is it?”

“The elephants are fine,” I said, my voice shaking. We had reached the base of the spiral staircase. “I need you to do something, and I need you to not ask me any questions. Can you handle that?”

Gideon took one look at my face and nodded.

I climbed as if I were headed to my own execution. In retrospect, maybe I was. Maybe this was the first step to a long and fatal fall. I opened the door so that Gideon could see the interior.

“Holy shit,” he breathed. “What is this?”

“I don’t know. But you have to paint over it before morning.” Just like that, the threads of self-restraint snapped, and I doubled over, unable to breathe, unable to stem the tears anymore. Gideon immediately reached for me, but I backed away. “Hurry,” I choked out, and I ran down the stairs, back to my cottage, where I found Thomas just opening the door of the bathroom, a cloud of steam haloing his body.

“Did I wake you?” he asked, and he smiled, that crooked smile that had made me hang on his words in Africa, that I saw whenever I closed my eyes.

If I had any chance of saving Thomas from himself, then I had to make him believe I wasn’t the enemy. I had to make him believe that I believed in him. So I pasted what I hoped was a similar smile on my face. “I thought I heard Jenna cry.”

“Is she all right?”

“Fast asleep,” I told Thomas, swallowing around the wishbone of truth caught in my throat. “It must have been a nightmare.”


I had lied to Gideon when he asked what was written on the wall. I did know.

It wasn’t a random string of letters and numbers. It was chemical formulas for drugs: anisomycin, U0126, propanolol, D-cycloserine, and neuropeptide Y. I had written about them in an earlier paper, when I was trying to find links between elephant memory and cognition. These were compounds that—if given quickly after a trauma—interacted with the amygdala to keep a memory from being coded as painful or upsetting. Using rats, scientists had successfully been able to eliminate the stress and fear caused by certain memories.

You can imagine the implications for that—and recently, some medical professionals had. Controversies had sprung up around hospitals that wanted to administer drugs like this to rape victims. Beyond the practical issue of whether or not the blocked memory actually would stay blocked forever, there was a moral issue: Could a traumatized victim actually give permission to be given the drug, if by definition she was traumatized and unable to think clearly?

What had Thomas been doing with my paper, and how did it tie in to plans to raise money for the sanctuary? But then, maybe it didn’t. If Thomas truly had snapped, he might see relevance in the clues of a crossword puzzle; he might see meaning in the weatherman’s forecast. He would be constructing a reality full of causal links that were, to the rest of us, unrelated.

It had been a long time, but the conclusion of my paper was that there was a reason the brain had evolved in a way that allowed a memory to be red-flagged. If memories protected us from future dangerous situations, was it in our best interests to chemically forget them?

Would I ever unsee that room, looped with the graffiti of chemical formulas? No, not even after Gideon had painted it white again. And maybe that was for the best, because it reminded me that the man I thought I had fallen in love with was not the one who came into the kitchen this morning, whistling.

I had plans. I wanted to get Thomas help. But no sooner had he left for the observation deck than Nevvie showed up with Grace. “I need your help moving Hester,” Nevvie said, and I remembered that I’d promised her we could try to put the two African elephants together today.