Leaving Time(93)

“It is if you can go back in time.”

“What?”

He rolled his eyes. “I’m not building a TARDIS, a time machine,” Thomas said. “That would be insane.”

“Insane,” I repeated, the word breaking on the jetty of a sob.

“It’s not literal bending of the fourth dimension. But you can alter perception for an individual, so that time is effectively reversed. You take them back to the stress, through an altered consciousness, and have them reexperience the emotional trauma long enough for the drug to do its job. And here’s the part that’s a surprise for you. Maura, she’s going to be the subject.”

At the sound of the elephant’s name, my gaze snapped to his. “You aren’t touching Maura.”

“Not even if I can fix her? If I can make her forget her calf’s death?”

I shook my head. “It doesn’t work that way, Thomas—”

“But what if it did? What if there were implications for humans? Imagine the work that could be done with veterans who suffer from PTSD. Imagine if the sanctuary cemented its name as a critical research facility. We could get seed money from the Center for Neural Science at NYU. And if they agree to partner with me, the media attention could bring in investors to offset the loss of revenue the calf had been projected to bring in. I could win a Nobel.”

I swallowed. “What makes you think you can regress a mind?”

“I was told I could.”

“By whom?”

He reached into his back pocket and took out a piece of paper with the letterhead of the sanctuary at the top. Written on it was a phone number I recognized. I had called it last week, when my credit card was declined at Gordon’s.

Welcome to Citibank MasterCard.

Beneath the customer service hotline number was a list of anagrams for the words Account Balance:

Cabal cannot cue; banal ceca count, accentual bacon, cabala once cunt, canal beacon cut, cab unclean coat, lacuna ant bocce, nebula coca cant, a cab nuance clot, a cab cannot clue, a cable can count, a conceal can but, cabal can’t cue on, anal acne cub cot, ban ocean lac cut, cabal act once nu, actual can be con.

The last words were circled so deeply that the paper had begun to disintegrate. “You see? It’s in code. Actual can be con.” Thomas’s eyes burned into mine as if he were explaining the meaning of life. “What you see is not what you believe.”

I stepped toward him, until we were standing only inches apart. “Thomas,” I whispered, holding my palm up to his cheek. “Baby. You’re sick.”

He grasped my hand, a lifeline. Until then I hadn’t realized how hard I was trembling. “Damn right I’m sick,” he muttered, squeezing so hard that I twisted in pain. “I’m sick of you doubting me.” He leaned so close that I could see the ring of orange around his pupils, and the pulse in his temple. “I am doing this for you,” he said, biting off each word, spitting them in my face.

“I’m doing this for you, too,” I cried, and I ran out of the airless room and down the spiral stairs.


Dartmouth College was sixty-five miles south. They had a state-of the-art hospital there. And it happened to have the closest inpatient psychiatric facility to Boone. I don’t know what made the psychiatrist agree to see me, considering I did not have an appointment and there was a waiting room full of people with equally pressing issues. All I could think, as I clutched Jenna against me and sat across from Dr. Thibodeau, was that the receptionist must have taken one look at me and thought I was feeding her a line. Husband, my ass, she probably thought, staring at my wrinkled uniform, my unwashed hair, my crying baby. She’s the one who’s in crisis.

I had spent a half hour telling the doctor what I knew of Thomas’s history, and what I had seen last night. “I think the pressure’s broken him,” I said. Out loud, the words swelled like garish balloons. They took up all the space in the room.

“It’s possible that what you’re describing are symptoms of mania,” the doctor said. “It’s part of bipolar illness—which we used to call manic-depressive disorder.” He smiled at me. “Being bipolar is like being forced to take LSD. It means your sensations and emotions and creativity are at their peak, but also that the highs are higher and the lows are lower. You know what they say—if a manic does something bizarre and it turns out to be right, he’s brilliant. If it turns out to be wrong, he’s crazy.” Dr. Thibodeau smiled at Jenna, who was gumming one of his paperweights. “The good news is, if that’s what’s actually going on with your husband, it’s treatable. The medications we put people on to control these mood swings bring them back to center. When Thomas realizes that he’s living not a reality but just a manic episode, he’s going to swing in the other direction and get very depressed, because he isn’t the man he thought he was.”

That makes two of us, I thought.

“Has your husband harmed you?”

I thought of the moment he grabbed my hand, how I heard the crunch of bones and cried out. “No,” I said. I had betrayed Thomas enough; I would not do this, too.

“Do you think he might?”

I stared down at Jenna. “I don’t know.”

“He needs to be evaluated by a psychiatrist. If it is bipolar disorder, he may need time in the hospital to be stabilized.”