Leaving Time(10)

“I’m not selling Girl Scout cookies,” I tell her. “I’m here for a reading.”

That stops her in her tracks. “I don’t do kids.”

Don’t or won’t? “I’m older than I look.” This is a fact. Everyone assumes I’m still in fifth grade, instead of eighth.

The woman who was inside having a reading suddenly is framed in the doorway, too. “Serenity? Are you all right?”

Serenity stumbles, tripping over the frame of my bike. “I’m fine.” She smiles tightly at me. “I can’t help you.”

“I beg your pardon?” the client says.

“Not you, Mrs. Langham,” Serenity answers, and then she mutters to me: “If you don’t leave right now, I’ll call the cops and press charges.”

Maybe Mrs. Langham doesn’t want a psychic who’s mean to kids; maybe she just doesn’t want to be around when the police come. For whatever reason, she looks at Serenity as if she is about to say something, but then edges past us both and bolts down the flight of stairs.

“Oh great,” Serenity mutters. “Now you owe me for a priceless heirloom and the ten bucks I just lost.”

“I’ll pay double,” I blurt out. I have sixty-eight dollars. It’s every penny I’ve made this year from babysitting, and I’m saving it for a private eye. I’m not convinced Serenity is the real deal. But I’d be willing to part with twenty dollars to find out.

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.