Leaving Time(104)

Grace shook her head. “I have PCOS,” she clarified. “It’s a hormone thing.”

“You could get a surrogate. You could adopt. Have you talked to Gideon about the alternatives?” She just stared at me, and I understood: Gideon didn’t know. This was the secret she had been keeping from him.

Suddenly Grace grabbed my arm, so tightly that it hurt. “You won’t tell?”

“No,” I promised.

She settled, picking up her knife again to start cutting. We worked in silence for a few moments, and then Grace spoke again. “It’s not that he doesn’t love you enough to tell you the truth,” she said. “It’s that he loves you too much to risk it.”


That night, after Thomas slipped into the cottage after midnight, I pretended to be asleep when he poked his head into the bedroom. I waited until I heard the shower running, and then I got out of bed and walked out of the cottage, careful not to wake Jenna. In the dark, as my eyes adjusted, I ran past Grace and Gideon’s cottage, where the lights were off. I thought of them twined together in bed, with an infinitesimal space between them at every point they touched.

The spiral staircase was painted black, and I banged my shin against it before I realized I had already reached the far edge of the African barn. Moving silently—I didn’t want to wake the elephants and have them send out an inadvertent alert—I crept up the stairs, biting my lip against the pain. At the top, the door was locked, but one master key opened everything at the sanctuary, so I knew I’d be able to get inside.

The first thing I noticed was that, as Thomas had said, the moonlit view was remarkable. Although Thomas hadn’t installed the plate-glass windows, he had cut out rough openings and covered them with a sheet of clear plastic. Through them, I could see every acre of the sanctuary, illuminated by the grace of the full moon. I could easily imagine a viewing platform, an observatory, a way for the public to see the amazing animals we sheltered without us having to disturb their natural habitat or make them part of a display, like they’d been in zoos and circuses.

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.