Leaving Time(105)

“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.

I could have postponed it, but then Nevvie would have asked why. And I didn’t feel like talking about last night.

Grace held out her arms for Jenna, and I thought about our conversation yesterday. “Did Gideon—” I began.

“He finished,” she said, and that was all I needed to know.

I followed Nevvie out to the African enclosures, peeking at the upstairs level of the barn, with its sheet of plastic and the overpowering smell of fresh paint. Was Thomas in there, even now? Was he angry, to find his handiwork destroyed? Devastated? Indifferent?

Did he suspect me of doing it?

“Where are you today?” Nevvie asked. “I asked you a question.”

“Sorry. I didn’t sleep well last night.”

“Do you want to take down the fence or drive her forward?”

“I’ll get the gate,” I said.

We had built a hot-wire fence to separate Hester from Maura when we realized Maura was pregnant. To tell the truth, if either elephant had wanted to get to the other side, she could have easily torn it down. But these two had not been together long enough to bond before they were separated. They were acquaintances, not friends. They had no great affection for each other yet. Which is why I didn’t think Nevvie’s idea was going to work.

In Tswana, there is a saying: Go o ra motho, ga go lelwe. Where there is support, there is no grief. You see this in the wild, when elephants mourn the death of a herd member. After a while, a few elephants will peel off to go to a watering hole. Others will investigate the brush for sustenance. It comes down to one or two elephants left behind—usually the daughters or young sons of the fallen elephant—who are reluctant to resume their daily lives. But the herd always comes back for them. It may be en masse, it may be just an emissary or two. They vocalize with “let’s go” rumbles and angle their bodies to encourage the mourning elephants to join them. Eventually, they all do. But Hester was not Maura’s cousin or sister. She was just another elephant. Maura had no incentive to listen to her, no more than I might have followed a complete stranger who walked up to me and suggested we go to lunch.