Leaving Time(108)

I came to the conclusion that the only way to get Thomas to voluntarily check in to a psychiatric ward was to make him see, simply and honestly, that this was best for him. That I still loved him. That we were in this together.

Fortified, I drove into the sanctuary, parked at the cottage, and carried a sleepy Jenna inside. I settled her on the couch and then went back to close the door I’d left ajar.

When Thomas grabbed me from behind, I screamed. “You scared me,” I said, turning in his arms, trying to read his expression.

“I thought you left me. I thought you took Jenna, and that you weren’t coming back.”

I ran my hand through his hair. “No,” I swore. “I would never.”

When he kissed me, it was with the desperation of a man who is trying to save himself. When he kissed me, I believed that Thomas was going to be fine. I believed that maybe I would never have to call Dr. Thibodeau, that this was the beginning of Thomas’s sway to center. I told myself that I could believe all of this, no matter how unfounded or unlikely, without realizing how much that made me like Thomas.

There is something else about memory, something Thomas hadn’t brought up. It’s not a video recording. It’s subjective. It’s a culturally relevant account of what happened. It doesn’t matter if it’s accurate; it matters if it’s important in some way to you. If it teaches you something you need to learn.


For a few months, it seemed as if life at the sanctuary was settling back to normal. Maura took extended walks away from her calf’s grave before returning to settle down there each night. Thomas began to work in his home office again, instead of constructing the observation deck. We left it locked and boarded up, like a ghost village. A grant he’d written for funding months ago came in unexpectedly, giving us a little breathing room for supplies and salaries.

I began to compare my notes about Maura and her grief to those about the other elephant mothers I’d seen lose calves. I spent hours walking with Jenna, at a toddler’s pace; I pointed to wildflowers by color, to teach her new words. Thomas and I argued about whether it was safe for her, in the enclosures. I loved those arguments, for their simplicity. Their sanity.

One lazy afternoon, when Grace was sitting for Jenna in the stagnant heat, I was doing a trunk wash in the Asian barn with Dionne. We trained the elephants in this behavior, so that we could test for TB: We’d fill a syringe with saline, flush it into a nostril, and get the elephant to lift her trunk as high as possible. Then we’d hold a gallonsize Ziploc bag over the trunk as she lowered it and the fluid drained out. The sample was collected in a container and sent off to the lab. Some elephants hated the process; Dionne was one of the easier ones. So perhaps my guard was down, and that’s why I didn’t notice Thomas suddenly striding into the barn. He grabbed me by the neck, dragging me away from the elephant so that she couldn’t reach us through the metal bars.

“Who’s Thibodeau?” Thomas yelled, smacking my head against the steel so hard that my vision blurred.

I honestly didn’t know what he was talking about.

“Thi … bo … deau,” Thomas repeated. “You must know. His card was in your wallet.” His hand was a vise around my throat. My lungs felt like they were on fire. I clawed at his fingers, at his wrists. He pressed a small white rectangle close to my face. “Ring a bell?”

I could barely see anything but stars at the edges of my vision. Still, somehow, I was able to make out the logo for the Dartmouth-Hitchcock hospital. The psychiatrist I’d seen, the one who had given me his card. “You want to lock me away,” Thomas accused. “You’re trying to steal my research. You’ve probably already called NYU to take credit, but the joke’s on you, Alice, because you don’t have the code to dial in to the colloquium’s private conference line, and not knowing that flags you as an impostor—”

Dionne was bellowing, crashing against the reinforced bars of the barn. I tried to explain; I tried to speak. Thomas slammed me harder against the steel, and my eyes rolled upward.

Suddenly there was air, and light, and I was falling to the cement floor, gasping as my chest filled with fire. I rolled to my side to see Gideon punching Thomas so hard that his head arced backward and blood bloomed from his nose and mouth.

I scrambled to my feet and ran out of the barn. I did not get very far before my legs gave out beneath me, but to my surprise I didn’t fall. I wound up caught in Gideon’s arms. He stared at my throat, touched a finger to the red necklace made by Thomas’s hands. He was so gentle, like silk over a scar, that something inside me snapped.