Leaving Time(120)

Free contact. So that’s what it’s called when you can go right into an enclosure, like my mother and our caregivers used to do. I wonder if the death at our sanctuary, and the debacle that followed, led to the change.

Only two other visitors are in the welcome center with me—both wearing fanny packs and Tevas with socks. “We don’t actually offer tours of the facility,” an employee explains. “Our whole philosophy is to let the elephants live out their lives being elephants, instead of being on display.” The tourists nod, because it’s the politically correct thing to do, but I can tell they’re disappointed.

Me, I’m on the prowl for a map. Downtown Hohenwald is no more than a single block, and there is no hint of the twenty-seven hundred acres of sweeping elephant vista anywhere nearby. Unless the animals are all shopping at the dollar store, I don’t know where they’re hiding out.

I slip out the front door before the tourists do and wander around back to the small employee parking lot. There are three cars and two pickup trucks. None have any logos on the doors for The Elephant Sanctuary; they could belong to just anyone. But I lean close to the passenger-side windows of each car and peek inside to see if there’s anything to identify the vehicles’ owners.

One belongs to a mom; there are sippy cups and Cheerios all over the floor.

Two are owned by dudes: fuzzy dice, hunting catalogs.

At the first pickup truck, though, I hit pay dirt. Flapping out of the driver’s visor is a sheaf of papers, with the logo of The Elephant Sanctuary at the top.

There’s a messy cloud of hay in the back of the pickup, which is a good thing, because it’s so damn hot that bare metal would have practically branded me. I stow away in the flatbed, which is quickly becoming my favored mode of transport.

Less than an hour later, I’m bouncing down a road to a high metal gate with an electronic opening mechanism. The driver—a woman—punches in a code so that the gate opens. We drive about a hundred feet before we hit a second gate, at which she does the same thing.

As she drives, I try to get the lay of the land. The sanctuary is enclosed by a normal chain-link fence, but the interior corral is made of steel pipes and cable. I can’t remember what our facility was like, but this one is pristine and orderly. Land stretches out forever—hills and forests, ponds and grasslands, punctuated by several big barns. Everything is so green it makes my eyes hurt.

When the truck pulls up to one of the barns, I flatten myself, hoping that I will not be seen as the driver gets out. I hear the door slam, and footsteps, and then the happy trumpet of an elephant as this caregiver walks into the barn.

I’m out of that truck like a rocket. I duck along the far wall of the barn, following the heavy cabled fence until I see my first elephant.

It’s African. I may not be an expert like my mom, but I know that much. I can’t tell if it’s a male or a female from this position, but it’s freaking huge. Although maybe that’s redundant, when you’re talking about elephants and you’re only separated by three feet and some steel.

Speaking of steel—there’s metal on the elephant’s tusks. Sort of like they were dipped in gold at the tips.

Suddenly the elephant shakes its head, flapping its ears and releasing a cloud of reddish dust between us. It’s loud and unexpected; I fall back, coughing.

“Who let you in?” a voice accuses.

I turn around to find a man towering over me. His hair is nearly shaved to his scalp; his skin is mahogany. His teeth are, by contrast, almost electroluminescent. I think he’s going to grab me by my collar and drag me physically out of the sanctuary, or call the guards or whoever else keeps trespassers out of this place, but instead, his eyes get wide and he stares at me as if I just apparated before him. “You look just like her,” he whispers.

I had not expected it to be so easy to find Gideon. But then again, maybe after traveling a thousand miles to get here, I deserved a cosmic break.

“I’m Jenna—”

“I know,” Gideon says, looking around me. “Where is she? Alice?”

Hope is a balloon, always just a breath away from being deflated. “I was hoping she was here.”

“You mean she didn’t come with you?” The disappointment on his face—well, it is like I am looking into a mirror.

“Then you don’t know where she is?” I say. My knees feel weak. I can’t believe I’ve come all this way, and have found him, and it’s all for nothing.

“I tried to cover for her, when the police came. I didn’t know what happened out there, but Nevvie was dead, and Alice was missing … so I told the cops I assumed she had taken you and run off,” he says. “That was her plan all along.”