Leaving Time(121)

All of a sudden, my body is infused with light. She wanted me; she wanted me; she wanted me. But somewhere between plotting her future and executing it, things had gone horribly wrong for my mother. Gideon, who was supposed to be the key to the lock, the antidote that would reveal the secret message, is just as clueless as I am. “Weren’t you part of that plan?”

He looks at me, trying to gauge how much I know about his relationship with my mother. “I thought I was, but she never tried to contact me. She disappeared. Turned out, I was a means to an end,” Gideon admits. “She loved me. But she loved you so much more.”

I have forgotten where I am until that moment, when the elephant in front of us lifts its trunk and trumpets. The sun is beating down on my scalp. I am dizzy, like I’ve been drifting in the ocean for days and just sent off my last flare, only to realize that the rescue boat I was so sure I saw was a trick of the light. The elephant, with its fancy plated tusks, makes me think of a merry-go-round horse I had been scared of as a child. I don’t even know when or where my parents might have taken me to a carnival, but those terrifying wooden stallions, with their frozen manes and their gnashing teeth, had made me cry.

I feel like doing that now, too.

Gideon keeps staring at me, and it’s weird, like he is trying to see underneath my skin or riffle through the folds of my brain. “I think there’s someone you should meet,” he says, and he starts walking the fence line.

Maybe this has been a test. Maybe he needed to see that I was truly devastated before he would take me to my mother. I don’t let myself hope, but as I follow him I move faster and faster. What if, what if, what if.

We walk for what feels like thirty miles in the ridiculous heat. My shirt is soaked through with sweat by the time we climb the hill and I see, at its crest, another elephant. He doesn’t have to tell me it’s Maura. When she places her trunk delicately along the top edge of the fencing, the fingers opening and closing gently like the head of a rose, I know she remembers me the same way I remember her—at some internal, visceral level.

My mother is really, truly not here.

The elephant’s eyes are dark and hooded, her ears translucent in the sun, so that I can see the highway maps of veins running through them. Heat radiates from her skin. She looks leathery, primitive, cretaceous. The accordion folds of her trunk roll upward like a wave to reach over the fence toward me. She blows in my face, and it smells like summer and straw.

“This is why I stayed,” Gideon says. “I thought one day Alice would come to check on Maura.” The elephant reaches out and curls her trunk around his forearm. “She had a really hard time, when she first got here. Wouldn’t leave the barn. She stayed in her stall, her face pressed into the corner.”

I thought of the long entries in my mother’s journals. “You think she felt guilty about the trampling?”

“Maybe,” Gideon says. “Maybe it was fear of punishment. Or maybe she missed your mother, too.”

The elephant rumbles, like a car running its engine. The air around me vibrates.

Maura picks up a pine log that is lying on its side. She scrapes her tusk along the edge of it, then lifts it with her trunk and presses it against the heavy steel fence. She scratches at the bark again, dropping the tree and rolling it beneath her foot. “What is she doing?”

“Playing. We cut down trees for her, so that she can strip off the bark.”

After about ten minutes, Maura lifts the log as if it is a toothpick and raises it as high as the fence. “Jenna,” Gideon cries. “Move!”

He shoves me, landing on top of me, a few feet away from where the log has crashed down, exactly in the spot where I was standing.

His hands are warm on my shoulders. “You all right?” he asks, helping me to my feet, and then he smiles. “The last time I held you, you were only two feet tall.”

But I pull away from him to crouch down and stare at this gift I’ve been given. It’s about three feet long by ten inches wide, a hefty club. Maura’s tusks have created patterns—lines that cross and grooves that intersect without rhyme or reason.

Unless, that is, you’re looking carefully.

With my finger I trace the lines.

With a little imagination, I can make out a U and an S. That knot waves the wood grain like a W. On the other side of the log, a semicircle is caught in between two long scrapes: I-D-I.

Sweetheart, in Xhosa.

Gideon may not think my mother ever came back, but I’m beginning to believe she’s all around me.

Just then, my stomach grumbles so loud I sound like Maura. “You’re starving,” Gideon says.