Leaving Time(148)

Detective Mills took care of all the arrangements, and I flew in from Johannesburg. I watch Jenna’s coffin being lowered into the screaming mouth of the earth, and I think, This is still not my daughter.

After the brief interment, Detective Mills asks if he can get me something to eat. I shake my head. “I’m exhausted,” I say. “I’m going to get some rest.” But instead of heading back to the motel, I take the rental car to Hartwick House, where Thomas has lived for ten years now.

“I’m here to visit Thomas Metcalf,” I tell the front desk nurse.

“And you are?”

“His wife,” I say.

She looks at me, astonished.

“Is there a problem?” I ask.

“No.” She recovers. “It’s just that he rarely has visitors. He’s down the hall, third room on the left.”

There is a sticker on Thomas’s door, a smiley face. I push the door open to see a man sitting by the window, his hands curled around a book in his lap. At first I am sure there has been a mistake—this is not Thomas. Thomas doesn’t have white hair; Thomas isn’t hunched over, with narrow shoulders and a sunken chest. But then he turns around, and a smile transforms him, so that the features of the man I remember ripple just beneath this new surface.

“Alice,” he says. “Where on earth have you been?”

It is such a direct question, and such a ludicrous one given all that has passed, that I laugh a little. “Oh,” I say. “Here and there.”

“There’s so much to tell you. I don’t even know where to start.”

Before he can begin, however, the door opens again and an orderly walks in. “I hear you’ve got a visitor, Thomas. Would you like to go down to the community room?”

“Hello,” I say, introducing myself. “I’m Alice.”

“I told you she’d come,” Thomas adds, smug.

The orderly shakes his head. “I’ll be damned. I have heard a lot about you, ma’am.”

“I think Alice and I would prefer to talk in private,” Thomas says, and I feel a knot in the pit of my stomach. I had hoped that a decade might dull the sharp edges of the conversation we need to have, but I had been naïve.

“No problem,” the orderly says, winking at me as he backs out of the room.

This is the moment when Thomas will ask me what happened that night at the sanctuary. When we will pick up from the awful, electric spot where we left off. “Thomas,” I say, falling on my sword. “I am so, so sorry.”

“You should be,” he replies. “You’re second author on the paper. I know your work is important to you, and far be it from me to curb that, but you should understand better than anyone the need to be the first to publish before someone else steals your hypothesis.”

I blink at him. “What?”

He hands me the book he’s holding. “For God’s sake, be careful. There are spies all over the place.”

The book is by Dr. Seuss. Green Eggs and Ham.

“This is your article?” I ask.

“It’s encoded,” Thomas whispers.

I had come here hoping to find someone else who was a survivor, someone who might be able to take the worst night of my life and help me shoulder the memory. Instead, I found Thomas so trapped by the past that he can’t accept the future.

Maybe that is healthier.

“Do you know what Jenna did today?” Thomas says.

Tears spring to my eyes. “Tell me.”

“She took all the vegetables she doesn’t like to eat out of the refrigerator and said she was going to give them to the elephants. When I told her they were good for her, she said this was just an experiment and the elephants were her control group.” He grins at me. “If she’s this smart at three, what will she be like at twenty-three?”

There was a moment, before everything went wrong, before the sanctuary had failed and Thomas had gotten sick, when we had been happy together. He had held our newborn in his arms, speechless. He had loved me, and he had loved her.

“She’ll be amazing,” Thomas says, answering his own rhetorical question.

“Yes,” I say, my voice thick. “She will.”


At the motel, I take off my shoes and my jacket and pull the shades tight. I sit down on the swivel chair at the desk and stare into the mirror. This is not the face of someone at peace. In fact, I do not at all feel the way I thought I would if I ever received a call that my daughter had been found. This was supposed to be what I needed to stop straddling the distance between reality and what-if. But I still feel rooted. Stuck.

The blank face of the television mocks me. I do not want to turn it on. I don’t want to listen to newscasters telling me of some new horror in the world, of the limitless supply of tragedy.