Leaving Time(19)

Today, though, when I fall asleep, my mind is a kaleidoscope of color. I see a flag, whipping across my field of vision, but then realize it’s not a flag—it’s a blue scarf, wound around the neck of a woman whose face I can’t see. She is lying on her back near a sugar maple, immobile, being trampled by an elephant. At second glance I realize maybe she isn’t being trampled; the elephant is going out of its way to not step on her, lifting one of its back feet and moving it over the woman’s body without touching it. As the elephant reaches out its trunk and tugs at the scarf, the woman doesn’t move. The elephant’s trunk strokes her cheek, her throat, her forehead, before slipping the scarf free and lifting it, so that the wind carries it off like a rumor.

The elephant reaches down for something leather-bound I cannot quite make out, which is tucked beneath the woman’s hip—a book? An ID badge holder? I’m amazed at the dexterity the animal has, flipping it open. Then it places its trunk on the woman’s chest again, almost like a stethoscope, before slipping silently into the forest.

I wake up with a start, disoriented and surprised to be thinking of elephants, wondering at the storm that still seems to be filling my head. But it’s not thunder, it’s someone banging on the front door.

I already know who it’s going to be as I get up to open it.

“Before you freak out, I’m not here to try to convince you to find my mother,” Jenna Metcalf announces, pushing past me into my apartment. “It’s just that I left something behind. Something really important …”

I close the front door, rolling my eyes when I see that ridiculous bicycle parked in my foyer again. Jenna starts looking around the space where we had been sitting a few hours ago, ducking beneath the coffee table and poking around under the chairs.

“If I’d found something I would have contacted you—”

“I doubt it,” she says. She starts opening up drawers where I keep my stamps, my secret stash of Oreos, and my take-out menus.

“Do you mind?” I say.

But Jenna is ignoring me, her hand stuck between the cushions of the couch. “I knew it was here,” she says with obvious relief, and like floss, she pulls out the blue scarf from my dream and winds it around her neck.

Seeing it, three-dimensional and close enough to touch, makes me feel a little less crazy—I had only been incorporating a scarf this kid had been wearing into my subconscious. But there’s other information in that dream that makes no sense: the onion-skin wrinkles of an elephant’s hide, the ballet of its trunk. Plus something else that I had not realized until this moment: The elephant had been checking to see if the woman was inhaling and exhaling. The animal had left—not because the woman had stopped breathing but because she still was.

I don’t know how I know this, I just do.

My whole life, this is how I’ve defined the paranormal: can’t understand it, can’t explain it, can’t deny it.

You cannot be a born psychic and not believe in the power of signs. Sometimes it’s the traffic that makes you miss your flight, which winds up crashing into the Atlantic. Sometimes it’s the single rose that blooms in a garden full of weeds. Or sometimes it’s the girl you dismissed, who haunts your sleep.

“Sorry I bothered you,” Jenna says. “Or whatever.”

She is already halfway out the door when I hear my voice calling her name. “Jenna. This is probably crazy. But,” I say, “was your mother in the circus or something? A zookeeper? I … I don’t know why, but there’s something important about elephants?”

I haven’t had a true psychic thought in seven years. Seven years. I tell myself this one is coincidence, luck, or the aftereffects of the burrito I had for lunch.

When she turns around, her face is washed with an expression that’s equal parts shock and wonder.

I know, in that moment, that she was meant to find me.

And that I am going to find her mother.





ALICE




There is no question that elephants understand death. They may not plan for it the way we do; they may not imagine elaborate afterlives like those in our religious doctrines. For them, grief is simpler, cleaner. It’s all about loss.

Elephants are not particularly interested in the bones of other dead animals, just other elephants. Even if elephants come across the body of another elephant that has been long dead, its remains picked apart by hyenas and its skeleton scattered, they bunch and get tense. They approach the carcass as a group, and caress the bones with what can only be described as reverence. They stroke the dead elephant, touching it all over with their trunks and their back feet. They will smell it. They might pick up a tusk or a bone and carry it for a while. They will place even the tiniest bit of ivory under their feet and gently rock back and forth.