Leaving Time(8)

She was not listed as deceased, but that doesn’t tell me enough. She could be alive, or she could be living under a different identity. She could be dead and unidentified, a Jane Doe.

She was not on Facebook or Twitter, or Classmates.com, or the alumni network of Vassar, her college. Then again, my mother was always so absorbed in her work and her elephants, I don’t imagine she would have had much time for those distractions.

There were 367 Alice Metcalfs in online phone directories. I called two or three a week, so my grandmother wouldn’t freak out when she saw the long-distance charges on the phone bill. I left a lot of messages. There was one very sweet old lady in Montana who wanted to pray for my mom, and another woman who worked as a producer at an L.A. news station who promised to bring the story to her boss as a human-interest piece, but none of the people I called were my mother.

The book had other suggestions, too: searching prison databases, trademark applications, even the genealogy records of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. When I tried those, I didn’t get any results. When I Googled “Alice Metcalf,” I got too many—more than 1.6 million. So I narrowed it down by searching for “Alice Kingston Metcalf Elephant Grief,” and got a listing of all her scholarly research, most of it done prior to 2004.

On the sixteenth page of the Google search, however, was an article in an online psychology blog about the grieving process of animals. Three paragraphs into it, Alice Metcalf was quoted as saying, “It’s egotistical to think that humans have a monopoly on grief. There is considerable evidence that elephants mourn the loss of those they love.” This was a tiny sound bite, unremarkable in many ways, something she’d said a hundred times before in other journals and scholarly papers.

But this blog entry was dated 2006.

Two years after she disappeared.

Although I’ve searched the Internet for a year, I have not found any other proof of my mother’s existence. I don’t know if the date on the online article was a typo, if they were quoting my mother from years earlier, or if my mother—apparently alive and well in 2006—is still alive and well.

I just know I found it, and that’s a start.

• • •

In the spirit of leaving no stone unturned, I haven’t limited my search to the suggestions in So You Want to Be a PI? I posted on missing persons Listservs. I once volunteered at a carnival to be a hypnotist’s subject in front of a crowd of people eating corn dogs and blooming onions, hoping he’d release the memories jammed inside me, but all he told me was that, in a past life, I was a scullery maid at a duke’s palace. I went to a free seminar on dream lucidity at the library, figuring I could transfer some of those skills to my stubborn locked mind, yet it turned out to be all about journaling and not much else.

Today, for the first time, I’m going to a psychic.

There are a few reasons I haven’t been before. First, I didn’t have enough money. Second, I didn’t have any idea where to find a reputable one. Third, it wasn’t very scientific, and if my mother, in absentia, had taught me anything, it was to believe cold, hard facts and data. But then two days ago, when I was restacking my mother’s notebooks, a bookmark fell out of one.

It wasn’t a bookmark, really. It was a dollar, origami-folded in the shape of an elephant.

All of a sudden, I could remember my mother with her hands flying over a bill, creasing and folding, flipping and reversing, until I stopped my toddler crying and stared, riveted, by the tiny toy she had made me.

I had touched the little elephant as if I expected it to disappear in a puff of smoke. And then my eye fell on the open page of the journal, a paragraph that suddenly stuck out like it was written in neon:

I always get the funniest expressions from colleagues when I tell them that the best scientists understand that 2–3 percent of whatever it is they are studying is simply not quantifiable—it may be magic or aliens or random variance, none of which can be truly ruled out. If we are to be honest as scientists … we must admit there may be a few things that we are not supposed to know.



I took that as a sign.

Everyone else on the planet would rather look at a folded masterpiece than the original flat piece of paper, but not me. Me, I had to start from the beginning. So I spent hours gingerly unfolding my mother’s handiwork, pretending I could still feel the heat of her fingertips on the bill. I went step by step, as if I were performing surgery, until I could refold the dollar the way she had; until I had a small herd of six new tiny green elephants marching across my desk. I kept testing myself all day, too, to make sure I had not forgotten, and every time I succeeded I flushed with pride. I fell asleep that night picturing a dramatic, movie-of-the-week moment when I finally found my missing mother and she didn’t know it was me, until I fashioned a dollar bill into an elephant in front of her eyes. And then she hugged me. And did not let go.