Leaving Time: A Novel (14 page)

It’s possible that Alice knew her marriage was a mess, that it was only a matter of time before she screwed up her kid, too. Maybe, like me, she cut bait before her life got even worse.

I spear a hand through my hair. “Look, no one wants to hear that maybe she’s the reason her mother flew the coop. But my advice to you is to put this behind you. File it away in the drawer that’s saved for all the other crap that isn’t fair, like how the Kardashians are famous and how good-looking people get served faster at restaurants and how a kid who can’t skate to save his life winds up on the varsity hockey team because his dad is the coach.”

Jenna nods but says, “What if I told you I had proof that she didn’t leave of her own free will?”

You can give the detective shield back, but you can’t always get rid of the instincts. All the hair on my forearms stands up. “What do you mean?”

The kid reaches into her backpack and pulls out a wallet. A muddy, faded, cracked leather wallet that she hands to me. “I hired a psychic, and we found this.”

“You’ve gotta be kidding,” I say, my hangover roaring back full force. “A psychic?”

“Well, before you say she’s a hack—she found something that
your
whole team of crime scene investigators never managed to find.” She watches me open the clasp of the wallet and sort through the credit cards and driver’s license. “It was up in a tree, on the sanctuary property,” Jenna says. “Close to where my mom was found unconscious—”

“How do you know where she was found unconscious?” I ask sharply.

“Serenity told me. The psychic?”

“Oh, well, good, because I thought maybe you had a less reliable source.”

“Anyway,” she continues, ignoring me, “it was buried under a lot of stuff—birds had been making nests up in there for a while.” She takes it out of my hands and slips from the cracked plastic photo insert the only picture still even remotely visible. It’s bleached and faded and wrinkled, but even I can see the gummy mouth of a smiling baby.

“That’s me,” Jenna says. “If you were going to run away from a child forever … wouldn’t you at least keep a picture?”

“I stopped trying to figure out why humans do what they do a long time ago. As for the wallet—it doesn’t prove anything. She could have dropped it while she was running.”

“And it magically flew up fifteen feet into a tree?” Jenna shakes her head. “Who put it up there? And why?”

Immediately I think:
Gideon Cartwright
.

I don’t have any reason to suspect the man; I have no idea why his name pops into my head. As far as I know he went to Tennessee with those elephants and lived there happily ever after.

Then again, it was Gideon who Alice allegedly confided in about her failed marriage. And it was Gideon whose mother-in-law was killed.

Which brings me to my next thought.

What if the death of Nevvie Ruehl had not been an accident, as Donny Boylan had pushed me to believe? What if Alice had been the one to kill Nevvie, had stashed her own wallet in the tree to make it look like she was the victim of foul play—and then run away before she could be named as a suspect?

I look across my desk at Jenna.
Be careful what you wish for, sweetheart
.

If I still had a conscience, I might feel a twinge about agreeing to help a kid find her mother, considering that it might involve pinning a homicide on the woman. But then again, I can play my cards close to my chest, and let the girl believe this is just about finding a missing person, not a possible murderer. Besides, maybe I’m doing her a favor. I know what loose ends can do to a soul. The sooner she knows the truth, whatever it is, the sooner she can get on with her future.

I hold out my hand. “Ms. Metcalf,” I say. “You’ve got yourself a private eye.”

I have studied memory extensively, and the best analogy I’ve found to explain its mechanics is this: Think of the brain as the central office of your body. Every experience you have on any given day, then, is a folder being dropped on a desk to be filed away for future reference. The administrative assistant who comes in at night, while you’re asleep, to clear that logjam in her in-box is the part of the brain called the hippocampus.

The hippocampus takes all these folders and files them in places that make sense. This experience is a fight with your husband? Great, let’s put it with a few more of those from last year. This experience is a memory of a fireworks display? Cross-reference it with a Fourth of July party you attended a while back. She tries to place each memory where there are as many related incidents as possible, because that is what makes them easier to retrieve.

Sometimes, though, you simply cannot remember an experience. Let’s say you go to a baseball game, and someone tells you later that two rows behind you there was a woman sobbing in a yellow dress—but you have absolutely no recollection of her. There are only two scenarios in which this is possible. Either the incident was never dropped off for filing: You were focused instead on the batter and didn’t pay attention to the crying woman. Or the hippocampus screwed up and coded that memory in a place it should not be: That
sad woman gets linked to your nursery school teacher, who also used to wear a yellow dress, which is a place you’d never find it.

You know how sometimes you have a dream about someone from your past who you barely remember and whose name you couldn’t recall if your life depended on it? It means that you accessed that path serendipitously, and found a bit of buried treasure.

Things you do routinely—things that get consolidated repeatedly by that hippocampus—form nice big connections. Taxi drivers in London have been proven to have very large hippocampi, because they have to process so much spatial information. We don’t know, however, if they are born with naturally large hippocampi, or if the organ grows as it is put to the test, like a muscle being exercised.

There are also some people who cannot forget. People with PTSD may have smaller hippocampi than ordinary people. Some scientists believe that corticoids—stress hormones—can atrophy the hippocampus and cause memory disruptions.

Elephants, on the other hand, have enlarged hippocampi. You hear, anecdotally, that an elephant never forgets, and I do believe this is true. Up in Kenya, at Amboseli, researchers have done playbacks of long-distance contact calls in an experiment that suggests adult female elephants can recognize more than a hundred individuals. When the calls were from a herd with which they had associated, the elephants being tested responded with their own contact calls. When the vocalizations were from an unfamiliar herd, they bunched and backed away.

There was one unusual response in this experiment. During its course, one of the older female elephants that had been recorded died. They played back her contact call three months after her death, and again at twenty-three months postmortem. In both instances, her family responded with their own contact calls and approached the speaker—which suggests not just processing or memory but abstract thought. Not only did the family of the lost elephant remember her voice, but for just a moment as they approached that speaker, I bet they hoped to find her.

As a female elephant gets older, her memory improves. After all,
her family relies on her for information—she is the walking archive that makes the decisions for the herd: Is it dangerous here? Where are we going to eat? Where are we going to drink? How are we going to find water? A matriarch might know migratory routes that have gone unused for the life span of the entire herd—including herself—yet somehow have been passed down and encoded into a recollection.

But my favorite story about elephant memory comes from Pilanesberg, where I did some of my doctoral work. In the nineties, to control the South African elephant population, there had been massive culling, in which park rangers shot adults within the herds and translocated the babies to places where there was a need for elephants. Unfortunately, the juveniles were traumatized and didn’t behave the way they were supposed to. In Pilanesberg, a group of translocated young elephants didn’t know how to function as a legitimate herd. They needed matriarchs, someone to guide them. And so an American trainer named Randall Moore brought to Pilanesberg two adult female elephants that, years ago, had been sent to the United States after being orphaned during a cull in the Kruger National Park.

The young elephants immediately took to Notch and Felicia—the names we gave these surrogate mothers. Two herds formed, and twelve years passed. And then, in a tragic accident, Felicia was bitten by a hippo. The bush vet needed to clean and dress the wound repeatedly while it healed, but he couldn’t anesthetize Felicia each time. You can only dart an elephant three times a month or the M99 drug builds up too much in its system. Felicia’s health was at risk, and if she died, her herd would find itself in jeopardy once again.

That’s when we thought about elephant memory.

The trainer who’d worked with these two females more than a decade ago had not seen them since they were released into the reserve. Randall was happy to come to Pilanesberg to help. We tracked the two herds, which at this point had merged because of the injury of the older female.

“There are my girls,” Randall said, delighted, as the jeep shuddered to a halt in front of the herd. “Owala,” he called. “Durga!”

To us, these elephants were Felicia and Notch. But both of the
stately ladies turned at the sound of Randall’s voice, and he did what
no one
did with the fragile, skittish Pilanesberg herd: He got out of the jeep and started walking toward them.

Now, look, I’ve worked in the wild with elephants for twelve years. There are some herds you can approach on foot, because they’re used to researchers and their vehicles and they trust us; and even so, it’s not something I would do without carefully thinking it through. But this was not a herd that was familiar with humans; this was not even a stable herd. In fact, the younger elephants immediately stampeded away from Randall, identifying him as one of those two-legged beasts that had killed their own mothers. The two matriarchs, however, came closer. Durga—Notch—approached Randall. She stuck her trunk out and gently snaked it around his arm. Then she glanced back at her nervous young adoptive charges, still snorting and huffing on the ridge of the hill. She turned to Randall again, trumpeted once, and ran off with her babies.

Randall let her go, then turned to the other matriarch and said softly, “Owala … kneel.”

The elephant we called Felicia walked forward, knelt down, and let Randall climb on her back. Although she’d had no direct contact with people in twelve years, she remembered not only this individual man as her trainer but all the commands he had taught her. Without being given any anesthetic, she allowed Randall to direct her to stay, lift her leg, turn—commands that made it possible for the bush vet to scrape away the pus from the infected area, clean the wound, and give her an injection of antibiotics.

Long after her infection healed, long after Randall had returned to training circus animals, Felicia went back to leading her patchwork family in Pilanesberg. To any researcher, to anyone at all, she was a wild elephant.

But somewhere, somehow, she remembered who she used to be, too.

There is another recollection I have of my mother that ties to a conversation scrawled in her journal. It’s a single handwritten page, scraps of dialogue that for some reason she didn’t ever want to forget. Maybe that’s why I remember it so clearly, too, why I can flesh out what she has written as if it is a movie playing out before me.

She is lying on the ground, her head in my father’s lap. They are talking as I yank the heads off wild daisies. I’m not paying attention, but part of my brain must be, recording everything, so that even now I can hear the gossip of mosquitoes and the words my parents toss back and forth. Their voices rise and fall and swoop like the tail of a kite.