Leaving Time: A Novel (48 page)

“I’m
thirteen
,” I say.

“I’m Raoul.”

I duck my head and push past him, dragging my bike into the entryway to Serenity’s house. I lug it up the stairs and into her foyer again, careful not to upset the table this time. But before I can knock on the door softly—I mean, it’s 2:00
A.M.
—it opens.

“You couldn’t sleep, either, sugar?” Serenity says.

“How did you know I was here?”

“You don’t exactly float up the stairs like a fairy when you’re dragging that damn thing around.” She falls back so that I can step into her apartment. It looks the way I remember it from the first time I came here. When I still believed that finding my mother was what I wanted most in the world.

“I’m surprised your grandmother let you come here this late,” Serenity says.

“I didn’t give her a choice.” I sink down on the couch, and she sits beside me. “This so sucks,” I say.

She doesn’t pretend to misunderstand me. “Well, don’t jump to conclusions just yet. Virgil says—”

“Fuck Virgil,” I interrupt. “Whatever Virgil says won’t bring her back to life. Do the math. If you tell your husband you’re pregnant with another guy’s kid, he isn’t going to throw you a baby shower.”

I’ve tried, believe me, but I can’t summon up hate for my father—only pity, really, a dull ache. If my dad was the one who killed my mom, I don’t think he’ll wind up going to trial. He’s institutionalized already; no prison is going to be more punishing than the confines of his own mind. It just means exactly what my grandmother said—she’s the only family I really have left.

I know it’s my fault. I know I’m the one who asked Serenity to help me find my mother; who got Virgil on board. This is what curiosity gets you. You might live on top of the biggest toxic waste dump on the planet, but if you never dig, then all you ever know is that your grass is green and your garden is lush.

“People don’t realize how hard it is,” she says. “When my clients used to come to me, asking to talk to Uncle Sol or their beloved grandma, all they were focusing on was the hello, the chance to say what they didn’t say when the person was alive. But when you open a door, you have to close it behind you. You might say hello, but you also wind up saying good-bye.”

I face her. “I wasn’t asleep. When you and Virgil were talking, in the car? I heard everything you said.”

Serenity freezes. “Well, then,” she says. “I guess you know I’m a fraud.”

“You aren’t, though. You found that necklace. And the wallet.”

She shakes her head. “I just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”

I think about this for a moment. “But isn’t that what being psychic
is
?”

I can tell that she never thought about it that way. One man’s coincidence is another’s connection. Does it matter if it’s gut feeling, like Virgil says, or psychic intuition, if you still get what you’re searching for?

She pulls a blanket up from the floor to cover her feet, and casts it wide so it will cover me, too. “Maybe,” she concedes. “Still, it’s nothing like what it used to be. Other people’s thoughts—they just were suddenly
there
in my head. Sometimes the connection was crystal clear, and sometimes it was like being on a cell phone in the mountains, where you only catch every third word. But it was more than stumbling over something shiny in the grass.”

We are cuddled under a blanket that smells like Tide and Indian food, and rain is striking the windows from outside. I realize this is very close to the image I’d conjured earlier, of what my life would have been like if my mother had survived.

I glance at Serenity. “Do you miss it? Hearing from people who are gone?”

“Yes,” she admits.

I lean my head on her shoulder. “Me, too,” I say.

Gideon’s arms were the safest place in the world. When I was with him, I forgot: how Thomas’s highs and his lows scared the hell out of me; how every morning started with an argument and every night ended with my husband locked in his office with his secrets and the shadows of his mind. When I was with Gideon I could pretend that the three of us were the family I had hoped to be.

Then I found out we would be four.

“It’s going to be okay,” he’d promised when I told him the news, although I did not believe him. He couldn’t tell the future. He could just, I hoped, be mine.

“Don’t you see?” Gideon had said, lit from within. “We were meant to be together.”

Maybe we were, but what a price to pay. His marriage. Mine. Grace’s life.

Still, we dreamed out loud in Technicolor. I wanted to take Gideon back to Africa with me, so he could see these incredible animals before they had been broken by humans. Gideon wanted to move south, where he’d come from. I resurrected my dream of running away with Jenna, but this time, I imagined that he would come with us. We pretended to be racing forward, but we didn’t move an inch, because of the trapdoors that threatened to swallow us: He had to tell his mother-in-law; I had to tell my husband.

But we had a deadline, because it was getting very hard to hide the changes to my body.

One day, Gideon found me working at the Asian barn. “I told Nevvie about the baby,” he said.

I froze. “What did she say?”

“She told me I should have everything I deserve. Then she walked away from me.”

Just like that, this wasn’t a fantasy anymore. It was real, and it meant that if he had been brave enough to confront Nevvie, I had to be brave enough to confront Thomas.

I did not see Nevvie all day, or Gideon, either, for that matter. I tracked Thomas’s whereabouts and followed him around from enclosure to enclosure; I cooked him dinner. I asked him to help me do a foot soak on Lilly, when normally I would have asked Gideon or Nevvie for assistance. Instead of avoiding him, as I’d been doing for months, I talked to him about the applications he’d received for a new caregiver and asked him if he’d made a decision yet to hire anyone. I lay down with Jenna until she fell asleep and then went to his office and started to read an abstract, as if it was normal for us to share the space.

I thought he might tell me to get lost, but Thomas smiled at me, an olive branch. “I forgot how nice it used to be,” he said. “You and me working side by side.”

Resolve is like porcelain, isn’t it? You can have the best intentions, but the moment there’s a hairline crack, it is only a matter of time before you go to pieces. Thomas poured himself a tumbler of scotch, and another one for me. I left mine sitting on the desk.

“I’m in love with Gideon,” I said bluntly.

His hands went still on the decanter. Then he picked up his glass and finished the shot. “You think I’m blind?”

“We’re leaving,” I told him. “I’m pregnant.”

Thomas sat down. He buried his face in his hands and started to weep.

I stared for a moment, torn between comforting him and hating myself for being the one to reduce him to this, a broken man with a failing sanctuary, a cheating wife, and a mental illness.

“Thomas,” I begged. “Say something.”

His voice hitched. “What did I do wrong?”

I knelt in front of him. I saw, in that instant, the man whose glasses had fogged in the steamy heat of Botswana, the man who had met me at the airport clutching the roots of a plant. The man who had a dream and had invited me to take part in it. I had not seen that man for a very long time. But was it because he’d disappeared? Or because I’d stopped looking?

“You did nothing,” I replied. “It was me.”

He reached out, grasping my shoulder with one hand. With the other, he smacked me so hard across the face that I tasted blood.

“Whore,” he said.

Clutching my cheek, I fell backward. I backed away from him as he advanced toward me, scrambling to get out of the room.

Jenna was still asleep on the couch. I raced toward her, determined to take her with me as I walked out the door this last time. I could buy clothes and toys and anything else she needed later. But Thomas grabbed my wrist, wrenching it behind me, so that I fell again and he reached our child first. He picked up her small body, and she curled into him. “Daddy?” she sighed, still caught in the web between dreams and truth.

He wrapped his arms around her, turning so that Jenna was no longer facing me. “You want to go?” Thomas said. “Be my guest. But you want to take my daughter with you? Over my dead body.”

He smiled at me then, a terrible, terrible smile. “Or better yet,” he said. “Over yours.”

She would wake up, and I would be gone. Her worst fear, come true.
I’m sorry, baby
, I said silently to Jenna. Then I ran for help, leaving her behind.

Even if I’d been able to find the body that was buried ten years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to get a court order. I don’t know what I was thinking I’d resort to, shy of sneaking into a graveyard, Frankenstein-style, to dig up a corpse that I had assumed was Nevvie Ruehl. But before a body is released to a funeral home, the medical examiner does the autopsy. And the autopsy would have had a DNA sample taken by the state lab, stored somewhere in FTA card files for posterity.

No way in hell am I going to be able to get the state lab to cough up evidence to me, now that I’m a civilian. Which means I have to find someone they
would
give it to. So a half hour later, I’m leaning on the ledge of the evidence room at the Boone PD, sweet-talking Ralph again. “You’re back?” He sighs.

“What can I say? I missed you desperately. You haunt my dreams.”

“I already took a chance letting you in last time, Virgil. I’m not risking my job for you.”

“Ralph, you and I both know that the chief wouldn’t give this job to anyone else. You’re like the Hobbit guarding the ring, man.”

“What?”

“You’re the Dee Brown of the department. Without him, nobody would have even known the Celtics
existed
in the nineties, right?”

Ralph’s wrinkles deepen as he grins. “Well, now you’re talking,”
he says. “It’s true. These young guys don’t know their ass from their elbow. I come down here every morning and someone’s moved crap around, trying to classify it some newfangled computerized way, and you know what happens? Shit gets lost. So I move it back where it belongs. You know what I say—if it ain’t broke …”

I nod like I’m hanging on his every word. “This is what I’m talking about. You’re the central nervous system of this outfit, Ralph. Without you, everything would fall apart. That’s why I knew you were the right guy to turn to for help.”

He shrugs, trying to look humble. I wonder if he realizes I’m good-copping him, buttering him up so that I can get something out of him in return. Up in the break room, officers are probably still talking about how he’s senile and so slow-moving that he could drop dead in the evidence room and no one would notice for a week.

“You remember how I was reviewing an old case, right?” I say, leaning closer, so that he’s in on the secret. “I’m trying to get a DNA sample from the blood that was taken by the state lab. Any chance you could place a few calls, make that happen?”

“I would if I could, Virgil. But the state lab’s pipes burst five years ago. They lost eight whole years’ worth of evidence when the FTA cards were destroyed. It’s like 1999 through 2007 never happened.” The smile on my face stiffens. “Thanks anyway,” I tell him, and I slip out of the PD before anyone can see me.

I’m still trying to figure out how I’m going to break this news to Jenna when I pull up to my office building and see Serenity’s VW Bug parked out front. As soon as I get out of my truck, Jenna is in my face, peppering me with questions. “What did you find out? Is there a way to figure out who was buried? What about the fact that it’s been ten years, is that going to be a problem?”

I glance at her. “Did you bring me coffee?”

“What?” she says. “No.”

“Then get me some and come back. It’s too early for the third degree.”

I climb the stairs to my office, aware that Jenna and Serenity are trailing behind. I unlock the door, stepping over the hills of evidence
to get to my desk chair, where I collapse. “It’s going to be more challenging than I thought to find a DNA sample from whoever we identified as Nevvie Ruehl ten years ago.”