Leaving Time: A Novel Read online

  It’s not like I don’t fit in at school because I’m the only kid without a mother. There are lots of kids missing parents, or kids who don’t talk about their parents, or kids whose parents are now living with new spouses and new kids. Still, I don’t really have friends at school. I sit at the lunch table on the far end, eating whatever my grandmother’s packed me, while the cool girls—who, I swear to God, call themselves the Icicles—chatter about how they are going to grow up and work for OPI and make up nail-polish color names based on famous movies: Magent-lemen Prefer Blondes; A Fuchsia Good Men. Maybe I’ve tried to join the conversation once or twice, but when I do, they usually look at me as if they’ve smelled something bad coming from my direction, their little button noses wrinkled, and then go back to whatever they were talking about. I can’t say I’m devastated by the way I’m ignored. I guess I have more important things on my mind.

  The memories on the other side of my mother’s disappearance are just as spotty. I can tell you about my new bedroom at my grandma’s place, which had a big-girl bed—my first. There was a little woven basket on the nightstand, which was inexplicably filled with pink packets of Sweet’N Low, although there was no coffeemaker around. Every night, even before I could count, I’d peek inside to make sure they were still there. I still do.

  I can tell you about visiting my father, at the beginning. The halls at Hartwick House smelled like ammonia and pee, and even when my grandma urged me to talk to him and I climbed up on the bed, shivering at the thought of being so close to someone I recognized and didn’t know at all, he didn’t speak or move. I can describe how tears leaked out of his eyes as if it were a natural and expected phenomenon, the way a cold can of soda sweats on a summer day.

  I remember the nightmares I had, which weren’t really nightmares, but just me being awakened from a dead sleep by Maura’s loud trumpeting. Even after my grandma came running into my room and explained to me that the matriarch elephant lived hundreds of miles away now, in a new sanctuary in Tennessee, I had this nagging sense that Maura was trying to tell me something, and that if I only spoke her language as well as my mother had, I’d understand.

  All I have left of my mother is her research. I pore over her journals, because I know one day the words will rearrange themselves on a page and point me toward her. She taught me, even in absentia, that all good science starts with a hypothesis, which is just a hunch dressed up in fancy vocabulary. And my hunch is this: She would never have left me behind, not willingly.

  If it’s the last thing I do, I’m going to prove it.

  When I wake up, Gertie is draped over my feet, a giant dog rug. She twitches, running after something she can only see in her dreams.

  I know what that feels like.

  I try to get out of bed without waking her, but she jumps up and barks at the closed door of my bedroom.

  “Relax,” I say, sinking my fingers into the thick fur at the ruff of her neck. She licks my cheek but doesn’t relax at all. She keeps her eyes fixed on the bedroom door, as if she can see what’s on the other side.

  Which, given what I have planned for the day, is pretty ironic.

  Gertie leaps off the bed, her wagging tail pounding the wall. I open the door and let her scramble downstairs, where my grandmother will let her out and feed her and start to cook breakfast for me.

  Gertie came to my grandmother’s house a year after I did. Before that, she had lived at the sanctuary and she was best friends with an elephant named Syrah. She’d spend every day at Syrah’s side; and when Gertie got sick Syrah even stood guard over her, gently rubbing her with her trunk. It was not the first story of a dog and an elephant bonding, but it was a legendary one, written up in children’s books and featured on the news. A famous photographer even shot a calendar of unlikely animal friendships and made Gertie Ms. July. So when Syrah was sent away after the sanctuary closed, Gertie was just as abandoned as I was. For months, no one knew what had happened to her. And then one day, when my grandmother answered the doorbell, there was an animal rescue officer asking if we knew this dog, which had been found in our neighborhood. She still had her collar, with her name embroidered on it. Gertie was skinny and flea-bitten, but she started licking my face. My grandmother let Gertie stay, probably because she thought it would help me adjust.

  If we’re going to be honest here—I have to tell you it didn’t work. I’ve always been a loner, and I’ve never really felt like I belong here. I’m like one of those women who read Jane Austen obsessively and still hope that Mr. Darcy might show up at the door. Or the Civil War reenactors, who growl at each other on battlefields now spotted with baseball fields and park benches. I’m the princess in an ivory tower, except every brick is made of history, and I built this prison myself.

  I did have one friend at school, once, who sort of understood. Chatham Clarke was the only person I ever told about my mother and how I was going to find her. Chatham lived with her aunt, because her mother was a drug addict and in jail; and she had never met her father. “It’s noble,” Chatham told me. “How much you want to see your mother.” When I asked her what that meant, she told me about how once her aunt had taken her to the prison where her mom was serving her term; how she’d dressed up in a frilly skirt and those shoes that look like black mirrors. But her mother was gray and lifeless, her eyes dead and her teeth rotted out from the meth, and Chatham said that even though her mother said she wished she could give her a hug, she had never been so happy for something as she was for that wall of plastic between them in the visiting booth. She’d never gone back again.

  Chatham was useful in a lot of ways—she took me to buy my first bra, because my grandmother hadn’t thought to cover up a nonexistent bosom and (as Chatham said) no one over the age of ten who has to change in a school locker room should let the girls go free. She passed me notes in English class, crude stick-figure drawings of our teacher, who used too much self-tanner and smelled like cats. She linked arms with me as we walked down the hall, and every wildlife researcher will tell you that when it comes to survival in a hostile environment, a pack of two is infinitely safer than a pack of one.

  One morning Chatham stopped coming to school. When I called her house no one answered. I biked over there to find a For Sale sign. I didn’t believe that she’d leave without any word, especially since she knew that was what had freaked me out so much about my mom’s disappearance, but it got harder and harder to defend her to myself as a week went by, and then two. When I started skipping homework assignments and failing tests, which wasn’t my style at all, I was summoned to the school counselor’s office. Ms. Sugarman was a thousand years old and had puppets in her office, so that kids who were too traumatized to say the word vagina could, I guess, put on a Punch and Judy show about where they’d been inappropriately touched. Anyway, I didn’t think Ms. Sugarman could guide me out of a paper bag, much less through a broken friendship. When she asked me what I thought had happened to Chatham, I said I assumed she had been raptured. That I was Left Behind.

  Wouldn’t be the first time.

  Ms. Sugarman didn’t call me back into her office again, and if I was considered the oddball in school before, I was completely off-the-charts weird now.

  My grandmother was puzzled by Chatham’s vanishing act. “Without telling you?” she said at dinner. “That’s not how you treat a friend.” I didn’t know how to explain to her that the whole time Chatham was my partner in crime, I was anticipating this. When someone leaves you once, you expect it to happen again. Eventually you stop getting close enough to people to let them become important to you, because then you don’t notice when they drop out of your world. I know that sounds incredibly depressing for a thirteen-year-old, but it beats being forced to accept that the common denominator must be you.

  I may not be able to change my future, but I’m sure as hell going to try to figure out my past.

  So I have a morning ritual. Some people have coffee and read the paper; some people check Facebook;
others straight-iron their hair or do a hundred sit-ups. Me, I pull on my clothes and then go to my computer. I spend a lot of time on the Internet, mostly at www.NamUs.gov, the official Department of Justice website for missing and unidentified persons. I check the Unidentified Persons database quickly, to make sure that no medical examiners have entered new information about a deceased woman Jane Doe. Then I check the Unclaimed Persons database, running through any additions to the list of people who have died but have no next of kin. Finally, I log in to the Missing Persons database and go right to my mom’s entry.

  Status: Missing

  First name: Alice

  Middle name: Kingston

  Last name: Metcalf

  Nickname/Alias: None

  Date LKA: July 16, 2004, 11:45 P.M.

  Age LKA: 36

  Age now: 46

  Race: White

  Sex: Female

  Height: 65 inches

  Weight: 125

  City: Boone

  State: NH

  Circumstances: Alice Metcalf was a naturalist and researcher at the New England Elephant Sanctuary. She was found unconscious the evening of July 16, 2004, at approximately 10:00 P.M., one mile south of the body of a female sanctuary employee who had been trampled by an elephant. After being admitted to Mercy United Hospital in Boone Heights, NH, Alice regained consciousness at approximately 11:00 P.M. She was last seen by a nurse checking her vitals at 11:45 P.M.

  Nothing’s changed on the profile. I know, because I am the one who wrote it.

  There’s another page about my mother’s hair color (red) and eye color (green); about whether she had any scars or deformities or tattoos or artificial limbs that could be used to identify her (no). There’s a page that lists the clothing she was wearing when she disappeared, but I had to leave that blank, because I don’t know. There’s an empty page about possible transportation methods and another about dental records and one for her DNA sample. There’s a picture of her, too, that I scanned from the only photo in the house my grandma hasn’t squirreled away in the attic—a close-up of my mother holding me in her arms, in front of Maura the elephant.

  Then there’s a page for the police contacts. One of them, Donny Boylan, retired and moved to Florida and has Alzheimer’s (you’d be amazed at what you can learn from Google). The other, Virgil Stanhope, was last listed in a police newsletter for being promoted to detective at a ceremony on October 13, 2004. I know, from my digital sleuthing, that he is no longer employed by the Boone Police Department. Aside from that, it appears he has disappeared off the face of the earth.

  It’s not nearly as uncommon as you think.

  There are entire families whose homes were abandoned with television sets blaring, kettles boiling, toys strewn across the floor; families whose vans were found in empty parking lots or sunk in local ponds, and yet no bodies were ever located. There are college girls who went missing after they wrote their numbers down on napkins for men at bars. There are grandfathers who wandered into the woods and were never heard from again. There are babies who were kissed good night in their cribs, and gone before the light of morning. There are mothers who wrote out grocery lists, got in their cars, but never came home from the Stop & Shop.

  “Jenna!” My grandmother’s voice interrupts me. “I’m not running a restaurant!”

  I shut down my computer and head out of my bedroom. On second thought, I reach into my lingerie drawer and pull a delicate blue scarf out of its recesses. It doesn’t work at all with my jean shorts and tank top, but I loop it around my neck, hurry downstairs, and climb onto one of the counter stools.

  “It’s not like I have nothing better to do than wait on you hand and foot,” my grandmother says, her back to me as she flips a pancake in the skillet.

  My grandmother is not the TV grandmother, a cuddly, white-haired cherub. She works as a meter maid for the local parking enforcement office, and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen her smile.

  I wish I could talk to her about my mom. I mean, she has all the memories I don’t—because she lived with my mother for eighteen years, while I, on the other hand, had a measly three. I wish I had the kind of grandmother who showed me pictures of my missing mom when I was little, or baked a cake on her birthday, instead of just encouraging me to seal my feelings inside a little box.

  Don’t get me wrong—I love my grandmother. She comes to hear me sing in school chorus concerts, and she cooks vegetarian for me even though she likes meat; she lets me watch R-rated movies because (as she says) there’s nothing in them I won’t see in the halls between classes. I love my grandmother. She just isn’t my mom.

  The lie I’ve told my grandma today is that I’m babysitting for the son of one of my favorite teachers—Mr. Allen, who taught me seventh-grade math. The kid’s name is Carter, but I call him Birth Control, because he’s the best argument ever against procreation. He’s the least attractive infant I’ve ever met. His head is enormous, and when he looks at me, I’m pretty sure he can read my mind.

  My grandmother pivots, pancakes balanced on a spatula, and freezes when she sees the scarf around my neck. True, it doesn’t match, but that’s not why her mouth pinches tight. She shakes her head in silent judgment and smacks the spatula against my plate as she sets down the food.

  “I felt like accessorizing,” I lie.

  My grandmother doesn’t talk about my mother. If I’m empty inside because she vanished, then Grandma’s full to bursting with anger. She can’t forgive my mother for leaving—if that’s what happened—and she can’t accept the alternative—that my mother can’t come back, because she’s dead.

  “Carter,” my grandmother says, smoothly peeling back the conversation one layer. “Is that the baby who looks like an eggplant?”

  “Not all of him. Just his forehead,” I clarify. “Last time I sat for him, he screamed for three hours straight.”

  “Bring earplugs,” my grandmother suggests. “Will you be home for dinner?”

  “I’m not sure. But I’ll see you later.”

  I tell her that every time she leaves. I tell her, because it’s what we both need to hear. My grandmother puts the frying pan in the sink and picks up her purse. “Make sure you let Gertie out before you go,” she instructs, and she’s careful not to look at me or my mother’s scarf as she passes.

  I started actively searching for my mother when I was eleven. Before that, I missed her, but I didn’t know what to do about it. My grandmother didn’t want to go there, and my father—as far as I knew—had never reported my mother missing, because he was catatonic in a psychiatric hospital when it happened. I bugged him about it a few times, but since that usually triggered new meltdowns, I stopped bringing it up.

  Then, one day at the dentist’s office, I read an article in People magazine about a kid who was sixteen who got his mother’s unsolved murder case reopened, and how the killer was brought to justice. I started to think that what I lacked in money and resources I could make up for in sheer determination, and that very afternoon, I decided to try. True, it could be a dead end, but no one else had succeeded in finding my mom. Then again, no one had looked as hard as I planned to look, either.

  Mostly, I was dismissed or pitied by the people I approached. The Boone Police Department refused to help me, because (a) I was a minor working without my guardian’s consent; (b) my mother’s trail was stone cold ten years later; and (c) as far as they were convinced, the related murder case had been solved—it had been ruled an accidental death. The New England Elephant Sanctuary, of course, was completely disbanded, and the one person who could tell me more about what had happened to that caregiver who died—namely, my dad—wasn’t even able to accurately give his own name or the day of the week, much less details about the incident that caused his psychotic break.

  So I decided that I would take matters into my own hands. I tried to hire a private detective but learned quickly they don’t do work pro bono, like some lawyers. That was when I started babys
itting teachers’ kids, with a plan to have enough money saved by the end of this summer to at least get someone interested. Then I started the process of becoming my own best investigator.

  Almost every online search engine to find missing people costs money and requires a credit card, neither of which I had. But I did manage to find a how-to book, So You Want to Be a PI?, at a church rummage sale, and I spent several days memorizing the information in one chapter: “Finding Those Who Are Lost.”

  According to the book, there are three types of Missing People:

  1. People who are not really missing but have lives and friends that don’t include you. Old boyfriends and the college roommate you lost touch with—they’re in this category.

  2. People who are not really missing but don’t want to be found. Deadbeat dads and mob witnesses, for example.

  3. Everyone else. Like runaways and the kids on milk cartons who are stolen away by psychos in white vans with no windows.

  The whole reason PIs can find someone is that lots of people know exactly where the Missing Person is. You just aren’t one of them. You need to find someone who is.

  People who disappear have their reasons. They might have committed insurance fraud or be hiding from the cops. They might have decided to start over. They might be up to their eyeballs in debt. They might have a secret they want no one to find out. According to So You Want to Be a PI?, the first question you need to ask yourself is: Does this person want to be found?

  I have to admit, I don’t know if I want to hear the answer to that. If my mother walked away willingly, then maybe all it would take is knowing I’m still searching—knowing that, after a decade, I haven’t forgotten her—to make her come back to me. I sometimes think it would be easier for me to learn that my mother died ten years ago than to hear that she lived and chose not to return.

  The book said that finding those who are lost is like doing a word jumble. You have all the clues, and you’re trying to unscramble them to make an address. Data collection is the weapon of the private investigator, and facts are your friends. Name, birth date, social security number. Schools attended. Military service dates, employment history, known friends and relatives. The farther you cast your net, the more likely you are to catch someone who has had a conversation with the Missing Person about where he wished they could go on vacation, or what his dream job might be.