Leaving Time

Jenna, Virgil, and Serenity go to visit Thomas in the asylum. They walk in on a temper tantrum. The orderlies are having a hard time getting an empty cereal box out of Thomas’s grip. He claims it’s his research and they’re trying to steal it. Serenity and Virgil intervene and defuse the situation.

When Virgil questions him about the night of Alice’s disappearance, Thomas insists that she never left. She’s right in the room with them. He believes Jenna is Alice. Virgil gets him to focus for a brief moment, and Thomas recognizes his daughter. Then he begins to fixate on the necklace. He rips it off Jenna’s neck, slaps her face, and calls her a bitch.

Alice talks about an odd behavior that elephants perform when one of their companions has died unexpectedly or violently. They cover the corpse with dust, leaves, and branches. This behavior isn’t limited to their own species.

She recalls a story about a mahout who was accidentally killed by a bull elephant that he had tended for years. The female elephants covered the man with dirt and branches.

Shortly before she leaves Botswana, Alice drives out to the baobab tree where she’d last seen Thomas. She falls into a deep sleep. When she awakes, she finds herself dusted with dirt and leaves. The unknown elephant who found her assumed she was dead. In reality, she is ten weeks pregnant with Jenna.

Serenity and Virgil try to subdue Thomas to keep him from hurting Jenna any further. As they all leave the institution, Virgil suggests that maybe Thomas was abusing Alice. Possibly, he was responsible for Nevvie’s death, too, before the elephant trampled her. Jenna insists that her parents had a happy marriage.

Virgil gets a phone call from Tallulah announcing the DNA test results. The red hair found on Nevvie’s clothing is a genetic match to Alice’s.

As Virgil speculates that Alice might have murdered Nevvie, Jenna becomes annoyed, since the detective has now accused both her parents of murder. In a fit of anger, she fires Virgil. He says that he quits anyway. Serenity advises Virgil not to push so hard to a conclusion but just to let the facts unfold however they will.

He speculates that no matter what happened the night of Nevvie’s death, Thomas was upset with his wife. Virgil suspects Alice was having an affair.

Alice says that there is no better mother than an elephant. Because their pregnancies last two years, she believes that they become very invested in their young: “Babies are the most precious thing in an elephant’s life” (187).

All the calves are nurtured by all the females in the herd. The behavior is termed allomothering. Despite that level of collective care, a special bond exists between a calf and its birth mother: “In the wild, a mother and daughter stay together until one of them dies” (188).

After her fight with Virgil, Jenna is walking home when Serenity catches up in her car. Jenna climbs in, and they start a conversation about the meaning of life. Serenity says the universe asks very little of us: “Don’t do any intentional harm to yourself or anyone else, and get happy” (191). Jenna believes her only purpose in life is to find out what happened to her mother.

Once Serenity drops her off at home, Jenna takes off for the sanctuary on her bike. She falls asleep on a bed of purple mushrooms, under a tree. This is the spot where an elephant calf had been buried years before. She dreams she’s in preschool, making drawings of elephants. The dream jogs her memory about a real event from her past.

When asked to draw a family picture, she depicts her father, mother, Grace, Gideon, and Nevvie. However, Gideon is in the spot where her father should be. Even at the age of 3, she must have realized who she wished her father was and who had given her mother the pebble necklace. She decides that she needs to find Gideon if she wants to get any real answers to her mother’s disappearance.