Leaving Time

When Thomas returns from treatment, he’s taking a new type of medication. He also brings an influx of cash from new investors. Things return to normal at the sanctuary, though Alice and Thomas maintain a distant personal relationship. By this time, Jenna is going to preschool so she can socialize with children her own age.

Amid this everyday routine, Alice and Gideon still carry on their affair. One night, they meet for a brief tryst in the unfinished observation deck. Grace comes looking for Alice because Jenna’s school has called to say the child is ill and someone needs to come get her. Grace finds Gideon and Alice together.

Alice breaks down and apologizes, begging Grace not to tell Thomas. Grace tells only Nevvie. Everyone on staff retreats into their work, avoiding the subject completely. Because Alice knows her latest pregnancy will begin to show soon, she fears Thomas’s reaction and begins to plan an escape. Intending to bring Jenna with her, she packs a duffel with clothes and money to tide them over.

On the morning she intends to leave, Gideon bursts in to announce that Grace has gone missing. She has left a note telling him, “By the time he found this, it would be too late” (319). Grace has stuffed her pockets with rocks, waded out into the Connecticut River, and drowned.

Serenity and Virgil are still recovering from the soaking they received in Nevvie’s house. Serenity explains poltergeists to Virgil, suggesting that Grace might have caused the deluge since she drowned in a river. Just then, Jenna calls, asking for help.

Virgil and Serenity drive to pick her up. Jenna appears shaken and tells the other two what she’s learned from Gideon about the affair, Alice’s plans to run away, and the baby she was carrying. They all speculate that the dead body at the sanctuary may have been Alice, not Nevvie. Suspicion now points to Thomas as the killer.

If Alice really is dead, Jenna asks Serenity if her mother will wait for her. Serenity explains that the afterlife doesn’t work that way because ghosts inhabit the same space as the living, but they don’t connect: “You’re like oil and vinegar in the same container” (323). Jenna confides that even though she now knows her mother didn’t want to abandon her, she still feels empty.

On the car ride back home, with Jenna asleep in the back seat, Virgil admits that the initial investigation was so flawed that he never really identified who was alive and who was dead. He also confesses that he failed to pursue a murder investigation when he should have done so. He let his partner convince him that all the public wanted was to feel safe, so he hid the medical examiner’s report.

The death was ruled an accident, and Virgil was rewarded with the rank of detective. He felt so guilty about the incident that he drove his car off a cliff on the day of his promotion ceremony. He ruefully adds that he botched his own suicide, too.

Serenity observes that Jenna couldn’t have picked two worse people to help her if she tried. Virgil adds, “That’s all the more reason […] to make it right” (327).

Gideon and Nevvie leave to attend Grace’s funeral in Tennessee while Alice remains behind to tend the elephants. When they return, the awkwardness of their relationship with Alice continues.

Jenna begins exhibiting odd behavior. She’s afraid to fall asleep. She calls it the Leaving Time because she thinks that her mother will be gone when she wakes up. While Alice is trying to soothe Jenna into taking a nap, she gets called away to help Gideon with an electric fence.

This is the first private conversation that Gideon and Alice have had since Grace’s death. Gideon says they can’t resume their affair. Alice asks if it’s because she’s sorry Grace is gone. Gideon replies, “‘No […] Because I’m not’” (331).

Alice returns to the house to find Jenna missing. She’s in a panic and enlists Gideon’s aid to search. They finally find her eating a popsicle as Nevvie babysits. Alice thinks this is a good arrangement, since Jenna needed mothering and Nevvie has lost her own daughter.

Alice recalls an event from her years in Botswana, when an elephant from a different herd tried to carry off a newborn calf. The rest of the herd didn’t attack her for doing so, which made the event all the more puzzling to Alice.

The night after Jenna’s disappearance, Alice has a nightmare in which she witnesses Gracie wading into the river to drown herself. Suddenly, their positions are reversed, and it’s Alice who’s drowning. She wakes up screaming. Alice only remembers one other time when she had such a vivid nightmare: when she had become pregnant with Jenna.

When Jenna returns home after her unexplained absence, her grandmother is furious and grounds her. Jenna goes to her room to process everything she’s learned on her trip. She now believes her mother was the one crushed by an elephant, but the fact brings her some relief: “She did not willingly leave me behind” (339).

When her grandmother comes in to check on her, Jenna tells her that she went to find Gideon to retrace the events of Alice’s disappearance. Her grandmother feels that Jenna’s obsession with the past has gone too far. She rips the blue scarf in half and takes away all of Alice’s journals. She tells Jenna, “You need to start living your own life, instead of hers” (342).

Jenna sneaks out but this time leaves a note saying she’ll be back after she says one final goodbye to her mother. She goes to Serenity’s apartment. Even though she knows Serenity has lost her ability to speak to the dead, they sit on the couch together, cuddled under a blanket.

Alice realizes that she can’t hide her pregnancy much longer and must make plans to leave. She and Gideon dream of a future together, but first Gideon needs to tell Nevvie, and Alice needs to tell Thomas.

Nevvie appears to take the news calmly. She says she hopes that Gideon gets everything he deserves. At first, Thomas appears stricken by Alice’s announcement and asks what he did wrong. Then he grows violent and slaps his wife. He says she can leave if she wants, but Jenna will go over his dead body, “[o]r better yet […] [o]ver yours” (348).