Read Online Leaving Time: A Novel by Jodi Picoult - Free Book Online Page B

calf, Kgosi, who was about four at the time, put his trunk in her mouth, the way young elephants greet their mothers. The herd rumbled and the calf was making sounds that seemed like screams, but then they all got very quiet. At this point I realized she had died.
    A few of the elephants moved toward the tree line, collecting leaves and branches, which they brought to cover Bontle. Others tossed dirt onto her body. The herd stood solemnly with Bontle’s body for two and a half days, leaving only to get water or food, and then returning. Even years later, when her bones had been bleached and scattered, her massive skull caught in the crook of a dry riverbank, the herd would stop when passing by, standing in silence for a few minutes. Recently, I saw Kgosi—now a big young male of eight years—approach the skull and stick his trunk in the spot where Bontle’s mouth would have been. Clearly these bones had general significance to him. But if you had seen it, I think you’d believe what I do: that he recognized that these particular bones had once been his mother.

JENNA

    “Tell me again,” I demand.
    Serenity rolls her eyes. We’ve been sitting in her living room for an hour while she goes over the details of a ten-second dream she had about my mother. I know it’s my mother because of the blue scarf, the elephant, and … well, because when you desperately want to believe something’s true, you can convince yourself of just about anything.
    True, Serenity might have Googled me the minute I walked out the door, and concocted some crazy trance with a pachyderm. But if you Google “Jenna Metcalf,” it takes three pages before you get to any mention of my mother, and even then, it’s an article that only references me as her three-year-old daughter. There are too many other Jenna Metcalfs who have done too much with their lives, and my mother’s disappearance was too long ago. Also, Serenity didn’t know I was coming back for the scarf I left behind.
    Unless she
did
, which proves she’s the real deal, right?
    “Listen,” Serenity says, “I can’t tell you any more than what I already have.”
    “But my mother was breathing.”
    “
The woman
I dreamed about was breathing.”
    “Did she, like, gasp? Make any sounds?”
    “No. She was just lying there. It’s just … a sense I had.”
    “She’s not dead,” I murmur, more to myself than to Serenity, because I like the way the words fill me up with bubbles, like my blood has been carbonated. I know I should be angry or upset getting even this loose proof that my mother might still be alive—and that she’s abandoned me for the past decade—but I’m too happy about the thought that if I play my cards right, I will see her again.
    Then I can choose to hate her or I can ask her myself why she didn’t come for me.
    Or I can just crawl into her arms and suggest we start from scratch.
    All of a sudden, my eyes widen. “Your dream. It’s new evidence. If you tell the police what you told me, they’ll reopen my mother’s case.”
    “Honey, there isn’t a detective in this country that’s going to take the dream of a psychic and write it up as formal evidence. It’s like asking the DA to call the Easter Bunny as a witness.”
    “But what if it actually happened? What if what you dreamed was just a piece of the past, looping itself into your head?”
    “That’s not how psychic information works. I once had a client come to me whose grandmother had passed. Her grandmother was a very strong presence, showing me the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, Chairman Mao, fortune cookies. It was like she was doing everything in her power to get me to say China. So I asked if her grandma had visited China, or been into feng shui or something like that, and the client said that didn’t sound like her grandma, it didn’t make sense. Then Grandma showed me a rose. I told the client, and she said,
Gram was more of a wildflower girl
. So I’m thinking,