Leaving Time

Part 1 begins with a poem entitled “The Elephant,” by Don Chiasson, which is told from an elephant’s point of view. It describes the abuse that careless humans inflict on elephants and the weary resignation of the animals themselves toward their abusers.

Jenna introduces herself to the reader as a teenage loner with strawberry red hair and green eyes who is obsessed with finding her missing mother. She now lives with her grandmother, who suppresses any discussion of the mysterious disappearance.

Jenna flashes back to her memories of the night her mother left, even though she was only 3 years old at the time. An elephant has crushed an employee at the sanctuary. Her mother is knocked unconscious and taken to the hospital. Jenna says that her life feels broken into two parts:

Sometimes I think of my life as two train cars hitched together at the moment of my mom’s disappearance—but when I try to see how they connect there’s a jarring on the track that jerks my head back around (13).

Because she can’t connect the two halves of her life, Jenna is determined to find out what happened to her mother that night. She describes all the different methods that she’s used to get any information, adding that no one will take her seriously because she’s just a kid.

Finally, she decides to contact a local psychic named Serenity Jones, who lives in a seedy part of town. Serenity reluctantly does a tarot reading and announces that Jenna’s mother is not dead. She refuses to help Jenna any further.

Jenna leaves, then digs up more info on the net about Serenity. She learns that Serenity made a bad prediction about a senator’s son that ruined her reputation as a psychic. Because Serenity seems to have lost faith in her own abilities, Jenna decides this is exactly the right person to help her.

Alice talks about how good an elephant’s memory is. She gives examples of how long an elephant will remember an offense and retaliate against it. She also mentions incidents where elephants were able to identify specific humans as being friend or foe and would selectively react to an individual based on that person’s past treatment of the herd. She says, “The question isn’t whether elephants can remember. Maybe we need to ask: What won’t they forget” (39)?

Serenity talks about her psychic abilities. Her ancestors possessed the gift but not her parents. As a child, she saw both dead and living people as she walked down the street and sometimes had trouble telling the difference between them. Her mother advises her to hide her “[g]ift” so other children at school won’t harass her.

As she gets older, Serenity decides to embrace her abilities and learn all she can about the psychic realm. She meets her two spirit guides: Lucinda, an elderly black woman, and Desmond, a snarky gay man. With their assistance, she builds a reputation and eventually becomes famous after a high-profile client offers Serenity her own TV show.

At the height of her fame, Serenity takes on the kidnapping case of a senator’s son. Her head is so filled with dreams of another Emmy award that she alienates her spirit guides. They abandon her, so she is forced to give a fake prediction that the kidnapped boy is safe. When the child’s murdered body is found, Serenity’s credibility is destroyed.

In the seven years that follow, she never has another authentic vision. She works at low-paying jobs, desperately wanting her gift back, but her guides have fled. The night after Jenna’s visit, she has a dream about an elephant, an unconscious woman, and a blue scarf.

She dismisses the dream as nonsense until Jenna returns in the morning to look for a scarf she left behind on her previous visit to the psychic. The scarf belonged to Alice and is the same one that Serenity saw in her dream. Serenity interprets this as a sign and believes she is meant to find Jenna’s mother

Alice recalls experiences from her time as a researcher in Africa. She asserts that elephants understand death and that they are fascinated by the bones of other deceased elephants. She describes their grieving ritual of covering a dead elephant with dirt and leaves, then standing by the corpse for days afterward.

When passing the bones of a long-dead member of their herd, elephants will linger a few moments in respectful silence. After an interval of several years, Alice observes one elephant approaching the remains of his mother: “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” (54).