LEAVING TIME Extract by Jodi Picoult

Download as pdf or txt
Download as pdf or txt
You are on page 1of 9

JODI

PICOULT
Leaving Time

106JJ_tx.indd 3 31/07/2014 11:38


First published in the United States by Ballantine Books
An imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC,
a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Hodder & Stoughton


An Hachette UK company

Copyright © Jodi Picoult 2014

The right of Jodi Picoult to be identified as the Author of the


Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Grateful acknowledgment is given for permission to reprint ‘The Elephant’ from


Natural History by Dan Chiasson, copyright © 2005 by Dan Chiasson. Used
by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday
Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may


be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means without the prior written permission
of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding
or cover other than that in which it is published and without a
similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real
persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Hardback ISBN 978 1 444 77814 4


Trade paperback ISBN 978 1 444 77815 1
Ebook ISBN 978 1 444 77818 2

Typeset in Berkley Oldstyle by Palimpsest Book Production Limited,


Falkirk, Stirlingshire

Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

Hodder & Stoughton policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable
and recyclable products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests.
The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the
environmental regulations of the country of origin.

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd


338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH

www.hodder.co.uk

106JJ_tx.indd 4 31/07/2014 11:38


Prologue

106JJ_tx.indd 1 31/07/2014 11:38


Jenna

S ome people used to believe that there was an elephant grave-


yard – a place that sick and old elephants would travel to to
die. They’d slip away from their herds and would lumber across
the dusty landscape, like the titans we read about in seventh grade
in Greek Mythology. Legend said the spot was in Saudi Arabia;
that it was the source of a supernatural force; that it contained a
book of spells to bring about world peace.
Explorers who went in search of the graveyard would follow
dying elephants for weeks, only to realize they’d been led in circles.
Some of these voyagers disappeared completely. Some could not
remember what they had seen, and not a single explorer who
claimed to have found the graveyard could ever locate it again.
Here’s why: The elephant graveyard is a myth.
True, researchers have found groups of elephants that died in
the same vicinity, many over a short period of time. My mother,
Alice, would have said there’s a perfectly logical reason for a mass
burial site: a group of elephants who died all at once due to lack
of food or water; a slaughter by ivory hunters. It’s even possible
that the strong winds in Africa could blow a scattering of bones
into a concentrated pile. Jenna, she would have told me, there’s an
explanation for everything you see.
There is plenty of information about elephants and death that
is not fable but instead cold, hard science. My mother would have
been able to tell me that, too. We would have sat, shoulder to
shoulder, beneath the massive oak where Maura liked to shade
herself, watching the elephant pick up acorns with her trunk and
pitch them. My mother would rate each toss like an Olympic
judge. 8.5 . . . 7.9. Ooh! A perfect 10.

106JJ_tx.indd 3 31/07/2014 11:38


4 JODI PICOULT

Maybe I would have listened. But maybe, too, I would have


just closed my eyes. Maybe I would have tried to memorize the
smell of bug spray on my mother’s skin, or the way she absent-
mindedly braided my hair, tying it off on the end with a stalk of
green grass.
Maybe the whole time I would have been wishing there really
was an elephant graveyard, except not just for elephants. Because
then I’d be able to find her.

106JJ_tx.indd 4 31/07/2014 11:38


Alice

W hen I was nine – before I grew up and became a scientist


– I thought I knew everything, or at least I wanted to know
everything, and in my mind there was no difference between the
two. At that age, I was obsessed with animals. I knew that a group
of tigers was called a streak. I knew that dolphins were carnivores.
I knew that giraffes had four stomachs and that the leg muscles
of a locust were a thousand times more powerful than the same
weight of human muscle. I knew that white polar bears had black
skin beneath their fur, and that jellyfish had no brains. I knew all
these facts from the Time-Life monthly animal fact cards that I
had received as a birthday gift from my pseudo-stepfather, who
had moved out a year ago and now lived in San Francisco with
his best friend, Frank, who my mother called ‘the other woman’
when she thought I wasn’t listening.
Every month new cards arrived in the mail, and then one day,
in October 1977, the best card of all arrived: the one about
elephants. I cannot tell you why they were my favorite animals.
Maybe it was my bedroom, with its green shag jungle carpet and
the wallpaper border of cartoon pachyderms dancing across the
walls. Maybe it was the fact that the first movie I’d ever seen, as
a toddler, was Dumbo. Maybe it was because the silk lining inside
my mother’s fur coat, the one she had inherited from her own
mother, was made from an Indian sari and printed with elephants.
From that Time-Life card, I learned the basics about elephants.
They were the largest land animals on the planet, sometimes
weighing more than six tons. They ate three to four hundred
pounds of food each day. They had the longest pregnancy of any
land mammal – twenty-two months. They lived in breeding herds,

106JJ_tx.indd 5 31/07/2014 11:38


6 JODI PICOULT

led by a female matriarch, often the oldest member of the group.


She was the one who decided where the group went every day,
when they took a rest, where they ate, and where they drank.
Babies were raised and protected by all the female relatives in the
herd, and traveled with them, but when males were about thirteen
years old, they left – sometimes preferring to wander on their own
and sometimes gathering with other males in a bull group.
But those were facts that everyone knew. I, on the other hand,
became obsessed and dug a little deeper, trying to find out every-
thing I could at the school library and from my teachers and
books. So I also could tell you that elephants got sunburned,
which is why they would toss dirt on their backs and roll in the
mud. Their closest living relative was the rock hyrax, a tiny, furry
thing that looked like a guinea pig. I knew that just like a human
baby sucks its thumb to calm itself down, an elephant calf might
sometimes suck its trunk. I knew that in 1916, in Erwin, Tennessee,
an elephant named Mary was tried and hanged for murder.
In retrospect I am sure my mother got tired of hearing about
elephants. Maybe that is why, one Saturday morning, she woke
me before the sun came up and told me we were going on an
adventure. There were no zoos near where we lived in Connecticut,
but the Forest Park Zoo in Springfield, Massachusetts, had a real,
live elephant – and we were going to see her.
To say I was excited would be an understatement. I peppered
my mother with elephant jokes for hours:
What’s beautiful, gray, and wears glass slippers? Cinderelephant.
Why are elephants wrinkled? They don’t fit on the ironing board.
How do you get down from an elephant? You don’t. You get down
from a goose.
Why do elephants have trunks? Because they’d look funny with glove
compartments.
When we got to the zoo, I raced along the paths until I found
myself standing in front of Morganetta the elephant.
Who looked nothing like what I had imagined.
This was not the majestic animal featured on my Time-Life card,
or in the books I had studied. For one thing, she was chained to

106JJ_tx.indd 6 31/07/2014 11:38


Leaving Time 7

a giant concrete block in the center of her enclosure, so that she


couldn’t walk very far in any direction. There were sores on her
hind legs from the shackles. She was missing one eye, and she
wouldn’t look at me with the other. I was just another person
who had come to stare at her, in her prison.
My mother was stunned by her condition, too. She flagged
down a zookeeper, who said that Morganetta had once been in
local parades, and had done stunts like competing against under-
grads in a tug-o’-war at a nearby school, but that she had gotten
unpredictable and violent in her old age. She’d lashed out at visi-
tors with her trunk if they came too close to her cage. She had
broken a caregiver’s wrist.
I started to cry.
My mother bundled me back to the car for the four-hour drive
home, although we had only been at the zoo for ten minutes.
‘Can’t we help her?’ I asked.
This is how, at age nine, I became an elephant advocate. After
a trip to the library, I sat down at my kitchen table, and I wrote
to the mayor of Springfield, Massachusetts, asking him to give
Morganetta more space, and more freedom.
He didn’t just write me back. He sent his response to The Boston
Globe, which published it, and then a reporter called to do a story
on the nine-year-old who had convinced the mayor to move
Morganetta into the much larger buffalo enclosure at the zoo. I
was given a special Concerned Citizen award at my elementary
school assembly. I was invited back to the zoo for the grand
opening to cut the red ribbon with the mayor. Flashbulbs went
off in my face, blinding me, as Morganetta roamed behind us.
This time, she looked at me with her good eye. And I knew, I
just knew, she was still miserable. The things that had happened
to her – the chains and the shackles, the cage and the beatings,
maybe even the memory of the moment she was taken out of
Africa – all that was still with her in that buffalo enclosure, and
it took up all the extra space.
For the record, Mayor Dimauro did continue to try to make
life better for Morganetta. In 1979, after the demise of Forest Park’s

106JJ_tx.indd 7 31/07/2014 11:38


8 JODI PICOULT

resident polar bear, the facility closed and Morganetta was moved
to the Los Angeles Zoo. Her home there was much bigger. It had
a pool, and toys, and two older elephants.
If I knew back then what I know now, I could have told the
mayor that just sticking elephants in proximity with others does
not mean they will form friendships. Elephants are as unique in
their personalities as humans are, and just as you would not
assume that two random humans would become close friends,
you should not assume that two elephants will bond simply because
they are both elephants. Morganetta continued to spiral deeper
into depression, losing weight and deteriorating. Approximately
one year after she arrived in L.A., she was found dead in the
bottom of the enclosure’s pool.
The moral of this story is that sometimes, you can attempt to
make all the difference in the world, and it still is like trying to stem
the tide with a sieve.
The moral of this story is that no matter how much we try, no
matter how much we want it . . . some stories just don’t have a
happy ending.

106JJ_tx.indd 8 31/07/2014 11:38

You might also like