Leaving Time: A Novel Read Online Free

She comes to hear me sing in school chorus concerts, and she cooks vegetarian for me even though she likes meat; she lets me watch R-rated movies because (as she says) there’s nothing in them I won’t see in the halls between classes. I love my grandmother. She just isn’t my mom.
    The lie I’ve told my grandma today is that I’m babysitting for the son of one of my favorite teachers—Mr. Allen, who taught me seventh-grade math. The kid’s name is Carter, but I call him Birth Control, because he’s the best argument ever against procreation.He’s the least attractive infant I’ve ever met. His head is enormous, and when he looks at me, I’m pretty sure he can read my mind.
    My grandmother pivots, pancakes balanced on a spatula, and freezes when she sees the scarf around my neck. True, it doesn’t match, but that’s not why her mouth pinches tight. She shakes her head in silent judgment and smacks the spatula against my plate as she sets down the food.
    “I felt like accessorizing,” I lie.
    My grandmother doesn’t talk about my mother. If I’m empty inside because she vanished, then Grandma’s full to bursting with anger. She can’t forgive my mother for leaving—if that’s what happened—and she can’t accept the alternative—that my mother can’t come back, because she’s dead.
    “Carter,” my grandmother says, smoothly peeling back the conversation one layer. “Is that the baby who looks like an eggplant?”
    “Not all of him. Just his forehead,” I clarify. “Last time I sat for him, he screamed for three hours straight.”
    “Bring earplugs,” my grandmother suggests. “Will you be home for dinner?”
    “I’m not sure. But I’ll see you later.”
    I tell her that every time she leaves. I tell her, because it’s what we both need to hear. My grandmother puts the frying pan in the sink and picks up her purse. “Make sure you let Gertie out before you go,” she instructs, and she’s careful not to look at me or my mother’s scarf as she passes.
    I started actively searching for my mother when I was eleven. Before that, I missed her, but I didn’t know what to do about it. My grandmother didn’t want to go there, and my father—as far as I knew—had never reported my mother missing, because he was catatonic in a psychiatric hospital when it happened. I bugged him about it a few times, but since that usually triggered new meltdowns, I stopped bringing it up.
    Then, one day at the dentist’s office, I read an article in
People
magazine about a kid who was sixteen who got his mother’s unsolved murder case reopened, and how the killer was brought to justice. I started to think that what I lacked in money and resources I could make up for in sheer determination, and that very afternoon, I decided to try. True, it could be a dead end, but no one else had succeeded in finding my mom. Then again, no one had looked as hard as I planned to look, either.
    Mostly, I was dismissed or pitied by the people I approached. The Boone Police Department refused to help me, because (a) I was a minor working without my guardian’s consent; (b) my mother’s trail was stone cold ten years later; and (c) as far as they were convinced, the related murder case had been solved—it had been ruled an accidental death. The New England Elephant Sanctuary, of course, was completely disbanded, and the one person who could tell me more about what had happened to that caregiver who died—namely, my dad—wasn’t even able to accurately give his own name or the day of the week, much less details about the incident that caused his psychotic break.
    So I decided that I would take matters into my own hands. I tried to hire a private detective but learned quickly they don’t do work pro bono, like some lawyers. That was when I started babysitting teachers’ kids, with a plan to have enough money saved by the end of this summer to at least get someone interested. Then I started the process of becoming my own