Leaving Time

Many of Alice’s chapters are devoted to observing elephant behavior, and specifically the relationship between mothers and offspring. She marvels at the patience that elephant mothers exhibit, and the degree to which they cherish the young. Their behavior represents an ideal to Alice, and she judges both herself and other humans harshly for falling short of that ideal.

Even though Jenna is gone, Alice can’t stop reproaching herself for being a bad parent. She observes in one of her journal entries: “Once a mother, always a mother” (118). This represents a kind of curse, in that Alice can’t stop being a mother even after the death of her child. She is haunted by the vision of Jenna’s murder and her inability to prevent it.

The longevity of elephant memory contrasts sharply with issues of forgetfulness. Alice can’t entirely remember what happened on the night Nevvie died. She recovers consciousness in a pond, finding herself covered in blood. She sees that Nevvie has died but doesn’t know if the woman struck her head on a rock or if Alice killed her. Later, Alice again loses consciousness and wakes up in a hospital room. The details of the most traumatic night of her life are either vague or absent.