Soon, the only sound is me. There’s no shadow ahead any longer. Whoever I was chasing is gone. Silence has settled all around, thick and eerie. Starlight makes its debut of the evening above. I stop, my breath hot and fast, a vein in my throat throbbing.
“Adam!” I call. My voice is desperate and wounded, an animal crying. No answer comes. “Why are you doing this?”
The final syllables are just a girlish shriek.
I’m sick from exertion. I hope I don’t puke. Breathe, breathe, breathe.
Is it you? Why would you follow me if you wanted to get away from me? Why would you stand on the edge of my life, then run when I came to you?
The obvious answer is: it wasn’t you.
It was no one, nothing. Like the form in the office window.
Like Robin.
I see the things I want to see.
A barred owl hoots, mocking, its rhythmic call sounding all the world like: Who looks for you? The forest and its residents, how they must laugh at us, all our folly of wanting and trying, wasting, and burning energy.
Or possibly some drifter. Or some freak who hangs around a cemetery, smoking over a dead stranger’s grave for kicks.
I touch a stinging spot on my face and pull back fingers wet with blood. I use the cuff of my shirt, sticking out of my jacket, to try to stop it. But it’s a bit of a gusher. The white of my shirtsleeve looks black in the dark. I press harder hoping to stave the flow, lean against the nearest tree and sink down, feeling its rough bark against my back. There’s something comforting and familiar about the tree, about even the wet, cold ground. Nature’s embrace, however cold, is a comfort. It’s where we belong, my father would surely say.
Here I begin to weep, a deep, ugly sadness welling up, a tsunami of emotion. Every loss evokes the loss that formed me. I know the slick walled abyss of losing someone, losing everyone, even myself. Which is maybe why you’re the first person I’ve risked loving in a long, long time.
Yes, I loved you. Still, I love you. It’s not a switch that gets turned off.
I let it all out, great heaving sobs. The flow becomes an eddy; I’m caught there awhile. Then it releases me. I breathe, feel cleansed as the sobs subside.
When my name echoes on the wind, at first I think it’s my imagination, just the call of a bird, or something carrying from far away as sometimes happens in the woods at night. Sound bounces around and winds up in all kinds of weird places.
“Wren! Wren Greenwood!”
Not the name I was given. But the name I gave myself. But maybe that makes it more real than the name my mother gave me. It’s the name of the person in the story I tell myself about myself. The girl who was born from ashes and formed herself from what remained.
“Wren Greenwood!”
The voice comes from the direction of the graveyard, back where I need to be, in the opposite direction of the person I was chasing. Who is it? Who knows I’m here?
“Wren Greenwood!”
It’s a stupid name. A name that a child would make up. Of course, that’s the truth of it. I was a child when I gave myself that name, cobbling together pieces of myself to make a patched-up whole. A rag doll stitched back together.
I pull myself to standing, spent emotionally and physically, and walk in the direction of the voice. The night has grown frigid, and after the heat of exertion I am shivering, sweat having dampened my clothes, my butt wet from sitting on the forest floor. I’m ready to go back to the inn and sleep. For a week.
A figure moves toward me, this one real, the white glow of a flashlight bobbing up and down. I turn to look back behind me in the direction where the dark form disappeared, but there’s no one, nothing.
When he calls my name again, he’s close enough that I can recognize his voice.
In the story of my life, I’m not often surprised. I’ve lived through too many twists and turns of my own, heard too many tales of woe from those reaching out to Dear Birdie. Sometimes I think I know people and the way of things too well. I ache for unpredictability.
But I am surprised when the man comes close and drops his light.
Bailey Kirk.
“What the hell?” I say, some uncomfortable combination of angry, embarrassed, and relieved. “Are you following me?”
“Are you hurt?” he asks. He touches his own cheek, in empathy for the lash he must see on mine. “You’re bleeding.”
His voice is soft, a little breathless from the trek out here. He shines the light in my direction, and I shield my eyes, must be a wreck—face bleeding, leaves in my hair, jeans dirty at the knees.
Yes, I want to tell him. I’m hurt in about a hundred different ways.