I had to leave her, suddenly, and without explanation. I know it broke her heart. But I didn’t have a choice. There are people looking for me, and they are catching up fast. And, now, if I reach out to her, I risk my life, my freedom. I’ll be asked to pay a price that I’m not sure I’m willing to pay. The world is harsh and cruel, but without my freedom I will die. I can’t live in a cage.
So, my question is this, Dear Birdie. If I ask her to come to me, if I find a way to ask her to meet me, so that I can share myself with her, do you think that she would come? Or would she turn me in, open the door to the wolves waiting outside. Would she want to hear the awful things I have to tell her? Could she ever forgive me? Could she possibly still love me?
Whatever you tell me to do. I’ll do.
Sincerely,
Unforgiven
The words swim on the screen, and I’m shaking from deep inside. It’s you, Adam, it must be. Asking for my love, my forgiveness. And something else, you always knew I was Dear Birdie. All my layers, the ones I thought I’d hidden were exposed long ago. Buffeted by anger, sadness, fear, I answer now, my fingers quaking over the keyboard.
Dear Unforgiven,
We can never undo the things we’ve done. We can’t turn back time and right wrongs. All we can do is move forward wiser for our mistakes, vowing never to make the same mistakes again. We can make amends to those we’ve harmed. And we can face our punishment, if that’s what’s called for by the law.
If you love this woman, and she loves you, she deserves to know everything about you. Even the things that sound like they are very dark, maybe things she can never understand or accept. Still, if she has given herself to you and you have given yourself to her, there can only be honesty now. The truth is the only way forward. Otherwise, she’ll never really know you. And she’ll never have the chance to love you. Can I promise that she’ll accept you? Can I promise that she won’t force you to pay for your crimes? No. But if you don’t reach out to her, you’ll never know if the love you shared was real. And you will remain unforgiven.
Sincerely,
Dear Birdie
I send the letter and wait, refreshing the screen every few minutes.
No answer ever comes.
I drift off into a dreamless sleep.
When I awake, the sun is streaming through my window and my screen has gone dark. I touch the keypad, my heart racing.
But the inbox is empty.
There is however a text on my phone. Hey, it reads. I heard you were in town. Come see me. We need to talk.
twenty-eight
Then
Robin taught me how to track, how to follow signs, detect a game trail. How to determine if it had been a rabbit or a squirrel or a deer nibbling at the vegetation. How if you saw crows circling in the sky, there was likely a fresh kill—coyotes or less common wolves—and they were waiting their turn to pick the bones clean. The land spoke to her. And she was my translator. Or so it seemed to me at the time.
But it was my father who taught me how to hunt.
“Killing a thing,” my father told me, “is a sacred act.”
We’d been trekking through the woods for what seemed like hours, the vegetation thick, the crossbow heavy on my back. I was tired already, though the sun was just rising. And dread was thick in my throat. I was no hunter. I knew this, and I wondered how my father was going to feel about me when he figured it out.
“It’s nature’s way that we must kill to survive.”
Was that true? It sounded true but it didn’t feel right.
I’d seen enough nature shows—impalas felled by lions, seals taken by killer whales, bunnies carried off by eagles—to know that death was part of life. But animals act on instinct. They have no choice. Some animals kill to survive; others are born prey. Humans, supposedly, are elevated by their intelligence.
“Like war?” I asked quietly, knowing to keep my voice low.
My father looked back and down at me, eyes startled, deeply sad. “No,” he said. “Not like war at all.”
How is it different? I didn’t dare ask.
“When you kill an animal to feed yourself and your family, it’s part of an agreement you have with the planet.”
I didn’t say anything. There was only our breath, the sound of our movement through the woods. “Now, people take and take. They’ve taken too much. The bill will come due. And those of us who know how to survive when civilization crumbles will keep our contract with the planet. Take what you need to survive. Not more.”
I stayed quiet as we moved slowly on. The world we’d left behind had swiftly fallen away. Without phone or cable or internet, everything I knew and thought was real seemed as distant as a dream. Even the faces of my friends were fading.