The Evolution of Love

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  Then Lily had changed her mind.

  “Let’s start thinking of alternatives,” she’d said that night a few months ago.

  “We’re fine as we are. Sometimes you just have to accept circumstances. You’re barren. Or whatever.”

  “What?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Barren?” A word from a different century. It was almost as if he wanted to escalate a fight. “The doctor never said it was me.”

  “Okay. Fine. My point is, it’s done.”

  “Nothing is ‘done.’ We’re only thirty-three.”

  “Why can’t we just move on?”

  “Yes! Move on to other ideas. I’ve been thinking about adopting,” Lily had said.

  “We’ve talked about this.”

  “There are so many children who need homes.”

  “Out of the question.”

  “I like the idea.”

  “Think, Lil. Imagine the problems. Illnesses. Behavior issues. No. Absolutely not. I want my own children.”

  “They would be our own children. Ones we adopt.”

  “No.”

  “Can’t we even talk about it? I thought we wanted a family.”

  “I want my own family.”

  His position infuriated her. It encapsulated everything that made him increasingly intolerable to her: his inability to see outside himself. It wasn’t arrogance. It was a lack of imagination. He couldn’t see beyond Fair Oaks. Or, apparently, even beyond his own DNA.

  “I want children.” All the heartbreak of the past years of trying had stuck in her throat. “Yours, mine, ours. I don’t really care how we get them.”

  That was when he’d dropped what at the time seemed like a total non sequitur: “We’re just really different people.”

  “That’s brilliant. Yes, we’re different people. You’re a man and I’m a woman. I’m a gardener and you’re a locksmith. Yes, we’re different. And now we have a difference of opinion on adoption.” She’d lost control of her decibels.

  “I don’t even know you anymore.”

  The statement had stunned her. For one thing, it was a lie. They’d been friends since they were eleven years old and married since they were eighteen. He knew her. “What are you saying?”

  His face had briefly convulsed. She’d thought it was his sadness about children. He’d shook his head and forced himself to say, “I’m sorry.”

  Those two words, Lily had thought at the time, they were barren. Final. Empty. He hadn’t looked at her as he’d said them. Both of them were afraid to broach the topic again in the weeks that followed.

  She realized now, lying on Joyce’s couch, that that argument had contributed to her coming to California. The idea of stepping outside her own biology, outside her own niche, excited Lily. Putting her life on the line to help someone she loved felt essential. The years were ticking by. She couldn’t bear the thought that the only thing she’d ever contribute to humankind was planting a few ladies’ gardens.

  Lily’s mouth felt mossy and she realized she hadn’t brushed her teeth in about forty-eight hours. Joyce had water! She clicked on her flashlight and dug around in her pack for her toothbrush. She carried it to the kitchen and brushed her teeth for a long time. Then, as she tucked the toothbrush back into the pack, she saw her sweat-stained manila folder of letters from Travis. She pulled out his last one.

  6

  Dear Lily,

  I’m posting this from Kinshasa. I’ve left the sanctuary. I’m staying in a hotel and will go to the airport in the morning. All is lost. All. Except for this shell of a body I inhabit. We humans are hardwired to survive. At any cost. So I’m leaving. My entire future is my betrayal. I’ll return to Berkeley, the cushy university life. I’ll fold the sanctuary and Oscar and Malcolm and Rosa and Coral, all of them, into my subconscious where no doubt they’ll fester. But I’ll survive. I’ll be on that plane tomorrow morning.

  I won’t write you again. You were my hope. The holder of my message. Yeah, sure, some of the studies have been published and academia will mull the results. Others will do more research, if they can find any subjects to do it on.

  The truth is, evolution will continue without you. Without me. Even without the bonobos. God knows thousands of species have gone extinct. And anyway, I’ve begun to believe that the best thing that could happen, certainly for the planet, but maybe even for humanity, is our extinction. Or near extinction, anyway. We’ve made a mess of this planet. Maybe recovery is only possible without us.

  I want to tell you what happened, and I want to be truthful. Will you hold this last truth for me? There might come a day when I can face it, and myself, again. There might come a time when my failure could be used for some good. I can’t imagine how. But I’m guessing you can imagine it. Please do. Not for me. For them.

  Eight weeks ago, a wildlife trader had the gall to come right to the sanctuary gate. He had four bonobo babies with him. Four. He wanted 150,000 francs apiece, and he had a semiautomatic. His eyes were red and rheumy, and he was probably drunk. Yannick said call the police, and I started to do it, but Renée said no. The man had arrived in a Jeep. The police wouldn’t get here in time to arrest him. Anyway, he said he would shoot all four bonobos if we called the police. I believed him. He lodged the gun against one of the juvenile’s heads. With his other hand he gestured furiously for us to fork over the cash.

  I don’t know how it came to this. Maybe twenty years ago, yes. This kind of thing was standard. But Renée has worked tirelessly to build a relationship with the local officials, including the police, and pretty much single-handedly drove the wildlife market underground. It never went away, we knew that, but they didn’t dare bring the bonobos to the open market anymore. It was a big win. It meant we could set up stings, and we did, successfully, many times, sending an undercover official to pick up a bonobo for sale and make the arrest. Maybe that was the problem: it’d happened too many times. This trader decided to change tactics. He was asking for so little money. In the past, traders had gotten much more for the babies.

  Lily, I’ve written you the deepest truths I know. If people are hungry, they are desperate. They will eat even a creature that is damn near identical to their own species. I know that. I have learned not to judge. People are hungry. For food. For justice. And I am an outsider, a big blond healthy one. What right do I have to protect the resources of the Congo? Why should someone who has known only war and hunger listen to me when I try to tell them that bonobos might be our last chance out of human misery?

  You also know that’s what I believe. The bonobos are the key to our understanding of the possibility, the human possibility, for compassion and altruism. These cousins of ours exist only here in the Congo Basin and they’re disappearing. The ugly truth is that I did feel like a hero. I believed so passionately, so desperately in these sweet creatures, our link to them, that I thought protecting them was the only worthy work on this planet. I believe that still. I do. And I have failed.

  The four little ones with the trader were emaciated. Nearly hairless. Their ribs and elbows and knees stretching the skin. Yannick started to walk back up to the bungalows to get water and food for them, but the trader shouted for him to stay. Yannick shook his head with disgust. As usual, Renée focused on the bonobos. She sat down on the dusty road in front of our gate, her legs sprawled, and held out her arms. All four. All four, Lily, rushed to her. They threw their withered little arms around her neck and waist and thighs, anything they could grab onto, and just held on for dear life. She stroked their heads, cooed soothing words to them, let them nearly strangle her with their fear.

  I was so relieved. She wouldn’t let them down. Not Renée. She’d spent her whole life protecting their brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers. Renée would find a way.

  I crouched and eased one away from her. The little girl threw her arms aroun
d my neck and held back her head to make eye contact. Such beautiful, grieving eyes. Her skin, though wrinkled from malnutrition, was nonetheless satiny. They were all too sad to even scream their anxiety.

  We would bottle-feed them rich milk as we had so many others. I would peel mangoes and bananas for them. Yannick would treat their diseases. They would grow glossy coats and fatten up. Trust would be difficult for them—it always was for the orphans taken from the forest—and some would never learn it. But some would. Renée was a miracle worker.

  She wiggled her face clear of baby bonobo arms. She looked up at the trader who now pointed his semiautomatic straight at her head. The foolish trader didn’t know that she’d rather he shoot her than the bonobos.

  She said, “We don’t buy bonobos. They’re protected. But we’ll feed and nurture these four. Yannick is our vet and he’ll make sure they get any medicines they need. Thank you for bringing them.”

  The man snorted. “Not possible,” he said, of course in French. “I’ve traveled a long way with them. I had to feed them and give them places to sleep. I protected them from bad men who would steal and sell them. Rescuing them has been very expensive.”

  “No,” Renée said, struggling to her feet and standing in front of the babies who still clung to her legs. “I’ll ask you to please leave now.”

  He took three steps forward and held the gun to the head of the closest bonobo. His hands were shaking. I don’t know from what. Fear? Alcohol? The ruins of his life? The ruins of his life. I saw then that he wanted the cash and if he didn’t get it, he didn’t really care what happened next. I knew he would pull that trigger, not once but four times.

  I had 250,000 francs in my wallet. Renée knew this because she’d sent me the day before to fetch the money. We had a couple of builders coming to help us expand the nursery, and they wanted to be paid in cash. I made eye contact with Renée and placed my hand over the bulge of my wallet in my back pocket. She understood and held my eyes with her own. For too long. The trader saw.

  I know that Renée wouldn’t have initiated the transaction. Raised in the Congo, not a hundred miles from here, she’d staked her entire life, every penny she’d ever owned, the respect of her parents who thought she should go to medical or law school, on this sanctuary. Day in and day out, she’d used her local connections and her black skin—she wasn’t just another do-gooder from the outside telling people what to do with their land and resources—to convince her fellow Congolese of the urgency in saving the bonobos. Her techniques have been brilliant and based on a degree of patience I will never possess. She has always said, “I will change one heart at a time.”

  I take full responsibility for what happened. I’m the one who touched my wallet. I asked the question. I allowed the possibility to be viewed by the trader.

  But I’ll never know why, after all these years of holding her ground against all forms of bribery and corruption and flat-out threats, Renée nodded at me. Did she nod at me? I thought she did. So I pulled the wallet from my pocket.

  I handed the money to the man. He snatched it and jumped in his Jeep. The tires spat gravel and dust as he sped out of there, and we knew he’d be long gone before the police arrived, even if we called them.

  Renée closed her eyes for a long cooling-off period as we listened to the Jeep skid away into the bush. When she opened them again, I saw her anger. She’s been my boss for over twenty years, but I’ve never seen rage like that. She had always converted her rage into love. I don’t know how a person does this. And I only know now why she finally failed, this time, at doing it. Renée saw further into the future than I did, she always could, and no amount of love was going to stop what I’d set in motion.

  But at the time I thought she was just being human, giving in to righteous anger, and I was glad, I have to admit, to see her give in to it. Her control drives me nuts. Her ability to apply reason and rationality to emotional issues, to love, over and over and over again. I was glad to see her succumb to anger.

  But she didn’t succumb exactly. Of course not. She shook her head hard, just once, as if she could flick the anger into the forest, and then she turned to the terrified orphans who were now finally screaming their fear. I helped her calm them, and then we walked them up to the bungalows. One collapsed on the path, too weak to walk, and I had to pick her up.

  Yannick walked up the trail behind us, and he said in a low voice to me, “You asshole. You idiot.” I ignored him. We had saved four bonobos, and Renée had agreed on our course of action. Yannick and I have had our conflicts for years. This was no time to hash anything out. We had four babies who needed our immediate attention.

  The weak one died that night. A second one died forty-eight hours later. The other two survived.

  A week later, the trader was back. He had two more with him this time. I had no cash in my wallet and he shot them both in the heads. He flung the bodies in the back of his Jeep. He said he’d be back in two days time and we were to have cash on hand for the product he brought. He said a million francs a head wasn’t the suggested price, it was the required one.

  Yannick said the whole thing was my fault, that I’d always been a liability, that I couldn’t be trusted to understand long-term strategy. He said they needed to cut me loose. I saw Renée consider this. She paused too long before she shook her head.

  Renée went to town and planned with the police. They came out and set up an ambush. They waited for three weeks. The trader didn’t come back. Maybe he’d paid the police off. Maybe he had spies watching from the forest. I don’t know. But we eventually let down our guards. The police couldn’t stay out at the sanctuary indefinitely and they left.

  An emissary of the trader came on foot. He tried to bargain, tried to pretend he was on our side. He said he was helping save the bonobos and only needed funding for doing so. He said we could buy the last of the species from him or let the poachers finish the apes off.

  With my 250,000 francs, I’d shot a hole straight through Renée’s years of meticulous consistency. We had been winning the battle. The communities surrounding the sanctuary had come to understand the importance of protecting our sister species. The police were helping, for the most part, to catch and prosecute poachers and traders. There was still an underground market, people still ate bonobo steak, and foreigners still bought the animals for pets. But we’d slowed the leak. We were winning.

  I had to try to correct my mistake. I started searching the forests for signs of poachers’ camps. I walked to the village, too, and questioned everyone about illegal sales. When Renée found out about my activities, she asked me to stop. She said I was making things worse.

  When some locals told me that for a fee they could tell me where the trader lived, I paid them. The man was arrested. I felt vindicated. Renée kissed me that night, on the cheek, and said, “Thank you.” Looking back, I see the sadness in her eyes, the loss, the knowledge, and realize now that it was a kiss of forgiveness. Yannick, who lived in the village with his wife and children, who had walked to work and back every morning for nearly as many years as I had been at the sanctuary, quit.

  A few nights later, at three in the morning, our chain-link fences were cut with wire cutters. Axes were used to break down the bungalow doors. That woke us, of course, the sound of splitting wood, and Renée and I raced down to the bonobos in time to witness the massacre. The masked men shot every last one in the head. A complete slaughter.

  I wanted them to shoot me, too. I wrestled with one of the masked men, hoping he would. But they were smart. They knew leaving me and Renée to live was a better form of torture.

  Love is slow work. It’s meticulous work. It’s holding out against evil.

  I don’t have it in me to love. I see that now.

  Sincerely yours,

  Travis

  7

  In his first letter, twenty years ago, Travis had explained all about the b
onobos. He’d written that hope for humanity was dependent upon our understanding of this dwindling species. Thrillingly, he’d told her that she, Lily Jones, had a role to play. It was people like her—“an ordinary girl from Nebraska with no particular passions”—who would change the world. Or not.

  She’d read that letter maybe a hundred times. Her understanding of his meaning, as well as her response to that meaning, kept changing over the years. At first, at that age when she was just stepping beyond girlhood, she felt seen. Growing up in Vicky’s shadow, she’d never considered the possibility that being ordinary could be a good thing. Already five feet eight inches tall, gangly and gawky, wanting bright blue rather than gray eyes, plump lips rather than thin ones, a pert rather than Roman nose, the idea that she might have a role in world transformation, that her very ordinariness could be useful, riveted her. She wolfed down every word, phrase, sentence, paragraph of Travis’s. She wanted to hear more, much more.

  Later, in her early twenties, she felt not seen. Yes, she was ordinary, she embraced ordinary, married Tom for ordinary, and yet she did have strong feelings. Particular passions. She wrote to Travis about them. She wanted him to know what she loved. Sometimes she resented the way he seemed to want to use her as a blank canvas for his ideas.

  Then, a few years ago, she let go of worrying about how he saw her. What did it matter? He was a few thousand miles away. She loved his dedication to an ape in the Congo. She admired his gigantic life. Sure, he could be self-involved, but Travis was a window to the world beyond, and Lily had gazed and gazed and gazed.

  How strange to think that he too might now be in Berkeley, California.

  Of course, Tom had known about Travis from the very beginning. He’d also been in Mrs. Saunderson’s eighth-grade Language Arts class when she’d made the assignment to find an interesting pen pal. Tom had written a few letters to a professional baseball player who’d never written back. He called Travis “the monkey guy,” even though Lily had explained to him dozens of times that bonobos were apes, not monkeys.