The Evolution of Love

by Lucy Jane Bledsoe

  He painted circles around her breasts. She was afraid to bat away his hands.

  “I need to see my sister.” It was stupid to have let her phone die.

  “First tell me you love me.” Then he laughed, as if he were joking, and sat beside her. He dabbed himself with mud as he spoke. “Okay. There’s a small rogue Cluster that’s been living just up the hill, at Lake Anza. They’re totally disorganized, barely squeaking by. The people are hungry, some quite ill. I wanted to do something for them. They have something I need: a location where we can set up our tech center. Reception down here in the canyon is for shit. So I’m organizing Lake Anza as an electronics hub. Vicky’s setting it up for us. She’s rigging solar panels, engineering internet capability, everything. I’ve deployed a team of builders to put together a secure bunker for the equipment and they’re almost finished.”

  “She’s there now?”

  “Let’s go get you set up in your tent. Then I’ll take you over there.”

  Lily jumped up and dove back into the reservoir. She washed her face, arms, legs, and also between her legs. She swished her wounded hand back and forth vigorously. She floated on her back and scrubbed her scalp. Then she swam to shore and dressed. Travis sat quietly, nakedly, arms crossed on his raised knees, watching her.

  “There’s no hurry,” he said. “Look. I’m sorry I pressured you. I’m just worn a little thin right now.”

  She stood in front of the mud-painted man. “I know where Lake Anza is. I can go on my own.”

  “No problem. Dinner is at six. We can do your tent then.”

  Lily stared at Travis for a long moment. She wanted, more than anything, to shout, No. He would not see her later. She did not love him. She was no longer thirteen years old, nor fifteen years old, nor even twenty-two years old. She was thirty-three years old and her husband was leaving her for a woman with whom he was having a baby. She needed her sister.

  But she was afraid to say no, even to make sudden movements, afraid what she might trigger. Instead she backed away and forced herself to say, “Great. Good. I’ll see you then.” She touched her fingers to her lips—oh, she’d never been this calculating, this disingenuous—and blew a kiss his way.

  Lily found her bicycle still propped against the guard’s kiosk. She pedaled off fast, under the blazing midafternoon sun, before the guard or Travis could detain her. She rode back along the reservoir and then up Wildcat Canyon Road until she came to the turnoff. She soared down the same hill she’d ridden in the wheeled kayak.

  Lake Anza looked just as deserted as it had a couple of weeks ago. She walked along the spillway and then hid her bicycle next to the kayak, still nestled deep in the undergrowth on the far side of the lake. She climbed the embankment where she’d seen the little long-haired boy go, following a faint path up into the woods.

  Lily found the camp in a small clearing about two hundred yards from the lake. Three women tended a fire burning inside a ring of rocks. They’d placed a storm grate across the rocks, and several steaks sizzled on the hot metal. The women fanned the smoke to diffuse it before it reached the sky. Two men worked at a rustic table made of rough-hewn planks, one slicing apples into wedges, the other chopping onions, cabbages, and carrots. Lily recognized the makings of their meal: these were the same foods at Travis’s camp. Five children raced around the trampled grasses, chasing each other and swatting the ground with willow whips, behaving exactly like children except for the absence of squealing and laughter. The hot midday air held everything—people, food, vegetation—in a tense stasis.

  Two of the women gasped at the sight of the stranger. The man chopping onions swung around with the knife in his hand. They all looked haunted, hungry, and ill.

  “I’m looking for my sister Vicky.”

  “Your sister?” one of the women said.

  “I heard she’s working here.”

  The men shared glances. One shrugged angrily and turned back to his apple slicing. The other said to the women, “We need to leave. Now.”

  All three women looked at the children who’d stopped their play and stood in a huddle, the oldest one standing behind the others, her arms draped around as many little bodies as she could fit in her embrace. Lily read the whole situation: the children were hungry; Travis provided steaks and vegetables; the mothers wanted to stay.

  Then Lily saw the giant live oak tree, with its curling dark branches and full canopy of green leaves, growing just beyond the far side of the clearing. Vicky’s bubble chair hung from a horizontal limb. The clear globe of plastic with the silver cushion inside, the original Eero Aarnio, swayed back and forth.

  Lily raised her voice. “Where’s Vicky?”

  “Not so loud,” the apple man said. “You have to leave. This is a private camp.”

  “She’s my sister. I need to find her.”

  “She’s not here.”

  “We got to get out of here,” the onion man said to the rest of the group. “We have no idea what we’ve gotten into. We don’t know who these people are. Winnie? Darlene? I’m serious. Let’s take the kids and go.”

  “And go where?” one of the women said in a flat voice.

  “Bring me a plate,” said another mother. “These steaks are ready.”

  It was already four thirty by the time Lily got to town, but she went to the library instead of the church. She needed to charge her phone and locate Vicky. Kalisha would have to manage without her today.

  After plugging in her phone, Lily went directly to the reference desk.

  “Travis Grayson,” she told the same librarian who’d opened the library doors for the first time after the earthquake. “He’s with the university, but I don’t know which department. He’s been studying bonobos in the Congo for a couple of decades. I need anything you can find.”

  The young, spiky-haired information specialist nodded briskly, delighted by the fresh challenge, and announced her search attempts as she went. She started by checking university directories, both current and archival.

  “Nothing!” she said loudly. “But that means little. Especially if he’s been out of the country for so long. Hold on here. We’ll find Travis Grayson!” she ballyhooed, as if research were a bucking horse and she the rider. “It’s remarkable,” she said, eyes riveted on her computer screen and fingers rat-tat-tatting away on the keyboard, “what a deep Google search can find. The key is to not give up after a couple of screens.”

  It’s not as if Lily had never Googled him before. But he was in the freaking Congo, she’d told herself when nothing came up. People there didn’t tweet their every bowel movement like they did here.

  After ten minutes, Lily wanted the librarian to stop looking. She’d changed her mind about not showing up for work. The community room at Trinity would be full by now, and everyone would be eating. Kalisha would be angry. Or maybe even worried. She needed to get over to the church and apologize.

  “No, no, no. I’m not busy.” The reference warrior waved at the empty space behind Lily, indicating the lack of a line, and then attacked the keyboard anew, her eyelids flicking through webpages. “I just want to look at a few other sources. You said he teaches at UC, but so far he’s definitely not turning up in any professorial way in the last ten years.”

  “He’s been in the Congo,” Lily said impatiently, as if it were the librarian’s fault that Travis was unfindable. She imagined Tom shaking his head slowly, looking at her with pleasurable sympathy. Firmly, trying to close the case, Lily said, “Thank you. You’ve been really helpful.”

  It was too late to go to the church. Anyway, she needed to let her phone finish charging so she could call Vicky. She’d apologize to Kalisha and Ron tomorrow. She got in line for the computers. When her turn came up, she opened the website for the bonobo sanctuary. She’d looked here many times over the years. It was a minimal site, but Renée occasionally put up pictures of the ape
s, and every once in a while she posted news. Lily found a brief write-up about the raid, and though Renée provided few details, the general outline followed Travis’s account, so far as she could tell using her high school French.

  Lily clicked the contact link at the bottom of the site and wrote in English: “I’m considering hiring Travis Grayson. I understand he worked as a researcher at the sanctuary. Would you recommend him?”

  She looked up at the institutional clock on the library wall with its stark white face and practical black hands. Kalisha would be wiping down tables by now.

  A small aftershock shuddered through the building, rattling the windows and tables. Everyone looked up from their books and computers. A few stood, preparing to leave, but it was nothing—just a quick shake.

  Lily clicked through her old emails, reading the ones from Tom, including the one with the plane ticket information. Angelina must have gotten pregnant before Lily left Fair Oaks. If she’d stayed, would Tom ever have told her? Would Angelina ever have told him? Maybe she would have quietly moved to another town, far from Fair Oaks, to raise their child. Well, that was no longer necessary, although surely a woman like Angelina would insist on marriage.

  This last thought almost made her sorry for Tom. A sitting duck, he could be counted on to do the right thing.

  But no. Here was the most painful part of the whole deal: his tone of voice. She’d heard sadness, definitely, and anger. But she’d also detected an unmistakable substratum of happiness. He wanted Angelina. He wanted the baby.

  Not the sharpest knife in the drawer, he’d said when he first hired her. But he had never wanted sharp. He’d wanted a big pillow he could sink into, a place to bury his eyes and ears, blunt any pain life might bring. The thought of him smiling at her was unbearable. The thought of her gigundous and soon-to-be-lactating breasts made her sick.

  Lily thought of Van Gogh cutting off his ear and sending it to his ex. It didn’t seem crazy. It seemed like a reasonable response.

  She was about to close out her email program when a new message blinked in.

  Renée Ojukwu wrote just two sentences: “Travis Grayson worked as a groundskeeper at the sanctuary for twenty-one years. He is no longer with us.”

  It took five or six reads before she could comprehend the words on the screen. She rubbed her eyes, even tapped the monitor, as if the missing parts of Renée’s message would blink into place. Ridiculously, briefly, she wondered whether the words “groundskeeper” and “researcher” were interchangeable in the Congo.

  Lily shouldered her backpack, yanked her phone from the power strip, and stepped out into the evening light. She sat on the sidewalk pavement in front of the library, beside her locked bicycle. Her whole world pixilated, broke up into shattered pieces, and then tried to come back into focus, tried to find a new whole. But it wouldn’t come together. She pressed her palms against the warm concrete and leaned her head back against the spokes of her bike. Rock and metal, this was all she had now.

  Travis had lied about who he was for twenty years. Vicky had joined his anarchic Cluster. Tom was having a baby with a stupid woman five years his senior.

  She might have sat there for the rest of the night, stunned by the betrayals, if it weren’t for the spiky-haired librarian who bounded out the library door, crying, “Oh, thank god, you’re still here! I found him!”

  The woman crouched down in front of Lily waving a piece of paper. “Total fluke that I found this,” she said. “It’s from an article in a Kinshasa newspaper that someone translated and quoted on her blog. Listen.” She read a short description of the raid at the sanctuary, and then held up her forefinger for the crucial line. “‘Neither sanctuary director Renée Ojukwu’—I have no idea how to say that name. Anyway, ‘Neither sanctuary director Renée Ojukwu, nor groundskeeper Travis Grayson, the only two people present at the time of the raid, would comment on the attack.’”

  Lily looked at the crouching librarian’s face, glowing with excitement about her gold nugget of information. Then she looked over her own shoulder at the towering green stucco building, which contained all the wisdom people had amassed over the centuries so we wouldn’t have to start again from square one. This woman, this excited librarian squatted before her, spent her days searching for facts in that building. The contrast, between her tenacious dedication to truth and Travis’s lifetime of deception, made Lily want to laugh out loud. Or spit. Or scream. She stood up.

  “You okay?” the librarian asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “This has to be him,” she said cautiously, sensing more to the story than she knew but unable to let go of celebrating her research coup. “How many Travis Graysons work with bonobos in the Congo?”

  “That’s totally him,” Lily said. “It’s incredible that you found this. Thank you so much.”

  “Sure. No problem. But, I mean, it doesn’t really say where he is now. So, it’s pretty incomplete.”

  “Actually,” Lily said. “It’s exactly what I needed to know. Entirely and completely.”

  The librarian’s face slackened into cautious pleasure. “Well, take care. You know where the shelters are, right?”

  She assumed Lily was homeless. But of course she was homeless. There was no reason she shouldn’t also look it.

  “Thank you,” Lily said again and rolled her bike into the street.

  31

  Lily called Vicky from her hillside camp just as the first stars began showing in the sky. She did her best to disguise her own distress. “It’s me. Where are you?”

  “Travis told me you came by!”

  “I don’t want you working with him.” She realized she was holding her breath and let it out.

  “Excuse me? He’s been like your best thing for your entire life.”

  “He isn’t a university professor. He lied. He’s a little nuts.”

  “Who isn’t? Anyway, what we’re doing is really cool.”

  “What you’re doing is called being homeless.” Lily picked up a small stone and held it tight in her fist.

  “Look, Lil, maybe you need to go home to Tom. Maybe you need to just do that.”

  “I told you he’s with Angelina now.”

  “Like that’s going to last. Everyone makes mistakes. Forgive him. Get over it. Go home. You need each other. You were practically born married.”

  “They’re having a baby.” Lily threw the stone as far as she could. She heard a soft puh sound when it landed.

  “What?”

  “He’s happy about it. They really are together.”

  Vicky was quiet for a moment and then, “So. You’re with Travis. So.”

  “I’m not with Travis.”

  “That’s weird. He said you were.”

  “Please listen to me. He’s going off some deep end.”

  “We all are,” Vicky said cheerfully.

  “No, we’re not. I came out here to help you and—”

  “I’m not stupid, and I don’t need help.”

  The last thing Lily wanted was a fight with Vicky. “I never said you were stupid. You’re the smartest person I know. But I’ve been learning a lot more about Travis. He means well. I think. But he’s very skilled at roping people into his…his delusions.”

  “You think I don’t know how to read people. That I let people take advantage of me.”

  “You do.”

  “And you?”

  Touché. How desperate he must have been, defrauding a little girl, needing a stranger’s admiration so badly he built a fictional life. Maybe he actually believed he was a primate researcher and a university professor.

  “I think you should go home,” Vicky said again. “Things will snap into place once you get there.”

  That was such a Vicky thing to say: things will snap into place.

  “No.” Lily looked out into
the darkening expanse. Tom wanted the deep code in his own cells. Travis wanted someone to calm his desperation. “I’m not going back there. And I’m not with Travis.” She paused, trying to figure out how to articulate what she did want, her idea about the Hyena Cluster.

  “Okay. Well, cool. We agree about Nebraska, anyway. But don’t try to talk me out of this. I want to see if we can live off the grid, create our own network that responds directly to people’s needs. It’s an extraordinary opportunity. To build from scratch the perfect communications hub. I’m having a blast!”

  “Please be careful,” Lily whispered.

  “For crying out loud! I’m having fun!”

  “I love you,” Lily said. “I just want to say that.”

  32

  Walking down Telegraph Avenue had been Annie’s idea. She liked to steel her nerves. Sharpen her senses. Brave the worst.

  “I’d rather go over to the swings,” Binky said, reaching up to pet the head of the big orange kitten who rode on his shoulders.

  “We always go there.”

  “It’s fun.”

  “I want some gum,” she said, determined to stay their course.

  “We don’t even have any money,” Binky pouted, but he continued with her up Dwight Way.

  As they approached Telegraph Avenue, Annie’s skin prickled. There was a table set up at the intersection, run by some interfaith group who attempted to address youth needs. They called out as you went by, asking if you were hungry or wanted help getting home. Annie felt sorry for them. They were clueless. The kids who hung out on Telegraph Avenue maybe were hungry and maybe wanted to go home, but Annie doubted it. They were entrepreneurs. On this street you could buy anything. If you wanted something they didn’t have on hand, they could get it within twenty-four hours. Mostly, though, they had weed, dope, and meth.

  Annie and Binky turned left, ignoring the inquiries from the interfaith table, and started down Telegraph Avenue. It was stupid to have come here. Annie was scared. She was even breathing hard, and how fucked up was that? But the thing was, once they got to the end of the street, made it to the university, and turned left onto Bancroft, they’d be almost free. A few more blocks after that, and they’d be pretty much safe again. Or a hell of a lot safer, anyway. In the meantime, they’d be mentally tougher. Maybe they’d make a second go of it, right after.