The Darling Read Online Free Page B

at flight than I that if a person, especially a woman, travels in fear, she is never safe. So if you’re afraid, don’t move. Freeze. Disappear into the scenery. You’ll only attract attention to yourself by running.
    Despite my plan, however—which was like a long-faded path through the jungle, nearly overgrown now, with only a few landmarks still recognizable—and despite there being an ostensible goal, a consciously chosen destination that I’d imagined lying at the end of the path, it felt as if I were being mysteriously drawn towards that goal by a magnet, and that the pull was generated out there, in Liberia. Not here, inside me. I was being reeled in. I could say, and had, that I was going out to Liberia to learn what happened to my sons after I left the country those many long years ago and, if possible, to bring them back with me to the States; I could say, and had, that I was going out there to honor my husband’s memory somehow, a private, solitary thing I had to do. I could say that I was going to try to learn what happened to my friends and my husband’s family. I had said these things any number of times—to Anthea, to the other girls at the farm, to the few good citizens of Keene Valley whom I counted as friends. And to myself. I said them especially to myself. All the way across the Atlantic to Abidjan, then in the bush taxi to the border between Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia, and down to the coast from Nimba in the back of the truck, I kept naming my reasons for coming there.
    And I will tell you something that at the time made me ashamed, although now it makes a kind of sense. Not moral sense, but psychological, emotional sense. From the beginning, from the day that I decided to leave my farm and return there, I did not once picture my husband Woodrow’s dark, perpetually somber face in my mind; nor did I see the faces of the boys, little Dillon, my crackling smart, hyperactive one, or angelic Paul, my peacemaker, or William, as somber as his father. They were my family—the only husband I have ever had and probably ever will, and my missing sons, my only children, for I know that I will never bear another. I am too old. Old and dried up, a husk of a woman. So they are not just the family of my past; they are the family of my future as well. But it was as if they had become names only. I have their photographs in frames on the sideboard in my living room at the farm, all four faces gazing at me, and another set is on my bedroom dresser. Yet once I had actually departed from the farm and driven in my Honda along the lane to the road and headed down the Northway from the Adirondacks to New York City, once I was on my way to Africa again, I did not, I could not, I would not see their faces. No, the truth is I saw only the faces of my chimpanzees.
    On a deep—perhaps the most basic—level, my chimpanzees were drawing me back. Not my husband’s memory, not my sons. My chimpanzees. And during that long night coming down the half-destroyed road from Nimba to Monrovia, enduring the pronged heat under the canvas tarp as if I were inside a covered, black, cast-iron pot baking in an oven, I lay there and remembered the creatures that I had abandoned, my chimpanzees. I did not remember my husband or my sons or our life together. I remembered only those poor, confused creatures whom I had nurtured and protected for so long, the innocents for whom I had been willing to give my life—or so I had believed.
    In the early days, when I first set up the sanctuary, I cared mainly for the babies, newborns and infants. I had two helpers more experienced with chimps than I. They took care of the older, more demanding and sometimes dangerous chimps, who often arrived at the sanctuary traumatized by abuse and from afar, found stuffed into packing crates at JFK or LAX or in birdcages or cat carriers on their way to an even more abused life and a mercifully early death in a pharmaceutical laboratory in Vienna or New