Within five years, I was filming in Kenya and Tanzania. I have traveled to more than forty-five countries and filmed more than two hundred wildlife documentaries. I have honorary degrees from four universities. I have dined with politicians and royalty, and I have lobbied before the U.S. Congress, the British Parliament, and the United Nations.
But my biggest regret has always been Rebecca.
She stayed in the Peace Corps. After I left, she remained in Buru for another three years before transferring to Timor. After two years working in a hospital there, she took a yearlong sabbatical and went home to Kentucky. We were going to meet one time during that year, but duty called and I was forced to cancel my trip home. After that, she went back to the Peace Corps, and her last assignment was in Burma, helping to establish a new medical facility in the town of Kyaukme, about seventy-five miles east of Mandalay.
We stayed in contact with letters, and occasionally by phone, but as old friends tend to do we corresponded less and less as the years wore on. When I got the telegram on that tranquil Tanzanian night, it had been nearly a year since I’d last heard from her.
How would our lives have been different, I wonder, if I had gone with my heart instead of thinking only of my career? I might never have become a well-respected zoologist and filmmaker, but she might also still be alive today. In a way, I suppose, my ambition is to blame for her death. Without it, we might have forged a life together somewhere else, somewhere different, in a faraway place where Rebecca would still be alive and I could still hold her hand and feel the warmth of her breath on my cheek.
She died on a lonely night, in a lonely bed inside the very hospital she had helped establish in Kyaukme. A single nurse was by her side when she passed from the land of the living, holding her hand as she made the terrifying journey through death’s dark threshold. Rebecca had fallen victim to an illness that had run rampant for three months through much of rural eastern Burma. She had treated dozens of patients for the same malady and had finally succumbed to it herself. I don’t even know what it was. I’m not sure I want to know. What entity could stop the whirlwind of life, love, and passion that was Rebecca Marks? She’d had such vigor, such vitality. Such fire. It seemed brutally unfair that such a person could be ended when there was still so much life left to live and so much love left to be given.
The morning after receiving my mother’s telegram, I left our camp in the Serengeti and was in Dar Es Salaam by the afternoon. From there, I caught a flight to Cairo, then London, Boston, and finally Lexington. Within forty-eight hours of hearing of her death, I was standing inside her parents’ kitchen in central Kentucky.
The house was at the center of a small farm in northern Fayette County. It was within the city limits, but you would never have known. Green hills rolled away in every direction, and only at night did the city seem close, glowing on the southern horizon.
“She left this for you,” her father said to me, handing me an envelope. I’d only been there about five minutes.
I took the envelope, turned it over in my hands. It was plain, with only my name written on the front. “She left it for me?”
Her father shrugged, his eyes tired, rimmed in red. “She knew she had a dangerous job,” he said. “She was nothing if not a realist.”
I nodded. That much was true. She used to tell me she’d probably give her life for her work someday. She was at peace with that, I think. “How old is this letter?”
“The last time she was home – oh, it’s been almost a year and a half now – she told us she had some things for us to give out if she died. Her own version of a will, I guess. It was just a shoebox full of letters.” He sat down and sighed, the weight of his grief evident in his bowed back. “She said not to open any of them until after the funeral.”
My God, I thought. Had she expected to die? I looked at the plain, white envelope in my hand again. There was a piece of paper inside. Folded notebook paper. I slid the envelope in my jacket pocket.
The funeral was unbearable. I couldn’t bring myself to look at her. I stayed in the back, with barely a glance at the opened casket. They buried her in a small cemetery near her parents’ home, next to a lake where she’d loved to swim as a girl.
When it was all over, I hugged her parents and promised to stay in touch. I left on a plane three hours later and was back in Tanzania within a matter of days.
Looking back on it, I don’t know why I didn’t open the letter right away. I think I was scared. Scared of how I might react, hearing her speak to me from the grave. I fully expected it to be a heart-rending manifesto, telling me of her deep love for me and how our two years together were the best days of her life.
Turns out, it wasn’t that at all.
A week after arriving back in Tanzania I finally opened the letter. I was sitting in my tent late at night, an oil lamp burning on my makeshift desk. The rains were coming, and the flap on my window whipped and ruffled in the African wind. I slit the envelope with a knife and eased the letter out. Holding it up to the light, I read the single phrase: Dear Jake, I hereby bequeath to you my house in Scott County, Kentucky.
That was all it said. No hello, no goodbye, no painful memories, no tear-stained words. Just a simple statement in legalese. I must have stared at it for an hour. It was her handwriting alright, but it wasn’t her. It wasn’t the vibrant, life-loving creature that I had known. It was a cold, lifeless phrase, as though she’d already been dead when she had written it.
I was confused and perplexed. Why would she leave me her house, one which we had never been inside together, and one which she herself had only lived in on rare occasions? I wasn’t even sure exactly where it was. To the best of my knowledge, it was just an old place out in the countryside between Lexington and Cincinnati, a place that had been mostly empty for the fifteen years Rebecca had owned it. And why would she tell me about it like this? With an impersonal letter, written with unnecessary formality, and hand-delivered by her father with instructions not to read it until after her funeral?
It was a mystery, but one which I intended to pursue further.
It took a while, and I had to postpone the start of a new documentary, but I finally made it back to Kentucky. I had decided to take some time off. I would move into Rebecca’s house as she had wished, and take time to reflect on everything.
There was a lot of legal wrangling, of course. In addition to her letters, Rebecca had drawn up a formal will, but it took some time for her home and property in Scott County to be officially turned over to my name. Once the lawyers had had their say, I loaded my belongings into the back of my Land Rover and drove north out of Lexington, following a map supplied to me by Rebecca’s parents.
Throughout the legal process, I had never seen the home. I wanted my first visit there to be special and intimate. I wanted to be able to go inside, sit down, spread out, take in the atmosphere. I didn’t want a lawyer standing over my shoulder appraising anything or shoving any documents into my hands.
It was a warm Saturday evening in May, and I drove through Georgetown, past the little college there and all the quaint shops along Main Street. Within minutes, the town was past and I was in the countryside, the setting sun casting long, gilded rays across the rolling bluegrass hills. Horses and cattle grazed in the wide-open fields, and sycamore trees overhung pre-Civil War stone fences, colored brown and green with time.
Following the map, I turned off the main road and found myself on a tree-lined lane, barely wide enough for two cars to pass. It wound through thickening woods, over hills and streams, deep into the countryside. I made another turn and came around a wide bend, passing an old barn with a caved-in roof, a disheveled sentry watching over an abandoned field blue with cornflower. I found the dirt road indicated on the map as Rebecca’s driveway. It cut back through an area that was mostly wooded, running for nearly a mile before opening into a clearing.
I rolled
to a stop before the house.
It was vast: a gothic, antebellum home with a watchtower in the center and rows of windows spreading to the left and right. The landscaping was in need of attention and the grass was thick and full of weeds, but the home and grounds seemed otherwise in good repair. It sat on roughly an acre of cleared land, hemmed in on all sides by trees, completely secluded.
I stepped out of my Land Rover and stood listening. Sounds of nature emanated all around me, undisturbed by artificial noise: I heard only the buzz of insects, the call of birds, the wind in the trees. I might as well have been back in the Serengeti.
The place was peaceful and serene if not a little creepy. Dusk was just settling in the sky overhead and the house seemed dark and mournful and forlorn, as if it knew that Rebecca was never coming back. It didn’t seem happy that I was there.
Digging the key out of my pocket, I walked up the porch stairs and unlocked the door. Pushing it open, I stepped inside the foyer. Hardwood floors spread out in all directions and a staircase wound up into the watchtower overhead. The house was still furnished with Rebecca’s things: the furniture she’d gathered in her lifetime, all the trinkets she couldn’t take with her to the far corners of the earth. Despite the