Surveillance Operations and a Dead Hummingbird
Nearly every morning when I came downstairs—early, just not as early as Forrest—I’d find a note or a small, odd gift waiting for me.
It wasn’t just flowers now. One day a perfect, intact butterfly lay on the table by my bowl.
Another day it was a single clamshell with a rhinestone ring inside, the kind you get at one of those machines at the drugstore for fifty cents.
The best of all of them—not the type of thing everyone would have appreciated, but I did—was a tiny, perfect hummingbird.
He must have flown into the French doors on the patio and died on impact.
He was laid out on a piece of Kleenex, his beautiful iridescent wings folded against his little body.
As with every one of these morning offerings I’d been receiving, a piece of paper sat next to the bird’s body with the letter X on it.
I remembered reading somewhere that a hummingbird weighed roughly the same as a penny. Now I saw this was true.
These gifts baffled me. What did it mean that the same man who seemed to have utterly abandoned our precious friendship (precious to me, anyway), who now appeared so unaware of my presence, had taken the time to leave me these daily treasures?
And what kind of a jerk was I, to be spying on the same person who left the body of a beautiful (though dead) hummingbird next to my cereal bowl?
I had no answer to that one. I just knew that every morning when I woke up, I looked forward to finding another magical gift.
This was the reason I didn’t get up earlier.
I didn’t want to interrupt the moment when he set whatever odd thing it was he’d chosen to leave on the table for me that morning.
I was afraid that if Forrest and I met now, in the kitchen, in those early morning hours before he took off for his bike ride or his swim—on his way to see his lover—it might ruin the small, good thing that remained between us.
I’d rather eat my breakfast alone than risk losing that.
So I chose to lie in bed until the sun was up and I’d heard the sound of his bicycle tires going down the gravel driveway, or the French doors slamming shut as he closed them on his way down to the dock.
I made sure Forrest was gone before I descended the long staircase into the kitchen to see what he’d left for me. It wasn’t how things had been when we’d sat side by side in the breakfast nook, starting our day together. But along with tennis, this was the best part of every day.