Hummingbird Salamander(30)

I think now, so late, too late, of the neighbor’s lawn service, using leaf blowers to release herbicide all over their lovely roses. How all of that invisible death didn’t disappear into the air. How it coated us, all of us, and that holding pond. How it masked us from ourselves. How it shone through us and we didn’t even know it.

Soon, my illness would get worse. I would notice what Silvina had noticed as a young person: how many dead things haunt us in our daily lives.

“As purses, handbags, shoes—even as heads on walls. Or as roadkill, unless it’s a fox or something we haven’t seen a hundred times before. The mind renders them as setting. But now I saw them everywhere—an ongoing, everyday exhibit of dead animals and their parts. A horror show. A vast extermination of lives and minds.”

Does analysis colonize you? Subject matter become the subject. Truth or cult.

As my illness progressed, over time, I would see also the complexity of what we took for granted in our landscapes and hidden lines of connection would attach to me until moving through the world was like being wrapped in chains. But it was the links, the chains, that made you free. Once you saw it all, you could never go back. Everything was alive. Overwhelming. I was overwhelmed eventually. Overcome.

Silvina wrote that even through the poisoned landscape, we must love it. We must love what has been damaged, because everything has been damaged. And to love the damage is to know you care about that world. That you’re still alive. That the world is alive.

How did I not see the damage for so long?





[36]


Husband and daughter—glad to see me, in their separate ways. Husband with the long, all-encompassing hug. Daughter with a wave from the kitchen, where she was having breakfast cereal for early dinner, some weird perk of it being a school holiday or a lenient dad. The relatives had left in my absence. The house had a reassuring silence to it. I could find almost no trace of their former presence.

“Held down the fort?” I said.

“Fortress secure,” he replied, hands on my shoulders as he regarded me closely, as if looking for contamination. Had I slept with anyone? I felt a pang of guilt. That I could never stop that thought in him.

“Glad to be back,” I said.

“Conference good?”

“Boring. I went to bed early both nights.” Which was true, as far as it went. Still drunk, trying to hide it with breath mints and a considered precision to my movements.

“Got some good intel?”

That word again, like a trap.

I shrugged, taking off my shoes. “Nothing earth-shattering. The usual.” I had Silvina’s apartment, 3215 Avalon Boulevard, burning a hole in my head, distracting me. Tomorrow I would investigate. The office wouldn’t expect me in right away.

He followed me up to the bedroom, helping me with the suitcase, even though he knew I liked to carry it up the stairs, just to feel it in my calves.

As I was unpacking, he turned to me and said, “Listen, there’s something I have to show you.” The tone felt urgent, even if I was already on alert.

I stood up from the dresser drawers, from that family heirloom from the farm that smelled of people and places I’d deserted or had deserted me. With, I realized, an almost pathological number of photos of me, my daughter, my husband. To erase it.

“Can it wait until tomorrow?”

“It won’t take long. Out in the yard.”

“I heard you were thinking about a fence. And doing yardwork or something.”

I said it like he’d been thinking about building a hill out of mashed potatoes in our living room. But it’s true it was unlike him. For some reason, he had always treated landscaping like bringing his work home with him.

“Yes. To a fence,” he said. He wasn’t smiling.

There it was, at the fringe, evidence that wasn’t a phantom SUV or a sullen Fusk. In that wooded corridor between our house and our neighbor, haunted by the ghosts of garter snakes, rabbits, and deer. It was a quiet place, I’d always thought. Too silent for a wood. No thought for why. Now the stillness deepened.

“See why I brought you?” my husband said.

“I understand,” I said. The last of the energy I’d brought from the plane dissipated into the ground. Even if it had been a kind of poison in me. A dizziness in the gathering dusk, some nausea.

A flattened patch of earth, the grass yellowing. Behind a large oak tree. Perfect vantage to surveil the house. A sin gle cigarette butt. A beer bottle, Belgian import, that might not have been related. A couple shoe prints in soft dirt. Deep imprints. Someone was very large or had stood there a long time. A tree branch had been snapped off and shoved into the ground. Boredom? A message?

“Drifter,” I said.

“Drifter?” my husband echoed, incredulous. “Did you just say ‘drifter’ like we’re in a fucking western or something? A ‘drifter’ in suburbia.”

He didn’t swear at all unless intensely upset.

“When did you notice this?”

“I don’t remember—a couple days ago. But from those shoe prints overlapping, he could’ve come back since.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“Didn’t want to bother you.” Hands in his pockets, staring at the ground like a kid.

“And yet it bothers you so much I’m on the receiving end of … whatever this is.”