Hummingbird Salamander(32)
Somehow, I wasn’t up for canvassing the neighbors just yet. Not over evidence so flimsy. I had to take it seriously, but how much energy should I put into it?
I came back to the oak. I stood there, behind the tree, and stared at my house. Tried to see it as an intruder might. A generic, usual house for an upper-middle-class family. A comfortable swing my daughter had used when she was younger, hanging off a far branch of the oak. A garden hose attached to a sprin kler. A nub of a deck with some molding plastic lawn furniture. That umbrella stand we rarely used.
Ah, Silvina, it was everything and it was nothing.
How the swing and the old tire in the yard became reduced to the stilted, broken shapes of skeletal animals as the dark leaked in. How the lights of the house made mockery of the curtains, so silhouettes came clear, like a shadow puppet play. There, on the second floor, even now: my bear husband in his study, pacing, still angry. There, my daughter’s room, and her sitting upright receiving the bright blue glow of her phone screen. The first floor: dull rectangles in which could be seen the kitchen table, the living room couch.
What would you learn about me while I wasn’t home? It wasn’t that cold, but I shivered. What was a watcher but a warning? Forget a deep character study. He wasn’t out there taking notes on habits, personalities.
But I struggled to visualize what he had been doing. What information was being pushed toward? Why was it important to have eyes on my house in this age of electronic surveillance? Visual verification? Of what?
Still grasping, gasping, vaguely drunk. I wanted an enemy I could grapple with, draw close, choke out.
I didn’t want to acknowledge that Langer might’ve been in my backyard. That might’ve taken me the rest of the way from defiant to scared.
The little bird drone watched me from a branch halfway up the oak. Noticing that came as a shock. My husband had been told it was security provided by the HOA. Later, I would ask to see the surveillance footage, be told a glitch had erased it. Meanwhile, it just sat there, a dull pewter jewel with blue plastic wings. Staring at me. Sharing in the mystery.
Imagine you’re all alone and out of nowhere someone starts talking to you. It might be from the past. It might be through a cigarette butt and a beer bottle, or a drone … or by aiming a gun at you.
But, no matter how, you’re receiving and you can’t stop receiving. Even when it becomes damage. Maybe you’re used to damage. Maybe the damage is what lures you in.
[39]
Routine would save us, my bear husband and his dandelion wife. Say good night to our daughter, bound by that love shining down from us into her. Our shared half-smiles at how she shrugged out of it, turned away, but still acknowledged and shared in it. How we looked at the posters of pop groups on her walls and the microscope on her desk and the old Girl Scout badges pinned to a corkboard. How we saw her four pairs of sneakers, but also how she didn’t waste time on jewelry or “accessories.” How she did sometimes use her phone under the covers after lights out, but the strict curfew she gave herself of an hour. So that by midnight she was safely asleep and away from a screen.
That she set her own routine even if sometimes her discipline lapsed in other areas. We knew when to pick her up from after-school events because she presented us with a weekly schedule. An art class. Chorus. Debate. How she could also be aloof and remote, and I would wonder where she was off in her thoughts and if I should worry. How she could be gruff in her demands: that she didn’t want to take the bus to a debate meet, wanted us to drive her, which was her way of saying she wanted us to be there. Then ignored us the whole time.
By these coordinates, we had set our lives.
By the coordinates, too, of my husband making the rounds of the downstairs, turning off lights, coming up to where I was already in bed with a book. His noisy ritual of brushing his teeth, putting on pajamas if it was cold. Of coming around to my side to give me a hug and then, ponderous, back to his side. And maybe we would cuddle later, but it was also okay to just be comfortable with another breathing, snoring human being.
All of these things happened as always the night I returned home from the conference. I could tell from the preciseness with which my husband went through the usual list that he meant to reassure me after our argument. So when he got into bed, I put my hand on his, reached over and kissed him, went back to my book.
It felt like it was going to be okay. Like I had kept my normal, everyday life. I remember I let out a deep breath and breathed in and was surprised by the surge of oxygen. Hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath, breathing shallow, waiting for the next surprise.
I’d run out of Silvina intel to read but couldn’t pick up the mystery novel I’d started before I’d left. I needed to feel like I was making progress. On the hummingbird. On Silvina. So I was reading Oddly Enough: From Animal Land to Furtown.
Strange that a book come into my possession by chance, bought to bribe, laid bare so much. But it did. The introduction gave me such pause, I read through it twice, then skipped to the illustrations and skimmed while I pondered it.
“Let it not seem queer to see us dressed alike, humans and animals. It does not appear queer when the genius of your fur science transforms us to look alike despite the different origins of our families. As representatives, part of our mission shall be to applaud that genius.”
Those words written by an Arthur Samet in the 1930s. There was no part of it I didn’t recoil from and yet nothing in it existed far from my father’s attitude making a living on the farm. This was just the extremist version—the one in which the animals enjoyed their slaughter. But no matter the complicity, we had slaughtered animals, too, for market. Not for decoration or fashion. And trappers had killed animals, often in cruel ways, for coats and other necessities in that often cold climate. So what, exactly, repulsed me?