Hummingbird Salamander(4)
The distance across the counter widened, and the silence grew unbearable. Who was “Silvina”? And why had she given me a hummingbird? And where was the salamander? Because the salamander felt personal. As if this woman I didn’t know had done her research and understood the salamander didn’t need to be there, in the storage unit. That just the word could awaken a recognition or impulse.
Some things remain mysterious even if you think about them all the time.
Salamanders. Hiding under logs and river stones. A creature that did not want to be found.
* * *
I drank a glass of water, had an apple and then a big bowl of leftover chicken salad, rummaged for gum in my purse after. Tried to shake off whatever had gathered within me, but the hummingbird stared at me defiant. It was what I had to work with.
I resisted the idea of using my phone for an online search for “Silvina” and for “hummingbird.” A search for “R.S.” yielded nothing useful and, three pages down, “arse.” But adding Silvina’s name to “R.S.” concerned me. A stabbing unease at the thought of exposure. I needed context more than data. Didn’t want to open up a channel that could lead back to me. A client breach around search terms months ago didn’t help rationalize the risk.
Was the hummingbird code for something? Or just the first of two bookends? That space between them yawned like the abyss, and the space in my head felt deliberate, like Silvina wanted it to be there.
[6]
Before the school bus brought my daughter home, I put the hummingbird back in its box and hid it under a couple old blankets in the trunk of my car. I knew enough to act normal and ask my daughter about her day. To close myself off while receiving, in the usual way, the eye roll and shrug as she took off her sneakers.
“Fine. Swell.” Always “Fine,” along with something terse and sarcastic. “Swell.” The swell of teen angst. The swell of irritation with parents. Her chaotic grades reflected a creative child with an erratic attention span, no patience, and so much talent it hurt to think about.
Backpack tossed in a corner with the discarded shoes.
She had no sense of caution, would jump from a tree to our rooftop on a dare from the kid across the street. She’d cost me thirty-two hours of labor, a breach birth through C-section. I didn’t mind the scar; it joined the others. I just wished she’d be easier sometimes. I used to get texts from her, but not lately, except for “Ready for you to pick me up.”
A grunt. That’s how my daughter acknowledged the mound of gifts we’d snuck under the tree after she’d left for school. She scrambled up the stairs to her cave. I’d barely gotten a glimpse of her wide, open face and the thick dark eyebrows I loved so much.
Soon enough, my husband would pull up in a late-model tan sedan. A car chosen to be tidy and respectable and solid if seen by his real estate clients. But he was fooling himself. I had married a shambolic mountain in human form. He always made me feel I was a reasonable size.
No matter how often he shaved, he would always have a shadow of a beard. He smelled fantastic. He had hardly ever raised his voice to me.
* * *
Once upon a time, I could still imagine he’d burst through the door at the end of the day and I’d greet him with a smile. He’d bring me close, one mountain to another. Plant a rough kiss on my neck, my cheek, my mouth, pull away to stare at my face. Then, reassured, barrel through the house in search of our daughter, making a production of not knowing where she is, so when he finds her she will be exasperated with his theatrics, his need to track her down for a mighty hug even as her scowl dissolves into a half-grin.
Then he will make dinner, like he always made dinner. Because I could just about cook an egg. Had taken steps never to get better at cooking, throughout my long, bumpy career as a woman.
My husband in the kitchen never looked like anything other than a cheerful Kodiak trained in the glories of French cuisine, a glass of Malbec held careless in one hairy paw and a knife in the other. I always felt he would knock over everything that I hadn’t and maybe start a fire and burn the house down. But instead he just used every plate and utensil in the kitchen and made a mess.
After the mess, I will sit down at the kitchen table to a meal of something delicious—pork chops with asparagus and roasted potatoes? We will talk about our day, me, my husband, our daughter. Or I would and he would. Together we will tease out of my daughter the things that were important to her. Or some version of them. After, I do the dishes and maybe help my daughter with her homework. Before bed, we play a board game or watch something stupid on TV.
I still remember. When there was a time that was still plausible. The bigness of that.
The sheer expanse of that.
* * *
You’ll never get their names. I can’t bring myself to, not even surrogates. The moment I type their names, they’ll be lost to me, belong to you. I think I know when you’ll read this, but I can’t be sure.
Even then, there was too much neither of them knew about me. Only the cast-off interference, the things that caused distance or created it. A kind of shadow or smudge. Not a clear view.
The face that stares back at you from the mirror later in life is so different than when you’re young. There’s a winnowing away and a shutting down. A sense of something having been taken from you and you don’t know exactly what it is, just that it isn’t there anymore. What opens up to you instead is experience, is cunning, is foreknowledge. Nothing you sought.