Hummingbird Salamander(46)
Over time, there was mythology around them. Over time, we came to believe in their existence because of how it pushed every other thought out of our minds. There were maps for future expeditions. Folded paper picture books. Fake accounts of sightings. We kept it all in a secret compartment in a shed near the barn. Not because we thought Dad or Grandpa would destroy them, but because it was our secret. Our secret thing.
Imagine there comes a day when all of that, everything you’ve created, is gone. It’s not because it’s been discovered or thrown away. It’s because the person you imagined it with doesn’t exist anymore.
Imagine being frozen, and when you thaw, in another place, you can’t be sure you made the right choice. How ever after the past calls to you and sometimes you want to join it in the black water, in the mud, among the snails and crawdads and salamanders.
How it’s calling you now: to transform, to make a decision, to become one thing or the other.
Neither will make you happy.
[52]
I recall getting through dinner like a spy in deep cover who knows the other party suspects the deception. Being extra-nice to my daughter—and to my husband. Peppering him with questions about his day so there can be no questions thrown my way. My daughter mercifully mum about the gun and my husband putting her silence down to teen angst.
The texts keep coming in, but I ignore them until later. I can’t think about them. I have to compartmentalize. I’m living in the moment but denying the moment, too. I can’t think I can’t think I can’t think.
>>You should respond, just so I know you’re reading this. So you understand.
>>But, then, I have all the time in the world. Even if the world doesn’t.
What I can’t see can’t disturb me. Do I get rid of my phone or use the phone to contain this demon? How far has the contagion spread? Are there cameras inside the house, watching us eat?
I “make” dinner by ordering out. Roast chicken with golden potatoes and broccolini. The chicken a little dry, but the potatoes are delicious, and he didn’t have to cook. I am a very good wife. I am a very good mother. In these roles rejoice, for in these roles I can forget and forget again, for a little while. Keep the stress at bay. Take a couple Motrin and open a bottle of white wine. Drink just enough to keep the edge off. Drink less than I want to.
I go off to the bathroom to peek at the journal, with the one-page accident report shoved inside, but my daughter’s knocking on the door soon enough, saying to hurry up. She needs to use the bathroom, but I think mostly she doesn’t trust me in there for too long and I don’t want to think of the reasons for that. So I come out, put on a smile.
What are we celebrating? my husband asks when I return, nodding at the bottle of wine. We never drink midweek.
I reply, with a look at my daughter, that we are celebrating the near end of a difficult project.
He seems relieved, so he noticed, too, that I have been AWOL, gone, not here. But what is “here”? Why is “here”? In the comfortable heat of the kitchen, as I clean up and my daughter beats my husband at checkers … as I scour the dishes and toss out a lot of single-use plastic.
>>Looks like you had a nice dinner. You’ll need your strength for the next part, no matter how it goes.
As I let the water run a little too hot so my thumb pulses and burns under the flow. The smell of the roast chicken wholesome and enveloping, and me eating scraps because eating, too, is a way to forget. I don’t want the clenched hands. I don’t want the mystery. But I have it anyway, and no matter how I disguise it, I’m manic, I’m on fire.
I can’t help but think of Larry in the company parking ga rage. I can’t help but hope there will be some clue in Silvina’s journal that will explain the plan. Why her ghost has reached out to me. Along with an emotion I can’t identify that coalesces around this thought: if Silvina hadn’t been killed, I would never have known she existed. Would never have received the rapture of the hummingbird. Would never have begun to wake up about the world. This terrible catalyst that has to mean something.
Right there, under my husband’s nose, I am conducting a covert investigation. All he has to do is open the file folder and he’ll see something’s not right. Several somethings.
>>Don’t worry—they’re safe. No one cares about them. Only about Silvina.
I know he means my family. I know I don’t trust him.
I am not a spy. Not a detective. Not caught and lost in some tangle or maze. Not lying against the mud and leaves watching over my brother’s body. I am not I am not I am not …
But I don’t know what I am.
[53]
“We’re ghosts trapped in the wreckage of our systems. So why shouldn’t we haunt them? Why should we not avenge ourselves upon them? Why be merciful?”
The office was a graveyard of abandoned cubicles, most employees off-site working on the pipeline project. The overhead lights in that emptiness shone hard but oddly dim. The smell of cleaners gave a lemon twinge to the corridors that felt off. A casual onlooker would’ve thought we were going out of business.
On the constant TV in the break room as I made coffee: the ongoing crisis of a cruise ship commandeered by climate refugees rejected by yet another port. A threat to security, but, then, wasn’t everything? Europe was cocooned uncomfortable in a massive snowstorm that had killed three thousand people so far. The garbage in the Atlantic had slowed the Gulf Stream to a near-critical level. Some kind of contamination from the Far East would soon turn our skies green-gray, we were told. But none of this made us even blink anymore.