Hummingbird Salamander(55)

Because I thought the hummingbird had to mean more. It wasn’t a pointless regifting. Whatever snapped in Silvina, whatever made her too intense for Ronnie, Unitopia.

A little later another text came in.

>>Bitch bitch bitch bitch bitch

Well, that was Larry. Maybe Allie was wrong and he felt better.

Good enough to dump a paper bag full of dogshit on my front step.





[60]


The world that week seemed to be dying in flame and famine and flooding and disease. The things meant to help us were hurting us and the things meant to hurt us continued to get better at it. I told myself my job didn’t matter. So I wouldn’t enter a M?bius strip of might-have-beens. Tried to be calm. We had savings. We had assets we could liquidate. I could go freelance, as a consultant. I didn’t really have it in me to think about job hunting. Didn’t have it in me to tell my family, either.

I had Unitopia lodged in my skull. This concrete place that would breed so many new search terms. That would reveal a part of Silvina’s mind I could cross-reference to the journal. Sparks of excitement, along with the stress.

Still, home was a nightmare. No evidence in the woods of a watcher, as if a hallucination. No evidence that I would be forgiven for missing the rehearsal. Dinner had a bleak, dull quality, made worse because it was the rare night I’d promised to cook. All I could do was stare at the woods and try to make my mind blank against a crescendo of conflicting thoughts.

Like: the address Ronnie had given me must be worthless, because she’d relinquished it so easily. Like it was where I was meant to go, because “R.S.” had been given to me as a clue. So Ronnie’d been told to give me the address. Except, it was only by luck that I even knew who Ronnie was. Fusk was my investigation work, in the sense that Silvina hadn’t put the initials “C.F.” on the bottom of the hummingbird’s stand. My twist on the incoming intel.

If the address was worthless, it wouldn’t hurt to see it anyway. Intel wasn’t just information—it was context, tone, texture, nuance. Maybe it would help. Maybe, at the very least, it would make me give up.

Because part of me wanted to give up. Part of me wanted to stanch the bleeding and find a way back to normal.

But all it meant, really, is that I was too far gone to come back to normal yet.



* * *



Blessed relief and release when dinner was over and we could go our separate ways for a couple hours. Once or twice, doing the dishes as inadequate penance, I opened my mouth to say something to my husband, sequestered in the living room with a glass of strong red wine. Then I would close it again. Futile. What would I tell him? About being fired? About wildlife traffickers. About a hummingbird, a salamander.

We migrated to the bedroom, with sullen, unreadable daughter off to her room. Something in her eyes: if we talked again, I would need better answers. I remember feeling relief: that my lie meant she wasn’t ratting me out or writing me off. Whereas my husband suspected nothing. Or did he?

Wired to the moment, to the present tense, as I brush my teeth, put on my pajamas, as he flosses and puts on his boxers, takes up the half-read newspaper and grunts in satisfaction at his fullness from a dinner he didn’t have to make. No questions from him, just the usual routine. While I’m making a conscious effort to take deep breaths, to be some semblance of calm.

Then I crash into the world again and I am no longer light, no longer able to keep it all at arm’s length. Have to strangle a scream.

Surely he will notice? But he doesn’t. He sits up in bed reading until it’s time for sleep. Until we turn the light off and lie there on our separate sides.

He’s snoring soon enough. But I can’t sleep. I can’t even be gin to think of sleeping. I’m wired like a race is about to start, like a match is about to start, like a fight is about to start.

I rise up rise up rise up. The clock reads two in the morning.

I tiptoe best I can, seeming thunderous to my ears. To the closet, to put on some clothes, quietly go downstairs, retrieve Shovel Pig, take out the gun, close the front door behind me.





[61]


I needed to screw up my courage first. “Dutch courage,” Shot would’ve called it. For what I planned to do. I kept telling myself it was stupid. Then finding ways to convince myself. This would be it. The last lead I’d investigate. I’d do this thing and Silvina would be out of my life. Whatever I found, whatever I’d already discovered that might be valuable … I’d send it anonymously to the authorities, to wildlife protection organizations. Whatever made sense. Then I’d find another job in the security business. Or somehow beg Alex to take me back. Like my old life just waited there, patiently, for me to inhabit it again.

First, I’d driven to within a fifteen-minute walk of the broken-down shed that hid my go-bag. I’d already taken out all the cards at the house, along with further precautions. I stashed Shovel Pig and all my phones save my work phone. Bog felt too valuable to risk, but I’d changed the work phone to make it harder to trace. I’d ditch it after.

Then I drove to the dive bar across from my gym, which wasn’t too far out of the way. Back route through a residential neighborhood and parked a block away. Slipped in through the back door, sat in the velvet darkness on the long, low bench along the wall, derelict pool tables in a herd in front of me. Only three people at the bar. I waited for the bartender to come to me. Figured I was four or five quick steps away from slipping out the back door. That was how I was thinking. That someone might come for me.