Hummingbird Salamander(67)

I’d bandaged my ankle. The Langer bullet wounds were through and through. Superficial. But I had a balcony bullet lodged in my shoulder, and ribs that might be broken. Passed out once before the painkillers kicked in. Moving kept me focused. The ways to move that hurt less. Not many.

Everything looked skewed and fuzzy. Kept being lucid and then not. I called the gym and left a long, rambling message for Charlie on the answering machine. I don’t know what it would sound like now. Mostly swearing and rambling and paranoid. The kind of thing you’d play for the jury. Charlie never called me back. I know my thought was that Charlie used to train boxers. Used to have a doctor on call. But I don’t really know why I did that. Charlie would’ve said fuck off and he would’ve been right.

Then I dialed Allie, on a burner phone. When the click came and Allie was listening but not saying anything, I began to babble, and whatever came out was so unconvincing, she hung up right away. The apologies. The pleading. Whatever I said.

That was it. The sum of my connections. I had acquaintances, colleagues, people I performed rituals of friendship with … but they weren’t friends. Not close friends.

I had no one. Except Silvina, in a perverse way.

I had her journal. I had her account of a trip down the coast.

The go-bag had a lot of cash in it, too, and prepaid credit cards not in my name, which I’d used cash to get. I had the family credit cards. Also, a fake driver’s license, name of “Joan Ark.” But my passport—that was back at the house. So stupid. No way I was going back to the house for it.

No choice. Or only bad choices. I took another cab to a used-car lot. I bought a clunker with cash. I got on the highway and headed straight for the coast, then took all the little hidden roads and detours. With a bullet in my shoulder and my busted ribs.

I had a list of Vilcapampa subsidiaries operating in the areas I passed through. Gas station chains. Dollar stores. Even plastics factories. A pipeline running out the back of beyond. I had to believe they could see me, in the sense that they might have remote access to on-site surveillance cameras. I would be loyal to local businesses. I always checked where the cameras were anyway. Hit the road in the morning with that in mind.

Fooling myself. I’d studied Silvina’s journal closely enough to put together a road map of her West Coast trip so long ago. To guess at places she’d stopped from the natural landmarks she mentioned. Even though once I passed through Crescent City, the details would get murky, my path slower, less sure.

As I performed these rituals, undertook these expeditions, I punished myself with the idea that I had been a diversion for Silvina or part of her sleight of hand. Meant to be roadkill. I spent sleepless nights in agony physical and mental, trying to focus on the positive. But always drawn back to destructive ideas.

I hated Silvina. I loved her. Didn’t know whether to blame her or just bad luck. I was in a state of shock and self-loathing I couldn’t convey to anyone.

At first, I slept in my car. I had a license, but not really. Everything was forged. A cop might or might not spot the deception. So I drove like a fucking granny. I drove like an ogre in a tiny lima bean of a car. But the coast was glorious when it came into view through the mist. As I put the sea behind me and began to head a little inland, I became sad. But being right on the coast felt too exposed, too obvious. Even the looming brutalist figureheads on the steel-and-stone bridges felt too obvious. Every time I was herded onto one, I felt there was a roadblock on the other side.

The coast saved me, though, while I traveled next to it. The cold. The waves. The isolation. Like home but not like home. I kept thinking I’d gotten out of this place, these kinds of places. How I’d sneak off by myself once I could drive, from the farm and to the coast. Running away from home, except I had nowhere to go. Would sit in a freezing coffee shop watching the surf break against rocks. Then go back. But I had gotten out, no matter how my escape brought me back into proximity with who I had been.

Shovel Pig didn’t remember any of this. Shovel Pig must be in shock, too, but for different reasons. That was the kind of spiral of thought I tried to snuff out. Because it was ridiculous. But also because it was dangerous. To imbue the inanimate with feelings. To talk to people in my head who were not there, not physically in front of me. Like my husband. Like my daughter. Like Silvina. Always Silvina.

But as I drove—scared, paranoid—a goal emerged. Not just to hide, but hide with some small purpose. I told myself I’d find the houseboat Silvina had mentioned in her journal, leaping-off point for her expedition into the wilderness of the King Range. Find the houseboat and live there for a time, and then I, too, would plunge into the forest as she had. I would find what she had found there, something she couldn’t bring herself to put in the journal but I could sense was there, between the lines.

And if I didn’t find the houseboat? Then I’d just plunge into the wilderness beyond and accept whatever came next.

My wounds, somehow, seemed secondary. I’d fix myself only when cause and effect had been broken. I’d fix myself only when I could find a clinic or doctor who wouldn’t ask questions.

That took more than a month. My shoulder would never be right again. My leg might never be right again. I would never be right again.

Did I have daydreams, even then, of some return to my former life? Of a way back to normal? No.

But I’d found the houseboat. At least there was that.