Hummingbird Salamander(84)

She was my father’s wife. “Lorraine,” let’s call her, after a pinch-lipped Lutheran I once knew. I guessed the Bible quote was hers. Lorraine and Lawrence, as if meant to be. Or some other consonance. Did I begrudge my father a new wife? Or was it more that I begrudged him some form of success, as it had clearly come to him after so much failure.

How could this place coexist with a burning houseboat? With a gunfight in a car lot? With a warehouse full of death? But the trick of the world was to contain all things.

Lorraine had picked up my cane and restored it to me. Lorraine had brought in Shovel Pig and my little bag full of fresh clothes. The guns were all in a locked box. While I just sat there, on a different trajectory, like an injured space alien crashed to Earth.

I couldn’t quite look Lorraine in the eye, just as my father could not look at me.

“How long?” I asked.

My father looked confused, so Lorraine answered, showing me the wedding ring. “Five years. We met at a church dance.”

The Church of Bewildered, Lonely Failures?

“That’s nice,” I said. A sense that they’d been together much longer than five years.

How could I find fault? I did then, but, now that the hurt has passed, how could I blame my father for being successful, for having a new wife? He had lived with an abusive father and had had an absent wife for a companion.

“We rent out the three cabins on the property,” Lorraine said. “We also sell wild honey and candles and soap. People come for riding lessons sometimes. Your father has done a good job of diversifying.”

Diversifying.

“That’s wonderful,” I said.

So it went. Fifteen minutes later, a torrent of heavy rain like bullets on the roof woke me up. I realized I was being lulled. Into small talk, into normalcy. Mostly by Lorraine. And I couldn’t afford that. It was too much like being back in my house with my family. Everything I’d put aside. I didn’t have the armor for that. I would lose my mind staying here too long, in this alternate reality. This false place.

“I need to talk to Dad,” I said, interrupting Lorraine on the subject of jam.

Lorraine gave Lawrence a protective look and then a look toward me that was open to interpretation. A welcome with an end date and a warning both.

“I have chores and a phone call.” She went past the kitchen into the back. Maybe even into what used to be my room.

But my father was not a talker.

“A long time,” he said. “Such a long time. Too long.”

I had not come to my mother’s funeral. I had not written or called. I had two early letters from him I’d never opened and then I’d changed addresses, left no forwarding information. Thought that was the only way. A rage that you never lose.

After another awkward pause, a nod, a vague exchange of what might be called “catching up,” I could only feel relief. No way to reconcile. No way to find within my father the things I had needed from him—because they had never been there. Not withheld. Never present.

Kinder to us both to consider him an eyewitness and move on. Safer.

I pulled out a slightly damp photo of Silvina.

“Do you know her?”

“Yes. Of course.” No doubt. No hesitation.

I sat back in my seat, chest tight. “Of course?”

He still wouldn’t look at me. “She lived up on the ridge for a time when you and Ned were teenagers.”

“What?”

“Yes—in that new development. New back then. They kept to themselves. Never came down to the farm.”

I don’t think I had a single thought in my mind for a second, or five seconds. I wasn’t numb. I was nothing.

“How did you know her?” My voice felt distant, thready. My mouth was dry. Was it the physical toll or the mental? I couldn’t keep taking shocks to the system. Yet I did.

“Her family hired Ned. He did … odd jobs … for them.”

“I don’t remember any of this. This isn’t true. It’s not true.”

He shrugged, gave me a thin smile. And I realized.

“You hid this from me. You hid it.” Worse, Ned had hid it. All those expeditions to places that weren’t safe for me.

“It was illegal, what Ned was doing. We needed the money. I didn’t tell anyone. Your mother didn’t know. Grandpa didn’t know. I wished I didn’t know.”

“What kinds of things?”

“Poaching. Courier for … what they were growing the other side of the ridge.”

I tried to absorb that.

“And I never knew any of this.” Searching my memory for any hint, any clue, other than Ned’s disappearances.

“Ned specialized in salamanders.”

“What?”

“A big demand in China for salamanders. Other places, too.”

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t breathe.

“Ned would never do that.” Silvina would never do that. Langer and Vilcapampa, though. In business together. They would do that.

My father shrugged. “It was a long time ago. You idolized your brother. What would I have told you? It just would have hurt you. Shot was already hurting you.”

“While you did nothing!”

I shouted it.

Lorraine came back into the room.