Hummingbird Salamander Page 10

“Boring. I went to bed early both nights.” Which was true, as far as it went. Still drunk, trying to hide it with breath mints and a considered precision to my movements.

  “Got some good intel?”

  That word again, like a trap.

  I shrugged, taking off my shoes. “Nothing earth-shattering. The usual.” I had Silvina’s apartment, 3215 Avalon Boulevard, burning a hole in my head, distracting me. Tomorrow I would investigate. The office wouldn’t expect me in right away.

  He followed me up to the bedroom, helping me with the suitcase, even though he knew I liked to carry it up the stairs, just to feel it in my calves.

  As I was unpacking, he turned to me and said, “Listen, there’s something I have to show you.” The tone felt urgent, even if I was already on alert.

  I stood up from the dresser drawers, from that family heirloom from the farm that smelled of people and places I’d deserted or had deserted me. With, I realized, an almost pathological number of photos of me, my daughter, my husband. To erase it.

  “Can it wait until tomorrow?”

  “It won’t take long. Out in the yard.”

  “I heard you were thinking about a fence. And doing yardwork or something.”

  I said it like he’d been thinking about building a hill out of mashed potatoes in our living room. But it’s true it was unlike him. For some reason, he had always treated landscaping like bringing his work home with him.

  “Yes. To a fence,” he said. He wasn’t smiling.

  There it was, at the fringe, evidence that wasn’t a phantom SUV or a sullen Fusk. In that wooded corridor between our house and our neighbor, haunted by the ghosts of garter snakes, rabbits, and deer. It was a quiet place, I’d always thought. Too silent for a wood. No thought for why. Now the stillness deepened.

  “See why I brought you?” my husband said.

  “I understand,” I said. The last of the energy I’d brought from the plane dissipated into the ground. Even if it had been a kind of poison in me. A dizziness in the gathering dusk, some nausea.

  A flattened patch of earth, the grass yellowing. Behind a large oak tree. Perfect vantage to surveil the house. A single cigarette butt. A beer bottle, Belgian import, that might not have been related. A couple shoe prints in soft dirt. Deep imprints. Someone was very large or had stood there a long time. A tree branch had been snapped off and shoved into the ground. Boredom? A message?

  “Drifter,” I said.

  “Drifter?” my husband echoed, incredulous. “Did you just say ‘drifter’ like we’re in a fucking western or something? A ‘drifter’ in suburbia.”

  He didn’t swear at all unless intensely upset.

  “When did you notice this?”

  “I don’t remember—a couple days ago. But from those shoe prints overlapping, he could’ve come back since.”

  “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “Didn’t want to bother you.” Hands in his pockets, staring at the ground like a kid.

  “And yet it bothers you so much I’m on the receiving end of … whatever this is.”

  I let out my breath. I had been threatened with a gun less than twenty-four hours before. No stamina to keep being mindlessly reactive. Which just made me feel even grainier, like I needed a shower.

  “Has a homeless man been seen in the neighborhood?”

  “No, Jane. This feels more like someone watching us.”

  “Because of the cigarette butt?” Incredulous.

  “You tell me.” Resentful.

  I relaxed, because I could tell part of the problem from his tone. He’d reverted to an older accusation, one I could accept. That I was the one who knew security, that I should be the one on top of those things just as he was always on top of cooking meals.

  “We can extend the security system out here,” I said. “It’s probably just someone passing through. Some transient spending the night. Or, happy thought: it could be a neighbor whose wife doesn’t want him smoking.”

  I didn’t think it was any of those things.

  “We’re putting in a fence,” he said. “I don’t care how it looks. You call someone.”

  Through my fatigue, irritation. He didn’t understand my job, that I managed security. I wasn’t out there in a uniform installing home security systems.

  “Could be one of your unhappy clients, too, you know,” I said.

  It just came out. Didn’t mean it, except I did. He spent too much time helping a colleague off-load homes in a subdivision plagued with housing code citations. Just because they were old friends.

  “Really?” he said. “Really?”

  Not really. But we’d never have the real. That was the sadness that came over me in that moment. Struck me—hard—that the distance between us had increased tenfold since I’d left for New York. And it was all my fault.

  He stalked off. He’d drop the subject. I’d drop the subject. We would click back into place on the tracks, like it had never happened, a space I could inhabit like an actor. If I wanted to.

  Because we had a reservoir of love and goodwill? Because we, like most, were creatures of habit?

  I never discovered the answer, because there was also the world beyond us, changing and changing again.

  [37]

  I met my husband in college. He’d been on the football team, third-string defensive end. More specific: on a bus to the pep rally for a crosstown rivalry that spanned multiple sports. This big, hulking guy with great hair and a wicked smile.

  “Hey, Dandelion,” he’d said. Absurd. No one had mistaken me for a dandelion even as a kid. But he managed to convey by his tone that he thought I was hot, that I was not a dandelion, but that he wasn’t making fun of me.

  “Hey, Bear,” I said, from within the cocoon of my fellow female athletes. Like we’d known each other for years. “How’re things? I haven’t seen you in a while.”

  “You know—the usual,” he said. “Was in prison for a while. Then lost a bet. Had to board a bus. To go sit on a bench.”

  “Bus to lift a bench, Bear. Like always.”

  “How about you? Did you ever get certified as a psychic?”

  “No. Turns out I’m terrible at seeing the future.”

  “So am I, Dandelion. That’s why they got me to play football.”

  “You’ll grow out of it,” I said.

  “No, I’m done growing. Sick of it. How about you?”

  He sat next to me on the way back. He’d lost a sibling, too. I don’t know how the subject came up. But it did. Talked about it intensely, in the back of the bus. Talked about it honest. Then rarely if ever talked about it again, all through dating for three years, engagement, and then marriage. Because we didn’t have to. He already knew how I was feeling around the date of my brother’s death. And I knew how he was feeling.

  I didn’t have to keep pulling out my insides for him. Explaining any new thing might pull all the stitches out, without warning. Neither of us would ever “get over it.” Neither of us would expect the other one to pretend to.

  But we were different. His family had gotten it right. His sister’s death didn’t pull them apart. It brought them closer together. Maybe I kept his family at arm’s length because that was too painful. Maybe I resented how much time they’d had to say good-bye.

  “Hey, Bear.”

  “Hey, Dandelion.”

  I never thought anyone would call me Dandelion. I never thought I’d be married, or to a bear. Never thought I’d have a kid. All I had focused on for the longest time was escape. Escape velocity.

  We hadn’t used those terms of endearment in a long time.

  Would it have made a difference if we had?

  [38]

  I stayed out there by the oak tree for a while. The dead leaves obscured the man’s path to the observation site. A sour smell permeating the undergrowth, a kind of sweat smell that registered like sickness. Like my mother’s last years. I felt I had smelled it before, but the memory of my mother snuffed it.

  I took
out my key chain, flicked on my little flashlight, examined the ground in a semicircle out from the oak into the corridor of woods. The faded glow of dusk couldn’t quite claim this territory. I already knew you couldn’t be seen looking out from behind the oak. But here? I’d never realized how much of a shadow you’d be. You could stand there for hours and no one would ever know you were there. Never disturb you. The line of sight to the street—at a right angle to our house—was negligible. A thicket of high bushes. But once on the street, you’d have to get into a car. Or you’d have to walk four or five blocks to a public park. Either you’d have to look normal, like you belonged, or someone would notice you.

  Somehow, I wasn’t up for canvassing the neighbors just yet. Not over evidence so flimsy. I had to take it seriously, but how much energy should I put into it?

  I came back to the oak. I stood there, behind the tree, and stared at my house. Tried to see it as an intruder might. A generic, usual house for an upper-middle-class family. A comfortable swing my daughter had used when she was younger, hanging off a far branch of the oak. A garden hose attached to a sprinkler. A nub of a deck with some molding plastic lawn furniture. That umbrella stand we rarely used.

  Ah, Silvina, it was everything and it was nothing.

  How the swing and the old tire in the yard became reduced to the stilted, broken shapes of skeletal animals as the dark leaked in. How the lights of the house made mockery of the curtains, so silhouettes came clear, like a shadow puppet play. There, on the second floor, even now: my bear husband in his study, pacing, still angry. There, my daughter’s room, and her sitting upright receiving the bright blue glow of her phone screen. The first floor: dull rectangles in which could be seen the kitchen table, the living room couch.

  What would you learn about me while I wasn’t home? It wasn’t that cold, but I shivered. What was a watcher but a warning? Forget a deep character study. He wasn’t out there taking notes on habits, personalities.

  But I struggled to visualize what he had been doing. What information was being pushed toward? Why was it important to have eyes on my house in this age of electronic surveillance? Visual verification? Of what?

  Still grasping, gasping, vaguely drunk. I wanted an enemy I could grapple with, draw close, choke out.

  I didn’t want to acknowledge that Langer might’ve been in my backyard. That might’ve taken me the rest of the way from defiant to scared.

  The little bird drone watched me from a branch halfway up the oak. Noticing that came as a shock. My husband had been told it was security provided by the HOA. Later, I would ask to see the surveillance footage, be told a glitch had erased it. Meanwhile, it just sat there, a dull pewter jewel with blue plastic wings. Staring at me. Sharing in the mystery.

  Imagine you’re all alone and out of nowhere someone starts talking to you. It might be from the past. It might be through a cigarette butt and a beer bottle, or a drone … or by aiming a gun at you.

  But, no matter how, you’re receiving and you can’t stop receiving. Even when it becomes damage. Maybe you’re used to damage. Maybe the damage is what lures you in.

  [39]

  Routine would save us, my bear husband and his dandelion wife. Say good night to our daughter, bound by that love shining down from us into her. Our shared half-smiles at how she shrugged out of it, turned away, but still acknowledged and shared in it. How we looked at the posters of pop groups on her walls and the microscope on her desk and the old Girl Scout badges pinned to a corkboard. How we saw her four pairs of sneakers, but also how she didn’t waste time on jewelry or “accessories.” How she did sometimes use her phone under the covers after lights out, but the strict curfew she gave herself of an hour. So that by midnight she was safely asleep and away from a screen.

  That she set her own routine even if sometimes her discipline lapsed in other areas. We knew when to pick her up from after-school events because she presented us with a weekly schedule. An art class. Chorus. Debate. How she could also be aloof and remote, and I would wonder where she was off in her thoughts and if I should worry. How she could be gruff in her demands: that she didn’t want to take the bus to a debate meet, wanted us to drive her, which was her way of saying she wanted us to be there. Then ignored us the whole time.

  By these coordinates, we had set our lives.

  By the coordinates, too, of my husband making the rounds of the downstairs, turning off lights, coming up to where I was already in bed with a book. His noisy ritual of brushing his teeth, putting on pajamas if it was cold. Of coming around to my side to give me a hug and then, ponderous, back to his side. And maybe we would cuddle later, but it was also okay to just be comfortable with another breathing, snoring human being.

  All of these things happened as always the night I returned home from the conference. I could tell from the preciseness with which my husband went through the usual list that he meant to reassure me after our argument. So when he got into bed, I put my hand on his, reached over and kissed him, went back to my book.

  It felt like it was going to be okay. Like I had kept my normal, everyday life. I remember I let out a deep breath and breathed in and was surprised by the surge of oxygen. Hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath, breathing shallow, waiting for the next surprise.

  I’d run out of Silvina intel to read but couldn’t pick up the mystery novel I’d started before I’d left. I needed to feel like I was making progress. On the hummingbird. On Silvina. So I was reading Oddly Enough: From Animal Land to Furtown.

  Strange that a book come into my possession by chance, bought to bribe, laid bare so much. But it did. The introduction gave me such pause, I read through it twice, then skipped to the illustrations and skimmed while I pondered it.

  “Let it not seem queer to see us dressed alike, humans and animals. It does not appear queer when the genius of your fur science transforms us to look alike despite the different origins of our families. As representatives, part of our mission shall be to applaud that genius.”

  Those words written by an Arthur Samet in the 1930s. There was no part of it I didn’t recoil from and yet nothing in it existed far from my father’s attitude making a living on the farm. This was just the extremist version—the one in which the animals enjoyed their slaughter. But no matter the complicity, we had slaughtered animals, too, for market. Not for decoration or fashion. And trappers had killed animals, often in cruel ways, for coats and other necessities in that often cold climate. So what, exactly, repulsed me?

  “We praise your modern machinery and your art which converts our raw greasy skins into attractive fur pelts and thus preserves us for a lasting existence in our second being. We admire your artistic design when you cut, sew and nail our skins to fit the patterns designed to meet the demands of modern fashions.”

  Worse things than cattle led to market. Worse things than being reduced to a piece of taxidermy. But how much worse and why? Did the amount of suffering matter? Did wild or domesticated matter? We interfered with all, left nothing alone, as Silvina said. We could not leave anything untouched. And, for some, the compulsion grew not to simply do the deed, as my father did, but to be heroic for it. There, with the suffering, lay a further crime.

  “For those of you who intimately understand us will be able to recognize us regardless of change of shape or color. However, to those who are not thoroughly acquainted with us, the parts we play in this story shall feature our distinguishing characteristics, that will immediately identify us in any disguise … This is Our Inalienable Right.”

  How did the wildlife trafficking cartels justify it? I hardly thought they cared. But someone must, along the way. That a family would starve if not for a dead pangolin? That if not me, then someone else will do it. This is the way of the world.

  Or, better: this is progress. The new thing murdered, wanton and alone, gifted with credentials not yet earned.

  An old bookmark advertising Carlton Fusk’s antiques store fell out while I was reading. I snatched it up,
placed it safely back between two pages. But my husband hardly noticed. Me and eccentric books had happened before; I liked to read out-of-date cybersecurity manuals. I found them comforting.

  The bookmark had a black-and-white photo of Fusk, much younger, beardless, but recognizable. Fusk proudly held a taxidermied armadillo. The legend read “If it’s dead, we can fix it.” Even after death, we couldn’t leave anything alone.

  Fusk. The gun. Just an old eccentric who didn’t want to be questioned? Or something more? Hard to tell what was more unlikely: Fusk reaching for a gun so quickly on impulse or because the photo of the hummingbird had triggered that response. I began to feel the impulse to contact him again, across the safety of a continent.

  I lay awake long after we’d turned out the lights, thinking about Fusk. Thinking about Silvina and her family. Unsure what part of the puzzle ate at me the most. The moon was bright that night, and I rose to stare out the bedroom window down into the wooded fringe. Which was veiled by shadow. When I began to imagine I could make out the singed tiny red circle of a cigarette, I went back to bed.

  I dreamed not of hummingbirds that night, but of salamanders. Giant salamanders and flooded rivers and the slack face of my brother, staring at me, half caked in mud.

  [40]

  The next morning, headed for the 3215 address, I rechecked my car first. For surveillance devices. Found nothing. Hoped I had done the check right. There had been a lecture on current procedure at the conference, but I’d skipped it. I laughed and hit the steering wheel as I drove. Realized I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t done my check based on what I’d seen on TV shows.

  The apartment complex was an anonymous block of concrete painted a pale blue. Staggered concrete balconies jutted out at irregular angles like gun emplacements, up the full five stories. The balconies cast shadows on the dull gravel path leading to a covered garage in the basement. A few scraggly decorative trees didn’t seem up to the task. Stink of asphalt from something new around the corner. The established neighborhood beyond had been subdivided to hell and back, most of the trees cut down.