Hummingbird Salamander Read online

  I parked down the street, up the hill from the apartments. Thankful the address wasn’t in a gated community. Yet. The walk down to the apartments, I felt exposed, observed, but no one was around. It was midmorning. I should’ve been at work. But everyone else was.

  My husband texted, the sound startling, shrill.

  >>The office called. Urgent. Asking where you are. Something’s urgent there. Where are you? Something was always urgent. Something that could always wait.

  >>I’m on my way, I lied, and turned off my phone.

  Silvina’s property lay on the third floor, hidden from the street by a covered walkway beyond the stairs. The gate to the garage had a hitch, so it didn’t close right away after a car went through. But the stairs, although more open, made me feel less like a thief. Just a visitor.

  The blue door made me rethink what I was doing. Of course there was a locked door. What did I think would be there? An open archway? A welcoming committee? Some refreshments?

  Because: what was I doing? I’d have to break in.

  Fusk pulling the gun on me. Fusk telling me to leave well enough alone.

  No.

  I broke in. The method isn’t important. I’ve done it since. Several times. Each time it feels less like crossing a boundary or a border. Each time, there’s less resistance.

  Inside, I tried to think like a detective, to be a detective. Trusted my first thought inhabiting that: everything I’m seeing has been staged. Just like in the storage unit. Maybe because there was so little of it. Hardwood floors, rich grain, and tiny pillbox windows, and the sliding glass doors to the balcony at the far end, and, before that, a living room with a fake fireplace and an open-concept kitchen, with the office and bedroom down a corridor to the left, beyond the balcony.

  It struck me that if Silvina had lived here, or visited, she must have hated it. She must have loathed this place. Even if there had once been more here. Even if she’d found some way to make it resemble a cave. But she had lived here … why?

  The blazing-white kitchen island eclipsed most of the rest. The off-white walls faded into the backdrop. A coffee table in the living room and a couple more chairs. Generic landscape paintings on the wall. The smell wasn’t new apartment or old apartment, but stripped apartment.

  Over the fireplace, perched precarious on the mantel: three foxes, fur tattered and mangy. Old taxidermy, with clipped fiberglass paws. A male, female, and kit. Whoever or whatever they had fallen afoul of, death had come long ago. The male had a dusty bluish tint to his coat from overapplication of chemicals.

  They had no eyes.

  Did that mean someone had gotten to a clue before me?

  My blood pressure had risen. I had expected, I guess, more evidence of a secret life. Some comfort in the mundane. Books, magazines, a better sense of her.

  Instead: cautious, precise. Why had I expected the disorganized mind of a hoarder anyway? Because my mother had lived that way, and that’s what the past meant to me. An accumulation of crap.

  But I was already there. I would search among the non-wreckage to glean any possible clue. I put down Shovel Pig and got to work. I checked behind every painting. Nothing. I went through the few cabinets and drawers, entered a bedroom stripped down to the mattress.

  No one and nothing lurking in the closet.

  I came back into the common space, feeling an urgency. I picked up the foxes and rattled them. Solid. And still I was shameful, disrespectful, in my desperation to be thorough but to finish fast. I treated those bodies like objects. I tore the first two foxes apart, just in case. Massacred them again. Nothing. Nothing in them.

  The third, the kit, remained in position on the mantel. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to tear it apart, too. There was in its scruffy decay a kind of ancient, vulnerable quality combined with youth that overwhelmed me.

  Something about the empty eye sockets got to me. And I saw.

  Three sets.…. . from Silvina’s note … and three foxes. It could be. It could not be.

  Where did they stare? Where did the last one stare?

  The balcony and a dead houseplant in a large ceramic container, flanked by faded falling-apart lawn chairs.

  I slid the door open, went out on the balcony. The “railing” came up to my waist and was made of thick concrete. I didn’t think I could be seen from the other apartments. No building taller nearby. Just a gridlocked grid stretching, stitched, farther down the hill.

  The planter was enormous, the plant housed by it ridiculously small and dead, the soil dry, almost like sand. Even for me it was an effort to lift the planter, make sure nothing was hidden in the saucer beneath. An awkward, unwieldy weight, like trying to lift a concrete ball in a strongman competition.

  I put it down again, dug with my bare hands through the porous soil. I had hoped to leave no trace, but that wasn’t possible. I could discard the remains of the foxes, but there was dirt everywhere. My fingernails were caked with evidence of my own crime. I was a mad gardener, searching for roots. I don’t know what I was.

  My hands in the dirt felt real. As if I could’ve just done that for an hour, as therapy. But then I encountered something. Way deep down.

  With difficulty, I brought the object to the surface. A small black journal, hardback, protected in its own clear plastic case.

  A sound came from the street below, carried by the wind. Like a sharp cough. Just that. I froze. Maybe I was wrong, but I felt like I had no more time. Cleaned nothing up—what was the point, I’d been a disruptive mole—ran to the front door. Then realized I was disheveled, covered in dirt, and had left Shovel Pig on the coffee table. Next to the ripped-up foxes.

  I stuck the journal in my waistband, on the side. Tried to get clean in the bathroom, gathered my belongings, put the poor foxes in the bedroom closet.

  Ran down the stairs. Only slowed to a walk out on the street. I didn’t think anyone was following me as I headed into the office.

  Something nagged at me. Something I’d forgotten to check in the apartment, but it eluded me.

  As if I’d failed. That there had been something else I was supposed to find.

  [41]

  Larry had been the victim of a hit-and-run in the parking garage the night before. For once, he’d been working late. Details were sparse. It had happened in a corner not covered by a surveillance camera or the camera had been broken. The irony. He’d been seen arguing with someone right before. A parking attendant had called an ambulance, and, in the confusion, no one at the office had known about it until the morning.

  Larry, in the hospital, with broken ribs and broken collarbone and a broken arm. Larry, not yet conscious, but his wife said his phone and wallet had been taken. The car ransacked after he was hit. “Cold-blooded,” is how Alex put it. Alex had already been to the hospital, as had some of the rest of the staff. Allie was ashen. I didn’t have to apologize to anyone for coming in late. No one cared.

  I made supportive, sympathetic noises. I chipped in as a cup went around for money for flowers and a card. I said I’d visit later that day. But I wouldn’t. I kept thinking of the watcher in the yard. Larry wouldn’t be answering questions for a while. If I was right, Larry would just be … bait. As I tried to see things from the point of view of a private eye. Which meant, be paranoid. Which meant shoving aside the uncomfortable idea that I was complicit in Larry’s condition. Ironically, this wasn’t the first lapse in garage security. I could be wrong.

  I owed Alex and the other managers a conference report, but I was too on edge. I loaded up on coffee, as if I thought that would help. I kept typing the same sentence over and over again. “The conference focus on new protocols designed to thwart third-party service attacks…”

  Silvina’s diary burned a hole in Shovel Pig. In my mind.

  “The conference focus on new protocols designed to thwart third-party service attacks revealed a flaw in overall security thinking…” Trying to find ways to shove references to Vilcapampa companies in there. As muc
h to forestall Allie as Alex.

  I wanted to quit, go home, have time to think.

  “Opportunities for business partnerships include a shift toward examining the changed psychology of human security risks due to personal isolation and working from remote locations. The conference’s partial focus on new protocols designed to accommodate concerns about zoonotic viruses reveals a flaw in overall security thinking due to the assumption that…”

  But I couldn’t. Couldn’t go home. Couldn’t stay in the office. Uncomfortable and itchy in my own skin. Allie kept coming in to talk about Larry, which made me twitch and wince, until I point-blank told her I had to concentrate on my report. Only to watch her face go cold. “I understand.” No, she didn’t understand. But I didn’t understand her, either.

  Alex came by to share new office protocols, in light of the approaching pandemic. I listened with half an ear. When he asked me if I was okay, I said sure, even got to the gym. Everything’s fine. Be calm, Alex. Be still, Alex. Be gone, Alex.

  I closed my door. I closed the blinds. Like a flag at half-mast, for Larry. Even then, I put Silvina’s journal in a folder to disguise it as a client file. Began to skim and sample it. But I was too shaken to even do that right. I got bits, pieces, kept missing things and starting over. Allie, undaunted, would knock and bring me documents piecemeal to sign for expense reimbursements. A coordinated attack to punish me for not caring more about Larry?

  But some things came clear to me, even then. One was the full extent to which Silvina experienced the human world as a torment and a kind of siege upon her senses. Right there in the journal, head-on, she addressed that moment of change as a child. That fundamental shift.

  “I woke up one night to the sounds of traffic on the street below. I woke to the light through my window. And the sound never turned off. The light never turned off. They just intensified. Ever after. No matter where I was. And if I sought sanctuary in wild places, it was selfish at first. Because I couldn’t tolerate life elsewhere.”

  How she said her father’s friends tormented her for her “weaknesses.” In how they talked. How they looked at her. The way they would go out trophy hunting at one of her father’s lodges, in whatever country, and bring back the heads. How the heads piled up in their palatial homes in Miami, in Buenos Aires, and, finally, on the West Coast.

  “I remember as a child walking down a hallway from my bedroom to get a glass of water and all those faces were looking down at me. A gauntlet of death in the shadows. If I’m dramatic, it’s because I had nightmares from that. I didn’t want to forget what that meant. Who it meant something to and who it didn’t. In the daylight, everyone walked past these tombstones as if it was nothing.”

  How her father had the idea that she would grow up to be a model U.S. citizen, almost as if he planned to use her to legalize the less savory of his operations. How he would tell her that she, as the eldest, would be his heir, and then he would undermine that idea because she wasn’t a son. How his favor fell to a younger son, and then also to Silvina’s younger sisters. And no way to tell exactly what came first: Silvina’s radicalization or that repudiation. How she had reported her father’s “collector” friends to the police. At age thirteen. And as she entered adolescence, her father sent her on a tour of the places where he owned property, always absent himself. So that she went to school the way an army brat does: knowing she would be somewhere else the next month or semester.

  “The first thing to realize is that you are all alone and you can rely only on yourself,” she wrote. “And if you can realize this is a good thing, not a frightening thing … that is a miracle.”

  I couldn’t imagine it, that state of being. Not without curing yourself of a fear of death first.

  “There’s no one they won’t kill in time because you don’t matter to them,” Silvina had written in the margin, and I began to realize I was reading a composite, a hybrid: a journal, or diary, that had begun to be transformed into a memoir.

  Also in the margins: hastily drawn diagrams. That resembled homemade bombs. What she’d been accused of. What she’d escaped going to jail for.

  I stopped reading when I reached the diagrams.

  Here was a woman who had idly drawn bombs in the margins of her notebook. Absentmindedly. Daydreaming. Accompanying an account of traveling in disguise by train at the age of twenty-one. The expedition to Quito. Her repatriation to her home continent. A state of mind.

  As she tried to acclimate herself to a country where she’d never lived. As she set her compass by Humboldt, the European naturalist who had done so much good, but also had electrocuted four thousand frogs in the name of science.

  I stared at those sketches a long time. Trying to imagine the reality or fantasy of them. But I saw nothing real there. Just a terrible sense of dread, such stress, that I could not live beneath the weight of it. The weight of her journal.

  I read more, but my heart wasn’t in it. I kept hoping it was misdirection. You’re drawn to the visual, but maybe that was the least important part.

  There was a monkey with a broken leg in the jungle outside of Quito. Javier, a guide, wanted to put it down, but she had them catch it. Make the monkey a splint, put it in a cage to recover. It’s frightened in the cage. I don’t know if she ever set it free or where. She never mentioned the monkey again.

  On that same Quito expedition she had encountered the naiad hummingbird. Or had sought it out. Or had found them for sale in a local market as love charms, dead and dried out. I was reading too fast. As if I would find some key or some clue that would leap off the page to help me.

  Allie barged in again. I closed the file, set it on my desk. Frustrated anyway by my lack of focus, or perhaps what I began to see as Silvina’s lack of focus. Or a straight answer.

  “Just one more,” Allie said, with no apology in her voice. The sheet for the bar drinks with “Jack,” which had to be filed separately as “Meeting with potential client.” I’d made up a last name. “Fusk.” Jack Fusk. No one ever checked. Just like no one ever cared about Larry taking clients to strip clubs.

  But “hummingbird” had jogged loose another fear. Something about the torn-out eyes of the foxes.

  Was the hummingbird still in my gym locker?

  [42]

  I parked up the hill from the gym, on a side street, then walked down to the strip mall. I didn’t think I’d been followed, but I wanted some distance from my destination. I wanted to get the lay of the land from up high. A short walk, but a long one in terms of how at the top of the hill lay the rich neighborhoods. Then a strip of scruffy forest, hidden by a tall, wooden slat fence, that no one had developed yet, and then the parking lot.

  Outside was a guy I knew vaguely, eating a burrito from the fast-food place down the street and smoking a cigarette. I knew he’d spend a half hour lifting heavy weights or working the tired heavy bag over in the farthest dark corner. Oddly comforting to see him.

  But inside, all that evaporated.

  One look at Charlie’s face and I knew.

  “Your locker was broken into,” he said, in a flat tone.

  “You didn’t call me?”

  I hurried over to the lockers, saw the broken lock, dangling. Everything was still there. Except the hummingbird. I’d known this could happen. I’d tried to steel myself to the possibility. But the absence was stark.

  My locker wasn’t the only victim. They’d gone down the line, busting off the locks. Saving Charlie a major repair bill: only a couple dozen people bothered to use locks.

  “When did it happen?”

  “I don’t know. They jimmied the door in the night. I came in, stuff was all over the place. I just finished cleaning up.”

  “Do you have surveillance footage?”

  The look Charlie gave me was incredulous. A lot of people used that gym because Charlie said he didn’t use cameras.

  “Here’s the license number of that SUV I saw hanging around. Someone else saw it again yesterday.” He handed me
a scrap of paper.

  “Thank you, Charlie!”

  But I should’ve realized he wasn’t looking at me in a friendly way. Or I wouldn’t have said what I said next.

  “Do you know people who could hide something for me?” I was thinking of the journal in my purse.

  “Know people? Know what people?” With scorn. “No. Get the hell out. Take your bag of junk with you.”

  I straightened up. I was one step behind what was happening. Again. The panic returned. Hard to doubt his tone. Something about the contempt for my go-bag hit harder. Like he’d always been judging me.

  “Charlie—”

  “You leave now and you don’t come back here. For a good long time. I don’t want any part of what this is. Remember— I told you someone was following you.”

  A gut punch. But it made me mad, too. Reflexive. Like, I didn’t understand the old world was receding from me.

  “No, I’m not going to do that. I’ve been a member of this gym for—”

  “Leave or I’ll call the cops,” he said. “Trespassing.”

  “What the fuck, Charlie!” Call the cops … on the one who’d been robbed. Unfair. Like I was playing a role where I was the innocent.

  “Cops or get the fuck out!”

  I knew he’d do it. The expression on his face told me. The set of his body, like he wanted to punch me. And that’s when I knew for sure Charlie owned the place. And it was all he had.

  “Can I come back when—”

  “Get the fuck out.”

  So I got the fuck out.

  [43]

  Halfway back up the hill, I realized someone had followed me from the gym. A glimpse back revealed a bulky man in a suit. Shitty haircut for dull brown hair, washed-out features. Very wide shoulders. Maybe fifty and a powerful build, only a bit gone to fat. Laboring on the incline. Built for a different kind of labor.

  Quickened my pace, determined to get to my car, then slowed again. What if someone else was waiting at the car? Then fast-walked again. I had no choice. There was no one on the street, just a few cars passing by. I’d reached the part with the fence and the small woods. I got ready to use my phone to call the police. Hesitated. Realized just how complicit I was in … something. I’d broken into an apartment. For example.