But, mostly, I was thinking of how I missed the hummingbird, the softness of the fierceness of its wings. Knowing I would never see one in real life. Already, the photograph wasn’t enough and my memory wasn’t enough and video online wasn’t enough. Nothing would be enough.

That’s what I thought of in that moment, god help me, sitting in the car after Alex hung up. To calm me down, to put things in perspective. The hummingbird and its vast journey, its tragic fate. Not my family.

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 Möbius 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.