A handful of months after I jumped off the balcony of Silvina’s apartment, I sat on a stool in a dive bar somewhere remote down the coast, my cane hanging from a hook by my knees. Remote the way your phone doesn’t always get reception and places are called towns, but it’s mostly a gas station and a convenience store and maybe a kiosk that’s the police station. Something you could run over in a pickup truck.

I sat at the bar—a bar, any bar—and drank, knowing I could never return to my home. The wound I couldn’t solve with painkillers. My daughter would grow up and forget me. She would actively try to forget me. And it would be easy because I’d made it easy. My husband would remarry, move on with his life. He would find someone the exact opposite of me, raise another family. I wouldn’t blame him. I wouldn’t be able to. I’d be dead by then. Tracked down by Vilcapampa’s men or a capricious “Jack” or Langer. Or maybe I’d die before all of that, from the accumulation of injuries.

I sat there, feeling the burn on the back of my neck despite the vodka shots. That throb. The flat smoke aftertaste on my clothes, the soft stale reek of that, and I drank more. They might’ve taken Hellbender’s gun from me, but I’d acquired another easily enough. Concealed carry, no permit. I called it my “Fusk” because I’d gotten the same type he’d pulled on me. A lifetime ago.

What concerned me most: keeping my hands hidden under the bartop to obscure from the bartender the way I couldn’t stop my fingers from moving. A limp folks thought understandable, familiar. They’d seen it before. Grandparents. Veterans of foreign wars. But bartenders, I’d found, took spider fingers as a sign you were unstable or alcoholic … and unstable people were trouble. Fears over pandemic and the vagueness of that, of how little was known about its spread, made spider fingers even less attractive.

My fingers were like creatures in search of a piano, but maybe the better lie was that they could never stop trying to work, as if they felt the rest of me would stop functioning otherwise. And, somehow, they were connected to the condition of my left leg. The more my fingers wandered, the more the leg hurt.

I never drink (except I do). I don’t like bars (except I do). I just needed to be someone else for a while (except I need to be someone else all the time). Besides, you might overhear something useful in a bar. You might even get to show the bartender an ancient photo of an Argentine woman or a more recent one—a newspaper clipping with a group shot that had “R.S.” in it.