So we stitched our way through what remained of life. The wounds deeper. The disconnect higher.

The shock that shattered our bones yet left us standing.

[101]

But the world didn’t really end. I’ll give it that. One year passed. Then two. Then three, four. My husband died in the pandemic, one of the pandemics, at the lake house in which he’d sought refuge. Not an easy thing to absorb or put aside. But I had to.

Things found out in the wrong order. At a remove, so my grief was late, distant from the event. The way information became intermittent due to circumstance or location. How this became the disconnect.

My father and Lorraine passed away under circumstances the police could never unravel, amid a torrent of religious ecstasy and violence. Random or a disciple? It didn’t matter. The family farm became what I’d always thought it had been: ramshackle, falling apart at the edges from neglect. Empty. Hard to give my father a final eulogy when, for me, he’d been dead so long and only briefly resurrected.

I clung to the thought that maybe I would see my daughter one day and we would grieve together, even if she had gone to stay with a distant relative in a gated community in Canada. But the truth was: I would never see her again. I did not, even when I had Wi-Fi, check the obscure game inbox where I’d left my message for her. I couldn’t bear to see no reply. And if there had been a reply, how terrible. How unthinkable. What else could I say to her? What could I be to her now?

Even coming off the mountain in bad shape, I’d seen the course of things. The lines at gas stations. The closures of businesses. The empty shelves in grocery stores. Wandering aimless was a good way to get a reading. To analyze incoming evidence—and the evidence all pointed to a kind of reckoning. In that sense, Silvina hadn’t been wrong.

Fires, floods, disease, nuclear contamination, foreign wars, civil unrest, police brutality, drought, massive electrical outages, famine. Always somewhere else. Until the garbage piled up and the buses stopped running and security forces patrolled streets instead of cops. Some places, militias conducted roadblocks, and no one tried to stop them. Military tribunals popping up. A federal government in crisis. Cell towers destroyed by conspiracy theorists. At the very least, we had become a failed state. Was the world a failed state, too?

Somehow, in the midst of this, I sorted myself out. Lied to myself that I had to find a purpose for my daughter, for whatever in Silvina had been good. All the things she’d striven for, even if, in the end, she couldn’t outstrip delusion or hypocrisy any more than the rest of us.