That didn’t mean I meant to leave without my family. I think I just wanted to protect them—from the thought, the impetus, the raging landscapes of the nightly news. Protect them from the idea that I believed such a future might come to pass.

So when I pried the hummingbird’s eyes out sometime during that first week, I stashed it all in the go-bag in my gym locker. I worked on the hummingbird in the unisex bathroom, with the door locked. Sitting on the ancient, cracked toilet seat. Using the tip of a nail file and a toothpick. Took an obscene amount of time and I cringed every time I thought I might be crushing the hummingbird.

Ghoulish, wrong, a violation … but a security situation with a client and a camera situated in the eyes of a teddy bear had made me think of it.

Scrutiny with a magnifying glass had revealed evidence of a prior excavation. The hint of glue leaking from one bird eye as I’d examined it close, shook it for some dislodged rattle.

The adrenaline rush at what was revealed, like I’d achieved something. As if I had some sense of why Silvina had chosen me.

Hidden behind, etched, delicate and tiny, into the sockets, still hard to make out even with the magnifying glass.

Two numbers: 23 and 51.

Combination or code?

I did a visualization, which helped sometimes. Tried to look down on myself, there in the crappy bathroom. Feverishly prying eyes out of the hummingbird. This hulking, bulky shadow doing brutal things to a delicate bird. Everything about that act wrong.

What were that person’s assumptions? What might this person miss?

One was this: the number could just be some taxidermy reference. Some manufacturer’s designation. Nothing to do with Silvina.

Still, I wrote the numbers down on a slip of paper, stuck the paper in my wallet. Stuck the wallet in my purse. The next day, I would glue the eyes back in because I couldn’t bear the thought of the hummingbird without them.

Left the mystery alone, did not tug on the string of it. But, all the while, the string was tugging at me.

[16]

Things I learned, I couldn’t undo or forget. Things that hurt me in the knowing of them.

The hummingbird had gone extinct because of poaching, habitat loss, and climate change. The wildlife trafficking cartels manufactured need—they told those inclined to buy that this or that animal was good luck or the next hip thing for the rising newly rich. They pried open the coffers of countries that would look the other way. They dealt in volume, so the inconvenience of a shipment or two caught at a border meant little to them.

They’d played off specific Latin American traditions about love potions, and what had been a few hundred birds, caught and killed for the purpose in Mexico each year, became thousands and thousands, smuggled around the world. Stuffed into little plastic pouches. Sometimes well cleaned enough, not just dried, to wear as the centerpiece of a necklace. A rabbit’s foot. A dead animal. But people wore dead animals all the time.