I knew the risk in giving myself over to Silvina’s mystery. I did, on some level, know. But on another level, this drift felt more like depth to me. I wasn’t drifting; I was being pulled deeper, and, with each step I took, I learned more, and thought that just around the corner … it would end. I would have the answers and, tug of disappointment, life would return to normal.

Knowledge was power, right? That’s what Alex liked to say, because he liked to say simple things. But the truth is, I enjoyed the sensation as much as I enjoyed badly lit bars and unfamiliar men, as if losing your balance was a kind of pleasure. That sweet retreat from control and yet you knew someone was in control.

Because Silvina was always there, far ahead of me, even though she was dead. Beckoning me on, and me too stupid, or too smart, not to follow.

As the plane landed and I turned my phone back on, I remember thinking: what world was I returning to? Would this be the time something had happened to make it unrecognizable?

On the familiar route from the airport to the house, the weather had turned warm and humid even though it was winter. In a day or two, it would freeze again. Bees would die in confusion. The plants that had bloomed out of season would fade and decay. Alerts popping up that a pandemic raged in far-distant places.

Almost dusk, but enough of that dark gold, late-afternoon light. Staring once again out the window, observer in my own life, I saw the holding pond around the corner from home. The crosshatched branches of a beaver’s lodge, there, where the creek became something human-made.

I hadn’t seen it before, the pond or the lodge. Not really. It had registered as dead branches, just something clogging up the system. And maybe this time, too, for the last time. I can’t recall if I passed that way again; it wasn’t the usual route. But that time or the next, I saw it as a home. As someone’s home. Something’s home. Right in the middle of our subdivision. And how had that happened? Weren’t they supposed to be out there, in the parks, in the wilderness? That was the agreement. Not here. Not with us. Beside us.

I think now, so late, too late, of the neighbor’s lawn service, using leaf blowers to release herbicide all over their lovely roses. How all of that invisible death didn’t disappear into the air. How it coated us, all of us, and that holding pond. How it masked us from ourselves. How it shone through us and we didn’t even know it.

Soon, my illness would get worse. I would notice what Silvina had noticed as a young person: how many dead things haunt us in our daily lives.