Somehow, I wasn’t up for canvassing the neighbors just yet. Not over evidence so flimsy. I had to take it seriously, but how much energy should I put into it?

I came back to the oak. I stood there, behind the tree, and stared at my house. Tried to see it as an intruder might. A generic, usual house for an upper-middle-class family. A comfortable swing my daughter had used when she was younger, hanging off a far branch of the oak. A garden hose attached to a sprinkler. A nub of a deck with some molding plastic lawn furniture. That umbrella stand we rarely used.

Ah, Silvina, it was everything and it was nothing.

How the swing and the old tire in the yard became reduced to the stilted, broken shapes of skeletal animals as the dark leaked in. How the lights of the house made mockery of the curtains, so silhouettes came clear, like a shadow puppet play. There, on the second floor, even now: my bear husband in his study, pacing, still angry. There, my daughter’s room, and her sitting upright receiving the bright blue glow of her phone screen. The first floor: dull rectangles in which could be seen the kitchen table, the living room couch.

What would you learn about me while I wasn’t home? It wasn’t that cold, but I shivered. What was a watcher but a warning? Forget a deep character study. He wasn’t out there taking notes on habits, personalities.

But I struggled to visualize what he had been doing. What information was being pushed toward? Why was it important to have eyes on my house in this age of electronic surveillance? Visual verification? Of what?

Still grasping, gasping, vaguely drunk. I wanted an enemy I could grapple with, draw close, choke out.

I didn’t want to acknowledge that Langer might’ve been in my backyard. That might’ve taken me the rest of the way from defiant to scared.

The little bird drone watched me from a branch halfway up the oak. Noticing that came as a shock. My husband had been told it was security provided by the HOA. Later, I would ask to see the surveillance footage, be told a glitch had erased it. Meanwhile, it just sat there, a dull pewter jewel with blue plastic wings. Staring at me. Sharing in the mystery.

Imagine you’re all alone and out of nowhere someone starts talking to you. It might be from the past. It might be through a cigarette butt and a beer bottle, or a drone … or by aiming a gun at you.

But, no matter how, you’re receiving and you can’t stop receiving. Even when it becomes damage. Maybe you’re used to damage. Maybe the damage is what lures you in.

[39]