The calm, even breathing of the person I couldn’t see. The spiral of smoke. The firm, even tread. The sense of bleakness, of darkness, and the sound of the shoes or dress boots against gravel and dirt. A body at his feet.

It didn’t seem credible that the man I’d beaten up had anything to do with that specter, haunting me, invisible, from the other side of the fence.

But what did I know?

Nothing.

[44]

Much of Silvina’s journal described an epic journey down the West Coast. According to her account, she’d started at the border with Canada and gone as far south as Northern California. This was in the third year of her banishment after the trial. I would’ve been thirty-three at the time: oblivious, still learning the ropes at the company, not yet a manager.

I reread the story of her “expedition” over and over. Not just because it had been important to her. But because it was odd to see the familiar through her eyes and to realize how familiar it had been to her. That Quito had been where she had felt strange. That Argentina had meant little to her. And, after her trial, even less.

“For the first time, I felt, in a way, as if I was home,” Silvina wrote. “In those endless miles of coast, in the cold and the fog and the rain, I opened up what was closed down. I received and kept receiving. It was sunless. Bridges would appear monstrous out of endless shadow, almost brutalist. The smell of marsh water would hit unexpected and the richness of cedar. The hawks on the telephone wires felt like sentinels judging my progress.

“I would drive until I found a wilderness trail—through hills or along the coast. I loved lighthouses because they were always somewhere isolated. I didn’t like to see lots of people when driving. How can we pretend we are alone, but I wanted to pretend I was alone. Until I wasn’t.

“I saw deer and otters, a bobcat or two, and, once, a bear, in the distance. Just a smudge, a shadow. But that was enough. While in the trees, as I walked, so many birds, and under rocks and fallen branches a world of the small that carried on beneath our notice.

“I fell in with strangers sometimes. I could tell by the look in someone’s eye when they said hello whether they approved or disapproved of me. But I spent time with the disapprovers, as much as the other, because I was curious. And sometimes, around a campfire, they would soften. Others, never lose a rigid, guarded pose, and I would make excuses soon enough.”

She would stay in cheap motels and befriend strangers in bars and diners. Once, she stayed in a houseboat along a river delta for a month or two. A few times the folks she befriended in bars she would go home with. She described them, as above, with a miraculous miscomprehension. As if they were miracles, because most of the time she was out in the wilderness. As if, over time, she didn’t know what a human really was.