“Yes, on the twelfth day, I saw the hummingbird. Coming across it with the overwhelming scent of cedar all around and the mountainside rich green with moss and lichen, and the trees, full of lichen, too, and ferns, so their leafless limbs burgeoned with life.

“I turned a bend to see a puddle or a pond, something caused by rainwater, in the middle of the trail, and bent down over the water, to drink … the naiad hummingbird. A female. The iridescent black wings. Her sharp, long, thin beak.

“She didn’t see me at first, her back to me, and I stood and watched as she stood there so defenseless, on the ground, drinking. Until with a little cry she sensed me and, alarmed, rose effortless and acrobatic straight up into the air and cursed me from above, hidden soon by the cedar.

“I hadn’t eaten all day. I had drunk very little water. I felt light as air, and in the moment of seeing the hummingbird, I began to weep with the beauty of it, which I cannot convey. I cannot get across to you or anyone the emotion of that moment. Because of the hummingbird on the ground, not in flight, and knowing that not one person in a million had experienced the miracle of such a small moment.

“So you can imagine how I felt when, later, I identified the bird and realized how rare the species was and headed toward extinction, and what I had borne witness to wasn’t just a minor miracle but, in fact, a moment that would replicate only another hundred or another thousand times.

“That in the history of the world, a naiad hummingbird would only come to the ground to drink a finite number of times before they no longer existed.

“This thought was unconscionable to me. Unbearable. It ripped me in two. It destroyed me. And then remade me, and I became someone different than before.”

Just reading it on the page destroyed me. Remade Jane. I was already in the grip of such exhausting emotions and impulses. Yet I let Silvina in again when I had resolved not to.

Because I had let the hummingbird in first.

PART 2

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THE TANGLE

[45]

I try, in these moments now of anticipation, of the possibility of the ecstatic … I try to recall the framework by which I made decisions after the encounter on the hill. It seems so far away from me and constantly receding.

Scared, angry, wanting to punch a wall for the hazy nature of the enemy. Wanting out, but not knowing what “out” was, and, perversely, not wanting to abandon Silvina. Underneath it all, too, an elation at flexing muscle, at knowing I was built like a truck and could defend myself. As if the idea of me as analyst was a kind of disguise or deep cover or adaptation, and the true me was shining through.

But that was a trap, too.