“Christ, we got another bleeding heart right here, folks,” he says with a sigh. “So then how come I didn’t feel at home in Ireland, either?” he asks me as though it’s my fault. “I went there when I was eighteen thinking I’d find that homeplace.” He shrugs, takes another drag. “Can’t find it anywhere.”
I can no longer hold in the question. “How long are you gonna keep doing this, Basil?”
He looks at me and smoke billows from his mouth into my face. “I dunno,” he admits. “Samuel’s so sure of it all. He says God will provide for us, the fish’ll come back. That man’s been fishing as long as we’ve been breathing. I used to listen to him. But there’s too much talk now about sanctions.”
“Do you think that’s likely?”
“Who knows.”
“Don’t you … Why don’t any of you seem to care about what you’re doing?”
“’Course we care. It used to be such a good way to make money.” He folds his arms, lets that sink in, and then he tops it off by saying, “And it’s not us, you know. Global warming’s killing the fish.”
I stare at him. “Aside from also fishing to excess and contaminating the waters with toxins, who do you think caused global warming?”
“Come on, Franny, this is boring. Let’s not talk politics.”
I can’t believe him, I really can’t, and then it’s like standing at the bottom of a mountain I have no way to scale, and I’m exhausted, I’m exhausted by Basil and his small selfish world, and I’m exhausted by my own hypocrisy because I’m just as human and just as responsible as he is, and so in the end I slump back in my seat and close my mouth.
You decided this. You decided the destination was worth spending the trip on a fishing vessel. So suck it up.
“How ’bout you, then?” he asks.
“How ’bout me what?”
“Where’s your place?”
If I have a place, I think, it was left behind long ago.
Basil hands me the spliff and our fingers touch. Oh, I remember you. Skin. A pained thing inside me rears up. The rushing sound of the ocean rises.
“Where’s your place, Franny?” Basil asks me again, and I think, Why would I ever tell you, and then I kiss him. Because I don’t like him even a little and it feels destructive. He tastes of tobacco and marijuana and smoke, but I must taste of the same, and maybe worse after all my vomiting. His free hand grabs at my arm, a fumbling surprised motion that seems to reflect a great need inside him, one maybe he didn’t know he harbored.
I end the kiss and sit back. “Sorry.”
He swallows, running the hand over his long hair. “No worries.”
“Night.”
“Night, Franny.”
* * *
My sleep is interrupted again, first by nightmares of my mother and second by the warm liquid sliding down my wrist. I sit up blearily, disoriented. I’m moving and there’s pain, and the wetness is familiar, its rusty smell like a memory in the night.
I take a breath and let my head calm. You’re not in prison. You’re on the boat.
The swaying has grown much worse. Back and forth the boat rolls, in great woozy lunges, pulling my wrist so hard against its rope binding that blood has trickled wetly down my arm.
With one hand I untie the slipped constrictor knot. I’m quite proud of this knot because it wasn’t easy to learn. I’ve decided to start binding myself to the bed at night, because there’s obviously a version of me that wants to escape this cabin and find the ocean, and the least I can do is make it hard for her.
Untied, I tumble off the bed like a rag doll.
“You okay?” Léa asks. Then, “Are you awake?”
“I hope so.” I untangle myself from the sheet and hurry through the locked cabin door, pinging off the walls like a pinball, careening into the stairs and gashing both my shins on the bottom rung. “Franny? What are you doing? Don’t!” Up I go onto the deck, into the violent lash of rain and the howl of wind and the black sky despite the morning hour, and I can barely remain upright, almost plucked and carried off with the storm, almost stripped of my very skin by the sudden savagery of the world. For a moment I stop, stunned. Then my feet slip and I am nearly overboard, nearly gone, it’s only my fingers grasping the railing that hold me to the world. I find my footing and lunge for the second stairwell. I have to get to Ennis, to the chart and the tracking dots, to my birds. The climb is perilous; my fingernails break where they scratch at the rungs and shoulders bruise against metal and my feet keep slipping, again and again, scraping my already tender shins but soon I arrive at the bridge, I am flinging open the door and being wrestled into the dark and the quiet. The door slams behind me and for a moment I am shell-shocked, the scream from outside echoing in my ears.
“The fuck are you doing?” he asks me.
I look away from Ennis’s thunderous expression. “Is this … This is bad, isn’t it?”
Sway, goes the boat, and we both careen into the wall. I can see it now, what’s happening. The storm is pushing us up and down over the swell of the mighty waves. Up the wall of one and then—whoomph—down the other side of it.
“Got both anchors down, engine full throttle, still being forced backward. Be lucky if it’s only miles we lose.”
“And if it gets worse?”
“We’ll take on too much water.” He squints at me. “You deserve to be thrown overboard, wandering about like that.”
“I wasn’t wandering, I was coming here, to you.”
Something I can’t recognize fills his blue eyes. “Why?”
My stomach bottoms out as we go over a massive wave and I have to catch hold of the back of his chair.
“The birds,” I say.
Ennis retrieves a life vest and places it over my head, and there’s pity in the motion.
“Ennis, where are the birds?”
He nods to my feet. “Take off your boots, love.”
“Why?”
“In case we have to swim.”
And here it is, even now, even after everything. The return of that mad thrill, the one I have been seeking all my life. It’s not right to be excited by danger, but I am. I am, even still. The only difference is that once I was proud of this and now it shames me.
9
GALWAY, IRELAND TWELVE YEARS AGO
I’ve spent the afternoon on the computer in the university library, trying to find Maire Stone and John Torpey. Maire is almost nonexistent online—or at least the right Maire Stone is—but I’ve come up with a number of John Torpeys in the correct area and age bracket. I’m writing down the addresses when Niall Lynch walks past the row of computers with a pile of books in his arms. He doesn’t look at me but my eyes are pulled to him as if by gravity, or perhaps something less scientific, something for which I don’t yet have a name. We haven’t spoken since the night he came to my house almost a month ago and said that absurd thing. I’ve been to his lectures but he hasn’t looked at me once and maybe this is all part of his design because he has turned me effortlessly into a creature made of obsession.
I jerk upright, computer search forgotten. The bit of paper is crumpled into my jeans pocket, an afterthought now, and without conscious decision I am following the professor from the library. His winding path takes him through various buildings and I feel myself stepping his steps, making his choices, donning his life for these precious few minutes. Who is he? Where did he come from? What is he thinking of in this very moment? Why did he say that thing, that wrecking ball of a thing, and did he mean it? Did he know, somehow, that I’ve been waiting for someone to smash me to bits, to do the wrecking so I mustn’t always do it myself? I draw his skin upon me and nestle down into his self. I wonder if he has ever wanted free of it, like I do mine, and if he has ever imagined leaving his life for another. Who would miss him? Who are the people that love him?
He doesn’t spot me in the hallways or rounding corners, or lurking behind a tree in the evening sunlight. He unlocks his bike, spares a moment to
chat with a student, then mounts and pedals away.
I unlock my bike and follow.
The professor rides at a good pace, but I have no trouble keeping up. On the contrary—several times I’m forced to slow so I won’t draw too near. He leads me through the city, pausing at traffic lights and then dismounting to walk his bike through the cobblestoned outdoor mall, catching the vibrant snippets of musicians taking advantage of the sun. Then he rides out beyond the city’s edge to where the grass is long and the sky is wide. Farther from the sea, but there’s beauty out here nonetheless, in the gold-drenched green of the fields. He slows around a winding hill and each time I lose sight of him I come to my senses and decide to turn back and then each time I see him again I just keep following. Who else can I honestly say has had this effect on me? Who else, ever? It’s the fantasy he’s created, no more. I know this, and still I follow. Huge trees appear to line the narrow road, blocking the paddocks on either side. They turn the world darker. A tunnel with no end in sight.
Niall reaches an arched gate, unlocked, and rides through onto a driveway. I stop and lower a foot to take it in. Before us is some sort of brick manor, a castle, almost, with several stories and enormous grounds and a Lexus parked out front.
He could turn around now and see me plain as day, framed by the curled iron and ivy. I wonder how I could explain it, if I could bear to try. But he doesn’t turn, and curiosity gets the better of me. I ride through the gate, embracing my insanity and ensuring humiliation. Up the winding driveway and around the stone fountain, all the way to the side path down which I saw Niall disappear. I leave my bike hidden behind a large, perfectly manicured hedge and creep along the perimeter of the house.
The back of the property is unlike the front. Out here it’s overrun, uncontained. There are tall trees and unruly plants and too-long grass. A lake spreads silver, at its edge a gently rocking dinghy. Niall disappears into a small building in the distance, hidden by draping vines. Up close I see that its roof is made of cobwebbed glass, and the windows on all sides are almost too dusty to see through. If I squint I can make him out, moving through plants and workbenches. There he is now, between hanging succulents, now gone, and now there again, appearing and vanishing. He draws me to the back of the greenhouse; I am so magnetized to his passage that I step into a ditch and twist my ankle. Biting my lip to keep from swearing, I clutch the windowsill and find him again, and I forget about the pain because at the back of the greenhouse is a tremendous cage, and it is filled with birds.
All the blood rushes to my cheeks and I step away from the window, trying to catch my breath, only I can’t, so I walk back to the entrance of the greenhouse, and then inside, through the vibrant colors as though in a dream, and the sound of the birds, what must be dozens of them, is echoing inside me and I can feel the flap of their feathers against my ribs. Niall doesn’t hear me over the racket of chirps and squawks. There are finches and robins and blackbirds and wrens and those are just the ones I can identify at a glance. He’s inside the cage feeding them grain, and the flutter of their colored wings is a whirlwind around him, and then suddenly, as though I haven’t decided it myself, I too am inside the cage, and he’s looking at me, surprised and also not surprised, and then I am kissing him amid the feathers.
We cling to each other, feverish. Perhaps it’s the recognition of a second will, one to rival my own, but in his certainty I find mine awakening, I find true adventure, at long last, one that might just be enough to keep me.
He pulls away to say, “Let’s get married,” and I burst into laughter and he does, too, but we are kissing again and again and I am thinking that we have lost our minds and that this is ludicrous, foolish, absurd, but I am also thinking that this must finally be it: the end of loneliness.
The Saghani, NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN MIGRATION SEASON
* * *
“Be easy,” Ennis says a while later when the storm has lulled us both into an uneasy stupor. “It won’t come to that.”
“To swimming?”
He nods. “We’ll be all right.”
He’s sitting in his captain’s chair because it’s bolted to the floor. Every few seconds he braces himself against the lurch and sway. I kept being toppled off my seat so now I’m lying on the floor in order to avoid injuring myself. My feet break my forward impact, and Ennis has put a life vest behind my head for when I slide backward. He doesn’t want me here, but he wouldn’t risk me trying to get belowdecks.
The cabin feels small with the dark rain lashing at its windows and the two of us trapped here until the storm passes. There is a sky beast outside, intent on our destruction. Or maybe it doesn’t notice us at all, small as we are.
My eyes are fixed on the laptop screen, on the red dot in the storm’s path. How the terns will survive this is beyond me, but I know they will. I can feel it. I’ve never been more certain of anything.
Ennis reaches for the computer, moving it so he too can watch the dot.
“How’d you lose your kids?” I ask.
He doesn’t reply.
“What happened between you and their mother?”
Ennis gives no sign that he’s heard me, until—a slight shrug. Progress.
“Who ended it?”
He glances at me like he wants me to shut up. “She did.”
“Because you went to sea?”
“No.”
“Anik said you don’t like me because I don’t have the training to be here. He said it’s dangerous.”
Ennis grunts.
“Is that all it is?”
Silence.
I lick my dry, cracked lips. “Okay. We can do this, you and me, we can do this whole thing with you hating me for some reason and that’s all right, I can deal with that. Or we can just talk and maybe make things easier for us both.”
Long moments pass and I guess that means he’s chosen the first option. Truth is I’m not sure why it bothers me. Of all the things that matter, Ennis’s regard is not one. Not in the scheme of things. And yet with each passing day his dislike digs deeper under my skin. Maybe it’s because I’ve been working my ass off on his boat, and I’d kind of hoped he might respect that.
“It’s not just that,” Ennis finally admits.
I wait.
He doesn’t look at me as he says, “I know your kind.”
“My kind?”
“Greenies.”
“Oh, Jesus, now you sound like fucking Basil.”
“I don’t care what you believe in. That’s your business. But why come on my boat with those eyes and look at us like that?”
“Like what?”
“Like we’re scum. Like I’m scum.”
I pause, astonished. “I don’t think you’re scum.”
He doesn’t reply.
“Ennis, I don’t.”
Again, nothing, and it’s clear he doesn’t believe me. My mind whirls, trying to figure out if he’s right. I haven’t said a word to any of them about what I think, except to Basil last night. But I guess I haven’t needed to. I don’t think they’re scum—against all my better judgment I’m actually starting to like these people—but there’ll always be a part of me that’s disgusted by what they do. Maybe once upon a time the world could tolerate the way we hunted, the way we devoured, but not anymore.
I swallow, sitting up and holding the leg of the desk. “I didn’t mean to,” I say. “I’m sorry. I just don’t understand.”
“You got the luxury of not understanding.”
My grip slips and I forget to protect my head in the backslide, clunking heavily. Pain pricks my eyes and blurs him. “I thought you were a hard old sailor who didn’t get bruised by anything,” I admit. “I thought you couldn’t care less what I thought. I mean I’m no one, Ennis. I’m no one.”
He looks at me once and a flash of lightning streaks his eyes, but he doesn’t say anything, because that’s mostly what he does, the not saying anything.
Exhaustion sets into my bones. I could sleep dreaml
essly now, I’m sure of it, swayed into a lull broken only by the walls. If I were a deep-sea creature the storm would be nothing to me but a vista above, a painted roof to the world.
“Is it often like this?” I ask tiredly.
“It’s just a bad day,” he says, misunderstanding. “There’ll be worse, and plenty of good.”
I nod and it comes in a wave, as it does, the rupturing force of missing my husband. He too loves storms.
“I’ve been reading,” I say. “Can I tell you what I’ve learned of the ocean?”
Ennis is silent again, and I think this means no, so I close my eyes and imagine the words.
But he says, “Go on, then,” and a tense part of me uncoils within.
“It never stops moving around the world. It edges its way slowly down from the polar region, and some of it forms into ice. Some of it gets saltier and colder and starts to sink. The water that sinks into the deep cold makes its way south along the ocean floor, through the black twelve thousand feet down. It reaches the Southern Ocean and grazes the icy water from the Antarctic, and then it gets flung across into the Pacific and the Indian. Slowly it thaws, warmer and warmer and rising to the surface. And then at last it turns for home. North again, all the way to the mighty Atlantic. Do you know how long it takes the sea to make that journey around the world?”
“How long?” He is humoring me, but gently, so I smile.
“A thousand years.”
Ennis shares my expression. How could he not? Who was it that discovered this extraordinariness? Someone like my husband, who has dedicated his life to the questions by which others are dwarfed.
“This ocean that’s tossing us about?” I say. “She wasn’t here sixty million years ago, but the earth moved enough to make her and now she’s more boisterous than most. More stubborn. That last bit wasn’t from a book. Samuel told me.” I let my eyes drift shut as I speak. “We don’t know her at all, really, or what she holds in her depths. We’re the only planet that has oceans. In all the known universe, we’re the only one sitting in the perfect spot for them, not too hot and not too cold, and it’s the only reason we’re alive, because it’s the ocean that creates the oxygen we need to breathe. It’s a miracle we’re here at all, when you think about it like that.”
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