Migrations

by Charlotte McConaghy

  “Your parents teach you how to tell stories?” Ennis asks, startling me.

  “I … Yes. My mam.”

  “What’s she think of you being out here?”

  “She doesn’t know.”

  “’Bout your dad?”

  “No. But he doesn’t know much. I’d be surprised if he knew my name.”

  Silence. Wind howls.

  “Do you have children?” Ennis asks me.

  I shake my head.

  “You’re young. Plenty of time for that yet.”

  “I never wanted them. We fought about it for years.”

  “And now?”

  I think for a long while. The truth is a wound I can’t speak. “Do you know the ocean, Ennis?” I ask instead.

  He grunts noncommittally, his eyes falling closed.

  “I know her a little,” I say. “I’ve loved her all my life. I could never get close enough, or deep enough. I was born in the wrong body.”

  Something of him shifts, I know it. I can feel it upon the prickle of the air. A defrosting.

  We sway back and forth, and I’m not anxious about the birds anymore, and maybe that’s because the storm is easing or maybe it’s because I’m talking. Niall has always wanted me to study the things I love, to learn them in a way he understands, like this—in facts. But I’ve always been content to know them in other ways, to know the touch and the feel of them.

  “There’s a spot,” Ennis says, slow like he says all his words, “way out at sea. In the Pacific. It’s called Point Nemo.”

  “Because of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea?”

  He shrugs. “It’s the remotest place in the world, farther from land than anywhere else.” His voice is a deep rumble. I think, abstractly, that this must be what it feels like to have a father, if only he could thaw all the way. That this is what children are meant to have in a storm.

  “This place is thousands of miles from safety,” he says. “There’s nowhere crueler or lonelier.”

  I shiver. “Have you been there?”

  Ennis nods.

  “What’s it like?”

  “It’s quiet.”

  I roll over and curl into a ball. “I’d like to go there.”

  Perhaps I imagine it, but I think I hear him say, “I’ll take you one day.”

  “Okay.”

  But there won’t be any more journeys after this one, no more oceans explored. And maybe that’s why I am filled with calm. My life has been a migration without a destination, and that in itself is senseless. I leave for no reason, just to be moving, and it breaks my heart a thousand times, a million. It’s a relief to at last have a purpose. I wonder what it will feel like to stop. I wonder where we go, afterward, and if we are followed. I suspect we go nowhere, and become nothing, and the only thing that saddens me about this is the idea of never seeing Niall again. We are, all of us, given such a brief moment of time together, it hardly seems fair. But it’s precious, and maybe it’s enough, and maybe it’s right that our bodies dissolve into the earth, giving our energy back to it, feeding the little creatures in the ground and giving nutrients to the soil, and maybe it’s right that our consciousness rests. The thought is peaceful.

  When I go there will be nothing of me left behind. No children to carry on my genes. No art to commemorate my name, nothing written down, no great acts. I think of the impact of a life like that. It sounds quiet, and so small as to be invisible. It sounds like the unexplored, unseen Point Nemo.

  But I know better than that. A life’s impact can be measured by what it gives and what it leaves behind, but it can also be measured by what it steals from the world.

  10

  We married the very same evening of our kiss in the aviary. Tripping onto our bikes and riding all the way back into town, stopping by the thrift shop to buy him an old-fashioned brown suit. For me a long silk dress of palest, softest peach, the feel of which will never leave me. Niall paused by someone’s front garden to pick white flowers for my hair and his lapel, and he knew all their names, but chose only an array of sweet peas. Our next stop was at Joyce’s supermarket to get a loaf of bread and a bottle of champagne. He made murmured phone calls all the while, using his money and connections to get us a fast-tracked marriage license and a celebrant who could be available on the spot. Not for Niall Lynch a merely ceremonial wedding, no, certainly not.

  I kicked off my shoes at the harbor and we walked barefoot to its very edge, out to meet the sea. He’d asked me where I would like to get married and I’d said here, in this spot, exactly where I was once told about a woman who became a bird. Something of me had been left here that day. I didn’t know if I would find it now, or leave another piece. Blue draped over us, saturating the world and our skin with it. The celebrant came and married us legally and we even spoke vows we conjured on the spot, vows we later found mortifying and laughingly rewrote, and from the corner of my eye I could see the elegant curve of white swan necks gliding through, waiting for the bread we’d brought to feed them, and I could see a mole beside his ear, and a dimple on the right side of his smile, and flecks of yellow in his dark hazel eyes, flecks I hadn’t seen before. We thanked the celebrant and sent her away so we could sit with our feet dangling over the edge and drink champagne and feed the swans. The birds honked softly. We spoke of nothing in particular. We laughed at ourselves and swigged from the bottle. We had moments of incomprehensible silence. He held my hand. The sun went down, the swans swam away. Tears found my cheeks and his lips in the dark.

  It was utterly mad. And still. I had not one doubt, not one question, nothing but a sense of inevitability. This had been designed and I would ruin it one day but for now it was mine, and his, and ours. Niall didn’t see it that way, but instead as a choice I’d made. He said Franny Stone makes choices and the universe bends. She makes her own designs and always has; she is a force of nature and he the quiet thing that looks on and loves her for it, even then, still now. Funny, that. For to me it always felt as though I were the one following him.

  Niall told me on our wedding night, as we gazed into the wild Atlantic, that for him it was because he’d dreamed of me before we met.

  “Not you, exactly. Of course. But something that felt as you did that night in my lab, when we touched the gull. And then again when I watched you save the boys from drowning. It was so familiar. I recognized you.”

  “What did it feel like?”

  He thought for a while and then said, “Something scientific.”

  This, I accepted—a tad disappointed—was his cynicism. But I was wrong. It remains to this day the most romantic thing he has ever said to me, only I didn’t know that until much later.

  UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL GALWAY, IRELAND FOUR YEARS AGO

  They think me asleep but in the dark I hear their soft voices.

  “We don’t know what really happened.”

  “She confessed. She said she was trying to do it.”

  “She was in shock. It might not count.”

  “It better fuckin’ count.”

  “Do you understand how far she walked?”

  “Don’t be going soft ’cause you went to school with the bitch. She’s bound for bars and you getting torn up about it won’t help.”

  “I’m not torn up. I just don’t understand it.”

  “Aye and that’s a good thing, Lara—you’re no killer.”

  I roll over, longing for sleep, but my wrist is shackled to the bed and the pillow is lumpy and my feet, oh god, my feet burn and burn and burn and they said I might lose some of the toes and still it’s as nothing to the screaming, ravening burn of my mind.

  The Saghani, NORTH ATLANTIC OCEAN MIGRATION SEASON

  Something shrieks.

  I jerk upright, woken by the high-pitched grind of metal against metal. Ennis is talking quickly into an intercom, more urgently than I’ve heard him.

  I climb to my feet in the small captain’s office to find that the storm hasn’t yet passed. It rages on, as violent a
s it’s been all day. It takes me a moment to register what I’ve heard Ennis say.

  “—nets are going in, prepare stations. Repeat—we have fish, nets are going in.”

  “Now?”

  Ennis glances at me and nods grimly. The Saghani is barely holding anchor in the gale-force winds and I can see ten-foot waves crashing onto the deck. It will be slippery as hell down there, the simplest thing in the world to be washed overboard. On Ennis’s monitors I see sonar circles that measure the depth of the ocean and any change of volume. There’s a red spike to which he points that I assume indicates a large body of marine life two hundred meters under the surface, although I could be wrong because he doesn’t explain.

  Through the wall of rain I can barely see the crew members venturing onto the deck, just their bright orange overalls and parkas. They are wearing white helmets today, and they move quickly into action, hauling the cables into place and connecting them to the nets. It is Anik who seems to be in the most danger as he is lowered down onto the rocking sea in his skiff.

  “He’ll be killed,” I say.

  Through his radio Ennis is in constant communication with Daeshim on the deck, who relays everything that’s going on and takes orders from his captain.

  “He’s down!” Dae reports. “I’m checking the winch cables now. Ropes are going out. Everyone stand clear! Bas—”

  The radio goes off. I saw it: Basil slipped. I lose sight of him for a moment and then spot him again, clinging to a piece of rigging.

  “Report, Dae,” Ennis says calmly.

  “He’s all right, Skip. He’s up.”

  Ennis studies a different monitor closely.

  “What’s that one?” I ask.

  “Sensors on the net so I can see where they are.” He goes for the radio again, but this time it’s connected to an earpiece in Anik’s ear. “You good to give me a wider loop, Anik?”

  “Roger that, Skip. It’s … rough down here … my best.”

  “Fuck,” I breathe, closing my eyes. I can’t see Anik’s skiff through the storm. He’s down there somewhere, tossed about and trying to maneuver the enormous one-ton net on his own.

  “He’s fine,” Ennis says. “He’s got it. We’re in place. Dae, get him back in.”

  The men work quickly to haul Anik back onto the boat and then they rush to deal with the catch, pelted by rain and wind and waves. It’s a kind of nightmare and it feels surreal to be up here out of harm’s way, watching. I feel wrong.

  “Pursing,” Ennis warns, and starts to work his controls. “Nets up.” He goes slowly and I feel the boat tilt alarmingly. “Fuck,” he says, so softly I almost don’t hear it. “Big catch.”

  “Skip, I got a lotta strain on the block,” Dae reports. “The cables are stretched to their limit.”

  “Hold steady.”

  “How much weight’s in that thing?” Dae asks incredulously.

  “’Bout a hundred tons.”

  There’s shouting on the deck and I press my nose to the glass to try to see what’s going on down there. The net is almost out of the water when one of the cables snaps.

  “Cover!” I hear someone shout and every crew member hits the deck. Too late for one of them: the cable whips out and cracks into a body, flinging it against the bulwark. A doll, a toy, something weightless and lifeless and fragile. I gasp in horror and listen to the shouts of panic from below. Whoever it is doesn’t move.

  The net, meanwhile, holds, but only just. More strain works at the power block and all the pulleys, and I feel the boat tilt farther. Someone is climbing the A-line to reach the top of the power block, and I recognize Malachai’s tall athletic frame as it nears the top, swaying precariously with the waves. He could go over at any moment, and water this cold can kill.

  “What’s he doing?” I demand.

  “Attaching the backup cable.”

  “Can’t you just put the fish back and end this?”

  “Too good a haul.”

  “Are you fucking kidding?”

  Ennis ignores me so I bolt out into the gale.

  “Franny!” I hear him roar but I’m ducking and hammering down the metal steps, holding on for life. I am drenched to the bone, my parka seems no help against that, and the cold is shocking. It is worse than when I dove into the fjord to save Ennis. It is worse than the winter mornings in our freezing little wooden house on the beach, with wind howling through the slats in the wall and you thought you would die of it, you honestly thought you would—oh, it is worse than that by far. Water streams inside my parka, down my spine and into my gloves, turning my fingertips to ice. My ears, I think, have dropped off. I have the lucidity to think of these poor people who work in this madness, who must function at their best in it. On deck the shriek of the storm is deafening. I press myself to where Anik is huddled over the crumpled body of Samuel. Léa, Basil, and Dae are still struggling heroically with the winch, holding it in place with nothing but sheer muscle, a constant stream of curse words spewing from their mouths all the while, as Mal tries to reconnect the cables.

  I focus on Samuel, who is unconscious. “Help me get him inside!” Anik yells and so we take an armpit each and drag the big man over the lurching deck. My feet slip out from under me and I hit the deck hard. Air goes from me. I remember this. It’s drowning. I gasp, panicked, trying to find a breath but there are none. The sky spins and falls onto my face. Anik’s hand rests between my ribs and he says, “Slow, slow, easy,” until I can breathe again and I’m not drowning and then we are moving, dragging, slipping, and finally inside the top of the ladder.

  “How do we get him down?” I pant.

  Anik is shimmying down the ladder and disappearing, and he seems to take a disastrously long time to emerge with a first-aid stretcher. Together we roll Samuel onto it and strap him in and I’m worried about his spine but there’s nothing for it. Anik goes a few steps down and catches Samuel’s feet, and then we slide the stretcher down the stairs to the bottom. The next task is to lift it, and it seems to weigh a thousand tons, a million, it’s far too heavy for me, I can’t—

  “Franny,” Anik says calmly. “No one is coming to help—they’re too busy. You must lift him.”

  I nod, and bend my knees. I’m stronger than I’ve been before, stronger than even the days when I was a swimmer—prison will do that, it will carve you tough. We haul him up and stagger down the corridor. As the boat heaves the wall slams into us and there goes the air from my lungs again. “Keep going,” Anik pants, and we do, crashing into the kitchen and dropping him on the bench.

  “He’s not breathing,” I pant. “I don’t think he has a pulse.”

  “I’m getting the paddles.”

  But he’s taking too long, searching through a cupboard, so I duck to blow air into Samuel’s mouth and then because he’s too high and too large I climb up onto the kitchen bench and I straddle his large girth, and I start pumping his chest as hard as I’m able. I don’t feel as though I’m making any difference. He is too firmly built, the bones and muscles too protective of his heart for me to get to it. I give him another breath of air, a long one, feeling him inflate beneath me in a way that unnerves me deeply.

  “Off, quick.”

  I scramble down and Anik unzips Samuel’s parka and cuts his shirt open. Then he places the small patches over where the heart should be. They connect with wires to a small black box with a monitor.

  “Do you know what you’re doing?” I ask.

  “No.”

  “I think you have to put one to the side and one to the bottom.”

  “How do you know that?”

  I shrug helplessly.

  He hesitates, unsure, then does as I’ve said. The pack is energizing itself, and we watch the charge climb higher and higher until the light goes green.

  Anik’s eyes are frantic. He reaches for the button but he doesn’t need to press it—the device automatically shocks if it can’t detect a heartbeat. Electricity jolts through Samuel’s large body. He is immed
iately a thing of meat and blood. But Samuel isn’t dead—this isn’t that, it isn’t—he gasps and returns to consciousness, more quickly than I would have imagined possible. He groans and vomits all over himself, and we have to roll him onto his side so he doesn’t choke.

  “The fuck happened?” he asks.

  “No clue,” I say. “You got hit and your whole body shut down. Your heart stopped, Sam.”

  He rolls onto his back once more and stares at the ceiling. We watch him, frightened. I don’t know what kind of injury could cause your whole body to shut down like that, and I imagine jumping back onto his chest and pumping it once more, blowing my breath between his cold lips once more. If he goes again I will have to.

  But instead Samuel says, “Like a shipwreck we die going into ourselves…”

  And I laugh, startled—because even now—and I say, “As though we were drowning inside our hearts.”

  Samuel says, faintly, “You Irish.” And then he closes his eyes and continues to breathe.

  * * *

  The catch is lost to the storm and the broken cable. Samuel has a laceration from the cable that cuts clean across his back. The crew is exhausted and heartsick over the lost catch, worried for Samuel. Ennis is so furious with himself that he’s stopped speaking altogether.

  And me?

  I’m no longer the thing with feathers.

  Because the tracking light for my tern has blinked out, snuffed away by the storm, dragged into the deep below where no sun can find it. Just as she must have been.

  11

  WOMEN’S PRISON, IRELAND FOUR YEARS AGO

  I flinch at every sound. My nerves are shot. The numbness has worn off and now there are sharp edges everywhere.

  Because I’m on remand my lawyer can visit me any day of the week. I am led by a guard into the open meeting room and shown to a table. The glass windows are set high into the walls, right up near the ceiling, and they’re open only a crack. It’s better than my cell, though.