They each hug Ennis excitedly, then Léa, and then the rest as they pile out of the rental car. Me they are watchful of.
“Hally,” the oldest introduces herself as she shakes my hand. She has the most disheveled hair of all and eyes a deeper blue than the sea on a clear day.
“And this is Blue, Sam, Coll, Brin, and Ferd.”
I say hello to each, trying to commit their odd names to memory.
“Don’t worry, nobody ever remembers us all,” says the one I think is called Brin.
“I’ll try my best.”
“Sometimes I make them wear name tags,” Gammy admits.
“You’re Irish?” Hally asks me.
I nod.
“We’re Irish!” says Ferd.
“A long way back,” Blue adds. Then, “Which part are you from?”
“Galway.”
“The republic,” Hally says. “So did you support the end of the War of Independence and the British colonization of Northern Ireland?”
I blink. “Uh … How old do I look, exactly?”
Hally makes an impatient sound and decides I’m not worth questioning further on the matter.
The rest of the adults are all gathered around the big kitchen table, while I’ve been surrounded by children in the living room. The fire is raging, even now with the sun high—the wind out here cuts through the house, turning the air frigid.
“You should visit Ireland one day,” I tell the girls, sinking into one of the deep leather armchairs. “You’d suit it.”
“Can we stay with you?” Hally asks me.
Surprised, I say, “Of course.”
The littlest one, Ferd, climbs onto my lap and makes herself comfortable.
“Hello.”
“Hi,” she says, curling my hair around her tiny fingers and humming contentedly.
“You like history, huh?” I ask Hally.
She nods.
“Mom wants her to study it in college,” Blue says.
“Leave Franny alone, hounds,” Gammy calls from the kitchen. She’s taken off her huge woolen sweater and I can see that her arms and shoulders are thick with muscle.
The girls are reluctantly drifting away when I say quickly, “No, don’t go.”
From then on I have six shadows. Hally pummels me with questions. Ferd seems to want to always be cuddling. Coll doesn’t speak a word but she watches my face like it holds the secrets of the universe. Blue and Brin seem more interested in mucking around with each other, but stay close, and Sam laughs kindly at anything anyone says.
“Would you like to see our garden?” Ferd asks.
In the kitchen I can see Basil and Gammy arguing about the food they’re cooking for dinner. It seems Basil is rude enough to order people around in their own homes, and Gammy is the first one with enough moxie to stand up to him. Dae and Mal are playing cards again and baiting each other into fights. Léa is with the cars—I can hear her tinkering with Gammy’s engine. Anik has disappeared outside somewhere and I don’t know where Ennis has gone.
I smile because there’s nothing I’d like more than to see the garden. Ferd decides she will be piggybacked, so I hoist her up and march outside. Her little hands gently circle my throat.
“We’ve been harvesting for months,” Sam explains as we head up onto a hill covered in a marvelous, sprawling vegetable patch. “During the summertime.”
“And which vegetables do you grow?” I ask, picking my way over winding stone pathways between beds.
“These were onions here,” Blue tells me, pointing them out. “Potatoes were in those far beds, but we got all of those for the moment. These are beets, carrots, cauliflower, um … what was that one, Coll?”
“Kale,” Coll says in a whisper, running her fingers over the brilliant purple and green leaves.
“They’re Coll’s favorite,” Blue says. “See how they look like roses?”
“There’s heaps more,” Sam says. “Herbs all over there. Mint and stuff.”
“Mint, ugh,” Brin announces, pinching her nose in disgust.
“Do you know how to garden?” Hally asks me.
“A little. Not like you.”
“How do you expect to live sustainably if you can’t garden properly?”
I stifle a laugh. “You’re right, I should. It’s hard when you live on a boat.”
“Well, yeah,” she agrees. “But when you get home.”
I nod.
“We don’t eat anything but what we grow ourselves, and the eggs our chickens lay, and what we catch in the sea.”
“But we haven’t had fish in ages.” Brin sighs.
“What about other meat?” I ask. “Do you raise livestock?”
“No meat,” Hally says. She puffs her chest out a little and looks truly fearsome. “Dad says we don’t need it.”
Does he now. Samuel’s definitely been eating meat on the boat—no wonder he gave me such a sheepish look when I said I was a vegetarian.
“I’m impressed and envious,” I tell them, and Hally’s bristling gaze loses some of its suspicion.
“We’ve been taking down the nets, see?” She points to the end of the garden, where there’s a metal skeleton over which drapes a length of netting. “Hey, get out of there,” she adds to Blue and Brin, who’ve wrestled their way into a bed of dirt and are now filthy.
“Why?” I ask Hally.
She shrugs. “The birds haven’t been trying to eat anything lately.”
“That’s because there aren’t any,” Blue says as though it’s obvious.
I swallow. “That’s sad.”
Hally shrugs. “I guess.”
“But good for the vegetables!” Ferd pipes up cheerfully from my shoulder.
* * *
Next we spend time in the chicken coop, a great big maze of a space, with wooden houses in which the birds sleep and patches of grass for them to scratch around in. There are twenty-three in total, and they’re so used to people that they let us hold and stroke them. Their speckled feathers feel silky to the touch, their soft clucking is almost motherly, and I love it here.
It’s nearing dusk as we walk down the hill to the long stretch of sandy beach. Most of the girls bound ahead, but Ferd stays on my back. She grows heavier by the moment but I wouldn’t part with her for anything.
Two of the girls disappear to fetch their enormous black horses and lead them onto the beach. They both wave at me and swing themselves up onto the bare backs of the creatures, kicking them into a canter along the shore. Mighty hooves thunder and sand sprays; the girls seem miniature and dwarfed by their mounts, and yet earthily at one with them.
Ferd wriggles down to play with her sisters on the sand, so I sit on a dune and watch the two riders gallop up and down the length of the beach. A golden setting sun streaks the sky pink, the ocean metallic. I bury my feet and hands, feeling the coarse grains against my skin, and I beg myself to live inside this evening, but I am a million miles away. Once I would have lived for the sweetness of this night, I would have devoured it and let it quicken my blood, and now there is nothing. I am separate, and that might as well be death anyway.
Ennis appears silently and sits beside me. He has brought me a glass of wine, and a beer for himself. I’m surprised by his presence, when he has studiously avoided me.
“They’re something, huh?” he asks, eyes on the girls.
I nod. “What are your children like?”
I’m not expecting an answer, but he says, “I don’t know. I don’t know them anymore.”
“What are their names?”
“Owen and Hazel.”
There’s something tight in his voice, so I stop asking about his children.
My curiosity catches hold of something else instead. “So what’s this big secret that no one will tell me about how Anik became your first mate?”
“It’s not a secret,” Ennis says. “It’s just not their story to tell. We were on another boat together, before the Saghani. There was a storm and she sank, a
nd every man aboard drowned except me and Anik, and the two of us survived because we held on to a bit of the mast and to each other, and we waited in the water for three days to be found. Now we don’t sail without each other and that’s it, that’s all there is to it.”
I’m silent. It’s far from what I expected, and I turn cold, trying to imagine what it must have been like in that water for so long, knowing the endurance of it must bind you to someone forever.
“Why are you talking to me?” I ask eventually.
Ennis glances at me. “I’m taking pity on you.”
I roll my eyes.
The horses thunder by, a storm of sound. Two tails of red hair stream out behind them, tangled with the dark manes of the animals.
“The fish will come back,” Ennis says abruptly.
“No, they won’t. Not while humans are here.”
“There are always cycles—”
“This is mass extinction, Ennis. They’re not coming back.”
His face twists in denial. I find it astonishing.
“Why do you do this to yourself?” I ask him. “It’s like punishment. Why?”
“Because there’s nothing else. There’s nothing else for me. There’s this, and there’s my children, and they’re not even mine anymore unless I can keep going, unless I can make something of myself.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but what does money have to do with getting custody?”
“I’ll never get them back unemployed and penniless.”
“So go back, drive taxis, clean buildings, pour beers, whatever. You can’t be a father if you’re not there.”
He shakes his head. I don’t think he can hear me, not really. I stare at him, and something sinks slowly in through my pores. Recognition.
Ennis and I are the same.
He told me I judged him, that I thought him scum, and the truth is I did. But how can I judge his destructive compulsion when I bear the same?
“I can’t fucking stop,” Ennis admits. He gulps his beer, I think to calm himself. “It’s a sickness.”
I said the same thing to Niall once about my wandering feet, about leaving him and hurting him over and over, but hearing it said now, it sounds more like an excuse than anything. It sounds selfish.
Ennis goes on, purging himself, maybe seeking some kind of absolution, but he’s come to the wrong person—I have none to give. “Fishing’s been in my family for hundreds of years. Generation after generation of fishermen. There was nothing else. Only thing I was raised on was the need to find the Golden Catch, to be the first one to do it in a long line of men obsessed.”
He’s quiet awhile, and then he adds more softly, “It’s the only thing I’m good at. There has to be some way to be a father and a good man, and still be me.”
I don’t have an answer for that. I never worked out how to be relied upon and also free.
Ennis’s hand on the glass trembles. “If I have to give it all up to be there for them, then I will, but I have to end it well. I have to … achieve something.”
“Even if it puts people in danger.”
“Yes.” His voice cracks. “Even then.”
We are silent as the girls go up and down, up and down. There’s a heaviness between us and it’s made of shame, but there’s also a new understanding.
“What if you set the others free?” I ask.
“I can’t do it on my own.”
“Could you do it with me?”
Ennis looks at me. “Just the two of us?”
I nod.
Slowly he shakes his head. “No. I don’t think so.” But something in his gaze has shifted; I’ve the feeling I’ve struck a match.
“Dinner!”
We both turn to see Basil bellowing from the house. Ennis rises. The gray in his beard turns silver in the light.
“I’ll wait for the girls,” I say, wanting to be alone.
The white fetlocks of the horses are thick and heavy; love pulses through their muscles and the small bodies atop. The littlest, Ferd, is six. My daughter would be that age now, her hair jet-black like mine, like her father’s.
13
NEWFOUNDLAND, CANADA MIGRATION SEASON
“Why are you crying?”
I open my eyes to find Ferd sitting on the sand in front of me. The other girls are walking the horses back up the hill. The sun has sunk completely now, the stars a glittering blanket above.
“I’m always crying,” I say, dashing the tears from my face.
“Hally’s always crying, too. Mom says it’s because she had a past life and it keeps sneaking back in.”
I smile. “That’s nice.”
“And it’s probably true, if Mom says.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“Come on. Aren’t you hungry, Franny Panny?” She laughs at the name, making me laugh, too.
“Aye, I’m famished.” She leads me by the hand up to the house. The beam from the lighthouse circles, inexorable as the tide, there and then gone, there and then gone.
A card table is added to the end of the large dining table, but it’s still a squeeze to get all fourteen of us seated. Gammy doesn’t banish her kids to another area, and they’re all impeccably behaved at dinner.
“To Dad,” Coll says in her dreamy whisper. We all raise our glasses to Samuel.
Dinner is served, a delicious winter vegetable stew. Basil has refrained from his usual ridiculousness, except to walk around the table ensuring everyone has a stalk of rosemary and a slice of lemon atop their bowl, and that the grown-ups all have a glass full of wine. I’m surprised to find myself enjoying his particularities, his passion, his attention to detail. He catches me staring at him and winks, ruining the moment.
“I haven’t gotten to the bottom of who your new girl is,” Gammy says, and all eyes turn to me.
“She’s our ornithologist,” Mal says. “Her birds are gonna lead us to the fish.”
“There’s no more birds left,” Ferd protests.
“There are some,” I tell her. “They’re only hiding.”
“Which ones?” Hally asks.
“The Arctic terns,” I say. And all of a sudden I am back in my husband’s lab the first time he told me of them. I’m with him as he sheds real tears, the first I’d ever seen him shed, describing the journey of these little birds, the courage of them. “They have the longest migration of any animal in the world, from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back again.”
“And you follow them, Franny?” Gammy asks. “To study them?”
I nod. “I have trackers on three.” I swallow. “Two, sorry.”
“Then why do the trip yourself?”
“It’s part of the methodology.”
“Don’t you have a team? You do this on your own, you track them all that way?” She shakes her head slowly, not taking her eyes from me. “What would possess someone to choose such a lonely life?”
There is silence as they wait.
I fold my hands in my lap and feel the question. “Life’s always lonely. Less so with the birds. They led me to my husband, once.”
It sounds mad.
The silence lengthens.
“Fucking mental,” Basil says abruptly.
“Language, Bas,” Dae says as the girls dissolve into giggles.
* * *
After dinner the girls decide to sing, which I gather they do a lot. They argue for a good five minutes about what the first song will be, until finally Hally declares they will sing only Irish songs for me, so I might feel less homesick.
But it’s raw, and suddenly it’s Kilfenora, my family in their kitchen as they played for me, it’s my mother’s cottage by the sea, and it’s missing her, it’s my husband and the distance between our bodies and it’s my daughter, the child I never wanted, the child I fought a battle to be rid of, the one I fell deeply, devastatingly in love with, the one I lost. It’s the littlest one, Ferd, her fingers around my neck and her hot breath against my ear, she has cracked me open and now my own lit
tlest one is in my arms once more, a too-still thing, a most precious thing, breathless and without warmth, and no matter how often I try to leave it behind there will never be an end to this ache, this pain, the feel of her unbearable weightlessness in my hands.
I can hardly feel my body as I move for the door. It’s cold outside and I hardly know it, and before I close the door behind me I hear Blue ask, “Did we upset her?” and Anik’s voice replying, “Something darker did that,” and I’m walking for the hills and shore and sea. I take off all my clothes and wade out into the icy water and the pain is immense and also nothing nothing nothing.
I lie in the sea and feel more lost than ever, because I’m not meant to be homesick, I’m not meant to long for the things I have always been so desperate to leave.
It isn’t fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay.
* * *
It is Léa and Gammy and Hally who finally find me. They wrap me in a blanket on the seashore and I hear someone saying, “Let me die,” over and over and then as Gammy kisses my forehead and Hally strokes my hair and they hold me so tight we tremble, I realize it is me.
“Stay,” Hally whispers in my ear.
But I can’t.
TRONDHEIM, NORWAY EIGHT YEARS AGO
“Hello?”
“Hi.” I listen to his breathing a long while.
“Where are you?” he asks, and he sounds very tired.
“Trondheim.”
A moment for him to take that in, to readjust. I ask so much of him. I wear him down. “Why Trondheim?”
“Because I was in Oslo but the city lights made it impossible to see the Aurora.”
“But you’ve found it? How is it?”
“I’m watching from the balcony. It’s the most gorgeous thing, Niall … You’d love it.”
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