Migrations

by Charlotte McConaghy

  “Whose balcony is it?”

  “A friend’s.”

  “Are you safe?”

  “Aye.”

  “Whose balcony is it? Can you text me their name and address?”

  “A couple I met at dinner, Ann and Kai, I’ll text in a bit.”

  “Do you have enough money?”

  “Aye.”

  “When are you coming home?”

  “Soon.”

  He pauses awhile. I slide down onto the floor with my back to the wall. The brilliant greens and purples dance across the sky. I can feel him through the phone, it is such a potent thing, like I could touch him, feel his breath on my cheek, smell him. I’m dizzy with it, with his nearness and his terrible absence.

  “It’s lonely here, darling,” I say, tears spilling onto my face.

  “It’s lonely here, darlin’,” Niall says.

  “Don’t hang up.”

  “I won’t.”

  And we don’t, not for a long time.

  NEWFOUNDLAND, CANADA MIGRATION SEASON

  * * *

  They leave me in bed with hot water bottles piled about my feet. A distant part of me is embarrassed, but the current creature I am just wants quiet.

  Only quiet is a different beast when it finds you. A perfect kind of thing until you have it and it turns on you.

  My joints ache as I rise; there is screaming in my head and I hurry down the hallway to the stairs, and then I find my way back outside despite the cold, I feel none of it anyway, and I walk up to the headland and I sit where I can watch the wild Atlantic and I return to those first days with you, my darling, as I always find myself doing.

  PART TWO

  14

  GALWAY, IRELAND TWELVE YEARS AGO

  It starts as a tickle that creeps its way deeper, into a scratch, a scrape, a choke, until all I can do is cough up feather after feather, born of my very body and I can’t get any air, not one breath—

  “Franny!”

  There’s something atop me, pressing me into the ground, oh god, it’s a body—

  My husband is pinning me to the bed. I jackknife, repulsed at the sudden confinement of limbs and the powerlessness.

  Niall immediately scrambles back, raising his hands. “Easy. It’s okay.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Franny—I woke up and you were strangling me.”

  I stare at him, trying to catch my breath. “No … I was choking…”

  His eyes are wide. “You were strangling me.”

  Dread curls inside. I have never slept a night beside someone, never woken beside another body. Last night we were married. This morning I have tried to kill him.

  I stumble, caught in the sheets, then run for the toilet in time to vomit. He follows me, tries to hold my hair but I shrug him off, not wanting to be touched, too ashamed to be touched. When I’m done I rinse my mouth. Can hardly look at him.

  “I’m sorry. I sleepwalk. And other things, sometimes. I should have said.”

  He takes this in. “Right. Okay. Fuck.” He laughs a bit. “I’m kinda relieved.”

  “Relieved?”

  “I thought you might have been really regretting last night.”

  There’s something so wry in his voice that I too find myself with a slightly unhinged laugh on my lips. “I was asleep.”

  “Must have been one hell of a nightmare.”

  “I can’t even remember now.”

  “You said you were choking.”

  Scratching in my mouth and lungs—I shiver, block the memory as best I can.

  “Do you often dream of choking?”

  “No,” I lie, moving past him for the kitchen. With the contents of my stomach flushed down a drain I’m starving. His apartment is simple and too modern for my taste, but we talked about finding a new place last night, somewhere that can be ours.

  I raid his fridge but all he has are ultra-healthy grains and seeds and right now I need something greasy to sponge up all the alcohol we consumed last night. “Can we go get a fry-up?”

  “Is this really not a big deal to you?” he asks. “Should I expect to get strangled every night? What else happens? Do you leave the house? Is it dangerous?”

  For the first time since I woke I force myself to look him in the face. There he is again, pinning me to the bed, stronger in every muscle than I am, something shocked and determined in his eyes and is this how I looked when he woke to the same thing? “It won’t happen again,” I say. “I promise. I have medication I can take.” Another lie. There are no meds that work. But I don’t want him to be scared—for me or of me. I don’t want that look in his eyes, for him to feel the way I felt, waking to his hands pressing me small.

  * * *

  Three more nights of the same—not strangling, exactly, but thrashing or walking about the apartment and tearing through kitchen cupboards. Niall is terrified I’ll hurt myself. I don’t admit that it’s happening more than usual because I have never been so dislodged from reality as I am in this strange apartment with this unknown man. Instead I ask him to help me remove all the sharp things from his bedroom, and any extra furniture, and I ask him to have a lock placed on the inside, the key to which he will keep somewhere I cannot find.

  I don’t tell him that this makes me very nervous.

  I don’t tell him that as I try to sleep tonight the walls are shrinking and the ceiling is falling and that I want to kick down the door or smash through the window and get the fuck out of this apartment and this town and even this goddamn country. I don’t tell him any of that, I just tie my wrists to the bedposts because I don’t want to strangle my poor husband as we sleep.

  * * *

  “What are we doing today?”

  Niall unties my wrists so I can roll over to face him.

  “Don’t you have to work?”

  “What’s the point?” he asks. “Nothing ever changes.”

  I am surprised to hear this from him but I suppose I shouldn’t be; the other side of passion is melancholy, after all. Instead of reminding him that there is always a point to educating people I kiss him. We make love in the morning light, but I am tense with the memory of feathers and my wrists are sore, and I don’t feel close to him, I feel in bed with a man who recognizes none of the monstrousness I keep hidden.

  Afterward he asks again what we’re doing.

  “Anything you want,” I say.

  “Really? You don’t have anything planned?”

  “I’m off today.”

  “I know, but there’s nothing outside work you planned?”

  I look at him, frowning.

  He laughs. “I heard you on the phone yesterday, arranging to visit someone in Doolin.”

  “Were you eavesdropping? You creep!”

  “It’s a small apartment.”

  I make a face.

  “So do you want to drive or will I?” he asks.

  “What if I want to go on my own?”

  “Then go on your own.”

  I consider him, looking for a trap. He seems genuine, so I shrug and feign disinterest. “Come if you want, but you’ll probably be bored.”

  He heads for the shower. “Boredom’s for the boring.”

  * * *

  Most of the trip to Doolin is without music or talk, with only stretches of quiet that feel comfortable in one moment, awkward the next. The car is airless, so I have the windows down even though outside it’s freezing.

  The closer we draw, the more unraveled I feel. I become convinced that this is wrong and I must turn back, that this door leads only to something harmful: it’s why Mam never led me here herself.

  “So tell me about this accent of yours,” Niall says into the quiet, I think because he senses my unease.

  “What about it?” I ask, keeping my eyes fixed on the stretch of sea to our right.

  “I can’t work out what it is,” he admits. “Sometimes I think it might be English, other times you sound American. Then it’ll be pure Irish.”
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br />   “You married me without knowing where I come from.”

  “Aye,” he says. Then, “Do you know it?”

  “Where I come from?” I turn to him with a mouth open to answer, but stop. “I … Maybe not.”

  “Is that what this is about?” Niall asks, nodding at the road unspooling itself before us.

  I nod.

  “All right, then. Grand.”

  The small house sits on a ridge in the hillside and from its driveway we can see all the way down the sloping green to the sea. Rocky, uneven paddocks crisscross the expanse between, with a scattering of goats here and there.

  Niall knocks because I’m unable to. The man who answers is a thousand years old and wind-bitten and hard-faced. He squints to make us out.

  “Afternoon, sir,” Niall greets him. “We’re looking for John Torpey?”

  “That’ll be me. Unless this is about the land and then old Jackey ain’t here.”

  Niall smiles. “It’s not about the land.”

  I clear my throat—Niall can’t do any more of this himself, for he knows no more about why I’m here. “I’m wondering if you might have ever known an Iris Stone.”

  John stares at me, squinting until it seems his eyes are closed. “This a joke?”

  “No.”

  “You’ll be the wee daughter, then. I’d heard you were about in the world. Look at you now, all grown.” He sighs deeply and invites us in.

  I am tense all the way through, unsure what to expect but feeling nearer the truth than ever.

  The house is simple, with remnants of a woman’s touch here and there, a life left over from someone else. Old lace curtains, their edges dirty now. Once-cheerful porcelain figurines on a bookshelf, most chipped. A thick layer of dust covers every surface, and the windows are so dirty they let only streaks of light through. I feel instantly sad, gazing at the loneliness of the place. There’s a single photo on the mantelpiece of the fireplace. It’s a much younger John with a shock of incredibly orange hair, a dark-haired woman beside him, presumably his wife, Maire, and a little girl between, one with an inky swath of locks just like her mam’s. I don’t get much of a look at it before John is beckoning me to sit.

  “What are you wanting, dear? If this is about the land after all then we’ve things to discuss.”

  I frown, confused. “No, sir. I’m just here to ask after my mother. I was told by Margaret Bowen in Kilfenora that you might know her.”

  He laughs then, the sound turning quickly to a wheezing cough. “Ah, now I see. Margaret’s losing her senses, can’t remember a thing about who belongs where.”

  He goes into the kitchen and Niall and I listen to him shuffling around.

  “Can I help you, John?” Niall asks, but John only grunts and returns with a floral tray, on top of which he’s placed a plate of digestive biscuits and two glasses of water.

  “Thank you,” I say, taking a glass and noticing the smears of dirt on it. John must be close to blind.

  “I’ll give it to you straight, lass, ’cause it seems you know very little.”

  “I’d appreciate that.”

  “Iris is my daughter.”

  My fidgeting hands fall still. Everything of me falls still.

  “I haven’t seen her now in many years but that’s her there.” He points to the photo on the mantel.

  I rise on weak legs and reach for it. Shock steals the breath from me. Up close, the little girl looks just like me. I had no idea—I’ve never seen a photo of my mother at this age. I return to my seat, cradling the photo in my lap, leaving fingertips pressed to her face, to her dark mane and the little red dress she wears.

  “That was taken down at the shore,” John says, and it’s the shore we can see now, all the way down at the base of this sprawling hillside.

  I clear my throat. “But then if … If you’re my grandfather why wasn’t I sent here to be with you?”

  “Now why would that have happened?”

  “Well … when Mam left.”

  “She left?”

  I nod blankly. “When I was ten.”

  John’s shoulders sag. His face gentles a moment, loses some of its creases, and I’m able to see a flash of true grief in his small, liquid eyes.

  “Ah, now. That’s a burden of mine, and it’s part of a dark time.”

  “Could you tell me? Please? I don’t know anything about my family.”

  Niall takes my hand and squeezes it. It startles me; I had forgotten he was here.

  John folds his old, gnarled fingers in his lap. They are shaking a little with age. “Maire, my wife there, she was a wanderer. Her feet ne’er touched the ground. But she swam in that ocean each day, and had all the lads admiring her, and I couldn’t be easy with it. She’d go missing, you see, for days at a time, and I told myself it didn’t matter, she was still mine, the strange, lovely lass, the one everyone wanted for himself. But when wee Iris was born I took it into my head that she’d come of some other man.”

  I study the photo again. It’s true, the little girl looks nothing like the man.

  “Maire swore black and blue she was mine, and that was all right for a while. But it ate at me, and one day I couldn’t stand it anymore, and I told Maire to take the girl back to where she belonged, wherever it may be, to whoever it may be. I’d had done with them both.

  “So Maire divorced me and changed her name back to Stone. She gave Iris her name, too. And they wanted nothing to do with me and that was the way it stayed for twenty-odd years until I had a letter from Iris telling me Maire had passed.”

  He looks away from me now, to the window. “You hadn’t been born yet, lass,” he tells me softly, and then he falls silent a long while.

  I’m glad of it, of the break. And I’m so glad of Niall’s grip, the warmth of it, when there has never before been a hand to hold mine.

  “You say she left, child?” John asks me eventually.

  I nod again.

  “I was hoping that curse wouldn’t pass from mother to daughter.”

  “I think it did.” And on again, to granddaughter.

  “It makes sense Iris didn’t want you left with me,” John eventually says. “I was no father to her. Only … I wake some nights and there’s no surer thing in me except that I was all wrong, that she was mine after all.”

  I can’t keep the tears from slipping down my cheeks. One of them drops onto the photo, distorting my grandmother’s face, drowning her. I wipe it off so she can breathe again.

  “Where did you go?” John asks.

  But I don’t want to tell him. I don’t want this man knowing anything about me, this man who throws away his family as though they aren’t precious.

  “To my father,” I lie.

  “And he was a good man? She found a good man to love her?”

  “He’s a good man and he waits for her.” This is absolute nonsense but the sheer falseness of it coats me like armor.

  The sky is beginning to darken. Night will soon fall.

  “How is she?” John asks abruptly, and I hear the pain in him and the longing, and I feel the same in myself, the pain and the longing, and a small ugly part of me hates him for it, for not being able to help me find her, for knowing less than I do, and another part of me loves him for it, and it is all too much and too swift and so I get to my feet.

  “She’s well,” I say, and then for no reason I can name, simply because it feels warm to say so, I add, “She speaks highly of you. I mean, of her memories of her father…”

  John covers his face with a shaking hand. It is too terrible, all the wasted years. I have to get out of here.

  “Thank you for having us,” I say stiffly. “We should go.”

  “You won’t stay for dinner?”

  “No, thank you.”

  I am edging for the door, I can’t get there fast enough.

  “Will you come back to see me, dear?”

  I breathe out, feeling suddenly tired. “I don’t think so. But thank you.”

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nbsp; It’s only when I reach the door that I realize I still have the photo clenched in white-knuckled fingers. It feels a kind of death, to place it back on the mantel.

  “Bye, John,” I manage. And again, “Thank you.”

  Then I’m outside in a wind that has blown its way up from the sea. I can hear Niall speaking to John and then he is whisking me back to the car.

  He doesn’t take me toward Galway, but down the winding road that leads through the bright little town and past it to the shoreline. Pinks and lilacs streak the sky. At the horizon it burns.

  The boat to the Aran Islands leaves from here and I wish we could board it but it doesn’t run this late; the car park is empty when we pull into it. So instead we climb out and walk down onto the rocks. The ocean roars, steady and ferocious and calling.

  “That man up there—he’s your family,” Niall says.

  “He’s not.”

  “He could be.”

  “Why would I choose someone who never chose me?”

  Niall gazes at me. My hair whips over my face and I push it back.

  He says, “I hate everyone but you.”

  I start to smile, thinking he must be making fun of me, but he grabs my arms and holds on to me and there’s such a burning thing that my laughter dies and something different comes awake. He throws his head back and roars.

  A thrill erupts within me, and grief for the years wasted, thrown away by a jealous man. So I let forth a scream of my own, at John and for him, for his loneliness, and I scream for the missing of my mother, and for the never having met my grandmother, and for the madness of this man I have married, who may be just as mad as I am. We scream and scream, and then we laugh, building a world of our own.

  Afterward I swim in the ocean awhile, and then I rejoin him and we sit on the rocks to watch dark stain the sky. He keeps an arm about me and I press myself as close to him as I can. It’s my least favorite time of day, coming out of the water, but it is better with him waiting for me. Immeasurably better.

  “Where’s your mam?” he asks.

  The lie forms so easily on my tongue. “She’s in the wooden house by the sea where I grew up.”