Migrations

by Charlotte McConaghy

  He considers this. “Then why does it feel like you’re looking for her?”

  I don’t reply.

  “Do you know where she is, Franny?”

  My throat thickens as I shake my head.

  “You haven’t spoken to her since you were a kid?”

  “I’ve been trying to find her.”

  He absorbs this silently. Then, “What of your da?”

  “I don’t have a da.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “No idea.”

  I wonder if I will ever tell Niall the truth of my dad, or if I will keep it buried in the dark, rotting place within.

  “Then why’d she send you to live with him?”

  “She sent me to the only place there was left, to his mother in New South Wales.”

  “Australia? Shit.” He scratches the early growth of his beard. “Accent seems obvious now. Hybrid thing that it is. How long did you live with your grandmam?”

  “Why are you asking so many questions?”

  “Because I want to know the answers.”

  “You didn’t before.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Then why didn’t you ask? Why now?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  “Why didn’t either of us ask a single question?” I press. “We were so stupid.”

  “Regretting it already?” he asks. The wedding, if it can be called that.

  And for one long moment I think the answer will be yes, it seems obviously yes, only when I open my mouth it’s to say the other word, and I’m astonished to feel it as truth.

  We both catch sight of an egret carried by an eddy. “Too windy for you, my love,” Niall murmurs to it. The bird is flung about and stolen from view.

  “I was with her a few years,” I say. “Edith. But I came and went a lot, and in the end I didn’t spend much time with her before she died.”

  “What was she like?”

  I try to find the right word, my mind reluctant to go back there, to that farm and all its hard edges, all its loneliness. “Unforgiving,” I say.

  Niall strokes my hair off my face and kisses my temple.

  “Mam wasn’t like that,” I murmur. “She was warm and sweet, and lost. I loved her so much. She had the wandering thing but she was terrified of it, too. She begged me not to leave her. She was fine being on her own until I came along and then the thought of being without me made her want to die. That’s what she said. But there was a boy I liked. I wanted to go to the beach with him and I didn’t fucking tell her, I just went. Why did I do that? I stayed away two whole days—or it might have even been three. So by the time I got back it was too late and she was gone. Like she warned me she’d be.”

  “She just left?”

  I shake my head. He isn’t listening. “I left.” I look at him and brace myself for a truth, the worst one of all. “I always leave.”

  He is quiet a long while, and then he asks, “But do you come back?”

  I rest my head on his shoulder; I rest myself in his hands. It seems a safe place to be kept, even to belong. But where does he get to belong? What crueler fate is there than to belong in the arms of a woman who dies each night?

  * * *

  For years I thought of that evening in Doolin warmly, the evening I first knew I was his. It was only when he seemed bewildered by this recollection that something long since cast aside returned.

  “I thought you hated dead things,” Niall said.

  And I remembered how we walked along the rocks until we found the seabird settled among them, its neck broken and wings twisted at violent angles. It had gone simply from my mind, that image, like a light winking out.

  15

  LIMERICK PRISON, IRELAND FOUR YEARS AGO

  I have waited for a rare moment alone to drag the crudely sharpened end of my toothbrush through my wrist. It hurts more than I’d thought. I drag it again, trying to deepen the wound. I know I’ve done it right when the blood is born dark as night. It’s slippery and I lose my grip on the toothbrush, only to find it again and go for my other wrist, wanting it over—

  She smells of sweet, cheap sugar as she kneels and gathers my arm strongly in her grip. The makeshift weapon is flung from my reach and she is calling for help and I am sobbing for her to let me go, please just let me go—

  * * *

  Her name is Beth. My cellmate. We don’t speak to each other, not after those first days when I tried to end it. I don’t think she will ever speak to me again, and that is fine. She and I don’t cry at night, not like the women in other cells. We don’t shout like they do, nasty lewd comments for the benefit of the guards or to rile each other up. I think they shout and cry to give voice to the fury and the fear of being so reduced. No, Beth ignores me and I lie shivering in horror, the horror of walls and of what I’ve done. I am unmade.

  After only a month or so I was moved from the relatively comfortable single bedrooms of the women’s prison, with its bedspreads and kitchens and sweet-smelling bodywash, to Limerick Prison, which is a different world and far more fitting. Here the cells are small and gray and concrete. Beth and I share a metal toilet and the window is opaque.

  There are women here who’ve been violent because of drugs or alcohol. Women with addiction problems. Women who steal or commit vandalism. Abusive mothers. Homeless women. There are men, too. It is a mixed prison, after all, and not much keeping us apart. One door, to be specific. To be terrifying.

  There are all kinds here. But I am the only woman who has killed two people.

  * * *

  I’ve been here nearly four months when it first happens. It takes them that long to realize that the murderess is harmless, catatonic, even. I don’t speak, I hardly eat, don’t manage to move much, except to clean and walk when they let me outside. But even without a voice I manage to offend Lally Shaye—it’s something in my eyes—and she beats me black and blue. It happens again a month later, and then in another three weeks. It’s becoming a habit of hers. I’m an easy target.

  After the third attack I’m sent back from the infirmary with broken ribs and a broken jaw and all the blood vessels in one eye burst. I feel like hell. But Beth looks at me and stands up. It is the longest she’s regarded me since that bad day near the start.

  “Get up,” she says in her Belfast accent.

  I don’t, because I can’t.

  She takes my wrist and wrenches me to my feet; it hurts less to surrender to it.

  “You don’t stop this now, it’ll never stop.”

  I shake my head, listless. I don’t care about being beaten.

  Then Beth says, “Don’t die in here. Not in a cage. Get free and die, if you have to.”

  It stills me. An idea forming.

  “Lift your hands.” She lifts hers, making fists like a boxer. It seems absurd. I’m not this, I can’t fight. She yanks my arms up for me, positioning them. Ribs hurt. Lungs wheeze. Spine sags.

  She punches me. I gasp in pain, cupping my cheek.

  And Beth sees it. The flash of anger in my eyes. A remnant of willpower, not completely dead after all. She stokes it, calling it back to life, and all right, then, why not, I set my mind to a plan: die free.

  16

  NEWFOUNDLAND, CANADA MIGRATION SEASON

  I walk over grass wet with dew and through a blanket of dawn fog. After a mostly sleepless night I should be at my lowest, but instead I find myself bolstered this morning, determined to continue on our way. I never expected this journey to be easy, so what right do I have to give up at the first hurdle?

  Despite the early hour, when I push through the back door and into the warm kitchen the lighthouse is already flush with agitation.

  They’re watching the news, crew members and children alike crowded into the living room. The coals of the fire have been forgotten and are just about out, I see, and it’s this that makes me think something must be wrong.

  Daeshim glances at me—all other eyes are glued to the screen—and murmurs, “Co
mmercial fishing vessels recalled.”

  It doesn’t register. “What? What does that mean?”

  “They’ve made it illegal to fish for money.”

  “Where?”

  “Anywhere.”

  “Hang on—all fishing vessels?”

  “Every damn one,” Basil says. “Shackled to land for the foreseeable future, and if you don’t do as you’re told they seize ownership of the boat. Cunts.”

  “Language,” Gammy snaps. None of her children laugh this time.

  “So we’re stuck here,” Léa says.

  I look at Ennis. He hasn’t said a word, but there’s no color in his face.

  This has been a long time coming. It’s terrible for the economy and the people whose livelihoods come from the ocean. It’s disastrous for my plan, and for poor Ennis’s ability to get his kids back. But even so, I can’t help smiling inside. Because it’s not bad at all, not really—it’s wonderful. It’s an enormous turning point, a step forward, at long last, by those in power, and as I stand here what feels a million miles from him, I know exactly what Niall’s smile will look like.

  * * *

  The St. John’s hotel room is claustrophobic with four men and two women crammed inside it. I’m sitting with my head poked out the open window, smoking a cigarette. Basil, to whom the cigarette belonged, sits opposite me; I’ve gone through three in the time it’s taken him to smoke one. Ennis didn’t want to impose on Gammy, so we’re back in town, waiting to hear how Samuel is, and trying, listlessly, to figure out what to do with ourselves. Our captain hasn’t appeared all afternoon. Anik said Ennis had taken himself off to mourn the Saghani privately.

  A trip to the coast guard yielded an information packet about the new laws that are coming into effect and what to do with our vessel. If we’re not docked in our home port then the vessel is to be frozen for thirty days before being released, and Ennis can then take it straight to his Alaskan mooring, without detour and under the supervision of a maritime police officer.

  I’m the only one who has nowhere to go. If I go back to Ireland the garda will grab me for breaking my parole.

  So my only option is to find another way to follow the two remaining tracked terns.

  “Are you okay?” Basil asks, voice low.

  I ignore him, my mind busy turning the problem over. “Can I have another?”

  He passes it to me, groping at my fingers before I pull them away.

  “What’s with you?”

  “Nothing.” I just don’t want to be touched, especially by you.

  Basil frowns, leering at me in a way that is so over the top I want to shove his face away. “Franny. I’m into you. You don’t have to worry.”

  My mouth opens and I nearly laugh. “That’s what you think I’m worried about?”

  “Well, then what?”

  His presumption and arrogance are hardly fathomable; I actually do laugh this time, and see him blush. We sit in silence and smoke, the cigarette leaving a foul taste in my mouth and not making me feel relaxed at all.

  “I’m going for a walk,” I announce.

  “Do you want any company?” Mal asks, but I shake my head.

  “I have some stuff to figure out.”

  I go down to the docks and share a few ciggies with some of the beached sailors. There’d been rumors circling that this could happen, but none of them thought it’d be so soon, in that way that nobody ever thinks the things they love will end. I ask them what their plans are and most say they’ll head home, sell their boats to be repurposed, find some other way to make a living. Some of them already have backup plans in place. One of them, an older man with deep wind grooves lining his face, sheds a few tears, but when I try to console him he shakes his head and says, “It’s not for the job. It’s for the violence we brought to the earth.”

  I walk past a couple of tourist charter businesses and wonder if I could ever afford to charter a private boat to take me the distance. Doubtful. How the hell do you make a huge amount of cash in a hurry, without resorting to theft?

  There’s a pub on the corner that I saw when we came in—I head for it and order a Guinness and a whiskey. They have the fireplace raging so I sit in front of it, next to a young man with a beagle called Daisy. Daisy sniffs my hands and then parks herself at my feet to let me pat her. The owner, whose name I’ve already forgotten, tries to talk to me but when I don’t have much to say he grows bored and finds new conversationalists.

  Léa sits and hands me another Guinness.

  “I don’t need a minder,” I say.

  “Sure you do. You walk into oceans when you’re not being minded.”

  I finish my whiskey and move on to the stout. Daisy’s ears are silky soft to touch. Her bottomless chocolate eyes gaze lovingly up at me, and then drift shut as I stroke her ears.

  “Do you think we could de-commercialize the Saghani?” I ask her.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. Remove the power block? The netting, the freezer … all the fishing gear.”

  She looks at me with pity, and it’s irritating. “You really are desperate, huh? Why?”

  “I have a job to do.”

  “Why does it matter where they die, those birds? Because they’ll die one way or another, no? And what does it even matter if they do? Makes no difference to us.”

  The question leaves me breathless. I don’t have any response to it, to the apathy.

  It occurs to me that Léa is so tense I can almost see the grinding of her teeth through her jaw. She’s dealing with her own crisis.

  “There’ll still be boats for you to work on,” I tell her softly. “It’s gonna be okay.”

  “Why’d you fuck Basil?” Léa asks abruptly. “He’s such an asshole.”

  I stare at her. “I didn’t fuck Basil.”

  “Not what he said.”

  My mouth falls open. But really, why am I even surprised?

  “What are you punishing yourself for?” Léa asks.

  “What does it matter?”

  “It matters to me. I’d say it probably matters to your husband, too.”

  “My husband left me.”

  It’s her turn to be speechless a moment. “Oh. Sorry. Why?”

  I shake my head slowly. “I’m bad for him.”

  “You’re in a dark place,” she says impatiently. “I get it. I’ve been there. But you have to keep your shit together. It’s dangerous at sea and I can’t be looking out for you all the time.”

  “I don’t need you to. We’re not going back to sea, remember?” Not together, in any case.

  She drops her eyes.

  When I get to my feet she follows suit, so I have to say, “I just need a minute alone, okay? Sorry. I’ll be fine after a walk. See you back there.”

  To get out of the pub I have to go past the gambling area, and there, sitting at a slot machine, is Ennis. I hesitate, then walk over to him.

  “Hey.”

  He presses the button, over and over, like he’s a machine himself.

  Malachai mentioned Ennis has a gambling problem. I can see it now. “Want to get some fresh air?” I ask.

  He grunts something like a no and finishes his rum and Coke in one go.

  “How long have you been here, Ennis?”

  “Not long enough.” He sounds very drunk.

  “Have you … won anything?”

  No response.

  “I think you should come back to the hotel with me—”

  “Fuck off, Franny,” he says flatly. “Just fuck off out of my life.”

  I oblige.

  * * *

  Outside it’s grown colder. I head for the sea, but I’ve only made it half a block when I register unease and stop. I have no idea what’s changed between now and two seconds ago, but suddenly this doesn’t feel right and I need to get back to the hotel, I can’t get there fast enough. I can see its light in the distance as I pick up my pace.

  Instinct, always. The body knows.

  A
man steps into my path.

  “Riley Loach?”

  I recognize him. The protester who was wearing the striped beanie and looking inside me. I don’t say anything but my heart thunders because how did he get that name?

  “You part of the Saghani ’s crew?”

  “No.”

  “Fuck off.”

  “Okay.” I make to walk past him but his hand lands on my arm. It sets my hairs on end.

  “You know what you and your friends are doing to the world?”

  “I agree with you,” I say quickly. “It’s wrong. But the sanctions have put an end to it.”

  “You think that’s enough? To let the lot of you get away with what you’ve done? It’s bullshit!” He’s so angry. I don’t know what to do, how to defuse this.

  “Look, I’m not one of them. I’m trying to—”

  “I saw you, bitch. So tell me where your captain is. I can’t let this go unpunished.”

  The animal rears within me. “No fuckin’ idea.”

  He is a large man, at least double my size, so when he pushes me back into the wall I feel the presence of his strength. I feel it in those same ancient instincts, given to me by generations of women, the adrenaline I inherited flooding my system, I feel it in the punch kick fight fuck kill of my body and I want to hit him right now, I do, but instead I hold myself very still, sensing it all, knowing I could be a hair’s breadth from a great deal of pain or worse, some violation of my body or even death and without warning I snap my teeth at him, so fucking furious I could goddamn burn the world down.

  He jerks back, surprised by my strangeness. Then he laughs and presses me by the throat to the wall, blocking my air, slamming my skull. Pain lances down my spine.

  “Just tell me where they are.”

  But I don’t, and so he drags me painfully around the corner and into a darker street, and whatever noble quest he’s set himself on has been poisoned by hate; I see it the second before he does it, the way in which he’ll make me pay for his hatred. His hand gropes my crotch, going for the buttons of my jeans, but by then I’ve well and truly had enough.