Migrations

by Charlotte McConaghy

  After the class I wait for him in his lab. I make myself look at the gull carcass, stretched and pinned still, though I don’t know why. Maybe because it returns me to the moment we first touched, the intimacy and the fear of it.

  “The world’d be a better place if it was humans we could stuff and pin up and study,” Niall says as he enters.

  I can’t help smiling a little. “No, it wouldn’t.”

  “Can I show you something?”

  I follow him to a projector screen. He turns down the lights but without showing me anything he looks at my face, at my eyes, and murmurs, “You look so tired, darlin’.”

  Less sleepwalking lately, more nightmares. It’s usually one or the other. I’m a little frightened of sleep, a little frightened of my body and what it will do. But it’s not what’s worrying me now.

  “You look so hopeless,” I tell him. “Are you okay?”

  He kisses my eyelids tenderly. I breathe out and lean into him, knowing he’s not okay at all.

  The video runs, thrown large onto the screen. There is no sound. Only a sudden expanse of white that blinds us both. When we look again, there are hundreds of snowy breasts and crimson beaks and the movement of elegant, sharp wings.

  I move closer to the screen, hypnotized.

  “Arctic terns,” Niall says. And then he tells me of their longest of all journeys, he speaks of the survival of them, the defiance of them, and finishes with, “I want to follow them.”

  “On their migration?”

  “Aye. It’s never been done before. We’d learn so much—and not just about the birds themselves but about climate change, too.”

  I smile, excitement throbbing to life within. “Let’s.”

  “You’d come with me?”

  “How soon can we go?”

  He laughs. “I don’t know. I have work…”

  “This is your work.”

  “I’d have to get funding. It’ll take a lot of effort.”

  I swallow my disappointment and turn back to the screen.

  “We’ll go, Franny. One day. I promise.”

  But he’s said this before and we never go anywhere.

  “Tell me where they fly,” I murmur, and he does, he takes me over oceans and onto foreign continents, he takes me to the other end of the earth, farther than anyone has yet followed. In his voice I hear tears. I turn to him.

  “I went to your house this morning,” he says.

  “What house?”

  “The wooden one by the sea.”

  “Where Mam and I lived.”

  He nods. “No one has lived there in a long time. I went inside. It was so cold, darlin’. The wind cuts straight through it and all I could see was your little body huddled into the bed with your mam trying to stay warm.”

  I hold him, I wrap myself about him. If I make of myself a thick enough shell then I will keep him safe; if I fuse myself to his skin, if I am needed, then surely we can’t be parted.

  * * *

  Cutlery scrapes against plates and echoes off the high ceiling. It’s practically a cathedral in here.

  We are staying the weekend at Niall’s parents’ place, so I can meet them. Niall wanted to do a half-hour coffee; it was me who suggested the whole weekend when I heard his dad’s longing on the phone. Arthur Lynch is a quiet, cheerful fellow who misses his son a lot. Penny Lynch is a different story. I should have opted for the coffee.

  “What do you do for work, Franny?” she asks me, even though Niall’s already told her. I’m just grateful someone is speaking.

  “I’m a cleaner at NUI.”

  “And what drew you to that vocation?” Penny asks. She’s wearing a cashmere sweater and ruby earrings. The fireplace in the corner is the size of Dublin, and the wine we’re drinking has been in the cellar as long as Niall’s been alive.

  “It’s not a vocation,” I say with a smile. I don’t know if she meant it as a joke but it’s pretty funny to me. “It’s just a job I could get with no skills or qualifications. It’s easy enough to come and go, and you can do it anywhere in the world.” I pause with the fork halfway to my mouth. “Actually to be honest, I don’t mind it. It’s meditative.”

  “Happy days,” Arthur says. His cheeks are very red from the wine and he seems chuffed to have us here. His accent is more Belfast than Galway.

  “And what do your parents do?”

  Niall exhales loudly as though he’s about to lose his shit. He must have briefed them before we arrived, and his mother isn’t following the script.

  “I don’t know,” I tell her. “I haven’t seen either of them in a long time.”

  “Then they’re unaware of your marriage to Niall?”

  “They are.”

  “What a shame. You’ve done so well for yourself, I’m sure they would be proud.”

  I meet her hazel eyes, the same exact color as her son’s. I’m not playing whatever game this is. “I’m sure they would be,” I agree. “Your son’s very special.”

  “How’s the new gardener going, Dad?” Niall asks loudly.

  “Very well indeed—”

  “How did you two meet?” Penny asks me.

  I put my wineglass down. “I sat in on his class.”

  “Only person in the history of my teaching career to leave in the middle of a lecture,” Niall says.

  “I bruised his ego.”

  “What a meet cute,” Arthur says.

  Penny’s gaze is precise; everything about her is careful and poised. She says, very deliberately, “I suppose working on the university campus might allow one access to a successful young professor’s schedule.”

  “Jesus, Mother—” Niall starts to say but I squeeze his knee under the table.

  “Sadly the faculty isn’t so transparent with their lecturers,” I tell her. “No matter how hard I looked, I couldn’t find any information about the professors’ net worths or their marriage statuses. Made it really hard to know which classes to sit in on.”

  It takes a moment, and then Niall dissolves into laughter. Even Arthur has a chortle, while Penny keeps her eyes trained on me and offers a magnanimous smile.

  “I just like birds, Penny,” I tell her. “I promise.”

  “Of course,” she murmurs, signaling for one of her staff to take our plates.

  * * *

  “I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy,” Niall says, still grinning with glee. I roll my eyes and hide a smile of my own. I don’t want to condone making fun of his mother—he’s lucky to have one who still wants to be around him, and now that the moment’s passed I regret the jab.

  “She was just being protective,” I say.

  “She was being an enormous bitch, and what’s worse—she didn’t even have the wit to be subtle about it.”

  We’re in the guest wing because Niall didn’t want me sleeping in his childhood bedroom. That bedroom was a haven for him but it was also his prison; Penny used to punish him for the smallest things by locking him in there to think about his behavior, and as this occurred daily it offers him a cold childhood to remember. Venturing into that bedroom is stepping back into his inadequacies, his loneliness, the feeling of being responsible for his mother’s happiness and also an utter failure at it.

  “Here you are, darlin’.” He’s run me a bath, so I cross to the en suite, undressing as I go and letting clothes fall where they may, as you do when you’re on holiday. I sink into the hot water and Niall sits on the edge of the tub, peering around at his parents’ ornate bathroom tiles and gilding as though the sight of it all bewilders him.

  “I’m glad I married a girl who can hold her own,” he says.

  “Did you marry me to annoy your mother?”

  “No.”

  “Not even partially? Because I wouldn’t mind if it were partially.”

  “No, darlin’. I stopped trying to get reactions out of my mother a long time ago.”

  “You’re still so angry with her.”

  I’m surprised at how quickly
his response comes. “Because she’s not good at love,” he says.

  * * *

  I wake from a dream of trapped moths, throwing themselves repeatedly into a pane of glass as they try to reach the light of the moon. Niall’s gone from the bed so he doesn’t see what I see: that my feet are covered in dirt, and have smeared it all over the sheets. I pause. Oh no. I must have gone roaming in my sleep.

  At breakfast something is wrong. Penny is striding around the house giving terse instructions to her staff, while Arthur buries his face in a newspaper, hoping for invisibility. Niall pours me a cup of coffee and steers me to a window seat overlooking the gardens.

  “What’s wrong?” I ask.

  “Penny’s greenhouse cages got left open last night. Her birds escaped.”

  “Oh shit…” I try to make out her cutting words in the next room, and hear something about reimbursement and pays being docked. I gulp my coffee and tell Niall I’ll be back in a moment.

  Sunlight turns the surface of the pond molten. Long grass brushes my calves as I walk to the greenhouse. It’s quiet and cool inside; I can already see the huge cages at the end are no longer alive with color and movement and sound, but empty like a skeleton. I inspect the lock on the door and my heart sinks—there is no key or combination, simply a deadbolt that can be easily opened from the outside. I wonder if they hesitated before their escape, wary of what lay beyond the cage, or if they surged free, a vibrant bursting of joy.

  “I had over twenty species,” says a voice and I turn to see Penny. She looks out of place in this earthy cave.

  “Niall showed them to me once. They were wonderful.” And trapped. Even if I hadn’t seen the dirt on my feet, or the type of lock, I would know what happened. There was an ache in my chest from the first moment I saw them in here, hidden from true sky. More than anything I wanted to set them free. But only my other half, the savage half, would actually do such a thing.

  “Penny, I…” I clear my throat. “I’m so sorry, I think it might have been me.”

  “I beg your pardon?” She walks into a shaft of sunlight and I’m startled to see a sheen of moisture brighten her eyes.

  “I was outside last night, sleepwalking. It seems … I mean it must have been me.” I take a step toward her, resisting the urge to reach out. She’s very still. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Nonsense,” Penny says faintly. “You can’t be blamed for something you had no control over.”

  There is a long silence and I will myself to think of some way to fix this. I see now how much she loved the birds, and it’s so painful to realize how I’ve hurt her.

  “How can I make it up to you?”

  She shakes her head slowly. Instead of pride and steel she is abruptly small, and old, and scared. “It was a contradiction. I felt sad every time I looked at them.”

  My own eyes feel hot.

  Penny gathers her poise and drapes it upon herself once more. “Franny, please forgive my rudeness last night. I deal with many patients who suffer a quality that can damage their lives and those of the people around them. I thought I might have recognized that quality in you, but it was unfair of me to make that judgment, and inappropriate to diagnose someone I’m not treating. It’s a failing of mine.”

  “Oh…” I’m not sure what to say to this. “What’s the quality?”

  “I thought you might be fickle.”

  In the crisp silence I recognize her apology for what it is: a politely veiled barb.

  “Have something to eat,” she tells me coldly. “You’ve had a busy night. And you might want to consider letting me prescribe you something for the sleepwalking.” She leaves me alone in the greenhouse, and she’s right: I’m impulsive and changeable and restless, but those are kind words for a more brutal truth.

  21

  The Saghani, MID-ATLANTIC OCEAN MIGRATION SEASON

  It has taken us a month to reach the equator. No birds, no fish, and no other boats for quite some time. We are utterly alone out here, but crossing the equator, according to the crew, graduates me from landlubber to shellback. “You’re a real sailor now, Franny,” they say.

  Ennis has been hugging the American coasts—he says we’d never catch up to the birds by turning east. Crossing the Atlantic would take too long, when instead we can set a more gradual course to intercept the birds somewhere much farther south.

  Brazil is now to our right, so close we can see her. To our left is Africa. My feet itch to touch land in those places, to explore them, but there isn’t time.

  Basil doesn’t look at or speak to me, which suits me fine. He spends most of his time snarling about his status as little more than a prisoner on this ship, since he wasn’t given the opportunity to vote for turning back. He’s still cooking obsessively but there’s only so much he can do now that our food stores have run down to mostly tins. I’ll be happy never to eat another variation of beans. Most of my time is spent with Léa, Dae, and Mal, learning the ropes. Even now, after so long at sea, I still seem to know next to nothing, and Mal makes an effort to teach me incorrect terms so that when I use them everyone giggles.

  Out here it’s easy enough to pretend we aren’t fugitives. I can pretend I’m not wanted for murder—again.

  This afternoon I am belowdecks in the belly of the boat, relegated to the engine room with Léa. It’s my least favorite task, it being hot and stuffy down here. Léa’s got me checking the gauges for things like hydraulic fluid, air pressure, and oxygen, which has to be done regularly. She’s working on something greasy, as usual getting it smeared all over hands and face, but stops abruptly with a string of curses.

  “It’s stuffed.”

  “What is?” I ask.

  “Our backup generator.”

  “Can you fix it?”

  “Nuh.”

  “So what does that mean?”

  “Means we’re fucked, Franny,” she snaps, wiping sweaty hair off her face. “Without a backup, if the mains go down at any point all the power stops running and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

  “What do we use power for?”

  She snorts. “Everything, dumbass. Temp regulation, navigation, the power block, all our hot water, everything in the kitchen, and not to mention goddamn drinking water.”

  “Right. Shit. Is it likely the mains will go down?”

  “Yeah, it’s likely, happens all the time.”

  “Only we never notice it because the generator kicks in?”

  “You got it, Sherlock.”

  She stomps up the ladder—I was warned never to call them stairs—and I hurry to follow her. “Where’re you going?”

  “To tell Skip.”

  We find Ennis on the bridge and I listen as Léa explains the problem with a lot more patience than she did with me. Ennis doesn’t react except to let out a long breath, and I think his shoulders look less square. He turns back to the helm, gazing out at the empty sea before us.

  “Thanks, Léa.”

  “I think we have to go ashore.”

  There is a long silence before he says, “Not for a while yet.”

  “Captain, we can’t carry on without a backup. The risk is huge, it’s madness. Second something happens—”

  “I understand, Léa.”

  She swallows and straightens up, and I can see her gathering courage. “And do you also understand that you’re putting us in danger?”

  “Yes,” he says simply.

  She glances at me. Her gaze softens a little. “Okay, but we can’t keep on like this forever, Skip. We need a real plan to keep Franny out of trouble. Sooner or later we have to refuel and resupply—it’s not fucking Love in the Time of Cholera. Let’s just pray the old girl’s still above water by the time these imaginary fish come along.”

  Once Léa has stomped out, Ennis and I share a quiet look.

  “I’ll find another boat,” I offer.

  Ennis ignores me. “Still on the same course?” He can see the on-screen chart as well as I can, but he makes me
go over it again. We’ve been marking the terns’ route clearly so we can see the patterns of movement, which are appearing more unpredictable by the day. They’re currently flying away from the coast of Angola toward us.

  “Still south-southwest,” I say. “We’ll intercept them if they hold their course, but Ennis, they might not. Depends on the wind and the food.”

  Ennis nods once. He doesn’t care. Like Anik said, we’re in it now.

  “They’ll hold firm, and so will we,” he says.

  * * *

  Léa always switches her bed light out first, while I read for longer. But tonight she doesn’t nod off instantly, as she normally does. She rolls over to face the wall and asks, muffled, “How’d you lose your toes?”

  “Frostbite.”

  “How’d you get frostbite?”

  “I just … went walking around in the snow without shoes on.”

  “That was pretty fuckin’ dumb, wasn’t it?”

  “Yep.”

  “What do you imagine is gonna happen when we find these birds?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We get a good haul, all right, and that’s sweet for us, but what happens to you? Do you plan on ever going home again? Or will you be on the run for the rest of your life?”

  “You don’t have to worry about that.”

  “I’m worrying about it. You get picked up, you go back to jail, right? For breaking your parole? And when they identify you for what happened in St. John’s…”

  I close my book.

  “They’ll work out whose passport you’ve been using,” she warns me as if I’m unaware.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know! How do police do anything?” She sits up angrily, swinging her legs to the floor. “What aren’t you telling me? ’Cause you sure as shit don’t seem like a woman on the run.”