Migrations

by Charlotte McConaghy

  “I’m not on the run.”

  “You should be! You should be scared, Franny! I don’t want you going back to jail.”

  I hear the tears in her voice and realize with horror that she’s started crying. “Jesus, don’t do that,” I try. “It’s not worth that.”

  “Oh, fuck you,” she snaps, covering her face.

  Reluctantly I climb out of bed and move to sit beside her. “Léa, come on.”

  “You don’t care, do you?”

  “Not really.” Hard to care when the plan is to die long before anyone catches me.

  Léa looks at me, and there’s something about the pain in her eyes, there’s a seduction in it, and before I can look away she is kissing me.

  “Léa, hey, we can’t.”

  “Why not?” she asks against my lips.

  “I’m married.”

  “Didn’t stop you with Basil.”

  “That was destruction, it didn’t mean anything. This would.”

  She sighs a little; she has turned languid and knowing. “So let it.”

  We kiss again and I want to, I want to sink into it and let it overwhelm everything, let the intimacy salve my wounds, and I think it would, it might, but what a betrayal that would be, not only to Niall but to my own sense of certainty, to this migration I’ve begun. The only person I’m intent on destroying is myself, with no more collateral damage along the way.

  So I end the kiss as gently as I can, and I go back to my bed and turn out the light. She watches me, wordless and wanting and unsure in the dark. Then she, too, sets herself to sleeping.

  * * *

  We are a plague on the world, my husband often says.

  Today there is a huge landmass to our left, and it surprises me because there is no land on the chart I’ve been studying. As we draw close enough to see, I realize that it’s an enormous island of plastic, and there are fish and seabirds and seals dead upon its shore.

  * * *

  I write to Niall; the pile of letters to send him grows fat with the weight of my thoughts. I try to come to terms with our relationship, with the mistakes I made and the twisting paths we chose to take. I ponder the way things could have been different but try not to dwell there; only regret lives in what-ifs and I have an ocean of that already. Instead I spend most of my time in the sweetness, the moments hidden between words or looks, the lines he wrote me while I was away, always generous and tender despite my abandonments. I live in the nights we spent in bed, reading to each other, or the weekend mornings we ran each other baths, or the endless bird-watching trips we took, silent and perfect and breathing each other in. I try to pretend we will have more of these moments.

  * * *

  Down along the coast of Brazil we travel. Each day begins with hope, is spent straining upward, gazing, searching, frightened of blinking, and ends breathless with despair. Only two wear trackers, but there should be many more of you, and you should be near. Where are you? Are your little wings still flapping? Are you still struggling against winds and tides and exhaustion? What if you aren’t there when I reach Antarctica? What if you die on this journey, like the others? My meager attempts to find meaning in the end of my life will come to nothing.

  I wonder if this matters.

  I wonder if there is meaning in any death, ever. There has been meaning in the deaths of the animals, but I am no animal. If only I were.

  I wonder if Niall will be able to forgive me for failing.

  * * *

  The power to the radio goes first. Léa and Dae manage to get it back up again, but this causes an outage to the kitchen, meaning the fridge, microwave, kettle, and oven all go. We eat our way through the cold food as quickly as we can, but most of what we have left goes to waste.

  Things fail by the day; Léa explains it’s because the boat is automatically rerouting the power to the autopilot system, which uses the most energy and will always be the most important thing aboard—apart from the navigation system. We lose our television, and our ability to refrigerate the stores. We are lucky to have made it to warmer weather before we lose the heating. The hot water goes in and out—someone is usually testing it to see when we might steal a quick shower or a cup of tea. Soon the autopilot fails; the battery is too low to be able to sustain it. Followed, a day later, by navigation.

  Nobody says a word about any of it. There are tireless efforts to fix what has gone. Léa and Dae work night and day on the equipment, sometimes getting things up and running again, mostly not. The rest of us work around the clock to keep the boat moving, scooping water out of the engine room and off the deck, trying to keep everything dry. Ennis rarely sleeps now that there is no autopilot, and he spends his days with charts, compass, and sextant, navigating the way sailors of old once did. It is terrifying, all of it, and I can feel fear coming off the sailors in waves, yet I can see in the captain a quiet kernel of passion sputtering to life, a return to the way the world once was. He doesn’t know this ocean and yet I think some ancient heart of him knows all oceans, the way some ancient heart of me does.

  It’s not only Ennis and me who now take comfort in the red dots of the terns but the whole crew. One by one they have made their way to the bridge to ease their trepidation and check that the little beacons of hope are steering us true.

  “It’s time to stop,” I overhear Anik say to him one day. “We had grand plans, and we made it a long way, but it’s over now, brother. The birds are too far ahead, and the ship’s failing.”

  I think this will be it. We can’t limp on this way forever.

  But all Ennis says is, “Not yet.”

  I watch the captain return for the bridge, leaving Anik to stare after his friend. I know what Ennis must be thinking: we’ve come too far to stop now. He hasn’t reached whatever line it is he won’t cross. I don’t know where mine lies, but I haven’t reached it yet either.

  I approach the first mate carefully, trying to offer support. “He’ll find us a way through this,” I say softly. “He’s strong.”

  Without looking at me Anik flashes a bitter smile. “The stronger you are, the more dangerous the world.”

  22

  GALWAY, IRELAND ELEVEN YEARS AGO

  On our one-year anniversary the thing I feel most is astonishment. Niall isn’t surprised in the least, but a part of me has always quietly thought this a frivolous adventure that would lead, ultimately, nowhere. We would discover too many qualities we didn’t like in each other, I would panic, leave, he would grow bored of me. Sometimes when I’m cleaning I imagine Niall and I are playing a monumental game of chicken, and I wonder who will be the first to admit how silly we are, to back down or laugh or throw in the towel, this was all good fun, wasn’t it, darling, but now back to our real lives, to the business of finding proper husbands and wives. Cohabiting with a stranger has been a terrifying, embarrassing nakedness.

  But today, as with every day, I am astonished by how deeply we are falling in love.

  What luck. What willpower.

  To celebrate the anniversary we go to a couple of sessions in town, making our way from one pub to the next and listening to the circle of musicians in each. It is one of my favorite things to do because the fiddles always fill me with an inexplicable familiarity. The musicians gather, the music swells, and the shared pleasure is tangible.

  After some time the songs shift, turning slow and melancholic. I know the tune from somewhere … Without warning it comes, the answer. My grandmother used to play it and hum along while she did the washing up. “Raglan Road.”

  Niall reaches for my hand. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, sorry.” I shake my head. “Have you ever felt born in the wrong body?”

  He squeezes my fingers.

  I ask, “Who are you, do you think?”

  Niall takes a sip of his wine. Probably trying not to roll his eyes. “Dunno.”

  “We’ve spent every day together for a year and you’re still a stranger to me.”

  We consider
each other.

  “You know me,” he says firmly, “where it matters.”

  Which must be true because it feels true.

  “But who am I?” Niall echoes. “What does it matter? How should I answer? How would you?”

  Who am I?

  “You’re right, I have no idea,” I say. “But I think it might live somewhere in the day Mam left. Why else would I keep going back there? Why else can’t I stop looking for her?”

  Niall kisses my hand, which is also his hand, my mouth which is also his.

  “Maybe mine lives in all the days my mother stayed,” he murmurs.

  “Did she try, at least?”

  He shrugs, takes some more drink. “We can only give what we have.”

  “Do you want children?”

  “Yes. Do you?”

  This will change things. I almost lie to protect what we have, but even to me this lie feels too cruel, too damaging. “No,” I say. “I’m sorry. I don’t.”

  Niall’s eyes shift. Something in him is so startled I don’t know if he will be able to settle back into place. The equilibrium of his certainty is thrown off balance.

  “Why not?”

  Because what if I left that child like my mother left me? What if my darkest fears are real and I truly have no control? How could I do that to a child?

  “I don’t know,” I say, because my cowardice would choke me if I tried to give it voice. “I just don’t.”

  “All right,” he says eventually, though this will not be the end of it. He says without warning, “I don’t think you should go tomorrow.”

  “Why not?” I have a train ticket to Belfast, on the hunt for a lead.

  “Because I don’t think you should keep looking.”

  I’m thrown. “I will find her eventually—”

  “She doesn’t want to be found, Franny. Why else make it so difficult for you?”

  I shake my head, my chest tight and swollen.

  “If she wanted to see you, she’d reach out.”

  “Niall, listen to me,” I say as calmly as I’m able. “This restless thing … it can take over.” I will him to hear me. “If I ever leave you—if I have to go—I want you to promise that you’ll wait for me to come back, you’ll wait for me, and if that’s taking too long and you can’t wait any more, you have to come and find me and make me remember.”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “Do you promise?”

  Slowly he nods. “Yes. I promise.”

  “You’ll wait?”

  “Always.”

  “And you’ll find me, if that’s what it takes?”

  “Even had you not asked, darlin’.”

  The song ends and that heavy weight shifts off my chest. The nameless ache. In its place is bone-deep relief, and love. We stay for another drink, and we don’t talk of anything, and I could listen for hours but Niall has something else planned. We ride our bikes down to one of the docks to where a small, motorized dinghy is waiting. My eyes widen as he gestures for me to climb in. I wonder if he has hired this boat, or if we’re stealing it. I don’t mind either way. A shiver of delight finds me as we set out into the dark water. We hug the coast, traveling north by the ceaseless circling light of the lighthouse. The salty smell of the sea and the sound of its crash, the sway of the waves and the black abyss of its depths, the reaching dark of it, up to where it meets the inky velvet sky pricked through with glitter. With the stars reflected in the water we could be sailing through the sky itself; there is no end to it, no end to the sea or the sky but a gentle joining together.

  Too soon Niall turns us inland. We climb out onto a stretch of rocks and he hauls the boat up behind us. With a finger to his lips he gestures for me to be silent and we creep along the shore until the gaping mouth of a cave opens. I can hear something over the crash of the night-ocean. Many somethings. It’s a purring and then trills, hundreds of them, an echoing song. My heart starts pounding as we edge our way into the cave. The smell drapes itself upon me, a pungent musty warmth. Niall’s hand finds mine and he pulls me to the ground, whispers for me to lie flat on my stomach. The rocks are crooked and cold but above the noise is swelling, and there are shapes in the dark, shadows. I think briefly of bats—the movement is the same sort of fluttering.

  “What are they?” I whisper.

  “Wait.”

  Eventually the clouds in the sky move so that the light of the almost-full moon shines into the cave, casting them in silver. Hundreds of nesting birds, flying and flitting and calling to each other, a sea of black feathers and curved beaks and shining eyes, a world of them.

  “Storm petrels,” Niall whispers. He lifts my hand to his lips. “Happy anniversary.”

  And I understand that we will never need the word, for this is a greater proclamation, this is the immensity of love and its furthest-reaching depths. I kiss him and hold him and we stay here, watching and listening to the beautiful creatures, for these few dark hours able to pretend we are the same.

  * * *

  It’s almost dawn when he takes this night and destroys it with naught but a handful of words, as most things are destroyed.

  * * *

  Back on the shore, wading from the dinghy to the rocks. Seawater about my ankles. Gray draped upon us.

  “Franny,” he says, and I turn, smiling. The water reaches his knees. He holds the boat’s edge. His skin looks ashen.

  “I’ve been searching, too,” Niall says.

  “For what?”

  “Only I went a different way about it. I could never work out why you didn’t want to go through the police.”

  My smile falls away.

  “You never found her because she took your father’s name. She was legally called Stewart, then, not Stone.”

  He moves a little closer but still leaves space between us, unable, somehow, to close that last gap.

  “Darlin’,” he says, and so gently. “You know what happened. Do you remember?”

  Do I remember?

  No.

  But I could go back, couldn’t I? Really go back this time, to the secret places.

  I could walk back into the wooden house by the sea all over again. Call her name all over again. See her body hanging by its neck all over again.

  “Oh.” I take a breath and the world blurs.

  “She didn’t leave you,” Niall says, but he’s wrong. “She died.”

  I nod once. Yes. I know this now. I have always known it, somewhere. As I know the shape of her swollen face and the red of her burst eyes and the blue of her bruised skin. I know how dirty her feet looked, hanging there without shoes or socks. I wanted to cover them to keep them from the chill. It was so cold in that house.

  My legs wobble, sitting me gracelessly in the water.

  How funny, that such a thing should drop so delicately from my mind. A falling, fluttering leaf.

  What else have I lost that has fallen free?

  “Franny,” Niall says. I see him kneeling before me. His face is blurry and handsome and no longer a stranger’s.

  “I remember now,” I say, and he presses his warmth to my cold and his mouth to my eyes and I feel it so strongly, the knowing. Whether I leave now or in ten years, I am done here, in this place.

  23

  The Saghani, MID-ATLANTIC OCEAN MIGRATION SEASON

  “Before you go,” I say.

  The crew turns back to look at me. We’ve just finished breakfast in the mess, all but our inimical captain.

  I clear my throat, not wanting to say it.

  “Get on with it, will you?” Basil says. “Boat’s falling apart, or’d you forget?”

  “The laptop battery’s died again, and this time there’s no power to recharge it.”

  Pain crackles upon the air. This was bound to happen, but by saying it aloud I’ve killed what little hope the crew had left.

  “It’s not like last time—it doesn’t mean the birds have drowned,” I try to convince them, try to convince myself, “it just mean
s we can’t see them anymore.”

  Dae puts his arm around his boyfriend—Malachai’s struggling not to openly lose it.

  “Ennis says it doesn’t matter,” I say more softly. “He says we know where they’re going.”

  “Ennis has lost his goddamn mind,” Basil says. “He can’t sail seas he doesn’t know. None of us can.”

  This is not the first time it’s been said. The crew are wound tight with anxiety, thrown off their game by unfamiliar waters and failing machinery.

  I look to Anik for guidance but his eyes are focused somewhere far away.

  “It gets worse,” Léa says. “The water pumps have failed, which means we can’t run the desalinator, so we have a couple of days left of drinking water, max.”

  “Oh my god.” Dae slumps his head onto the table.

  “That does it, then,” Basil says. “We’re stuffed.”

  “What do we do?” Mal asks. “Birds or no birds, we need water.”

  Basil rises to pace the room, full of aggressive energy. “Are we really too scared of mutiny to save our lives?”

  “What are you talking about, Basil?” Léa asks.

  “We’ve tried. Nik’s tried, and if he can’t get through to him, then the old man’s cooked.” Basil quivers with frustration. “We should land. We’ll do it ourselves.”

  “Skip’s the only one who can do that.”

  “Any one of us knows how.”

  “That’s not the point—”

  “We could lock him in his cabin.”

  “No one is locking him anywhere!” Léa says. “He’s our captain!”

  Basil shakes his head. “Same as what happens when he gambles, he can’t see when it’s time to surrender.”

  “Have you tried?” Daeshim asks and it takes me a second to realize he’s addressing me.

  “Me?” I ask. “Why would he listen to me?”

  Nobody answers.

  “I’m not dying for this boat,” Basil says quietly, and he’s been deflated of air, of anger. “I’m not dying for fish or birds or any fucking thing.”