Migrations

by Charlotte McConaghy

  “Real sailors don’t board vessels without knowing they could—” Léa starts, but Basil says, “Be quiet,” and she stops.

  I get to my feet. On the main deck I am rocked by a gust of wind. White streaks in the sky, pulled along like the sea spray we leave in our wake. I pause to think, to seize a single thought, but they are as wispy as the clouds, as insubstantial. I don’t know what to do, how to argue for an end to all of this, for land and police and a cell I swore I’d never return to. And yet how can I not? It is madness to continue on until the Saghani is in pieces and all seven of us have drowned or, more likely, died of thirst.

  I look up at the man on the bridge. His untrimmed beard and bloodshot eyes. His conviction. His children. He’s phantom-like. A pursuit only, and no edges left at all. If we go ashore we’ll never leave again. Beached forever. A rearing thing inside me says no. My will makes a monster of me, time and again. Eyes fix on something off to starboard. A couple of kilometers away, maybe less. Shapes in the water, not far off the coast.

  “What are those?” I ask Dae, who’s returned to his work on the rigging.

  He squints against the sun. “Fisheries. Salmon, probably.”

  There is a boat alongside the nets.

  I hurry back to the mess. “Anik,” I say. “I need you to take me somewhere.”

  The first mate’s eyes narrow.

  It happens quickly. Anik and I climb down into the skiff and set off over the water. We don’t tell Ennis; Léa has said that if we slow to a stop we might not get going again, and I don’t want him to have to make that decision. So we need to be quick. As we approach the salmon vessel I can make out people on the deck, watching us. It’s smaller than the Saghani, but not by much.

  “Ola,” a man calls. “O que o traz para fora?”

  “Do you speak English?” I ask.

  “A little, yes,” comes the reply.

  “We need water,” I say. “Our generator is down and the pumps have gone. We need drinking water. Could you help us?”

  He points to land. “A port, very close.”

  “We can’t go there.”

  The sailor looks confused. “It is very close. There is water on land.” He says something to his crew members and they return to their duties. The man strides away and that’s the end of the conversation.

  “Fuck.”

  “Now what?” Anik asks.

  “What if we snuck on board?”

  “See him?”

  I follow Anik’s pointed finger to the man in the crow’s nest, watching us. “Are storerooms generally in the same place on all boats?”

  Anik studies the boat and shrugs. “Near enough.”

  “You go back to the Saghani. I’ll meet you there.”

  “What?”

  “I’ll bring the water.”

  He snorts with laughter. “It’s nearly two miles away. More by the time you’re swimming. And how will you carry the water?”

  There’s rope in the storage box. I haul it over my shoulder, wait for the lookout to turn away for a moment and then I slide quietly into the sea. I stay under as long as I can, resurfacing closer to the hull of the salmon boat. When I circle around, I find that there are multiple ladders extending down to the fisheries—most of the sailors have used them to disembark their boat and spread out around the circular farms, checking their fish.

  I don’t wait around to make sure it’s safe—the Saghani is getting farther away every minute—I haul my waterlogged body and coil of rope out of the water and up the ladder. It’s quiet on board, at least. The fisheries look like seething pink tentacles curled into orbs. I pad, dripping, to the ladder and follow it down onto the mess deck. There’s no one in the galley, and no one in the storeroom, so I’m easily able to find the water containers—five-gallon carriers lined up along the wall. I also spot a store of batteries, and shove several into my sports bra. I can only carry two of the water containers, so I grab them and struggle out, straight into the approaching captain.

  He stares at me, a salty thief dripping wet and shivering. Two of his men look equally astonished to see me.

  I take a breath, heart jackhammering, and when no other words come to mind I say, “Please.”

  The captain looks as lost for words as I am.

  There is a long, painful moment and in it the Saghani travels farther away, it grows steadily more impossible that I will reach it again, but in his face I can also see an understanding settle, for he knows of the sanctions at play, everyone does, and then the captain steps aside with a gesture for me to pass. I sag in relief.

  “Thank you.”

  I haul the water up the ladder and my feet slap loudly on the deck. Tie one end of the rope around my waist with a bowline, link the other through the two container handles and finish them with the same. The bowline, I think, is my favorite knot. It doesn’t slip. Then step to the edge of the railing. This could be the stupidest thing I have ever done, anyone has ever done. I could be about to sink myself to the bottom of the ocean.

  I almost laugh, almost stop breathing. But panic is an enemy. Any emotion at all can be an undoing. Slow your breaths, deepen them, time them to a metronome. Make your limbs calm and your mind quiet and in you go.

  I don’t try to dive, as the containers would wrench me out of it. Instead I go straight down, hitting the water smoothly and kicking upward before the containers have even hit the surface behind me. They sink and drag me down with them and for one horrible moment I’m done, I’m dead and this is too soon, it’s unforgivably soon and all that will be left is a bloated floating thing tethered to the sea’s floor by her own chains and then I am kicking with all the power I can muster, dragging myself up to the surface with arms and feet. But I needn’t have worried about being weighed down: the containers of fresh water float. I settle into a rhythm, ignoring the shouts of the sailors who are watching this madwoman, ignoring everything except the feel of the water around me.

  Mam always said it was only a fool who didn’t fear the sea, and I’ve tried to live by that. But there’s no way to conjure fear if it doesn’t exist. And here is the undeniable truth: I have never feared the sea. I have loved it with every breath of me, every beat of me.

  It honors me now, lifting my limbs, making them light and strong. It carries me with it, embracing me as I embrace it. I can’t fight it. I wouldn’t know how.

  From a letter Niall once wrote me:

  I am only the second love of your life. But what kind of moron would be jealous of the sea?

  * * *

  Anik drags me into the dinghy with a lot of cursing and takes us the last few hundred meters, where we are met by the entire crew, including Ennis.

  My arms and legs are useless, and I have to be lifted onto the boat. They wrap me in a blanket and carry me below, and they kiss my cheeks, each one of them, making me smile, and they thank me and I think they are shocked and it’s unnerving me.

  “That’s enough, then. Leave me in peace.”

  The sailors file out, all except Ennis, who stays.

  I reach to take his fist, smoothing it into an ordinary hand once more. It is a thick, rough hand, with chipped and dirty nails, with scars.

  His eyes meet mine.

  “The batteries will help. But the water’s only enough for a week,” I say softly. “I’m with you. I’m with you to the end, as far as we can go, but if you have a plan, Ennis, then now is the time for it.”

  He squeezes my hands, dwarfing them inside his own. “Franny,” he murmurs, “you frightened me,” and then he kisses my forehead.

  24

  The Saghani, THE COAST OF ARGENTINA MATING SEASON

  Once it was mild here, even in summer. Now it’s much warmer than it should be. The climate has always been ruled by the Antarctic, who stretched her cool fingers north to stroke this fertile coast. Now her reach is much shorter, for she is much smaller. We’re a long way south when we turn into a cove and let our engine rumble to a halt. Not far from us lies “the city at
the bottom of the world,” as Ushuaia is known. No fishermen come to this cove, Ennis says, only luxury holiday yachts and sometimes locals who want to swim. Fishing has been banned here for centuries. It is where our captain always meant to reach before surrendering to his failing vessel, the only place he knew of that is private and hidden and maybe, just maybe, will allow us to remain undetected while Léa and Dae get what they need to fix the boat. Turns out he did indeed have a plan, and the extra water got us here.

  Anik delivers the crew to shore in his skiff, while Ennis and I wait on the Saghani a long way out, far enough to watch for any approach. Rearing above is a dying forest and the magnificent Martial Mountains, once covered in snow, but I can’t turn my eyes from the ocean, not now, not when we are so close.

  It’s my thirty-fifth birthday today. I don’t tell Ennis. Instead I pull free the bottle of French wine Basil has stowed in his cabin.

  “Let’s drink this,” I say, returning to the deck.

  Ennis glances at it and laughs. “He would murder you.”

  “I’ll buy him another.”

  “That’s a Domaine Leroy Musigny pinot noir.”

  I stare blankly.

  “It’s worth five thousand dollars. He’s been saving it for twenty years.”

  My mouth drops open. “Now I really want to drink it.”

  Ennis grins, while I put the wine back.

  We play cards to while away the time, and we don’t drink five-thousand-dollar wine but we do drink forty-dollar gin and it goes down a treat. The sun only begins to set at 10:00 p.m., tracing the remarkably blue sea with delicate threads of gold. The little boats lining the shore light up, winking on one by one and turning the world fairy.

  “My in-laws drink that sort of wine every night,” I say with my third double warm in my mouth.

  Ennis whistles long and slow. “You must have had a few nice drops in your time then.”

  “They bring out cheaper stuff for us. We wouldn’t appreciate it.” He grimaces and I laugh softly. “The funny thing is that we probably wouldn’t. At least I wouldn’t.”

  “Niall might?”

  “Yeah, he might. He’d pretend not to, though.”

  “I think I like Niall,” Ennis says.

  “He’d like you, too.” That is a lie. Niall hates fishermen, unreservedly. “He’ll be jealous when he hears about all of this.” Another lie. Niall has never wanted to adventure for the sake of it—he only wants to save the animals.

  “Haven’t you been writing him?”

  “Yeah, but…” I shrug.

  “There are other things to write first.”

  “Guess so.”

  “Apologies?”

  I hesitate, then nod.

  “Don’t apologize too much, kid. It’ll bleed you dry.”

  “What if you’ve a lot to apologize for?”

  “Once is enough for anything.”

  I suppose that’s true. It’s impossible to control someone else’s capacity for forgiveness.

  “Why did you name her Raven, Ennis?” I ask.

  He runs his hand over the wood of the railing, rough against smooth. “Because she flies.”

  * * *

  As soon as the others are back with the parts, we work through the night and all of the following day, helping Léa and Dae as much as we’re able. There are so many bits and pieces to fix that it seems never ending. I grow more anxious by the minute, eyes always darting back to the water, waiting for the approach of maritime police. If anyone reports the commercial vessel for putting down anchor somewhere it shouldn’t …

  I have taken on Ennis’s desperation to be apart from land, to be only adrift, always.

  By the second night there’s no more to be done. Léa has ordered a part from a mechanic on land and all we can do now is wait for it. So we drink. Malachai’s nervous energy is so heightened he can barely sit still. Basil is crueler than normal. Léa is surlier. Ennis more silent. Anik is exactly the same as he always is, while Dae is left to muster what positivity remains and enough of a shred of cheer to make us play cards.

  I don’t know what I am.

  Hours pass. I am counting them, almost, even though there is no point in it whatsoever. We don’t turn on any lights, but sit on the deck lit only by moonlight. And to Dae’s credit, he gets everyone involved and he relaxes us enough to laugh at his bad card tricks. Even Malachai calms down and tells us a story about the pranks he used to play on his sisters. As we laugh it comes to me without source or explanation that I feel one with them. Against all odds, I feel happy with them, and I know I could belong here, on the Saghani, if only in another life.

  They make it harder to think of dying. They make me entertain the shadow of an idea, one that has something to do with life after this migration, and that’s dangerous.

  I asked Niall once what he thought happened to us after we die, and he said nothing, only decomposition, only evaporation. I asked him what he thought it meant for our lives, for how we spend them, for what they mean. He said our lives mean nothing except as a cycle of regeneration, that we are incomprehensibly brief sparks, just as the animals are, that we are no more important than they are, no more worthy of life than any living creature. That in our self-importance, in our search for meaning, we have forgotten how to share the planet that gave us life.

  Tonight I write him a letter telling him I think he was right. But that also I think there is meaning, and it lives in nurturing, in making life sweeter for ourselves, and for those around us.

  “Don’t you ever stop?” Léa asks, sitting beside me. A splash of wine from her glass slops onto my paper, smearing my untidy words. “You’re obsessed. What do you write to him?” she demands. “Do you tell him about us?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “What do you say about me?”

  I look at her. She’s a little drunk, a little needy. “I say you are unforgiving and superstitious and suspicious. I say you’re wonderful.”

  She takes a gulp. “Bullshit. Tell him he’s a fool. Tell him you don’t need him. You don’t need him, Franny.” And then, blearily, “Stupide créature solitaire.”

  “What do you think happens to us when we die?” I ask her.

  She snorts with laughter. “What’s wrong with you? Why does it matter?”

  “It doesn’t.”

  There’s a silence, and then she gives a great heaving sigh. “I think we go where we deserve to go and that is only for God to decide.”

  She’s quiet after that, and so am I.

  Later, when she nose-dives drunkenly into bed, I get her a glass of water (from our once-more working water tap) and leave it beside her. The others all retreat to sleep, too, but I stay up awhile, returning to the empty main deck. It’s Basil’s turn on watch duty, and I can see him smoking in the bow, eyes trained to the shoreline in case of approach. I have no desire to go anywhere near him and suffer another stream of vitriol, so, on a whim, I climb all the way up into the crow’s nest. I’m not meant to come up here—it’s too easy to slip and fall if you haven’t spent your life on boats—but there’s no one around, and tonight I want to see as far as I’m able, I want away from other breathing bodies, I want sky. The pretty lights of the other boats wink and glow below me and I wish they’d flick off and leave the world in darkness. All these humans have left no space for anything else. I learned this love of darkness not from my husband, though I learned so much from him, but in our bottom paddock in the deep, witching hour of the morning, with true night draped above in a sky full of stars and a sea roaring gently in the distance and my silent grandma beside. All those nights we spent down there in that pitch-black paddock, and never a word between us, only an occasional sigh from me because I’d rather have been in bed.

  Sitting here now, in the uppermost part of this boat, I would give anything, any part of me—my flesh or my blood or my very heart itself—to be back inside one of those nights, standing beside her in the dark, she who infuriated and confused me, she who was unkno
wable and unreachable, she who loved me when no one else did, only I was too intent on loneliness to see it.

  * * *

  It’s late when I hear something. I must have fallen asleep in the crow’s nest because I stir awake at the distant sound of a boat engine.

  I stand slowly. Keep a firm hold on the railing. Squint in the darkness. The lights that are drawing closer are white and blue, and approaching from the mouth of the cove, from sea.

  Fuck.

  Why hasn’t Basil seen them yet? Has he fallen asleep? I look around for him and see him standing at the railing, silently watching the boat’s approach. He’s wearing a backpack. He is leaving, he has done something. I go dark inside with knowing and with no disbelief, it makes too much sense for disbelief. A part of me thinks I should have tried harder, I should have reached out to him and maybe that would have stopped this. But what use is that now? It’s done.

  It’s not for the faint of heart, the crow’s nest of a boat. It is very high, and though climbing up can seem simple enough, descending again is nauseating. One rung after another, down down down, keep moving, don’t lose your balance, look only at the rungs. The boat spins below me as vertigo hits and I must pause, slam my eyes shut, and breathe quickly through my nose. Wait for the world to right itself, for my stomach to readjust. Then down once more, stepping rhythmically on and on until feet hit wood.

  I don’t bother confronting Basil, but hurry into the belly of the boat.

  I go to Ennis first, alone in his captain’s cabin. He must be a light sleeper for he wakes the instant I open his door. “Police,” I say, and he’s up.

  That’s when the siren sounds. Jesus, it’s like a bomb alarm, it makes me think the sky is falling, that this is the end and that I can’t go back to prison, I can’t.

  The others are up now, too, all of us panicked and half dressed in the mess. All except Basil.

  “I’m going to kill him,” Anik says in this disturbing way that’s a little too convincing.

  “What do we do?” Malachai asks in a voice three octaves higher than normal. He’s vibrating with fear. Dae puts a hand on his arm to try to steady him.