Migrations

by Charlotte McConaghy

  I climb the ladder onto the main deck and the others follow me. It’s different here now, it’s flashing lights and a deafening siren, does it really have to be that loud?

  Basil looks at us and we look at him. No one says anything but I could suffocate on this silence and I could tear the stubborn look from his face and I think the others feel the same because Anik spits at his feet and Basil finally has the grace to look at least a little ashamed.

  It’s Léa who takes my hand and tugs me back, out of the light-drenched sphere and into the dark. Ennis is lowering the rope ladder over the hull and into the water. I realize what they’re doing and do I have the energy for this, to keep running, to find myself lost in a foreign land and scrambling for a new way south? As it turns out, I do. All it takes is the flicker of a prison cell in my mind to make me hurry over the side and down that rope ladder into the dark.

  “Go,” Léa says from above and I realize she is talking to Ennis. Ennis who has become as mad as I am. Ennis who thinks he can’t possibly return to his life having failed.

  “We’ll meet up with you after we sort this mess,” she tells him. “Go and finish what you started.”

  He’s thinking about it. I can see him up there, paused on the precipice.

  “Stay,” I argue. “Go home to your children, Ennis.”

  But the police are boarding starboard and Ennis moves with instinct, lowering himself down above me. He’s too deep in it to give up now.

  Basil’s arguing about something, and so are Daeshim and Anik, too, and then a police voice, louder than the rest, asking for everyone to be quiet, the boat is going to be impounded and will Riley Loach please step forward, she’s a person of interest.

  A female voice speaks up, hoping, I suppose, that they haven’t been given a picture. “That’s me.”

  Léa.

  Shit, that wasn’t part of the deal. Even if this is just her way of giving us a head start, even if they’ll soon work out that she isn’t Riley Loach, and she didn’t stab a guy in the neck, I find that I can’t just leave. I scramble back up the ladder, wriggling up beside Ennis, sure on these ropes after having spent months working with them. Ennis holds on to my waist to stop me from climbing any higher, but it’s all right, from here I can see.

  There are several cops. There’s animosity, I think, I don’t know why, but one of them grabs Léa by the arms and pulls her toward the gangplank to their police vessel. “Hey, don’t grab her like that,” Basil says, and Daeshim is trying to help Léa, everyone is sort of reaching for her and she says something, snarls it in French and wrenches her arms out of the cops’ and it’s chaotic then, the policeman shoves at her, trying to force her down the gangway but there’s so much anger in the shove that she stumbles, unprepared for it. Someone tries to catch her, but her head connects dully with the railing. Her body sinks to the deck. She tries to sit up, reaches for something I can’t see, and then she stops moving.

  Shouting erupts. Shock and disbelief and her name being said over and over and her body being shaken but it’s still not moving, it’s not waking and I think, No, not again, please not again.

  Ennis tries to drag me down but I hold on tight. I must keep my eyes on her because I must make sure she moves, must see her open her eyes.

  “Franny,” Ennis says. “Climb.”

  It is quiet and still inside me.

  “Franny.”

  I don’t move. I can’t, how could I?

  “Please,” Ennis says.

  I look down at him in the shadows of the hull. He says it again, please, and so I climb. Into the water we go, the two of us, sinking down and entangled as though in an embrace, holding each other for the space between heartbeats and then he slips through my hands and I’m alone.

  The world above is fierce movement and color and sound. Underneath is calm.

  Weightless.

  Flight.

  A diving cormorant, I strike out for the shore, wings back, feet kicking. Smoothly I carve through the water, breath held to stay beneath, guided by the dark shape in front. Good lungs, he told me once, and it’s true, he stays under a long time, and I have no choice but to try to match him because I will not be the reason we are spotted from above. Too soon we’re up and breathing again but it’s all right; we’ve swum quite a distance and they aren’t looking for us yet, they think we’re on that boat, they think I’m lying motionless on the boards of that deck.

  We keep swimming, almost to the shore now. We’re abreast of the scattering of moored boats, unsure where we’re going but knowing we have to get away from here—

  I stop.

  It is called the Sterna Paradisaea. That’s how I know what to do. Look for the clues, they’re hidden everywhere. This isn’t a clue, it’s a goddamn neon sign.

  “Ennis,” I say, and he stops, waits for me to reach him in the dark. He’s panting hard, not used to swimming this far. His eyes look crazed.

  There are no lights on in the forty-foot steel yacht. We climb up onto its deck and straight to the covered hull. No keys, either, but we go below and Ennis finds a set. “Always a spare in the pantry,” he grunts.

  I go into the cramped bathroom and don’t turn on the light. I look at the silhouette of my reflection, and I slap my cheek, once, twice, wanting it to hurt, wanting it to bleed, and when it doesn’t, when it’s not enough I almost go to smash my forehead against the glass, but Ennis is pulling me away, constricting me, ignoring my struggles and my sobs until I give up, and collapse and weep against him. The second he lets me go I pull away from any comfort because what if she’s dead.

  We wait until dawn. Until the Saghani is empty, the police gone.

  Ennis stops the yacht beside her and waits for me to board her once more. “You’re coming, aren’t you?” I asked him, but he said he couldn’t. Instead he waits for me to run through the ransacked boat, stripped by the police of most belongings, of anything of interest, including my laptop. But my paranoia about my pack, about the preciousness of the letters it holds, has meant that I always keep it stashed under my bed and with a great stroke of luck I find it still hidden there, waiting for me.

  I check the bridge just in case, but as Ennis warned, the steering wheel has been locked in place so even if the boat were seaworthy we wouldn’t be able to sail it anywhere. With a last farewell I climb back down to the yacht and then together Ennis and I sail on past her, a ghost ship in the gray dawn and I think what might have happened to Léa, I think of where she is now, in some hospital room or a morgue and I want to scream, but I hold it inside, I hold it where it burns, because where we’re going I may need it yet.

  As we leave the mouth of the cove Ennis meets my eyes and there is a thing unspoken now, something I know he understands. There may be no end to this we can survive. Not with only the two of us, setting out on a stolen boat this small, leaving behind the tracking software and the little red dots, discarding a trail of destruction in our wake like the delicate film of a snake’s shed skin. We didn’t get goodbyes or parting glances. We didn’t get guarantees any of them will find a safe way home, if home exists for them beyond what has been burned to ash with the slip of a foot, the crack of a skull.

  We watch the Saghani for as long as we can. As he navigates south into the most perilous stretch of ocean left on this planet the captain weeps unashamedly.

  I am too numb for any more tears. Too animal now.

  PART THREE

  25

  When my daughter is born without breath, drowned by my body, part of me goes to sleep.

  I go in search of something to wake it.

  YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, UNITED STATES SIX YEARS AGO

  * * *

  I waited for him at the airport. There is that. I always ask him to come with me, but he is a different kind of creature. He has his own grief to bear and his own strength to gather, and he finds his in work, not in freedom from responsibility, not in journeys or movement or turning resolutely forward and not looking back. So I’ve left
him once more, when I promised I never would again.

  I will stop making that promise now. It demeans us both.

  I’ve found my way to Yellowstone, to one of the last pine forests. It is an empty place now, not as it once was. The deer have all died. The bears and wolves went long ago, already too few to survive the inevitable. Nothing will survive this, Niall says. Not at the current rate of change. There is no birdsong as I walk among the trees and it is catastrophically wrong. I regret coming here, to where it should be more alive than anywhere. Instead it is a graveyard.

  As my boots crunch on the carpet of dead bark and leaves I can hear her crying as she should have done when she was born. I must be going mad. Panic sets in, silver eddies over my skin as light moves upon the iridescent scales of a fish.

  It’s been many months since I’ve seen Niall, though we write religiously, always. Right now a letter is not enough. I need to hear his voice. My eyes are blurry as I hike my way to the nearest lodge. I am shaking as I rent a room and close its door and switch on my phone. The walls spin a little and I can’t get this pain out of my chest, out of my insides, I have to leave here.

  The phone dings as dozens of missed calls and messages flood in. They are all from Niall, and I turn cold with fear because this isn’t normal, he doesn’t call me unless there’s something wrong.

  He answers on the second ring. “Hello, darlin’.”

  “Are you all right?”

  He is quiet a moment. Then, “They’ve declared the crow extinct.”

  The air leaves me in a rush. Like that, all panic is gone. All this self-absorption dissolves and what I have left is the memory of twelve friends offering me gifts from their perches in the willow tree. I have an enormous sadness—and I have concern for my husband to outweigh it all. I know what this will do to him, what it has been doing to him.

  “All of the Corvidae family have gone,” Niall says. “The kestrel was the only raptor left, and the last one of them died in captivity last month…” I can hear him shaking his head, losing his voice. I can hear him gathering what’s left of him. “Eighty percent of all wild animal life has died. They say most of the rest will go in the next decade or two. We’ll keep farmed creatures. Those will survive because we must keep our bellies full of their flesh. And domesticated pets will be fine because they let us forget about the rest, the ones dying. Rats and cockroaches will survive, no doubt, but humans will still cringe when they see them and try to exterminate them as though they are worth nothing, even though they are fucking miracles.” There are tears in his throat. “But the rest, Franny. Everything else. What happens when the last of the terns die? Nothing will ever be as brave again.”

  I wait to be sure he is finished, and then I ask, “What can we do?”

  He breathes in and out, in and out. “I don’t know.”

  He has spoken before of a tipping point. A point where the extinction crisis would pick up speed and things would begin to change in ways that directly impact humans. I can hear in his voice that we have reached that tipping point. “There’s something to be done,” I say. “You know it better than the rest of us. So what do we do, Niall?”

  “There’s a conservation society in Scotland. They’ve been predicting this for decades, breeding more resistance into some of their creatures, trying to grow new habitats, rescuing wildlife.”

  “Then we’ll go to Scotland.”

  “You’ll come with me?”

  “I’m already on my way.”

  “What happened to Yellowstone?”

  “It’s too lonely without you.”

  He doesn’t say it back. He always says it back, but not this time. Instead he says, “I don’t think I can do this again.”

  And I believe him.

  “I’m coming home,” I promise. “Wait for me.”

  LIMERICK PRISON, IRELAND TWO YEARS AGO

  * * *

  “Hey, Stone, wake up.”

  I don’t want to. I’ve been dreaming myself a seal, watching sunlight move through water. When I open my eyes it’s to see Beth and our cell and everything warm slips away.

  “Come on. They spotted one.”

  “One what?” I ask, but she’s already moving.

  I rise grumpily from bed and follow her into the rec room. All the women are crowded around the television this morning, and the guards, too, even them.

  It’s a news bulletin.

  A lone gray wolf has been discovered and captured in Alaska, amazing scientists who believed them extinct. Authorities were alerted to its existence after it killed a flock of livestock south of the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. Experts say this behavior only occurred because its own natural habitat and food sources have all perished, but they fail to understand how this solitary creature—a female—could have survived so long undetected and alone.

  I move closer to see the footage, everything tightening and hurried inside me. She is thin and scrawny and magnificent. They have her in a cage and together we watch her prowl back and forth, gazing out at us with eyes of such cool wisdom I shiver.

  The farmer whose livestock was slaughtered has called to have the creature destroyed but the public outcry over this has been loud and unrelenting, so much so that state government has stepped in to forbid the harming of the gray wolf—speculated to be the last of any wolves in the world. She will be moved to and cared for by the wildlife conservation team Mass Extinction Reserve, based in Edinburgh. People from all over the world are reportedly flocking to Scotland to see the gray wolf, the very last of her kind.

  Which brings us to our final reminder that if you or anyone you know wishes to visit the remaining forests of the world, you need to join the waiting lists immediately, for it is becoming more likely that the lists will outgrow the life spans of the forests.

  I barely hear the reporter, locked in the black eyes of the wolf. I imagine her at MER, with its eager, heartbroken volunteers and scientists, and know she will be beloved. But given there is no way for her to reproduce even in captivity, I can’t help but wonder if she should have been left to live out her solitary life in the wild. I can’t help but think no animal, ever, should live in a cage. It’s only humans who deserve that fate.

  MER BASE, CAIRNGORMS NATIONAL PARK, SCOTLAND SIX YEARS AGO

  * * *

  The people who live and work at the Mass Extinction Reserve conservation base are all one of two breeds. The first: earnestly, irritatingly optimistic. The second: outraged, and not interested in being anything otherwise.

  Niall is the only one of them who seems to exist somewhere in between. I say “them” because there is no one on this base who would pretend for a second that I belong here. I can’t contribute anything except to cook and clean, and to the scientists this means very little. They are profoundly single-minded. As they should be. They are in a battle to stop the turning of the world.

  We were greeted at the airport in Edinburgh by a young couple who acted as though Niall was the second coming. Everyone on the base has read his work and knows it intimately—they refer to it in meetings. (I only know this because Niall sometimes invites me to sit in on them, and I do so swollen with pride.) We stayed a week at the headquarters there, and then were driven north to the Cairngorms National Park, which is where their wildlife sanctuaries are located and has blessedly clean air. What I have gathered here is that the conservationists have made amazing progress for certain species and no progress for the rest. It was always going to be this way, Niall tells me. They had to choose the more important animals, the ones we need and those with a chance of survival, letting the no-hopers fade into extinction. Interestingly, insects are high on their list—bees, wasps, butterflies, moths, ants, and some types of beetles, even flies. As are hummingbirds, monkeys, possums, and bats. All these animals are pollinators; without plant life we are truly fucked.

  This was where Niall and I felt our hearts sink in unison. Saving specific animals purely on the basis of what they offer humanity may be
practical, but wasn’t this attitude the problem to begin with? Our overwhelming, annihilating selfishness? What of the animals that exist purely to exist, because millions of years of evolution have carved them into miraculous being?

  This is what I ask today, after a month of holding my tongue on the matter, and what causes all the heads in the room to swivel my way. Niall is beside me, holding my hand under the table. They afford me a lot of patience because I am married to Professor Lynch.

  James Calloway, a professor of genetics in his seventies, says simply, “We are only so many. Prioritizing is life.”

  There is no arguing with that.

  Niall squeezes my hand, which is nice. We don’t touch much anymore, not since Iris was stillborn. It’s been over a year since we made love, and maybe that’s due to the fact that most of that year has been spent apart, but even now, reunited, I sometimes can’t imagine how we ever will again. There is a universe between our bodies.

  Then again, today he has taken my hand and held it tightly, and that is no small thing.

  Talk turns to future migrations and how much of a problem these pose to the remaining breeding pairs of bird species. They are genetically engineered to go in search of food but when no food can be found the journey becomes fatal. The birds die of exhaustion.

  “Professor Lynch has written about human involvement in migration patterns as a possible source of species prolonging,” James, who chairs the meetings, says.

  “It’s a theory,” Niall murmurs.

  “We can’t be following birds around the world,” Harriet Kaska says, ever contrary. “The scale of that would be completely unfeasible. We need to be containing the birds so there is no need for migration. Simplify and prevent.” Harriet is a professor of biology from Prague with a Ph.D. in climate change and another in ornithology. She is obsessed with arguing with Niall, and I think it’s because he challenges her professionally in a way none of the others do. Her notion to prevent migrations is one they have argued about at length. My opinion on the matter, not that it’s required, is obvious.