Migrations

by Charlotte McConaghy

  The funny thing that falls into the silence is a shared thought of how we never really promised each other anything, actually. Not with words. I suppose there were promises made with lips and fingers and gazes. Yes, there were thousands of those.

  I put the heater on high and we sit for a minute, warming our hands in front of the vents, urging it to get going.

  “Christ almighty,” he grunts. “I’ve had enough of this winter now.”

  “We’re a good long way from its end yet.” I start the drive home, windscreen wipers struggling to clear the drifting snow. I drive slowly, unable to see well in the dark, but there are never any cars out here this time of night.

  “Did you have a nice night, darling?” I ask.

  He reaches for my free hand and squeezes it. “It was tedious as all hell.”

  “Liar. I saw you laugh so hard champagne came out of your nose.”

  “Fine.” He tries to hide his smile. “It was tolerable. You?”

  I nod.

  For some reason I decide that I will tell him now. I would like to have another child. Would you?

  Instead he says, “I do have to go back to MER. And I don’t think you should come with me this time.”

  I’m thrown. “I thought you said you were done with MER.”

  “I was frustrated, and being childish, but you’re right. There’s still more to do.”

  “Good. Of course I’ll come. We’ll find a way to solve the money problem.”

  He shakes his head. “I think you should travel.”

  “I know it’s only Scotland, babe, but it still counts.”

  He doesn’t say anything for a long while. Then, very clearly, “I don’t want you to come with me.”

  “Why?”

  “We can’t come and go from a place like that. If you’re there, it means you have to stay.”

  There is silence in the car. I lick my dry lips. Calmly I ask, “Did I leave, the whole time we were there?”

  “No.” He pauses, then adds, “But I was waiting for it day and night.”

  I look at him.

  “The road,” he reminds me and I reluctantly go back to it.

  “Now you’re saying I shouldn’t stay?”

  “I’m not saying you should do anything, Franny.”

  Anger rears inside me. “So how do I win this?” I ask. “Is it some kind of trap? When I stay, you expect me to leave, so I might as well just fucking go.”

  Niall nods slowly. It is the last thing I expect from him. Heat floods my body, making me nauseous. I breathe deeply until it passes, and then I try to explain. “Something changed that night you fell in the lake. I changed.”

  He takes my free hand and squeezes it. “No, you didn’t, darlin’.”

  “I know it will take a long time for you to trust me again, but—”

  “I trust you implicitly.”

  “Then why aren’t you listening to me?”

  “I am.”

  My pulse is quickening because I don’t understand what this conversation is. His calm is starting to derail me—I have none of my own left and my knuckles are white on the steering wheel. Flurries of snow turn the road ahead into a tunnel made by the headlights. “You said I leave because I’m frightened, and that that wouldn’t do, and you were right—it wasn’t good enough, so I’ve stayed. For years now.”

  I dart a look at his face—he is watching me in surprise.

  “That’s not what I meant,” Niall says. “I meant you were frightened of admitting the real reason you wander.”

  I stare at the road, my mind blank. “The real reason?”

  “It’s in your nature,” Niall says simply. “If you could only let go of all this shame, Franny. You should never be ashamed of what you are.”

  Hot tears. My eyes are flooded with them.

  “Have you stayed put since then because I said it would make you brave?”

  I don’t say anything but the tears slip freely down my cheeks and chin and throat. I am so tired, suddenly, of denying the pull.

  “Oh, darlin’,” he says, and then I think he might be crying too. “I’m sorry. I’ll love you no matter where on this earth you are. I want you to be free to be what you are, to go where you want. I don’t want you chained to me.”

  He isn’t John Torpey, frightened of having a wife who was wilder than he was, punishing her for it and living a life of regret. No, Niall is a different kind of man. He reaches to kiss my hand, to press it to his face as though gripping at life itself, or something more ardent, and he says, my husband, changing my life, “There’s a difference between wandering and leaving. In truth, you’ve never once left me.”

  A gust of air beneath my unfurling wings and I am up, weightless, soaring. I could never love anyone more. And in the same moment comes a terrible awareness. He’s opened the cage door I closed on myself and now I’ll fly, I’ll have to. I see it all laid out before us, how I will wander away again and again, and I won’t want to have more children because of it, and no matter what he says, no matter how generous he is, it will ruin us both a little more each time.

  “Franny, I think you should pull over.”

  A snowy white owl flies low over the road, swooping up past the windscreen and into the black night, its plumage moonlit and portentous. I watch it, stunned, frozen. They are extinct, owls. But there one is. Maybe this means there are more hidden away, and maybe there are more of everything and the world is still breathing. My broken heart swells with it, flies away with it, seeks shelter within the night, and then it is gone in a flash of light, a sounding of noise and I see myself instead, myself naked and loathsome and for a split second I want nothing but to destroy myself and so that’s what I do—

  “Fran—”

  Impact.

  * * *

  There are few things more violent than two cars colliding at high speed. Metal screams and glass sprays and rubber smokes. Within it what chance does a human body have? We are liquid and tissue. As fragile a thing as there is. It’s like how people describe it, and not. It’s slow, and not. The moment stretches out and it doesn’t. I have a thought, both simple and complex. In its simplest form: I have killed us. In its most complex it becomes the days I will never have, the children I will never kiss. It lives deep, this thought. It is all of me and somewhere inside it, inside this infinite intimacy, is Niall Lynch.

  * * *

  I wake slowly. Or maybe fast. We are upright, but slanted. I don’t feel any pain, and then I do. In my shoulder and my mouth. Then my chest.

  “—ny, wake up. Franny. Franny. Wake up.”

  I open my eyes and for one second I am blinded by the brightness and then in the next second I’m blinded by the blackness. A sound comes from my mouth, something shocked.

  “Good girl, you’re all right.”

  I blink until I can see Niall beside me, still in his seat, still holding my hand. “Fuck,” I say.

  “I know.”

  We’re in a paddock. There’s a tree growing out of our car. Its trunk and boughs are skeletal for winter, silver in the night. The headlights carve two hollows out of the darkness; I can see moths flickering toward the source, atop a surface of white snow as unmarked as a pane of glass.

  I struggle with my seat belt—learning the source of the pain in my chest—then remember to click out of it.

  “Do you have any injuries?” Niall asks. “Check your body.”

  I pat myself down and can’t feel anything bad. I’ve bitten my tongue. A shard of window is in my shoulder. And the bruises across my breasts. But otherwise … “I think I’m okay. Do you have any?”

  “My foot’s a fuckin’ mess but that’s it,” Niall says. “We have to get to the other car.”

  Oh god. I crane my neck and see it on the road, upside down. “Shit. Oh, fucking shitting hell.” My door opens with a creak but Niall isn’t following me.

  “I’m fine,” he assures me, “I just can’t get my foot out. Go see if they’re all right, I’ll work on
this. Do you have your phone?”

  I search until I find my purse and then drag it free. “Dead.”

  “Mine has no reception. Get to the other car.”

  I meet his eyes.

  “Easy,” he says. “Just breathe. Whatever you find.”

  I pull myself out of the car. It’s freezing outside. My feet sink eight inches into snow and instantly go numb but I’m hauling myself back onto the road.

  The car’s wheel is still spinning in the air. How much time has passed? Maybe whoever is inside is still … I can’t move, abruptly. Because I am unimaginably frightened of what I will find. Death, but worse than death, the absence of life within flesh. I cannot move.

  “Franny,” my husband calls.

  I don’t turn to him. I stare at the slowly spinning wheel.

  “It’s only a body,” he says.

  But doesn’t he know? That’s the problem.

  “What if they’re alive?”

  Of course. I am moving; the words don’t even reach my brain before they reach my body, propelling me to the car. I lie flat on the freezing road so I can see the driver. She’s alone in the car. A woman, my age maybe. Short black hair, shaved short.

  “She’s not … awake,” I yell. “I can’t tell … Oh, fucking hell…”

  “Try to wake her up!”

  I shake her gently. “Hey, wake up. You need to wake up.”

  She doesn’t wake. Damn it damn it damn it … My fingers are shaking as I reach—I truly, deeply do not want to touch her body, Jesus, just fucking do it—and feel for a pulse. It takes a moment, a much-too-long moment, and I’m convinced she’s gone and I will be touching a rotting thing, a corpse thing, and then at last I feel the softest, flickering beat, like the dart of the moths’ wings I saw in the headlights. I imagine the same thing flickering within her, that abrupt defiant hazardous force of life, fainter than it’s ever been and yet here, urging. It centers me and I climb in to reach for her seat belt. I can’t get it free, I wrench at the thing and—

  She wakes.

  A muffled whimper. Then a mighty wail, a cataclysmic thing.

  “Quiet,” I say instinctively, some strange otherworldly creature, and she falls quiet. “You’re alive.”

  A soft, slow moan leaves her and she starts to cry, to panic.

  “You’re alive,” I say again, “and you’re upside down in your car, and I’m going to get you out.”

  The pervasive fog of fear evaporates within me. I hold fast to the facts that will keep us together, the three of us, and these are the facts that I know: she is alive and I’m going to get her out.

  “Help,” she whispers. “I have to get out. I have to get out.”

  “I’m getting you out,” I tell her and I have never been more certain of anything. I crawl out and run to the other side of the car, climb in feetfirst so that I can smash my foot against the seat belt buckle. The shoes are useless, heels, for the goddamn first time in my life. I crawl out and fling them off, fling them with all the rage I can afford and then there’s calm again, certainty, as I crawl back in and smash my bare foot against the plastic and it hurts, it hurts so much, I can feel the blood in a warm flow over my foot and ankle, but I kick it again and again until I feel the plastic give way, letting the woman free. She falls on her head and I twist around until I can slip a hand beneath her skull. What good it will do I don’t know.

  She is crying, sobbing, bleeding. It is catastrophic. I have the thought simply and clearly: this is madness.

  Our faces are lying close. Turned like lovers.

  “I have the uniforms in the boot,” she says.

  “What’s that, my love?”

  “For my son’s football team. I picked them up today. I was meant to get them a week ago but I kept forgetting and they had to train in their tracksuits. He was so annoyed about that. He’s such a brat sometimes.”

  We laugh together, both of us.

  I stroke her face. “I think we should try to get out of this car.”

  “Yes. Can we make sure to get the uniforms?”

  “Of course. What’s your name?”

  “Greta.”

  “Greta. I’m Franny.”

  She is shaking, her voice a croak.

  “Can you move your body, Greta? I left your door open so you can crawl out, if you can.”

  “My hair’s short because of cancer,” she says.

  “What?”

  “I shaved it. To raise funds. Not because I have cancer. Oh god, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that I have cancer—”

  “Shhh, it’s okay, I understand.” She is panicking again so I say, “It looks fucking badass,” and she smiles, bolstered somehow.

  “It does,” she mutters. “It does look fucking badass.” Then, “I really need to get out now.”

  It occurs to me that I haven’t seen her move at all, and maybe that’s because she can’t, maybe she shouldn’t. “It might be better to wait for an ambulance…”

  “No, I need to get out. I have to get out.” She starts to struggle and I’m worried she’s going to do herself more damage.

  “Okay, hang on,” I say. “I’ll go round to your side and help you. Wait for me.” I crawl out backward and sprint round once more.

  “Niall, she’s awake!”

  “Good,” he calls.

  “I’m getting her out.”

  “Is it safe to move her?”

  “She’s moving herself, I need to help her.”

  “All right, good girl.”

  Poor Greta is all contorted in her seat, lying dazed on her head and neck, and I pray she doesn’t have spinal damage, I pray we’re not about to make anything worse, but if I can get her into our car then maybe, if it’s still running, I can drive her to a hospital.

  “Can you get the uniforms first?” she asks.

  “No, love, we’ll get you out first and then I’ll get the uniforms, I promise. Come on now, can you move your arms up a bit so I can … Yeah, that’s the way…” I don’t know how to drag her out, I can’t get a grip anywhere, her body is too slippery with blood …

  I take another breath and force myself back into the car, my body pressed atop hers so that I can get my arms around her torso. “Wait,” she says, terrified, “just wait, wait,” but we’re past that now, I have her just right so that I can brace myself on my knees and drag her out and at first she isn’t moving, she’s wedged, but I clench my teeth, demanding everything I can, screaming with the effort and her body is sliding out over the twisted metal and the rough bitumen of the road and—

  I see her eyes fall closed.

  All the blood leaves her face. She is waxen, gone. I don’t know how I know it so soon, so immediately, but I can see her gone.

  “Greta!” I shout.

  She’s dead.

  I stand, recoiling from her. There’s so much blood. I see it now. It’s spreading around my bare feet. I have pulled her almost in two.

  “Niall,” I say. “Niall, she…”

  I turn and stumble back to our car. I open Niall’s door and lean over for his seat belt, which he hasn’t removed, strangely, and I click it open so that he can get out, and I say, “Come on, we can’t stay here—” and then I see.

  * * *

  His eyes are still open.

  They are so beautiful, so changeable. I see so many colors hidden within them, the russets of autumn, tawny forests, and even flecks of gold in the right light. They have been deep browns and hazel greens and an endless night black.

  They are black now, still.

  And monstrous.

  I am no longer one but two.

  One of me is an old woman who climbs atop his body. Every one of her joints creaks and groans, hardly under her control, but somehow she lays herself upon him, and she cradles his head with its dark, perfectly combed hair, and she presses her mouth to his cold mouth, tasting smoke. “Oh, my darling, no,” she whispers. “Please.” He gives no warmth but she wills hers into him, she wills it with all she is,
he will have every last atom of it. He will have the soul of her. Else she’ll leave it here with his.

  While one of me remains on the road, frightened of dead things, all.

  * * *

  Hours pass.

  I’ve long since decided to die here with him and Greta when a thought occurs. Standing here like this, grasping at a heat that went long ago, I am freezing to death, my bare feet and hands immovable, my nose aching, ears stinging, eyelashes coated in frozen tears.

  The thought is this: the football uniforms. I have to get them out of Greta’s boot.

  “Niall,” I say softly from the road. “Niall.”

  I want to give him something, something that will part us well, something to let his spirit know I will follow it, and yet I can think of nothing, I am laid bare and empty and stripped of any grace. I am too appalled by the thing that was once him.

  How does he die here in the cold with so little ceremony? How does he die without me to look at him as he goes? How did we not deserve last words, last moments, last looks? How could the world be so cruel, so cruel as to let him pass alone, unwatched, while I wasted my love on a woman I don’t know? It is unbearable.

  I stand on the cold ground. I walk to the boot of Greta’s car and pull out the bag filled with her son’s football uniforms. I walk down the road with one shattered and bleeding foot, back toward a world in which I have never for a moment belonged.

  I stop just before the beam from our headlights ends. There is an abyss ahead of me. Not even a star in the sky. I look back at him. I can’t leave. I can’t leave. I cannot leave him here. Not alone.

  My knees give out. I sink to the ground. I rest my face on the bag and I think I won’t leave I won’t leave I won’t leave, and in the end it’s something much simpler and older that makes the choice. It urges me to claw to my feet and turn away from that beam of light and walk into the pitch-black night along a road I know will lead only to grief.

  It’s not love, or fear.

  It’s the wilderness within that demands I survive.

  28

  GALWAY, IRELAND TWELVE MONTHS AGO