Migratory Animals

by Mary Helen Specht

  She didn’t remember her mother reading books to her as a child, but she remembered her telling stories, trying to get Alyce to fall asleep so she could return to the living room where the rest of the adults drank and played records. She remembered her mother telling her the story of the honey-diviner, a bird whose call sounded like “Quick! Quick! Honey! Quick!” and how, if you followed it, the bird would lead you to a stash of honey in a tree nearby. But if you didn’t share some of the honey with the bird, it plotted revenge. The next time it came calling—“Quick! Quick! Honey! Quick!”—it led you to another hole, and inside wouldn’t be honey but a poisonous snake.

  As Alyce finally began to drift off, her mother would lie on the bed and say, “Now my turn,” motioning for Alyce to scratch or rub her back. Her mother always wanted something in return, her share of the honey.

  Alyce retreated to the studio. Designing Lou’s wedding shawl would be another welcome distraction from Alyce’s official project, a series of small tapestries reinterpreting William Morris’s famous designs, Woodpeckers in an Orange Tree and Strawberry Thief. Alyce still hadn’t chosen between the sketches scattered across her workbench or measured out the yarns on her warping board to create the order for slaying them on the loom.

  Since moving out to Roadrunner Ranch for the Women’s League fellowship, Alyce found herself uninspired by the weaving project that had landed her the gig. The compositions were so mannered and aristocratic and restrained and, well, lovely, too. But she just didn’t particularly feel like making them new. She could put an updated spin on them, abstracting the trees, turning the birds into mechanical, steampunk versions of the real thing—but why? Who really cared? The only reason she’d applied for and accepted the fellowship was because they needed money. They would live free for a year and make extra cash renting out their house in town. Though he didn’t say it aloud, Alyce knew Harry, with his and Santi’s firm on shaky ground, wished she’d return to engineering, to being the practical one with the steady income and good benefits.

  The only tapestry actually hanging in Alyce’s studio was a square weave of gray thread, hand-spun from the fur of her first long-haired cat, slowly unraveling on the top and bottom because she never tied it off. It looked like a rain cloud. She’d made the cloth after reading about a weaver goddess riding a shaft of moonlight to impress an official in the Tang dynasty. The goddess shows the man her robe. It is not made with needle or thread. It is perfect. It is where the phrase “a goddess’s robe is seamless” comes from, and Alyce wove her own seamless piece of art as a reminder: she, Alyce, was not a goddess. She was only human.

  She went into the kitchen to make coffee, scooping two tablespoons from the tin in the freezer and dumping the grounds into the tiny white coffeemaker. She filled the reservoir with water and turned it to brew. Coffee. She thought of Santi’s father. One moment you’re drinking coffee out of an ironic Hello Kitty mug with your son, shaking your head over the Rangers’ disappointing season, and the next you’re flying high over a river gorge. Life spilled out of you.

  There were so many moments when Alyce was outwardly affectionate toward her young sons but inwardly thinking how easy it would be to walk away. Not easy. But not as difficult as it should be.

  As the coffee brewed and gurgled, Alyce’s mind turned back to the image of Molly on the cliff, and she probed it again. Some sadness, yes, she’d discovered that already, but the sadness seemed almost perfunctory, like an old habit. Resentment, maybe, because this news would bring to the others a renewed, though tragic, appreciation of life, but not to Alyce. Finally, she realized what the feeling was: part of her, though she didn’t yet know how big a part, wanted Molly’s future. To have a disease that was real and physical, a comprehensible reason for the pain and an eventual end to it.

  Alyce was a mother, and Molly was not. But kids were resilient. They survived all kinds of tragedies, and Harry was a really good father. Surely she was dragging them down. Was it a terrible cliché to think they’d be better off without her? Her son’s voice echoed in her head, parroting her, I’m not up to it. I’m sorry. She knew she couldn’t make it as an engineer anymore, not realistically, not after all these years, and with her gone, at least there would be life insurance. Alyce would be better as a story told before bed, as a memory glossed over with time, than as a real-life, breathing, flawed mother. She thought of how Santiago took his small inheritance and bought his dream: an urban fire station. What could she leave her own sons so that they might be better off than before?

  In her studio, surrounded by blurry sketches that made her want to scream, all manner of small beasts toiling away outside the window, Alyce decided to throw away her William Morris drawings. This decision did not feel like a resolution exactly, but choosing to eat celery rather than rocks. No matter how exhausting it might be, if Alyce truly planned to bow out, she must make something beautiful to leave behind. Something for her sons to remember her by.

  She sighed, searching her reserves for a vestige of energy.

  Alyce tossed the dozens of filled pages into a far corner of the room. Slowly, splaying her fingers along the thick paper like making a bed, she spread out a new ream over the table, picked up a stub of charcoal with the other hand. She would draw whatever came to mind.

  And so she started.

  First: a long picnic table. Similar to the one just outside the ranch house where everyone at the party had sat earlier, waving beer bottles and skewers of dead animal. Next, she sketched heads. Ovals and eyes, the arch of a neck. Individual faces took shape and distinguished themselves.

  The words echoed in her head: Quick! Quick! Honey! Quick! As she drew, she wondered if she could imbue the paper and charcoal with stories from her past. Alyce did not remember what it felt like to be happy exactly—that was like trying to feel the high of a drug the morning after, on the comedown. But if not the precise feeling, she could remember the scenes, the settings, the people involved. She could leave her sons the outlines of what it meant to be happy and hope that they would fill them in. If she could weave a piece of cloth capable of encapsulating the few, small things that had been good about her life, she could give it to Jake and Ian. Then, she might be free to go.

  Could she make her sons understand how difficult her childhood had been? That, shy and awkward even in high school, she hadn’t felt at home until she’d arrived at Marsh College? Nestled in a historic neighborhood on the outskirts of Austin, with all the streets named after famous authors like Chaucer and Wordsworth and Dryden, Marsh was known as a nerd school. Some of her classmates used to buy the bumper stickers in the campus bookstore that read I GO TO MARSH, I MUST BE SMART and put them upside down on their cars. The small university had such a big endowment from its founder, who’d hoped to create a Harvard of the South, that if you were book-smart and ambitious, the admissions committee didn’t care where you came from or how much money your parents had socked away in a college fund, which was good, because Alyce’s folks weren’t big savers. And at Marsh, for the first time in her life, she was one of the pretty girls, one of the people others wanted to be friends with. They were her people, her new, real family.

  Flannery: Small eyes with long lashes and long straight hair spreading out behind her like a train. Freckles everywhere, splattering off her face and into the air. Chin cocked, confident. Alyce drew her in the cubist style because Flan had the beauty only other women truly appreciate—the tall, dramatic angularity of a runway model, sharp jaw and shoulders, jutting collarbone. She was the first person Alyce met at college, her freshman roommate, and they used to share Flan’s upper bunk during thunderstorms.

  Santiago: Head bare and shiny. She drew him long and thin and towering, not because he was really so tall but because everything about his body shouted vertical line. Corduroy jacket. An architect like her husband, Santiago had that same pretentious look. She thought he enjoyed designing homes because he was always in search of one—he never brought the same woman around twice.
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br />   Steven: Obscured by beard and caveman hair and overalls. Now a self-professed laborer of the land, Steven had for a few years been clean-cut, a doll in khaki slacks. The one to laugh first and longest. She found his new Santa Claus appearance more appropriate, like he’d finally relaxed into himself.

  Lou: Her body and hair, both full of puffed-up, wavy lines. Alyce drew her with a garland of flowers on the crown of her head. Her mouth was partway open—she might say anything, she didn’t give a shit. Lou hadn’t gone to college with them. She was new, though she’d been around for years. She was not yet Steven’s wife, but to them she already was.

  Brandon: All wild, dark, Middle Eastern hair. He looked like electricity. Alyce drew him gazing at Molly, his hand on her neck. Inseparable. Nothing in his luminous appearance gave away his long days sitting behind microscopes and beakers.

  Molly: Heart-shaped face, heart-shaped torso, heart-shaped mouth. Enormous, watery eyes that seemed to look out on everything with equanimity. Her hands placed together in her lap. Dying.

  Alyce and Molly had never been close, and Alyce wondered now if part of that might have been because they were too much alike. They were the ones who’d been most conventional, married their college beaus, ended up with mortgages. Molly had always seemed a little dull to Alyce and, frankly, she’d wondered why everyone else was so enamored with her when she followed Flannery to Marsh.

  Now she could see Molly’s glow. It was the closest thing Alyce had felt to a sexual attraction in years, maybe longer. It was as though death were a powdery film on Molly’s skin that might somehow rub off onto her own.

  As she continued to draw, hand moving in broad strokes, she imagined her sons’ faces behind the paper, absorbing her story into their developing brains.

  It was in college when I began to suspect that traces of what would eventually happen to us already ran faintly through every single moment of life. Like quartz through a bed of rock.

  Brandon was driving the Honey Wagon, whistling, gliding us through the humid streets away from Dryden House and toward the Jumbodome, the Monster Truck Rally, and first destination of the night.

  We were young and afraid of nothing except being left behind. We did drugs out of boredom. We did them for fun. But we also did them for reasons I didn’t entirely understand at the time. We did them to be momentarily released from the irony that lay like a waxy film on our skin and tongues and eyeballs. We did them so for once we could say exactly what we meant.

  We held hands in a chain, blocking the rednecks and shitkickers behind us, as we walked up the concrete ramp to our seats, where we squirmed and twirled and laughed at everything. We passed red plastic cups of beer from hand to hand. We swayed and yelled as Gravedigger or Eradicator or Carolina Crusher revved their neon-painted engines and jumped and smashed cars in the dirt arena below, our depth perception so altered it seemed the big-wheeled trucks were mere inches from busting into the stands and making a bloody mess of the chanting crowd.

  Flannery crawled onto Santiago’s lap, and they began to kiss, their lips sucking at each other as he put his hand up her floral skirt and along her dimpled thigh. I leaned over and grabbed her shoulder, yelling into her ear, “I love you guys together!,” and so they pulled me from my seat and onto Santiago’s lap, too, all hugging and giggling and making fools of ourselves. I did love them.

  Steven was gone for what seemed like ages, finally returning with more beers and a dazed group of children. We ran fingers through their hair and said we would never have kids ourselves, but that they seemed all right. They could be our little brothers and sisters and come home with us, we said. We gave them handfuls of popcorn and sips of our beer. At some point, they wandered away.

  Molly kept trying to get everyone to look at the lights overhead, and we rolled our eyes at her for being such a trip novice, but she was right. The lights blinked and expanded above us like little broken pieces of firmament.

  We left and threaded through the parking lot looking for the Honey Wagon. It was dark. Your father kept saying, “It’s gone. I knew it would be gone. I knew it. It’s gone. It’s really gone.” I kissed him hard. We found the Honey Wagon and jumped in through the windows.

  We went to a park, the one across from the roundabout with the big triple-layered fountain in the middle. It was after hours, and the water wasn’t running. Brandon gripped a pink glow stick between his teeth and held Molly’s hand, leading her toward the playground, where they disappeared for a while inside an orange metal teepee. By the time they came back, we were all lying on the grass and on each other’s bellies and chests and arms, looking up at the stars. Mooning, we liked to call it. Thinking about how great we would become and about all the ways we were going to change the world.

  I began to pluck long blades of the Saint Augustine grass and twist them into a tight braid. I said I was weaving our destinies together. Or maybe it was a nest for the bird I felt I had become, each in-breath thrusting me higher.

  Molly sank down beside Flannery and looked up to where we all were looking, into the black and bright. She reached over and took the woven braid of grass from my outstretched palm.

  This is where we belong, Molly said. We will stay like this forever, she said.

  Yes, we said.

  Yeah.

  Sure.

  Why not?

  Yes.

  Yes.

  HARRY

  Lying in the dark, his hand straying into the cool, empty side of the bed next to him, Harry struggled to let go of the buzzing thoughts that threatened to keep him awake for hours. It had always been hard for him to fall asleep alone. Harry sneezed. And then he sneezed again.

  Harry’s mother had taught him two things about the Finnish culture from which they were allegedly descended: the equivalent for “cheers” was “kippis,” and sneezing twice in a row was bad luck (although three times in a row was good luck in love; four times, good luck in money—which gave one a sense of how the Finns prioritized things).

  Harry’s mother had been an earnest and active member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, having traced her lineage back to John Morton, signer of the Declaration of Independence on behalf of Pennsylvania and grandson of Finnish settler Martti Marttinen, who’d changed his name to Morton upon arrival in the New World. Despite generations of distance between Harry and his immigrant ancestor—not to mention abiding disdain for his mother’s involvement in the uppity DAR—as a young boy, Harry was obsessed by the idea of this faraway place called Finland. Craggy shorelines. Brutal winters. The shape of the country like a hook cast down in water grasping for the lip of a fish. The way the word Helsinki dropped and caught in his throat.

  In fifth grade, Harry wrote a report on the Finnish sauna, trying to reconcile the images in library books (small outdoor structures made up of wooden slats and rustic kiuas and masonry containing heated black stones) with the sauna his oil executive father sometimes went to with clients in the fancy gym in Houston, marbled and filled with small fountains shooting fast spits of water from the mouths of ridiculous statues.

  Harry remembered a stern private-school teacher looking over his shoulder, probably suspecting the boy’s interest in Finnish saunas was more about seeing nude people than cultural heritage. And even now, Harry himself didn’t entirely understand that youthful fascination with Finland, Scandinavia, cold northern Europe. Maybe it was the exotic images of ice and evergreen forests and wolves, so different from the muggy Gulf Coast of his hometown. Maybe because he imagined it as the land of winter behind the wardrobe in the C. S. Lewis books he read growing up—snow glittering like crystals, sleds filled with furs, animals dancing around fires. Maybe it was an innate, genetic attraction to women possessing the contrast of black hair with translucent skin—after all, wasn’t that what first drew him to Alyce? Hair as dark as night, skin as white as snow.

  In fact, the first thing Harry ever said to her was, “In Finland, that means good luck in love,” after she’d sneezed a second
time. She was sitting at a nearby table in the dining hall, and he leaned back in his chair to say it. He was lying, of course, but she was lovely and he didn’t want to start things off on the wrong foot. Alyce was sitting with Flannery, whom he only knew then as the loud, chain-smoking freshman who lived below him. He figured they drank so much because they’d both been good girls back home.

  Alyce always claimed not to recall this first encounter, but Harry remembered it explicitly because he’d done something appallingly out of character: he spoke first. Harry rarely engaged strangers, not because he was a social pariah who froze in the presence of the fairer sex, but because he wasn’t good at beginnings. He’d never had to be. He’d gone to the same private school his entire life with the children of his parents’ social circle. He didn’t remember meeting his childhood friends for the first time. He didn’t even remember meeting the girls who would become his teenage girlfriends, his first crushes and heartbreakers. In his world, one’s attention just sort of circled the same group of people, alighting on a different face every few months, like a dragonfly jumping from one plant to the next around the same small pond.

  In fact, Harry was relieved when his parents bribed him to stay in Texas and go to their alma mater, Marsh College, offering him a Toyota Corolla and a debt-free college experience. He’d applied to many of the same far-flung schools as his buddies—Emory, Williams, Brown—because he felt he should want to leave the state. But he didn’t, really. He rationalized staying in Texas by telling himself he would need all the financial help he could get if he was going to make it as an architect. Harry had known since he was ten exactly what he meant to do with his life. It didn’t matter that he’d never been especially gifted artistically. He was smart and worked harder than everyone else and assumed that would be enough.