Migratory Animals

by Mary Helen Specht

  As Molly held a tripod headstand, the blood flushing her brain, an image from her honeymoon in Mexico City floated to the surface. She and Brandon were on their way back from a show at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, holding hands and walking through the long underground subway tunnels toward the train that would return them to Brandon’s boyhood friend’s apartment, where they would sleep with windows open to a breeze, listening to the sound of the vendors yelling “Tamales, tamales tan ricos,” and smelling the faint odor of marijuana plants on the balcony. But then, as they walked forward, the doors of a stopping subway train opened to literally hundreds of teenagers streaming forth in a wave, each holding in their arms the statue of a saint, some of them elaborately carved and enormously unwieldy, others unrecognizable blobs of wood. She and Brandon stood still as the crowd flowed past them in a rush; everything inside Molly vibrated. She turned to look at her brand-new husband, his wild curls a halo around his head, and she grabbed him around the waist so that her arms too would be full.

  Suddenly, images from the Mexico City train station still pulsing through her brain, Molly went light and toppled onto her yoga mat, bashing one shoulder on the way down. She moaned and tucked her knees to her chest. Back and forth, she rocked.

  Santiago and Brandon were both alphas in the kitchen.

  “I’ve just never seen polenta cooked this way in my entire life. That’s all,” Brandon was saying when Molly walked in after her shower. Brandon’s nose crinkled like it did whenever he was concerned.

  “Well, get ready for the next-level shit,” said Santiago, wearing a white apron with the phrase WORLD’S NUMBER ONE GRANDMOTHER written in red cursive.

  “One Strawberry Hill Boone’s Farm and the latest Juggs says it collapses under that much moisture.”

  “You boys play nice,” said Molly. Brandon walked over holding a wooden spoon, and she opened her mouth to the hot, steaming Swiss chard. “More serrano,” she said.

  Brandon was the chef of the marriage, but Molly was the one he turned to for spice consultations, claiming she had an unusually good palate for these things. She went along even while suspecting he’d invented this theory out of his Brandonian desire to include her. Molly was really only good at identifying songs on the radio, and the only two things she liked to do in the kitchen were to peel hard-boiled eggs and make guacamole. There was a special satisfaction when the shell of an egg came off in only two or three pieces, or when an avocado was sliced open to reveal the perfect chartreuse of ideal ripeness.

  As the three of them sat at the table that barely fit into one corner of the kitchen, Brandon nodded as he took a bite of polenta, a movement that indicated, “not bad.”

  Santiago put a hand to his shaved head and looked up, something strange in the way he held his mouth. “I thought Flan was coming tonight.”

  “She canceled,” said Molly, scraping butter-roasted “magic pumpkin” off her plate with the side of her fork. “Working late.”

  “She’s meeting us at the show?”

  “Nope.” Molly looked back at her plate with the dusty rose on it, too self-absorbed with her own sibling resentments to notice that she wasn’t the only one disappointed.

  Recently Molly had gotten a ticket for reckless driving (she told the officer and her husband she’d been on the phone, though that wasn’t true), and so Brandon did all the night driving now. He let Molly and Santi off at the entrance to the club.

  The band began on time and played two hours of tragic bluesy rock and country. Molly liked La Zona Rosa because the dirty concrete floor sloped up from the stage, so even being short, she could find spots to see above the bobbing heads of those in front of her.

  The front woman was no longer young and beautiful, yet she had that leather-and-zippers aura of eternal cool Molly wished for but knew she’d never possess. The crowd of shitkickers and hipsters and dirty old hippies swayed en masse; Brandon stood behind Molly with his arms around her waist, and they breathed and moved and sweated, a singular beast. Lou and Steven met them there, and they stood nearby drinking beer handed out by Santiago, who made trip after trip to the bar. Onstage, the singer made the word righteously sound like gritty exultation.

  During the encore, Molly was on her way back from the bathroom, trying to find her friends in the crowd, when she started to get an unsettled, lurching sensation in her stomach—an anxious, shaky, heart-racing panic. The notes from the guitars onstage suddenly seemed stretched and off-key, grating. She put her hands over her ears.

  She tried to take a few steps toward the middle of the room, her feet weaving in front of her, and then she stumbled. Her body was disobeying her. Like one of those dreams where your limbs are seemingly trapped in a vat of honey. Some men standing nearby laughed and rolled their eyes: “Hold your liquor, sugartits.”

  The stage lights pulsed and circled up above like halos. Molly crouched to escape them, focusing her gaze on the littered ground, the crunched plastic cups and wadded-up credit card receipts—confusing clues to a mystery she couldn’t solve, couldn’t quite wrap her head around. Good night! Thank you for coming, Austin! I love you! What was she doing here? Who had brought her to this place, this experience? What was making everything spin? The crowd moved past Molly on their way to the doors, jolting and rattling her, a few of them looking down with abstract concern. She noticed a pair of lanky calves and Converse tennis shoes—Flannery. Flannery was here to save her. But when she tilted her head upward Molly saw orange curly hair and a teenager’s face. The stranger slid away into the crowd.

  Headaches. Mood-shifting night panics. Tics and twitches and restless limbs. Problems driving and counting money. Loss of balance. They were all symptoms she knew intimately from growing up, from watching her mother die, and yet she’d managed to ignore and deny them all. And Flannery. The way her sister had avoided Molly ever since getting back to Austin. Had it been so clear? No. No. No.

  She closed her eyes, remembering the time in Dallas when she and her sister weren’t led into the usual waiting room at the hospital with the green plastic furniture that had accrued the waxy film of hours and hours of their boredom. The time they were allowed to go back with their mother into a different space where nurses and technicians bustled around little stations labeling vials and marking paperwork, one of them stopping to take a white medical glove and blow it up like a balloon, handing it to them with a bright smile.

  Flannery tossed it to Molly with a look that said, I’m too old for such a transparent bribe. But did Molly truly understand it that way at the time? She remembered holding the glove balloon with the tips of her fingers as if it were a crystal ball.

  The nurse was preparing to take a blood sample from both girls.

  “Why, Papa?” asked Flannery, her hands pushed deep into her corduroy pants pockets.

  “To help Mom,” said their father.

  “But we’re not sick like she is.”

  “Of course not. That’s why she needs your help.”

  Later, days after the Lucinda Williams concert, Molly would do her own research. She would discover that this was before the International Huntington’s Association had drawn up guidelines to limit testing of those under age eighteen. In fact, it was not for a test of HD at all, but merely to add their blood samples to a project on the cusp of finding and labeling the exact gene that could eventually predict the future of someone at risk. But already they were close, already they could make a pretty good guess based on the number of CAG repeats on a certain gene. And that, as it turned out, was good enough in Molly’s case.

  The nurse bound her arm and readied the syringe.

  “It will only hurt for a second.”

  Finally, the group found her sitting on the concrete of the club floor. They surrounded and protected her, Lou’s and Steven’s and everybody’s arms reaching out like one big net. She looked into their eyes—Brandon, Santiago—and did not see surprise; what she saw looked more like grief and desperation. She could almost detect the invisible fil
m that rippled between the land of the living and of the dying. She felt ice-cold, as though she were trapped inside a deep, black hole while warm, living people tried to drag her out, to reanimate her.

  But it was too late. As they pulled her up, she let her body go limp. Molly was dying, and it seemed she was the last to know.

  SANTIAGO

  Santiago looked at the window, fogged and beaded from the humidifier, still expelling its slow mist of water particles up into the room like one long winter breath.

  “Since when do you fly-fish?” asked Flannery. It was morning. They were lying on the floor in sleeping bags.

  “My grandmother made them.” Santiago followed her gaze to the case he’d hung on the wall a few days ago: dozens of colorful and elaborate flies, tiny and twisted with little trails of fuzz and string.

  “They’re funny looking,” she said.

  After the scene at the concert, Santiago had left Molly and Brandon at their car, Molly folding herself into the passenger seat in silence. He had taken a cab to the Climate Institute and dragged Flannery back with him to the fire station, where they drank whiskey and paced the floors, crying and wringing their hands. He talked some about his own father’s death, but mostly Flannery rambled, spewing bits of stories he had to work to put together, about how her grandfather, her mother’s father, had been misdiagnosed with Alzheimer’s at first but his chorea was so bad her grandmother moved him out of town. To hide him. How at his memorial service, Flannery saw two of his sisters shaking with chorea, all blamed on strokes or something else. All ashamed to face the truth: they had passed down a death sentence to their children.

  Later, when he was too drunk to drive her home, she agreed to stay the night if she could camp out downstairs. He gave her his blue insulated sleeping bag and then zipped himself up next to her in a cotton army-green one that had belonged to his father, enduring the hard floor in the sick hope she would turn to him for comfort. But Flannery slept spiraled in on herself the whole night.

  “That one’s called a ‘Royal Coachman.’ That one’s a ‘Peeper Popper,’” he said, pointing at the flies displayed on the wall. “A ‘Humpy Blue.’ And . . . I can’t remember the rest.”

  “You never told me your grandmother was into fly-fishing.” She lifted her other hand into the air and pretended to catch the flits of sunlight that played on the wall.

  “My grandfather fished; Abuela tied the flies. He didn’t have the patience for it.” Santiago’s father had rarely taken him to visit his abuelos at their small tin house on a Rio Grande tributary, where they fished and raised corn and cleaned houses at some of the ranches nearby, his grandmother frying up pieces of queso blanco at the stove and singing songs in Spanish that Santiago never had the chance to learn. Recently Santiago had begun to understand that his father was probably more embarrassed than he was estranged from his parents, critical of their dirt floors and lack of interest in learning English. His father thought their way of life, their poverty, might be contagious.

  “Your grandparents were a team,” said Flannery, smiling. He loved her smile, how it transformed her otherwise ovoid face, giving it dips and contours, a more complicated landscape. This morning they didn’t talk about Molly or his father, but he wanted to turn to her and say, Well, you must stay now. How could you go back to Africa after this?

  “Would you ever tie flies?” Santiago asked instead, rubbing her shoulder with his thumb.

  “Give me a lover and a fulcrum, and I’ll change the world.”

  “Lever.” He turned inside his sleeping bag to look at her. She faced the ceiling and her small pink ears stuck out from her hair like seashells.

  “Lover. Lover. Lover.” Her tone was hard when she said it. Each word a whip.

  He thought of the first time he’d laid eyes on her. It was the Night of Decadence party, a bacchanal thrown by Marsh students each Halloween and known for its scandalously clad, drug-fueled dancing—an interesting proposition at a nerdy little engineering school. He saw her walking across the quad wearing nothing but a G-string and pasties, having convinced an art student to paint the rest of her body the white and black of a Halloween skeleton, so naked even her bones showed. She set up a row of tequila shots on the picnic table outside and said to Santiago, “I don’t know about you. You look like trouble.”

  In their sleeping bags on the floor of his fire station, Santiago could feel Flannery becoming restless. He said, “It’s Saturday morning. Let’s troll the garage sales.”

  “I have to go into the lab.”

  “Later.”

  She bit her lip and shrugged. Santiago took it for “yes.”

  By midmorning it was already hot, and Santi felt his underarms dampen, which he hated.

  “A widow,” Flannery said, holding up a plastic turkey. “He was a hunter. He died years ago, but she’s only now able to finally let go of all his stuff.”

  “She cried into his clothes every night, but not because he was dead,” Santiago added, “but because she’d cheated on him for years with his twin brother and the guilt was too much.” There were stacks of T-shirts and cargo shorts and flip-flops on a foldout table, science fiction paperbacks in a box beneath it. Incense and potpourri and accordion fans.

  “And she couldn’t tell anyone because the twin brother was the married mayor of Georgetown, until he left his wife of twenty years—not for her but for a stripper from the Yellow Rose . . .”

  “. . . who was working her way through medical school . . .” He turned an orange-and-yellow hurricane lamp over in his hands.

  During the summer when Flannery crashed with him in Boston, they’d spent weekends crisscrossing Cambridge looking for yard sales, stopping to flip through yellowed paperbacks, scratchy LPs, army fatigues, heavy clip-on earrings, scented Christmas candles, teacups with saucers, dolls with missing limbs, rusted wrenches, and big bunches of cloth flowers faded from too many days in the sun. Life’s detritus. They did the commuter crossword puzzle over day-old glazed donuts, Flannery sometimes pretending she didn’t know as many answers as she did just so Santiago wouldn’t become too frustrated and throw the newspaper across the room. He knew this, and he let her. Three down: Sound that might indicate hunger. Mew. Thirty across: One with a growing hobby. Gentleman farmer. When the summer was gone, so was she, not even a mixed tape for him in the mail.

  “Santi,” said Flannery. “It’s boiling. One more, then let’s head back.” They were only on their second yard. With the app Santiago downloaded on his phone, it was much easier to find garage sales than it had been back in Boston, when they’d had to go aimlessly looking for homemade signs with Marks-A-Lot arrows.

  “Right,” he said. Flannery always did what she wanted. “We should get something for Molly.” He looked around. “What about one of those weird, splotchy hand-dyed scarves?”

  “Is she still obsessed with scarves?” asked Flannery, grinning at him. “I love that you remembered that.” She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

  Instinctively, Santiago reached a hand into the messenger bag he always carried slung across his chest, feeling into its depths for the 1950s Dashboard Jesus and fingering the plastic hand that shaped a blessing. He and Flannery had bought it at a garage sale almost a decade ago now. Santiago didn’t really believe in these things, in relics or even in Jesus, but something had moved him to slip it into the bag that morning, a talisman in his quest to woo Flannery back, a link to their past before Nigeria got in the way. His father may have let the good life pass him by, but Santiago was not going to make that mistake.

  Now was the time, he thought. “Flannery, look at me.” He spun her around to face him. “You need to call your sister.” Part of him felt guilty for using Molly in this way, but he believed what he said was also true. Molly needed Flannery; she always had.

  She shrugged him off.

  “You will regret it, Flan, if you don’t do this right. I’m telling you.”

  She looked up at him, and her eyes were slightl
y altered, moony. He was getting through. Then, she half smiled and looked off in that way that meant the conversation was over.

  There was so much else he wanted to say. He wanted to remind her about how she’d stayed up all night at Dryden House helping him finish a model due the next day, sitting hip to hip with him at the kitchen table, painstakingly gluing into position bits of balsa wood and Styrofoam as well as the little plastic figures he included to give it scale, like a bride and groom atop the cake; and how when her mother died senior year, for two weeks straight he played nothing but My Bloody Valentine—her favorite sad band—during his 2:00 A.M.–6:00 A.M. shift at the college radio station. It had been his way of holding her hand, of serenading her grief.

  As they walked along, side by side, together, handling goods they had no intention of buying, Flannery turned to Santiago, her mouth open as though she were releasing moths captured inside. Then, he heard the Pavement riff he’d programmed into her cell phone the night before. Her phone was ringing.

  She closed her mouth and looked down at the screen. “It’s Kunle.” And the moment was broken.

  As Flannery walked away, Santiago tried not to notice how her face relaxed when she talked to this stranger on the other side of the world. He took his own phone out of his pocket. He had one missed call from a client, Kit Hobbes. As he hit the dial button, Santiago allowed himself to hope the man was calling to give them the green light on his vacation home design job.