Migratory Animals

by Mary Helen Specht

  “Kit Hobbes. How’s life treating you?” he said, trying to sound like Harry did when he talked to big clients. Santi wandered back to his car and got inside to escape the ambient chatter of other yard-sale shoppers.

  “A problem, I’m afraid.” Kit was an executive for a local organic juice company. Harry and Santi had designed a small home for him that cantilevered over Town Lake on the still-underdeveloped east side of town. They’d only landed the job in the first place because Kit knew Harry’s parents in Houston, but he liked their design and promised them more work.

  Listening, Santiago cringed as Kit explained that all the insanely expensive copper fittings on the deck were starting to green and crumble at lake level. “I just don’t think it’s going to hold up.”

  The copper had been Santiago’s idea—it looked stunning—and that meant he’d have to be the one to fix it, too. It would take a bite out of their account to coat everything with iron.

  “I’ll have our contractor out there to look at it next week.” Santiago tried not to let his voice tremble, to remember that he owned a design firm and knew what he was doing. “And while I have you on the phone, have you thought any more about the Marfa house addition? We have some time opening up and would love to get started.”

  “Look. You and Harry are great kids. Talented. But that’s not going to happen,” said Kit as Santiago’s brain began to shut down, the voice on the phone sounding farther and farther away. “Our retirement took a hit in the market like everybody’s. Maybe in a few years we’ll revisit that project, okay?”

  Santiago watched Flannery pace the side of the house, laughing and tossing her hair as she talked on the phone. The owners of the yard-sale house were parked in lawn chairs in the shade of the one pecan tree, staring at the customers as if they were thieves.

  As he sat in the car, waiting for Flannery, his phone rang again, vibrating against his lap. It was Harry calling this time, probably to check up on things at “the office.” Santiago didn’t pick up the phone. Not because of the copper mishap—that wasn’t good, but it wasn’t the end of the world. But because Harry had spent months now working on Kit Hobbes’s Marfa house, inspired by the Donald Judd boxes that dotted the West Texas desert. Santiago thought he’d sold Hobbes on the idea when they talked about it last winter, but they hadn’t actually inked a deal, which was what Santiago had implied to Harry. Harry was always bringing in projects with his Houston connections, and Santiago had only wanted to do his part. To show that he could make business happen with his talent. Hadn’t that always been the dream?

  Maybe they could sell the design to someone else, he thought. Santiago watched as Flannery moved toward his car, her phone now hanging dead in her hand. But who else would want to buy the design for a two-room cube in the desert? With one hand, he reached across the car to open her door; with the other Santiago felt again for his plastic Jesus, praying for many things in the only way he knew how.

  FLANNERY

  When Kunle called her at the yard sale, Flannery felt relief. Anything to take her mind off Molly. Anything to bring back Nigeria.

  “Did you get it?” she said before hello.

  “Once again, robbed of the Nobel Prize by those bastards in Stockholm.”

  She snorted. “Did you get the tourist visa?”

  “No.”

  Flannery sucked in her breath.

  “They rescheduled the consulate interview for next week.” He couldn’t hide the disappointment in his voice. “Rotimi’s kids are driving me mad—Prosper actually took a piss on me in the middle of the night, poor kid.”

  Kunle was staying with his brother’s family in Lagos, where real estate prices were so high that Rotimi’s family had to squeeze into a two-bedroom flat, which meant Kunle was sleeping on a king-size mattress with the children (Praise, Promise, Precious, and Prosper) while he waited for the visa interview. Unlike other megacities, Lagos didn’t have satellite slums: the whole place was dilapidated and mired in extreme poverty—or at least that’s what Flannery had read in The New Yorker. But living in Nigeria one eventually learned to make subtle distinctions between decrepitudes, to consider factors such as the density of trash along the road, how many people were asleep on benches among the market stalls, if any paint had been used on buildings. In areas of town that at first seemed indistinguishable from others, one began to intuit the presence of elite compounds and neighborhoods hidden behind locked gates and cinder-block walls spiked with broken glass.

  “And you? How far?” Kunle asked in Nigerian slang. “Have they found your bike?”

  “Ha. Even our police don’t give a shit about a stolen bicycle in the hood.”

  “Abeg, move somewhere safer, baby.”

  Flannery’s new apartment was a nondescript one-bedroom east of I-35. As much as she liked the idea of dirt-cheap rent and a quick bus commute to the Climate Institute, passing storefronts hawking bright pink piñatas and pulled pork sandwiches, she felt guilty living on the east side, another overeducated Caucasian bringing gentrification and an eventual hike in property taxes. But it was a good thing she’d taken the place—Kunle had a job teaching biology at a public university, but the government hadn’t paid faculty salaries in months because of another budget shortfall.

  “Your flat sounds like a dump,” he continued, pressing the issue. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine him standing next to her in his blue soccer jersey and ironed khakis. “You haven’t been there a month, and your bike’s already been pinched. It suffers you more than Nigeria.” He seemed to have forgotten she decided on a bike rather than the used hatchback she’d been eyeing (much harder to steal) because his father had come down with spinal meningitis, needing weeks of treatment in the hospital, which had siphoned both their savings.

  “Technically, it was only the front wheel.” There were bigger things to worry about than stolen bike parts. “So don’t get a bee in your bonnet. Don’t get your knickers in a bunch,” she added, hoping to lighten the mood, to regain access to their intimate history whereby she mocked his Briticisms. Most Nigerian schools were taught in English, but an actual British accent was particularly prized, and for those not lucky enough to be “been to’s”—people who had been abroad—it was enough to have what was called a LAFA, or Locally Acquired Foreign Accent.

  Flannery had been surprised by how, as a white person, she was treated in many places in Nigeria, not reviled as a former oppressor but revered as a celebrity. There was a saying in Nigeria: “Clap like you would for a white.” The first time Kunle walked with her through Agbono market at night, buying snacks wrapped in newspaper and passing towers of yam, tomato, T-shirts, and sandals illuminated by kerosene lamps and the occasional lightbulb strung along a wooden frame throwing shadows off the figures laughing and shopping on their way home from work, people began waving at them and shouting “Oyinbo! Oyinbo!” or “Mrs. White!” Being in Nigeria hadn’t really taught Flan what it was like to be marginalized but, rather, what it was like to be famous, eliciting smiles and shouts with a mere word or touch of the hand. “I don’t hate your company, anyway,” Kunle had said in response to all the fuss. He liked to present compliments like this, using contradictory negation. “Cockroaches tend to go it alone, so when you see them circling something, you know it must really be good.”

  “Are you calling your people cockroaches?”

  That evening, as they sat on wooden benches drinking bottles of Star, he became obsessed with comparing the color of their skin, placing his forearm beside hers and saying, “You’re not really white. I’m not really black. But in relation to each other . . .” as well as making pronouncements like, “Sometimes I look at you and see a beautiful woman, and sometimes I see a slaveholder.”

  “Why do rich Nigerians put their money in America, but rich Americans don’t put their money here?” he asked a different time, pointing to another in a long line of newspaper articles about a Nigerian politician purchasing a second home in Maryland.

  “W
hat about me? I buy beer here all the time.”

  Flannery now wondered if part of her ennui since returning to the States had to do with returning, not only to her sister’s illness but also to the quotidian reality of being just one among millions. Nothing special.

  “Flannery. You still there?” Kunle’s voice sounded small and distant through the phone. “What’s wrong? Gist with me.”

  Flannery stood in a stranger’s yard looking at a table of someone else’s castoffs, some other family’s junk, and she didn’t know how to begin to tell Kunle all that was really wrong. That her sister was dying and she wasn’t. That she needed to do something for her but didn’t know what. That Santiago, with his devotion and lack of judgment, sat in a car nearby looking at her with adoring eyes. That, despite the long hours spent at the lab, she wasn’t close to having a proof of principle so that she could return home to him.

  Flannery was using advanced computer modeling to predict whether various green barriers planted along the edge of the Sahara might delay or stop the desertification creeping into Nigeria. She was programming her own model, using the derivations her Nigerian lab group had come up with before the research post closed, but so far the results weren’t significant enough to convince the National Science Foundation to fund her at the next level. They certainly weren’t enough to keep Kunle’s homeland from turning into dirt.

  Kunle was no longer on the other end of the line. Another dropped international phone call. She clicked the piece of plastic shut in her hand. She looked up at the sky.

  It took almost a week for Flannery to act on the sense of responsibility that, after the morning at the yard sale with Santiago, she was having a harder time ignoring. Steven and Lou were moving forward quickly with their wedding, and Flannery and Molly had been asked to help plan the bachelorette party. Flannery tightened the muscles in her abdomen and phoned her sister, offering to pick her up in Santiago’s borrowed car. She would be a better caretaker, she told herself. She would rise to the occasion.

  The local nonprofit CASITA, which worked to keep immigrant youths out of juvie or foster care and where Lou worked as director of special projects, was staging a fund-raising happy hour where Lou had asked them to meet her. The event was at the private library and grounds of Floyd Falcon, one of the wealthiest businessmen in the state’s capital. Flannery had only heard about this place.

  After being greeted at the gate by a smiling CASITA intern in a tweed skirt, they spent a few minutes meandering the collection, including the outdoor statuary, poached from all over the world. Falcon had strong ties to defense contractors.

  “The owner calls this the Garden of Evil,” said Molly, as she led Flannery past larger-than-life statues of Lenin and Saddam Hussein and a bust of Chairman Mao all tucked into perfectly landscaped foliage. “Look, there’s Churchill over on the high ground.”

  And inside, in the library itself, the bounty was even stranger: first editions of Isaac Newton alongside Hitler’s personal place settings; the first U.S. Census signed by Jefferson next to a miniature of the atomic bomb “Little Boy” signed by the pilot of the Enola Gay.

  At one point, Molly turned her mouth to Flannery’s ear and asked if everyone knew.

  “Everyone?” asked Flannery, though she understood what Molly meant.

  “Everyone coming to plan the bachelorette party.” Molly was whispering, though there was nobody nearby.

  Flannery nodded. Of course, by now everyone knew Molly was sick.

  “Once the main business is done, make an excuse and get us out of here.”

  Flannery nodded but thought: so here it comes again, her role as protector of the ill and dying. To be with someone who had Huntington’s was to be on display. As the symptoms became worse, the chorea and grimacing and flitting eyeballs would always create a scene. Always. Flannery remembered being at a baseball game once and her mother not returning from the bathroom. It was Flannery who noticed she’d been gone too long, and Flannery who was sent to find her, which she did: flailing about in frustration in front of a stern-looking cop one level below their seats. Flannery put her arms around her mother to calm her, her mother finally able to sputter, “He thinks I’m drunk.” Flannery, not even bothering to address the policeman directly, looked in her mother’s twitching face and said, “It’s okay. He doesn’t understand you’re sick.” As a teenager, Flannery found it hard not to care what people thought. She found it painful to ignore the world, suffocating to be so needed by her mother.

  At the Falcon Library, she gravitated toward the row of death masks in the far corner beneath a shelf holding a hand-sewn first edition of Don Quixote. Flannery didn’t recognize the subjects of three of the masks, all old men, but the fourth was obvious: Abraham Lincoln. She knew the molds were initially done in plaster, but she couldn’t help imagine his stoic, puckered face being slowly coated in liquid bronze, as if to snuff out the last air in his presidential lungs.

  “So what do you think?” whispered Lou later, having found Flannery and her sister in the Garden of Evil, putting an arm over the two women’s shoulders, a glass of wine dangling from each hand.

  “Wonderful in every way.” Molly grabbed one of the sloshing glasses.

  They found a bench in the garden and sat down. “Isn’t there something creepy to fund-raising for troubled kids in such a lavishly fucked-up place?” asked Flannery.

  “Yes.”

  “And shouldn’t you be over there schmoozing with all those moneybags rather than discussing your bachelorette party with us?”

  “Flan. The moneybags prefer to spend their time talking to each other in a setting that doesn’t make them feel guilty about their own lives.”

  Flannery noticed some of Lou’s friends waving from the back porch, making the international sign for “Anybody need another free drink?” before walking over. The three women wore flowery sundresses and various incarnations of what she and Molly used to call “Savior sandals.” Like Lou, the three women were unshaven, bursts of black hair beneath their armpits like grass growing from the crack of a rock. It made Flan feel suburban and overly groomed.

  They hugged Lou, who said, “You guys remember Flannery and Molly? Steven’s friends from college.” Flannery had actually complained to Molly earlier, saying they really should have been invited to the bachelor party. Molly told her to be grateful they were invited to anything at all.

  Of course they remembered the two sisters. They asked how they were doing. Was Flannery enjoying being stateside? Was Molly . . . ? The conversation stuttered.

  “Molly’s been doing a lot of gardening.” Flannery tried her best to fill the void. “She grows the most beautiful irises. Tell them.”

  “The irises bloomed months ago. They’re dormant now.”

  From the opposite direction, Alyce arrived wearing loose, rumpled linen, bags and dark circles under her eyes. But Flannery didn’t notice this at first, so relieved was she to have backup. Alyce had always been the one who knew how to deal with hard things. In college, she’d been the only one who didn’t clam up and turn awkward when Flannery spoke about her mother.

  “Sorry I’m late.” Alyce shrugged, kissing Flannery and Molly on their foreheads before sitting down. “There was a triple hatchling homicide on our porch at the ranch this morning. The boys are in mourning—wearing black, building a memorial of leaves. The whole hog.”

  “Have you been inside the library yet?” asked Lou.

  Alyce gazed at her hands; she didn’t seem to be listening.

  “To have your own personal librarian—that’s what impresses me,” said one of Lou’s hippie friends.

  “We could all chip in and share a librarian,” said another, raising her eyebrows at the man, cute in a nerdy sort of way, strolling the garden, gesticulating wildly as he answered people’s questions about the collection. “I could use some help with my . . . shelving.”

  Flannery noticed Molly’s legs shaking a little. And were her cheeks redder than normal? “Let’s
get you into the shade. I think there’s an umbrella in the car. I’ll grab it.”

  Molly’s smile was tight. “No, thanks.”

  The discussion about Lou’s bachelorette party wasn’t as long and drawn out as they’d feared. By now, these women had done this dozens of times and pretty much agreed: keep it cheap, keep it alcoholic, keep it party bus. If they ponied up for the psychedelic party bus, nobody would have to drive, and they could just barhop until it was time for karaoke.

  “Shit,” said Lou, standing up from the bench and giving a fake smile to a man in a blue-and-white-striped catastrophe from the J.Crew catalog. “My boss is waving me over to meet that crotchety bitch who always promises to give us money and never does. We’re done, right?”

  A waiter came around with a tray of raw tuna and cheese croquettes. Flannery started to reach for the food until she remembered that fish was supposed to increase chorea in HD patients. Wasn’t it? Or was that just shellfish? And all Molly had had to drink this afternoon was wine, which wasn’t good. “Can you bring my sister here some water? And do you have any fruit?”

  The waiter, who looked about twelve, nodded.

  “It’s fine.” Molly picked a croquette off the tray.

  Flannery mouthed fruit and water before the penguin-suited waiter had time to make his escape.

  “Don’t Milky Way me. You have to take care of yourself,” said Flannery, growing impatient. “Don’t Milky Way me” was a phrase originating when their aunt offered Molly a Milky Way from a bag of leftover Halloween candy, and Molly lied, gushing and saying it was her favorite when, in fact, she hated them. For years afterward their aunt gave her a Milky Way each time they visited, Molly choking it down with a smile. “You have to stand up for your health. You have to be smart.”

  “Gosh, sis. That’s always been my problem. Never was as smart as you.”

  Flannery looked to her best friend for some support, but Alyce remained on the bench, placid and half smiling. Lou’s other friends were trying not to stare.