Migratory Animals

by Mary Helen Specht

  “This bacteria causes things to freeze in above-freezing temperature—but not by much. Enough to do this in West Africa?” Brandon looked like he hadn’t slept in days.

  “I don’t know yet,” Flannery said, truthfully. “Depends on how high up in the atmosphere we can make the process viable. Will you help me? Let me use your ice chamber?”

  “You’ll need a certain level of moisture in the air to form around the bacteria.” He rubbed his eyes. “Will there be enough?”

  “Yes.” Flannery was aware her voice sounded more stubborn than reassuring—not just hopeful, faithful, like Kunle’s magical thinking. “I think so.”

  “You can’t use the ice chamber.” Brandon sighed, taking the pencil out from behind his ear and making marks on a blank sheet of paper. Flannery’s heart seized.

  After a minute of ignoring her as he scribbled, Brandon looked up and said, “We’ll need something bigger than my ice chamber. Much, much bigger.”

  Flannery stayed up the rest of the night, fiddling with Brandon’s numbers, experimenting with computer models. She wasn’t sure at what point she put her head down on the desk and began to daydream. Or was she falling asleep?

  “You know that whatever it is I’m developing won’t save your mother’s farm.” She said this in her head, in the mush and muddle of dreamscape. “It takes years for advances to make an impact.” Kunle was not there to hear her speak and yet he was.

  “So what are you going to do?” he asked, his voice like a caress along her neck. “Make it snow in the desert?”

  She tried to keep her eyelids open but their tiny veins filled with liquid metal, weighing them down. “That’s exactly what we’re going to do,” she said, or maybe did not really say, becoming lost in the thicket of sleep. And in her dreams, snowflakes and tiny grains of sand were harmlessly swirling together through the atmosphere, a sandstorm of snow. And in her dream she reached out a hand to touch them, and they were warm. And they were cold.

  And in this place where snow and sand mixed together, her sister was not dying. And in this place she had no sister at all.

  ALYCE

  Molly’s arrival at the ranch, holding a suitcase and two burlap sacks filled with iris bulbs, was more or less having its desired effect: Alyce was working on her tapestry.

  Still not sleeping in any traditional sense, Alyce spent the daylight hours dozing on the sofa, in and out of strange dreams filled with dirty-winged birds and nests made from her own things, tapestries and dish cloths and cheap jewelry passed down from her grandmother. She oozed through the kitchen nibbling on stale crackers, absentmindedly watched reruns. She pitched back and forth in the rocking chair on the porch as mohawked roadrunners hopped their way through the yard; as quick as the insects they hunted, they barely noticed her, occasionally flipping up their long tail feathers in a show of indifference. During the day Alyce seemed to float in a vat of molasses.

  But her torpor lifted as night fell. She walked the perimeter of the ranch house locking doors and turning on lamps; they ate a late dinner standing in the kitchen, Alyce picking at a turkey sandwich on rye, Molly devouring the same along with sides of collards or pasta salad or beets plus whatever Alyce couldn’t finish. Alyce was amazed by all that Molly could consume. Alyce used to carry a piece of paper in her pocket with quotations given to her by her first therapist: Believe your family is worth living for even when you don’t. Hold on to the memories depression tries to steal and project them into the future. Eat when food revolts you. One out of three ain’t bad, Alyce thought, shoving another bite of sandwich into her mouth, forcing herself to chew.

  Before Molly trundled off to bed, Alyce would wrap her arms around her friend’s shoulders, elbows squeezing in tight, and allow whatever dark energies pooled inside this woman to flow into Alyce’s own hands, her knotty-knuckled weaver’s fingers. Then she went into her studio and worked.

  On this particular night Alyce stood taut in front of the loom, hands quivering along the warp. Tonight she was unspooling Flannery onto the frame, blowing tangy, hot breath into the emerging form, animating it like a puppet, trying to channel the pressure from Molly’s sharp edge of life pulling adjacent to death, a convergent boundary.

  As she worked, Alyce daydreamed about the myth of the goddess weaver, daughter of the jade emperor, who wove the light of stars into what the Chinese named the Silver River, which ran, spangled, down the night sky outside Alyce’s casement window. She looked up at that splash of galaxy, sugar falling into a pool of ink, and felt a grandiose affinity with this celestial weaver, her fingers working one butterfly of thread over, under. Over and under. One row of contrast color made a dotted line; two rows a solid one.

  The purpose of the loom was to keep the warp, the threads running front to back, rigid so Alyce could weave the weft, or side-to-side threads, through and then pull the beater forward to press the material tightly into place. The pads of her bare feet pedaled the treadles, which were harnessed to shafts separating various strands of the warp, opening what were called sheds. Unlike the big vertical looms used to weave medieval tapestry, this production-style loom revealed only one small section at a time laid out under Alyce’s hands, the unwoven warp rolled up on the back beam, the already woven cloth on the front. The piece of tapestry that she worked in was eight feet by one foot, but she really only had a four-inch-wide strip where she could freely maneuver the butterfly into the intricate patterns required. Once a section was finished—many hours of work—she ratcheted the loom forward to begin on the next part.

  Learning to weave was one of the few things she remembered fondly from her childhood. Her eccentric father had given Alyce her first handheld frame loom when she was five. He’d learned to set one up in the art education classes he’d had to take so he could substitute teach between the Renaissance Fairs where he and Alyce’s mother dressed up like knights and wenches. Later, after watching Alyce spend hours working cloth after school and on the weekends, her parents called a company that made big floor looms and pretended to be textile dealers setting up a new business. The company let them borrow a horizontal loom for their “showroom,” and it barely fit shoved up next to Alyce’s single bed. She considered it the nicest thing her parents ever did for her.

  Mostly, when she thought back on growing up, Alyce remembered feeling like the third wheel to her parents’ full life: long hours of tagging along. And what stuck out in particular was the winter when she was thirteen and her jaw had to be wired shut after a collision in a volleyball game left it broken in two places, and how she lived through those weeks in a liminal state, a drug-addled witness responding to outside stimuli with grunts and shakes of the head. Looking back, she recognized this as her first depressive episode.

  Alyce’s family traveled to Texas that February—her parents were working a Renaissance Fair in the Hill Country, demonstrating candle making and blacksmithing in open-air booths while Alyce sat sullenly on a bench watching the sword swallowers open their gullets and slide thin sheaves of metal all the way down. Her wired jaw gave her an excuse not to talk to anyone.

  “Watch as I stretch out its tail,” her mother told a group of children, shaping a black-and-green strand of hot wax into a miniature dragon with puffed-out cheeks. Her mother managed to look glamorous even wearing the flouncy skirt and purple felt vest of her costume.

  During that trip, they camped in the yard of another Ren Fair enthusiast her parents had met through the circuit, a hippie who grew marijuana plants in his closet and played the mandolin on his porch every morning.

  On Alyce’s birthday, her parents and the hippie took her out to a seafood place—despite the fact she disliked fish and couldn’t open her mouth—and her mother asked the waiter, “What do you have that can fit through the space between her teeth?” She was given lobster bisque and a straw. Every time she sucked in through the plastic tube if felt as though Alyce were filling herself with hot air like a balloon until she floated upward, her parents flirting down bel
ow, eating off each other’s plates and holding hands beneath the table. The hippie smiled at her, but it was a probing, curious smile, and she looked away.

  February in the Texas Hill Country was also when the purple martins arrived from South America, and so, one afternoon, her father drove the three of them to an open field with tall poles topped with martin houses strung from one end to the other like a necklace. Martins were odd migrants because they leapfrogged their way up North America: the first group traveled in February to Texas and parts of Florida, where they spent the entire breeding season; the next group came in March, ending up in the Midwest; the final flocks arrived in Canada in May.

  That particular winter was unusually cold for the Hill Country, though, so when the purple martins arrived in Texas, there was little insect life on which to feed. Having lost most of their stored fat during migration, the birds Alyce and her parents saw near the martin houses looked thin and sickly. The purple sheen of their feathers was dulled, their bellies were shrunken; one bird even fell from his perch while they watched and never got back up. Her mother’s face was grim as they returned to their puke-green Plymouth, binoculars in hand, but neither of her parents said anything, perhaps aware that suffering was a fact of life they could neither protect her from nor adequately explain.

  As she stooped over Flannery’s form on the loom, working the thread, Alyce decided her adult depression was actually not so much like the winter when her jaw was wired shut and she went to look at purple martins in the Hill Country. Rather, her adult life was more like being a purple martin that winter: losing the desire to go on.

  But when night weaving, Alyce was invincible; she was in control; the tapestry was an all-knowing projection of her own migration across the Silver River, moving at night like a criminal on the lam, like a flock of robins or purple martins taking advantage of the still and silent nighttime atmosphere to migrate long distances. Somewhere in the vast inner sky where her subconscious floated like pretty little storm clouds, Alyce knew this tapestry couldn’t save her. But maybe her sons could look at it, touch it, and be satisfied. The tapestry would be full of the friends who had known her boys since they were born, and Alyce was convinced, when the time came, that these people would circle to protect Jake and Ian from the worst.

  Flannery emerged slowly. Little by little. In oranges, for the long tunic and iridescent scarf she wore in college, and metallic browns, for her hair and freckles and eyes. Autumn colors. Earth tones. With fabrics that grew from the earth, cotton and linen. Wool shorn from the backs of sheep or llamas or sometimes goats, and silk stolen from the silkworm, spun into yarn, all of which Alyce now wove together.

  Alyce used to draw her final designs on vellum, a heavyweight tracing paper, using a grid and protractor for precision, and then place them behind the warp as a pattern. But over the past few years she’d developed a technique whereby she dyed the warp itself to approximate the design, and then elaborated from there, freestyle.

  Most tapestry weavers used a plain, cheap material for the warp because it was only a backbone for the real design. But Alyce used hand-dyed wools and silks because she liked to leave stretches of the warp exposed and brocade on top to give the material an almost sculptural quality. For the weft, Alyce chose a fiber that was airy and malleable so she could pack and shape it, and the delicacy of her materials meant it was not uncommon for threads to break when she initially cranked the warp onto the loom. When this happened, she would tie off the break and deal with it when it came up in the weaving by weaving weft over the break until it was unnoticeable to the naked eye. And the finer the warp threads, the closer together they could be, the more detail was possible, and the longer the weaving time. One of her teachers used this rule of thumb: an hour a yard to weave plain cloth, an hour an inch to weave tapestry. Alyce didn’t rush, but neither did she rest.

  Early in the night, as the whip-poor-will called back and forth across the yard, she put on an album—ambient trance for its repetitiveness—on low volume, so as not to wake Molly in the adjacent room, but by halfway through the first track she’d tuned it out, hadn’t noticed when the album finished and the noises of the night took over. For the ranch was never silent, always creaking and groaning, animals making their contributions of howls and scrapes and high steps through the fallen mounds of leaves covering the ground in dunes. Autumn colors. Earth tones.

  But then Alyce heard something that did grab her attention, causing her to stop short, head perking up like an antenna: a shrill cry tore through the night. She tried to place it. Screech owls? A howler monkey from the rescue zoo down the road? Then, the scream came again, sounding much closer. Actually, it seemed to be coming from directly down the hall.

  The door to her studio burst open and, for a moment, Alyce thought it was her oldest son, Jake, running from a nightmare. But, no. Her sons were gone, and Molly stood there in a nightgown, panting, eyes wide, yelling, “Bat out of hell!”

  “What?” Alyce stood, using her body to block Molly’s view of the loom behind her. “Are you hurt?”

  Molly fell quiet, then smiled sheepishly. “I’m not hurt. I woke up to pee, and then I was attacked . . .”

  “. . . by a poor bat that somehow got stuck in the house. Show me.” Alyce closed the door behind them, relieved once Molly was outside the studio.

  In the bedroom that had once been her sons’, bunks still stacked in place, Alyce took a broom from the corner. The frightened bat swooped erratically back and forth, throwing itself off the walls as if stuck in a crazed pinball machine. Alyce had the sense the animal was trying to shake the house off like a hat. Molly screamed again when it dove toward their heads.

  Patiently, Alyce used the broad lunging motions of the broom to herd it out of the room and down the hall. The bat dodged and squeaked and darted, but eventually complied. When they got near the front door, she kicked it open and, with one large swat, guided the bat outside.

  “Nothing to it.”

  The house quiet again, Alyce wanted to return to her loom, the weaving rush still coursing through her. She felt antsy as Molly followed her to the kitchen, chattering away: “Thanks. Now I feel silly. I have to pee like three times during the night, and when I saw that thing’s beady little eyes staring at me from the ceiling, it freaked the shit out of me. No way I’ll get back to sleep now. . . .” Molly began making a pot of coffee.

  “Sometimes they get in through the fireplace.” Alyce stuffed the broom into a closet. “Not often, though.” She inched her way awkwardly toward the kitchen door.

  “Alyce,” said Molly, holding her gaze. “Have a cup of coffee with me. Please.”

  Alyce nodded. Leaning against the counter, she thought back to her loom, still mentally weaving, under and over. Then, suddenly, she felt desperate for water—she often forgot to drink while she was working—and took a glass down from the cupboard only after catching with the palms of her hands those first deep sips from the tap. As she looked out the window, something moved in the yard, skirting the edge of the porch just past where the moonlight stopped. Four creatures, like dogs, but more muscular. She’d heard coyotes most nights howling back and forth across the 250-acre property, but this was the first time she’d caught sight of them.

  Alyce motioned for Molly to follow her into the living room for a better view. The darkness blurred the beasts’ edges, causing their movements to seem stealthier, more menacing. The smallest one shifted from leg to leg as though waiting for something. There was a firefly, and the small coyote jumped after it into the air, playful but ungraceful, crashing back down to the ground.

  “Holy cow,” said Molly.

  The coyotes must have been together, a pack. And yet Alyce thought they took almost no notice of one another, like it was only an accident that they’d each found themselves here in the yard of this particular ranch on this particular night, an apathetic partnership of utility.

  Everything is so strange, thought Alyce. There was an old wives’ tale that a bird
in the house foretold a death in the house; she wondered if it was the same for bats. She thought of the baby birds, knocked from their nest on the porch, squirming and naked in the grass. All signs pointed in one direction.

  The coffeemaker dinged at the same time that the coyotes disappeared out the gate. In the kitchen, Alyce watched Molly, now wearing a wool sweater, pour steaming black liquid into two cups resting on round saucers, the discreet movements of her body like yarn coming together on the loom. There was something different about Molly.

  “Why do you have to pee three times a night? Is that one of your symptoms?”

  “Yes.” Molly sat at the small square country table. “But not of HD.”

  The two women looked at each other. Nothing shocked Alyce anymore. She sipped and then nodded. “How many weeks are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Molly blew gently on her cup. “It won’t be here much longer.”

  Alyce wanted to say, well, in that case, it fits right in. But she didn’t. “I’ll go with you to the clinic.”

  “Soon.”

  They drank their coffee out of cups covered in geometric designs that Alyce didn’t remember buying at a table that felt like someone else’s. Where did all this stuff come from?

  “Don’t you miss Harry?” asked Molly. “And the boys?”

  Alyce shrugged. “I have you.” She didn’t notice the curious look Molly gave her.

  The truth was Alyce did not feel the absence of Harry and her sons so much as she felt the absence of their needs. The absence of the need to check on them in their sleep. To see if they were still breathing. The absence of the need to make breakfast in a few hours. Of the need to smile and respond to questions and entertain them and listen to incoherent children’s stories.