Migratory Animals

by Mary Helen Specht

  “You didn’t have to kick them out,” said Molly. “I still feel horrible.”

  “Not this again.” Alyce was unable to keep the sharpness from her voice. “It was inevitable.”

  “Okay. Then why be so weird and secretive about it?”

  “People separate. It’s sad; it’s not weird. Harry needs to learn to be on his own. And so do I.” Alyce got up and placed her cup in the sink. “Get some rest, babe. I have work to do.”

  “Another mystery,” said Molly.

  Inside the cluttered studio, warmly aglow with three green lamps craned directly on the loom, Alyce slumped onto her stool. Any mention of Harry and her children felt like a distraction from the cause.

  She looked down at her embedded wedding band, impossible to get off her finger without petroleum jelly. She and Harry had been married at a Houston society event—in a chandeliered ballroom with turtle soup and a ten-piece zoot suit band—that she truly thought lovely even if it was far from the wedding she would have planned in the absence of Harry’s parents. The wedding itself was mostly a blur. She remembered much of her and Harry’s excitement stemming from the distinction of being the first in the group to get hitched—not because their friends mooned over getting paired up, but because a wedding seemed to signal that they were all entering a new, possibly exciting stage of life. It was the same when Jake was born. The novelty of babies. Nobody else had any yet, which meant they still had extra time and money and attention to lavish on the new, little family.

  Flannery brought baby Jake carved wooden animals from Nigeria when she came home for Christmas that year, and she cooed over him as if he were the most miraculous thing. Then her best friend returned to Africa and left Alyce pressing the mysterious new baby to her chest, the wooden animals staring at her from a shelf. She hadn’t necessarily wished she were Flannery, living and traveling in far-flung places, but she hadn’t wanted to be herself, either, all alone with an incomprehensible being for whose very life she was entirely responsible. It began feeling less like a choice and more like a game of musical chairs—the music stopped and she was surprised to find herself sitting next to Harry holding this baby.

  It was around this time Alyce and Flannery began trading books, one of the ways they kept in touch across continents—through marginalia scribbled in the paperback novels they loaned back and forth. The things you didn’t necessarily say out loud over the phone.

  It was to Nigeria Alyce sent Anna Karenina, the ending highlighted by a heart with an arrow through it. She’d sent that book right after learning Flannery planned to stay in West Africa once the EOP was finished.

  “How are you living?” Alyce had asked when Flannery told her she wasn’t ready to move back.

  “I’m living with that guy I told you about. We’re okay. I spend my free time reading paperbacks from the book trade library they keep at the university here. I’m down to the French detective novels.”

  “You don’t speak French.”

  “Right now I’m reading about a rabbit who steals diamond necklaces. Although it might actually be about a woman in a hat who likes spaghetti.”

  “Or a butcher who keeps hundreds of parakeets in the basement.”

  “So you’ve read it.”

  Later, Flannery responded to Anna Karenina by sending Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, underlining this on the first page: “And we sorrowed much because there were always those of us who had just returned from the world of the Living. They had returned inconsolable for all the love they had left behind, all the suffering they hadn’t redeemed, all that they hadn’t understood, and for all that they had barely begun to learn before they were drawn back to the land of origins.”

  When Harry started thinking about opening his architecture firm somewhere outside his hometown of Houston, Alyce had said, “Well, we could go back to Austin, if you really want to,” as if she had no particular stake. Only please, Brer Fox, please don’t throw me into the briar patch. But she was wrong if she’d thought returning to where they’d met and fallen in love would change things. One morning, two years after the move, lying in bed as the alarm went off, two children watching cartoons in the living room, Alyce realized she was more than just bored, more than just depressed. She was no longer in love with her husband. Where they had once both been birds, coasting along as part of the same flock, over time he’d become the hunter who stalked her, trying not to cling, remaining perfectly still in the blind, waiting for her to get close to him again. She was spooked; he was paralyzed.

  Alyce picked up the butterfly filled with fine, gold metallic yarn and pulled it along where the shed separated every other vertical warp thread. Working the yarn more slowly, she made a curve by stepping the weft, finishing the shape of Flannery’s shoulder. Then, to fill in the core, she began crosshatching gold thread with orange; when the yarn turned to go the opposite direction, she used the interlocking technique to avoid creating a slit in the fabric. For this to work the two weft colors had to be woven toward each other in one shed and away from each other in the opposite. This was the only rule of tapestry that couldn’t be ignored.

  Weaving two similar colors together created shading. It imbued that area of the cloth with a richness and, in this case, made Flannery’s neck appear to reflect light. Sometimes Alyce used up to five hues to shade one object, still giving the illusion of a single blended surface.

  As she wove, Alyce’s thoughts returned to Harry, trying to piece together where things first went wrong between them. Because that was something else her sons had a right to know. She was weaving them a tapestry about her greatest happiness—wouldn’t they eventually wonder why it hadn’t lasted? And if she said the words out loud, was it not possible the syllables might wrap themselves around the threads, becoming part of the wisdom of the tapestry itself?

  When you’re older, you’ll start to wonder why your father and I split up. You might even be angry. Kids worry it’s their fault; it isn’t your fault.

  Which is not to say things didn’t change when you showed up. You see, parenthood expanded your father: he became warm and doting, attentive to the slightest shift in your moods as if connected to you through shock sensors. He goofed around the house, play-wrestling and singing lyrics to the dumb songs you learned at daycare.

  Do you remember how when we moved to the ranch y’all were frightened by the moans coming from the lions at the rescue zoo a few miles away? Your father made a pen in the living room out of chairs and got inside to show you how sad the caged lions were, not scary. “Roar,” he said pitifully, crawling and hanging his head. “Roar.”

  Well, I didn’t transform into a natural parent like your father. I suppose I’m not particularly wired for nuclear family contentment in the first place. Here’s the only way I can think to explain it: Before either of you were born, your father and I used to make trips to wherever our closest friends were living at the time—your uncle Steven consulting in Dallas, Aunt Flannery in grad school in Wisconsin, Santiago in Boston, even Brandon and Molly that year they lived in Ann Arbor. We would arrive and buy an unlimited bus pass and a map to the museums; but these plans usually turned into spending all day making fall soups in the apartment, reading next to windows that were open to counteract the first week of heat from angry, spewing radiators. Butternut and acorn squash, leeks and celery. We drank cheap wine from the corner store and dipped bread into the soup, getting full until we no longer felt up for dancing at the one club that wasn’t too posh or too ghetto or too hipster or too fratty, and would instead play Trivial Pursuit or Scrabble until drink made us sleepy, snuggling into the hard mattress of the pullout sofa and drifting off to the sound of sirens and passing car stereos.

  What am I trying to say here? Maybe that part of the initial glow between your father and me had something to do with our place in the larger group living at Dryden House, that special web of chemistry and exclusivity, which after graduation scattered and weakened. It sounds awful, but on our own, maybe Harry and I just
weren’t enough.

  Of course, one of my therapists suggested the problems began earlier. Not with Harry but with me. Did you boys know I was a mechanical engineer once? Growing up, I’d wanted so much to fly like a bird, then to at least make planes that flew like one, effortlessly—so I went to an engineering college. We were nerds, immersing ourselves in propulsion and aerodynamics, navigation systems and, my favorite, celestial mechanics. What a name—celestial mechanics. The tools of creation itself.

  During one of these all-nighters—have I told you this story already?—I joined a group of engineers angry about the raise in tuition announced that day in the student newspaper. With pulleys, winches, ropes, and two twenty-foot wooden A-frames, we managed to lift and turn a full 180 degrees the, I don’t know, two-thousand-pound statue of founder William Marsh that sat in the middle of the academic quad. We turned its back to the administration building. The university paid something like two thousand bucks for a construction firm to turn the statue back around. It took them a week, and they broke it in the process.

  After graduation, I was miserable. I worked for an airplane manufacturer outside Houston for one year and learned that the chance to do a new plane design was remote; mostly what aeronautical engineers do is confirm calculations, make minor adjustments. So I quit and began making my living halfheartedly as a commercial fiber artist, convincing myself it really wasn’t so different from what I’d done as an engineer—taking materials and testing them, contorting them—just on a smaller scale, without lives riding on it. Weaving was satisfying, nothing more, nothing less. I did a little each day and eventually a concrete object was the result. For a while it was enough.

  I had hoped the buoyancy that surfaced at Marsh might become the fact of who I was as a person: an easy, lighthearted floater. Helium. Back then, it was the way I draped my pale limbs over Harry in the library and at the campus pub that made up for his rigidness, my airy affection that emanated outward and surrounded our friends. I had thought that was the beginning of something bigger. A marriage, a family. But it wasn’t the beginning. It was the thing itself, and it was almost over.

  After tying off the threads to Flannery’s torso, a flush of luminescence already visible on the horizon outside, Alyce felt like a washcloth all wrung out. She went into the bathroom, splashed water on her face. As she hung the towel back on the rack, she noticed something strange sticking out of Molly’s bathroom case: prenatal vitamins. Alyce wondered what a soon-to-be-terminated fetus needed with those.

  MOLLY

  The two women sat on the low-water crossing, feet dangling into the creek. The day was overcast, and occasional sharp gusts of wind whipped through.

  “Can’t a dying woman get any sunshine around here?” Molly’s hands were wrapped around the plastic cup of watermelon agua fresca she’d taken to blending for herself each morning.

  “Oh, no,” said Alyce, although there was no bite to her words. “You cannot start saying shit like that.”

  When Molly looked at Alyce, it was like looking at an old photograph where the colors had become washed out. “I bet Jake and Ian had a ball swimming here in the summer.” Below them, minnows circled and dispersed, circled and dispersed. “Is that a rope swing down there?”

  “Um-hm,” said Alyce groggily. “Ian’s too young to use it, though.”

  It was early November, and the creek running through the ranch had come back from the summer drought and was gurgling along, water flowing over the limestone bottom in a blue-green translucence. It was deeper than it looked.

  Even abbreviated conversations with Alyce, like this one—about something in particular, out in the daylight—were rare. In the weeks since she’d arrived at the ranch, Molly felt like an ocean lapping against Alyce’s rocky shoreline. They crossed paths in the early morning and late at night—she’d watched Alyce stand in front of the open fridge for long minutes, as if pulling free a carton of pulpy orange juice took the mustering of unfathomable strength—but the rest of the time they existed in parallel planes. Molly spent most of her days walking: from room to room in the ranch house and over the wild acreage outside, one hand placed on her belly as if she might fold over and be sick, fighting imaginary arguments with her husband and her father. Why did you collude to keep this from me? How could you turn out to be such bastards? Molly must have walked a hundred miles.

  “It’s been more than a month.” Molly consciously kept her voice easy, as if she were talking about what to cook for dinner. She’d hoped her friend would reach this realization on her own, but it had become obvious Alyce needed a push. “That’s a long time in kid years. You’ve got to invite them out, Snow White. Whatever’s going on between you and Harry, you’re still their mother.”

  Alyce skipped a stone across the surface of the water. “Being a mother is hard. In the best of circumstances. I just want to make that clear.”

  Molly swallowed and returned her attention to the creek. She wondered if that might be a water moccasin periscoping its head just before the bend. “I’ll help you. I know you’re not feeling well, but we can entertain them for one afternoon.”

  They sat in silence for a moment, but Molly just couldn’t help herself: “Alyce, I don’t know a single person who regrets their children after they’re born.”

  “I don’t regret them,” said Alyce quickly. “They’re good boys. But don’t kid yourself, Moll. People don’t allow themselves to regret their children—it’s a physiological defense mechanism—but that doesn’t mean they were all meant to be parents. That doesn’t mean the decision should be made lightly.”

  “Christ.” Molly stood, not sure if she was still angry about Alyce’s abandonment of Jake and Ian or at what her friend was implying. “Just invite them out here. Or go to the city to see them. You have to. It’s your job.”

  Alyce shrugged. “Fine. When are you going to invite your family out?”

  Molly watched a blue heron dive-bomb a fish jumping from the creek. Alyce must have known that Molly couldn’t see those people because then it would become real, the small swell of her stomach growing in prominence each day, refusing to be ignored. When she thought of what was inside, which she tried to avoid doing, she imagined a cold pinprick of light. “I’m going for a walk.”

  “Okay.” The dark circles under Alyce’s eyes made it clear she’d been up most of the night in her studio, as per usual. Molly watched her petite friend rise to her feet in baggy flannel pajamas, house shoes coated in dirt, holding a stretched cardigan closed with one hand; she tried to tease out the contradiction between Alyce’s obvious frailty and the growing sense that this broken woman was the only thing protecting Molly . . . from what?

  The two women walked separate ways.

  As Molly moved along the trail winding between thickets of dense cedar, her thoughts returned to what she’d read in the newspaper that morning: the city’s budget shortfalls meant all public pools would remain closed next year, their gaping concrete mouths empty. The article made her think of Brandon. Though it was months away, her husband always looked forward to March, because that was when the swimming pool in their neighborhood usually opened—spring being just a milder form of summer in central Texas. He swam laps there on his way home from work, and Molly liked to imagine him: pausing every few lengths to clear the fog from leaky goggles, the reddish evening sun fanning through the struggling magnolia tree that shaded the north corner. The pool was small and surrounded by a thin perimeter of sandy ground that refused to grow grass, but Brandon wouldn’t notice that once he was in the water, following the black lane marker painted on the bottom of the pool. As he crawled toward the deep end, the bottom receding beneath him, he told her he liked to imagine his body was an airplane taking off until he flew miles above the ground, the settled leaves on the pool floor little towns in the distance below. On the return length, his body seemed to float back down, landing softly in the shallow end.

  Molly understood that the swimming pool served as a cushion between
his two worlds. Between science and home. It pained her that he would lose that next year. It pained her that everything about his life would be different now.

  As she walked, she also obsessed about the book still ensconced in her suitcase. Her mother’s journal. Molly’s father had given it to her years ago—at the time, she’d thought because Flan was always moving. She could now almost laugh at her naïveté, at her father’s blunt hints. But still Molly had not read the journal, not a word of it, afraid of what she might find in the thoughts of a woman dying from a horrible disease, knowing she’d likely passed it on to at least one of her children. Occasionally, Molly took out the book and flipped the pages with her thumb, letting the handwritten scrawls pass too fast for any one word to catch. Was a short life better than none at all? Was that a stupid question? How selfish was it to have a child when you knew your blood was a vector for poison?

  That afternoon, Molly stood at the door to Alyce’s studio under the pretense of borrowing packing tape and scissors from the dented metal supply cabinet for a package she was planning to mail. Alyce was creepily protective of her studio space, but for once she was fast asleep in her bedroom, and so Molly decided it was best to act now and apologize later.

  Swinging open the creaky door, Molly was confronted by what Alyce had been working on so intensely, so secretly, all these weeks. The ends of the tapestry were rolled up on the loom like two ends of a scroll; Molly could see that the entire work would be enormous. The section splayed out flat was unfinished and reminded her of the diagrams of human bodies found in biology classrooms, each successive layer revealed: skin, then muscle, then bone. At the right end of the loom the picture unraveled into nothing but rows of taut threads. A skeleton. But on the left, the image was almost fully wrought.

  Molly remembered learning about the famous unicorn tapestries from medieval times, the white-horned colts prancing among lush spring gardens on blue backgrounds, shimmering and grand, nothing like what was displayed on Alyce’s loom. What Molly saw spooked her. The image appeared to be moving across the cloth. And yet something about it was familiar, like a scene from a dream Molly barely remembered. A fluttering at the periphery, a rising up. Molly put her hands in front of her face, looking at the tapestry through the lattice of her fingers. It felt like when she’d awoken to the bat in her bedroom, the screech and wing beat as it flew past her.