Migratory Animals

by Mary Helen Specht

  Flannery found it interesting how little about her father was revealed through her mother’s account of that trip. There were oblique references to his famous know-it-all chatter (“Ned reminded me that it was the American army who helped the Dutch stop the Germans at Arnhem . . .”) and lots of collective “we”s throughout, but the only real insight into their newlywed relationship came when she described the place where they stayed. Draped in red and smelling of cat piss, it was a cheap rented room, the owner of which offered them a shot of corn liquor upon their arrival. The tram ran loudly right outside their window at all hours. Her mother hated the room, and trying to fall asleep in it made her homesick. But she wrote about how eventually she decided to curl into her husband’s chest and close her eyes, imagining the life and home they would build together. She forgot the existence of the lumpy bed beneath her and made him the shield between herself and the world outside. As far as Flannery had been able to tell growing up, it always remained more or less that way.

  As she began to read about life after their honeymoon, Flannery heard a sharp slapping sound from the sliding glass door that led to the hotel balcony, and she looked up to see a naked, almost hairless ass pressed against the glass. Santiago was back from his walk and giving her the moon.

  She shook her head before returning her attention to the journal, willing herself to keep reading, to keep moving toward the conclusion, though she knew the ending by heart.

  Flannery dressed for dinner in front of the hotel bathroom mirror, putting in opal teardrop earrings and zipping up a black sheath, both on loan from a woman at the Climate Institute because Flannery no longer owned any nice Western clothes. As her spine disappeared, she wondered what her mother would have thought, if she’d lived to see them, of the tattoos that covered most of Flannery’s back, red sugarcane and a tall Nigerian palm next to the vine with star jasmine flowers blooming up and down an intricate twisting pattern of green. The star jasmine had taken ten sessions with the tattoo artist over the course of a year and, at the time, back in graduate school, she’d done it in part because she believed tattoos made otherwise plain women look interesting. Some of it spilled over her right shoulder and down her tricep, the vine forcing its way out of the black sleeve of the dress. Looking at herself in the mirror, the contrast of tattoo and formal wear, Flannery tried to imagine herself as an American professional, an establishment scientist who attended faculty meetings and conferences and sat through fund-raising dinners with a suited Nigerian husband. It was hard to imagine foisting such a life onto Kunle or herself.

  As she and Santi strolled through the lobby, Flannery ran her hand along a bowl filled with waxy, red apples. She was not one for public affection, but Santiago put his arm around her waist when they walked out of the hotel together; at any moment she could collapse and he would catch her. There was an old comfort in that.

  The restaurant on the edge of Park City was inside a converted greenhouse where the tinted fiberglass had been replaced by thick panels of glass. There was no menu, and it was expensive. Flannery, already embarrassed about having to ask for a loan, would never have suggested such a place. It was Santiago’s idea—he said he was feeling flush.

  They sat across from each other at the slate gray table in an easy silence. She noticed for the first time how the web of small wrinkles around Santiago’s mouth had become deeply etched into the skin, as they often were on the faces of smokers. If Flannery was honest with herself, she could see that Santiago looked full of a tender, empathetic affection for her. His face said: Tell me what to do. His face said: I’m trying to help.

  Trout topped with a sweet cabbage and Swiss chard slaw. Roasted golden beets. Pistachio mango pudding. Wine. Flannery watched what appeared to be a mother/daughter pair sitting on cushioned seats in the corner. The mother wore linen, gray hair pinned to the top of her head. Her adult daughter tapped on her phone.

  “I hope I’m not cold like that with my children,” Flannery whispered, and the images that flashed in her mind were of brown, mocha children. She shook her head.

  Santiago reached across the table, running his index finger down the inside of her arm in a gesture that was too intimate. She let him. It started to rain outside; smears of water ran down the high angled ceiling and long glass walls so that the trees became blurred and out of focus.

  “Dinner inside a metaphor,” he said.

  “We shouldn’t throw stones, then.” She signaled the server for another bottle.

  “That’s not a metaphor; that’s an aphorism.”

  She shrugged. She had never been inside a glass house before. With each bite, she felt like a traitor to Nigeria and to Kunle, who, even if he could afford it, would never come here because the prices would only make him think of what this money could buy back home.

  “How’s Molly?” Santiago gave her a sidelong glance when she didn’t respond right away. “Did you know that when she moved out, she told Brandon if he tried to contact her before she was ready, she’d never come home? Such a bluff, but he’s scared.”

  “Jesus.” She shook her head. “He didn’t tell me. He still comes to the lab every day, though, and putters around.”

  The food kept coming; they ate like gluttons.

  “Remember when you came running into the backyard to tell us that Amanda was transferring to Stanford to join the crew team and that if we didn’t find a replacement pronto, your annoying younger sister would take over that room?”

  “You and Brandon just sat there grinning at me like idiots.”

  “Your sister was hot. We couldn’t see what the problem was.”

  They laughed. Flannery loved that he remembered those moments. She loved that he loved her sister. “I haven’t seen Molly lately, if that’s what you’re asking me.”

  Santiago poured more wine. “It’s funny how we have a hard time imagining anything ending until it does. I only visited my father once in the year before he died. He’d made sure Brownsville didn’t have anything for me . . . but the thing is, it did. It had him.” He paused, fork in midair; light from frosted lamps danced along glass walls. “My father may not have been on the best terms with his family, but at the funeral you wouldn’t have known it. They were the wet earth taking him back.”

  He told her that the night before, at the wake, his father’s body had been laid out in the open casket for viewing, puffed up by gratuitous folds of white satin. Santiago hadn’t understood the need for this, his father’s mangled body reconstructed by the mortician to look like a waxy replica of someone he might have been distantly related to. It didn’t matter that Santiago was opposed to this pornography of detail. No one asked him.

  “At some point, after Communion and all the Ave Marias, I felt a hand press into my back and knew it was Molly. She said, ‘You have to forgive yourself for not appreciating it enough,’ and I told her that I had appreciated him. She said, ‘We all have to forgive ourselves for not appreciating life enough.’”

  Flannery hadn’t come back from Nigeria for Santiago’s father’s funeral—it was too short notice, too expensive. She suddenly felt guilty and tried to imagine him there, upright and dry-eyed while long Latin prayers flowed one into the next. In all honesty, she’d only ever visited Santiago for her own reasons, never for his. At the end of spring semester of his first year of graduate school, she’d called from Madison, just having finished her exams, to say, “Send me a ticket.” He’d told her he would send her money for bus fare, but he didn’t think you could buy a physical ticket in advance anymore.

  “Send me a ticket.” Why had she insisted?

  “How ’bout I draw you a ticket and send it with money for the fare.”

  Had she used Santiago—for comfort, companionship, support—pretending he hadn’t minded, pretending that he was using her, too?

  Flannery looked at the last bit of fish on her plate. “Sometimes Molly and I made fun of our mother with our friends. We mimicked her strange way of moving and talking. I hate myself for th
at now.”

  “You were just a kid.”

  “My father was protective, though. He used to carry around a fucking HD fact sheet and hand them out to people who stared at her in public places.” As she spoke, Flannery realized these were memories she and her sister had never talked about.

  “I could build you something like this, you know,” said Santiago, looking around at the glass building. “There’s a lot for sale not far from your sister’s house.”

  Something tightened within Flannery. “How do you know?”

  He didn’t say anything. He smiled sadly out of the corner of his mouth. “Maybe I’ll build it for myself.”

  “What about the fire station?”

  He finished chewing and cocked his chin. “Who cares about the fire station? The fire station isn’t important. Family is important.” His voice was insistent. “We are the lucky generation. We can live anywhere.”

  Flannery felt despair flow down her throat and flood her belly. When her face flushed, she could tell that Santiago, who reached out a hand, thought she was upset at him. But what she was feeling was the wrenching nausea of ground moving beneath her. She had a home in Nigeria. At that moment all she could think about was how, in a room smelling of cat piss, her father protected her mother from the world. Light in the darkness, light in the darkness, light, light, light.

  Back at the hotel, Flannery took a shower, letting the water get so hot she could barely stand it, steam rising, her skin splotching pink. The small hotel bottles of shampoo and conditioner were lined up on the side of the tub so perfectly, so straight; she almost couldn’t bring herself to pick one of them up.

  The image that had stayed with her from the journal was the one from the honeymoon, her mother in red sheets curled up like a shrimp into her father’s torso. But that wasn’t really the whole story. Years later, her mother wrote of trouble at the greenhouse where she worked part-time: she was no longer able to do the books with any confidence; she was caught giving the wrong change on multiple occasions. She was having trouble remembering her lines for the plays at the community theater. The diagnosis came as a shock. She knew her own father had been very sick, but nobody had ever said out loud that it was genetic. In the journal, Flannery’s mother didn’t explicitly mention that Papa had left her after learning she had HD, only his return three months later. Flannery would have been two years old at the time. She could hardly believe it: her father had left and come back, and she’d never known. It was the last entry in the journal, and her mother wrote, matter-of-factly, that, in the first month he was gone, her milk dried up and her youngest daughter, Molly, weaned herself. She wrote that since Papa had decided to come back to her, she would never ask for anything again. She wrote that, while the women in her Jazzercise class were always harping about how surprised they’d been by all that it turned out they could do—divorce that bastard, start their own company—Flannery’s mother was more surprised by the opposite, by all the things in the world it turned out she couldn’t change.

  Flannery racked her brain to connect the dots. Molly had followed her to college, followed her to Dryden House, and gone on to marry her close friend. Like their father, Flannery had a responsibility that didn’t end just because they’d grown up, and she’d been shirking it. Flannery who moved abroad. Flannery who couldn’t bear to help uproot her mother’s irises. Or imagine living without her little sister in the world. All the things one thinks it is impossible to bear and yet. And yet. Who does not have to bear them?

  Maybe Flannery could save the Sahel from a laboratory here. That’s what most scientists did: made their laboratory into their world. Because Santiago was right; they were family. She closed her eyes and repeated the word over and over, trying to comprehend its full meaning: Family. Family. Family.

  As she dried off, she heard sounds of Santiago returning from a smoke on her balcony. In the mirror, she watched him walk past the crack in the bathroom door. Santiago, whom she’d known forever, and who’d known her sister forever. Santiago who worshipped her. Santiago who was loyal and never asked her to explain. Santiago who bought her sister silk scarves at yard sales. Santiago who understood what it was like to lose a parent. Santiago who was here.

  Without knocking or calling out a warning, he opened the bathroom door wide to her standing in front of the mirror, the chocolate brown towel held tight around her body, hair wet and tangled. She didn’t turn around, but he must have been able to see the curve of her buttocks in front of him, the curve of her small breasts reflected in the mirror. She stared at him behind her in the reflection, his body sinewy, what they used to call punk-rock-skinny.

  He came toward her and reached out both hands in slow motion, touching Flannery on each shoulder blade with the very tips of his fingers. He moved down her spine, one vertebra at a time, pulling at the towel until she raised her elbows from her side, like a bird flapping its wings, and the towel fell to the floor.

  Afterward, Santiago lay motionless, one arm flung around Flan’s waist. His breath sounded shallow, and she wondered if he was only feigning sleep. Flannery tried to match her breath to his, tried to keep down the waves of panic that threatened to come up like vomit.

  In Nigeria, Flannery for the first time in her adult life had ruminated on the word home. There was a man on UniAdamanta’s campus who peddled pirated books, and he spread the faded photocopies over his car parked along the inner loop. Once, walking in that warm halo that surrounded her for the hour after she and Kunle made love, she bought a book by Heidegger called Building Dwelling Thinking, just because of the title. In it, the philosopher performs artful feats of metaphysical etymology: “The Old English and High German word for building, buan, means to dwell. This signifies: to remain, to stay in a place . . . to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine. . . . We do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell, that is, because we are dwellers.” Flannery learned that the word habitual comes from “we inhabit it.” Her daily routine, then, was also in a sense the place where she dwelled. A bed within a house. A house within a town. A town within a country. Lying next to Kunle one morning, she babbled to him about the book, wondering out loud whether she was ready to choose one place, to watch the accrual of seasons, to become a caretaker and till the soil. Cultivate the vine. Stay. “I want to dwell,” she said, excitedly. Kunle nodded and laughed because he’d never known any other way. Had he believed her? Believed she meant it? Had he realized that Nigeria was the first place for her where home meant a growing of the vine, not a dying of it?

  One day Kunle’s youngest aunt came to visit them, and she joked, like he did, in that way that wasn’t really joking, saying Flannery should only continue visiting the family village if she planned to stay. “It doesn’t seem fair for you to go all that way just to make us miss you,” she said. “I hope you’re not playing dice with our emotion.” She went on about someone she knew who married a Korean woman. Apparently, the woman gave them trouble because she refused to eat their food or drink their drink.

  “Flan loves our food,” Kunle told her.

  “Tell Flannery I’ll teach her how to cook it properly,” she said, as if Flannery were not sitting in the room. “That is, if she’s still here the next time I’m in town.”

  Sweating beneath the mosquito net, plagued by the insomnia that was a side effect of her malaria pills, Flannery sometimes lay awake in Nigeria thinking about how, in college, before they’d leave Dryden House to sashay over to the campus pub looking for beer and boys, Alyce would jokingly recite an incantation: “Spindle, my spindle, haste, haste thee away, and here to my house bring the wooer, I pray.” It was from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale wherein the young spinner’s magical spindle flew from her hand, unraveling behind it a thread that the prince could follow back to her. And when they arrived at the campus pub, plunging into the roar of music and laughter and pool cues hitting their marks, Flannery would look over the droves of men in basebal
l caps and hemp necklaces, like her mother in search of the one vein of blue beneath the rind. In Nigeria, when she touched Kunle’s skin as he slept, she felt it. Invisible, but there. Home.

  But now she wondered if she’d been wrong. Flannery had learned what it meant to appreciate a home, but maybe she had chosen the wrong one. Maybe she would never really belong in Nigeria, and Santiago, sleeping gently across the room, and her sister and all the rest, maybe they were the home she was supposed to return to finally.

  Flannery’s cell phone vibrated on the dresser across the room. Without looking, she knew it was Kunle calling, and she used the noise as an excuse to slip from bed. She didn’t go toward the phone, though, instead retreating to the bathroom, sitting on the lid of the toilet, shivering. If she were to pick up and listen to Kunle’s voice, she would feel as though life in Nigeria were still waiting for her with its grilled suya and harmattan winds, with its poverty and fly-covered meat and easy love. His voice had become more desperate, but still full of longing, still waiting.

  Flannery was living in mental possession of two worlds, but she would have to choose. It was only a matter of time. Mrs. Tonukari had been right when she dropped off Flan at the airport. This time, it wouldn’t be so easy to come back. Nigeria was receding.

  Mrs. Tonukari didn’t believe in e-mail and was too hard of hearing to carry on a viable conversation over an international phone line, and so the Welsh woman wrote Flannery letters, scribbled in four different colors of pen. Most of these letters had gone unanswered—Flannery didn’t know where to begin. She already knew the answer Mrs. Tonukari’s life had given. She just didn’t know if the answer would be the same for her.

  Flannery remembered spending one evening on the old woman’s porch in Nigeria, watching the quickening of dusk, until Mrs. Tonukari shooed her away early, saying she and her husband had to leave at dawn the following day for a funeral in Abuja.