Migratory Animals

by Mary Helen Specht

  ALYCE

  On the day before Thanksgiving, Molly borrowed Alyce’s truck to drive into town. The low-water crossing was covered by six inches of water, enough to make them nervous about splash damage to the engine of Molly’s low-riding compact, but there was no indication of the impending flood.

  Molly had an appointment at a women’s clinic in town. Only visibly pregnant because she was otherwise so thin, she wore a gray hooded sweatshirt, bushy brown hair sticking out from the hood like a lion’s mane. Alyce noticed she hadn’t bothered to make herself breakfast.

  “And you want to go by yourself?” asked Alyce again, fishing for the spare keys in one of Harry’s messenger bags.

  “No worries.”

  “Someone’s got to pick you up after. They require it, don’t they?”

  “They want me to stay overnight—in case of any complications with my HD.”

  Before Molly turned to leave, Alyce reached out and touched Molly’s forehead with the tips of her fingers, like a blessing.

  Each morning Alyce felt slightly less groggy than the one before, Molly having made progress in coaxing Alyce toward the circadian rhythm of the mainstream world. The tightness in Alyce’s chest was loosening, and most of her breaths now arrived without effort. Alyce was wary, though, because she knew the change was temporary. The molasses would be back. Maybe next week. Maybe later today.

  The tapestry was making good progress, and Alyce anticipated working through Thanksgiving Day—Harry and the boys would be at his parents’ in Houston, and it had been decided she would remain at the ranch. Everyone agreed with the arrangement (except the boys, who, like most children, had no choice). She would see them when they returned, and strangely, she was almost looking forward to the way their voices rang too loudly through the air, the way they stumbled through the house like drunks.

  With Molly gone, Alyce sat back down at her loom, placing the soft pads of her bare feet on the wooden pedals, picking up the shuttle with her left hand, rolling her neck and starting where she’d left off, with Harry. He was the last figure before she wove herself. It had been easy to choose the colors for her husband—light blues and dark browns—but she was still experimenting with his form. She took a deep breath and began:

  You’ve probably wondered how your father and I met. What happened the moment we laid eyes on each other.

  Well, first I have to tell you that Flannery and I were known freshman year as the “Party Girls.” At a nerdy engineering college, it didn’t exactly take much partying to get that reputation, but let’s just say we tried to live up to our moniker, rushing home from class to study so we could make it to the campus pub by ten. I’d actually prefer if you boys experiment with pot instead—much safer as long as you don’t just buy it off the street from some methhead who’s cutting it with oven cleaner or whatever. I mean, you still have to be smart.

  Anyway, at Marsh it wasn’t unusual for there to be a keg somewhere on the weekends. One night, Flan and I were at a party across the quad. It was lame, a bunch of ChemEs sitting around not talking to one another, but we didn’t want to leave because then where would we find free beer? So Flan came up with the idea for us to steal the beer and take it back to our dorm. The keg was in the bathroom, only about half full, and so we just carried it out through the other bedroom suite and down the stairs.

  Flannery had already met Santiago, I can’t remember how, and we decided to take the keg to his suite because it had a window that opened onto the roof of the cafeteria. I banged on the door, and when Harry opened it—to be honest I remember him seeming a little stuck-up at first—we just walked right in. The confidence of youth. The guys heaved the keg onto the pebbled tar roof, and we sat out there drinking and talking until the sun came up. Maybe I should remember something more specific about Harry, about what eventually drew me to marry him, but I’m telling the truth here. And the truth is that what I remember most about those years is that they were fun. We were happy. That’s what I remember. When I married Harry, that’s what I was trying to marry, I guess. But as it turns out, you can’t marry a time in your life.

  Alyce stopped weaving. Her phone had been beeping on and off for the last fifteen minutes, and she couldn’t take it anymore. She dug it out of her purse; the screen showed five missed calls and a handful of texts from Flannery. Alyce sighed. Flannery’s texts were becoming increasingly frantic. Saying she’d just returned from some trip to Utah. That she wanted to help Molly. That she was ready. She was sorry.

  Part of Alyce wanted to reassure Flannery; part of her wanted Molly all to herself. Alyce texted back: Remember when we stole that keg from Baker? Wonder what they thought when they walked into the bathroom and it was gone. . . . Then, Alyce turned her phone off.

  Alyce looked out the window at the bird feeders swinging as the wind picked up outside. There were no birds. The migrants were gone, the year-round dwellers hiding, out of sight. Around midafternoon, just as the rain began flinging juicy droplets sideways under the overhang of the porch, Alyce heard a loud rumbling and crunching down the road. It didn’t sound like an animal. It sounded like a truck.

  Throwing on waders and a poncho, she set off down the caliche road, which was already puddling and slick. The road curved at the end of a patch of oak trees and, ten yards farther, descended into the creek bed. There she saw her truck almost across the creek, which was now flowing at least a foot over the pavement on the low-water crossing, but the rear driver’s-side tire had slipped off the road and lodged in a drift of silt. The tires spun. Molly stuck her head out the window and waved.

  “What are you doing here?!” yelled Alyce. The rain and the rushing creek made it hard to hear anything.

  “I’m Craig Bent!” Molly yelled back, excitedly.

  Alyce felt put-upon and confused—who the hell was Craig Bent? The rain seeped into the neck of her poncho as she wheeled around searching for a suitable log to put behind the tire to give it some traction. Water refracted off the tops of leaves, flashing bits of color. She settled on three large limbs of cedar lying beneath a canopy that had kept them mostly dry.

  “I’m Craig Bent!” Molly was grinning like a madwoman as Alyce approached the truck with her load, trying to stay balanced as she walked through the foot of fast-spitting water sluicing over the crossing.

  “For God’s sake, Molly, stop spinning the wheels for one second!”

  Alyce crouched under the truck, getting mud caked up to her elbows as she positioned the wood. Then, she shimmied her way along the passenger side and used her arms to pull herself in through the window, butt and torso first, her legs kicking in the air like a pole dancer.

  “What is going on?” asked Alyce in the cloister of the cab, catching her breath, feeling dampness soak into her bones.

  Molly pressed down on the gas slowly and the truck made it across the creek. “I’ve been trying to tell you. I’m pregnant.”

  Alyce looked at Molly’s profile. “Still. You mean you’re still pregnant.”

  Back at the house, Molly emphasized that she had not canceled the abortion, only postponed it. She told Alyce she hadn’t said the word baby out loud even once until sitting in the waiting room at the clinic and the nurse called her name, to which she responded without thinking, “I’m having a baby.” She said she wanted to be alone with the idea for a while longer.

  Alyce looked at Molly’s softly arching belly—really looked this time rather than forcing her eyes to slide over the small protrusion like it wasn’t there. She couldn’t help but imagine a bird’s egg nesting inside. A white shell dappled in splotches of beige. The gooey nutrients of yolk forming a cushion as oxygen was absorbed and expelled through tiny little holes in the delicate shell. A cocoon.

  “I feel good.” Molly looked out the window. “When the rain lets up, let’s go for a hike along the cliffs. There’s a place where a group of wild turkeys are roosting for the winter. When they’re asleep, it looks like the tree is growing turkeys, just hanging there, plu
mp and delicious.” She sat at the kitchen table while Alyce unloaded the groceries Molly had brought back with her in canvas bags. Alyce tried to shake herself out from under the layer of fog that was settling back over her like a veil.

  “Thanks for buying food.” Alyce looked quizzically at some canned pumpkin.

  “I noticed our Old Mother Hubbard cupboard,” said Molly. “We’re doing Thanksgiving dinner here. I’ve decided. Then, we’ll rent a movie.”

  “If we can make it out.”

  “It’s just drizzling now.”

  “What matters is how hard it’s raining upstream.” Alyce slowly put away the cans of cream of mushroom soup and boxed macaroni and cheese, feeling vaguely disgusted by the sight of so much brightly colored packaged food. “Have you told Brandon?”

  Molly looked up, her cheeks still hollow, not yet having taken on the fullness of later pregnancy. “No.” She said the clinic told her she’d have to wait until sixteen weeks for the genetic test for Huntington’s, when it was safe to perform an amnio. “Then I’ll decide.”

  Alyce did the math: sixteen weeks was only two weeks away. Would Molly leave her? Leave the ranch if she decided to have the baby? Alyce shivered at the thought.

  As evening approached, it rained harder and the creek continued to swell, creeping up the road toward the house. What had once been a pleasant whoosh, a sweet and distant gurgle, now roared with a mean pleasure as the two women sat on the porch wrapped in scratchy, pink Mexican blankets and drank hot ginger tea, Alyce’s laced with brandy.

  Water was ubiquitous, thought Alyce—everyone so accustomed to it: drinking it, bathing in it, throwing it on lawns and plants, all while taking for granted what water was capable of. The way it parted and joined seamlessly and with little effort. The way it breathed in swells and waves. The way it rolled down rocks to form rapids, somersaulting like perfect little gymnasts. Some people—even Alyce when she was weaving in the middle of the night—believed in a life force that moved through the universe. And if such a power existed, surely its closest physical embodiment must be water—not air, not breath. Water could become one with ground or air or body. Alyce envied water its life without circumference; like the robes sewn by the goddess, it had no hemline.

  Alyce and Molly watched the hungry creek blanket the shrubs and cedar trees down below like a mantle fattening in front of them. Lord willing and the creek don’t rise. They talked about President Obama’s health care bill and cedar fever and about a teenage daughter of someone they knew who had been charged with burglarizing her own grandparents’ house. Alyce was finding that she had extra words after all. That she was not entirely empty. Part of her wished her sons were there, so she could pick them up by the arms and spin them in circles until they fell down dizzy from the effort.

  “Let’s play the Inquisitor game,” said Molly. “Who will be the last Dryden housemate to kick the bucket? Last man standing?”

  Alyce said what Molly wanted to hear. “Brandon.”

  “Yes. Brandon.” Molly shifted her weight and the chair creaked. “When we played Inquisitor back at Marsh, you guys never chose me for anything.”

  “You were younger, newer to the group. We forgot about you.”

  “But it’s also like you knew somehow. Knew what was going to happen to me.”

  Night had arrived fast, as it did in early winter, and Alyce was finding it difficult to sit still, to resist the urge to escape into her studio and her tapestry. “Molly.” Alyce leaned forward to look her in the eye. “We didn’t know. I didn’t know.”

  Molly smiled back at her and nodded. “I’m glad I’m here.”

  And Alyce didn’t know if her friend meant here at a ranch in the middle of nowhere, or here in the world, glad to be born, but she answered anyway. “So am I.”

  What she didn’t say was that one person’s will to be here did not always get passed down to another. That the reason Molly felt comfortable at the ranch was because Alyce was the only one unafraid of death. Alyce’s concern was only with the superficial, concrete things one could do something about: Are the pillows on your bed too soft? Did you get enough to eat? Let me put your whites into the washing machine with mine. Yes, you are going to die.

  At dawn, Alyce yawned and looked out from a house that was now riverfront property. The creek bed itself was fairly steep and so water had risen steadily but hadn’t really flooded until sometime in the early morning when it reached the plain of grass that led up to the house. Like a tick engorged with blood. Luckily, the front yard was spared, the water having crested a few yards before the cattle guard.

  “Isn’t it gorgeous,” said Molly from her seat on the porch, as Alyce swung open the screen door.

  “You’re up early.”

  “You’re up late.”

  Molly motioned for Alyce to sit beside her. The hummingbirds were blitzkrieging again, battling for control of the sugar water in two red feeders, whizzing through the airspace of the porch in figure eights, dive-bombing, duck and cover.

  “My dad’s upset I didn’t make it for Thanksgiving,” said Molly, lifting her cell phone in one hand. “The great thing is . . . I don’t really care.”

  “Tell him you’re flooded in. You, Molly, son of Ned, have been cruelly separated from your family by the forces of nature,” said Alyce, dramatically. “Like the goddess weaver separated from her mortal lover, a cow herder, when the Celestial Queen forbade her crossing the Milky Way to visit him.”

  “He said Flannery is on her way to the ranch.”

  “Oh.”

  “Is there any way for her to get in with all this water?”

  “Skydive. How long will it take her to get here from Abilene?”

  “Four hours, give or take.”

  There was an old retired couple who lived on the large ranch north of the house. One weekend, after they’d first moved in, Mr. Rose picked Alyce and the boys up for dinner on his off-road 4Runner, which he called “Calamity Jane,” weaving through the assemblages of cacti with the gusto of a teenager. But the Roses were out of town for the holidays, so the only way in or out would involve walking miles through their property to where the highway curved, and Alyce didn’t know the way.

  “It’s Thanksgiving,” said Molly. “Call your sons.”

  Alyce didn’t protest. Sometimes it was nice to be told exactly what was expected of you.

  She dialed her husband’s number. Her husband—he seemed part of another life. But no, that wasn’t fair. There were small moments when she missed him, when she swore she heard his voice calling from the other room.

  “Hello.” His voice. There.

  “Harry.”

  She heard him yell into the distant void: “It’s your mother.”

  These phone calls were exquisite torture. As though parenthood wasn’t difficult enough without attempting it from a disembodied state, no visual clues to help decode what was really being felt and communicated.

  “Jake,” said Alyce. “That you, kiddo?” Her body leaned forward, and she cupped the phone, as though the only problem was being able to hear clearly.

  “Mom. I killed a cockroach.”

  “You did?”

  “Grandma was afraid but I wasn’t.”

  “My resilient boy.”

  There was a silence.

  “You’re very brave,” Alyce rephrased. Sitting there in the rocking chair on the porch, her heart grew big until it felt like her body existed inside of it instead of the other way around.

  “Ian doesn’t want to talk. He doesn’t like the phone.”

  “I know. It’s okay.”

  She heard Harry in the background say, “Tell her you love her.”

  “I love you, Mom.”

  “I love you, too.” And she did love them. She just wished her love were more useful than it was. She wished her love could make everything better, make her better. She thought again of the tapestry growing wild on her loom in the studio and felt a stitch of hope.

  When Alyce got
off the phone, Molly was staring at her from across the porch. “You made two new people out of nothing.”

  “For what it’s worth.”

  “When can they tell you if it’s a boy or a girl?”

  “Twenty weeks or so,” said Alyce, “if you want them to.” For most people this might mean: if you don’t want it to be a surprise. But here she meant: if you decide to have the baby at all. Then she asked, as gently as she could, “Are you sure you want to do this? Even if the fetus doesn’t carry the gene? You have a lot on your plate.” She used the word fetus purposefully.

  “I’m not sure.” Molly, her thick hair pulled back in a pink bandanna, tilted her head. “But is it really the worst thing? I’m already showing symptoms, so this will be my only chance. And I’ll have help,” added Molly.

  Alyce raised her eyebrows. “When Jake was born, I spent thirty-six hours in labor, agreed to every drug they offered. He came a week early, so my ob-gyn was out of town and the replacement was this fat, hairy man who didn’t explain anything that was happening.” She told Molly about how he’d cracked inappropriate jokes (“Did you get that Brazilian for me?”) and how the thought of his fingers between her legs made her gag, and once, when Alyce was pushing during a contraction, “I shat right on him and high-fived myself.” She told Molly how, when Jake was finally born, the nurses didn’t put him in Alyce’s arms immediately, but rushed him out of the room to clean him first.

  “What did you do?”

  “I panicked. I told Harry: ‘Follow that baby.’”

  “And he did.”

  “And he did.” Alyce remembered feeling a longing for the baby but also a sense of relief as he was carried out.

  “Brandon will be an excellent father, too,” said Molly.

  Alyce heard: Will. Not would.

  For Thanksgiving dinner, they laid out food on the table: a dry, overcooked Cornish game hen; chopped celery and carrot sticks; canned cranberry sauce; recently unfrozen dressing; gooey, neon mac-and-not-really-cheese; and a pumpkin pie of premade filling in a premade crust. They heaped their plates and took them outside onto the porch, in full view of the water that surrounded them; it was like they were stranded on a deserted island, removed from civilization altogether, if not denied access to whipped cream in an aerosol can.