Migratory Animals

by Mary Helen Specht

  Alyce was surprised to find herself starving. She closed her eyes, relishing the feeling of need. It was nothing like the meal Alyce herself would have cooked, and yet she ate with feral abandon, shoving the salty, sugary, dry food into her mouth. Ravenous for the first time in months, her cheeks squirrel-like.

  Molly laughed at her. “Who’s the pregnant one?”

  Alyce asked herself, not for the first time: Why was there a levity to friendship that didn’t exist with family?

  When Molly and Alyce put their feet up and leaned back, overturned roly-polies with no intention of moving for several hours, it was afternoon and the creek already receding before their eyes—Alyce could see bits of damp grass left in its wake. And yet the surface of the water gave off the appearance of complete, unwavering permanence, such that she struggled to remember how the land looked without water swallowing the road.

  Flannery arrived with a flourish, as always, honking the car horn in the flooded quiet, fast and high-pitched, like a synchronized pack of geese.

  Molly and Alyce stood up at the same time and strolled down the wet and muddy road in their rubber wading boots. They didn’t rush. Molly grabbed Alyce’s hand, and when she did, a surge of emotion rolled through Alyce’s body.

  They waded through the dirty, churning flotsam until, water up to their thighs, they got to the bend in the road where they could see the other side of the creek, now more of a pond. Where usually it would be easy to throw a stone from one side to the other, even to hold a conversation with someone on the far bank, now the water was so wide that Flannery was a small figure in the distance perched on the hood of Brandon’s car, her head in her hands. Was she crying? Or merely bone tired?

  When Flannery saw them, she slid from the car and put her hands in the air. She looked as though she were signaling the start of a race. Her hair was tangled, and her clothes hung awkwardly on her body. She yelled something and waved her arms around, but they couldn’t hear her. Maybe the word no drifted over on the wind. And the word must. Alyce felt guilty standing there in the water, holding the hand of her best friend’s sister as if she were about to baptize her in the creek. Who had betrayed whom? How was this supposed to go? Red Rover, Red Rover, why don’t you come over?

  Now Flannery was getting something from inside the car. It was a book, and she held it up in the air. Alyce looked at Molly, facing serenely across the water toward her pleading sister. Molly nodded her head a few times, and then lifted her hands in the air, but this seemed to throw her body off balance and she faltered, splashing Alyce as she regained her footing.

  “Let’s go. There’s no way across.”

  They waved to Flannery and waited for her to wave back before turning and slowly wading down the drunken road toward the house. Alyce slipped her fingers free from Molly’s and pressed her palm against the woman’s belly. They stopped walking for a moment. Alyce felt the power of Molly’s death behind the little egg of life. She was afraid it might be loosening its grip.

  As they climbed the porch, Molly said, “It’s not my sister’s fault she didn’t get the gene.” She sat down on the swing.

  “No.”

  A gust of wind swept through, knocking forks and napkins off the small table. They let the items go.

  “I was thinking about the kissing contest you and my sister won,” said Molly, “and I’m curious.”

  “Yeah?”

  Molly smiled shyly, kicking her feet out in front of her. She didn’t say anything. Alyce laughed, maybe the first real laugh in a long time. She turned Molly’s face toward her own and kissed her heart-shaped mouth.

  MOLLY

  At the doctor’s office for her amnio, the thickest needle Molly had ever seen pierced her belly and sucked fluid from her uterus, teeming with the genetic material of her unborn child. Molly’s eyes watered from the pain. The doctor asked if she wanted to watch on the ultrasound screen but Molly shook her head.

  Looking around, she thought: In a decade, this examination room, with its crinkly white paper and generic posters, will be arena to the hopes and dreams of other mothers-to-be. Her own child, if she decided to have it, would be nine years old. Molly would likely still be alive then but in an advanced stage of the disease, in a wheelchair wearing diapers, depressed and mostly uncommunicative, language having piled up on the tip of her tongue, lost to the dark recesses of the brain. Afraid? Ready? Both? Even at that point—she remembered how it was with her own mother—when she slept at night the chorea would disappear, and she would look like any other forty-four-year-old woman. Peaceful. Dreaming. Released from the daytime cares of the world.

  After half listening to medical specialists slowly list the risks of her pregnancy and delivery, Molly left the medical building and walked into the adjacent park. Branches of dull winter trees, empty of leaves, pointed down at her with displeasure. A group of joggers ran by on the trail wearing sleek suits of spandex, and two dogs wrestled in the pond. The bamboo separating the park from the houses farther up the hill stood brown and jagged like a wall of upright chopsticks. More than anything, Molly wanted to see flowers.

  She drove to the nearest grocery store, walked inside, and grabbed the first bunch of color wrapped in green plastic. As she stepped across the street to her car, clutching the daisies in one arm, a woman stopped her and said, “Oh my God. You look like you’re out of a movie.” Molly could not bring herself to smile back. How does one respond when the outside and the inside are still so incongruous?

  Life rushed forward for these people and yet, for Molly, it slowed. This was what it felt like for the end to close in on you. To know more or less how everything would turn out. Molly would never change careers or move to a new house or city. For Molly, it was all done. Except for the little spark of life she carried. This was hers; hers and Brandon’s. If she managed to carry it to term, it would be the last new thing she would ever do.

  Buttery sunlight fell on Molly and Alyce as they stooped beside the small rock wall that ran along the west border of the yard, a crumbling, knee-high remnant built as a property line by the first ranchers who’d lived there more than a hundred years ago, before the cedar had sucked the land dry like a plague.

  Molly had decided it was time to plant her mother’s irises. If she waited any longer, it would be too late for the bulbs to settle in before spring. The two women finished preparing the ground by loosening soil and mixing in compost with a pitchfork.

  “Don’t plant them too deep,” said Molly. “The top should be barely covered.” But what she was thinking was this: What a pair we are. I feel guilty for wanting a child. You feel guilty for not wanting the family you already have.

  Alyce nodded and gave a thumbs-up before bending back over the ground, but in her corporeal movements, the strain of her neck and the grip of her hand, Molly imagined her friend was also finally admitting how she’d resisted getting help because being sick was a good excuse for not being happy with the choices she’d made.

  Alyce and Molly traded off digging holes and placing the dormant iris bulbs into the ground, patting the damp soil around them like tucking small children into bed.

  “Where did I leave the rest?” asked Molly at one point. What she really wanted to know was whether she could leave the ranch. She needed to go home soon, and she wanted to know Alyce would be all right without her.

  Alyce grunted. “On the porch.”

  Molly walked over and picked up another bag. She liked the way the iris bulbs felt in her hand, gritty baseballs, concrete objects inside of which so much pulpy softness lay dormant.

  As she neared Alyce again, Molly felt the energy of her friend’s secret tapestry. Flapping and fluttering. Rising up. The expanse of sky and night and endless distances to cross. And in that moment, Molly understood the real reason she’d come to this ranch, which was to make an alliance that might one day be absolutely necessary. Because Molly had no intention of living out the last horrible years she’d seen her mother endure. She would not allow tho
se she loved to watch the worst of the horrors.

  “Can you hand me the water?” asked Molly. Will you help me when the time comes? Asking for something was really more of a statement about what you were ready to give. Will you marry me? just a way of saying, I’m ready to marry you. Molly thought about the baby titmice that had fallen from their nest and how Alyce told her she’d swept them onto the grass so their deaths wouldn’t seem quite so brutal. Molly knew that her baby could not save her.

  “Here you go,” said Alyce, after stopping to slug from the plastic bottle that had been perched near her on the stone wall. I will see that what needs to be done is done.

  The kiss, thought Molly. The kiss that day on the porch equaled a promise. That kiss meant they were still alive.

  An hour later, when Molly and Alyce finished, the sleeping flower bed in front of the wall was six irises deep and ten long, spikes of green leaves sticking just out of the ground, like fingers clawing from a shallow grave.

  They sat on the wall surveying their handiwork. It was good.

  As Molly heaved her pregnant belly out of the driver’s seat, she realized she would miss this feeling after the baby was born. She had never been so physically substantial and fully present in the world.

  Molly walked the blue stone path toward her house. A thin layer of morning frost glazed the winter lawn. She looked up at the corrugated tin roof, topped by a rooster weathervane she’d found at a junk store on the way to Abilene, and decided that the roof would likely need replacing in another five years or so. Her child might be four years old. Molly would still be alive then, using a cane, irritable and prone to rages because one of Huntington’s myriad effects was to turn the dial of one’s personality several notches darker.

  Brandon’s car was parked beneath the carport; a lamp was on in the kitchen. Molly stopped at the small concrete porch and watched her husband’s shadow through the window. Brandon’s shoulders were bent, head and neck flopped forward. For a moment she thought he was slumped on the counter and a tremor of fear, a different kind (there were so many), ran through her body. Then there was a pumping movement from his right forearm, a fast tapping. He was crushing something with the granite mortar and pestle they’d received as a wedding gift, crouched over the job. She smiled. Brandon was still here, same as he’d always been, puttering around the kitchen before work.

  Molly stared at the doorbell, but her arm did not reach for it. She slipped the house key from her coat pocket and turned it in the lock, swinging open the front door, fast and with her eyes blinking closed.

  Brandon, in flannel pajama pants and a bleach-stained sweatshirt, turned slowly, unsure of what to expect from an intruder with a key. His cheeks were streaked wet.

  “You’re crying,” she said.

  “The onions.” The cutting board next to the mortar was littered with shallots.

  Molly stood in the entry to the kitchen with her coat still on—she wasn’t ready to take it off. She needed to find her balance. The only time she’d left the ranch in the past months had been for doctor’s appointments and grocery trips, Alyce harboring her as if she were a draft dodger, a bank robber. On the porch there she’d spent long hours looking out at the vast acreage of tightly woven oaks and cedars like a normal person might watch waves crash along a craggy beach, rocking herself back and forth, securely tied up. Harbored.

  Molly thought it would be difficult to move from all that back into the enclosure of her urban neighborhood just off the highway, back into her small, modest house painted the colors of a lazy winter sky, grays and light blues. Back under the watchful gaze of Brandon. She thought she would feel unmoored. And yet, now, here she was.

  “Staying awhile?” His voice was shaky but neutral.

  “If that’s all right with you.”

  Down the block a car alarm sounded.

  “Your father’s been calling and calling.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Nothing.”

  She couldn’t resist: “You’re so good at keeping secrets.”

  Brandon’s face remained unchanged, but his body lifted as if to brace for something. She didn’t feel guilty for saying words that were true, but she did feel a need to ameliorate their harshness. So she took off her coat.

  “I’m hungry. What’s for breakfast?” She tossed the parka onto the sofa.

  He didn’t exclaim, or suck in breath, or get saucer eyes. He just stood there, staring at her taut round belly, trying to compute all the things one tries to compute when given life-changing information. Molly understood precisely.

  “Omelet?” he asked finally, his mouth almost grinning, though his eyes retained that look of hurt. She knew what that was like, too.

  “And tea? Do you have any tea?”

  “We do. Of course we do.” He went about heating the skillet and boiling water in the kettle. Molly sat at the table and watched him sauté onion and garlic in the small frying pan. She was tired and hungry, almost happy. When the old anger tried to rise up, she pushed it back down.

  “Where are your things?” he asked once they were both seated at the table, napkins on laps, eating the fold of moist egg. He was wearing his hair shorter now, close around his head like a sheared sheep. It made him look older.

  Molly said her bags were in the car and, when he asked about the irises, as though he doubted she could really be back without them, she told him how she didn’t want to be weighed down by those purple and gold sirens any longer. They were her mother’s irises, not hers, and they belonged at the ranch now. Molly didn’t want to spend the time she had left working in the garden, grieving for skills and mobility that were gone forever. She had better things to do.

  Her hand jerked a little as it raised the fork to her mouth—she didn’t try to hide it.

  “A girl or a boy?” Brandon asked shyly.

  “There’s a sonogram scheduled for next week. We can go together?” She would wait until later to tell him that she was also seeing a high-risk specialist—her own symptoms made the pregnancy dangerous; she’d likely be put on bed rest soon—and that she’d signed up to join a double-blind cohort study for after her pregnancy.

  He nodded. His face tightened. “What about the . . . ?”

  “Reduced penetrance.” She emptied the diagnosis onto the table like spare change. “Indeterminate conclusion. The child can get tested again when he or she turns eighteen. If they want to. They will be offered all the possibilities.”

  Molly understood that doing things differently than her own parents didn’t guarantee a better outcome. She wouldn’t dare express out loud her hope that this honesty would teach their child how to take advantage of life, to notice its passing and appreciate it more than other children possibly could. If the fetus had turned out to have full penetrance, which meant a one hundred percent chance of getting the disease, she would have aborted it and told Brandon nothing. Spared him the knowledge entirely. But reduced penetrance meant life for the child would be something like life was for Molly and her mother, full of uncertainty. Research had shown that HD, while a dominant gene, was not a switch that turned off or on—the mutation was initiated by extra repeats of the codon CAG. If the repeats were less than thirty-five, one would be free of the disease. If forty or more, it was a sure thing. However, there was a gray zone between thirty-five and thirty-nine where some people would get it, some wouldn’t. Molly’s fetus: thirty-nine. One repeat short of determination. A cosmic joke.

  Many people would abort at thirty-nine repeats, though; it was just too close, too chancy. But it was a risk Molly was willing to take. And by making the decision alone, Molly would be the only one to blame if the child grew up to think differently. And that was all right, because Molly would be gone.

  Brandon reached out his hand and let his palm touch down on Planet Babe, as she and Alyce had begun calling it. His fingers were gentle. “A gene therapy will be discovered in time.” The love of her life, the atheist and rationalist, the man for whom res
earch had, along the way, become just a day job, even he wasn’t able to escape the illusion that we can make up for the pain we cause, she thought. That we can fix what is broken in the world.

  Molly remembered how, early on, when her mother was first diagnosed, there was real anticipation in the Huntington’s community that finding the gene would bring a quick cure. That hadn’t been the case, not in the thirty-odd years since, and as with cancer and Parkinson’s disease, all Molly hoped for now were minor improvements in treatment that might convey minor improvements in quality of life.

  Of course, some things in life could be repaired. Not returned to the way they were before, maybe, but patched up. Made workable again.

  “If it’s a girl, she could be Helen after your mother,” he said, tilting his forehead toward her. They were settling back into their own little world, their snow globe.

  “No afters.” Molly stacked their empty plates one on top of the other.

  “What will we do about your father?” Brandon cracked his knuckles and spun his wedding band. “We can’t hide this from him forever.”

  “My father,” she said, wishing she could have a cup of coffee from the carafe that sat on the stovetop. She was so tired these days, and the dining room chair so uncomfortable; her belly prevented her from scooting flush to the table. “I wrote to him that I needed space and time.”

  She could tell Brandon did not full-heartedly welcome this information—the squint of his face said he thought she was being cruel. She didn’t care. To keep looking her father in the eyes after what had happened was to continue unbinding the connections holding her entire childhood together. She couldn’t bear it. It may not have been fair, but fair had flown.