Migratory Animals

by Mary Helen Specht

  When Molly remembered conversations or outings with her father, they were refracted through a new prism of menace. When they had gone to the State Cemetery, for instance, the rolling grounds in East Austin where war heroes like Edward Burleson were interred next to politicians, Rangers, and other famous Texans, like Barbara Jordan and James Michener, Molly was seventeen. They’d driven to the state capital to see the Daughters of the Republic of Texas honor with a cenotaph one of their ancestors, Catherine Overton Jennings, who was known for riding through the Hill Country to tell settlers the Alamo had fallen and warn them to flee for their lives—Santa Anna was on the way. It was called the Runaway Scrape.

  At the time, as she and her father walked through the grounds, Molly found it amusing to meet these people, who introduced themselves as “Honeybunch” and “Bluford” and told stories of dead but colorful relatives who had been horse rustlers and bank robbers, while drinking punch in salute of a woman long gone and mostly forgotten. (In Molly’s generation it was not so fashionable to be an Alamo defender—after all, it wasn’t as if the Texicans hadn’t basically stolen the whole place from Mexico.) Her father did not find those people silly and ridiculous, though, and, in fact, had a grand time taking notes and tracing family trees. He even went out of his way to bring a bouquet of wine-colored carnations, the Lockwood family funeral flower because, two generations earlier, they were the only flowers grown in the local greenhouse during winter.

  Now, when Molly looked back at this afternoon in the State Cemetery with her father, it seemed like an attempt to get her on his side of family history. To show her the part of the family where strength and heroism originated. To let her know he’d given her nothing but a noble, unadulterated pedigree. His relatives were honored by brass plaques, buried next to the greatest men and women in the state. Molly’s father couldn’t be held accountable for any bloodborne wrath her mother might have passed down.

  Molly lurched up from the table and carried the plates to the sink.

  “Why forgive me?” Brandon asked. But she knew, deep down, he’d expected to be forgiven, and what he was really asking was: Why not forgive her father, too?

  “I choose my family from now on.”

  As she looked at the wooden countertop, a few knife nicks and wine stains marring its surface, she thought about when it would need to be replaced. Her child, if Molly was able to carry it through the next few months, would be about seven then. Molly might still be alive but she would be using a walker, grown thin from the chorea that made it increasingly difficult to get enough calories into the body, paranoid and maybe less afraid, maybe more. Unlike people suffering from Alzheimer’s, HD patients didn’t lose the essential self but retained large chunks of memory and personality. Molly was not yet sure if this was a blessing or a curse.

  She couldn’t decide which aspect of Huntington’s was most devastating: the horrors of the disease itself or the genetic dominion, which forced you to watch its long, pornographic destruction in those close to you, glimpsing your own future before it happened, knowing too well what lay crouched in wait.

  But Molly still didn’t know whether she would be more or less afraid than she was now. Lately, she’d been wondering if there was a finite amount of fear in a person. If fear could run out, like when you open the fridge and there’s no milk. And if fear can run out, what would it mean? Peace? Apathy? Emptiness? The end?

  She looked at the face of her husband, whom she loved more than anything in the world. She could admit that now. There was a tightness to his forehead, the emerging lines like a map of small hurts. She kissed him on the cheek, imagining her growing body becoming softer, skin melting onto Brandon’s and fusing them together. She tried to breathe in his pain and breathe out a large blue sky.

  HARRY

  By some unspoken code of friendship, every weekend that Alyce kept the boys out at the ranch, someone invited Harry to dinner so he wouldn’t be alone.

  Tonight he was at Heavy Metal Farm with Steven and Lou eating tofu stir-fry with brown rice and sitting on the picnic table just outside their trailer as glowing embers from the chiminea took the edge off the still-chill night air. Harry remembered walking these fields with Steven a year after his friend bought the land. The ground had been black and loamy, only just tilled by the gaggle of young, underpaid farming interns, and Steven had picked up a handful of rich soil, turning to Harry and saying, “Good enough to eat.”

  Their daughter, Maya, picked at her food; her pleading face said she wanted to ask for a grilled cheese sandwich but was too shy to with Harry there. Harry loved his boys fiercely but had secretly always wanted a girl. He used to hope Alyce would eventually be ready for a third.

  “Bet you’ve gotten spoiled eating Santi’s cooking.” Steven licked soy sauce from the whiskers of his beard. “I am but a humble plowman. Plowperson? How the hell do you say that?”

  “No, it’s good. Santiago’s making me fat,” said Harry, though it wasn’t true. Over the past months he’d grown wan, the sockets of his eyes probably casting shadows in the light of the fire.

  “Speaking of fat,” said Lou, laughing. “You should see Molly.”

  Harry smiled. It had been two months since Molly’s return to the city, and they’d all rallied around her news. But every time he saw her or heard her name, the only thing Harry could think about was the ranch. Alyce alone at the ranch.

  “I have some Brussels sprouts for you to take home,” said Steven. “First of the season.” Earlier in the evening his friend had revealed, looking off into the distance as he spoke, that it was also Heavy Metal Farm’s last season. The bank had finally come knocking. He said he hoped his daughter would remember these years when her father did something he was proud of all day long.

  “Santi will know what to do with them.”

  “Where is he, anyway?” asked Lou. “When I invited him to dinner, he texted saying he was out of town.”

  “Interviewing for jobs.” Harry shrugged. He and Santiago had made peace since their fight—Santiago was so penitent and Harry eventually able to admit he’d also ignored their problems, which allowed Santiago, in a sense, to go rogue. But even so, the firm was unsalvageable. They couldn’t work together anymore, and Harry would be moving out of the fire station at the end of the month. The vacation from his life was almost over.

  “I don’t think it’s going very well,” continued Harry. “It’s hard for everyone right now, but especially architects. When nobody’s building, who needs a designer? I might even take this summer off, go somewhere cold. Alaska. The South Pole.” What Harry didn’t say was that he didn’t know how he’d ever work again. Harry was lost.

  “The moon is cold,” said Maya, pointing to the slice of it rising on the horizon.

  “Or you could just turn up the air-conditioning and rent Doctor Zhivago,” said Steven. “Santiago has a ushanka hat somewhere. Remember? He wore it with his boxer briefs to Brandon and Molly’s wedding?”

  Steven’s banter felt forced. Even Maya stared glumly into her plate of food. Then, the girl sneezed three times in a row.

  “Maya,” Harry said, putting down his fork and looking at her, “did I ever tell you my family is from Finland on my mother’s side? In Finland, when you sneeze three times in a row . . .”

  Two weeks after dinner at Steven’s farm, Harry called his wife.

  “I want to come over.” The digital clock on the wall of Santiago’s guest room told Harry it was two in the morning, and he hoped her ringtone hadn’t woken Jake or Ian.

  “Now?”

  “Yes.” He didn’t allow his voice to become gentle.

  “Won’t that confuse the boys?” she asked.

  “I’ll be gone before they wake up.”

  “I’m not sure what’s left to talk about.”

  “I don’t want to talk.” He held his breath.

  A pause, a caesura. And then the word, “Come.”

  Harry was already pulling on jeans and a sweatshirt, feeling arou
nd for his flip-flops. Harry told himself he was only driving out to the ranch to make love to his wife, and then he would return to this exile without protest. But, secretly, deep down in the part of his mind he didn’t like to explore or examine, Harry believed Alyce would ask him to stay.

  He would touch her, and she would remember how the copper birds flocked on the ceiling of his room at Dryden House, imperfections blurring into beauty.

  ALYCE

  After hanging up with Harry, Alyce padded through the ranch house on the way to the front door, kicking aside tangled balls of tinsel and gold Burger King crowns. The boys had invented a new holiday called Castlemas, where they wore crowns and decorated the house with shiny treasures, waving silver serving spoons like scepters and making decrees. Jake decreed the official food of Castlemas to be peanut butter sandwiches and Ian decreed it was okay to pee in the yard and Alyce decreed that you had to move from room to room by leapfrogging. It was the sort of day Harry would have loved. It was the sort of day Alyce pretended to love, forcing her way through it with the invisible muscles of fake joy. The boys also decreed there would be no bedtime, but even so, they were all passed out by eight o’clock, smeared in glitter and melted chocolate. Even Alyce.

  As she brushed her teeth and washed her face, Alyce tried to ignore the stacks of boxes everywhere, symbols of impending departure; the fellowship at the ranch was coming to a close next month. It hurt to leave. It felt good to hurt.

  The late winter and early spring had been lively: White-tailed does showing up with their wobbly fawns, just as night lifted, to eat the corn Alyce left at the edges of the dewy yard. Wild turkeys mating and on the move, the hens crouching low to scour and peck the ground for worms and seeds, all the while seeming to ignore the gobbling blue-headed males attempting to get their attention by prancing in front of them, displaying enormous fans of feathers, regalia that sprang forth from their bodies like jazz-hands, like the images of turkeys children make at school by tracing their fingers. Alyce had also had her first and only encounter with a diamondback rattlesnake when, walking back up the gravel path from the swimming hole, she’d been startled by the hiss and rattle of a slithery dee coiled in the road. Her heart beat faster in her chest: I live. I live. I live.

  The yucca were in bloom, white flowers pluming up into soft cotton clouds, and the prickly pear were opening their paper-thin purple and yellow flowers, probably fruiting soon, although it was unlikely Alyce would get to see one of the sweet juicy bulbs before the raccoons and possums picked them off. In the last week, she’d seen a pair of painted buntings outside her casement window and at least one rose-breasted grosbeak, covered in geometric swaths of red, white, and black. According to the bird book on the shelf, grosbeaks shouldn’t have been in the Hill Country yet, but there was no mistaking it. The ranch seemed to attract vagrant birds, those aberrant individuals that, for reasons of strange weather or a reversed compass or simple curiosity, ended up out of the migratory range of their more normal counterparts.

  Alyce waited for her husband on the porch in the dark, like a teenager, dying for a cigarette though she hadn’t smoked in years. She felt a strange shift in her belly—butterflies—and remembered the fairy-tale rhyme her mother used to chant, whispering it aloud:

  Spindle, my spindle,

  haste, haste thee away,

  and here to my house

  bring the wooer, I pray.

  For a moment Alyce imagined herself a poor woman in a cottage in the woods, tossing her spindle into the thicket like a fisherman flings his line.

  But she didn’t believe in spells. She and Harry couldn’t go back, though she could pretend for a few hours. Feeling things she knew were ultimately pointless, that changed nothing, and yet were also nice in their way. For just a moment to believe entropy was reversible.

  Harry drove up to the house slowly, headlights off. He stepped out of the car wearing blue pajamas and flip-flops and a puffy jacket. His face looked white in the moonlight; two little pockets of shadows rested in his dimples when he smiled. She looked at him, flesh and blood, and felt the aftertaste of desire on her tongue.

  As he walked up the steps of the porch, she unbuttoned her shirt. It was chilly, the March air hitting her nipples like a shock. She took a sharp breath in. Then, Harry covered her chest and stomach with his, enveloping her as she walked them backward through the door. Like a film moving in reverse, they glided through the living room, past her studio, past the kitchen, past the boys’ room where they stopped and lightly clicked the door shut, the greenish glow of a night-light escaping beneath the crack.

  As they reached the master bedroom, goose bumps broke out on Alyce’s shoulders and arms, and she remembered what she said after they made up from their first big fight when they were only twenty-one years old: “I discovered I fancy you again.” She felt the pricks of hair along the back of Harry’s head and neck. The same body. The same touch. The same movements as they found their rhythm. It could have been any of the hundreds of times they’d made love. It was all those times. There was the cadence of the clock on the wall, its bright silver hands moving forward with controlled relish. The blanket sliding off the mattress. The creak of the floor.

  And afterward, as they lay on the bed, spent, Alyce could see in Harry’s face what he was too afraid to say: I believed my love would always be enough.

  Alyce stared at him and thought: Love was never enough. Not by itself. She felt the presence of the tapestry in the other room as if it were a living being. Listening. Waiting for her.

  Voices ricocheted off the walls of the small gallery space. Alyce skimmed her hand along the bar and plopped a lime into her seltzer water so it looked like she was drinking a gin and tonic. Her new therapist encouraged a multipronged approach. Medication but also exercise and vegetables and cutting back on the drinking. Alyce’s response, turning her cheek to the cool leather of the therapist’s Mission-style recliner, had been to shrug and say, “Sure.” Why the hell not.

  Alyce looked evenly at the wheeling groups of people chatting and spearing cubes of smoked Gouda and thought: At least it was a good turnout. Most of the attendees were friends and weavers, otherwise known as “people without enough money” to buy the biggest tapestry she’d ever made, eight by six feet (the width limited to the width of her loom).

  The event was a closing reception for her fellowship at the ranch, and it seemed none of the local newspapers or magazines had decided to cover or review it. Not a single art critic in the house. Her masterpiece, her personal apex, greeted not with applause, not with jeers, but with a distracted silence.

  She watched as Flannery, Steven, and Lou huddled in one corner, Flan’s hands behind her back, fingers brushing the wall. They were drinking and probably talking politics, guessed Alyce, from the way their faces telegraphed mutual disgust and frustration.

  When Lou and Steven had arrived at the gallery, late and flustered from trying to park downtown on a weekend, Lou had looked up at the tapestry saying, “I thought you said you were weaving images of us? You changed your mind?” Alyce had smiled and shrugged. Lou didn’t see what Alyce saw, but that was all right. The tapestry wasn’t really for her.

  An older friend who used to weave but didn’t anymore came up to Alyce with a plastic bag full of beautiful, vintage silk scarves she said she no longer had use for. The material looked too old and weak for the beaters of Alyce’s loom, but she accepted them graciously.

  Brandon and Santiago lorded over the spinach dip, the scientist gesticulating and trying to explain something to the architect, who leaned back, his gaze both skeptical and amused. Some of Harry’s friends from his private high school in Houston meandered about, nodding at Alyce and looking vaguely uncomfortable, a common response to impending divorce. A few feet away, Alyce and Harry’s old Realtor stood in front of the tapestry. He looked serious, leaning back with his large arms crossed.

  Next to her tapestry was a pasted white cardboard label with the piece’s title in ita
lics: Migratory Animals. The other walls of the space were lined with black-and-white photographs of her at the loom in the ranch studio—the fellowship had sent two photography majors from the university to take them. She thought the images turned out shadowy and formal, like old daguerreotypes taken on the frontier of stern women with beak noses and stiff black dresses. Don’t smile, the young photographer with spiky hair had told her—it will look better if you don’t smile.

  Alyce moved toward the middle of the room, looking up at the flock looking back at her. A robin, a black-capped chickadee, a golden warbler, a finch, a tufted titmouse, a purple martin, a mockingbird, and a kingfisher. All flying, for a moment, the moment captured here, in the same direction, feeling the same swift current, powered fliers and gliders both. The mosaic flock flew in inky blackness across a strip of stars, a silver river going in the opposite direction, the two configurations poised in an X. The birds were crossing the silver river, over it, beyond it somewhere. It didn’t matter where. Robin had not yet killed Bear, not yet tossed the scene in blood from his arrow. It was a story frozen en media res.

  With juicy yarns and sharp colors, Alyce had used her brocade technique to make the birds themselves emerge sculpturally from the background, which was more subtly constructed with thin, slippery silks, each bird framed by a ribbony strip where the weft itself showed through, creating a halo effect. The birds seemed to be flying in a closer plane to the viewers than the rest of the scene, and it was not just a trick of perspective but of the concrete elements of yarn and weave.

  Alyce had been conditioned never to touch art hung on walls, but with tapestry it was more difficult not to obey the impulse to reach, to press one’s body and face directly into the cloth, absorbing it tactilely through osmosis. And this one was hers and so she could. Who would stop her? The fabric was so soft she thought about ripping it down and flinging it around her shoulders and walking out.