Migratory Animals

by Mary Helen Specht

  From up close, the birds no longer looked like a flock but were abstracted into geometric shapes, a series of curves and sharp points. The hand-dyed silks and wools were shaded with so many colors that it was impossible to tell exactly where one thread started and another stopped.

  “Mom, what are you doing?” she heard her son Jake ask from behind her.

  Alyce backed up, removing her face from the cloth.

  The boys were characteristically disheveled but well dressed in matching navy jackets with fake brass buttons. Looking at her sons as they tugged self-consciously on their clothes, she thought maybe it was time to stop dressing them alike. “Well? Do you like it?”

  “It’s nice.” Jake smiled shyly.

  “We like it,” added Ian, a step behind him, slurping on a sucker, “but birds aren’t our favorite animal anymore.”

  Alyce leaned down to kiss them each on the forehead. Maybe the tapestry only absorbed the energies that had been put into it, neither transmitting nor refracting any of Alyce’s intentions. Her own sons were oblivious. All the painstaking hours and lost stories poured into it just for them.

  “Look at this, Mom,” Ian commanded, showing her the chewy chocolate he’d found in the center of his lollipop, as though no one had ever discovered it before.

  “Watch me, Mom. Are you watching?” asked Jake, his arms stretched wide, pinwheeling through the air, almost knocking over an older couple dressed in black. “I’m one of your birds.”

  Kids were always asking you to watch them, thought Alyce, to look at whatever they’d done or found. This confirmed to Alyce what she’d been lately discovering: her real job as a parent was her presence: her ability to watch, to look, to stand witness at the passage of Jake’s and Ian’s lives. Not for them to watch or look or stand witness to her tapestry and what it said about the passage of her own life. Maybe nobody saw what Alyce saw in the tapestry because it wasn’t real. It was her own self-serving narrative. Her own subjective story used to justify her actions.

  “Come on, kiddos. Daddy’s bedtime,” said Harry, squeezing Alyce’s shoulder. He told them to say good night to their mother, and they did so reluctantly, instinctively reaching for Harry’s hands. He congratulated her again on Migratory Animals, which in a kindhearted overstatement he called stunning. They were still at that place, the one before the legal wrangling begins in earnest and before the small cracks of bitterness start to spread, where they couldn’t get used to not supporting each other.

  As he turned to leave, Harry looked over his shoulder and said, “Do you remember the metal birds you hung from my ceiling?”

  Alyce smiled but shook her head no—metal birds?—fingering the glossy jet beads tied in a knot at her breastplate, the ones her mother had brought the last time she visited Austin, which must have been over two years ago now.

  “I was thinking about them the other day,” continued Harry. “Those birds, the way they moved when you turned on the ceiling fan. They were stunning, too, you know.”

  And then Harry was gone. And Alyce was alone again, with what was left of the flock.

  At that moment, Alyce could almost admit what would really happen: She would move into a duplex in Duvalier Place—a neighborhood more romantic-sounding than romantic. She would be a renter again, like when she was just out of college, someone else in charge of mowing the lawn and painting the walls and calling the plumber. Her life would become less cluttered. The boys would stay with her on weekends. She would watch the light change in the kitchen from morning to evening, autumn to spring, and she would notice it because she would be alone. She would go on living.

  It was a step in her most important recovery. She was a mother, which was sometimes harder than eating and exercising and drinking less. One day at a time and all that. As her therapist had acknowledged, maybe Alyce wasn’t one of those women who was better off with children than she was without them. But the only way to ever know something like that for sure was to live two lives. And Alyce barely had time and energy for this one.

  Migratory Animals might have been the last real piece of art Alyce would ever make. Not because it was really so different in style or staidness than the William Morris Woodpeckers in an Orange Tree that had been her original plan. But just because it was hers. It was all of theirs. It was finished.

  From now on Alyce would only weave brightly colored table runners, blankets, and scarves with pattern names like “rose path” and “bird’s eye” and sell them at festivals and boutiques around the state. She would make her own living, if not a particularly good one. She would become more efficient, warping two to four articles of clothing onto the loom at once. She wouldn’t have to pay attention in the same way she did for tapestry, and could fall into a rhythm, one arm throwing the boat shuttle as the other worked the beater, her bare feet tapping back and forth on the treadles.

  She would become known for a luxury shawl, based loosely on a Japanese garment she’d seen in an art house film, the stitching origami-like, the fringe feminine, the material chenille with a rayon weft, the “poor man’s silk” as it was called, to give it an underlying shimmer. It would take her an average of two hours to measure the warp, five to thread and wind the loom, two hours to weave each shawl and two to tie and wash. When she took them off the loom, they would be stiff until she rinsed and blocked them, which would make them spring to soft life. The pieces would be popular among a certain set. They would be lovely. They would be satisfying in their own way.

  At one of the festivals where she sold the shawls, her booth would be next to a woman hawking jewelry made from recycled glass. Customers would stop at the woman’s table to say, “Oh, how pretty,” pointing at a yellow or green bauble, and the woman would respond with its origin, a sake bottle or some sort of tequila they don’t make anymore. There would be one necklace, a glass sliver of unreal blue, like the color of a Senegalese kingfisher in bright sun. Alyce would walk over and say, “Blue Nun,” referring to a brand of wine that came in a blue bottle, and the woman would smile and ask how she knew.

  Alyce would tell her that her mother used to drink it when she was young, and then she would buy the necklace, or trade for it with one of her loose woven scarves, and wear it from then on like a talisman.

  Alyce wondered: Would we ever start anything if we knew how it would end? Would she have married Harry and had his children? Would she have woven this tapestry? If she’d known at the start that all she expected was not even possible? And at the start could she have believed it might still be enough?

  “Snow White. You’ve done it,” said Flannery, coming up behind Alyce in the gallery and leaning into her, letting their cheeks rub together. Flannery wore a yellow sundress Alyce had never seen before.

  “Where’s your sister?”

  Flannery shrugged. “We sent Brandon for more booze, but I don’t know where she disappeared to.” Molly was on bed rest at home, but her doctor had given her permission to come to Alyce’s show.

  “How’d it go last week?”

  Flannery shook her head. She said that the silo test hadn’t worked but that they thought they knew what went wrong. “We’ll try it again in a few weeks.”

  Alyce slipped her arm around Flannery and drew her across the floor and toward the tapestry. Alyce felt the new thin layer of flesh around her friend’s waist; where it used to be all rib cage, now it was like pressing your hand into a wall that has been painted over. Alyce thought: It’s curious how age softens some people and hardens others.

  “Which one am I?” Flannery nudged her shoulder into Alyce and looked up at the flock of birds covering the wall, arced and spread and diving into the bottom right-hand corner of the room.

  Alyce smiled at her old friend. “You know which one.”

  They stood there for a minute, touching, breath going in and out in unison, hearts pausing and finding the same rhythm; for a fleeting second, they merged into one organism and saw out of the same watery eyes. It was there, and then it was gone. But
it would sustain Alyce for weeks, longer. She looked down at her hands. Knobby and thick knuckled from so much weaving, they didn’t seem to match the bird bones that threaded the rest of her body. Her hands looked twenty years older than the rest of her. She didn’t mind.

  “I’m going for a refill,” said Flannery. “Want anything?”

  “Nothing. Thank you.” And she meant it.

  FLANNERY

  Pale pink and fuchsia petals from a crepe myrtle tree littered the windshield of the compact car parked across the street from the art gallery. Flannery tapped on the window, and Molly, sitting with the driver’s seat reclined all the way back, jumped.

  She rolled down the plate of glass. “Hey.”

  “On a stakeout?”

  “Most comfortable chair in the world,” said Molly, rubbing her belly. “Leans back at just the right angle.” She wore a navy-blue Mexican muumuu with flowers stitched around the neckline. She looked like a beautiful beached whale.

  Flannery walked around to the passenger side and climbed in. She had made up with her sister over the last few weeks, but slowly, testing the waters. They were being careful with each other for once.

  “Wanna cruise the strip and pick up Romeos?” asked Molly.

  “People are wondering where you are.”

  Molly rolled her eyes. “Oh well.” She reached to turn off the car radio. Then, her face scrunched up and her hands gripped the steering wheel. A moan escaped from between gritted teeth.

  “What the hell?”

  “Con . . . traction.”

  “Oh.” Flannery counted on her fingers: her sister wasn’t due for another five weeks.

  Molly took deep breaths. “Might be Braxton-Hicks,” she said.

  “How far apart?”

  Molly looked at her watch. “Five minutes or so.”

  “I’m taking you to the hospital.”

  “If I have two more, we’ll go.”

  “We’re going now.”

  “No. We’re not. We are doing things my way for once.” Eventually Molly’s body relaxed again. “Distract me. Tell a story.”

  Flannery heard a new steeliness in Molly’s voice; she tried to respect it. “I don’t know any stories.” She knew lots of stories, but all the ones that came to mind were told to her by a beautiful man with three scars across his face and involved palm-wine tappers falling from trees.

  “Remember when I came to visit you in Madison that one winter? I woke up to find your side of the bed empty because you were outside in your car watching the snow fall.” Molly yawned and stretched her neck. “I was mad at you for not waking me up.”

  Flannery tried to recall the visit she was talking about; the only images that came up were of the two of them at a bar with stained-glass windows and a fireplace. But she remembered watching snow. “I used to do that all the time. Sit in the car watching snowfalls. All winter long in Madison I did that.”

  “I was surprised you weren’t outside, standing directly in it. I remember thinking grad school had made you soft.”

  “I was protecting the snow. From my body heat. A car windshield is cold enough that when snow crystals land, the edges don’t melt, not right away. It’s one of the only ways to really see the designs of a lot of them at once.” Flannery twisted her hair in her hand, looking at the light spray of clouds in the sky. “Sometimes they’re all needles. Sometimes stars. Sometimes they’re needles at first, and then stars.”

  “What about this one?” Molly splaying out her fingers on the inside of the windshield so they covered a constellation of the pink flower petals resting lightly on the outside of the glass. “From the shape of these snowflakes, what can we determine about the conditions outside?” Molly doubled over with another contraction.

  Flannery reached out to put a hand on her sister’s back, but Molly waved her away. “Let’s see,” said Flannery softly, pointing to one pale pink petal. “First, notice the serrations on the perimeter. In isolation, it would have grown into a plain hexagonal prism, so this pattern means it was out of equilibrium as it developed inside the cloud. Because the points stick out a little, water molecules were more likely to diffuse there and that instability created branching. Complexity.”

  “Beauty,” said Molly through clenched teeth. They watched Harry and his sons walk diagonally across the street and toward their SUV. Brandon still wasn’t back from the store.

  “But these don’t have the long dendrite branches, which means the humidity is not particularly high.”

  “You’ll miss this when you go back to Nigeria.”

  “I’ve told you. I think I’m staying.” Flannery’s fingers found a tear in the upholstery and she had to stop herself from picking at it, making it bigger. Molly would be a mother soon, and it was important that Flan make herself clear. After her sister’s contraction seemed to have passed, Flannery swallowed her own personal, useless feelings and turned to look at Molly as she said, “Maybe Santiago will even build me a glass house down the street from you.”

  Molly didn’t respond for a few moments. She leaned forward and exhaled directly onto the glass. “There. More humidity.”

  Flannery leaned forward and breathed out, too. An act of solidarity.

  Molly shrugged. “It’s too late.”

  “Well, yes. By the time snow crystals reach the windshield, they’re done forming. They’re already dissolving.” As soon as Flannery finished saying it, she shivered.

  “No, Flan. I mean, it’s too late—years too late—for you to convince me that you truly love Santi,” she said.

  Flannery grimaced. “But Santiago is not the reason to stay. We’re the reason.”

  Molly, trying to turn despite the steering wheel’s creaking protest against her belly, squeezed Flannery’s shoulder. “You’re the one who told me that with Kunle it felt for the first time like a square peg fitting into a square hole. That Nigeria felt like home.”

  Flannery didn’t want to think about Nigeria or Kunle. How with him there wasn’t drama or suffocation or anxiety. Easy. Normal. Love. Nothing to say about it because it just was. Kunle was like a stasis. Like a kite suspended in wind. He’d never met her family or her friends, and he hadn’t understood her past. But that had been freeing in a way. With him, she was not tied to the expectations of history.

  Part of her realized Molly was right, but Flannery couldn’t let go of the guilt associated with making a selfish choice. With doing what she wanted to do. “People can change their minds and come back. Just like Papa did.”

  “Like Papa did?”

  “In the journal. He left Mom when he found out, but he came back. Remember?”

  “I didn’t read it.” Molly sighed. “But I can still tell you that’s a load of shit. Our father the martyr? Is that really your model?”

  Flannery turned away, not knowing how to respond. If her sister never read the journal, why had she sent it to Flan? What did Molly want? For her to get down on her knees and beg? The car was hot and stuffy; Flannery was suffocating.

  “How many times would I have to exhale to create enough humidity?”

  “What?” Flannery was unable to hide the frustration and resentment in her voice.

  “Shhh,” said Molly, stroking her. “Don’t be mad. Just tell me how many times I would need to breathe out to create enough humidity for the snowflakes to grow long, dendrite branches? Really long, amazing ones.”

  Flannery sighed and closed her eyes, allowing her skull to sink back into the headrest. “The average person probably exhales a liter of water per day into the atmosphere. So I don’t know. A lot. You’d have to spend many, many more hours exhaling.” She thought of Kunle’s breath on the back of her neck when they slept, spooned together.

  “Okay. I can do that,” said Molly. “But right now, I need you to take me to the hospital.”

  SANTIAGO

  When his phone had vibrated, as he stuffed his face with chips and guacamole at Alyce’s reception, Santiago was annoyed to see it was Flannery
. They were supposed to meet to “talk” after Alyce’s opening, and he assumed she was calling to cancel—again. For the last week she’d been calling to make plans and then calling to cancel them.

  But when he picked up the phone, she spoke quickly. She said she was taking Molly to the hospital with contractions and Brandon needed to get there. Santiago followed orders, grabbing Brandon as he returned from the liquor store laden with booze and driving him to the hospital.

  Now he wasn’t sure what to do. He found a seat in the waiting room as far away as possible from the television, which was blaring the right-wing news station. He knew Flannery was inside the hospital somewhere, and so he rummaged around in his messenger bag for his book of Czeslaw Milosz poems, which he’d accidentally bought online in the original Polish, and tried to sit there looking nonchalantly highbrow. Erudite. Like someone with whom a discerning woman might want to spend her life. Though, on second thought, while this might be a look he could pull off with a stranger, Flannery knew he didn’t speak Polish. To Flannery, he would only look ridiculous.

  As Santi pored dumbly over the violent Polish sentences, an enormous red balloon came floating across the room toward him. For a minute, Santiago’s heart buoyed—in his mind’s eye he pictured Flannery behind him, her long fingers having just released the balloon into the empty white space in a kind of playfulness that could only mean: Joy? Love?

  He swiveled his head to look for the balloon’s origin, but there was no Flannery. A man came bounding down the hall, chasing the now irrelevant object, his beeper bouncing awkwardly at his belt, and he tackled the balloon before returning it to the family holding more of them, all covered in cursive writing: “It’s a boy!”

  “Hey, hey,” said Flan’s voice. Suddenly she was beside him for real.

  Flannery’s sweaty brown hair was tied back in a ponytail that Santiago felt the urge to undo before raking his fingers roughly through the tangles. She sat down next to him and reached for his book, flipping absently through the pages and raising her eyebrows at the Polish.