Migratory Animals

by Mary Helen Specht

  “How’s Molly?” he asked.

  “Brandon took over.” She was not really looking at him. “Thanks for finding him.”

  “She’ll be okay?”

  “They’ll do a C-section, but she should be fine.”

  Santiago took a deep breath. He touched her hand.

  She looked up and smiled a little. “How are you, Santi?”

  Santiago decided to be brutally honest. “The fire station’s on the market, but we haven’t gotten any bites yet. I’ve applied to forty jobs, gotten five interviews and no offers. I have another interview next week for Whole Foods corporate, which I’m excited about because designing grocery store parking lots is really a lot more interesting than one might think.”

  “It is?”

  “Fuck no.” He shrugged. “I’d be lucky to get it, though.”

  Flannery dropped the book and laid her hand on his arm, her nose wrinkling like a rabbit’s, her tone serious and dark as she said, “I’m really sorry.” She said it like she meant it, but also like his job prospects weren’t what she was really talking about. She had started wearing powder and her freckles lay beneath the makeup like stars dimmed by cumulous clouds.

  “You have never judged me, and that’s something I always loved about you. But I have made a lot of mistakes. I haven’t treated you right. I haven’t treated a lot of people right.” Flannery paused, trying to convey something that Santiago did not want to understand.

  Someone came running into the waiting room saying, “He’s here!,” but it was a stranger addressing a group of strangers, excited about a stranger’s new baby. Santiago yearned to trade places with them. “Spit it out, Flancake.”

  “Santi, we have always had something . . .”

  He spoke before she could continue, before he could lose his nerve. “Let’s go to the courthouse right now and get married. Nothing’s stopping us,” he pleaded, as though the molecules in the air could be transformed by pure enthusiasm.

  She sat up, exasperated. “We’re not getting married. You know that.”

  “But we UNDERSTAND each other.”

  She stared at him.

  “You’re not listening,” he said, illogically. These were things he’d been saving up for later, but now later was in danger. An excruciating detergent jingle came on the television in the corner. “I’m ready for a home and a family and all that stuff we used to make fun of.”

  He thought Flannery might be tearing up a little as she said, “We are like a family. That is the fact you don’t want to face: we understand each other like siblings who speak in shorthand understand each other.” Santiago’s lungs deflated. A collapse. A crumbling. But Flannery refused to stop the assault, adding, “I wish that were enough, but it isn’t. You deserve somebody who loves you best.”

  They were quiet except for Flan’s repulsive sniffling. Santiago thought about the money he’d loaned her for the snow machine, the money he didn’t have. “This is not the way to break up with someone,” said Santiago, and it felt like a different person talking.

  “How would you do it?” she asked, turning her wide, watery cat eyes on him.

  “When breaking up with someone, be sympathetic but not patronizing. Explain yourself but avoid clichés like ‘I haven’t treated you right’ or ‘I love you like a brother.’” Flannery was openly crying now, and Santiago sensed she was trying to get him to think they were on the same side when they weren’t. “And whatever you do, don’t fall apart. If you’re breaking up with someone, you don’t have the right to fall apart in front of them.”

  She smeared snot with her sleeve, which did nothing to convince him she hurt as much as he did. There was a shift change at the nurses’ station, and a group of them walked off down the hall, purses slung over their shoulders.

  Santiago stared back at the television. “Do you think they’ll get the stain off? I’m worried.”

  She ignored him. “We’ll always love each other in a way?”

  He had no idea why she would phrase this as a question to him. Santiago stood.

  “Aren’t you going to stay and see the baby?” The crow’s-feet around her eyes became more prominent as she squeezed them shut.

  “I’m going to the bathroom,” said Santiago, attempting a tone of stiff dignity as he walked away.

  All the other times she’d left him should have prepared him for this, chipping away at his dependence on her. He told himself, this shouldn’t be such a big surprise. It shouldn’t hurt so much. He didn’t go to the bathroom. He walked past it, all the way out the door. He grabbed the plastic Jesus lodged in the bottom of his messenger bag and tossed it into the grass.

  Santiago found his car in the hospital parking lot. He popped the trunk, which was partially filled with Black Cats, Roman candles, sparklers, and a fountain called “Dark Science.” The previous summer’s severe drought meant a strict burn ban had gone into effect just before the Fourth of July, leaving Santiago with an ambitious cache of unused fireworks. He stared at them until his phone vibrated. It was a text from Brandon. The baby was here. Safe and sound.

  He imagined lining the fireworks up in a row and lighting the fireworks one at a time in succession. Noise. Lights. Love. We are an explosion, it would say. Maybe a spectacle was needed to make Flannery see how ridiculous she was. He would look at her as she came outside, the air filled with sooty pigment, and scream into the cacophony like a wild animal. He would be bigger and better than before. He would change. He would change her mind.

  When they were younger, Santiago suspected Flannery kept leaving him because he was too boring, not crazy enough. He even admitted this once to her, while they watched television in his apartment in Boston. She’d said, unconvincingly, “No, that’s not it,” and took his head onto her lap, pulling her stubby, bitten nails through his hair. “What does it mean,” she asked another time, in that dreamy voice she used when talking mostly to herself, “that whenever I’m upset, I end up comforting you?” How long had Santiago been hounded by the slippage between what he was and what he needed to be to make Flannery happy?

  He looked up at the square hospital building and calculated which windows funneled into the antiseptic room where Flannery waited. In the dark of the parking lot he placed the fireworks carefully on the pavement, searching for a lighter in his pockets.

  He decided to start big. To really grab her attention. It took him a few seconds to get Dark Science lit, but when he did, it shot a shower of gold and silver sparks twelve feet into the air, the base spinning in a circle of red and green flare all the time whistling like an oncoming train. It seemed to go on forever, and Santiago smiled in triumph.

  As he fumbled to find the next fuse, Santi heard footsteps. “Stop right there! Put your arms in the air!” He turned to find a security guard, small and round. “I’m calling the bomb squad.”

  “They’re fireworks. Safe fireworks,” said Santiago. “For a woman in the maternity ward. Please. I promised her.” Santiago was intentionally vague, hoping the man might think he was the father of the baby being born.

  The man relaxed a little and sighed. “I could lose my job.”

  “Been there, done that,” said Santiago, under his breath.

  “What?”

  “Can you just back up a few feet? I’ll set them off really fast and then you can come running and subdue me. You’ll be a hero.”

  The man shrugged and backed up.

  So, one by one, Santiago set off all the fireworks until the air was filled with smoke and the acrid smell of sulfur. The security guard played along good-naturedly, saying “oooh” or “aaaahhh” after each small glittery eruption.

  “Thank you. Thank you very much.” Santiago bowed.

  He looked at the asphalt littered with bits of paper and charred wicks like confetti. It was a letdown. When his father took him to see Fourth of July fireworks once as a boy, Santiago had asked why they didn’t just set them off all at once and make one enormous explosion. His father explained to him
that it was all about building up to things, anticipation and reward. Santi heard his father’s words but it was not a concept he understood at the time, being a boy born ready for everything to happen.

  “Come on, buddy,” said the security guard. “Let’s go.”

  Sweat poured down Santiago’s chest and the back of his legs as they made their way toward the main hospital doors, light glowing from behind the sliding glass. “She’s never coming back to me,” said Santiago. “It’s over between us.”

  “I have a couple of my own. Child support, all that. It’s hell.”

  “Fucking hell.”

  Santiago felt the night breeze on his face. The headlights of a car turning into the parking lot seemed unnecessarily bright. As he and the security guard walked side by side, jealousy and loss breaking over Santiago in waves, he looked at the long horizon of buildings and highway billboards and radio towers. They seemed to reach and claw toward a sky that was only an absence of light.

  FLANNERY

  In the waiting room, Flannery tilted her orange soda bottle, allowing a few drops to fall onto the white linoleum as she exhaled the words, “For Esu.”

  She prayed that her sister would be all right and that the child, while premature, would be healthy; she poured libations on the ground, as Kunle had taught her, to their favorite Yoruba deity, the trickster and protector of the crossroads. Then, she tossed a brown paper towel over the orange puddle on the floor.

  The others trickled into the waiting room: Alyce, still dressed up, then Steven and Lou, Harry in pajama pants. Flannery never saw Santiago return, which made her feel both guilty and relieved.

  It was three in the morning, and Flannery was exhausted. During the past two weeks, she and Brandon had stayed up late each night trying to figure out what had gone wrong with their snow machine in the silo. Because ski resorts were looking for acres of coverage, they required very big, very expensive water pumps and air compressors. She and Brandon had tweaked the machine from Utah to work at a smaller scale but with more complex functioning capabilities. They had created a software program to input the variables of humidity and atmospheric pressure that existed in the dry season of the Sahel and installed special insulation and climate control equipment in the silo, so it would be possible to accurately measure the output of the machine before the external air altered the chemistry. But their trial run had been a failure, and they weren’t sure why. The snowflakes didn’t form; instead, a cold sleet rained down inside the silo.

  Sitting in the plastic waiting room chair, her neck cramped, her soda finished, Flannery was startled to attention by Brandon emerging from the flapping hallway doors saying, “In the red corner, the tough and talented Rosie Salim, weighing in at five pounds three ounces. Ten fingers and ten toes and ready to rumble.”

  Through the glass separating them from the NICU, Flannery stood next to Alyce and looked at the tightly swaddled newborn, breathing peacefully through her ventilator. Her milky earlobes peeking from her cap, Flan’s niece squinched her eyes into adorable little slits. Flannery leaned into the window, imagining the smell of baby, powdery and sour.

  When Rosie began to cry, Flannery listened as Alyce soothed her with soft chants through the glass: “You will be brave. You will be lucky. You will be loved. You will feel joy.”

  “A lot of pressure.” Flannery wondered if what they said could slip its way into the bloodstream and the knitted fibers of muscle that bound the bones together.

  “Think so?”

  “Have you thought of putting it in the form of a question?” Flannery pressed her shoulder into Alyce’s. “Will you feel joy, little girl? Will you be brave today? Will you learn patience and how to be kind? Will you find your way? Will it snow in the desert? Will the birds re . . . ?”

  Flannery was interrupted by a loud noise coming from outside. A booming and whizzing. The two women lurched toward the window to find that fireworks were being launched above the parking lot. Bright splashes of color erupted into the sky. Pink and purple and long white stripes. It was beyond weird. As Flannery stared, some of the eruptions, when the white lights fell back down toward the earth, looked like what she hoped would happen if she and Brandon were able to fix their machine: Snow. Falling.

  Snow falling at above-freezing temperatures. Glittering like fireworks. Alighting slowly toward the ground. In her fantasy, Kunle would be at the silo when they performed the successful test, wearing his Drogba jersey and jeans, face as handsome and serious as the young Soyinka, and, in this dream, Flannery would kiss him on the cheek before disappearing behind the controls and water tanks. By this time, she would have gotten up the nerve to confess to Kunle her awful breach of trust. He would be hurt, but she hoped he would also understand. Maybe not at first, she thought, but eventually. She couldn’t force him, but she could beg.

  Molly and Rosie (on Molly’s chest in a candy cane baby sling) would also be there with Brandon. Harry would arrive with the boys, and immediately walk over to Alyce, kissing her straight on the mouth and sliding an arm around her, laughing. Steven would be sharing nuggets of wisdom with Maya and Harry and Alyce’s boys, little Zen koans about farming. “What goes down must come up.”

  Santiago always did like an entrance, and he would make one dressed in the rattiest ankle-length fur coat Flannery had ever seen, his Russian ushanka beaming off the top of his head, grazing the door as walked through it in black boots with shiny silver buckles, a woman’s muff swallowing hands and wrists.

  After setting everything up, Flannery would walk over to Molly and pick up little Rosie, skin the color of strawberry ice cream, and hold her up, the older cousin to her and Kunle’s future children. She would let Rosie settle onto her chest, and behind her would be Kunle, and behind him Molly moving backward into Brandon’s body. Like a row of Russian matryoshka dolls nestled together to form a set.

  There would be noise as the machine cranked and shook, the industrial lights covered in metal strips flickering. It would begin.

  Flannery would hand Rosie back to her mother and try to remember what it was like to be a child and feel that the world was still fluid and mysterious, a place where monsters and angels waited in the wings, just out of view.

  Then, they would begin to see it. Just barely. Little bits of white. Tiny. Lintlike. Cosmic dandruff. They would float from the open metal-gridded mouth of the machine, a little wobbly on their axes, as if they’d been waiting inside this mechanical prison for eons and were still getting their sea legs, air legs.

  The flecks of white would grow. The next puff would blow out bigger ones, real snowflakes that you could see. Snowflakes that, as they passed through the light, looked like real snow in the yellow pool of a streetlamp in a Wisconsin winter. Watching them fly and flutter and fall softly onto the combed heads of her friends, Flannery would almost forget she had no health insurance of any kind. Almost forget about everyone they knew who’d been laid off, about her dying sister, about climate change and the religious riots happening near Kunle’s mother’s village. About the fact that she had betrayed him. Not forget, but almost forget.

  Because when Flannery arrived in Nigeria for the first time, fearful of the chaos and danger she felt surrounded her as she stepped into throngs of people waiting outside the airport fence, it had been nighttime. The consulate driver picked her up, and they pulled onto the highway with military escorts, a lead and follow vehicle, heading into Lagos proper. There was something insane in the image of them barreling down those weaving and washed-out dirt roads in all their conspicuous, glorious first-world splendor. She couldn’t imagine what the people they passed must have thought. But she thought they were beautiful. Everything was just as poor and crazy as she’d expected—plastic tables and oil lamps and people drinking and dancing, selling food, children darting through the streets—but more joyous. Because she’d forgotten to expect joy.

  Flannery would continue to watch the snowflakes as they spewed out near the ceiling, before they fell, and she woul
d cry and feel ashamed of the crying. She would see Kunle to her right and allow their eyes to latch together for a moment until the sound of laughter broke the fishing line of their gaze. She loved him. She was exceedingly imperfect and yet she hoped he would still love her back. Forgive her. Have faith that she could change. The snow would feel cool and real as it hit her cheeks. The silo would be gone, and she would suddenly be in the Sahel, a yam farm stretching into the distance.

  Flannery would look around at Kunle and all her friends as they stood in the middle of West Africa, covered in the lightest dusting of snow, faces tilted upward to a God most of them didn’t believe in and who probably wasn’t there. Flannery might stumble under the dizzy weight of the white, cold flakes, but that wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t even matter if she fell. She would be home.

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .*

  About the author

  Meet Mary Helen Specht

  About the book

  The Seed of a Novel

  Read on

  Recommended Reading

  About the author

  Meet Mary Helen Specht

  Photo by Erica Nix

  BORN AND RAISED in Abilene, Texas, to librarian parents, MARY HELEN SPECHT holds a BA in English from Rice University and an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College, where she won the award for fiction. Her writing has been anthologized and appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times. She has been awarded fellowships from the Fulbright Program, the I-Park Foundation, and the Dobie Paisano Fellowship Program, and she has also lived and worked in South America and Africa. Specht currently teaches creative writing at St. Edward’s University in Austin, Texas. She enjoys live music, traveling by bus, goat pepper soup, elote, snorkeling in Barton Springs, paying for things with coins, receiving postcards in the mail, reading and lolling about in hammocks, hiking, meditating, bumper stickers, and drinking wine from a bota.