Migratory Animals

by Mary Helen Specht

  Everything in these lab stations was white, including the chairs and tables and cubbies. It made Molly feel as though she were walking through a cloud.

  “Hayes Carll,” she told Sanjeet, counting the number of rubber gloves in the drawer labeled GLOVES, PENS, FORCEPS, RAZOR BLADES.

  “Sell him to me.” Sanjeet was leaning back precariously, chair balanced on one leg, lab coat half on, half off.

  “He’s the only musician under forty who can pull off a rose-embroidered western shirt,” she said, letting him listen to the rockabilly twang on one of her earbuds before closing up the drawer and marking -10 on her clipboard. “You guys got everything you need?”

  “We need to buy you a drink,” Sanjeet said, nodding to include his “butt-mate”—the graduate student whose bench station was back-to-back with his and whose gray-eyed gaze was intent on his computer screen. “We’ve been here since six this morning working on a grant application, and it’s time to move on.”

  “I have plans.”

  Molly had felt awkward around Sanjeet ever since the Climate Institute graduation party the year before when, after too much mystery punch, he’d beckoned her into a corner to show off the half-finished tattoo of Nikola Tesla on his back. In an inexplicable desire to match him, Molly had turned around and, without a second thought, dropped trou to reveal the words scrolled across her ass in a looped script: Proud to Be in Texas Where Bob Wills Is Still the King. Sanjeet pretended he didn’t remember.

  As Molly walked away, trying to negotiate a turn at the Faraday cage, she felt herself slip, feet escaping from under her, and there was nothing she could do but turn her hip so that she landed on its pocket of flesh. From this new position sprawled on the floor, the bulletin board that loomed over her, filled with scientific papers and signs warning of biohazards and radiation, seemed suddenly ominous.

  “Look who’s already started tippling.” Sanjeet grabbed her by both elbows, lifting her up. “What happened, wobbles?”

  “Too much energy, not enough fundamentals,” she said, trying to smile despite her throbbing hip. Trying not to show her fear. The janitors did their job too well, she told herself, staring at the waxed floor.

  “Hey, have I ever shown you my moon walk?” Sanjeet started to slide backward. “Check it out.”

  She watched him dance, Sanjeet’s slide moves causing him to recede from where she stood, still a little unsteady, one hand against the wall, the other reaching helplessly into thin air.

  FLANNERY

  As a child, whenever Flannery tripped and skinned her knee walking up the porch steps, or bit her tongue falling from the monkey bars, or belly flopped sailing off the diving board of the swimming pool in Rose Park, her father would always say the same thing: You’re a tough cookie. Tough cookies don’t cry.

  And so she didn’t. She became proud of the little white scars adorning her knobby knees as she soaped them in the bath before bedtime. Her mother told her, while putting on makeup before another performance of Guys and Dolls, that scars migrated up the body over time, showing Flan the C-section scar on her belly and claiming it had moved there from her foot. Flannery liked this idea and imagined being old with a face crisscrossed by mutilations like the prizefighters on television.

  While her sister, Molly, occasionally played tennis at the public courts in their neighborhood growing up, Flannery was drawn to sports with contact. She played defense in soccer, slicing her cleats through other girls’ legs; forward in basketball, protecting the rebound with her elbows; and digger in volleyball, her hip bones hitting the floor with a loud smack. She was a tough cookie.

  Then, her first heartbreak arrived, initially so painful she thought about nothing else for weeks, carrying around the wrenching loss of a beautiful, delicate archaeology student who had come home to wait tables for the summer in the same Mexican restaurant where she worked all through high school serving plates of warm sopapillas. Months after their breakup, he drove back to visit her during fall vacation, parking his beater in her parents’ driveway, long fingers combing through his well-picked Afro.

  “Flan.” He pronounced it like the Mexican dessert, their own little joke, as he grabbed her into an awkward hug.

  She hadn’t planned this reaction but, standing there barefoot on her porch, she said, “You shouldn’t have come.” Because as she’d seen him walk across the lawn, Flannery realized she’d already worked through the pain, discarded it or sealed it off like an oil well whose gush was over. Love, like all wounds, healed easily, she realized. Nothing was really at stake—and not because she thought her life would be short, cut off by the genetic disease that stalked her childhood, but because she somehow felt assured of her invincibility, every new survival another testament to it.

  Their parents had encouraged this way of thinking, hadn’t they? Hadn’t her father told the girls they would be all right? That they had nothing to worry about? Which was why Flannery had been startled by her father’s words when she called in tears to tell Papa what she’d witnessed at Quack’s.

  “I know.”

  She stopped sniffling. A darker foreboding replaced the tears, which had been made up mostly of fear because part of Flannery had expected her father, with all his stubbornness, to tell her, “No way, José.” She thought he would say, “Don’t cry. Tough cookies don’t cry.” But instead, the words that traveled through the phone were, “I hoped I’d be long gone before this happened.”

  “But, Papa. I thought we didn’t inherit the gene. I thought . . .”

  “Who told you that?” As he spoke, she imagined him standing in the hallway, crouched over the old beige landline telephone still perched on the hutch, a halo of family photographs above his head. “I never said that.”

  “. . . I assumed . . .” Flannery let her voice trail off, confronted by her own lie.

  If she’d really assumed that, then why, in graduate school, had she submitted to a neurological exam and psychological screening before letting a nurse draw two vials of blood, one for the genetic test and one for research? They’d required that Flan bring someone with her when she came for the results, so she told Santiago they were going to the clinic to find out if she was pregnant (and, as far as she knew, he still thought that). At the time, Flannery toyed with the idea that if she came out looking pale, ghastly, he would not think she’d received an HD gene’s death sentence but the opposite. The life sentence of motherhood.

  In the tiny office, a genetic counselor had showed her the two printouts, one at a time. The first allele: normal. And then, the second allele: normal. Flannery was confused by this way of doing it. Of using suspense. A game show where the alleles were doors behind which the prizes and punishments of inheritance lay in wait.

  Returning to the clinic lobby, she’d seen Santiago before he saw her. He was engrossed in a midday talk show, legs tightly crossed, one knee resting on top of the other. Watching him, Flannery felt a wave of guilt for dragging him along, for trying to pretend that she wasn’t in this thing alone.

  “False alarm.”

  Santiago neither smiled nor frowned in response to the news. “Let me buy you a beer before I head back to the office.” It was the summer between semesters, and she was crashing at his place in Boston while he interned as a grunt on a project with a Dutch architect.

  They boarded the number 62 bus as it looped from the North End, with its redbrick and Italian restaurants, back through downtown. Santiago didn’t ask why she was so quiet or badger her to reveal what was wrong. Loyalty and lack of judgment: these were the qualities they cultivated in each other then. The stops and starts of the bus jarred them back and forth, their shoulders bumping against each other. The woman across the aisle read something called The Book of Tofu as Flan watched historical graveyards flitter by, the pub where you could drink a Sam Adams while looking at his grave marker across the street. Flannery didn’t really believe in an afterlife, but she couldn’t help think how much better it would be to be buried out here, where Amer
ican revolutionaries were buried. The dead were not hidden away, but slept among life, Bostonians walking past them on their way to work, right in the thick of things.

  A fifty-fifty chance. It was almost too neat, too tidy. Of course the test was negative. Of course she was free of the gene. She was invincible. The fact that Flannery didn’t possess the mutation had no effect on Molly’s chances one way or the other—Flannery knew enough about genetics to know that. The disease was maddeningly random in who it chose, but Flannery couldn’t escape the feeling that her own thick skin, her own ability to heal, was somehow connected to the outcome of the test. That she had sucked up all that was strong and, in doing so, stolen her future from Molly, the family’s delicate, rose-cheeked China doll.

  On the phone with her father, Flannery began to understand that it might have been the other way around. Their parents never told Molly to be a tough cookie. They indulged and protected her and stroked her hair at night because they already knew. Molly didn’t get Huntington’s because she was weaker; maybe she was just treated that way because she had Huntington’s.

  At that moment, Flannery didn’t think to ask how her father had known. Or why he’d never said anything before. “Maybe I’m wrong. I was jet-lagged and exhausted. Maybe it’s nothing.”

  “No.”

  The word was like a hard flick to her sternum. “But Molly never wanted to get tested.” Flannery didn’t know why she said this, why this mattered. The tests only revealed what was already there.

  “Expect erratic behavior,” he told her. “Don’t indulge it. You’ll need to take her to the specialist as soon as possible because they have new drugs to slow the progression.”

  “But, Papa, she doesn’t seem to realize yet.”

  “Oh.” There was a pause. “The worst isn’t knowing what is going to happen to them, Flan; the worst is knowing that they know what will happen.”

  There was another silence, and in that space flashed images of her mother, face resigned as fifteen-year-old Flannery changed her adult diaper, gently wiping and wiping until her mother shook. And Papa breaking his wrist—how it just hung limp like a sleeve—trying to lift her mother from bed because, even near the end, he refused to hire help or put her in a home.

  “You have to drive down from Abilene.” Flannery would only be here for a few months. She had a job in Nigeria. She had a life there.

  “I can’t,” said her father, in a whisper that sounded very old. “I’m in the middle of something. . . .” Papa spent his spare time writing literary westerns about assholes and tough guys. Once, after another rejection from a New York publishing house, Flannery asked why he never wrote anything based more on his own experiences. “Because I write about lives I never had, lived by men I could never be.”

  “It’s not like she doesn’t have a husband,” said Flannery eventually, as if they were discussing a problem with a logical solution. “Brandon will be great.”

  “Absolutely. Of course.”

  They talked a while longer about nothing, then said good-bye and hung up as though having come to some satisfactory agreement about the sale of a used car, a lemon. Flannery walked to the bathroom and dry-heaved into the toilet.

  Flan was not thinking about that phone conversation when Molly and Brandon picked her up at her run-down apartment complex on their way to Alyce’s ranch for the homecoming party. No, she would not think about it. She would not search for signs of disease in her sister’s movements as Molly jumped out of the car to let Flannery sit in the passenger seat, a rule the sisters had come up with years ago so neither would ever feel like a third wheel.

  Instead, Flannery leaned back against the headrest and imagined Kunle, who would be riding a danfo at that very moment, crowded four to a seat in the rickety van painted with maxims like “Protected by the Blood” or “No Food for Lazy Man,” hurtling down the lawless, crumbling highway toward Lagos and his visa interview at the U.S. Consulate later that week. Kunle hated traveling. He usually chose a seat by the window if he could get it and, when it was his turn to lean back in the seat (it was too crowded for everyone to do so at one time), took his handkerchief and spread it over the lower half of his face, as if that could protect him from the dust and car exhaust and odor of close bodies.

  “You’re quiet,” said Molly from the backseat as they drove out of town on a well-maintained highway where the traffic laws were posted and clear.

  Why not say it aloud? “I wish Kunle were here.” While she was allowed to roam the globe, he was still a prisoner to his country.

  “They’ll give your boy the visa. Why wouldn’t they?” Brandon tapped her lightly with one hand, the other gripping the steering wheel. She saw him glance in the rearview mirror at Molly, smile their private smile.

  Flannery didn’t feel like telling them about how few Nigerians made it past the consular officer sitting on the other side of the desk, attempting to judge whether each applicant could be trusted to return home. “Yeah.” She sighed. “Why wouldn’t they?”

  They should have applied for a fiancé visa, she thought. Those visas took months longer, but there was a better chance for approval. Of course, though she would never admit it to Kunle, this way of doing things was a win-win. If he didn’t get the visa, people would understand why she had to go back so soon.

  There was a saying in Nigerian pidgin: “Body no be firewood,” meaning that a body is not meant to be put through all the searing pains and horrors of this life. But when she’d first heard Kunle use the phrase, she’d thought he was talking about romantic sparks, the burn of physical attraction. Love turning your body into sticks of firewood. Flannery told herself she would not forget what it was like waking to the call to prayer each morning, dawn light illuminating a tree of egrets standing sentinel at the edge of the campus pond. She would not forget the burn of her body when she woke in his arms.

  Eventually the car drove over a cattle guard, a metal roadrunner soldered onto the open gate, before continuing for what seemed like forever down a curving caliche road. They parked adjacent to a white ranch house. Before Flannery opened the car door, Molly popped her head over the seat, kissing her on the cheek. “You’re home.” Then, Brandon wrapped his arms awkwardly around them both, kissing the opposite cheek until even Flannery’s face betrayed a small smile.

  ALYCE

  Flannery’s boyfriend is coming to visit.”

  Molly announced this abruptly to the people sitting closest to her at the picnic table, including Alyce, who dipped tostada chips into habañero and mango salsa and drank a strong margarita from a plastic cup, letting the sweat bead on her forehead and neck. Even in the shade of the oak tree, languid afternoon turning to dusk, the summer Texas heat was brutal. Alyce turned toward Flannery, her best friend, but was not particularly surprised, merely raising an eyebrow at her to say: Well, tell us about it, by all means.

  “He’s applying for a tourist visa,” Flannery said, shaking her head. She seemed withdrawn, and Molly, fingers fluttering nervously in the air, was in a state Alyce could only describe as forcibly cheerful.

  “Then, they’re going to buy a house down the street and stay forever,” said Molly, sweetly, jokingly, sporting red rectangular glasses and a black T-shirt. “Even if I have to keep them tied up in the basement.” She was trying to be funny, but there was a tenor of desperation in her voice. It was no secret that Molly was unusually attached to her older sister, which was why she’d ended up at Marsh for college, becoming part of their coterie despite being two years younger, even marrying Brandon, who at this particular moment announced, “And then we can barbecue every Sunday and finally start drinking martinis and sleeping with each other’s wives.”

  “Finally,” said Santiago, swirling goopy queso with a spoon. The whole spread disgusted Alyce, who let the flies land on her untouched plate without bothering to shoo them away.

  “Glad you guys have it all worked out,” said Flannery, sitting bronze cast beneath the sun’s rays as they sliced th
rough tree branches, her brown hair and the freckles covering her body adding to a sepia effect. Alyce let her head loll onto Flannery’s shoulder as two vultures glided on wind currents far above them, and she tried to feel happy that Flan was home.

  The party was made up of old friends, mostly from their college days, many of whom Alyce didn’t really see on a regular basis anymore. Kids. Work. Life. Breath.

  Steven and his girlfriend, Lou, walked over to the picnic table, and Alyce stood to make room for them, gathering up dirty napkins so they wouldn’t blow across the yard and lodge among the dense patch of cedars lining the fence.

  “You started gardening.” Steven pointed to the small eight-by-four raised bed.

  “Harry’s idea.” Everything was Harry’s idea, she almost said. Alyce felt like an outside observer watching people she knew, in that way you know familiar television characters, on an old Zenith. Why was she required to respond? How was it they didn’t realize she wasn’t one of them anymore?

  “Just say no to chemical fertilizers.”

  “I’m glad you brought that up,” responded Harry from across the table. “I actually invited you all out here so you could each take a dump in our compost pile.” A whoop came from the porch as someone turned up Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean” on the stereo.

  “You should put up a fence to keep out armadillos. They like to eat roots.”

  “I found an old book in the ranch house that claims armadillos taste like sea turtles,” said Harry, eyebrow raised.

  “Let’s trust the literature.”

  Alyce had known Steven for as long as she’d known her husband. Steven had been Harry’s roommate freshman year and later lived with all of them at Dryden House, the dumpy, ramshackle clapboard perennially rented to upperclassmen on one of the muddled but tree-lined streets bordering Marsh College. After graduation, Steven had been recruited into the vast and ambiguous Dallas consulting industry, the lucrative late-1990s catchall for aimless humanities majors with good grades, but he was laid off after the tech bubble. He’d used his small savings to buy a piece of land near the Austin airport that he named Heavy Metal Farm. Now he raised chickens and grew heirloom tomatoes and other organics (“consulting for the soul”) to sell at the farmers’ markets, which had become popular since locavores had infested the city. But with the recession, even the fat of the land had gone anorexic. The last time they’d spoken, he’d told Alyce he wasn’t sure the farm would last through next year.