Migratory Animals

by Mary Helen Specht

  He also justified going to Marsh by promising himself he would study abroad. In Finland, naturally. Then, he heard Alyce sneeze twice, and looked at her sitting primly in the metal chair, her legs in a pretzel like a dancer: pale skin, black slacks, a gray V-neck T-shirt.

  Harry never went to Finland. He told his parents the architecture program was too demanding for him to take a semester off, which was partly true. But he was also afraid if he left, Alyce might find someone else to spend her time with. They were living at Dryden House that year. They were nesting.

  He and Alyce weren’t officially a couple back then, but they had frequent midnight powwows in his bedroom (Harry was the only one with his own room, for which he paid more rent). He explored her body like it was the map of a northern coastline. The dip of her lower back. The low-lying stomach bookended by hip bones, sharp ledges where his fingers got caught up. The elbow. The clavicle. The shoulder blade. She was small and sharp and he claimed her bit by bit.

  In those days, Alyce was indefatigable. One project after another: painting the kitchen yellow, inviting a group of Bengali students over to teach her how to make curries, waking Harry up in the middle of the night to say, “I’ve found us cheap flights to Vegas. Let’s go there tomorrow and win a million bucks. Give me your credit card.” When did she find time to study? He wasn’t sure. Sometimes she scared him, but it was a good kind of scary. Like a roller coaster you know must have been tested but still seemed like it might go off the rails at any moment.

  One day he came home to find dozens of copper birds strung from the ceiling above his bed, small as fists with sharp beaks and tails. The light glanced off the metal as they turned faintly on paperclip hangers. They were crude cutouts made with an inexact tool, but there were so many, floating up there all together, that they blurred into something stunning. They flocked. Like a family. Like they belonged together. He lay back on the bed, looked up at them, and thought, Finland. Alyce. Finland. Alyce. Family.

  MOLLY

  Two months ago, when her husband, Brandon, had announced that he’d finagled an arrangement where Flannery could rent lab space at the Climate Institute after her research post closed down, Molly had bought a bottle of prosecco on her way home and proceeded to dance around the house to the Bangles. When they were kids, All Over the Place was the cassette her sister used to play again and again on the pink jam box they shared: I’m going down to Liverpool to do nothing. All the days of my life . . .

  However, Flannery’s move to Austin was not turning out like Molly had hoped. As she complained to Brandon one night during the Dumpster Divers reality television show they were addicted to watching before bed, Flannery was being distant and weird. Supposedly spending all her time with friends from grad school. Refusing Molly’s offer of the irises—as though everyone didn’t already know she was going to stay. As though, even if she did end up with Kunle, they wouldn’t ultimately prefer to live here.

  Molly tried to be a good sport. You still might move back to Nigeria? For good? Really? Flannery liked to remind her that she had already lived there for five years, but Molly still had a hard time processing this fact. Flannery’s life in West Africa may have seemed to last years to Flannery, but for Molly it had passed by overnight.

  Molly had pictured herself and her sister eating lunch together every day at one of the cheap Thai buffets along the Drag west of campus. In the weeks since she’d been back, however, Flannery worked straight through lunch, only agreeing to meet Molly once at the institute’s basement cafeteria where they shoveled down spinach macaroni and cheese off thick plates still warm from the dishwasher, brown cafeteria trays stacked up on an extra chair. The windowless room was depressing, the floor coated in yellowed linoleum.

  After minutes filled with the sound of their chewing, Flannery said, “I burned you some of my Fela Kuti bootlegs. You liked that last Afrobeat stuff I sent, right?”

  Molly nodded.

  “When you and Brandon visit Nigeria, Kunle and I will take you to the Shrine.”

  “I thought Kunle was a snake-charming, Bible-beating, Holy Roller who rejected indigenous religion?”

  “Africa Shrine,” Flannery said. “Where Fela played before he died. Where Femi plays now.” She told Molly she had never seen anything like the shows there. Dozens of the best musicians in West Africa playing until dawn. Dancers covered in paint and intricate beads and towering headdresses, shaking their hips and shoulders so fast to the music they become a blur of color and texture. They stomped and sang and glistened in the lights. Then, like a heartbeat, they just stopped.

  Molly nodded, reaching for Flannery’s plate to stack on top of her own. “Maybe we’ll make it someday.” But she didn’t mean it.

  After dumping their dishes into the plastic tub, she turned to her sister. “I was thinking we could drive to Abilene next weekend and visit Papa.” Molly didn’t need to say out loud that it was the thirteenth anniversary of their mother’s death.

  Flannery stopped walking, her expression flat, unreadable. “No,” she said, as if it had been a random question: Do you have to go to the bathroom? Do you have change for a five?

  Molly opened her mouth but nothing came out. What was going on with her sister?

  Flannery began to walk away, but before she opened the door to the stairwell, she turned to Molly, who thought she caught a flash of contrition cross her sister’s face. “I talked to Papa the other day, and I think he wants to be alone this time. We’ll go up another weekend.”

  Molly nodded. She didn’t understand, but she didn’t press. She deferred to Flannery. She had no desire to go home without her sister.

  Waiting for the elevator, Molly remembered when they were kids, returning from Rose Park on their bikes, swooping into the driveway one after the other to see Papa packing the trunk of the car. He was wearing white sneakers rather than cowboy boots. His out-of-town driving sneakers.

  “We leave in fifteen. Grab your jackets. There’s going to be a cold snap.”

  Snaps on pants, snapdragons in a pot on the porch, snapping her fingers, which she couldn’t do nearly as well as her sister. Cold snap. Molly had rushed to get her blue jean jacket covered in NASA patches, not because she understood the temperature was dropping, but because they were going to Dallas again and she wanted some sort of protection from whatever it was that made everything different there: Uncomfortable. Awkward. Sad.

  Even then, Molly knew her family vacations were not like most people’s. Since she could remember, when her family left town, they traveled in her parents’ used Pontiac three hours east on winding Interstate 20 to the sprawling white medical center in Dallas.

  Did she understand back then why her mother had to go there? Molly remembered asking her father about it once—early on, probably, though she couldn’t be sure. Why? Why were they always going to the hospital?

  Papa had told her, “To be witness. To be witnesses to each other’s lives.”

  It was one of her father’s many cryptic statements from which she and Flannery were forced to piece together their own meanings.

  Their mother said very little on these road trips, napping and looking out the window, flipping through a plant catalog, while their father played cassettes of Larry Blevins’s Town and Country Christmas Bluegrass Jamboree. “Where should we stop for lunch, y’all?” their father, trying to be upbeat, would ask after they’d gone through Fort Worth and were approaching Arlington, the Ferris wheels, roller coasters, and water slides of the big amusement parks taunting them on both sides of the highway. Molly pressed her forehead against the window glass until the passing structures were nothing but blurs of primary colors.

  “Dairy Queen,” said Flannery, flipping her long braid back and forth. Flannery always knew what she wanted. They weren’t normally allowed fast food, but Flannery’s tone of voice implied they deserved it, that this was a shitty way to have to spend a weekend, and that lunch at Dairy Queen was the least their parents could do.

  Molly
didn’t remember their mother smiling on these trips. Was it because she knew her smile was slowly becoming a grimace? That gummy snarl that eventually claimed all the faces of people with Huntington’s? Or was there just no reason to?

  Back then, when they were alone, Molly begged Flan to retell stories of their mother before. Her older sister claimed their mother used to star in plays at the local theater, which was in the round with big gray bleacher seats. This impressed Molly because Abilene was her whole world, and this theater, where they sometimes went to see pageants and musicals at Christmas, the apex of local sophistication and grandeur. Flannery claimed their mother had sometimes taken them along to a performance, allowing them to sit backstage and eat sandwiches, and that the other actors doted on them, teaching them dance steps and painting their faces with stage makeup. Molly had no memory of these events, but she believed Flan. She believed her sister that the golden age of their family had passed.

  When Molly opened the door to her house, a stucco bungalow covered by a tin roof that didn’t match but was too expensive to replace, Brandon was sitting at the kitchen table looking intently into a dirt-encrusted cardboard box as the last of dusk light filtered through the miniblinds.

  “What do you suppose this is?” he asked, holding up an oddly shaped orange-and-green gourdlike vegetable from the box.

  “Magic pumpkin.” She dropped her keys into the ceramic bowl on top of the antique secretary desk.

  He tilted his head, considering it. “Sautéing it in butter wouldn’t cook off any of the enchantment?”

  “No way.”

  When they received their weekly box of produce from Steven’s farm—Molly and Brandon owned a small community share—it was often filled with exotic varieties of vegetables that they didn’t really know what to do with.

  “Smothering it in cheese might not hurt, either.”

  Santiago was coming to dinner, and they had a few hours to kill before Lucinda Williams took the stage at La Zona Rosa. As Brandon washed and put away the vegetables, Molly slipped down into the rocking chair. Out the window, she watched her neighbor across the street soap up his sedan, suds overflowing out of the driveway and running down the street, a green garden hose snaked around his feet. There was a sycamore tree in the man’s front yard that reminded Molly of her childhood home, of the two sycamores she and Flannery used to climb until eventually both trees died from a fungal disease when she was a freshman in high school, leaving the front yard empty and burdened with sun. When they’d climbed the trees as girls, she on one and Flan on the other, they pretended to be inside fairy castles, draping gold blankets over themselves like capes and smuggling their parents’ champagne flutes to use as wands. Flannery always wanted to be the good fairy, forcing Molly to be the bad one. Secretly, Molly hadn’t minded. It gave her an excuse to say mean things to her sister.

  The rocking chair creaked beneath her. It was old, an antique from Molly’s mother’s childhood. Most of Molly and Brandon’s furniture was hand-me-down. After her mother died, Papa hadn’t wanted to be constantly confronted with so many memories in his Abilene house. Flannery lived out of a backpack and took nothing, so Molly and Brandon commandeered the round table and matching chairs carved with images of wind and clouds, the rocking chair, the secretary desk, the coatrack made of brass.

  On their walls were framed album covers from their combined collection of LPs and EPs: the Japanese version of “The Wind Cries Mary,” the Andy Warhol Velvet Underground with the peel-away banana sticker, Chuck Berry’s first pressing of “Roll Over Beethoven.” She and Brandon wanted kids someday, but they were also reluctant to leave behind their present life, free of the clutter of plastic toys, the distraction of whining voices.

  This was Molly’s most peaceful time of the day, when she read trash magazines surrounded by the smells and noises of Brandon in the kitchen. They liked to be silent, together. Not the sad, empty silence of elderly couples in Denny’s restaurants, but a silence that pulsed. Washing dishes, reading in bed, sleepily getting dressed in the morning, all of it like a graceful dance that buoyed her up.

  When she and Brandon talked, it was because they had a story to tell. As a joke, once, Brandon’s friends had given him business cards with the title “Oral Historian” written in dramatic calligraphy across the front. From the beginning, perhaps intuiting that they’d be together for the long haul, Brandon and Molly parceled out their stories in bits and pieces, dragging some of them out for years, like a television series of their past. One of Molly’s favorites was the story of how her husband became interested in cooking.

  Growing up in a traditional family, Brandon had cooked only when absolutely necessary—when his mother was sick and his sisters too young to be trusted with the stovetop burners. Then, one summer, he received a small study-abroad grant from the Kurdish American League to visit the region in Iraqi Kurdistan where his parents came from and to live with a host family outside a village near the Iranian border. His parents had no desire to return themselves; their extended family was dead or had left during the Barzani revolts in the late 1970s.

  After a hike to the Bekhal waterfall one afternoon, Brandon returned to the stone house to find his host mother crying as she chopped aubergines into cubes on her worktable. He fell in beside her, slicing green peppers and courgettes and potatoes, knowing better than to ask. The lives of Kurdish people were full of things to cry about. Maybe she cried for when they were mustard gassed or for when they were massacred and forced from their homes. Maybe it was for the sons killed or the daughters raped and disappeared. The knife was awkward in Brandon’s hand, and his vegetable pieces all funky and oblong.

  But as Brandon and his host mother stewed vegetables and kneaded dough, and as the light slanted through the rough, rectangular windows turning everything a pale gold, the woman, her long hair tied back in a flowery scarf, began to sing. Brandon tapped a rhythm out with his foot. They said nothing. By the time the tapsi was prepared and the family, which normally annoyed Brandon with their loud talk and strange manners, was sitting around the table sopping up the spicy sauce with thick slices of naan, his host mother was smiling again. So was he.

  Sitting in the rocking chair as Brandon prepared food in the other room, Molly thought about calling her aunt in Dallas to see if she would drive down to Abilene next weekend and meet her at her father’s house. But no. Flannery said they should wait, and so they would. Molly hadn’t talked to her aunt in ages, anyway: since their mother’s death that side of the family had fallen off, like a old neighborhood for which you feel affection but never have a reason to visit anymore.

  When they were growing up, their aunt’s was where they stayed each time they went to the medical center in Dallas, and Molly remembered the brick ranch house as dark and musty with flowery upholstery and thick drapes. There was an antique clock that struck the hour and half hour, and blue-and-white china plates that hung on the wall above the mantel.

  Only as an adult did Molly begin to wonder how their aunt must have felt being the one who didn’t get Huntington’s. The one who made the painful decision not to have children and yet, as it turned out, never even possessed the defective gene. Did she ever wish she could trade places with her sister? Did she ever wish she could take Molly’s and Flannery’s uncertain DNA strands and fill them with her own purer transcription? Of course, back then, their aunt would not have known for sure she couldn’t get the disease; she was still at risk.

  Like their mother, their aunt was a gardener, although she loved different plants. When the weather was nice, the two women would drink what their aunt called Texas Snake Bites, cider mixed with Lone Star beer, and sit in the garden having long, meandering conversations.

  “She was charming; she knew her bourbon,” she remembered their aunt saying to their mother once, “or at least she liked her bourbon.” But Molly could no longer imagine who they might have been talking about. She remembered a tiny orange tree and fierce-looking tiger orchids. She remembered th
e smell of Chantilly.

  “Your winter sweet is blooming nicely,” her mother said. “And your . . . and your . . . what is it called, the yellow blossoms . . .”

  “You know what it’s called,” Flannery sneered suddenly from where they played a board game on the patio table, no longer pretending she too wasn’t eavesdropping. “You grew up here!”

  At the time Molly didn’t share Flannery’s frustration over their mother’s many memory lapses and confusions. She was still too young to fully understand what it meant to watch the woman who brought her into the world fade and disappear.

  “Yes,” said their mother. “It’s on the tip of my tongue.”

  Molly squinted but couldn’t see anything on her mother’s tongue.

  “Witch hazel,” said their aunt, nonchalantly. “I thought there wasn’t enough rain for it this fall, but it’s done better than I expected.”

  Their aunt was also a big fan of the Dallas Cowboys, “America’s Team,” and so sometimes, while their parents were at the medical center, Molly and Flannery found themselves sitting around listlessly watching football with her in the afternoons. If Molly let her hand fall between the sofa cushions, she could feel the sudden hardness of the handgun her aunt kept hidden there “for protection.” During one trip their aunt was hoarse from a case of laryngitis, and so she poked Molly or Flannery whenever she wanted them to yell in her stead. Flannery was poked whenever the Cowboys did well, and she yelled: “Woohoo! That’s what I’m talking about!” Molly was poked whenever they had been wronged by the refs or by the other team: “Bullshit. Total bullshit.”

  After changing into shorts, Molly rolled out her yoga mat on the back porch, its wooden overhang festooned with white Christmas lights they kept up all yearlong.

  Then, she did vinyasas, swiftly moving from one pose to the next in a flow: Mountain, Plank, Up Dog, Down Dog, Warrior Two, Reverse Warrior, Triangle. Tuladandasana, Bakasana, Salamba Sirsasana. She was obsessed with balance poses. She told herself she did them over and over because she enjoyed them, not out of any desire to mask or correct her physical faults, her increasing clumsiness. She lifted her right leg gingerly from behind as her chest dipped toward the ground, her torso twisting to one side as she splayed her left hand to the sky, gaze following. She teetered but managed to stay in it. She breathed deeply. Half-Moon.