Migratory Animals

by Mary Helen Specht

  Then, there was a brief silence inside of which Molly could imagine her mother-in-law’s ritual litany of complaints. Her gout. Her neighbors. Her children.

  “Sahlah is a grown woman. Let her alone,” said Brandon. “What she’s doing is far from child abuse, Mama.”

  Brandon’s sister Sahlah, housewife and mother of two, had recently decided to don the niqab, arriving at his parents’ most recent Eid-ul-Fitr dinner wearing the midnight-blue headgear that left only her dark brown eyes and heavily penciled eyebrows showing, outraging Brandon’s only marginally religious parents. Molly had been intrigued by how Sahlah’s face no longer gave away every emotion. Was her mouth smirking beneath there? Or set in that line of determination she must have used when she was sixteen to get her curfew moved back to twelve, later than Brandon or his middle sister had ever been allowed?

  Molly left her husband sitting at the kitchen table, but after turning the corner toward the bedroom, she stopped at the window overlooking the backyard where her own mother’s irises stood dormant. For as long as Molly could remember, her mother had grown long beds full of them outside their stucco bungalow that backed up on a city park in Abilene. Molly kept an album with all the yellowed newspaper clippings, photos of her small mother, hair in a bob even as it grayed, standing in front of the award-winning blue and purple and orange blossoms.

  “Mama,” she heard Brandon say from the other room, his voice changing. “Molly has Huntington’s.”

  Molly hadn’t meant to eavesdrop, but she continued to stand there in the hallway as he added, “What her mother had. Remember? It’s what their mother had.”

  Molly remembered how as her mother became more infirm, she hired young workers to weed the iris beds in the spring and deadhead them in the fall. She would sit in her wheelchair, her body dancing with chorea, slurring orders until, eventually, she lost even that pleasure to the cloud of the disease.

  The first time Molly’d invited Brandon home with her to Abilene was to help dig up those irises a few months after her mother’s death. They’d only just begun dating and it was autumn, the best time to excavate dormant bulbs for transport to new ground. Dozens of friends and family showed up to help that afternoon and, while the activity was planned as a way for them to take and grow a living reminder of Helen, the flowers themselves were also special: fifty-year-old heritage bulbs, a purer genetic strain than found in irises bought on the general market. Smaller, but more beautiful, she’d explained to Brandon.

  It had been hard labor for the group of mostly chubby, middle-aged folks wearing old jeans and baggy T-shirts, going row after row, using their muddy sneakered feet to put weight onto the pitchforks, unhinging the fist-size white bulbs from the earth.

  Molly closed her eyes and thought of how those bulbs had felt like old baseballs in her hand as she listened to Brandon explain the disease to his mother over the phone. That first would come loss of motor control and coordination. Then changes in behavior. Finally, constant shaking, difficulty swallowing, dementia, and death. That was what Molly was looking at, and it could take ten, fifteen years, maybe more, to kill her.

  Trudging through the sodden flower beds that day, she and Brandon had taken on the job of grouping piles of the best bulbs and then bagging them such that each contained flowers from all sections of the yard—that way, everyone who took a bag would have a mix of colors when the irises bloomed in the spring. At one point, he’d asked her, “Were you closer to your mother or to your father growing up?”

  She told him the truth that day. Her mother was kind but self-pitying and sick. Her father was the family martyr, but he worked a lot and was always preoccupied with her mother’s care. “I was closest to my sister. Always. Half of what I know about my parents comes from Flan.”

  In the next room, there was silence. Molly strained but could not hear Brandon’s mother’s voice on the other end of the line, her rich accented alto, but she tried to imagine it. This is horrible news, Brahim, she might say. Or How is our poor girl doing, habibi?

  “What about them, Mama?” asked Brandon. “What?!”

  What was he responding to? Was his mother asking about medical bills or genetics? Babies? God forbid she was asking about babies. There was a sound, and Molly could have sworn she heard a wail travel through the phone line and down the hall to where she stood. An Arabic wail. But, no. It was not his mother crying through the telephone receiver. It was her husband beginning to sob.

  Touching the cool of the window glass, Molly pictured them as they’d been when they walked along that row of irises years ago. Young and in love, she’d had the feeling that, while her mother was gone, she was finding, not a replacement in Brandon exactly, but someone to be the witness her father had spoken of when she and Flannery were children. As they worked side by side, Brandon had told her about his own family, about getting up at three in the morning and going to work with his father, who was a baker for a large supermarket chain. During high school, his father got him summer jobs at the store, so he would sleep on bags of flour until his own shift at the deli began at six. Every once in a while, he said, despite the fact that they worked too hard for little pay, he felt nostalgic for it—awakening on the hard, gentle hills of those bags surrounded by the smell of rising dough.

  In second grade he’d started going by the Americanized name Brandon instead of the Arabic Brahim. His mother cried when she called to get him out of class for a dentist’s appointment and his teacher didn’t know who she was talking about. She said to him later, “How could you do this to me?” Brandon had comforted her then but didn’t stop using his chosen moniker, and he said she never brought it up again. He said he imagined that somewhere deep down she understood he was only trying to survive. His parents emigrated from Iraq when they were barely twenty, and they pushed him and his younger sisters to do well in school but after third grade were never able to help them with homework.

  As they’d talked that day while her mother’s garden was being uprooted, Molly hadn’t thought about needing Brandon to watch over her; it was she who had wanted to protect this sensitive, brooding, beautiful man, to marry him. To take care of him.

  As Molly listened to Brandon cry, she tried to make herself go to him in the kitchen and drape her body over him like a shroud, to rock him to sleep and have him wake on rolling bags of flour to the smell of rising dough. But she couldn’t.

  Two weeks later, at Steven and Lou’s wedding reception, there was no bouquet or garter toss, no cake-cutting or glass-clinking toasts. Just a big party. There was Thai food from Madame Mam’s laid out in big foil containers that people ate on the foldout tables set up ad hoc around a barn on the outskirts of town; there was a dance floor in the middle covered in sawdust donated by Santiago from his fire station renovations; somebody’s unwieldy, cone-headed dog sniffed at ankles and begged for food.

  Molly sensed a vaguely subdued atmosphere among her friends, despite all their superficial efforts to be festive, maybe stemming in part from the fact they were older now and mostly living in the same city, a wedding no longer the occasion for a group reunion and drunken antics. And Molly was sick and would be for a long time; everyone else, she imagined, was trying to figure out how to apportion his or her grief and concern over the long haul. Not wanting to use it all up at the beginning of the race.

  At some point, the music that had been pumping from speakers in the corner of the barn stopped. There was a muffled pitter-patter as three children dressed in matching plaid outfits and black patent leather shoes scampered onto the dance floor holding pieces of white cardboard. There was a drumroll, and the kids held up signs, chanting the words written on them in purple marker: WE-LOVE-STEVEN. We love Steven! We love Steven! And then they flipped them over so that the cards now read: WEL-COME-STEVEN. Welcome, Steven! Welcome, Steven! Welcome to the family, Steven! The sun streamed through the slates of the barn’s roof, lighting up twirling dust particles as they spun through the air.

  “Who are those little
hobgoblins?” asked Flannery, reaching across Molly for the water jug.

  “Lou’s brother’s kids, I think,” said Brandon.

  “Waste not, want not.” Santiago poured everyone more wine-from-the-box. Molly smiled and left hers sitting on the table. No reason to bring attention to her sobriety.

  “This stuff is terrible.” Brandon took another big swallow.

  “We’re being shown up by a crew of munchkins,” said Harry, faking energy, the only one of them wearing a full suit and tie. “Should we get up there and fuck with some Slayer? Is there a guitar around here we can smash?”

  But nobody did anything, and soon the kids requested “The Hokey Pokey” and went around pulling adults who they’d never met before out onto the dance floor. Molly noticed two people whom she assumed were the children’s parents, tall and well dressed, standing off to the side, proud smiles on their attractive, bland faces.

  “I’m coming,” said Flannery, being dragged off by a boy whose hair was slicked back like Buddy Holly. “Hold your horses, kiddo.”

  Soon, most of the guests were standing in a loose circle, putting their right foot in and their right foot out, shaking it all about, albeit halfheartedly. Molly and Brandon begged off and were left alone at the table.

  Molly took a deep breath and let it out. It was a difficult thing to say. “I need to leave.”

  “I’ll drive us home. They’ll understand.” Brandon sucked down the last of his wine.

  “That’s not what I mean.” She kept her voice gentle, as if she were talking to a child.

  “Okay.” He stopped. He squinted at her. “Let’s quit our jobs and travel. Let’s go to Italy. Alaska, maybe. Australia. We could do it.” He took her face between his warm palms, but she twisted away.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You’re scaring me.”

  “I’m leaving. I’ve packed for Abilene, and Papa’s expecting me.”

  “No,” he said, but weakly.

  “For a while anyway.”

  They sat there in silence for a minute, both stunned. Finally, Brandon set his glass on the table and sighed. “It was in Abilene where I learned about your Huntington’s gene.”

  Not at all certain she was ready to hear this, she said, “Go on.”

  Brandon let the story spill from his mouth as if it had been choking him. “I just don’t want you to get yourself into something without understanding what it is,” he claimed her father had said to him in a man-to-man chat over a bottle of rotgut whiskey in her father’s study, papered in blue-and-gold faded wallpaper, his desk shoved up against the window. Brandon said it was not what he was expecting to hear when her father invited him in the day after Christmas, just a year after Molly’s mother had died, flashing the bottle of liquor from behind his back while Molly and Flannery remained sprawled on the living room sofa, giving each other foot rubs and watching Fred and Ginger dance in an old black-and-white.

  “A horrible disease and a hardship to take care of someone suffering it. Believe me,” her father had said, glancing out the window. “I’m not saying I would have done things differently, but I wish somebody’d told me Helen was at risk. I wish Helen’s family had told me.”

  It took a moment for the information to push through the syrupy air of the room and into Brandon’s ears before piecing itself back together again in his brain, as if he were an observer watching himself sit there dumbly, blankly, gripping his glass tumbler in both hands.

  “I don’t understand. Why hasn’t Molly said anything?”

  “Molly doesn’t want to know. She doesn’t want to have these years ruined by the foreshadowing, so to speak. Trust me on this, kiddo.”

  Brandon recalled looking at Molly’s father: deep-set blue eyes and leathery jowls obscuring what had once probably been a sharp-cut jawline. Brandon said he’d wondered if it wasn’t a trick, a way for her father to get rid of him, to scare him away from becoming too serious with the youngest daughter. But it was true Molly’s mother had died from Huntington’s. It was true the disease was genetic. What kind of asshole would make something like that up?

  “And don’t worry,” her father continued when Brandon said nothing. “When she finds out, I won’t tell anyone you were in on it.”

  Brandon said he hated the way her father used the words in on it, like Huntington’s was a practical joke to be played on someone. And yet, Brandon had trusted the man at first, the man who was so much more educated, who seemed so much wiser than his own parents. He somehow managed to hear the words Molly doesn’t want to know as the equivalent of Molly told us explicitly she doesn’t want to know, which were, of course, not the same thing at all. They were young and any onset of the disease seemed a long way off, and so in a sense he was also in denial, convincing himself a cure would easily be found in time. Since the gene responsible for the disease had been pinpointed, how much longer could it be before therapies were developed to splice it out or counteract its effects with drugs? Brandon was going to be a scientist. He believed in progress. And most of all, he was in love and too cowardly to be the bearer of such devastating news rather than the savior from it.

  Molly listened to the story Brandon confessed into her ear, music booming all around them, the dance floor twinkling with the reflected light from miniature disco balls strung from the rafters of the barn, the faint smell of hay. Then, she stood from the table, a little shaky at first, and walked away. Her husband had known she would get HD from the beginning. He’d known from the very beginning.

  She needed her sister, her older sister, who was so tall she could always be found in a crowd, long neck like a homing beacon. Molly moved through the dancers toward Flannery, who was wearing a loud, crazy dress and dancing wildly, maybe drunkenly. Molly touched her shoulder. I need to talk to you, she mouthed. Flannery nodded and yelled, “After this song. I love this song!”

  Molly felt suddenly ill, a flash of nausea, her skin hot and clammy as she beelined for the door, rushing through the crowd, slipping through without jarring anyone, hoping she could make it. Please, God, she thought, help me make it out of here in time.

  ALYCE

  Earlier in the evening, under a sprawling live oak, when her husband, Harry (who’d paid twenty-five dollars to be ordained online at the Universal Life Church), had pronounced Steven and Lou married, Alyce clapped and smiled along with the rest. Seated in the middle of the audience, she was surrounded by a checkerboard of foldout chairs like a maze meant to trap her. Steven and Lou looked happy as they kissed and turned to face the crowd, a vaguely smug, satisfied look on their faces, thought Alyce, who knew from three professional photo albums that her own wedding-day expression had been similar, difficult as that was to believe now.

  After the ceremony, Steven’s parents began walking toward her, so she smiled and fluttered them a wave before turning in the opposite direction, weaving through the chairs with a faux expression of purpose. She walked until she found herself in front of a white clapboard cottage a dozen yards away, then climbed onto its wraparound porch that was badly in need of a coat of paint. The wedding reception was in the barn, but Alyce needed someplace private where she could push down her feelings of panic.

  The front door to the cottage was unlocked, and she inched along a short entryway and into the living room. The interior was furnished but in that way of vacation homes, everything matching and perfectly in place, from the green sofa cushions to the amber lamp to the framed prints of swaying wheat hanging on the wall. No shoes tossed into corners or bills stacked on the counter, no postcards or finger-painted drawings tacked to the fridge.

  Taking deep breaths, trying to focus on the physical world outside her own body, Alyce slid alongside the dark wooden bookshelves built into one side of the room, running her hand along the spines of aging clothbound hardbacks. She wondered if they were bought as a set from an antiques shop just to make the place look serious. One volume caught her eye: The Robin. She pulled it out and flipped it open to the title pa
ge. How interesting. An entire book about the bird. Written in 1970, it was not nearly as old as the emerald-and-gold-embossed cover made it appear.

  Alyce heard noises from upstairs, muffled voices and the clicking of a door. Did someone, in fact, live here? Or more likely, members of the bride’s or groom’s family had rented the house to stay in during the wedding. Why hadn’t she thought of that before? Alyce pushed the book down into her purse and walked back outside, down the porch steps to the grass lawn where people mingled, teetering in heels and swilling booze, waiting for the dancing to begin.

  The reception inside the barn was loud and crowded, and after enduring it for as long as she could, Alyce wandered outside to the line of Porta-Potties set up next to a restaurant-size sink, maybe built for washing farm eggs or vegetables. Or some more lurid purpose Alyce didn’t want to imagine, involving entrails and slaughter and afterbirth.

  It was dark now, and as she looked up at the stars, she had the feeling they were pinholes punched in the top of a jar, just enough air seeping in to keep her alive. Inside the portable stall, she stared at herself in the metal mirror attached to the door. Her face was physically coming apart, Picasso-like, separating into pieces until her gaze couldn’t put them back together again. Her breath stank. Her skin looked gray. She was not doing well. She was not getting better. She dug into her purse and came up with the bottle of Xanax—she didn’t count how many she swallowed before lifting up her dress and sitting down, listening as her stream of urine hit the black pile of shit and piss below.

  Wiggling back into her clothes, arms checkered by bits of moonlight filtering through the fiberglass of the outhouse, Alyce heard what sounded like someone retching in the Porta-Potty adjacent to hers.

  “Okay in there?” called Alyce.

  “Aces.” The voice belonged to Molly.