Migratory Animals

by Mary Helen Specht

“Drunk already . . . or did you eat the shrimp?”

  Molly opened the door, dabbing a wad of toilet paper to her mouth. “I’m not sure if I went into the Porta-Potty because I had to puke or if I puked because I went into the Porta-Potty.” Molly smoothed down her navy dress with white piping lining the straps. Her eyes were red and puffy. But even so, Alyce could still sense the pulsing magnetic glow beneath her skin.

  “Want to get out of here?” Alyce’s heart beat louder through her chest.

  “You have no idea,” said Molly in a half whisper. She told Alyce she wanted out, out. To disappear for a while. “I was planning to go to Abilene . . . but I’m not now.”

  Alyce didn’t hesitate. “Come live with me at the ranch.”

  Molly smiled. “That’s sweet, but I can’t handle being around a family right now.”

  “Yes.” Alyce knew exactly what she meant. “Harry and the boys are moving back into town. To be closer to school. And so I can get more work done.” As soon as she said the words, they no longer sounded like a lie.

  The two women stared at each other. Alyce reached out a hand to touch Molly’s hard, beautiful shoulder. “Come live with me. I mean it.”

  An hour later, after maneuvering bleak rural roads back to the ranch, having abandoned her husband to represent them at the reception, Alyce stripped off her clothes before going into the studio. She laid the stolen book on top of a stack of unsent letters addressed to her parents in Mexico. (The letters were long and full of rambling recriminations. In them, she blamed her parents for how her life had turned out. She blamed them for being so damn happy and free. She blamed them for the mole on her left shoulder.)

  The boys were in Houston for the weekend with their grandparents, so the house was quiet as she returned to the drawings she’d been working on obsessively since the night of the homecoming party. She moved them around on her table, looking at them from different angles, the mouths and eyes and cheekbones of her friends. She had dozens of strong drafts, but something kept her from proceeding to the next stage of the project.

  Alyce always did close studies before finalizing a design. She used drawing to investigate images she found aesthetically intriguing: a blue door, a wooden lattice, the spokes of a bike. She tried to find a way to distill the whole into a fragment that carried the feeling of whatever had touched her about the image in the first place. She then moved the elements around, redrawing and redrawing until satisfied with every inch. The process was like sending out a bird from a ship, over and over, until one day it didn’t come back and you knew land was near.

  But how to distill her new project into something that could represent a complex web of human beings? Alyce knew Molly was the entry point. That something inside her was pivotal to unlocking the rest of the group, the rest of the tapestry. Alyce needed to study Molly more closely.

  “Molly,” she said out loud to the room. Nothing. Alyce put aside the charcoal drawings and grabbed the stolen book from her desk.

  She read. From the book she learned robins were almost never seen in large groups as late in the season as they’d seen them here two months ago—it was earlier in the spring when flocks usually migrated through the Texas Hill Country from Mexico on their way to breeding grounds farther north. There were always rogue birds who got turned around, their migratory wiring twisted by strange weather or faulty genetics, but it was rare for an entire group to be months behind schedule.

  For the next several hours, Alyce pored over The Robin, far away from the dancing and drinking at Lou and Steven’s big event. She read about a myth from a tribe in Canada who believed the Big Dipper was made up of Bear being chased across the sky by three hunters: Robin, Chickadee, and Moose Bird, represented by the three stars of the handle. Bear comes out of his den each spring and is pursued across the sky all summer until in October the constellation is swallowed by the hills, Robin finally managing to kill Bear with an arrow. Jumping on top of Bear’s body, Robin becomes covered with blood and so he flies up again, shaking bright crimson onto the autumn maple trees, his breast still, and always, retaining the rust-red color of dried blood. Out the window Alyce thought she could still see flecks of it on the grass of the lawn, left behind by the hundreds of blood-drenched little bodies of her errant, dilatory flock. She could re-create the color in wool dye by mixing sumac and rose hips.

  Her thoughts returned to the faces of her husband and sons watching the flock. How they’d been so moved. As if seeing such a sheer number of bodies in one place changed anything fundamental about life. As if it could change what bodies did, which was fumble through the sky, migrate to different places, breed, then break down and die.

  Acquaintances often cooed to the effect of how wonderful it must be to have a husband who also worked in the visual arts, picturing a charmed, bohemian life of collaboration and discussion about each other’s work. But while Alyce and Harry had always been terribly supportive of each other—he throwing parties after her two gallery openings, she always there, smiling, for his open houses—in reality they gave only superficial attention to the other’s works-in-progress. Harry might help her decide between two color charts. She might help him tweak a floor plan so the air-conditioning duct fit. But that was the extent of it.

  Alyce thought this was because they’d met so young and had already established a way of being together before either became an independent designer. The early years were filled with rejection and insecurity, so maybe they both intuited that a deep engagement with each other’s work would naturally include a level of criticism and hurt feelings the relationship might not survive.

  They were both commercial designers, working not for some lofty higher calling, but for other people. Alyce did everything from blankets to wall tapestries, while Harry worked on homes and offices and garage renovations. But still, they managed to insinuate a bit of their own aesthetic into every project. The couple now living in a triangle of steel and glass had come to Harry and Santiago’s firm holding sketches for a Spanish colonial. Her Coptic-style tapestry depicting a school of fish that hung in the foyer of the mayor’s ex-wife’s house was originally commissioned to be an explosion of peonies. But Alyce liked working directly for clients because, no matter how much she persuaded them to tweak their vision in line with her own tastes, there were still parameters, context. She considered the size of the space where the piece would hang, the lighting, the tone of decoration. Now she was learning how much harder it was to do something for herself.

  Alyce stared at the sketches of her friends, their faces so alive. So full and in the midst. She tried to reconnect with her purpose: to show her boys what it had been like when she was most happy, when she was lifted up on currents of air, not because she did anything deserving, but just because. She thought of a video she’d watched once in which scientists (using a camera invented to track ballistics) filmed a hummingbird flying through an air tunnel misted with vaporized olive oil. The fog of tiny droplets captured the movements the bird used to create lift and drag, a brief impression of an event left behind after everything was over, like a ripple on the water undulating with residual energy. That’s what Alyce wanted to do—capture something transient in the stillness of tapestry. Leave behind a footprint of the best parts of herself, the parts she was no longer able to give her sons in real life.

  Alyce began drawing birds around the faces of her friends and above them and on top of them. Robins, robins, everywhere. Arrested. Frozen there on the page. In those days at Marsh, they were flying through the air using instinct, creating their own lift and drag as if by magic.

  As she drew, she continued with the stories lodged inside her, fading droplets of olive oil. She told them to her sons as she worked.

  There was a game we invented one spring during those lazy afternoons of intramural softball. Our team, Campus Crusade for Christ, didn’t win very often, but there was beer in the cooler and time to sit on the grass looking up at the sky, treacly and barely blue.

  The game we
invented worked like this: We took turns acting as the Inquisitor, whose job was to come up with a question about our futures, and then everyone else had to guess who in the group the Inquisitor had foreseen. Who, according to Brandon, would be most likely to get plastic surgery? Who, according to Steven, the first to have kids? Who, according to Flannery, might lose a limb in war? The game was endless and endlessly permutating.

  But, though it wasn’t a rule, nobody, in all the years we played the Inquisitor game—at New Year’s Eve parties, barbecues, even on the drive back from the funeral for Santiago’s father—ever asked who would be the first to get divorced. Harry and I were the first to marry. The first to have kids. Who, according to me, Alyce, will be the first couple to part ways? One day you’re drinking a cup of coffee with your son, and the next . . .

  The only subject technically off-limits was death. You couldn’t ask who would be the first or last or third or fourth to die. Everyone agreed on this. But now it’s becoming clearer that Molly and I are in a dead heat to win that one . . .

  She heard Harry’s key in the door, his footsteps down the hallway. The interruption annoyed her. She couldn’t have her family lurking while she prepared this final project. She needed space and quiet.

  Alyce waited until Harry had brushed his teeth and settled into the bedroom. Then, she went to him. The spider plant on the dresser, the tall glass of water on the bedside table, even the tiny painting of a ruby-throated hummingbird hanging askew on the wall suddenly seemed filled with foreboding. She looked at Harry in bed with his book, the reading lamp glancing off gray hairs. She felt nothing.

  Growing up as an only child, Alyce had watched her friends with siblings fight, sometimes even torture one another. But once, when she threw a water balloon too hard at her best friend Jessica’s kid brother, Jessica turned on her. Alyce learned an important lesson: sisters could be mean to their brothers, outsiders could not. She’d admired this brand of familial loyalty and desired it for herself. On nights like tonight, when she tried to remember why she’d chosen Harry fifteen long years ago, she thought of his stability and kindness and loyalty. She hoped these weren’t the only reasons. She hoped there’d once been more to it than that.

  Ignoring the tremble of her voice, she glided up to the bed and told Harry she needed him to move out. She needed him to take the boys and go live with Santiago at the fire station.

  Harry stared at her in disbelief. The air felt suddenly humid, suffocating.

  “Not long,” she added. “A few weeks.”

  “The boys love it out here.” He sat up and took off his glasses. “Alyce, sweetheart, why don’t you leave. Go on a trip by yourself, if you need it. Go crazy.”

  She let the double entendre pass. “But this is my artistic fellowship. I have to be here. I need to . . .” She couldn’t tell him that she didn’t want the boys to see her like this, to become like her, to find her if the worst happened.

  “You need help. You need . . . you need to go back to therapy,” he stuttered. His voice was quiet, as if he were talking to himself under his breath.

  “That’s not it.” She was speaking automatically now. “It’s Molly. I told her she could come here for a while. To the ranch. She needs to think things over. She’s the one who needs help.” And it was all true. All of it. She felt her body straightening with the confidence of her words.

  “She has Huntington’s, A. What is there to think over?” His voice grew louder. “How are you going to help her? What are you going to do?”

  The more upset Harry became, the calmer Alyce felt. She knew exactly what she was going to do.

  FLANNERY

  Flannery picked at the blue icing from a half-eaten piece of cake that may or may not have originally been hers. She noticed a shoe poking up from behind a plate of noodles, and after some investigation—ducking under the table and closing an eye—confirmed it belonged to one of the two children asleep on a row of chairs. Maybe it was because Flannery had spent so many hours secretly trying to imagine the color and shape of her and Kunle’s babies—ochre, fawn, hazel, café au lait—but since moving back to the States, she felt slightly repelled by the sight of white children. She couldn’t help think they looked like unformed globs of dough. Or wisps of smoke that might disappear if you tried to grab hold. On a really bad day, when she missed Nigeria horribly, Flannery walked around thinking all white people, including herself, were nothing more than floating mobiles of bleached bone.

  These particular kids, sleeping in their grown-up outfits, made Flan think of the girl in Ojo market standing between two stalls selling brightly colored plastics—plastic buckets, plastic pitchers, plastic spoons and spatulas and cups—wearing nothing but panties, her body coated in dirt as she held a small puffed-out yellow lace dress scrunched in her fists, dunking it into a pail of soapy water with vigor and confidence. It was a Sunday afternoon, and Flannery imagined the girl had only just returned from church and could not bear to wear that hot, itchy dress one moment longer.

  Through her champagne haze, Flannery vaguely remembered that Molly had wanted to speak with her about something. She felt a pang of guilt, but it was too late. Brandon and Molly had gone home. Alyce had disappeared. At the edge of the dance floor, Santiago laughed and flirted with a couple of Lou’s cousins. She noticed Steven, in his white guayabera and linen pants, finally by himself, drinking a beer and squinting as though working out complex mathematical proofs on the slate of his brain. Flannery drifted across the barn to the groom and gave him a quick hug.

  “So you arrived with Santi?”

  “We carpooled.”

  Steven gave her a look.

  “I don’t have a car, remember?”

  “Be careful.”

  “Yeah, well.” Flan had enough problems right now, his petty judgment of her being the least of them.

  “Sorry. Forget it.” He shrugged. Steven didn’t have to say that what he was sorry about was her sister. “Huntington’s was what Woody Guthrie had. I didn’t know that.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  “Lou and I have been reading up.”

  “Congratulations.” Flannery needed to stop drinking so much. “I didn’t mean that.” She remembered the time, in the first stage of the sickness, when her mother threw a party in the garden to show off her bed of blooming irises. She filled a piñata full of airplane-size liquor bottles, not realizing how they’d shatter, spraying guests with booze and shards of glass.

  “It took you forever to convince Lou to go out with you. Yet here we are.”

  “I asked her once, why she’d been so resistant to my . . . charms.” He told Flannery that they were in bed, Lou’s curly hair wound around a pencil (“part of her naughty librarian shtick, but that’s another story . . .”), and she said she’d thought his dilettante farming project was a little too precious. She thought he was one of those self-righteous back-to-the-land romantics who had no idea what they were getting themselves into.

  “So what does she think now?

  “The same,” he said, laughing. “It just doesn’t bother her as much anymore.”

  “She looked beautiful. It was a beautiful wedding.”

  “An economical, recession wedding, but thanks.”

  Flannery thought about how Steven and Lou still lived in the trailer they’d moved into “temporarily” four years ago on the edge of the farm. “Oh, discretionary income. Who knew graduate school would be the height of my profit margin?”

  “Sushi.” Steven smacked his lips. “The way you sluice the wasabi around in soy sauce before dipping unagi in it with those slick chopsticks. I used to love that.”

  “Or a professional massage? All that chanty music and lavender candles . . .”

  “. . . and the ‘happy ending.’” He gyrated his hips.

  Flannery felt petty and selfish admitting she yearned for lost luxuries Kunle and most of their Nigerian friends had never experienced. But Steven was on a roll now, confessing that what he really misse
d from his consulting days were adventure vacations. Scuba diving in Belize. Backpacking through Thailand. “Now, I’m lucky if we make it to Krause Springs once a year with the gang,” he said, referring to a campground thirty miles north of town that sold cheesy bric-a-brac at the gate and was often crowded with drunk frat boys slipping around on the rocks that led to a natural green pool and grotto, lush with fronds. Flannery could imagine it: Molly videotaping beetles with her phone; Brandon doing tricks on the rope swing; Maya picking up shells as Lou read on the rock bank and Steven dove into the frigid water, green and musky in the sun, only to discover how much harder it was to swim beneath the pelting water of a grotto than it looked in the movies.

  “We went once in college,” said Flannery.

  “The time you and Santiago made your tent collapse from whatever robust exercise y’all were performing inside.”

  “I don’t remember that.”

  “It’s okay. Everybody else does.”

  With the reception winding down and the boxed wine running out, the deejay (Steven’s uncle Gabriel, in a baby blue polyester leisure suit) said it was time for the last song before the bride and groom would wave good-bye from their yellow Honda Prelude parked outside, decorated with a full-spectrum rainbow of condoms, red to violet. Santiago appeared, motioning for Flannery to dance with him, and so she did. It was Willie Nelson’s “The Party’s Over”; they two-stepped. Flannery pulled at her long Nigerian dress.

  In part because labor was so cheap in Nigeria, Flannery returned to the States with a duffel bag full of outfits made from wildly patterned cloth. She’d scoured the open-air markets, leaving a wake of delighted cries (“White! Mrs. White!”), before schlepping her purchases to the barely lit wooden shack where a tailor sewed the cloth to fit snug on Flannery’s long-legged, flat-chested frame. Her dark blue on light blue adire cloth dress with crisscrossing straps and swirling wavelike patterns was distinctly African and, it turned out, glaringly ethnic when worn by a white woman in the more sanitized and staid surroundings of a Texas wedding. For some reason this didn’t hit home for Flannery until she arrived at the wedding itself, looking around at the plain Western clothes in bewilderment as though they were what was foreign.