Migrations(14)

I’m clinging to the rope ladder I saw Ennis use. Swaying precariously against the ship’s hull. My knuckles are white and frozen in their grip, and I am not wearing enough layers, not even close.

I have sleepwalked here.

I am about to haul myself the hell up when instead I stop. I’ve found myself in strange places before, but never this extreme, this perilous. I feel abruptly alive, for the first time in years. For the first time, if I’m being honest, since the night my husband left me.

To be fair, I left him first, more times than I can count.

“Yours is a terrible will,” he told me once. And that is true, but I have been a casualty of it far longer than he has.

The rope’s ascent drags me from the sea. Someone has turned on the crank and now I rise without having decided to do so. For a second I hate whoever is pulling me up. Then thoughts blur as the cold finds its mark. Hands haul me over into a bundle of limbs. The flash of moonlit skin tells me this is Léa, her long frame strong enough to support my useless body. My legs can barely hold me upright, so she does that for me.

“What the fuck.”

“I’m okay.”

“You’re goddamn freezing.” She starts pulling me over the deck, catching me when I stumble. “What the fuck are you doing, Franny,” she says, but not really like a question. “What is wrong with you.”

We manage to get down the ladder and below deck. My teeth are tiny jackhammers. Into the little bathroom with its shower so narrow I have to step out to wash my hair. She wrenches off my sweater and shoves me under a stream of hot water. It burns so badly I bite my tongue and taste copper. Knees give out, and she catches me in time to sink with me to the floor, both of us soaked and scalded now, a tangled mess of extremities freezing and burning and everything in between.

“What is wrong with you?” she asks again, but really asking now.

I give a breath of laughter. “How much time do you have?”

Her arms tighten about me, shifting to an embrace.

I don’t have the energy for more, so I say only, “I’m sorry,” and I mean it.





4

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, GALWAY, IRELAND TWELVE YEARS AGO

““We ate the birds,” he says. “We ate them. We wanted their songs to flow up through our throats and burst out of our mouths, and so we ate them. We wanted their feathers to bud from our flesh. We wanted their wings, we wanted to fly as they did, soar freely among the treetops and the clouds, and so we ate them. We speared them, we clubbed them, we tangled their feet in glue, we netted them, we spitted them, we threw them onto hot coals, and all for love, because we loved them. We wanted to be one with them.”

There is silence in the enormous hall. He is small, down there behind his lectern. And big enough to fill the space. Loud enough, powerful enough. We are hanging on his every word, even if the words don’t belong to him, even if he is only saying to us what Margaret Atwood said first.

“They have been here for two hundred million years,” he says, “and until recently there were ten thousand species. They evolved to go in search of food, traveling farther than any other animal to survive, and thus they colonized the earth. From the oilbird, which lived in pitch-black caves, to the bar-headed goose, which bred only on the desolate Tibetan plateau. From the rufous hummingbird, which survived in the freezing altitude of fourteen thousand feet to the Rüppell’s griffon vulture, which could fly as high as a commercial airplane. These extraordinary creatures were undoubtedly the most successful on earth, because they courageously learned to exist anywhere.”

My heart is beating too fast and I will myself to be calm, to breathe more slowly, to really take this in. To savor it and remember every detail because too soon I will be gone from the circle of his perfect words.

The professor moves out from behind his lectern and spreads his hands beseechingly. “The only true threat to birds that has ever existed is us.

“In the 1600s the Bermuda petrel, of the Procellariidae family, the national bird of Bermuda, was hunted for meat so catastrophically that they were thought to be extinct. Until, in 1951, by sheer accident they were found again, only eighteen pairs of them. They were hiding, nesting in the cliffs of small islands. I imagine that day a great deal.” He pauses as though to imagine it now, and I marvel at the command he has over the hall. I am with him on those cliffs, discovering those lonely little birds, the only survivors of their kind. He goes on, and his voice is hard now, demanding. “They did not survive our second attack. This one was crueler, far more pervasive. With the burning of fossil fuels we changed the world, we’ve killed it. As the climate grew hotter and the sea levels rose, the Bermuda petrels were washed from their burrows and drowned. That is one species of a very great many. And it’s not only birds that suffer—as I’ve said, birds tend to be the most resilient. Polar bears are gone, thanks to that rise in temperature. Sea turtles have gone, the beaches where they once lay their eggs eroded by those same rising seas. The ringtail possum, which could not survive temperatures above thirty degrees Celsius, was decimated by a single heat wave. Lions perished in never-ending droughts, rhinos were lost to poaching. And on it goes. Those are simply a few you know of, the stars of the animal kingdom, but if I started listing the creatures destroyed by habitat destruction we would be here all day. Thousands of species are dying right now, and being ignored. We are wiping them out. Creatures that have learned to survive anything, everything, except us.”