Migrations(28)

“Where’s your place?”

If I have a place, I think, it was left behind long ago.

Basil hands me the spliff and our fingers touch. Oh, I remember you. Skin. A pained thing inside me rears up. The rushing sound of the ocean rises.

“Where’s your place, Franny?” Basil asks me again, and I think, Why would I ever tell you, and then I kiss him. Because I don’t like him even a little and it feels destructive. He tastes of tobacco and marijuana and smoke, but I must taste of the same, and maybe worse after all my vomiting. His free hand grabs at my arm, a fumbling surprised motion that seems to reflect a great need inside him, one maybe he didn’t know he harbored.

I end the kiss and sit back. “Sorry.”

He swallows, running the hand over his long hair. “No worries.”

“Night.”

“Night, Franny.”



* * *



My sleep is interrupted again, first by nightmares of my mother and second by the warm liquid sliding down my wrist. I sit up blearily, disoriented. I’m moving and there’s pain, and the wetness is familiar, its rusty smell like a memory in the night.

I take a breath and let my head calm. You’re not in prison. You’re on the boat.

The swaying has grown much worse. Back and forth the boat rolls, in great woozy lunges, pulling my wrist so hard against its rope binding that blood has trickled wetly down my arm.

With one hand I untie the slipped constrictor knot. I’m quite proud of this knot because it wasn’t easy to learn. I’ve decided to start binding myself to the bed at night, because there’s obviously a version of me that wants to escape this cabin and find the ocean, and the least I can do is make it hard for her.

Untied, I tumble off the bed like a rag doll.

“You okay?” Léa asks. Then, “Are you awake?”

“I hope so.” I untangle myself from the sheet and hurry through the locked cabin door, pinging off the walls like a pinball, careening into the stairs and gashing both my shins on the bottom rung. “Franny? What are you doing? Don’t!” Up I go onto the deck, into the violent lash of rain and the howl of wind and the black sky despite the morning hour, and I can barely remain upright, almost plucked and carried off with the storm, almost stripped of my very skin by the sudden savagery of the world. For a moment I stop, stunned. Then my feet slip and I am nearly overboard, nearly gone, it’s only my fingers grasping the railing that hold me to the world. I find my footing and lunge for the second stairwell. I have to get to Ennis, to the chart and the tracking dots, to my birds. The climb is perilous; my fingernails break where they scratch at the rungs and shoulders bruise against metal and my feet keep slipping, again and again, scraping my already tender shins but soon I arrive at the bridge, I am flinging open the door and being wrestled into the dark and the quiet. The door slams behind me and for a moment I am shell-shocked, the scream from outside echoing in my ears.

“The fuck are you doing?” he asks me.

I look away from Ennis’s thunderous expression. “Is this … This is bad, isn’t it?”

Sway, goes the boat, and we both careen into the wall. I can see it now, what’s happening. The storm is pushing us up and down over the swell of the mighty waves. Up the wall of one and then—whoomph—down the other side of it.

“Got both anchors down, engine full throttle, still being forced backward. Be lucky if it’s only miles we lose.”

“And if it gets worse?”

“We’ll take on too much water.” He squints at me. “You deserve to be thrown overboard, wandering about like that.”

“I wasn’t wandering, I was coming here, to you.”

Something I can’t recognize fills his blue eyes. “Why?”

My stomach bottoms out as we go over a massive wave and I have to catch hold of the back of his chair.

“The birds,” I say.

Ennis retrieves a life vest and places it over my head, and there’s pity in the motion.

“Ennis, where are the birds?”

He nods to my feet. “Take off your boots, love.”

“Why?”

“In case we have to swim.”

And here it is, even now, even after everything. The return of that mad thrill, the one I have been seeking all my life. It’s not right to be excited by danger, but I am. I am, even still. The only difference is that once I was proud of this and now it shames me.





9

GALWAY, IRELAND TWELVE YEARS AGO

I’ve spent the afternoon on the computer in the university library, trying to find Maire Stone and John Torpey. Maire is almost nonexistent online—or at least the right Maire Stone is—but I’ve come up with a number of John Torpeys in the correct area and age bracket. I’m writing down the addresses when Niall Lynch walks past the row of computers with a pile of books in his arms. He doesn’t look at me but my eyes are pulled to him as if by gravity, or perhaps something less scientific, something for which I don’t yet have a name. We haven’t spoken since the night he came to my house almost a month ago and said that absurd thing. I’ve been to his lectures but he hasn’t looked at me once and maybe this is all part of his design because he has turned me effortlessly into a creature made of obsession.

I jerk upright, computer search forgotten. The bit of paper is crumpled into my jeans pocket, an afterthought now, and without conscious decision I am following the professor from the library. His winding path takes him through various buildings and I feel myself stepping his steps, making his choices, donning his life for these precious few minutes. Who is he? Where did he come from? What is he thinking of in this very moment? Why did he say that thing, that wrecking ball of a thing, and did he mean it? Did he know, somehow, that I’ve been waiting for someone to smash me to bits, to do the wrecking so I mustn’t always do it myself? I draw his skin upon me and nestle down into his self. I wonder if he has ever wanted free of it, like I do mine, and if he has ever imagined leaving his life for another. Who would miss him? Who are the people that love him?