Migrations(35)

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Dinner is quiet tonight. Poor Samuel can’t get up from his bed so we’re without his comforting presence. Basil’s large knee is digging into my leg and I hate it, I hate his touch, but there’s no room for me to move.

The course has been decided. We’re for St. John’s, Newfoundland, and Labrador. It’s where Samuel’s family waits for him, where we can get him medical attention and repair the cable that snapped. From there I don’t know. Ennis said he didn’t want to cross the Atlantic—it’s a long way, and an unknown sea—but they’re the only birds we have left to follow.

Maybe he’s tired of following birds.

I don’t know if I can convince him again, but I let my feet carry me up to the bridge anyway.

It’s the first time Ennis hasn’t been at the helm. Anik stands in his place, eyes on the horizon. “Where is he?”

“On break. He hasn’t slept in days. Leave him be, Franny.”

I slump into a chair, and I don’t open the laptop screen to check on the dots. Anik’s gaze pins me a little. There’s something heavy about it.

“Are you gonna tell me to get back to work?” I ask.

“Would you listen?”

“Probably not.”

Anik’s wide mouth curls into a smile, the first real smile I’ve seen him offer. He says something in another language. I wait for him to explain, but he turns back to the helm.

“What language was that?” I ask.

“Inupiat.”

“Is that Inuit?”

He nods. “Northern Alaska.”

“Is that where you met Ennis?”

Another nod.

“How did you meet?”

“On a boat. How else?”

“What’s it like up there?”

“So many questions.”

“I have millions.”

His perpetual scowl is back in place. But he surprises me by saying, “It’s death, up there. And life. The truest of each.”

I watch the stretch of ocean before us, expecting at any moment to see land on the horizon. “How long will it take to get there?” I ask.

“Two days, maybe. What will you do, now that the birds…”

“They’re not all dead,” I say. And yet … “I don’t know.” I can’t stop picking at my scabs and making my hands bleed. “If Ennis doesn’t want to keep going…”

“You’ll find another way,” Anik says simply.

But he doesn’t understand. I tried for months before I found a captain to agree.

“They’re not all dead,” Anik echoes.

I take a breath. He’s right, but I can’t stop seeing the bodies sinking down into the blur, and I can’t stop remembering the hollowness of Samuel’s chest as I blew air into it. It sends a shudder through me. “That moment before he woke up. Before we shocked him…”

Anik looks sideways at me.

“It was frightening.”

“Yes.”

“He was gone for a second. He didn’t seem in his body anymore. I breathed into his mouth and it filled him up like a balloon. He was just this … just an empty thing.”

Anik nods. “My grandmother would say that for a moment he visited the spirit world. We called him back and perhaps he’ll thank us for that and perhaps he won’t. Some think it unkind to be forced from such a place.”

“Have you spoken to people who’ve returned from there?”

“They say they have.”

“Do you believe them?”

I want him to say yes, I want it so badly, but he only shrugs.

“How do they describe it?”

Anik thinks for a time and I realize I have leaned so far forward I’m in danger of slipping off the seat.

“They say it is free of rules or punishments,” he says. “They call it weightless, and very beautiful.”

And suddenly I am crying. “Everyone goes there?”

“That’s what they say.”

“Even us? Even me?”

“Yes.”

“And the ones we love?”

“Of course.”

I close my eyes and tears spill down my cheeks, and the spirit he speaks of, my spirit, I can feel it trying to get free, trying to find its way there, only my body won’t let it, not yet. “She’s waiting for me, then.”

“Who is?”

I open my eyes and meet his brown stare.

“My daughter.”

His shoulders drop as he breathes out. His eyes are full now, too.

“Franny,” Anik says, reaching to place a hand on my hair. We watch the sea, waiting for land and wishing we never had to reach it.





12

The Saghani, LABRADOR CURRENT OUTSIDE NEWFOUNDLAND MIGRATION SEASON

The mood is bleak this morning as we near the coast of Newfoundland. We have abandoned any search for fish, and I didn’t expect the profundity of their loss. It’s easier to see how much the sea drives this crew, how much they belong to the hunt, when they are no longer in it.

Samuel warned me about the Labrador Current and what it would be like to reach where it meets the Gulf Stream. Still I couldn’t have imagined it. We have been flung at such speeds that I fail to believe anything could stop us. Furthermore, the two currents running alongside each other, one freezing cold and the other warm, have created a shroud of heavy fog as we approach land. I stand at the bow, unable to see my hand before my face let alone the rocks we careen toward.