Migrations(39)

Ferd wriggles down to play with her sisters on the sand, so I sit on a dune and watch the two riders gallop up and down the length of the beach. A golden setting sun streaks the sky pink, the ocean metallic. I bury my feet and hands, feeling the coarse grains against my skin, and I beg myself to live inside this evening, but I am a million miles away. Once I would have lived for the sweetness of this night, I would have devoured it and let it quicken my blood, and now there is nothing. I am separate, and that might as well be death anyway.

Ennis appears silently and sits beside me. He has brought me a glass of wine, and a beer for himself. I’m surprised by his presence, when he has studiously avoided me.

“They’re something, huh?” he asks, eyes on the girls.

I nod. “What are your children like?”

I’m not expecting an answer, but he says, “I don’t know. I don’t know them anymore.”

“What are their names?”

“Owen and Hazel.”

There’s something tight in his voice, so I stop asking about his children.

My curiosity catches hold of something else instead. “So what’s this big secret that no one will tell me about how Anik became your first mate?”

“It’s not a secret,” Ennis says. “It’s just not their story to tell. We were on another boat together, before the Saghani. There was a storm and she sank, and every man aboard drowned except me and Anik, and the two of us survived because we held on to a bit of the mast and to each other, and we waited in the water for three days to be found. Now we don’t sail without each other and that’s it, that’s all there is to it.”

I’m silent. It’s far from what I expected, and I turn cold, trying to imagine what it must have been like in that water for so long, knowing the endurance of it must bind you to someone forever.

“Why are you talking to me?” I ask eventually.

Ennis glances at me. “I’m taking pity on you.”

I roll my eyes.

The horses thunder by, a storm of sound. Two tails of red hair stream out behind them, tangled with the dark manes of the animals.

“The fish will come back,” Ennis says abruptly.

“No, they won’t. Not while humans are here.”

“There are always cycles—”

“This is mass extinction, Ennis. They’re not coming back.”

His face twists in denial. I find it astonishing.

“Why do you do this to yourself?” I ask him. “It’s like punishment. Why?”

“Because there’s nothing else. There’s nothing else for me. There’s this, and there’s my children, and they’re not even mine anymore unless I can keep going, unless I can make something of myself.”

“Correct me if I’m wrong, but what does money have to do with getting custody?”

“I’ll never get them back unemployed and penniless.”

“So go back, drive taxis, clean buildings, pour beers, whatever. You can’t be a father if you’re not there.”

He shakes his head. I don’t think he can hear me, not really. I stare at him, and something sinks slowly in through my pores. Recognition.

Ennis and I are the same.

He told me I judged him, that I thought him scum, and the truth is I did. But how can I judge his destructive compulsion when I bear the same?

“I can’t fucking stop,” Ennis admits. He gulps his beer, I think to calm himself. “It’s a sickness.”

I said the same thing to Niall once about my wandering feet, about leaving him and hurting him over and over, but hearing it said now, it sounds more like an excuse than anything. It sounds selfish.

Ennis goes on, purging himself, maybe seeking some kind of absolution, but he’s come to the wrong person—I have none to give. “Fishing’s been in my family for hundreds of years. Generation after generation of fishermen. There was nothing else. Only thing I was raised on was the need to find the Golden Catch, to be the first one to do it in a long line of men obsessed.”

He’s quiet awhile, and then he adds more softly, “It’s the only thing I’m good at. There has to be some way to be a father and a good man, and still be me.”

I don’t have an answer for that. I never worked out how to be relied upon and also free.

Ennis’s hand on the glass trembles. “If I have to give it all up to be there for them, then I will, but I have to end it well. I have to … achieve something.”

“Even if it puts people in danger.”

“Yes.” His voice cracks. “Even then.”

We are silent as the girls go up and down, up and down. There’s a heaviness between us and it’s made of shame, but there’s also a new understanding.

“What if you set the others free?” I ask.

“I can’t do it on my own.”

“Could you do it with me?”

Ennis looks at me. “Just the two of us?”

I nod.

Slowly he shakes his head. “No. I don’t think so.” But something in his gaze has shifted; I’ve the feeling I’ve struck a match.

“Dinner!”

We both turn to see Basil bellowing from the house. Ennis rises. The gray in his beard turns silver in the light.

“I’ll wait for the girls,” I say, wanting to be alone.