Migrations(40)

The white fetlocks of the horses are thick and heavy; love pulses through their muscles and the small bodies atop. The littlest, Ferd, is six. My daughter would be that age now, her hair jet-black like mine, like her father’s.





13

NEWFOUNDLAND, CANADA MIGRATION SEASON

“Why are you crying?”

I open my eyes to find Ferd sitting on the sand in front of me. The other girls are walking the horses back up the hill. The sun has sunk completely now, the stars a glittering blanket above.

“I’m always crying,” I say, dashing the tears from my face.

“Hally’s always crying, too. Mom says it’s because she had a past life and it keeps sneaking back in.”

I smile. “That’s nice.”

“And it’s probably true, if Mom says.”

“Yeah, probably.”

“Come on. Aren’t you hungry, Franny Panny?” She laughs at the name, making me laugh, too.

“Aye, I’m famished.” She leads me by the hand up to the house. The beam from the lighthouse circles, inexorable as the tide, there and then gone, there and then gone.

A card table is added to the end of the large dining table, but it’s still a squeeze to get all fourteen of us seated. Gammy doesn’t banish her kids to another area, and they’re all impeccably behaved at dinner.

“To Dad,” Coll says in her dreamy whisper. We all raise our glasses to Samuel.

Dinner is served, a delicious winter vegetable stew. Basil has refrained from his usual ridiculousness, except to walk around the table ensuring everyone has a stalk of rosemary and a slice of lemon atop their bowl, and that the grown-ups all have a glass full of wine. I’m surprised to find myself enjoying his particularities, his passion, his attention to detail. He catches me staring at him and winks, ruining the moment.

“I haven’t gotten to the bottom of who your new girl is,” Gammy says, and all eyes turn to me.

“She’s our ornithologist,” Mal says. “Her birds are gonna lead us to the fish.”

“There’s no more birds left,” Ferd protests.

“There are some,” I tell her. “They’re only hiding.”

“Which ones?” Hally asks.

“The Arctic terns,” I say. And all of a sudden I am back in my husband’s lab the first time he told me of them. I’m with him as he sheds real tears, the first I’d ever seen him shed, describing the journey of these little birds, the courage of them. “They have the longest migration of any animal in the world, from the Arctic to the Antarctic and back again.”

“And you follow them, Franny?” Gammy asks. “To study them?”

I nod. “I have trackers on three.” I swallow. “Two, sorry.”

“Then why do the trip yourself?”

“It’s part of the methodology.”

“Don’t you have a team? You do this on your own, you track them all that way?” She shakes her head slowly, not taking her eyes from me. “What would possess someone to choose such a lonely life?”

There is silence as they wait.

I fold my hands in my lap and feel the question. “Life’s always lonely. Less so with the birds. They led me to my husband, once.”

It sounds mad.

The silence lengthens.

“Fucking mental,” Basil says abruptly.

“Language, Bas,” Dae says as the girls dissolve into giggles.



* * *



After dinner the girls decide to sing, which I gather they do a lot. They argue for a good five minutes about what the first song will be, until finally Hally declares they will sing only Irish songs for me, so I might feel less homesick.

But it’s raw, and suddenly it’s Kilfenora, my family in their kitchen as they played for me, it’s my mother’s cottage by the sea, and it’s missing her, it’s my husband and the distance between our bodies and it’s my daughter, the child I never wanted, the child I fought a battle to be rid of, the one I fell deeply, devastatingly in love with, the one I lost. It’s the littlest one, Ferd, her fingers around my neck and her hot breath against my ear, she has cracked me open and now my own littlest one is in my arms once more, a too-still thing, a most precious thing, breathless and without warmth, and no matter how often I try to leave it behind there will never be an end to this ache, this pain, the feel of her unbearable weightlessness in my hands.

I can hardly feel my body as I move for the door. It’s cold outside and I hardly know it, and before I close the door behind me I hear Blue ask, “Did we upset her?” and Anik’s voice replying, “Something darker did that,” and I’m walking for the hills and shore and sea. I take off all my clothes and wade out into the icy water and the pain is immense and also nothing nothing nothing.

I lie in the sea and feel more lost than ever, because I’m not meant to be homesick, I’m not meant to long for the things I have always been so desperate to leave.

It isn’t fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay.



* * *



It is Léa and Gammy and Hally who finally find me. They wrap me in a blanket on the seashore and I hear someone saying, “Let me die,” over and over and then as Gammy kisses my forehead and Hally strokes my hair and they hold me so tight we tremble, I realize it is me.