Migrations(41)

“Stay,” Hally whispers in my ear.

But I can’t.

TRONDHEIM, NORWAY EIGHT YEARS AGO

“Hello?”

“Hi.” I listen to his breathing a long while.

“Where are you?” he asks, and he sounds very tired.

“Trondheim.”

A moment for him to take that in, to readjust. I ask so much of him. I wear him down. “Why Trondheim?”

“Because I was in Oslo but the city lights made it impossible to see the Aurora.”

“But you’ve found it? How is it?”

“I’m watching from the balcony. It’s the most gorgeous thing, Niall … You’d love it.”

“Whose balcony is it?”

“A friend’s.”

“Are you safe?”

“Aye.”

“Whose balcony is it? Can you text me their name and address?”

“A couple I met at dinner, Ann and Kai, I’ll text in a bit.”

“Do you have enough money?”

“Aye.”

“When are you coming home?”

“Soon.”

He pauses awhile. I slide down onto the floor with my back to the wall. The brilliant greens and purples dance across the sky. I can feel him through the phone, it is such a potent thing, like I could touch him, feel his breath on my cheek, smell him. I’m dizzy with it, with his nearness and his terrible absence.

“It’s lonely here, darling,” I say, tears spilling onto my face.

“It’s lonely here, darlin’,” Niall says.

“Don’t hang up.”

“I won’t.”

And we don’t, not for a long time.

NEWFOUNDLAND, CANADA MIGRATION SEASON



* * *



They leave me in bed with hot water bottles piled about my feet. A distant part of me is embarrassed, but the current creature I am just wants quiet.

Only quiet is a different beast when it finds you. A perfect kind of thing until you have it and it turns on you.

My joints ache as I rise; there is screaming in my head and I hurry down the hallway to the stairs, and then I find my way back outside despite the cold, I feel none of it anyway, and I walk up to the headland and I sit where I can watch the wild Atlantic and I return to those first days with you, my darling, as I always find myself doing.





PART TWO





14

GALWAY, IRELAND TWELVE YEARS AGO

It starts as a tickle that creeps its way deeper, into a scratch, a scrape, a choke, until all I can do is cough up feather after feather, born of my very body and I can’t get any air, not one breath— “Franny!”

There’s something atop me, pressing me into the ground, oh god, it’s a body— My husband is pinning me to the bed. I jackknife, repulsed at the sudden confinement of limbs and the powerlessness.

Niall immediately scrambles back, raising his hands. “Easy. It’s okay.”

“What are you doing?”

“Franny—I woke up and you were strangling me.”

I stare at him, trying to catch my breath. “No … I was choking…”

His eyes are wide. “You were strangling me.”

Dread curls inside. I have never slept a night beside someone, never woken beside another body. Last night we were married. This morning I have tried to kill him.

I stumble, caught in the sheets, then run for the toilet in time to vomit. He follows me, tries to hold my hair but I shrug him off, not wanting to be touched, too ashamed to be touched. When I’m done I rinse my mouth. Can hardly look at him.

“I’m sorry. I sleepwalk. And other things, sometimes. I should have said.”

He takes this in. “Right. Okay. Fuck.” He laughs a bit. “I’m kinda relieved.”

“Relieved?”

“I thought you might have been really regretting last night.”

There’s something so wry in his voice that I too find myself with a slightly unhinged laugh on my lips. “I was asleep.”

“Must have been one hell of a nightmare.”

“I can’t even remember now.”

“You said you were choking.”

Scratching in my mouth and lungs—I shiver, block the memory as best I can.

“Do you often dream of choking?”

“No,” I lie, moving past him for the kitchen. With the contents of my stomach flushed down a drain I’m starving. His apartment is simple and too modern for my taste, but we talked about finding a new place last night, somewhere that can be ours.

I raid his fridge but all he has are ultra-healthy grains and seeds and right now I need something greasy to sponge up all the alcohol we consumed last night. “Can we go get a fry-up?”

“Is this really not a big deal to you?” he asks. “Should I expect to get strangled every night? What else happens? Do you leave the house? Is it dangerous?”

For the first time since I woke I force myself to look him in the face. There he is again, pinning me to the bed, stronger in every muscle than I am, something shocked and determined in his eyes and is this how I looked when he woke to the same thing? “It won’t happen again,” I say. “I promise. I have medication I can take.” Another lie. There are no meds that work. But I don’t want him to be scared—for me or of me. I don’t want that look in his eyes, for him to feel the way I felt, waking to his hands pressing me small.