Migrations(44)

John covers his face with a shaking hand. It is too terrible, all the wasted years. I have to get out of here.

“Thank you for having us,” I say stiffly. “We should go.”

“You won’t stay for dinner?”

“No, thank you.”

I am edging for the door, I can’t get there fast enough.

“Will you come back to see me, dear?”

I breathe out, feeling suddenly tired. “I don’t think so. But thank you.”

It’s only when I reach the door that I realize I still have the photo clenched in white-knuckled fingers. It feels a kind of death, to place it back on the mantel.

“Bye, John,” I manage. And again, “Thank you.”

Then I’m outside in a wind that has blown its way up from the sea. I can hear Niall speaking to John and then he is whisking me back to the car.

He doesn’t take me toward Galway, but down the winding road that leads through the bright little town and past it to the shoreline. Pinks and lilacs streak the sky. At the horizon it burns.

The boat to the Aran Islands leaves from here and I wish we could board it but it doesn’t run this late; the car park is empty when we pull into it. So instead we climb out and walk down onto the rocks. The ocean roars, steady and ferocious and calling.

“That man up there—he’s your family,” Niall says.

“He’s not.”

“He could be.”

“Why would I choose someone who never chose me?”

Niall gazes at me. My hair whips over my face and I push it back.

He says, “I hate everyone but you.”

I start to smile, thinking he must be making fun of me, but he grabs my arms and holds on to me and there’s such a burning thing that my laughter dies and something different comes awake. He throws his head back and roars.

A thrill erupts within me, and grief for the years wasted, thrown away by a jealous man. So I let forth a scream of my own, at John and for him, for his loneliness, and I scream for the missing of my mother, and for the never having met my grandmother, and for the madness of this man I have married, who may be just as mad as I am. We scream and scream, and then we laugh, building a world of our own.

Afterward I swim in the ocean awhile, and then I rejoin him and we sit on the rocks to watch dark stain the sky. He keeps an arm about me and I press myself as close to him as I can. It’s my least favorite time of day, coming out of the water, but it is better with him waiting for me. Immeasurably better.

“Where’s your mam?” he asks.

The lie forms so easily on my tongue. “She’s in the wooden house by the sea where I grew up.”

He considers this. “Then why does it feel like you’re looking for her?”

I don’t reply.

“Do you know where she is, Franny?”

My throat thickens as I shake my head.

“You haven’t spoken to her since you were a kid?”

“I’ve been trying to find her.”

He absorbs this silently. Then, “What of your da?”

“I don’t have a da.”

“What happened to him?”

“No idea.”

I wonder if I will ever tell Niall the truth of my dad, or if I will keep it buried in the dark, rotting place within.

“Then why’d she send you to live with him?”

“She sent me to the only place there was left, to his mother in New South Wales.”

“Australia? Shit.” He scratches the early growth of his beard. “Accent seems obvious now. Hybrid thing that it is. How long did you live with your grandmam?”

“Why are you asking so many questions?”

“Because I want to know the answers.”

“You didn’t before.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Then why didn’t you ask? Why now?”

He doesn’t answer.

“Why didn’t either of us ask a single question?” I press. “We were so stupid.”

“Regretting it already?” he asks. The wedding, if it can be called that.

And for one long moment I think the answer will be yes, it seems obviously yes, only when I open my mouth it’s to say the other word, and I’m astonished to feel it as truth.

We both catch sight of an egret carried by an eddy. “Too windy for you, my love,” Niall murmurs to it. The bird is flung about and stolen from view.

“I was with her a few years,” I say. “Edith. But I came and went a lot, and in the end I didn’t spend much time with her before she died.”

“What was she like?”

I try to find the right word, my mind reluctant to go back there, to that farm and all its hard edges, all its loneliness. “Unforgiving,” I say.

Niall strokes my hair off my face and kisses my temple.

“Mam wasn’t like that,” I murmur. “She was warm and sweet, and lost. I loved her so much. She had the wandering thing but she was terrified of it, too. She begged me not to leave her. She was fine being on her own until I came along and then the thought of being without me made her want to die. That’s what she said. But there was a boy I liked. I wanted to go to the beach with him and I didn’t fucking tell her, I just went. Why did I do that? I stayed away two whole days—or it might have even been three. So by the time I got back it was too late and she was gone. Like she warned me she’d be.”