Migrations(48)
He gasps in shock. His hands loosen.
Blood is a cascade upon us both.
People arrive, I think. There is movement around us.
“Holy fucking shit—” someone is saying and someone else is demanding the police be called and someone is telling them all to shut the fuck up and arms are holding me upright. The knife drops from my hand. “It’s all right,” someone says against my ear. But the man is still looking at me, looking and looking, and clutching at his neck, trying to stop the bleeding and sinking to his knees, and I think he’s hardly in his body anymore and I think I’m hardly in mine.
“Easy,” the voice says, and it’s Ennis holding me upright.
He walk-drag-carries me somewhere. Back to the hotel? I am dull with shock.
The others are here now, pulling us faster and it’s not the hotel at all but the boat we’re rushing toward, and I think it’s because there are people following us. We run, an adrenaline-fueled blur, feet slapping on boards and low voices giving urgent commands. I blink and I’m on the boat and the guys are working like madmen to get it moving. I blink and the Saghani is smoothly away from the shore and out into the ocean. I blink and I am in a room I don’t know, some part of me thinks it must be Ennis’s cabin, maybe, I don’t care, and from far away he is speaking.
“You’re not alone, love,” he is saying. “Be easy. You’re not alone.”
Does he think that’s true?
“Is he dead? Did I kill him?”
“I don’t know.”
I give in. A dam breaks and weariness floods in. It’s all I can do not to pass out. I blink and I’m in a bed.
“Are we leaving?” I ask.
“We’re already gone,” Ennis says. “Sleep.”
“Did I mess things up for us?”
“No, love,” he says. “You got us free.”
But I’ll never be free. I wonder if this was how my father felt the day he killed a person.
17
SOUTH COAST OF NSW, AUSTRALIA NINETEEN YEARS AGO
Edith is out with the lambs tonight, hunkered down with her rifle to watch for the reflective eyes of hungry foxes. She makes me do this some nights, despite my protests—I’ve told her a thousand times I refuse to kill any animal, even to protect our livelihood, and anyway protecting the lambs is what Finnegan is for, but still she sends me out into the cold on watch duty, the rifle awkward in my unwilling hands. “When it comes time, you’ll do what you have to,” she says in that way of hers, the way that brooks no argument, and I’ve yet to spot one of the predators so I don’t know if she’s right.
In any case, tonight is my chance. I’ve scoped out the locked box of treasures she keeps under her bed, and I’ve taken pains to steal her key and make a copy of it because I just know she’s the type of woman who would notice if it was gone for too long. Copying a key is actually no easy task when you’re stuck on a farm way out of town and you won’t get even your learner’s license until you turn sixteen and that’s an entire year away. I had to pay Skinny Matt to do it for me, and he’s the most stoned kid at our school, so he wasn’t exactly reliable. Next it was a matter of waiting for lambing season, when the first little ones drop messily from their mother’s bodies and then need protecting from all manner of hunter—not only the foxes but eagles, too, and wild dogs sometimes. They’re hungrier and hungrier now that their wild prey grows scarcer. These are the only nights I can be certain Edith won’t catch me: she’d lie in wait out there until her body wasted away and her bones turned to dust, if she had to. Determined and silent.
It’s possible I’m being a bit paranoid about the level of protection Edith has over this box. But anyway. It’s interested me ever since I got to this bastard of a farm. My grandmother is a hard kind of woman, see. She doesn’t tell me anything about my parents—she doesn’t talk much to me at all, really, except to bark orders, and if I don’t complete her slave labor to the required degree of perfection she doesn’t let me go to surf rescue training, which is just about the only thing I like doing in this country, and since I just got my bronze medallion I’m now responsible for lifesaving patrols and she doesn’t seem to get the importance of that—but she has this box and I’m convinced there are secrets hiding in it. Instead of turning her bedroom light on, which she might see from the paddock, I creep through the dark and lie flat on my tummy to root around until I can feel the cold of the box’s edge. I drag its heavy weight free—heavier than I’d expected—and dart into my room to open it.
The weight of the box comes from several military medals that belong, I’m surprised to see, to my grandfather, who was apparently in a regiment of Light Horse infantry. I read the inscriptions on them and run my fingers over the metal, trying to put pieces of a puzzle together. Why doesn’t she speak of him, or keep any pictures around the house? What’s so private about her marriage that she has to keep all remnants of it locked away from curious eyes?
I move on from the medals, lifting free a pile of various papers. Some are business documents—the deed to the farm, mortgage statements, and the like—which I put aside without reading. I don’t know what I’m looking for, really, just some sign that I didn’t get sent to the wrong farm, the farm of a woman who has no son and therefore can’t be my grandmother. She doesn’t speak of him, or of my mother. I don’t know where he is or what he does for a living—I don’t even know his name.