Migrations(60)

“Why not?” I have a train ticket to Belfast, on the hunt for a lead.

“Because I don’t think you should keep looking.”

I’m thrown. “I will find her eventually—”

“She doesn’t want to be found, Franny. Why else make it so difficult for you?”

I shake my head, my chest tight and swollen.

“If she wanted to see you, she’d reach out.”

“Niall, listen to me,” I say as calmly as I’m able. “This restless thing … it can take over.” I will him to hear me. “If I ever leave you—if I have to go—I want you to promise that you’ll wait for me to come back, you’ll wait for me, and if that’s taking too long and you can’t wait any more, you have to come and find me and make me remember.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“Do you promise?”

Slowly he nods. “Yes. I promise.”

“You’ll wait?”

“Always.”

“And you’ll find me, if that’s what it takes?”

“Even had you not asked, darlin’.”

The song ends and that heavy weight shifts off my chest. The nameless ache. In its place is bone-deep relief, and love. We stay for another drink, and we don’t talk of anything, and I could listen for hours but Niall has something else planned. We ride our bikes down to one of the docks to where a small, motorized dinghy is waiting. My eyes widen as he gestures for me to climb in. I wonder if he has hired this boat, or if we’re stealing it. I don’t mind either way. A shiver of delight finds me as we set out into the dark water. We hug the coast, traveling north by the ceaseless circling light of the lighthouse. The salty smell of the sea and the sound of its crash, the sway of the waves and the black abyss of its depths, the reaching dark of it, up to where it meets the inky velvet sky pricked through with glitter. With the stars reflected in the water we could be sailing through the sky itself; there is no end to it, no end to the sea or the sky but a gentle joining together.

Too soon Niall turns us inland. We climb out onto a stretch of rocks and he hauls the boat up behind us. With a finger to his lips he gestures for me to be silent and we creep along the shore until the gaping mouth of a cave opens. I can hear something over the crash of the night-ocean. Many somethings. It’s a purring and then trills, hundreds of them, an echoing song. My heart starts pounding as we edge our way into the cave. The smell drapes itself upon me, a pungent musty warmth. Niall’s hand finds mine and he pulls me to the ground, whispers for me to lie flat on my stomach. The rocks are crooked and cold but above the noise is swelling, and there are shapes in the dark, shadows. I think briefly of bats—the movement is the same sort of fluttering.

“What are they?” I whisper.

“Wait.”

Eventually the clouds in the sky move so that the light of the almost-full moon shines into the cave, casting them in silver. Hundreds of nesting birds, flying and flitting and calling to each other, a sea of black feathers and curved beaks and shining eyes, a world of them.

“Storm petrels,” Niall whispers. He lifts my hand to his lips. “Happy anniversary.”

And I understand that we will never need the word, for this is a greater proclamation, this is the immensity of love and its furthest-reaching depths. I kiss him and hold him and we stay here, watching and listening to the beautiful creatures, for these few dark hours able to pretend we are the same.



* * *



It’s almost dawn when he takes this night and destroys it with naught but a handful of words, as most things are destroyed.



* * *



Back on the shore, wading from the dinghy to the rocks. Seawater about my ankles. Gray draped upon us.

“Franny,” he says, and I turn, smiling. The water reaches his knees. He holds the boat’s edge. His skin looks ashen.

“I’ve been searching, too,” Niall says.

“For what?”

“Only I went a different way about it. I could never work out why you didn’t want to go through the police.”

My smile falls away.

“You never found her because she took your father’s name. She was legally called Stewart, then, not Stone.”

He moves a little closer but still leaves space between us, unable, somehow, to close that last gap.

“Darlin’,” he says, and so gently. “You know what happened. Do you remember?”

Do I remember?

No.

But I could go back, couldn’t I? Really go back this time, to the secret places.

I could walk back into the wooden house by the sea all over again. Call her name all over again. See her body hanging by its neck all over again.

“Oh.” I take a breath and the world blurs.

“She didn’t leave you,” Niall says, but he’s wrong. “She died.”

I nod once. Yes. I know this now. I have always known it, somewhere. As I know the shape of her swollen face and the red of her burst eyes and the blue of her bruised skin. I know how dirty her feet looked, hanging there without shoes or socks. I wanted to cover them to keep them from the chill. It was so cold in that house.

My legs wobble, sitting me gracelessly in the water.

How funny, that such a thing should drop so delicately from my mind. A falling, fluttering leaf.