Migrations(64)

They make it harder to think of dying. They make me entertain the shadow of an idea, one that has something to do with life after this migration, and that’s dangerous.

I asked Niall once what he thought happened to us after we die, and he said nothing, only decomposition, only evaporation. I asked him what he thought it meant for our lives, for how we spend them, for what they mean. He said our lives mean nothing except as a cycle of regeneration, that we are incomprehensibly brief sparks, just as the animals are, that we are no more important than they are, no more worthy of life than any living creature. That in our self-importance, in our search for meaning, we have forgotten how to share the planet that gave us life.

Tonight I write him a letter telling him I think he was right. But that also I think there is meaning, and it lives in nurturing, in making life sweeter for ourselves, and for those around us.

“Don’t you ever stop?” Léa asks, sitting beside me. A splash of wine from her glass slops onto my paper, smearing my untidy words. “You’re obsessed. What do you write to him?” she demands. “Do you tell him about us?”

“Sometimes.”

“What do you say about me?”

I look at her. She’s a little drunk, a little needy. “I say you are unforgiving and superstitious and suspicious. I say you’re wonderful.”

She takes a gulp. “Bullshit. Tell him he’s a fool. Tell him you don’t need him. You don’t need him, Franny.” And then, blearily, “Stupide créature solitaire.”

“What do you think happens to us when we die?” I ask her.

She snorts with laughter. “What’s wrong with you? Why does it matter?”

“It doesn’t.”

There’s a silence, and then she gives a great heaving sigh. “I think we go where we deserve to go and that is only for God to decide.”

She’s quiet after that, and so am I.

Later, when she nose-dives drunkenly into bed, I get her a glass of water (from our once-more working water tap) and leave it beside her. The others all retreat to sleep, too, but I stay up awhile, returning to the empty main deck. It’s Basil’s turn on watch duty, and I can see him smoking in the bow, eyes trained to the shoreline in case of approach. I have no desire to go anywhere near him and suffer another stream of vitriol, so, on a whim, I climb all the way up into the crow’s nest. I’m not meant to come up here—it’s too easy to slip and fall if you haven’t spent your life on boats—but there’s no one around, and tonight I want to see as far as I’m able, I want away from other breathing bodies, I want sky. The pretty lights of the other boats wink and glow below me and I wish they’d flick off and leave the world in darkness. All these humans have left no space for anything else. I learned this love of darkness not from my husband, though I learned so much from him, but in our bottom paddock in the deep, witching hour of the morning, with true night draped above in a sky full of stars and a sea roaring gently in the distance and my silent grandma beside. All those nights we spent down there in that pitch-black paddock, and never a word between us, only an occasional sigh from me because I’d rather have been in bed.

Sitting here now, in the uppermost part of this boat, I would give anything, any part of me—my flesh or my blood or my very heart itself—to be back inside one of those nights, standing beside her in the dark, she who infuriated and confused me, she who was unknowable and unreachable, she who loved me when no one else did, only I was too intent on loneliness to see it.



* * *



It’s late when I hear something. I must have fallen asleep in the crow’s nest because I stir awake at the distant sound of a boat engine.

I stand slowly. Keep a firm hold on the railing. Squint in the darkness. The lights that are drawing closer are white and blue, and approaching from the mouth of the cove, from sea.

Fuck.

Why hasn’t Basil seen them yet? Has he fallen asleep? I look around for him and see him standing at the railing, silently watching the boat’s approach. He’s wearing a backpack. He is leaving, he has done something. I go dark inside with knowing and with no disbelief, it makes too much sense for disbelief. A part of me thinks I should have tried harder, I should have reached out to him and maybe that would have stopped this. But what use is that now? It’s done.

It’s not for the faint of heart, the crow’s nest of a boat. It is very high, and though climbing up can seem simple enough, descending again is nauseating. One rung after another, down down down, keep moving, don’t lose your balance, look only at the rungs. The boat spins below me as vertigo hits and I must pause, slam my eyes shut, and breathe quickly through my nose. Wait for the world to right itself, for my stomach to readjust. Then down once more, stepping rhythmically on and on until feet hit wood.

I don’t bother confronting Basil, but hurry into the belly of the boat.

I go to Ennis first, alone in his captain’s cabin. He must be a light sleeper for he wakes the instant I open his door. “Police,” I say, and he’s up.

That’s when the siren sounds. Jesus, it’s like a bomb alarm, it makes me think the sky is falling, that this is the end and that I can’t go back to prison, I can’t.

The others are up now, too, all of us panicked and half dressed in the mess. All except Basil.

“I’m going to kill him,” Anik says in this disturbing way that’s a little too convincing.