Migrations(66)

I go into the cramped bathroom and don’t turn on the light. I look at the silhouette of my reflection, and I slap my cheek, once, twice, wanting it to hurt, wanting it to bleed, and when it doesn’t, when it’s not enough I almost go to smash my forehead against the glass, but Ennis is pulling me away, constricting me, ignoring my struggles and my sobs until I give up, and collapse and weep against him. The second he lets me go I pull away from any comfort because what if she’s dead.

We wait until dawn. Until the Saghani is empty, the police gone.

Ennis stops the yacht beside her and waits for me to board her once more. “You’re coming, aren’t you?” I asked him, but he said he couldn’t. Instead he waits for me to run through the ransacked boat, stripped by the police of most belongings, of anything of interest, including my laptop. But my paranoia about my pack, about the preciousness of the letters it holds, has meant that I always keep it stashed under my bed and with a great stroke of luck I find it still hidden there, waiting for me.

I check the bridge just in case, but as Ennis warned, the steering wheel has been locked in place so even if the boat were seaworthy we wouldn’t be able to sail it anywhere. With a last farewell I climb back down to the yacht and then together Ennis and I sail on past her, a ghost ship in the gray dawn and I think what might have happened to Léa, I think of where she is now, in some hospital room or a morgue and I want to scream, but I hold it inside, I hold it where it burns, because where we’re going I may need it yet.

As we leave the mouth of the cove Ennis meets my eyes and there is a thing unspoken now, something I know he understands. There may be no end to this we can survive. Not with only the two of us, setting out on a stolen boat this small, leaving behind the tracking software and the little red dots, discarding a trail of destruction in our wake like the delicate film of a snake’s shed skin. We didn’t get goodbyes or parting glances. We didn’t get guarantees any of them will find a safe way home, if home exists for them beyond what has been burned to ash with the slip of a foot, the crack of a skull.

We watch the Saghani for as long as we can. As he navigates south into the most perilous stretch of ocean left on this planet the captain weeps unashamedly.

I am too numb for any more tears. Too animal now.





PART THREE





25

When my daughter is born without breath, drowned by my body, part of me goes to sleep.

I go in search of something to wake it.

YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK, UNITED STATES SIX YEARS AGO



* * *



I waited for him at the airport. There is that. I always ask him to come with me, but he is a different kind of creature. He has his own grief to bear and his own strength to gather, and he finds his in work, not in freedom from responsibility, not in journeys or movement or turning resolutely forward and not looking back. So I’ve left him once more, when I promised I never would again.

I will stop making that promise now. It demeans us both.

I’ve found my way to Yellowstone, to one of the last pine forests. It is an empty place now, not as it once was. The deer have all died. The bears and wolves went long ago, already too few to survive the inevitable. Nothing will survive this, Niall says. Not at the current rate of change. There is no birdsong as I walk among the trees and it is catastrophically wrong. I regret coming here, to where it should be more alive than anywhere. Instead it is a graveyard.

As my boots crunch on the carpet of dead bark and leaves I can hear her crying as she should have done when she was born. I must be going mad. Panic sets in, silver eddies over my skin as light moves upon the iridescent scales of a fish.

It’s been many months since I’ve seen Niall, though we write religiously, always. Right now a letter is not enough. I need to hear his voice. My eyes are blurry as I hike my way to the nearest lodge. I am shaking as I rent a room and close its door and switch on my phone. The walls spin a little and I can’t get this pain out of my chest, out of my insides, I have to leave here.

The phone dings as dozens of missed calls and messages flood in. They are all from Niall, and I turn cold with fear because this isn’t normal, he doesn’t call me unless there’s something wrong.

He answers on the second ring. “Hello, darlin’.”

“Are you all right?”

He is quiet a moment. Then, “They’ve declared the crow extinct.”

The air leaves me in a rush. Like that, all panic is gone. All this self-absorption dissolves and what I have left is the memory of twelve friends offering me gifts from their perches in the willow tree. I have an enormous sadness—and I have concern for my husband to outweigh it all. I know what this will do to him, what it has been doing to him.

“All of the Corvidae family have gone,” Niall says. “The kestrel was the only raptor left, and the last one of them died in captivity last month…” I can hear him shaking his head, losing his voice. I can hear him gathering what’s left of him. “Eighty percent of all wild animal life has died. They say most of the rest will go in the next decade or two. We’ll keep farmed creatures. Those will survive because we must keep our bellies full of their flesh. And domesticated pets will be fine because they let us forget about the rest, the ones dying. Rats and cockroaches will survive, no doubt, but humans will still cringe when they see them and try to exterminate them as though they are worth nothing, even though they are fucking miracles.” There are tears in his throat. “But the rest, Franny. Everything else. What happens when the last of the terns die? Nothing will ever be as brave again.”