Migrations(70)

A time later. “Are you all right?”

He nods, reaching to cradle my head. Our lips are against each other’s shoulders. “Just a night dip, aye? You do them all the time.”

I smile. “Aye.”

“Must be your selkie blood,” he murmurs.

“It must.”

“I’ve missed you, darlin’.”

“I’ve missed you.”

“Why do you go?”

I don’t answer at first. “I’m not sure.”

“Can you try to think?”

I turn my mouth to his neck and press it there. Trying. “When I stay,” I whisper, “I think it does harm.”

“I think you’re frightened.”

It brings a kind of relief to admit it. “I am. I always am.”

“That won’t do forever, my love.”

I swallow, remembering the feel of the feather in my throat. “No, it won’t.”

There is a long silence, but for the fall of water.

“My father strangled a man to death,” I tell him softly. “My mother hung herself with a rope about her neck. Edith drowned on the fluid in her lungs. And my body suffocated our daughter.

“I dream of choking, and I wake to find myself trying to steal the air from you. There’s something broken in my family. It’s most broken in me.”

Niall strokes my hair for a long time. Then he says, very clearly, “Your body did not suffocate our daughter. She died, because sometimes babies die before they’re born, and that’s all.” Then, once more, “I’ve missed you.” And I am done with the universe between us. It is so perilous, this love, but he’s right, I will have no cowardice in my life, not anymore, and I will be no small thing, and I will have no small life, and so I find his mouth with mine and we are awake at last, returned to a land long abandoned, the land of each other’s bodies.

It feels an age since I’ve had him, and I am clutching at him as he pulls me tighter, moves callously inside me as though to destroy whatever civilized parts of me still exist, to push me through them into something uncivilized, something barbarous, and as I feel that liberation from my own shame I come with a leap, a bound into the air, a tugging away of something into the wild and lush and out of control, a place where I don’t run or leave, somewhere I am still.





26

MER BASE, CAIRNGORMS NATIONAL PARK, SCOTLAND FOUR YEARS AGO

Niall and I watch her, holding our breaths. When she extends her wings up and back like the Winged Victory I feel my pulse quicken. Her beak, usually orange to match her legs but now sooty for the winter cold, darts upward and then down into the bush. She eats one, two, three grass seeds.

The indrawn breath of the collective viewers is exhaled.

“Good girl,” I whisper.

“See!” Harriet cries. “I knew it. Adaptation.”

Niall is expressionless; for once I have no idea what he’s thinking. To be fair, he never said the birds wouldn’t adapt, only that with a little help from us they might not have to. He’s been working on getting permission to fund fisheries in the Antarctic waters but it’s been—in his words—“about as successful as pushing shit up a hill.” No governments give a rat’s ass about feeding birds when the fisheries could be feeding humans. The apathy is staggering.

I gaze at the Little tern, a smaller seabird than her Arctic brothers and sisters. She would normally migrate to the east coast of Australia if we didn’t have her caged here, eating grass instead of fish.

I wish I could touch her, but it’s strictly forbidden unless absolutely necessary. Not by the base, but by Niall. He says that human touch to an animal is disruptive and cruel. The tern’s mate is louder than she is, giving his distinctive, creaking call. He’s been eating the seeds longer. The female waited and waited, enduring more in the stubborn hope of freedom. For a while it seemed like we would stand here and watch her starve to death, but today, at last, she’s surrendered.

Niall and I head for our cabin. He is silent and introspective.

“What are you thinking?” I ask, but he doesn’t answer.

“Today went well,” I say, not understanding.

He nods.

“So then what?”

“We should have done better for her,” he says. “Harriet thinks it means they’ll change their course and their breeding grounds. Start mating on the coast of Australia or South America.”

“All of the terns?”

He nods.

“What do you think?” I ask.

“It’s smart, finding a species of plant that will withstand inclement weather and grow on most continents. It’s smart, seeing if the birds will eat it, when pressed.”

“But…?”

“I don’t think they’re going to fly around the entire world to eat grass.”

“Harriet’s saying they won’t have to fly around the entire world anymore.”

He flashes me a look that implies I’m a traitor for listening to Harriet. We’re quiet awhile, concentrating on our feet on the slippery ground, on our breath making clouds.

I’m sure we’re both thinking of the creature in her cage.

“You think they’ll keep flying, don’t you,” I say.