Migrations(71)

Niall nods once, slowly.

“Why?”

“Because it’s in their nature.”



* * *



We leave for Galway in the morning. Christmas with Niall’s parents. The car is waiting to drive us to Edinburgh but first Niall and I go to the bird enclosures to say goodbye. Instinctively we both move to the Little terns. The male is eating his grass seeds again, making do, while the female flies around her cage, around and around, her wings brushing futilely against the metal, forever trying to reach the sky.

I turn away, unable to watch her.

But Niall stands witness, even as I know it must break his heart.

Sterna Paradisaea, SOUTH ATLANTIC OCEAN MATING SEASON

I’m holding the skull of a baby wren. I found it this morning in one of the nests in our yard, right down the back in those willow trees; I think its parents must have left it there when it died. Discarded. Or maybe they waited with it as long as they could. It’s like an eggshell, only much tinier, much more delicate. It barely fits on the tip of my pinkie finger. I keep thinking about how easy it would be to crush. It reminds me of her. But not of you. You are made of a different thing. Something far more enduring. I never saw that thing you spoke of, the one that was missing from the stuffed birds in my lab. I see it now, or its absence. Your absence has never felt crueler. I’ve never hated you until now. I’ve never loved you more.



* * *



The letter smells of him, somehow. I’m holding it to my face when— “’Scuse me, love.”

Ennis is ducking awkwardly beneath the doorframe. I refold Niall’s letter and return it carefully to my pack with the rest. That one was from a particularly dark time, not long after Iris died.

“It’s about to get rough,” Ennis says.

“What should I do?”

“Stay down here. Take your shoes off.”

“In case we have to swim.” The corner of my mouth curls.

Ennis nods. I think he might be excited about the infamous Drake Passage. He has nothing else left but this journey, and in this we are the same. I take no excitement in it, only cell-deep weariness, only a need to see its end.

We no longer have anything to follow. No tracked terns. We can only guess at the birds’ destination, and it seems an age ago that I even saw them moving. How long has it been since I knew they were alive?

Instead of staying in the small bedroom—there is also a simply stocked kitchen, a cramped bathroom, a dining table, and a set of bunk beds that Ennis graciously offered to take—I go up to the helm and stand by the skipper. There is static in the air. A black sky. I can feel the sea waking slowly, readying itself; I can feel it in my gut.

“Do you know how to do this?” I ask softly.

“Do what?” he asks, but he knows what I mean. After a moment he shrugs. We gaze at the dark churning water and the waves growing steadily before us. There is no land yet in sight. “Not sure anyone knows how to do this,” Ennis says.

And then. He turns the wheel hard and steers us sideways up the wall of an oncoming wave, outrunning its hungry crashing teeth, until we reach its lip and sail over its other side, over the steep cliff edge. I let the held breath from my lungs as we plummet down but Ennis is already turning the boat in the opposite direction, sailing up the wall of the next wave and reaching the end just as I think we’ll be tipped backward and swallowed. He does this a long time, zigzagging his way between waves, following and outrunning them, turning always for their gentlest slopes and edges. He maneuvers the tiny craft through the enormity of this most perilous sea; it’s a dance, and it’s quiet, and the sky watches us, and it’s as close as I’ve ever come to feeling utterly at one with an ocean this ferocious.

Rain begins with a rumbling shudder.

The plastic windshield does its best to protect us but soon we are drenched and the waves are sweeping onto us from every side. Ennis has tied us both to the helm, and we do our best to stay upright, exposed and vulnerable.

If they have all died, all the terns, this will have been for nothing. But how on earth could the delicate weight of a little bird, an exhausted little bird who has flown across the entire world with hardly a thing to eat, who has already done so much, survive this?

It’s asking too much.

I understand, finally. So in my heart I let them go. Nothing should have to struggle so much. If the animals have died it will not have been quietly. It will not have been without a desperate fight. If they’ve died, all of them, it’s because we made the world impossible for them. So—for my own sanity—I release the Arctic terns from the burden of surviving what they shouldn’t have to, and I bid them goodbye.

Then I crawl into the bathroom to vomit.



* * *



I dream of moths dancing in the beams of car headlights. Maybe it’s the nearness of the end that sends me back. Maybe it’s my failure.

LIMERICK PRISON, IRELAND TWELVE MONTHS AGO

The shrink’s name is Kate Buckley. She is very small and very intense. I’ve spent an hour a week with her for over three years.

Today she starts our session with: “I’m not recommending you for parole.”

“Why the hell not?” Apart from a few early incidents I’ve been on good behavior, and she knows it. The self-destructive desire that led me to plead guilty and landed me in this place, and the self-loathing that saw me try to kill myself and then kept me catatonic for the first six months have both been redirected. Now I want out.