Migrations(75)

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Niall’s had about five whiskeys on top of the champagne, so it looks like I’m driving, despite my three drinks. He throws me the keys and I drop them, laughing at his exasperated expression.

“I never promised you I could catch.”

“No, you did not, my love.”

The funny thing that falls into the silence is a shared thought of how we never really promised each other anything, actually. Not with words. I suppose there were promises made with lips and fingers and gazes. Yes, there were thousands of those.

I put the heater on high and we sit for a minute, warming our hands in front of the vents, urging it to get going.

“Christ almighty,” he grunts. “I’ve had enough of this winter now.”

“We’re a good long way from its end yet.” I start the drive home, windscreen wipers struggling to clear the drifting snow. I drive slowly, unable to see well in the dark, but there are never any cars out here this time of night.

“Did you have a nice night, darling?” I ask.

He reaches for my free hand and squeezes it. “It was tedious as all hell.”

“Liar. I saw you laugh so hard champagne came out of your nose.”

“Fine.” He tries to hide his smile. “It was tolerable. You?”

I nod.

For some reason I decide that I will tell him now. I would like to have another child. Would you?

Instead he says, “I do have to go back to MER. And I don’t think you should come with me this time.”

I’m thrown. “I thought you said you were done with MER.”

“I was frustrated, and being childish, but you’re right. There’s still more to do.”

“Good. Of course I’ll come. We’ll find a way to solve the money problem.”

He shakes his head. “I think you should travel.”

“I know it’s only Scotland, babe, but it still counts.”

He doesn’t say anything for a long while. Then, very clearly, “I don’t want you to come with me.”

“Why?”

“We can’t come and go from a place like that. If you’re there, it means you have to stay.”

There is silence in the car. I lick my dry lips. Calmly I ask, “Did I leave, the whole time we were there?”

“No.” He pauses, then adds, “But I was waiting for it day and night.”

I look at him.

“The road,” he reminds me and I reluctantly go back to it.

“Now you’re saying I shouldn’t stay?”

“I’m not saying you should do anything, Franny.”

Anger rears inside me. “So how do I win this?” I ask. “Is it some kind of trap? When I stay, you expect me to leave, so I might as well just fucking go.”

Niall nods slowly. It is the last thing I expect from him. Heat floods my body, making me nauseous. I breathe deeply until it passes, and then I try to explain. “Something changed that night you fell in the lake. I changed.”

He takes my free hand and squeezes it. “No, you didn’t, darlin’.”

“I know it will take a long time for you to trust me again, but—”

“I trust you implicitly.”

“Then why aren’t you listening to me?”

“I am.”

My pulse is quickening because I don’t understand what this conversation is. His calm is starting to derail me—I have none of my own left and my knuckles are white on the steering wheel. Flurries of snow turn the road ahead into a tunnel made by the headlights. “You said I leave because I’m frightened, and that that wouldn’t do, and you were right—it wasn’t good enough, so I’ve stayed. For years now.”

I dart a look at his face—he is watching me in surprise.

“That’s not what I meant,” Niall says. “I meant you were frightened of admitting the real reason you wander.”

I stare at the road, my mind blank. “The real reason?”

“It’s in your nature,” Niall says simply. “If you could only let go of all this shame, Franny. You should never be ashamed of what you are.”

Hot tears. My eyes are flooded with them.

“Have you stayed put since then because I said it would make you brave?”

I don’t say anything but the tears slip freely down my cheeks and chin and throat. I am so tired, suddenly, of denying the pull.

“Oh, darlin’,” he says, and then I think he might be crying too. “I’m sorry. I’ll love you no matter where on this earth you are. I want you to be free to be what you are, to go where you want. I don’t want you chained to me.”

He isn’t John Torpey, frightened of having a wife who was wilder than he was, punishing her for it and living a life of regret. No, Niall is a different kind of man. He reaches to kiss my hand, to press it to his face as though gripping at life itself, or something more ardent, and he says, my husband, changing my life, “There’s a difference between wandering and leaving. In truth, you’ve never once left me.”

A gust of air beneath my unfurling wings and I am up, weightless, soaring. I could never love anyone more. And in the same moment comes a terrible awareness. He’s opened the cage door I closed on myself and now I’ll fly, I’ll have to. I see it all laid out before us, how I will wander away again and again, and I won’t want to have more children because of it, and no matter what he says, no matter how generous he is, it will ruin us both a little more each time.