Migrations(78)

They are black now, still.

And monstrous.

I am no longer one but two.

One of me is an old woman who climbs atop his body. Every one of her joints creaks and groans, hardly under her control, but somehow she lays herself upon him, and she cradles his head with its dark, perfectly combed hair, and she presses her mouth to his cold mouth, tasting smoke. “Oh, my darling, no,” she whispers. “Please.” He gives no warmth but she wills hers into him, she wills it with all she is, he will have every last atom of it. He will have the soul of her. Else she’ll leave it here with his.

While one of me remains on the road, frightened of dead things, all.



* * *



Hours pass.

I’ve long since decided to die here with him and Greta when a thought occurs. Standing here like this, grasping at a heat that went long ago, I am freezing to death, my bare feet and hands immovable, my nose aching, ears stinging, eyelashes coated in frozen tears.

The thought is this: the football uniforms. I have to get them out of Greta’s boot.

“Niall,” I say softly from the road. “Niall.”

I want to give him something, something that will part us well, something to let his spirit know I will follow it, and yet I can think of nothing, I am laid bare and empty and stripped of any grace. I am too appalled by the thing that was once him.

How does he die here in the cold with so little ceremony? How does he die without me to look at him as he goes? How did we not deserve last words, last moments, last looks? How could the world be so cruel, so cruel as to let him pass alone, unwatched, while I wasted my love on a woman I don’t know? It is unbearable.

I stand on the cold ground. I walk to the boot of Greta’s car and pull out the bag filled with her son’s football uniforms. I walk down the road with one shattered and bleeding foot, back toward a world in which I have never for a moment belonged.

I stop just before the beam from our headlights ends. There is an abyss ahead of me. Not even a star in the sky. I look back at him. I can’t leave. I can’t leave. I cannot leave him here. Not alone.

My knees give out. I sink to the ground. I rest my face on the bag and I think I won’t leave I won’t leave I won’t leave, and in the end it’s something much simpler and older that makes the choice. It urges me to claw to my feet and turn away from that beam of light and walk into the pitch-black night along a road I know will lead only to grief.

It’s not love, or fear.

It’s the wilderness within that demands I survive.





28

GALWAY, IRELAND TWELVE MONTHS AGO

“He wanted to be buried?” I ask, staring at the tombstone.

“Yes,” Penny says. “You never talked about it?”

“No. For some reason I assumed cremation…”

“Because he was a man of science, not religion?”

I shrug. “Guess so.”

There is a long silence, and then something in Penny gives way. She moves forward until she is standing beside me in the sunny graveyard. “He wanted his body to offer itself back to the earth, and the creatures in the earth. He wanted the energy of his life to be used for something good. It was in his will.”

I breathe out. “Of course.”

Niall Lynch, beloved son and husband.

“Thank you,” I whisper. “For writing that. You didn’t have to.”

“It’s true, isn’t it?”

I swallow tears. “Very much so.”



* * *



Afterward, in the mansion that is supposed to be my home for the remainder of my parole, I sequester myself in Niall’s childhood bedroom and sleep for nineteen hours. I wake in the middle of the night, disoriented and unable to go back to sleep. I look through his collection of trilobites, touching each one tenderly. Then the pages of a book hiding a treasure trove of delicate pressed flowers. A journal containing endless observations of animal behavior, a photo album of feathers, rocks of all shapes and sizes, beetles and moths frozen forever in hairspray, fragments of speckled eggshells … Each tiny thing is more precious than I could imagine, and I realize that even though Niall believed his mother was never really able to love him, here is the proof: keeping all these treasures so perfectly preserved for all these years.

Boxes sit in the corner, labeled Recent. Inside I find reams of paper, his publications and teaching notes and journals. I know these things. I have watched him working on them for years. One of the journals is unlike the others, and not one I recognize. It has been titled Franny.

I am nervous as I open it. Short, meticulous entries make up a study of a woman who has my name but seems alien at first.

9:15 a.m., she’s just thrown a used condom into the hallway outside the men’s bathroom, screaming with outrage about the vileness of men.

4:30, she is reading Atwood in the quad again, the essays I quoted.

Roughly 1:00 a.m., she calls her mother’s name and I have to shake her awake.

It is a logbook of my life. My actions. As I read, the entries become less scientific, more insightful, more poetic. And as my initial panic fades, I begin to recognize this for what it is. More a study of my husband than it is of me. This is how he teaches himself to know something, to love something.

The last entry I read is this.