Departures (13 page)

Michael, you have visitors, the woman said.

He was in a wooden chair by the window, and he didn't look up when we came in. Every flat surface—most of the floor, the desk and the dresser, the low wooden unit beside the bed—was cluttered with field guides and uncut labels, specimens in transparent envelopes, others on spreading boards, a few behind glass. My mind formed
the names of the ones I could recognise—
Colias hyale,
the Pale Clouded Yellow, its wings and antennae outlined in lavender;
Lysandra coridon,
the Chalk Hill Blue;
Callophrys rubi,
the Green Hairstreak, fringed from wing tip to thorax in the softest of greys.

You should see it downstairs, the woman said. The kitchen's full of them. I couldn't believe my own eyes. Every drawer and closet in this house, every shelf, full of them, and not one crumb of food in sight. Just those things, everywhere.

We've brought him another one, I'm afraid, my father said. He handed the cardboard box to me. Go on, wee woman, you give it to him. He'll like it better, coming from you.

We had brought him a new imago, the first to complete the cycle that started with the eggs we'd discovered in the field Michael introduced to my father, one of the few laying patches he hadn't yet found. What do you look for? my father'd asked him. All morning they'd been comparing notes. Michael shrugged. Videos, mostly. TVs, if they're small. This was shortly before my father hired him, paying him out of his own benefit cheque. Sometimes Michael would let me help him, let me pass a pin through the tight coiled centre of a slender proboscis and draw it down into sugar water till the insect stopped struggling and started to feed. The trick was to see if we could get them all started before the first one finished and began to walk away, wings opening and closing with the tentative speed of untried machinery, taxiing slowly in preparation for flight. We'd managed it once, working together, till all around the room on greaseproof paper Apollos and Peacocks and Camberwell Beauties were swallowing nectar, while I watched their wing patterns shifting and thought about bedsheets with people underneath. Don't
move, Michael said when the last one had finished and I'd just returned it to the breeding cage. His hand brushed my cheek as he reached past me, and I expected to see a string of silk handkerchieves, or the smooth removal of an egg from my ear. Close your eyes, Michael told me, and I'd felt its feet flailing, frantically scrambling to reestablish their grip; then its claws caught my skin with the tug of small anchors, and I thought of moored ships and hot air balloons in extravagant colours, tethered and straining against their cords. You can look now, Michael said, and there it was, a Great Spangled Fritillary, indignantly fanning, imagining itself bold and imposing when every tremor of its rust-coloured wings sent another shower of scales to my palm.

Look, Michael, I said.

It had made its way into an upper corner, had been testing the meeting of lid and wall there, when I opened the box. Placing one slender leg carefully after another until all six were pinching the rim, it climbed out, broad head first and wide-spaced antennae, then the short, stout body, wings flat at its sides—a butterfly, despite all the evidence, though even its flight was quick and erratic like a moth's. I felt the effort of its ascension just as I had when, with my father, I'd been a passenger in the plane he'd hired for an hour as a gift for my mother, who had always wanted to learn how to fly. We'd stood by the fence which guarded the runway, watching other aircraft take off and land while the pilot pulled levers and adjusted dials and untied the cords that kept our plane bound. They all seemed to rise with the smooth, steady lift of geese leaving water; I'd never imagined the shuddering fuselage, the thrust and drag of my heart and stomach, or the way my own equilibrium wavered with each changing attitude of the plane. The land below us looked artificial, like the scenes behind
glass in the museum at home, tiny figures of farmers and livestock grazing on velvet under parsley sprig trees:
Belfast and Surrounding Country, 1790–1801.
It bore no resemblance to what we'd seen of it when we'd taken the highway a few days before. We had come out of season, long after harvest, and well before blossoms hid the hunched, arthritic fingers of the peach trees again. The wizened phalanges of the apple orchards, the electrified carpals of the cherry trees we passed, the charred spinal columns of the naked vineyards, each with its singular pelvic twist—I could almost hear the startled hiss of them when our headlights swung round a corner and caught them unawares. Ah, look, my father'd said, slowing the car, and gradually my eyes did catch sight of them: Canada geese, two only at first, then three, then five, then a dozen or more, a whole flock of throats and bills and bandaged white jaws rising out of the mud and stubble of a cornfield in April in upstate New York. We'd intended to spend the day in Toronto, but Immigration had refused to let us in—something to do with our type of visa—so we were skirting the rim of Lake Ontario, hoping to see Canada on the opposite shore. But the weather was wet, and the lake barely visible; I could feel the mist on my face when we got out of the car—cool, like my mother's breath on my back as she slept behind me, all three of us together in a motel's queen-sized bed, and gentle, like the trick Michael taught me soon after she died. Give us your hand, he'd said, bending down, till I felt something lighter behind the touch of his hair, the insistance of eyelashes against my arm. Do you know what that is, missus? he'd said. That's what you call a butterfly kiss.

You see how it is, the woman said to my father. I've tried to get him to talk about it but he won't, at least not to me.

You don't know what's happened, then?

Not all of it, no, but I can guess. You know she'd gotten a job in England? Well, I thought she was fixing it so he'd have work, too. Three months go by and every day I'm thinking, He'll be off soon now, too, but then I hear she's home for a visit. I never saw her myself, but I know she saw him. The couple next door says she stayed for an hour, went away in a taxi and that was it. Then the milk bottles and papers started piling up. They knocked on the door but nobody answered. That's when they reckoned they'd better ring me.

I had no idea, my father said.

No, well, how could you? Sure he never said anything to anybody. She's found herself some fancy man, that's what I think, anyway. I don't know what she told him, but he's been like this ever since.

It's been awhile since we've seen him, right enough, my father said. But the weather's been nice, you know? I thought he might be collecting. See, what did I tell your Uncle Vincent? My brother-in-law thought he'd been stealing again.

It wouldn't surprise me, the woman said. But he's not been out of this room for a fortnight. Was it stuff of yours, aye? You're welcome to look for it. I couldn't tell you what's in this house.

No, my father said, I'm sure it's not Michael. It's been going on for awhile, see. A couple things disappear every day. I think it's me, to be honest. I misplace things. I don't know what I'm doing half the time anymore.

Well have a look anyway, the woman said. Sure, I'll make us a wee cup of tea while you do.

Thank you, my father said. You stay with Michael, daughter, alright? he told me. Try to get him to talk. I won't be long.

He was wearing pyjamas, his arms loose in the sleeves, each elbow at rest on an arm of the chair, and still I could see the inflated vessels altering the contours of his forearms and hands. I took hold of his wrist and turned it over, placed my two fingers at the heart of his palm and began to move up with a circular motion, crossing thin strands which began in confusion and later became conspicuous cords like the gradual gathering of slow drops of water, each bead jumping to join the stream till a single clear thread runs briefly down the length of a windshield or the cool face of a window, drains itself utterly and then is gone. Michael had taught me the game only recently, and the first time we'd played I'd fallen right into the trap, saying Now! There, stop! when his fingers were still a good two inches away from that tender hollow where an arm bends in, where the skin is creased even in infants, thin and defenseless behind the elbow's sharp bones. It's because of the way the nerves are laid out, Michael'd told me. It always feels like you've touched it before you do. But this time my fingers were well past the hollow and on toward that place near the armpit where all flesh turns smooth, in men as in women, regardless of age. I walked my two fingers onto his shoulder but he never responded, so I lay his hand back in its former position and smoothed his sleeves down.

You're awful pale, Michael, I said.

My mother had been white when the plane landed. She'd been sick for more than a year already, which is why my father had borrowed from usurers despite unemployment and the impossibility of ever paying them back, so she could visit her brother who now lived in America, having immigrated from Belfast some fifteen years before. But this time the illness refused to resettle, and a few days later we'd had to go home. What does it feel like, I'd asked
her in hospital. Like you felt at Funderland last summer, she'd said—when I'd made myself sick on the main attraction, the one that replaced the Big Wheel that year. I forget the name of the ride now, but not the sensation. It began with the rise and tilt of the axis, then the floor fell away as we started to spin, the centrifugal force of lopsided rotation kept us pinned to the sides of the iron cylinder, the crush of the wind came from all directions, and against every warning I had opened my eyes. The bright colours of the cars and pedestrians on the Lisburn Road, of the shop fronts with their fruit stalls and displays of appliances, nearly new clothing and secondhand books, all tumbled towards me as if someone had lifted the asphalt at Shaftsbury Square and shook everything down towards the spot where I hung, the only solid the boy strapped opposite me, his own eyes shut across the bottomless space. I turned my head to look for my parents, standing by the ticket booth on the good ground below, and the skin of my face stretched tight as elastic, my flesh seemed to pass through the metal grille, and I thought of wax melting, of the disintegration of the Lundy's features that time on the Shankill when I'd watched him burn. I'd gone on a dare with a boy from Clonnard Gardens, had stood at the end of a row of old houses and watched the flames consume the effigy, thinking, How much wasted effort. I had an art teacher once who made models and drawings for illustration, to show us precisely why our own projects failed. With broad thumbs and fingers he'd bend and pinch the mysterious clay, or with quick charcoal sketches of femurs and vertebrae, he'd illustrate the error which had crippled our plan. When he'd finished he'd destroy the model or scratch out the drawing and say, Now you do it. I'd often wondered how that point could be reached, when I'd no longer be invested in every project, when a
torn sketch wouldn't trouble me, when I could watch easily as they dismantled my armatures, as the screws were recycled, the wire unwound.

How do you feel, Michael? I asked, but he didn't answer. I followed his gaze out the open window, down the drainpipe at the edge of the sill to the patch of waste ground beside the house, where someone had dumped an old pot of tulips and some other horticultural rubbish in a tangle of weedroots and unwanted leaves. The lepidopterans of the floral world, my father once called them, and then tried to explain it to my cousin and me, how at every stage in a tulip's development it's transformed completely, how the final blossoming of the chaste, contoured petals was like the first full extension of a butterfly's wings. We'd spent the day looking for Painted Ladies, waist-deep and oblivious in the lush fluidity of the grass, and had come upon an inexplicable row of the flowers, paint-box bright, aloof and unblemished, in a rain-rutted pasture in County Down. The leaves look like cow's tongues, my cousin said, to be clever, though I could see the connection if I tried. I remembered a cow my uncle was supposed to have slaughtered; the animal had given him all kinds of trouble when he tried to drive it onto the truck. My uncle's cows were in Niagara County, on land which he left in the care of a neighbouring farmer a few months after we visited him there, so he and his wife and his son who was my age could be with us after my mother died. The cow's knees had been trembling badly and halfway up the ramp it'd balked, so three men were enlisted to help push it in. They stood side by side with their hands on its haunches, but their boots slid backwards over the gravel and damp diamonds of sweat appeared on their backs and under each arm. When they did finally get it into the back of the pickup, had pulled the ramp away and were raising the
door, the cow's eyes turned white, its legs buckled beneath it, its tongue rolled out like a jubilee carpet, and the hard knob on its head where its horns would have been made the chassis ring as it fell. I don't understand it, my uncle'd said. She was great yesterday. The beast wants to live, Vincent, my mother'd said. Well if it does, my uncle'd answered, that's a strange way to show it. But he did phone the abattoir to say the cow was unhealthy—and that was the reason he kept on giving whenever the subject of slaughter came up, though every morning when we went out to look at her she was grazing serenely, her coat sleek, her belly enormous, her ears and eyes and hindquarters imperturbable, despite the relentless assault of flies.

Any luck? my father asked from the doorway.

I shook my head.

No, I wouldn't've thought so, the woman said. It's alright, luv. Don't you worry. He'll be right as rain again in a couple of days.

Listen, Mrs. Hagan, my father said, if there's anything I can do, you'll tell me, won't you?

What can anyone do? the woman answered. These things happen.

Well, if there is anything, you let me know.