Migratory Animals (16 page)

Alyce began drawing birds around the faces of her friends and above them and on top of them. Robins, robins, everywhere. Arrested. Frozen there on the page. In those days at Marsh, they were flying through the air using instinct, creating their own lift and drag as if by magic.

As she drew, she continued with the stories lodged inside her, fading droplets of olive oil. She told them to her sons as she worked.

There was a game we invented one spring during those lazy afternoons of intramural softball. Our team, Campus Crusade for Christ, didn't win very often, but there was beer in the cooler and time to sit on the grass looking up at the sky, treacly and barely blue.

The game we invented worked like this: We took turns acting as the Inquisitor, whose job was to come up with a question about our futures, and then everyone else had to guess who in the group the Inquisitor had
foreseen. Who, according to Brandon, would be most likely to get plastic surgery? Who, according to Steven, the first to have kids? Who, according to Flannery, might lose a limb in war? The game was endless and endlessly permutating.

But, though it wasn't a rule, nobody, in all the years we played the Inquisitor game—at New Year's Eve parties, barbecues, even on the drive back from the funeral for Santiago's father—ever asked who would be the first to get divorced. Harry and I were the first to marry. The first to have kids. Who, according to me, Alyce, will be the first couple to part ways? One day you're drinking a cup of coffee with your son, and the next . . .

The only subject technically off-limits was death. You couldn't ask who would be the first or last or third or fourth to die. Everyone agreed on this. But now it's becoming clearer that Molly and I are in a dead heat to win that one . . .

She heard Harry's key in the door, his footsteps down the hallway. The interruption annoyed her. She couldn't have her family lurking while she prepared this final project. She needed space and quiet.

Alyce waited until Harry had brushed his teeth and settled into the bedroom. Then, she went to him. The spider plant on the dresser, the tall glass of water on the bedside table, even the tiny painting of a ruby-throated hummingbird hanging askew on the wall suddenly seemed filled with foreboding. She looked at Harry in bed with his book, the reading lamp glancing off gray hairs. She felt nothing.

Growing up as an only child, Alyce had watched her friends with siblings fight, sometimes even torture one another. But once, when she threw a water balloon too hard at her best friend Jessica's kid brother, Jessica turned on her. Alyce learned an important lesson: sisters could be mean to their brothers, outsiders could not. She'd admired this brand of familial loyalty and desired it for herself. On nights like tonight, when she tried to remember why she'd chosen
Harry fifteen long years ago, she thought of his stability and kindness and loyalty. She hoped these weren't the only reasons. She hoped there'd once been more to it than that.

Ignoring the tremble of her voice, she glided up to the bed and told Harry she needed him to move out. She needed him to take the boys and go live with Santiago at the fire station.

Harry stared at her in disbelief. The air felt suddenly humid, suffocating.

“Not long,” she added. “A few weeks.”

“The boys love it out here.” He sat up and took off his glasses. “Alyce, sweetheart, why don't you leave. Go on a trip by yourself, if you need it. Go crazy.”

She let the double entendre pass. “But this is my artistic fellowship. I have to be here. I need to . . .” She couldn't tell him that she didn't want the boys to see her like this, to become like her, to find her if the worst happened.

“You need help. You need . . . you need to go back to therapy,” he stuttered. His voice was quiet, as if he were talking to himself under his breath.

“That's not it.” She was speaking automatically now. “It's Molly. I told her she could come here for a while. To the ranch. She needs to think things over. She's the one who needs help.” And it was all true. All of it. She felt her body straightening with the confidence of her words.

“She has Huntington's, A. What is there to think over?” His voice grew louder. “How are you going to help her? What are you going to do?”

The more upset Harry became, the calmer Alyce felt. She knew exactly what she was going to do.

F
lannery picked at the blue icing from a half-eaten piece of cake that may or may not have originally been hers. She noticed a shoe poking up from behind a plate of noodles, and after some investigation—ducking under the table and closing an eye—confirmed it belonged to one of the two children asleep on a row of chairs. Maybe it was because Flannery had spent so many hours secretly trying to imagine the color and shape of her and Kunle's babies—ochre, fawn, hazel, café au lait—but since moving back to the States, she felt slightly repelled by the sight of white children. She couldn't help think they looked like unformed globs of dough. Or wisps of smoke that might disappear if you tried to grab hold. On a really bad day, when she missed Nigeria horribly, Flannery walked around thinking all white people, including herself, were nothing more than floating mobiles of bleached bone.

These particular kids, sleeping in their grown-up outfits, made Flan think of the girl in Ojo market standing between two stalls selling brightly colored plastics—plastic buckets, plastic pitchers, plastic spoons and spatulas and cups—wearing nothing but panties, her body coated in dirt as she held a small puffed-out yellow lace dress scrunched in her fists, dunking it into a pail of soapy water with vigor and confidence. It was a Sunday afternoon, and Flannery imagined the girl had only just returned from church and could not bear to wear that hot, itchy dress one moment longer.

Through her champagne haze, Flannery vaguely remembered that Molly had wanted to speak with her about something. She felt a pang of guilt, but it was too late. Brandon and Molly had gone home. Alyce had disappeared. At the edge of the dance floor, Santiago laughed and flirted with a couple of Lou's cousins. She noticed Steven, in his white guayabera and linen pants, finally by himself, drinking a beer and squinting as though working out complex mathematical proofs on the slate of his brain. Flannery drifted across the barn to the groom and gave him a quick hug.

“So you arrived with Santi?”

“We carpooled.”

Steven gave her a look.

“I don't have a car, remember?”

“Be careful.”

“Yeah, well.” Flan had enough problems right now, his petty judgment of her being the least of them.

“Sorry. Forget it.” He shrugged. Steven didn't have to say that what he was sorry about was her sister. “Huntington's was what Woody Guthrie had. I didn't know that.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“Lou and I have been reading up.”

“Congratulations.” Flannery needed to stop drinking so much. “I didn't mean that.” She remembered the time, in the first stage of the sickness, when her mother threw a party in the garden to show off her bed of blooming irises. She filled a piñata full of airplane-size liquor bottles, not realizing how they'd shatter, spraying guests with booze and shards of glass.

“It took you forever to convince Lou to go out with you. Yet here we are.”

“I asked her once, why she'd been so resistant to my . . . charms.” He told Flannery that they were in bed, Lou's curly hair wound
around a pencil (“part of her naughty librarian shtick, but that's another story . . .”), and she said she'd thought his dilettante farming project was a little too precious. She thought he was one of those self-righteous back-to-the-land romantics who had no idea what they were getting themselves into.

“So what does she think now?

“The same,” he said, laughing. “It just doesn't bother her as much anymore.”

“She looked beautiful. It was a beautiful wedding.”

“An economical, recession wedding, but thanks.”

Flannery thought about how Steven and Lou still lived in the trailer they'd moved into “temporarily” four years ago on the edge of the farm. “Oh, discretionary income. Who knew graduate school would be the height of my profit margin?”

“Sushi.” Steven smacked his lips. “The way you sluice the wasabi around in soy sauce before dipping unagi in it with those slick chopsticks. I used to love that.”

“Or a professional massage? All that chanty music and lavender candles . . .”

“. . . and the ‘happy ending.'” He gyrated his hips.

Flannery felt petty and selfish admitting she yearned for lost luxuries Kunle and most of their Nigerian friends had never experienced. But Steven was on a roll now, confessing that what he really missed from his consulting days were adventure vacations. Scuba diving in Belize. Backpacking through Thailand. “Now, I'm lucky if we make it to Krause Springs once a year with the gang,” he said, referring to a campground thirty miles north of town that sold cheesy bric-a-brac at the gate and was often crowded with drunk frat boys slipping around on the rocks that led to a natural green pool and grotto, lush with fronds. Flannery could imagine it: Molly videotaping beetles with her phone; Brandon doing tricks on the rope swing; Maya picking
up shells as Lou read on the rock bank and Steven dove into the frigid water, green and musky in the sun, only to discover how much harder it was to swim beneath the pelting water of a grotto than it looked in the movies.

“We went once in college,” said Flannery.

“The time you and Santiago made your tent collapse from whatever robust exercise y'all were performing inside.”

“I don't remember that.”

“It's okay. Everybody else does.”

With the reception winding down and the boxed wine running out, the deejay (Steven's uncle Gabriel, in a baby blue polyester leisure suit) said it was time for the last song before the bride and groom would wave good-bye from their yellow Honda Prelude parked outside, decorated with a full-spectrum rainbow of condoms, red to violet. Santiago appeared, motioning for Flannery to dance with him, and so she did. It was Willie Nelson's “The Party's Over”; they two-stepped. Flannery pulled at her long Nigerian dress.

In part because labor was so cheap in Nigeria, Flannery returned to the States with a duffel bag full of outfits made from wildly patterned cloth. She'd scoured the open-air markets, leaving a wake of delighted cries (“White! Mrs. White!”), before schlepping her purchases to the barely lit wooden shack where a tailor sewed the cloth to fit snug on Flannery's long-legged, flat-chested frame. Her dark blue on light blue adire cloth dress with crisscrossing straps and swirling wavelike patterns was distinctly African and, it turned out, glaringly ethnic when worn by a white woman in the more sanitized and staid surroundings of a Texas wedding. For some reason this didn't hit home for Flannery until she arrived at the wedding itself, looking around at the plain Western clothes in bewilderment as though they were what was foreign.

“Don't you beat all,” Santiago had said before the ceremony as the two of them rushed around helping to decorate the dank, smelly barn, tossing flower petals and silver foil stars over everything. “The white princess from the dark continent.” Flannery had given him the finger.

“I can't believe he asked you to sing effing Celine Dion for his wedding,” said Santiago now, his breath warm in her ear as they danced sloppily to the country music.

At the ceremony earlier, she'd stood in front of the small crowd, holding a scratchy mike and singing “My Heart Will Go On.” At Dryden House, Flannery and Alyce had devised a drinking game for the film
Titanic
, which had just come out, and forced everyone to play it over and over, Celine Dion belting out the cheesy song in a continuous loop on the sound track. The game was mostly based around character names, which the actors repeated ad nauseam in every piece of dialogue.

“Jack,” mimicked Flannery in a high-pitched voice of faux desperation, trying not to trip over Santi's feet.

“Rose,” said Santiago in a low-pitched voice of the same.

“Jack!”

“Rose!”

Flannery was trying to have fun. As she danced, she told herself she wanted to fit in with her old friends again, though Alyce was more and more a stranger and her sister sick. Santiago was the only person who didn't seem to have changed, and an appreciation for that welled up in her. Even when they were all nineteen and took a bus downtown to the tattoo parlor called Forbidden Fruit on Sixth Street, Santiago was the only other one who didn't chicken out, getting a fleur-de-lis tattooed on his forearm. Santiago was always game.

“We're friends, aren't we?” They continued to dance. Flannery immediately wished she hadn't asked. The booze talking again.

“Is that what you call it?” He sent her into a twirl.

Flannery knew her desire to be adored by ex-boyfriends wasn't admirable. She remembered with shame harassing a sad-eyed Australian conservation volunteer whom she'd ceremoniously dumped after only a few weeks of dating, later inviting him to events, showing up unannounced at his door, constantly calling to check up on him. One day he'd finally said, “Look, it's not just a figure of speech when I say I don't want to see you again.”

With Santiago, she really thought living in Nigeria would give the grout of friendship time to set, slowly filling in the cracks and gaps left between them. As they stepped and twirled on the sawdust—drunkenly, neither of them particularly good in the first place—she thought about those summers in grad school when they would shack up together, spending nights on booze or cocaine or ecstasy, turning his apartment into a two-person rave, filling it with dozens of plants they didn't know how to take care of, bought impulsively from the greenhouse at the twenty-four-hour big box store. Santiago would drill holes in the ceiling, and they'd hang plastic potted ivies and peonies and begonia, which they'd drape with white Christmas lights, dancing wildly beneath them, shouting out the windows at people walking down below.