Migratory Animals (23 page)

“Christ.” Molly stood, not sure if she was still angry about Alyce's
abandonment of Jake and Ian or at what her friend was implying. “Just invite them out here. Or go to the city to see them. You have to. It's your job.”

Alyce shrugged. “Fine. When are you going to invite your family out?”

Molly watched a blue heron dive-bomb a fish jumping from the creek. Alyce must have known that Molly couldn't see those people because then it would become real, the small swell of her stomach growing in prominence each day, refusing to be ignored. When she thought of what was inside, which she tried to avoid doing, she imagined a cold pinprick of light. “I'm going for a walk.”

“Okay.” The dark circles under Alyce's eyes made it clear she'd been up most of the night in her studio, as per usual. Molly watched her petite friend rise to her feet in baggy flannel pajamas, house shoes coated in dirt, holding a stretched cardigan closed with one hand; she tried to tease out the contradiction between Alyce's obvious frailty and the growing sense that this broken woman was the only thing protecting Molly . . . from what?

The two women walked separate ways.

As Molly moved along the trail winding between thickets of dense cedar, her thoughts returned to what she'd read in the newspaper that morning: the city's budget shortfalls meant all public pools would remain closed next year, their gaping concrete mouths empty. The article made her think of Brandon. Though it was months away, her husband always looked forward to March, because that was when the swimming pool in their neighborhood usually opened—spring being just a milder form of summer in central Texas. He swam laps there on his way home from work, and Molly liked to imagine him: pausing every few lengths to clear the fog from leaky goggles, the reddish evening sun fanning through the struggling magnolia tree that shaded the north corner. The pool was small and surrounded
by a thin perimeter of sandy ground that refused to grow grass, but Brandon wouldn't notice that once he was in the water, following the black lane marker painted on the bottom of the pool. As he crawled toward the deep end, the bottom receding beneath him, he told her he liked to imagine his body was an airplane taking off until he flew miles above the ground, the settled leaves on the pool floor little towns in the distance below. On the return length, his body seemed to float back down, landing softly in the shallow end.

Molly understood that the swimming pool served as a cushion between his two worlds. Between science and home. It pained her that he would lose that next year. It pained her that everything about his life would be different now.

As she walked, she also obsessed about the book still ensconced in her suitcase. Her mother's journal. Molly's father had given it to her years ago—at the time, she'd thought because Flan was always moving. She could now almost laugh at her naïveté, at her father's blunt hints. But still Molly had not read the journal, not a word of it, afraid of what she might find in the thoughts of a woman dying from a horrible disease, knowing she'd likely passed it on to at least one of her children. Occasionally, Molly took out the book and flipped the pages with her thumb, letting the handwritten scrawls pass too fast for any one word to catch. Was a short life better than none at all? Was that a stupid question? How selfish was it to have a child when you knew your blood was a vector for poison?

That afternoon, Molly stood at the door to Alyce's studio under the pretense of borrowing packing tape and scissors from the dented metal supply cabinet for a package she was planning to mail. Alyce was creepily protective of her studio space, but for once she was fast asleep in her bedroom, and so Molly decided it was best to act now and apologize later.

Swinging open the creaky door, Molly was confronted by what Alyce had been working on so intensely, so secretly, all these weeks. The ends of the tapestry were rolled up on the loom like two ends of a scroll; Molly could see that the entire work would be enormous. The section splayed out flat was unfinished and reminded her of the diagrams of human bodies found in biology classrooms, each successive layer revealed: skin, then muscle, then bone. At the right end of the loom the picture unraveled into nothing but rows of taut threads. A skeleton. But on the left, the image was almost fully wrought.

Molly remembered learning about the famous unicorn tapestries from medieval times, the white-horned colts prancing among lush spring gardens on blue backgrounds, shimmering and grand, nothing like what was displayed on Alyce's loom. What Molly saw spooked her. The image appeared to be moving across the cloth. And yet something about it was familiar, like a scene from a dream Molly barely remembered. A fluttering at the periphery, a rising up. Molly put her hands in front of her face, looking at the tapestry through the lattice of her fingers. It felt like when she'd awoken to the bat in her bedroom, the screech and wing beat as it flew past her.

The image made Molly think of her sister, something in the expression, in the tilt of the head. It wasn't even a human figure and yet, if she squinted, she could almost believe her sister was standing at the corner of her vision. Almost. If like Ovid's Philomela—raped and her tongue ripped out, with no other means to speak—Alyce was trying to tell her something by weaving this tapestry, Molly did not yet understand what it was.

She grabbed the packing tape from the cabinet and quickly walked out of the room.

Molly left the ranch, driving out of the gate and down the country road toward a forked Y where the blue post office drop box sat
exposed in the sun. It was the farthest she'd been from the ranch in weeks. The rural isolation felt protective but also like a strange purgatory, an anteroom before the end.

From years spent around scientists, Molly knew there were two theories about how the universe itself might culminate: expansion or contraction. In the expansion scenario, the universe would just continue unfurling from the Big Bang until the pull of gravity that held galaxies and solar systems together weakened and the energy in stars dimmed. Everything would get farther and farther apart, growing colder, snuffing out.

Proponents of the second theory thought the outward-thrusting universe would achieve a final point of tension, like a balloon reaching its limit, at which point everything in the universe would begin to reverse course, contracting back into the single point of origin, a pebble of fire.

Molly didn't have feelings one way or the other about what might happen to the universe—frankly, she didn't really care, seeing as how humans wouldn't be around for the big reveal—but nevertheless, as she'd sat at the kitchen table earlier wrapping her mother's journal in bubble wrap, this thought crossed her mind: most people's lives are like the second theory. We contract back in on ourselves. We slowly lose the ability to work, to remember, to function. We lose friends and know fewer and fewer people in the world. Mostly this happened later, in old age. But not always.

From watching her mother, Molly knew this cycle sped up when a person became terminally ill, the heavier burden shared between fewer people, the seraphim who tacitly agreed to take on the difficult emotional and physical work of transporting you to the other side. In the middle stage, when the chorea had worsened but her mental faculties were still mostly intact, Molly's mother sometimes cried as she took pill after pill, each swallow more difficult than the one before.

As Molly rolled down her window to drop the package into the mail, Flannery's address staring back in bold, black ink, she almost began to cry herself. Dropping her mother's journal into the yawning hole of the postal system seemed like a betrayal. But her mother had been gone a long time. Her mother's story was not necessarily Molly's, though they would die the same way. Molly wanted to remember her mother for other things: For turning suddenly to spray them with the hose as she worked in her garden, tiny hands in oversized work gloves. For practicing her cockney accent, in preparation for
Pygmalion
auditions, during their Friday-night spaghetti dinner.

Molly forced herself to wonder why she felt compelled to send the journal on to Flannery, as if her sister would know what to do with its unholy heft. As if by being free of the disease, her sister deserved some role in Molly's disintegration. But the real reason was that Molly wasn't sure she remembered her mother spraying them with water or speaking in a bad cockney at the dinner table. Those were stories Flannery told; it was Flannery who translated their mother's life for Molly.

As she drove back to the ranch, Molly felt like a leech. A bloodsucker. Flannery had her faults, to be sure, but Molly was only beginning to understand how much and for how long she'd used her sister, too.

Growing up, Molly believed Flannery understood things about the world she herself did not. And this was probably true at first. In a house full of secrets and illness, Flannery was older and grew more quickly attuned to the subtle gambits living there required. Flannery knew when to turn up the pink jam box to drown out sobs from the other room. When to nudge their parents out of silence by catapulting canned spinach or mashed potatoes onto the pink antique wallpaper. And when to just disappear from the house altogether,
sitting one-behind-the-other on the Nash “Executioner” skateboard and rolling down the bumpy asphalt hill.

Molly got through by following directly in Flannery's footprints: keep your head down, put one foot in front of the other, don't look up or around because vultures might be circling. She followed Flannery to Marsh and co-opted Flannery's friends—it was what she'd always done. She also fell in love with them, like she fell in love with worlds in her illustrated books as a child, thinking if she managed to pry her way inside, the characters there would protect her from whatever lurked in the dark water below the ocean surface, so deep she couldn't begin to fathom what it might be.

Flannery moved to Nigeria the same year Molly and Brandon lived in Ann Arbor for Brandon's postdoc, and it was the first time Molly had been entirely separated from her father and sister and sister's friends. She remembered it as a time of waiting. Waiting for Brandon to meet her at a fancy hotel bar, for example, an Asian woman with an enormous diamond ring sitting a few stools down talking to the bartender about her husband's organization: something that involved repairing limbs. The bartender made an amaretto sour for the woman and a martini for her husband, just arrived with their twentysomething daughter who whispered “Make it neat” to the bartender; they all laughed. The woman handed the drink to her daughter and said to the bartender, “They're really the drinkers.” Molly eavesdropped as the father told his daughter, who must have been a University of Michigan student, that he was proud of her but that she had to be—he pointed upward—“top, top, top to get into PhD.” Molly felt alone. She thought of the volunteer group that stood on the corner of a major downtown intersection during the dark, brutal Ann Arbor winter with a sign reading
FREE HUGS
.

When she finally saw Brandon walking across the room toward her, smiling—they were meeting to celebrate his first publication—everything
was suddenly all right again. He was her most precious representative of the magical, safe environment her sister and her sister's friends created for Molly, like a tortoiseshell. She remembered thinking in that bar in Ann Arbor that the fact was, in the real world, you couldn't be with everyone you loved. You had to pick one person, follow him, and hope he followed you.

But now, as Molly pulled her car in behind the ranch house and turned off the ignition, watching Alyce emerge from the door and sit heavy on the porch swing, she thought: What if your life turned out to be more than one person could handle? Molly wanted to pick up the phone and call her husband, dial the only number she knew anymore by heart. She imagined what he might be doing at that very moment: walking down a bland, institutional corridor, his heavy bag hanging crosswise on his shoulder, but also feeling burdened by all the things lost: the loss of his youth, of his parents' language, of the security of a social fabric where one could count on raises and tenure and stocks going up over the long haul, of his wife.

Molly knew Brandon would try to comfort her, but in that moment she could not bear the thought of his confused, wary, frightened form of comfort. If a woman cries and nobody is there to see it . . . ? She didn't make the call.

F
lannery's life was now pushed along by an all-consuming current: lab, sleep, Kunle; lab, sleep, Kunle. She was focused. She was an arrow on the way to its mark. Her sister's disease was the air around her, impossible not to breathe in with every breath, but possible to ignore in that way one always ignores the unconscious workings of the body.

Brandon helped her begin new calculations, and Flannery existed to make them work, returning to her apartment only to sack out, shower, and have long, meandering conversations with Kunle on the telephone as she trolled the Internet looking for nearby silos to house the custom ice chamber that was their next big move. Every step forward in the project felt like a step closer to Nigeria.

As weeks passed, her love for Kunle became like light through a prism, each beam emerging as a different color. Some days it was a love that made her sick to her stomach, an anxious and jealous love, an insecure love of long violet days. Some days she loved him to obsession, to distraction, almost to the exclusion of all other thoughts, a bright red pulse. The timbre of his voice became home.

Their relationship reverted to its earliest phase. They talked on the phone like teenagers, flirting and teasing each other, revealing old secrets from childhood. They talked about what they were wearing and eating, what they dreamed about at night, what they
overheard on the bus. They played each other new favorite songs, holding a cell phone up to computer speakers. When she didn't think about Molly, when she was able to keep everything compartmentalized, Flannery would even have said she was happy.