Migratory Animals (27 page)

Santiago was taking her out to dinner that night to celebrate the purchase of the snow machine, but it was still midafternoon and he was off on a hike along one of the trails, leaving Flannery alone in the hotel room to read: he'd always understood that she was a person who needed space. Sitting there skimming her mother's journal, she discovered that most of the entries were not about living with Huntington's at all—they were from before that.

Her mother wrote that she'd fallen for Flan's father in part because he was the only college student she knew in Denton, Texas, with a piano inside his apartment. The piano was black and waxed to a shine. When Flannery's mother first noticed the instrument, on
a visit to return a Graham Greene novel borrowed in class, she had imagined the handsome young man playing mournful sonatas late at night, brimming with otherwise unseen emotional depth and complexity.

Flannery found this striking because she never knew her father to own or even play the piano. Was it one of those things you sell and give up after having a family? Did he think one quixotic dream was enough? Or had her mother made the piano's presence in the apartment into more than it was?

Suspended there on the ski resort balcony, Flannery read the words of someone she barely knew. She learned that what her mother considered the triumph of her honeymoon was standing in front of Rembrandt's painting
The Night Watch
without anybody else in the room. She and Papa woke before dawn to be first in line at the Rijksmuseum when it opened, and they promptly bypassed the first floor, racing upstairs to the room where this gargantuan work of art hung, the masterpiece to which the rest of the collection surged, filling an entire wall with its ambition, or as her mother described the artist's use of movement and contrast: “light in the darkness, light in the darkness, light, light, light.”

Having used up most of their honeymoon money on the airline tickets to Holland, they spent their days walking, weaving through streets and canals. She didn't write “holding hands,” but that's how Flannery imagined them. They went on a canal ride one afternoon, and the wind bit through her mother's light jacket. The prostitutes standing in the windows of the Red Light District weren't afraid to look her in the eye.

Parts of these Holland entries contained only words or phrases: “almost mowed down by a bicycle,” “everywhere men with small children,” “gray skies again,” “flowers are cheaper than breakfast in Amsterdam.” And this was when the real reason for choosing
Holland came out: they went for the flowers, a gift from her father to her mother for tulip season. They took buses out of the city to visit farms where it looked as if the fields had been dipped in colored paint. There was a restrained relish in her mother's descriptions of these places, the flowers blossoming in perfect rows, “orderly as West Point cadets.”

Her father was self-conscious of their Texas drawl, of being seen as country bumpkins, and his attempts at blending in or appearing cosmopolitan in Amsterdam failed at least in one instance when a cheesemonger said sternly to Papa, “Maybe I will touch the cheese.” Her mother tried to recover by telling the man they'd like to buy 100 grams of the blue next to it labeled “Stinking Bishop.” The cheesemonger told them it was not a blue cheese—“Does it look blue?” It did not, but the only “stinky” cheeses she'd ever encountered were blue, and so her mother just assumed that beneath the rind somewhere ran hidden veins of cobalt, streaks and streaks of them.

Flannery found it interesting how little about her father was revealed through her mother's account of that trip. There were oblique references to his famous know-it-all chatter (“Ned reminded me that it was the American army who helped the Dutch stop the Germans at Arnhem . . .”) and lots of collective “we”s throughout, but the only real insight into their newlywed relationship came when she described the place where they stayed. Draped in red and smelling of cat piss, it was a cheap rented room, the owner of which offered them a shot of corn liquor upon their arrival. The tram ran loudly right outside their window at all hours. Her mother hated the room, and trying to fall asleep in it made her homesick. But she wrote about how eventually she decided to curl into her husband's chest and close her eyes, imagining the life and home they would build together. She forgot the existence of the lumpy bed beneath her and
made him the shield between herself and the world outside. As far as Flannery had been able to tell growing up, it always remained more or less that way.

As she began to read about life after their honeymoon, Flannery heard a sharp slapping sound from the sliding glass door that led to the hotel balcony, and she looked up to see a naked, almost hairless ass pressed against the glass. Santiago was back from his walk and giving her the moon.

She shook her head before returning her attention to the journal, willing herself to keep reading, to keep moving toward the conclusion, though she knew the ending by heart.

Flannery dressed for dinner in front of the hotel bathroom mirror, putting in opal teardrop earrings and zipping up a black sheath, both on loan from a woman at the Climate Institute because Flannery no longer owned any nice Western clothes. As her spine disappeared, she wondered what her mother would have thought, if she'd lived to see them, of the tattoos that covered most of Flannery's back, red sugarcane and a tall Nigerian palm next to the vine with star jasmine flowers blooming up and down an intricate twisting pattern of green. The star jasmine had taken ten sessions with the tattoo artist over the course of a year and, at the time, back in graduate school, she'd done it in part because she believed tattoos made otherwise plain women look interesting. Some of it spilled over her right shoulder and down her tricep, the vine forcing its way out of the black sleeve of the dress. Looking at herself in the mirror, the contrast of tattoo and formal wear, Flannery tried to imagine herself as an American professional, an establishment scientist who attended faculty meetings and conferences and sat through fund-raising dinners with a suited Nigerian husband. It was hard to imagine foisting such a life onto Kunle or herself.

As she and Santi strolled through the lobby, Flannery ran her hand along a bowl filled with waxy, red apples. She was not one for public affection, but Santiago put his arm around her waist when they walked out of the hotel together; at any moment she could collapse and he would catch her. There was an old comfort in that.

The restaurant on the edge of Park City was inside a converted greenhouse where the tinted fiberglass had been replaced by thick panels of glass. There was no menu, and it was expensive. Flannery, already embarrassed about having to ask for a loan, would never have suggested such a place. It was Santiago's idea—he said he was feeling flush.

They sat across from each other at the slate gray table in an easy silence. She noticed for the first time how the web of small wrinkles around Santiago's mouth had become deeply etched into the skin, as they often were on the faces of smokers. If Flannery was honest with herself, she could see that Santiago looked full of a tender, empathetic affection for her. His face said:
Tell me what to do.
His face said:
I'm trying to help.

Trout topped with a sweet cabbage and Swiss chard slaw. Roasted golden beets. Pistachio mango pudding. Wine. Flannery watched what appeared to be a mother/daughter pair sitting on cushioned seats in the corner. The mother wore linen, gray hair pinned to the top of her head. Her adult daughter tapped on her phone.

“I hope I'm not cold like that with my children,” Flannery whispered, and the images that flashed in her mind were of brown, mocha children. She shook her head.

Santiago reached across the table, running his index finger down the inside of her arm in a gesture that was too intimate. She let him. It started to rain outside; smears of water ran down the high angled ceiling and long glass walls so that the trees became blurred and out of focus.

“Dinner inside a metaphor,” he said.

“We shouldn't throw stones, then.” She signaled the server for another bottle.

“That's not a metaphor; that's an aphorism.”

She shrugged. She had never been inside a glass house before. With each bite, she felt like a traitor to Nigeria and to Kunle, who, even if he could afford it, would never come here because the prices would only make him think of what this money could buy back home.

“How's Molly?” Santiago gave her a sidelong glance when she didn't respond right away. “Did you know that when she moved out, she told Brandon if he tried to contact her before she was ready, she'd never come home? Such a bluff, but he's scared.”

“Jesus.” She shook her head. “He didn't tell me. He still comes to the lab every day, though, and putters around.”

The food kept coming; they ate like gluttons.

“Remember when you came running into the backyard to tell us that Amanda was transferring to Stanford to join the crew team and that if we didn't find a replacement pronto, your annoying younger sister would take over that room?”

“You and Brandon just sat there grinning at me like idiots.”

“Your sister was hot. We couldn't see what the problem was.”

They laughed. Flannery loved that he remembered those moments. She loved that he loved her sister. “I haven't seen Molly lately, if that's what you're asking me.”

Santiago poured more wine. “It's funny how we have a hard time imagining anything ending until it does. I only visited my father once in the year before he died. He'd made sure Brownsville didn't have anything for me . . . but the thing is, it did. It had him.” He paused, fork in midair; light from frosted lamps danced along glass walls. “My father may not have been on the best terms with his
family, but at the funeral you wouldn't have known it. They were the wet earth taking him back.”

He told her that the night before, at the wake, his father's body had been laid out in the open casket for viewing, puffed up by gratuitous folds of white satin. Santiago hadn't understood the need for this, his father's mangled body reconstructed by the mortician to look like a waxy replica of someone he might have been distantly related to. It didn't matter that Santiago was opposed to this pornography of detail. No one asked him.

“At some point, after Communion and all the Ave Marias, I felt a hand press into my back and knew it was Molly. She said, ‘You have to forgive yourself for not appreciating it enough,' and I told her that I had appreciated him. She said, ‘We all have to forgive ourselves for not appreciating life enough.'”

Flannery hadn't come back from Nigeria for Santiago's father's funeral—it was too short notice, too expensive. She suddenly felt guilty and tried to imagine him there, upright and dry-eyed while long Latin prayers flowed one into the next. In all honesty, she'd only ever visited Santiago for her own reasons, never for his. At the end of spring semester of his first year of graduate school, she'd called from Madison, just having finished her exams, to say, “Send me a ticket.” He'd told her he would send her money for bus fare, but he didn't think you could buy a physical ticket in advance anymore.

“Send me a ticket.” Why had she insisted?

“How 'bout I draw you a ticket and send it with money for the fare.”

Had she used Santiago—for comfort, companionship, support—pretending he hadn't minded, pretending that he was using her, too?

Flannery looked at the last bit of fish on her plate. “Sometimes Molly and I made fun of our mother with our friends. We mimicked her strange way of moving and talking. I hate myself for that now.”

“You were just a kid.”

“My father was protective, though. He used to carry around a fucking HD fact sheet and hand them out to people who stared at her in public places.” As she spoke, Flannery realized these were memories she and her sister had never talked about.

“I could build you something like this, you know,” said Santiago, looking around at the glass building. “There's a lot for sale not far from your sister's house.”

Something tightened within Flannery. “How do you know?”

He didn't say anything. He smiled sadly out of the corner of his mouth. “Maybe I'll build it for myself.”

“What about the fire station?”

He finished chewing and cocked his chin. “Who cares about the fire station? The fire station isn't important. Family is important.” His voice was insistent. “We are the lucky generation. We can live anywhere.”

Flannery felt despair flow down her throat and flood her belly. When her face flushed, she could tell that Santiago, who reached out a hand, thought she was upset at him. But what she was feeling was the wrenching nausea of ground moving beneath her. She had a home in Nigeria. At that moment all she could think about was how, in a room smelling of cat piss, her father protected her mother from the world. Light in the darkness, light in the darkness, light, light, light.

Back at the hotel, Flannery took a shower, letting the water get so hot she could barely stand it, steam rising, her skin splotching pink. The small hotel bottles of shampoo and conditioner were lined up on the side of the tub so perfectly, so straight; she almost couldn't bring herself to pick one of them up.

The image that had stayed with her from the journal was the one from the honeymoon, her mother in red sheets curled up like a
shrimp into her father's torso. But that wasn't really the whole story. Years later, her mother wrote of trouble at the greenhouse where she worked part-time: she was no longer able to do the books with any confidence; she was caught giving the wrong change on multiple occasions. She was having trouble remembering her lines for the plays at the community theater. The diagnosis came as a shock. She knew her own father had been very sick, but nobody had ever said out loud that it was genetic. In the journal, Flannery's mother didn't explicitly mention that Papa had left her after learning she had HD, only his return three months later. Flannery would have been two years old at the time. She could hardly believe it: her father had left and come back, and she'd never known. It was the last entry in the journal, and her mother wrote, matter-of-factly, that, in the first month he was gone, her milk dried up and her youngest daughter, Molly, weaned herself. She wrote that since Papa had decided to come back to her, she would never ask for anything again. She wrote that, while the women in her Jazzercise class were always harping about how surprised they'd been by all that it turned out they could do—divorce that bastard, start their own company—Flannery's mother was more surprised by the opposite, by all the things in the world it turned out she couldn't change.