Migratory Animals (7 page)

“You've been saying that since we moved here,” Jake whispered.
Alyce reached out to feather his hair but instead let her hand just float there above his head like a halo.

The group had to walk back up the road, traverse the low-water crossing over the creek, and then cut through a field to approach the cliff from the side where the cedar was penetrable. Behind the house the mowed lawn devolved into wildflowers, big blooming prickly pears and waist-high grasses shimmying in the hot wind. In the meadow was a dried-up pond and oaks and cedars that didn't quite obscure the view of a development springing up along the ridge.

Alyce made a mental list of things on the ranch that could kill you: rattlesnakes, water moccasins, a fall from the cliff into a half-empty creek. These thoughts were shiny coins in her pocket.

As they walked along with the group, Harry handed Alyce a bota full of wine, and she slugged from it, a red trickle running down her chin. It tasted a little like watermelon, she thought. As she handed it back, their hands brushed, and he smiled in the intimate way that made his cheeks crinkle, a smile that said:
Here, this is my gift to you. This party, this artistic fellowship we didn't really need.
He seemed to be smiling the words:
I'm here because I love you.
She tried to remember what it felt like to be in love with him, but she couldn't even recall how long they'd been married. Ten years? Eleven? Her mind felt fuzzy. An image flashed: of Harry, in college, too self-conscious to dance at parties usually, and Alyce plying him with shots and beers, saying, “Bottoms up, baby. Bottoms up,” until he allowed himself to be dragged to the makeshift dance floor, Harry grooving slowly like an uncoordinated facsimile of an underground jazzman as he twirled Alyce in circles, she dancing fast and frenetic, tossing her hair, releasing everything into the music.

When the group of partygoers reached the edge of the cliff, choked as it was with trees and shrubbery, they pushed through
until arriving at a rock shelf with a view of the falling sun and the house in the distance and the creek trickling below. In front of her, Santiago sat on the furthermost crag, legs dangling off the ledge, prompting Brandon to say, “That's a long way to tumble.”

Santiago didn't turn around, and Brandon seemed to realize his mistake, grimacing in self-reproach. Nobody said anything, but Alyce immediately thought of the day two years ago when Santiago's father drove off a highway bridge and into a gorge after stopping by his son's house for a cup of coffee. Father and son had talked about the Rangers' collapse and scooped sugar into their mugs. Alyce was still trying to wrap her mind around it. One moment you're drinking a cup of coffee with your son like it's nothing and the next you roar out of life. She felt an enticing warmth spread through her torso just thinking about it. She walked forward to sit beside Santi along the ledge.

Behind them, Molly stumbled. “Mexican jumping rocks.” Her voice slurred a little.

“Molly is traaaashed,” Alyce said under her breath to Santi.

The bright laughing chatter of the group behind them meant there wouldn't be much chance of seeing deer or even the turkey vultures that nested along the cliff.

“She's only had one beer, I've been watching,” said Santiago, staring straight ahead into the ravine. The skin on his face looked tight, and his eyes—were they watering? “She's her mother's daughter.”

Alyce didn't understand what he was talking about at first. Santiago shrugged. “Think, Alyce. Her movements . . .”

Stumbling, slurred speech, hands fluttering like paper birds. Maybe. But Molly was young. So much younger than Molly and Flan's mother had been. The odd warmth Alyce felt grew stronger until her face burned red, her pulse quickening. She looked at Flannery, hunching in front of a small cedar, silent, contained, distant.

Alyce stood and left Santiago on his ledge perch, not yet consciously wondering why he, of all people, was the source of this information but sensing it had something to do with her best friend. She walked behind Flan, encircling her in a loose embrace; they leaned against each other like two poles of a teepee. Alyce shielded her face from the sun as it shone directly parallel to them, stalled on the horizon. Years ago, when Flan's mother was dying, Alyce used to drive Flan, and later Flan and Molly, to Abilene on the weekends, but they'd be so hungover that they'd sleep in and not leave until late in the day, Alyce forced to drive west for hours into the setting sun, squinting hard as Flannery popped cassettes into the tape deck with her foot, long straight hair whipping out the window.

Alyce could learn this news about Molly, and yet her own limbs still moved in the same way, her own breath still traveled in and out of her lungs, air molecules trembling invisibly. Alyce did feel something new, though. Curiosity? She felt legitimately interested in what was going on around her for the first time all day, all month.

“There it goes,” said Molly loudly, the sun finally disappearing below the tree line, leaving a spray of lavender clouds behind. It was a nice sunset, though not particularly spectacular, not especially noteworthy as far as sunsets go. Alyce's chest surged with a rare crest of feeling anyway. It was the cliff and the wine and the sunset, but mostly it was the thought of endings glittering strangely in her mind's eye: Santiago's father's, Molly's. Part of the feeling was sadness, a feeling her depression had made as rare as all the other emotions.

As everyone began to switch on the flashlights Harry had handed out before they left, Alyce looked down at her sons lying on the ground, a pin cactus inches from their heads. She saw their spiky elbows and chins; she willed herself to say what a mother would say: “Time to go.”

Jake, her firstborn, her lovely little dark-eyed Jake, stared back at
her from his position splayed on the ground. Then he said, “I don't think I'm up to it. I'm sorry.”

The others laughed at the serious, melodramatic little boy, but Alyce's heart melted into the hammock of her belly. He was mimicking her. Getting attention for being drained and useless and spent. Jake's eyes were muddy pools into which Alyce could not see. Brown, watery pits. And their defiance frightened her.

As everyone else turned to leave, panic rose in the back of Alyce's throat and she rummaged in her bag, hands shaking, for the bottle of Xanax she stashed there for emergencies. The world was making it clearer and clearer: Alyce was bringing her family down.

The old friends walked back to the house in silence, flashlights leading the way, the crunch of footsteps on gravel. At the low-water crossing, droves of fireflies blinked along the creek banks like the pinpricks of light you see after staring too long at the sun.

“Name the speaker,” said Brandon as he lugged Alyce's youngest son on his shoulders. “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and the lightning bug.”

“Andre the Giant,” said Lou, sarcastically.

“Mark Twain,” three people corrected in unison. Alyce imagined Lou rolling her eyes in the dark, annoyed by this game in which her fiancé and his friends flexed their collected, trivial knowledge.

As everyone dropped into their cars, which then began to trek back down the road toward the gate and the highway and the city, Alyce had a fleeting thought that the line of vehicles looked like a funeral procession following a hearse. Headlights twinkled and dipped.

He washed; she dried. Out the window, the moon shone a circle onto the lawn. The boys were asleep on bunk beds in the room they shared.

Alyce didn't tell her husband about Molly. Not because of any conscious decision to keep it from him, but because it no longer crossed her mind to include him in her inner life. But Alyce did have the sick urge to humiliate Harry by asking him the big questions. Are you happy? Do you think we're decent parents? Are you still in love with me? Instead, she asked, “Remember when Steven said getting married while gay marriage is illegal in Texas was like joining a country club that excludes blacks?”

“People change.” Harry kissed her on the shoulder. He was never critical of their friends, never critical of their marriage. He was able to say: Maybe you need help. But never, if you don't get help, I'm leaving. Never, this isn't working. Or let's separate for a while. Because Harry seemed to think you didn't change your life or make dramatic choices so much as, like an infielder, react to what came at you and make the best of it.

And by now he and Alyce were so immersed in the chill he probably no longer noticed it. No longer expected her to respond to his touch like she had before. To fling her arms around his neck and say, “Wear me.” To Harry, they weren't unhappy; they were just busy. They had settled down.

“The boys behaved themselves,” he said. “Didn't nag for attention.” The ceramic plates he was stacking banged on the shelf, and the noise grated.

“Maybe we shouldn't have had them when we did. They'll be so much older than everyone else's kids. Who will they have to play with?”

“Maya. All the other children in the world.” Harry hung the dish towel on the handle of the stove, stretching and running his hands through brown hair streaked with white. His T-shirt read
LA CRIATURA GORE BAR
and was faded and tight around the stomach because he rarely bought new clothes. “I'm going to take a shower.”

Alyce didn't watch him leave but listened to his steps, his hand on
the bathroom door, the sound of the electric toothbrush. She swallowed the word she wanted to say:
good-bye
.

With the light on above the kitchen sink, Alyce could barely see past her reflection in the window to the yard outside. She imagined walking out the door and sinking into the hammock from Mexico, rocking back and forth in the blue-and-green threads, like waves, like the sea. She imagined floating off, maybe toward her expat parents, who lived in a cold stone house in Guanajuato now and almost never came to visit. She remembered, as a girl, wrapping herself in the long strands of her mother's nearly waist-length hair, and her mother's voice, rarely aimed at her, Alyce, but rather at her parents' many friends, always coming and going, her mother's laugh tinkling in response to things Alyce only partly understood.

She didn't remember her mother reading books to her as a child, but she remembered her telling stories, trying to get Alyce to fall asleep so she could return to the living room where the rest of the adults drank and played records. She remembered her mother telling her the story of the honey-diviner, a bird whose call sounded like “Quick! Quick! Honey! Quick!” and how, if you followed it, the bird would lead you to a stash of honey in a tree nearby. But if you didn't share some of the honey with the bird, it plotted revenge. The next time it came calling—“Quick! Quick! Honey! Quick!”—it led you to another hole, and inside wouldn't be honey but a poisonous snake.

As Alyce finally began to drift off, her mother would lie on the bed and say, “Now my turn,” motioning for Alyce to scratch or rub her back. Her mother always wanted something in return, her share of the honey.

Alyce retreated to the studio. Designing Lou's wedding shawl would be another welcome distraction from Alyce's official project,
a series of small tapestries reinterpreting William Morris's famous designs,
Woodpeckers in an Orange Tree
and
Strawberry Thief
. Alyce still hadn't chosen between the sketches scattered across her workbench or measured out the yarns on her warping board to create the order for slaying them on the loom.

Since moving out to Roadrunner Ranch for the Women's League fellowship, Alyce found herself uninspired by the weaving project that had landed her the gig. The compositions were so mannered and aristocratic and restrained and, well, lovely, too. But she just didn't particularly feel like making them new. She could put an updated spin on them, abstracting the trees, turning the birds into mechanical, steampunk versions of the real thing—but why? Who really cared? The only reason she'd applied for and accepted the fellowship was because they needed money. They would live free for a year and make extra cash renting out their house in town. Though he didn't say it aloud, Alyce knew Harry, with his and Santi's firm on shaky ground, wished she'd return to engineering, to being the practical one with the steady income and good benefits.

The only tapestry actually hanging in Alyce's studio was a square weave of gray thread, hand-spun from the fur of her first long-haired cat, slowly unraveling on the top and bottom because she never tied it off. It looked like a rain cloud. She'd made the cloth after reading about a weaver goddess riding a shaft of moonlight to impress an official in the Tang dynasty. The goddess shows the man her robe. It is not made with needle or thread. It is perfect. It is where the phrase “a goddess's robe is seamless” comes from, and Alyce wove her own seamless piece of art as a reminder: she, Alyce, was not a goddess. She was only human.

She went into the kitchen to make coffee, scooping two tablespoons from the tin in the freezer and dumping the grounds into the tiny white coffeemaker. She filled the reservoir with water and
turned it to brew. Coffee. She thought of Santi's father. One moment you're drinking coffee out of an ironic Hello Kitty mug with your son, shaking your head over the Rangers' disappointing season, and the next you're flying high over a river gorge. Life spilled out of you.

There were so many moments when Alyce was outwardly affectionate toward her young sons but inwardly thinking how easy it would be to walk away. Not easy. But not as difficult as it should be.

As the coffee brewed and gurgled, Alyce's mind turned back to the image of Molly on the cliff, and she probed it again. Some sadness, yes, she'd discovered that already, but the sadness seemed almost perfunctory, like an old habit. Resentment, maybe, because this news would bring to the others a renewed, though tragic, appreciation of life, but not to Alyce. Finally, she realized what the feeling was: part of her, though she didn't yet know how big a part, wanted Molly's future. To have a disease that was real and physical, a comprehensible reason for the pain and an eventual end to it.