“Ennis seems to say a lot of things to everyone except me.”
Samuel looks sideways at me, then reaches to pat my shoulder kindly. “You’re brand-new, kid. And he’s focused.”
“He’s pissed.”
“If he regrets his decision he won’t take it out on you. He’s not that petty. Look, what I mean to be asking is if you’re really sure about all this, lass. Quick way to the grave, hopping aboard a deep-sea vessel without the skills to survive it. Even if you do have the skills, come to think of it.”
“You’ve survived.” I suspect he’s hiding nimble feet under that rotund figure.
“And I expect Lady Luck to change her mind about that most every day.”
I shrug. “Well, Samuel, what can I say. If I die on this boat, then I guess it’s just my fate, isn’t it.”
“Huh.”
“Huh what?”
There’s something gentle in his eyes as he looks at me. “What makes a young thing like you so tired of life?”
When I don’t answer he hugs me. I am so surprised that I don’t remember to return the embrace. There are very few people, in my understanding of the world, who offer tenderness so freely.
I don’t follow the old sailor back inside. Instead I think about what he has perceived in me and know it isn’t true. It’s not life I’m tired of, with its astonishing ocean currents and layers of ice and all the delicate feathers that make up a wing. It’s myself.
* * *
There are two worlds. One is made of water and earth, of rock and minerals. It has a core, a mantle and a crust, and oxygen for breathing.
The other is made of fear.
I have inhabited each and know one to feel deceptively like the other. Until it is too late, and you are watching the eyes of the other inmates to see if there is death in them, watching every face you pass, listening to the angry hum for a hint you are its next target, clawing at the walls of your cell to get free, to get out, for air and sky and please, not this shrinking tomb.
The fear world is worse than death. It is worse than anything.
And it has found me once more, way out in the Atlantic, inside this rocking cabin.
Tonight is the first night I haven’t been able to sleep.
“Primary coverts,” I whisper through chattering teeth, “greater coverts, median coverts, scapular, mantle, nape, crown—shit.” I lurch upright because even the mantra isn’t helping me tonight, it’s not calming or centering me, there’s no distraction from the queasy terror of this skyless room.
I click on my travel torch and wedge it on top of my pack so its beam lights my notebook.
Niall, I scribble. I have to forestall a full-blown panic attack. Where are your lungs when I need them? Where is your sense, your perpetual calm?
It’s been over a week and we’ve escaped the ice. We’re headed for the Labrador Current, which Samuel says is dangerous. He says this whole ocean is dangerous. I’m not sure you’d like it. I think you enjoy having your feet on solid ground too much, but the sea is like the sky and I can’t get enough of either. When I die don’t bury me in the ground. Scatter me to the wind.
I stop because tears have blurred my eyes. This won’t be one of the letters I send. It would frighten him to hear me speak of dying.
“Turn that fucking light off,” Léa snaps at me from her bed.
I riffle through my pack until I find the sleeping pills. I’m not meant to take them with alcohol but at this point I don’t give a shit. I swallow one and then squeeze my eyes shut. Primary coverts, greater coverts, median coverts, scapular, mantle, nape, crown—
* * *
I wake hanging two inches above the sea. It roars black and bottomless, its spray icy against my face. For a moment it must be the most perfect dream and then the moment passes and I realize I’m awake and my body lurches with such shock that I nearly fall.
I’m clinging to the rope ladder I saw Ennis use. Swaying precariously against the ship’s hull. My knuckles are white and frozen in their grip, and I am not wearing enough layers, not even close.
I have sleepwalked here.
I am about to haul myself the hell up when instead I stop. I’ve found myself in strange places before, but never this extreme, this perilous. I feel abruptly alive, for the first time in years. For the first time, if I’m being honest, since the night my husband left me.
To be fair, I left him first, more times than I can count.
“Yours is a terrible will,” he told me once. And that is true, but I have been a casualty of it far longer than he has.
The rope’s ascent drags me from the sea. Someone has turned on the crank and now I rise without having decided to do so. For a second I hate whoever is pulling me up. Then thoughts blur as the cold finds its mark. Hands haul me over into a bundle of limbs. The flash of moonlit skin tells me this is Léa, her long frame strong enough to support my useless body. My legs can barely hold me upright, so she does that for me.
“What the fuck.”
“I’m okay.”
“You’re goddamn freezing.” She starts pulling me over the deck, catching me when I stumble. “What the fuck are you doing, Franny,” she says, but not really like a question. “What is wrong with you.”
We manage to get down the ladder and below deck. My teeth are tiny jackhammers. Into the little bathroom with its shower so narrow I have to step out to wash my hair. She wrenches off my sweater and shoves me under a stream of hot water. It burns so badly I bite my tongue and taste copper. Knees give out, and she catches me in time to sink with me to the floor, both of us soaked and scalded now, a tangled mess of extremities freezing and burning and everything in between.
“What is wrong with you?” she asks again, but really asking now.
I give a breath of laughter. “How much time do you have?”
Her arms tighten about me, shifting to an embrace.
I don’t have the energy for more, so I say only, “I’m sorry,” and I mean it.
4
NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, GALWAY, IRELAND TWELVE YEARS AGO
““We ate the birds,” he says. “We ate them. We wanted their songs to flow up through our throats and burst out of our mouths, and so we ate them. We wanted their feathers to bud from our flesh. We wanted their wings, we wanted to fly as they did, soar freely among the treetops and the clouds, and so we ate them. We speared them, we clubbed them, we tangled their feet in glue, we netted them, we spitted them, we threw them onto hot coals, and all for love, because we loved them. We wanted to be one with them.”
There is silence in the enormous hall. He is small, down there behind his lectern. And big enough to fill the space. Loud enough, powerful enough. We are hanging on his every word, even if the words don’t belong to him, even if he is only saying to us what Margaret Atwood said first.
“They have been here for two hundred million years,” he says, “and until recently there were ten thousand species. They evolved to go in search of food, traveling farther than any other animal to survive, and thus they colonized the earth. From the oilbird, which lived in pitch-black caves, to the bar-headed goose, which bred only on the desolate Tibetan plateau. From the rufous hummingbird, which survived in the freezing altitude of fourteen thousand feet to the Rüppell’s griffon vulture, which could fly as high as a commercial airplane. These extraordinary creatures were undoubtedly the most successful on earth, because they courageously learned to exist anywhere.”