Untied, I tumble off the bed like a rag doll.
“You okay?” Léa asks. Then, “Are you awake?”
“I hope so.” I untangle myself from the sheet and hurry through the locked cabin door, pinging off the walls like a pinball, careening into the stairs and gashing both my shins on the bottom rung. “Franny? What are you doing? Don’t!” Up I go onto the deck, into the violent lash of rain and the howl of wind and the black sky despite the morning hour, and I can barely remain upright, almost plucked and carried off with the storm, almost stripped of my very skin by the sudden savagery of the world. For a moment I stop, stunned. Then my feet slip and I am nearly overboard, nearly gone, it’s only my fingers grasping the railing that hold me to the world. I find my footing and lunge for the second stairwell. I have to get to Ennis, to the chart and the tracking dots, to my birds. The climb is perilous; my fingernails break where they scratch at the rungs and shoulders bruise against metal and my feet keep slipping, again and again, scraping my already tender shins but soon I arrive at the bridge, I am flinging open the door and being wrestled into the dark and the quiet. The door slams behind me and for a moment I am shell-shocked, the scream from outside echoing in my ears.
“The fuck are you doing?” he asks me.
I look away from Ennis’s thunderous expression. “Is this … This is bad, isn’t it?”
Sway, goes the boat, and we both careen into the wall. I can see it now, what’s happening. The storm is pushing us up and down over the swell of the mighty waves. Up the wall of one and then—whoomph—down the other side of it.
“Got both anchors down, engine full throttle, still being forced backward. Be lucky if it’s only miles we lose.”
“And if it gets worse?”
“We’ll take on too much water.” He squints at me. “You deserve to be thrown overboard, wandering about like that.”
“I wasn’t wandering, I was coming here, to you.”
Something I can’t recognize fills his blue eyes. “Why?”
My stomach bottoms out as we go over a massive wave and I have to catch hold of the back of his chair.
“The birds,” I say.
Ennis retrieves a life vest and places it over my head, and there’s pity in the motion.
“Ennis, where are the birds?”
He nods to my feet. “Take off your boots, love.”
“Why?”
“In case we have to swim.”
And here it is, even now, even after everything. The return of that mad thrill, the one I have been seeking all my life. It’s not right to be excited by danger, but I am. I am, even still. The only difference is that once I was proud of this and now it shames me.
9
GALWAY, IRELAND TWELVE YEARS AGO
I’ve spent the afternoon on the computer in the university library, trying to find Maire Stone and John Torpey. Maire is almost nonexistent online—or at least the right Maire Stone is—but I’ve come up with a number of John Torpeys in the correct area and age bracket. I’m writing down the addresses when Niall Lynch walks past the row of computers with a pile of books in his arms. He doesn’t look at me but my eyes are pulled to him as if by gravity, or perhaps something less scientific, something for which I don’t yet have a name. We haven’t spoken since the night he came to my house almost a month ago and said that absurd thing. I’ve been to his lectures but he hasn’t looked at me once and maybe this is all part of his design because he has turned me effortlessly into a creature made of obsession.
I jerk upright, computer search forgotten. The bit of paper is crumpled into my jeans pocket, an afterthought now, and without conscious decision I am following the professor from the library. His winding path takes him through various buildings and I feel myself stepping his steps, making his choices, donning his life for these precious few minutes. Who is he? Where did he come from? What is he thinking of in this very moment? Why did he say that thing, that wrecking ball of a thing, and did he mean it? Did he know, somehow, that I’ve been waiting for someone to smash me to bits, to do the wrecking so I mustn’t always do it myself? I draw his skin upon me and nestle down into his self. I wonder if he has ever wanted free of it, like I do mine, and if he has ever imagined leaving his life for another. Who would miss him? Who are the people that love him?
He doesn’t spot me in the hallways or rounding corners, or lurking behind a tree in the evening sunlight. He unlocks his bike, spares a moment to chat with a student, then mounts and pedals away.
I unlock my bike and follow.
The professor rides at a good pace, but I have no trouble keeping up. On the contrary—several times I’m forced to slow so I won’t draw too near. He leads me through the city, pausing at traffic lights and then dismounting to walk his bike through the cobblestoned outdoor mall, catching the vibrant snippets of musicians taking advantage of the sun. Then he rides out beyond the city’s edge to where the grass is long and the sky is wide. Farther from the sea, but there’s beauty out here nonetheless, in the gold-drenched green of the fields. He slows around a winding hill and each time I lose sight of him I come to my senses and decide to turn back and then each time I see him again I just keep following. Who else can I honestly say has had this effect on me? Who else, ever? It’s the fantasy he’s created, no more. I know this, and still I follow. Huge trees appear to line the narrow road, blocking the paddocks on either side. They turn the world darker. A tunnel with no end in sight.
Niall reaches an arched gate, unlocked, and rides through onto a driveway. I stop and lower a foot to take it in. Before us is some sort of brick manor, a castle, almost, with several stories and enormous grounds and a Lexus parked out front.
He could turn around now and see me plain as day, framed by the curled iron and ivy. I wonder how I could explain it, if I could bear to try. But he doesn’t turn, and curiosity gets the better of me. I ride through the gate, embracing my insanity and ensuring humiliation. Up the winding driveway and around the stone fountain, all the way to the side path down which I saw Niall disappear. I leave my bike hidden behind a large, perfectly manicured hedge and creep along the perimeter of the house.
The back of the property is unlike the front. Out here it’s overrun, uncontained. There are tall trees and unruly plants and too-long grass. A lake spreads silver, at its edge a gently rocking dinghy. Niall disappears into a small building in the distance, hidden by draping vines. Up close I see that its roof is made of cobwebbed glass, and the windows on all sides are almost too dusty to see through. If I squint I can make him out, moving through plants and workbenches. There he is now, between hanging succulents, now gone, and now there again, appearing and vanishing. He draws me to the back of the greenhouse; I am so magnetized to his passage that I step into a ditch and twist my ankle. Biting my lip to keep from swearing, I clutch the windowsill and find him again, and I forget about the pain because at the back of the greenhouse is a tremendous cage, and it is filled with birds.
All the blood rushes to my cheeks and I step away from the window, trying to catch my breath, only I can’t, so I walk back to the entrance of the greenhouse, and then inside, through the vibrant colors as though in a dream, and the sound of the birds, what must be dozens of them, is echoing inside me and I can feel the flap of their feathers against my ribs. Niall doesn’t hear me over the racket of chirps and squawks. There are finches and robins and blackbirds and wrens and those are just the ones I can identify at a glance. He’s inside the cage feeding them grain, and the flutter of their colored wings is a whirlwind around him, and then suddenly, as though I haven’t decided it myself, I too am inside the cage, and he’s looking at me, surprised and also not surprised, and then I am kissing him amid the feathers.