“I … Yes. My mam.”
“What’s she think of you being out here?”
“She doesn’t know.”
“’Bout your dad?”
“No. But he doesn’t know much. I’d be surprised if he knew my name.”
Silence. Wind howls.
“Do you have children?” Ennis asks me.
I shake my head.
“You’re young. Plenty of time for that yet.”
“I never wanted them. We fought about it for years.”
“And now?”
I think for a long while. The truth is a wound I can’t speak. “Do you know the ocean, Ennis?” I ask instead.
He grunts noncommittally, his eyes falling closed.
“I know her a little,” I say. “I’ve loved her all my life. I could never get close enough, or deep enough. I was born in the wrong body.”
Something of him shifts, I know it. I can feel it upon the prickle of the air. A defrosting.
We sway back and forth, and I’m not anxious about the birds anymore, and maybe that’s because the storm is easing or maybe it’s because I’m talking. Niall has always wanted me to study the things I love, to learn them in a way he understands, like this—in facts. But I’ve always been content to know them in other ways, to know the touch and the feel of them.
“There’s a spot,” Ennis says, slow like he says all his words, “way out at sea. In the Pacific. It’s called Point Nemo.”
“Because of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea?”
He shrugs. “It’s the remotest place in the world, farther from land than anywhere else.” His voice is a deep rumble. I think, abstractly, that this must be what it feels like to have a father, if only he could thaw all the way. That this is what children are meant to have in a storm.
“This place is thousands of miles from safety,” he says. “There’s nowhere crueler or lonelier.”
I shiver. “Have you been there?”
Ennis nods.
“What’s it like?”
“It’s quiet.”
I roll over and curl into a ball. “I’d like to go there.”
Perhaps I imagine it, but I think I hear him say, “I’ll take you one day.”
“Okay.”
But there won’t be any more journeys after this one, no more oceans explored. And maybe that’s why I am filled with calm. My life has been a migration without a destination, and that in itself is senseless. I leave for no reason, just to be moving, and it breaks my heart a thousand times, a million. It’s a relief to at last have a purpose. I wonder what it will feel like to stop. I wonder where we go, afterward, and if we are followed. I suspect we go nowhere, and become nothing, and the only thing that saddens me about this is the idea of never seeing Niall again. We are, all of us, given such a brief moment of time together, it hardly seems fair. But it’s precious, and maybe it’s enough, and maybe it’s right that our bodies dissolve into the earth, giving our energy back to it, feeding the little creatures in the ground and giving nutrients to the soil, and maybe it’s right that our consciousness rests. The thought is peaceful.
When I go there will be nothing of me left behind. No children to carry on my genes. No art to commemorate my name, nothing written down, no great acts. I think of the impact of a life like that. It sounds quiet, and so small as to be invisible. It sounds like the unexplored, unseen Point Nemo.
But I know better than that. A life’s impact can be measured by what it gives and what it leaves behind, but it can also be measured by what it steals from the world.
10
We married the very same evening of our kiss in the aviary. Tripping onto our bikes and riding all the way back into town, stopping by the thrift shop to buy him an old-fashioned brown suit. For me a long silk dress of palest, softest peach, the feel of which will never leave me. Niall paused by someone’s front garden to pick white flowers for my hair and his lapel, and he knew all their names, but chose only an array of sweet peas. Our next stop was at Joyce’s supermarket to get a loaf of bread and a bottle of champagne. He made murmured phone calls all the while, using his money and connections to get us a fast-tracked marriage license and a celebrant who could be available on the spot. Not for Niall Lynch a merely ceremonial wedding, no, certainly not.
I kicked off my shoes at the harbor and we walked barefoot to its very edge, out to meet the sea. He’d asked me where I would like to get married and I’d said here, in this spot, exactly where I was once told about a woman who became a bird. Something of me had been left here that day. I didn’t know if I would find it now, or leave another piece. Blue draped over us, saturating the world and our skin with it. The celebrant came and married us legally and we even spoke vows we conjured on the spot, vows we later found mortifying and laughingly rewrote, and from the corner of my eye I could see the elegant curve of white swan necks gliding through, waiting for the bread we’d brought to feed them, and I could see a mole beside his ear, and a dimple on the right side of his smile, and flecks of yellow in his dark hazel eyes, flecks I hadn’t seen before. We thanked the celebrant and sent her away so we could sit with our feet dangling over the edge and drink champagne and feed the swans. The birds honked softly. We spoke of nothing in particular. We laughed at ourselves and swigged from the bottle. We had moments of incomprehensible silence. He held my hand. The sun went down, the swans swam away. Tears found my cheeks and his lips in the dark.
It was utterly mad. And still. I had not one doubt, not one question, nothing but a sense of inevitability. This had been designed and I would ruin it one day but for now it was mine, and his, and ours. Niall didn’t see it that way, but instead as a choice I’d made. He said Franny Stone makes choices and the universe bends. She makes her own designs and always has; she is a force of nature and he the quiet thing that looks on and loves her for it, even then, still now. Funny, that. For to me it always felt as though I were the one following him.
Niall told me on our wedding night, as we gazed into the wild Atlantic, that for him it was because he’d dreamed of me before we met.
“Not you, exactly. Of course. But something that felt as you did that night in my lab, when we touched the gull. And then again when I watched you save the boys from drowning. It was so familiar. I recognized you.”
“What did it feel like?”
He thought for a while and then said, “Something scientific.”
This, I accepted—a tad disappointed—was his cynicism. But I was wrong. It remains to this day the most romantic thing he has ever said to me, only I didn’t know that until much later.
UNIVERSITY HOSPITAL GALWAY, IRELAND FOUR YEARS AGO
They think me asleep but in the dark I hear their soft voices.
“We don’t know what really happened.”
“She confessed. She said she was trying to do it.”
“She was in shock. It might not count.”
“It better fuckin’ count.”
“Do you understand how far she walked?”
“Don’t be going soft ’cause you went to school with the bitch. She’s bound for bars and you getting torn up about it won’t help.”
“I’m not torn up. I just don’t understand it.”