“And you follow them, Franny?” Gammy asks. “To study them?”
I nod. “I have trackers on three.” I swallow. “Two, sorry.”
“Then why do the trip yourself?”
“It’s part of the methodology.”
“Don’t you have a team? You do this on your own, you track them all that way?” She shakes her head slowly, not taking her eyes from me. “What would possess someone to choose such a lonely life?”
There is silence as they wait.
I fold my hands in my lap and feel the question. “Life’s always lonely. Less so with the birds. They led me to my husband, once.”
It sounds mad.
The silence lengthens.
“Fucking mental,” Basil says abruptly.
“Language, Bas,” Dae says as the girls dissolve into giggles.
* * *
After dinner the girls decide to sing, which I gather they do a lot. They argue for a good five minutes about what the first song will be, until finally Hally declares they will sing only Irish songs for me, so I might feel less homesick.
But it’s raw, and suddenly it’s Kilfenora, my family in their kitchen as they played for me, it’s my mother’s cottage by the sea, and it’s missing her, it’s my husband and the distance between our bodies and it’s my daughter, the child I never wanted, the child I fought a battle to be rid of, the one I fell deeply, devastatingly in love with, the one I lost. It’s the littlest one, Ferd, her fingers around my neck and her hot breath against my ear, she has cracked me open and now my own littlest one is in my arms once more, a too-still thing, a most precious thing, breathless and without warmth, and no matter how often I try to leave it behind there will never be an end to this ache, this pain, the feel of her unbearable weightlessness in my hands.
I can hardly feel my body as I move for the door. It’s cold outside and I hardly know it, and before I close the door behind me I hear Blue ask, “Did we upset her?” and Anik’s voice replying, “Something darker did that,” and I’m walking for the hills and shore and sea. I take off all my clothes and wade out into the icy water and the pain is immense and also nothing nothing nothing.
I lie in the sea and feel more lost than ever, because I’m not meant to be homesick, I’m not meant to long for the things I have always been so desperate to leave.
It isn’t fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay.
* * *
It is Léa and Gammy and Hally who finally find me. They wrap me in a blanket on the seashore and I hear someone saying, “Let me die,” over and over and then as Gammy kisses my forehead and Hally strokes my hair and they hold me so tight we tremble, I realize it is me.
“Stay,” Hally whispers in my ear.
But I can’t.
TRONDHEIM, NORWAY EIGHT YEARS AGO
“Hello?”
“Hi.” I listen to his breathing a long while.
“Where are you?” he asks, and he sounds very tired.
“Trondheim.”
A moment for him to take that in, to readjust. I ask so much of him. I wear him down. “Why Trondheim?”
“Because I was in Oslo but the city lights made it impossible to see the Aurora.”
“But you’ve found it? How is it?”
“I’m watching from the balcony. It’s the most gorgeous thing, Niall … You’d love it.”
“Whose balcony is it?”
“A friend’s.”
“Are you safe?”
“Aye.”
“Whose balcony is it? Can you text me their name and address?”
“A couple I met at dinner, Ann and Kai, I’ll text in a bit.”
“Do you have enough money?”
“Aye.”
“When are you coming home?”
“Soon.”
He pauses awhile. I slide down onto the floor with my back to the wall. The brilliant greens and purples dance across the sky. I can feel him through the phone, it is such a potent thing, like I could touch him, feel his breath on my cheek, smell him. I’m dizzy with it, with his nearness and his terrible absence.
“It’s lonely here, darling,” I say, tears spilling onto my face.
“It’s lonely here, darlin’,” Niall says.
“Don’t hang up.”
“I won’t.”
And we don’t, not for a long time.
NEWFOUNDLAND, CANADA MIGRATION SEASON
* * *
They leave me in bed with hot water bottles piled about my feet. A distant part of me is embarrassed, but the current creature I am just wants quiet.
Only quiet is a different beast when it finds you. A perfect kind of thing until you have it and it turns on you.
My joints ache as I rise; there is screaming in my head and I hurry down the hallway to the stairs, and then I find my way back outside despite the cold, I feel none of it anyway, and I walk up to the headland and I sit where I can watch the wild Atlantic and I return to those first days with you, my darling, as I always find myself doing.
PART TWO
14
GALWAY, IRELAND TWELVE YEARS AGO
It starts as a tickle that creeps its way deeper, into a scratch, a scrape, a choke, until all I can do is cough up feather after feather, born of my very body and I can’t get any air, not one breath—
“Franny!”
There’s something atop me, pressing me into the ground, oh god, it’s a body—
My husband is pinning me to the bed. I jackknife, repulsed at the sudden confinement of limbs and the powerlessness.
Niall immediately scrambles back, raising his hands. “Easy. It’s okay.”
“What are you doing?”
“Franny—I woke up and you were strangling me.”
I stare at him, trying to catch my breath. “No … I was choking…”
His eyes are wide. “You were strangling me.”
Dread curls inside. I have never slept a night beside someone, never woken beside another body. Last night we were married. This morning I have tried to kill him.
I stumble, caught in the sheets, then run for the toilet in time to vomit. He follows me, tries to hold my hair but I shrug him off, not wanting to be touched, too ashamed to be touched. When I’m done I rinse my mouth. Can hardly look at him.
“I’m sorry. I sleepwalk. And other things, sometimes. I should have said.”
He takes this in. “Right. Okay. Fuck.” He laughs a bit. “I’m kinda relieved.”
“Relieved?”
“I thought you might have been really regretting last night.”
There’s something so wry in his voice that I too find myself with a slightly unhinged laugh on my lips. “I was asleep.”
“Must have been one hell of a nightmare.”
“I can’t even remember now.”
“You said you were choking.”
Scratching in my mouth and lungs—I shiver, block the memory as best I can.
“Do you often dream of choking?”
“No,” I lie, moving past him for the kitchen. With the contents of my stomach flushed down a drain I’m starving. His apartment is simple and too modern for my taste, but we talked about finding a new place last night, somewhere that can be ours.