If they have all died, all the terns, this will have been for nothing. But how on earth could the delicate weight of a little bird, an exhausted little bird who has flown across the entire world with hardly a thing to eat, who has already done so much, survive this?
It’s asking too much.
I understand, finally. So in my heart I let them go. Nothing should have to struggle so much. If the animals have died it will not have been quietly. It will not have been without a desperate fight. If they’ve died, all of them, it’s because we made the world impossible for them. So—for my own sanity—I release the Arctic terns from the burden of surviving what they shouldn’t have to, and I bid them goodbye.
Then I crawl into the bathroom to vomit.
* * *
I dream of moths dancing in the beams of car headlights. Maybe it’s the nearness of the end that sends me back. Maybe it’s my failure.
LIMERICK PRISON, IRELAND TWELVE MONTHS AGO
The shrink’s name is Kate Buckley. She is very small and very intense. I’ve spent an hour a week with her for over three years.
Today she starts our session with: “I’m not recommending you for parole.”
“Why the hell not?” Apart from a few early incidents I’ve been on good behavior, and she knows it. The self-destructive desire that led me to plead guilty and landed me in this place, and the self-loathing that saw me try to kill myself and then kept me catatonic for the first six months have both been redirected. Now I want out.
“I can’t say you’ve been cooperating in your emotional rehabilitation, can I?”
“Sure you can.”
“And how would I do that?”
“You could lie.”
She pauses, and then laughs. Lights us both an illicit cigarette. Along with a “more defined sense of ego” she’s also cultivated my nicotine habit. Every time I lift one to my lips I can taste Niall.
“I don’t get it,” I say more calmly. “You said I’ve been doing well.”
“You have been. But you still won’t talk about what happened. And the first thing the parole board is going to ask me is whether you’ve been able to express true remorse.”
My eyes drift automatically to the window, my mind turns away from the words and to the slivers of wispy clouds I can make out. Oh, to be on a pocket of air, floating, listless …
“Franny.”
I force my gaze back to Kate.
“Concentrate,” she says. “Use your tools.”
Reluctantly I take a deep, slow breath and feel the chair beneath my butt, the floor beneath my feet, focus my eyes on her eyes, then on her mouth, narrowing the world to my physical senses, to this room, to her.
“Willful detachment is a very dangerous state of mind. I want you to stay present.”
I nod. I know this; she says it every week.
“Have you agreed to speak with Penny yet?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“She hated me even before all of this.”
“Why is that?”
“Because I’m fickle.”
“Is that what she said?”
“In a roundabout way. And she’s a shrink, so she should know.”
“How does that make you feel?”
I shrug. “Transparent.”
“You don’t strike me as fickle, Franny. Quite the opposite.”
“How’s that?”
“What have you ever changed your mind about?” Kate asks. “I’d call that willful and stubborn,” she mutters, making me snort. “Why does it bother you so much? Penny’s regard for you. The thought of seeing her.”
I look toward the window—
“Focus, please.”
And back to her face.
“Do you think it might be because she’s going to say things that make it hard for you to maintain your delusion?”
“I don’t have a delusion. I told you I let it go.”
“And we talked about how they can re-form as a coping method for spikes in emotional distress.”
I close my eyes. “I’m fine. I just need to get out of here. I’ve had enough.”
“You were sentenced to nine years.”
“Three non-parole. Let me serve the rest outside. I’ll do the community service. I’ll stay put. Be a model citizen. I can’t stand the walls any longer.”
“Have you been doing your exercises?”
“They don’t work, they don’t get me out.”
“Take a breath.”
My teeth clench but I force myself to breathe. Losing my shit in these sessions doesn’t help my case.
Kate waits until she deems me calm enough to continue. But she’s giving me a funny look now. The one that usually precedes something particularly unpleasant. “Have you heard from Niall?” she asks.
“Since the last time we spoke? No.”
“I’m asking if you’ve heard from him since you’ve been in here. Any phone calls? Letters? Has he written to you, Franny?”
I don’t reply.
“Why not?” Kate asks pointedly.
And she should be proud of me because this time when I lift my eyes to the sky it’s with a focus so singular I no longer hear the rest of her words, instead I am weightless and drifting.
* * *
“Mrs. Lynch,” the judge addresses me at the parole hearing. “It says in your psychiatrist’s statement that the only reason you pleaded guilty to the counts of murder was your traumatized state, and that you should have been given proper psychiatric care at the time. This reads to me like your time in prison has offered you some perspective and that you are regretting your honesty at the time of trial. Let me make it clear for you: we do not offer retrials to women who change their minds.”
I let my gaze fix on him, despite having been warned not to do this. There is something unsettling about my stare, apparently. “I haven’t asked for a retrial,” I say clearly. “This is a parole hearing. I’ve applied for parole.”
Beside me, Mara winces. “Your Honor, the application is simple,” she says. “Mrs. Lynch hasn’t had a single behavioral warning in her entire time in custody. She has been an impeccable inmate, despite multiple attacks on her person for which she was hospitalized. And as I said repeatedly at the time of her trial, this was her first offense. Multiple psychiatrists have deemed her psychiatric state at the time of the incident unstable, carrying on through the trial period. On the basis of the evidence presented against her I strongly recommended to her that she plead not guilty for the counts of murder, but guilty to the lesser charges of manslaughter. She was in no fit state to take my advice, so riddled with guilt and regret for what she had caused that she was intent on seeing herself punished beyond what the crimes deserved.”
“You don’t consider taking the lives of two people to be an offense worthy of punishment, Miss Gupta?”
“Not when they’re accidental, Your Honor. Not to the degree of nine years.”
“When asked at the trial about her intent, the accused said she meant to cause both the deaths. I remember specifically because she was quite adamant about it.”
“I refer you again to her state of shock.”