I breathe out. “Of course.”
Niall Lynch, beloved son and husband.
“Thank you,” I whisper. “For writing that. You didn’t have to.”
“It’s true, isn’t it?”
I swallow tears. “Very much so.”
* * *
Afterward, in the mansion that is supposed to be my home for the remainder of my parole, I sequester myself in Niall’s childhood bedroom and sleep for nineteen hours. I wake in the middle of the night, disoriented and unable to go back to sleep. I look through his collection of trilobites, touching each one tenderly. Then the pages of a book hiding a treasure trove of delicate pressed flowers. A journal containing endless observations of animal behavior, a photo album of feathers, rocks of all shapes and sizes, beetles and moths frozen forever in hairspray, fragments of speckled eggshells … Each tiny thing is more precious than I could imagine, and I realize that even though Niall believed his mother was never really able to love him, here is the proof: keeping all these treasures so perfectly preserved for all these years.
Boxes sit in the corner, labeled Recent. Inside I find reams of paper, his publications and teaching notes and journals. I know these things. I have watched him working on them for years. One of the journals is unlike the others, and not one I recognize. It has been titled Franny.
I am nervous as I open it. Short, meticulous entries make up a study of a woman who has my name but seems alien at first.
9:15 a.m., she’s just thrown a used condom into the hallway outside the men’s bathroom, screaming with outrage about the vileness of men.
4:30, she is reading Atwood in the quad again, the essays I quoted.
Roughly 1:00 a.m., she calls her mother’s name and I have to shake her awake.
It is a logbook of my life. My actions. As I read, the entries become less scientific, more insightful, more poetic. And as my initial panic fades, I begin to recognize this for what it is. More a study of my husband than it is of me. This is how he teaches himself to know something, to love something.
The last entry I read is this.
* * *
Before my wife was my wife, she was a creature I studied.
Now, this very morning, her fingers were splayed over the lump by her belly button, the elbow or fist or foot pressing itself toward us, wriggling to the sound of my voice, reaching to be closer. It moved, this tiny person, and Franny’s eyes shone a light so bright as she looked at me, looked in astonishment, in fear and in joy.
She loves this child, and it’s her cage. I think she only agreed to keep it because she wanted me to be left with something when she breaks free. The thing that calls to her, whatever it is, will call again. But she has forgotten my promise. I wait, always. Our daughter will wait with me. And maybe one day she too will leave, off on an adventure. And then I will wait for her, too.
* * *
After unearthing everything in his room I make my way barefoot into the backyard, around the pond, and into the greenhouse. The cage up the back is empty still—Penny never did replace those birds I freed—but I stand inside it, anyway, and remember so vividly the feel of feathered wings brushing against my face and the taste of his lips.
“Franny?”
I turn to face Penny, realizing that I have been standing frozen in this cage for hours like a lunatic. An uneasy déjà vu drapes over me. We’ve been here before, she and I, just like this. “Sorry,” I say.
“Would you like breakfast?”
I nod and follow her inside. Arthur’s spot at the end of the breakfast table is empty and has been now for years. He left after Niall’s death, unable to remain in the house where his son was raised. So now Penny is alone here in a hollow mausoleum and anything negative I’ve ever felt toward her melts away. I want only to shelter her from this impossible loss.
We eat quietly until she asks, “Why did you say you meant to do it?”
I put down my spoon. We haven’t spoken since before, I never wanted to face her in the prison, so it makes sense this would be her question, the one that matters most.
“I just … wanted to be punished. As harshly as possible.” It wasn’t hard to convince the court of my guilt, not after the blood alcohol level or the forensics of the car, the tires that didn’t swerve or brake, but charged straight for the oncoming vehicle as though seeking annihilation, or even, after, the damage I did to Greta’s body.
“What about the tire marks? You veered onto the other side of the road and you didn’t brake. Why didn’t you brake, Franny?”
“There was an owl,” I say, and my voice cracks. My head falls to rest on my arms as a tidal wave consumes me.
It feels an age later when a hand gently strokes my hair. “I have something to show you.”
* * *
Penny takes me into her office and pulls a file from a drawer. She hands it to me and I read Last Will and Testament. I’m not ready, but I sink onto the carpet and turn the pages until I see it.
If there are no terns left, I would like to be buried, so that my body can give its energy back to the earth from which it derived so much, so that it might feed something, give something, instead of only taking.
If there are terns left …
I close my eyes for a long moment. Preparing myself.
If there are terns left, and it’s possible, and not too difficult, I would like my ashes to be scattered where they fly.
The tumbling ocean calms. I rise to my feet, certain at last.
“Can we have his body exhumed?” I ask.
Penny is shocked. “What—But there’s no way to … They’ve all gone.”
“No,” I say. “Not yet. And I know where they’ll fly.”
“How?”
“Niall told me.”
Sterna Paradisaea, SOUTH ATLANTIC OCEAN MATING SEASON
* * *
The stretch of ice before us is resplendent and magnificent, overwhelmingly so. It claims command of an entire wintry world, the true heart of its universe. It is imperious and crude and completely impervious, all.
And it is empty.
Even though I let them go, even though I told myself it was over, I must have still somehow been expecting to see a sky filled with birds, or a stretch of ice covered in seals, or something, anything alive. Because as the Sterna Paradisaea tacks her way slowly toward shore, past great floating chunks of ice, and I cannot make out movement anywhere in the great expanse, my heart breaks anew.
“Do you know where we are?” I ask Ennis. Extraordinary cracks rend the air, the ice breaking off the shelf and falling with a noise greater than any thunder into the ocean. I never expected such sounds.
“Coming up on the Antarctic Peninsula now. We’ll make our way east into the Weddell Sea.”
I stare at the approaching land.
Something feels wrong, abruptly. The Weddell Sea is where they have always flown. It was always the stretch of Antarctica most filled with wildlife, followed by Wilkes Land on the northeast side, where the terns land if they have cut right across to Australia before turning south, as they sometimes used to.
“Wait,” I say. “Can you slow down a bit?”
Ennis gently eases the throttle lever back a little, looking at me quizzically.