Migratory Animals (15 page)

It took a moment for the information to push through the syrupy air of the room and into Brandon's ears before piecing itself back together again in his brain, as if he were an observer watching himself sit there dumbly, blankly, gripping his glass tumbler in both hands.

“I don't understand. Why hasn't Molly said anything?”

“Molly doesn't want to know. She doesn't want to have these years ruined by the foreshadowing, so to speak. Trust me on this, kiddo.”

Brandon recalled looking at Molly's father: deep-set blue eyes and leathery jowls obscuring what had once probably been a sharp-cut jawline. Brandon said he'd wondered if it wasn't a trick, a way for her father to get rid of him, to scare him away from becoming too serious with the youngest daughter. But it was true Molly's mother had died from Huntington's. It was true the disease was genetic. What kind of asshole would make something like that up?

“And don't worry,” her father continued when Brandon said nothing. “When she finds out, I won't tell anyone you were in on it.”

Brandon said he hated the way her father used the words
in on it
, like Huntington's was a practical joke to be played on someone. And yet, Brandon had trusted the man at first, the man who was so much more educated, who seemed so much wiser than his own parents. He somehow managed to hear the words
Molly doesn't want to know
as the equivalent of
Molly told us explicitly she doesn't want to know
, which were, of course, not the same thing at all. They were young and any onset of the disease seemed a long way off, and so in a sense he was also in denial, convincing himself a cure would easily be found in time. Since the gene responsible for the disease had been pinpointed, how much longer could it be before therapies were developed to splice it out or counteract its effects with drugs? Brandon was going to be a scientist. He believed in progress. And most of all, he was in love and too cowardly to be the bearer of such devastating news rather than the savior from it.

Molly listened to the story Brandon confessed into her ear, music booming all around them, the dance floor twinkling with the reflected light from miniature disco balls strung from the rafters of the barn, the faint smell of hay. Then, she stood from the table, a little
shaky at first, and walked away. Her husband had known she would get HD from the beginning. He'd known from the very beginning.

She needed her sister, her older sister, who was so tall she could always be found in a crowd, long neck like a homing beacon. Molly moved through the dancers toward Flannery, who was wearing a loud, crazy dress and dancing wildly, maybe drunkenly. Molly touched her shoulder.
I need to talk to you
, she mouthed. Flannery nodded and yelled, “After this song. I love this song!”

Molly felt suddenly ill, a flash of nausea, her skin hot and clammy as she beelined for the door, rushing through the crowd, slipping through without jarring anyone, hoping she could make it.
Please, God
, she thought,
help me make it out of here in time.

E
arlier in the evening, under a sprawling live oak, when her husband, Harry (who'd paid twenty-five dollars to be ordained online at the Universal Life Church), had pronounced Steven and Lou married, Alyce clapped and smiled along with the rest. Seated in the middle of the audience, she was surrounded by a checkerboard of foldout chairs like a maze meant to trap her. Steven and Lou looked happy as they kissed and turned to face the crowd, a vaguely smug, satisfied look on their faces, thought Alyce, who knew from three professional photo albums that her own wedding-day expression had been similar, difficult as that was to believe now.

After the ceremony, Steven's parents began walking toward her, so she smiled and fluttered them a wave before turning in the opposite direction, weaving through the chairs with a faux expression of purpose. She walked until she found herself in front of a white clapboard cottage a dozen yards away, then climbed onto its wraparound porch that was badly in need of a coat of paint. The wedding reception was in the barn, but Alyce needed someplace private where she could push down her feelings of panic.

The front door to the cottage was unlocked, and she inched along a short entryway and into the living room. The interior was furnished but in that way of vacation homes, everything matching and perfectly in place, from the green sofa cushions to the amber lamp to
the framed prints of swaying wheat hanging on the wall. No shoes tossed into corners or bills stacked on the counter, no postcards or finger-painted drawings tacked to the fridge.

Taking deep breaths, trying to focus on the physical world outside her own body, Alyce slid alongside the dark wooden bookshelves built into one side of the room, running her hand along the spines of aging clothbound hardbacks. She wondered if they were bought as a set from an antiques shop just to make the place look serious. One volume caught her eye:
The Robin
. She pulled it out and flipped it open to the title page. How interesting. An entire book about the bird. Written in 1970, it was not nearly as old as the emerald-and-gold-embossed cover made it appear.

Alyce heard noises from upstairs, muffled voices and the clicking of a door. Did someone, in fact, live here? Or more likely, members of the bride's or groom's family had rented the house to stay in during the wedding. Why hadn't she thought of that before? Alyce pushed the book down into her purse and walked back outside, down the porch steps to the grass lawn where people mingled, teetering in heels and swilling booze, waiting for the dancing to begin.

The reception inside the barn was loud and crowded, and after enduring it for as long as she could, Alyce wandered outside to the line of Porta-Potties set up next to a restaurant-size sink, maybe built for washing farm eggs or vegetables. Or some more lurid purpose Alyce didn't want to imagine, involving entrails and slaughter and afterbirth.

It was dark now, and as she looked up at the stars, she had the feeling they were pinholes punched in the top of a jar, just enough air seeping in to keep her alive. Inside the portable stall, she stared at herself in the metal mirror attached to the door. Her face was physically coming apart, Picasso-like, separating into pieces until her
gaze couldn't put them back together again. Her breath stank. Her skin looked gray. She was not doing well. She was not getting better. She dug into her purse and came up with the bottle of Xanax—she didn't count how many she swallowed before lifting up her dress and sitting down, listening as her stream of urine hit the black pile of shit and piss below.

Wiggling back into her clothes, arms checkered by bits of moonlight filtering through the fiberglass of the outhouse, Alyce heard what sounded like someone retching in the Porta-Potty adjacent to hers.

“Okay in there?” called Alyce.

“Aces.” The voice belonged to Molly.

“Drunk already . . . or did you eat the shrimp?”

Molly opened the door, dabbing a wad of toilet paper to her mouth. “I'm not sure if I went into the Porta-Potty because I had to puke or if I puked because I went into the Porta-Potty.” Molly smoothed down her navy dress with white piping lining the straps. Her eyes were red and puffy. But even so, Alyce could still sense the pulsing magnetic glow beneath her skin.

“Want to get out of here?” Alyce's heart beat louder through her chest.

“You have no idea,” said Molly in a half whisper. She told Alyce she wanted out, out. To disappear for a while. “I was planning to go to Abilene . . . but I'm not now.”

Alyce didn't hesitate. “Come live with me at the ranch.”

Molly smiled. “That's sweet, but I can't handle being around a family right now.”

“Yes.” Alyce knew exactly what she meant. “Harry and the boys are moving back into town. To be closer to school. And so I can get more work done.” As soon as she said the words, they no longer sounded like a lie.

The two women stared at each other. Alyce reached out a hand to touch Molly's hard, beautiful shoulder. “Come live with me. I mean it.”

An hour later, after maneuvering bleak rural roads back to the ranch, having abandoned her husband to represent them at the reception, Alyce stripped off her clothes before going into the studio. She laid the stolen book on top of a stack of unsent letters addressed to her parents in Mexico. (The letters were long and full of rambling recriminations. In them, she blamed her parents for how her life had turned out. She blamed them for being so damn happy and free. She blamed them for the mole on her left shoulder.)

The boys were in Houston for the weekend with their grandparents, so the house was quiet as she returned to the drawings she'd been working on obsessively since the night of the homecoming party. She moved them around on her table, looking at them from different angles, the mouths and eyes and cheekbones of her friends. She had dozens of strong drafts, but something kept her from proceeding to the next stage of the project.

Alyce always did close studies before finalizing a design. She used drawing to investigate images she found aesthetically intriguing: a blue door, a wooden lattice, the spokes of a bike. She tried to find a way to distill the whole into a fragment that carried the feeling of whatever had touched her about the image in the first place. She then moved the elements around, redrawing and redrawing until satisfied with every inch. The process was like sending out a bird from a ship, over and over, until one day it didn't come back and you knew land was near.

But how to distill her new project into something that could represent a complex web of human beings? Alyce knew Molly was the entry point. That something inside her was pivotal to unlocking the
rest of the group, the rest of the tapestry. Alyce needed to study Molly more closely.

“Molly,” she said out loud to the room. Nothing. Alyce put aside the charcoal drawings and grabbed the stolen book from her desk.

She read. From the book she learned robins were almost never seen in large groups as late in the season as they'd seen them here two months ago—it was earlier in the spring when flocks usually migrated through the Texas Hill Country from Mexico on their way to breeding grounds farther north. There were always rogue birds who got turned around, their migratory wiring twisted by strange weather or faulty genetics, but it was rare for an entire group to be months behind schedule.

For the next several hours, Alyce pored over
The Robin
, far away from the dancing and drinking at Lou and Steven's big event. She read about a myth from a tribe in Canada who believed the Big Dipper was made up of Bear being chased across the sky by three hunters: Robin, Chickadee, and Moose Bird, represented by the three stars of the handle. Bear comes out of his den each spring and is pursued across the sky all summer until in October the constellation is swallowed by the hills, Robin finally managing to kill Bear with an arrow. Jumping on top of Bear's body, Robin becomes covered with blood and so he flies up again, shaking bright crimson onto the autumn maple trees, his breast still, and always, retaining the rust-red color of dried blood. Out the window Alyce thought she could still see flecks of it on the grass of the lawn, left behind by the hundreds of blood-drenched little bodies of her errant, dilatory flock. She could re-create the color in wool dye by mixing sumac and rose hips.

Her thoughts returned to the faces of her husband and sons watching the flock. How they'd been so moved. As if seeing such a sheer number of bodies in one place changed anything fundamental
about life. As if it could change what bodies did, which was fumble through the sky, migrate to different places, breed, then break down and die.

Acquaintances often cooed to the effect of how wonderful it must be to have a husband who also worked in the visual arts, picturing a charmed, bohemian life of collaboration and discussion about each other's work. But while Alyce and Harry had always been terribly supportive of each other—he throwing parties after her two gallery openings, she always there, smiling, for his open houses—in reality they gave only superficial attention to the other's works-in-progress. Harry might help her decide between two color charts. She might help him tweak a floor plan so the air-conditioning duct fit. But that was the extent of it.

Alyce thought this was because they'd met so young and had already established a way of being together before either became an independent designer. The early years were filled with rejection and insecurity, so maybe they both intuited that a deep engagement with each other's work would naturally include a level of criticism and hurt feelings the relationship might not survive.

They were both commercial designers, working not for some lofty higher calling, but for other people. Alyce did everything from blankets to wall tapestries, while Harry worked on homes and offices and garage renovations. But still, they managed to insinuate a bit of their own aesthetic into every project. The couple now living in a triangle of steel and glass had come to Harry and Santiago's firm holding sketches for a Spanish colonial. Her Coptic-style tapestry depicting a school of fish that hung in the foyer of the mayor's ex-wife's house was originally commissioned to be an explosion of peonies. But Alyce liked working directly for clients because, no matter how much she persuaded them to tweak their vision in line with her own tastes, there were still parameters, context. She considered the
size of the space where the piece would hang, the lighting, the tone of decoration. Now she was learning how much harder it was to do something for herself.

Alyce stared at the sketches of her friends, their faces so alive. So full and in the midst. She tried to reconnect with her purpose: to show her boys what it had been like when she was most happy, when she was lifted up on currents of air, not because she did anything deserving, but just because. She thought of a video she'd watched once in which scientists (using a camera invented to track ballistics) filmed a hummingbird flying through an air tunnel misted with vaporized olive oil. The fog of tiny droplets captured the movements the bird used to create lift and drag, a brief impression of an event left behind after everything was over, like a ripple on the water undulating with residual energy. That's what Alyce wanted to do—capture something transient in the stillness of tapestry. Leave behind a footprint of the best parts of herself, the parts she was no longer able to give her sons in real life.