Migratory Animals (28 page)

Flannery racked her brain to connect the dots. Molly had followed her to college, followed her to Dryden House, and gone on to marry her close friend. Like their father, Flannery had a responsibility that didn't end just because they'd grown up, and she'd been shirking it. Flannery who moved abroad. Flannery who couldn't bear to help uproot her mother's irises. Or imagine living without her little sister in the world. All the things one thinks it is impossible to bear and yet. And yet. Who does not have to bear them?

Maybe Flannery could save the Sahel from a laboratory here. That's what most scientists did: made their laboratory into their
world. Because Santiago was right; they were family. She closed her eyes and repeated the word over and over, trying to comprehend its full meaning:
Family. Family. Family.

As she dried off, she heard sounds of Santiago returning from a smoke on her balcony. In the mirror, she watched him walk past the crack in the bathroom door. Santiago, whom she'd known forever, and who'd known her sister forever. Santiago who worshipped her. Santiago who was loyal and never asked her to explain. Santiago who bought her sister silk scarves at yard sales. Santiago who understood what it was like to lose a parent. Santiago who was here.

Without knocking or calling out a warning, he opened the bathroom door wide to her standing in front of the mirror, the chocolate brown towel held tight around her body, hair wet and tangled. She didn't turn around, but he must have been able to see the curve of her buttocks in front of him, the curve of her small breasts reflected in the mirror. She stared at him behind her in the reflection, his body sinewy, what they used to call punk-rock-skinny.

He came toward her and reached out both hands in slow motion, touching Flannery on each shoulder blade with the very tips of his fingers. He moved down her spine, one vertebra at a time, pulling at the towel until she raised her elbows from her side, like a bird flapping its wings, and the towel fell to the floor.

Afterward, Santiago lay motionless, one arm flung around Flan's waist. His breath sounded shallow, and she wondered if he was only feigning sleep. Flannery tried to match her breath to his, tried to keep down the waves of panic that threatened to come up like vomit.

In Nigeria, Flannery for the first time in her adult life had ruminated on the word
home
. There was a man on UniAdamanta's campus who peddled pirated books, and he spread the faded photocopies over his car parked along the inner loop. Once, walking in that warm halo
that surrounded her for the hour after she and Kunle made love, she bought a book by Heidegger called
Building Dwelling Thinking
, just because of the title. In it, the philosopher performs artful feats of metaphysical etymology: “The Old English and High German word for building, buan, means to dwell. This signifies: to remain, to stay in a place . . . to preserve and care for, specifically to till the soil, to cultivate the vine. . . . We do not dwell because we have built, but we build and have built because we dwell, that is, because we are dwellers.” Flannery learned that the word
habitual
comes from “we inhabit it.” Her daily routine, then, was also in a sense the place where she dwelled. A bed within a house. A house within a town. A town within a country. Lying next to Kunle one morning, she babbled to him about the book, wondering out loud whether she was ready to choose one place, to watch the accrual of seasons, to become a caretaker and till the soil. Cultivate the vine. Stay. “I want to dwell,” she said, excitedly. Kunle nodded and laughed because he'd never known any other way. Had he believed her? Believed she meant it? Had he realized that Nigeria was the first place for her where home meant a growing of the vine, not a dying of it?

One day Kunle's youngest aunt came to visit them, and she joked, like he did, in that way that wasn't really joking, saying Flannery should only continue visiting the family village if she planned to stay. “It doesn't seem fair for you to go all that way just to make us miss you,” she said. “I hope you're not playing dice with our emotion.” She went on about someone she knew who married a Korean woman. Apparently, the woman gave them trouble because she refused to eat their food or drink their drink.

“Flan loves our food,” Kunle told her.

“Tell Flannery I'll teach her how to cook it properly,” she said, as if Flannery were not sitting in the room. “That is, if she's still here the next time I'm in town.”

Sweating beneath the mosquito net, plagued by the insomnia that was a side effect of her malaria pills, Flannery sometimes lay awake in Nigeria thinking about how, in college, before they'd leave Dryden House to sashay over to the campus pub looking for beer and boys, Alyce would jokingly recite an incantation: “Spindle, my spindle, haste, haste thee away, and here to my house bring the wooer, I pray.” It was from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale wherein the young spinner's magical spindle flew from her hand, unraveling behind it a thread that the prince could follow back to her. And when they arrived at the campus pub, plunging into the roar of music and laughter and pool cues hitting their marks, Flannery would look over the droves of men in baseball caps and hemp necklaces, like her mother in search of the one vein of blue beneath the rind. In Nigeria, when she touched Kunle's skin as he slept, she felt it. Invisible, but there. Home.

But now she wondered if she'd been wrong. Flannery had learned what it meant to appreciate a home, but maybe she had chosen the wrong one. Maybe she would never really belong in Nigeria, and Santiago, sleeping gently across the room, and her sister and all the rest, maybe they were the home she was supposed to return to finally.

Flannery's cell phone vibrated on the dresser across the room. Without looking, she knew it was Kunle calling, and she used the noise as an excuse to slip from bed. She didn't go toward the phone, though, instead retreating to the bathroom, sitting on the lid of the toilet, shivering. If she were to pick up and listen to Kunle's voice, she would feel as though life in Nigeria were still waiting for her with its grilled suya and harmattan winds, with its poverty and fly-covered meat and easy love. His voice had become more desperate, but still full of longing, still waiting.

Flannery was living in mental possession of two worlds, but she would have to choose. It was only a matter of time. Mrs. Tonukari
had been right when she dropped off Flan at the airport. This time, it wouldn't be so easy to come back. Nigeria was receding.

Mrs. Tonukari didn't believe in e-mail and was too hard of hearing to carry on a viable conversation over an international phone line, and so the Welsh woman wrote Flannery letters, scribbled in four different colors of pen. Most of these letters had gone unanswered—Flannery didn't know where to begin. She already knew the answer Mrs. Tonukari's life had given. She just didn't know if the answer would be the same for her.

Flannery remembered spending one evening on the old woman's porch in Nigeria, watching the quickening of dusk, until Mrs. Tonukari shooed her away early, saying she and her husband had to leave at dawn the following day for a funeral in Abuja.

“I hate getting old. It's so much harder to get the energy to do things like leave the house.”

She asked Flannery if she was familiar with any of the Welsh writers.

“Just Dylan Thomas. ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light.'”

“It's funny,” she'd replied. “My husband quoted that line to me recently, telling me I needed to fight harder. But Dylan Thomas died in his thirties in a pile of filth. So what does a young man really know about all this?” She pointed at her hands and feet swollen with arthritis. Flannery thought:
She has not aged gracefully, but she has survived.

During the years she lived down the road from Mrs. Tonukari, Flannery was young enough to think:
I am not like her.
And she was old enough to doubt whether that was entirely true. The country had taken something out of Mrs. T, like the flesh of an avocado spooned from its skin. How did a young, intrepid Welsh woman, someone who put on avant-garde plays and was willing to turn her life upside down for a handsome Nigerian, manage to live here so long and still be so afraid most of the time?

But now, from the other side of the world, Flannery realized she had been worried about the wrong things. Fear wasn't the biggest danger after all. Believing you really belonged there was.

She remembered one humid, overcast rainy-season afternoon when she tried to catch a bus to downtown and was accosted by beggars. In the States, they would probably be considered black. But, there, the immigrants from the country of Niger or Nigeriens—the second “e” delineating them from Nigerians—were sometimes referred to as “her people” because of their honey-colored skin. “Look, your people are calling to you,” Flannery's companions would sometimes say as they walked out of the main gate of the university, out of its comparative placidity and order, its concrete drainage systems and pruned tropical plants, and into the teeming activity of Adamanta with its
danfo
s zigzagging off the road just long enough for a few passengers to slip on, its market stalls selling vegetables and pirated DVDs, and its shopping complex housing dimly lit cybercafés, small Pentecostal churches and pharmacies whose shelves were often bare besides a few boxes of Panadol and stacks of oversized greeting cards the height and width of a billboard.

But that day the Nigeriens, “her people,” ragged and dirty children with hair curling into loose locks, grabbed tightly to Flannery's arms and wrists and put fingers to their mouths, speaking without having to say anything:
feed me, give me money, see my need
. They targeted her more vigorously than they did others, and she was pretty sure it wasn't because they thought of her as “their people” but because her pale skin and hair signified something more important.

She shouldn't give them anything. She knew that. It encouraged dependence; it solved nothing; they should be in school; you couldn't just throw money at a problem and expect it to disappear. But.

It was hard to take the individual case—these small children clinging with such ferocity—and judge it impartially on a global scale. They were still children. They were still hungry. She still had naira bills in her bag whose absence she would hardly notice. And, really, that's why they targeted her; why, when she shook them off, they just continued to reattach themselves, multiplying; why their faces contorted into such horrible, such studied, such melodramatic expressions of despair: they sensed her indecision. They smelled her pity, and it gave them hope.

As she sat inside the rapidly filling
danfo
, a man grabbed the door with one hand while tossing crinkled naira to one of the beggars with his other. She looked at him as he squeezed into the last seat. Noticing her gaze, he said in English, “I can't imagine how bad things must be in their country if so many of them come to this godforsaken place for a better life.” He half smiled. And the
danfo
kept moving.

Flannery and Santiago's flight didn't leave Utah until evening, so the next morning Santiago took her fishing on the Provo River. The river was fast and clear and wild. Herons touched down and took off from the surrounding wetland. Canada geese honked at them overhead on their way south for the winter.

Flannery slipped while casting, and her booted foot slid into the water, so frigid she immediately sat down on a rock to recover from the shock. Santi, wearing a wool-lined corduroy jacket, looked at home fly-fishing, swinging the gossamer line beautifully over the water, gently landing the tiny black-and-red fly on the surface of the river before the line hit. Flannery had never been fishing before, so she stuck with a rod and spinner, a green plastic minnow she named Iggy. As they stood on the rocky banks, surrounded by wintry white sunlight reaching through the trees like fingers, she remembered
the hand-tied fishing flies Santiago's grandmother used to make, the ones he had in the display case in the fire station.

“This is so much better than fishing in the catfish tanks back home.” Santiago grinned.

“Say that again after I catch something.” A fish jumping in the rapids taunted her.

A group of serious-looking fishermen with a guide from a sports store in town walked by on the path behind them, crunching the brown grass, going downriver to find their own spot.

Santiago made a cast and then said, “I want you to move in with me. When Harry moves out.”

Flannery's body stiffened, unnerved by the statement. She conjured an image of the two of them sitting across from each other at a dining room table. They were eating meat loaf.

But Flan didn't respond because, just then, her line tugged, and her throat loosened, letting out a shriek of surprise. Santiago scrambled over with the net and told her to keep reeling it in, but not too fast—best to tire it out some. The cold steel water roiled about the struggling animal, the line tight and quivering. When the fish emerged from the water, Santiago declared it a fourteen-inch brown trout and scooped the head with the net while grabbing the tail. Her hook had caught the poor fish in one gill, which meant it couldn't be released. Couldn't be saved.

But even as she watched him secure the first fish she'd ever caught—unhooking it and flipping out his pocketknife—in the back of her mind she was still thinking about his offer. To say yes would be the final betrayal of Kunle. To say no would be a betrayal of her sister, her own flesh. Santiago squatted beside her on the river, and she loved him in a different way than she loved Kunle: in that way you love your fumbling past and your brave and careless youth.

Looking at the dying fish, she thought about the graduation trip she and Alyce took during college to watch songbirds during their big migration through Cyprus on their way to breeding grounds in northern Europe. It had been Alyce's idea, of course. They dressed in Windbreakers, carrying binoculars and backpacks filled with beer. When they discovered rampant illegal poaching—long perching sticks covered in sticky lime used to ensnare shrikes, warblers, blackcaps, golden orioles—Alyce insisted on ditching their plans to get drunk and watch birds for volunteering with a group that snuck around disabling traps. They spent the next two days with a gaggle of ex-pat Germans and Brits tramping through private orchards and public parks, trying to save the ones still alive, caught by tail feathers or a beak or the tip of a wing. Some were too far gone by the time they were found and mercy was administered with a quick twist. Flannery never volunteered for this task, but Alyce agreed to do it once. Later she said she had pretended to be opening the lid off a jar of salsa.