Migratory Animals (10 page)

But as Brandon and his host mother stewed vegetables and kneaded dough, and as the light slanted through the rough, rectangular
windows turning everything a pale gold, the woman, her long hair tied back in a flowery scarf, began to sing. Brandon tapped a rhythm out with his foot. They said nothing. By the time the
tapsi
was prepared and the family, which normally annoyed Brandon with their loud talk and strange manners, was sitting around the table sopping up the spicy sauce with thick slices of naan, his host mother was smiling again. So was he.

Sitting in the rocking chair as Brandon prepared food in the other room, Molly thought about calling her aunt in Dallas to see if she would drive down to Abilene next weekend and meet her at her father's house. But no. Flannery said they should wait, and so they would. Molly hadn't talked to her aunt in ages, anyway: since their mother's death that side of the family had fallen off, like a old neighborhood for which you feel affection but never have a reason to visit anymore.

When they were growing up, their aunt's was where they stayed each time they went to the medical center in Dallas, and Molly remembered the brick ranch house as dark and musty with flowery upholstery and thick drapes. There was an antique clock that struck the hour and half hour, and blue-and-white china plates that hung on the wall above the mantel.

Only as an adult did Molly begin to wonder how their aunt must have felt being the one who didn't get Huntington's. The one who made the painful decision not to have children and yet, as it turned out, never even possessed the defective gene. Did she ever wish she could trade places with her sister? Did she ever wish she could take Molly's and Flannery's uncertain DNA strands and fill them with her own purer transcription? Of course, back then, their aunt would not have known for sure she couldn't get the disease; she was still at risk.

Like their mother, their aunt was a gardener, although she loved different plants. When the weather was nice, the two women would
drink what their aunt called Texas Snake Bites, cider mixed with Lone Star beer, and sit in the garden having long, meandering conversations.

“She was charming; she knew her bourbon,” she remembered their aunt saying to their mother once, “or at least she liked her bourbon.” But Molly could no longer imagine who they might have been talking about. She remembered a tiny orange tree and fierce-looking tiger orchids. She remembered the smell of Chantilly.

“Your winter sweet is blooming nicely,” her mother said. “And your . . . and your . . . what is it called, the yellow blossoms . . .”

“You know what it's called,” Flannery sneered suddenly from where they played a board game on the patio table, no longer pretending she too wasn't eavesdropping. “You grew up here!”

At the time Molly didn't share Flannery's frustration over their mother's many memory lapses and confusions. She was still too young to fully understand what it meant to watch the woman who brought her into the world fade and disappear.

“Yes,” said their mother. “It's on the tip of my tongue.”

Molly squinted but couldn't see anything on her mother's tongue.

“Witch hazel,” said their aunt, nonchalantly. “I thought there wasn't enough rain for it this fall, but it's done better than I expected.”

Their aunt was also a big fan of the Dallas Cowboys, “America's Team,” and so sometimes, while their parents were at the medical center, Molly and Flannery found themselves sitting around listlessly watching football with her in the afternoons. If Molly let her hand fall between the sofa cushions, she could feel the sudden hardness of the handgun her aunt kept hidden there “for protection.” During one trip their aunt was hoarse from a case of laryngitis, and so she poked Molly or Flannery whenever she wanted them to yell in her stead. Flannery was poked whenever the Cowboys did well, and
she yelled: “Woohoo! That's what I'm talking about!” Molly was poked whenever they had been wronged by the refs or by the other team: “Bullshit. Total bullshit.”

After changing into shorts, Molly rolled out her yoga mat on the back porch, its wooden overhang festooned with white Christmas lights they kept up all yearlong.

Then, she did vinyasas, swiftly moving from one pose to the next in a flow: Mountain, Plank, Up Dog, Down Dog, Warrior Two, Reverse Warrior, Triangle. Tuladandasana, Bakasana, Salamba Sirsasana. She was obsessed with balance poses. She told herself she did them over and over because she enjoyed them, not out of any desire to mask or correct her physical faults, her increasing clumsiness. She lifted her right leg gingerly from behind as her chest dipped toward the ground, her torso twisting to one side as she splayed her left hand to the sky, gaze following. She teetered but managed to stay in it. She breathed deeply. Half-Moon.

As Molly held a tripod headstand, the blood flushing her brain, an image from her honeymoon in Mexico City floated to the surface. She and Brandon were on their way back from a show at the Palacio de Bellas Artes, holding hands and walking through the long underground subway tunnels toward the train that would return them to Brandon's boyhood friend's apartment, where they would sleep with windows open to a breeze, listening to the sound of the vendors yelling “Tamales, tamales tan ricos,” and smelling the faint odor of marijuana plants on the balcony. But then, as they walked forward, the doors of a stopping subway train opened to literally hundreds of teenagers streaming forth in a wave, each holding in their arms the statue of a saint, some of them elaborately carved and enormously unwieldy, others unrecognizable blobs of wood. She and Brandon stood still as the crowd flowed past them in a rush; everything inside
Molly vibrated. She turned to look at her brand-new husband, his wild curls a halo around his head, and she grabbed him around the waist so that her arms too would be full.

Suddenly, images from the Mexico City train station still pulsing through her brain, Molly went light and toppled onto her yoga mat, bashing one shoulder on the way down. She moaned and tucked her knees to her chest. Back and forth, she rocked.

Santiago and Brandon were both alphas in the kitchen.

“I've just never seen polenta cooked this way in my entire life. That's all,” Brandon was saying when Molly walked in after her shower. Brandon's nose crinkled like it did whenever he was concerned.

“Well, get ready for the next-level shit,” said Santiago, wearing a white apron with the phrase
WORLD
'
S NUMBER ONE GRANDMOTHER
written in red cursive.

“One Strawberry Hill Boone's Farm and the latest Juggs says it collapses under that much moisture.”

“You boys play nice,” said Molly. Brandon walked over holding a wooden spoon, and she opened her mouth to the hot, steaming Swiss chard. “More serrano,” she said.

Brandon was the chef of the marriage, but Molly was the one he turned to for spice consultations, claiming she had an unusually good palate for these things. She went along even while suspecting he'd invented this theory out of his Brandonian desire to include her. Molly was really only good at identifying songs on the radio, and the only two things she liked to do in the kitchen were to peel hard-boiled eggs and make guacamole. There was a special satisfaction when the shell of an egg came off in only two or three pieces, or when an avocado was sliced open to reveal the perfect chartreuse of ideal ripeness.

As the three of them sat at the table that barely fit into one corner of the kitchen, Brandon nodded as he took a bite of polenta, a movement that indicated, “not bad.”

Santiago put a hand to his shaved head and looked up, something strange in the way he held his mouth. “I thought Flan was coming tonight.”

“She canceled,” said Molly, scraping butter-roasted “magic pumpkin” off her plate with the side of her fork. “Working late.”

“She's meeting us at the show?”

“Nope.” Molly looked back at her plate with the dusty rose on it, too self-absorbed with her own sibling resentments to notice that she wasn't the only one disappointed.

Recently Molly had gotten a ticket for reckless driving (she told the officer and her husband she'd been on the phone, though that wasn't true), and so Brandon did all the night driving now. He let Molly and Santi off at the entrance to the club.

The band began on time and played two hours of tragic bluesy rock and country. Molly liked La Zona Rosa because the dirty concrete floor sloped up from the stage, so even being short, she could find spots to see above the bobbing heads of those in front of her.

The front woman was no longer young and beautiful, yet she had that leather-and-zippers aura of eternal cool Molly wished for but knew she'd never possess. The crowd of shitkickers and hipsters and dirty old hippies swayed en masse; Brandon stood behind Molly with his arms around her waist, and they breathed and moved and sweated, a singular beast. Lou and Steven met them there, and they stood nearby drinking beer handed out by Santiago, who made trip after trip to the bar. Onstage, the singer made the word
righteously
sound like gritty exultation.

During the encore, Molly was on her way back from the bathroom,
trying to find her friends in the crowd, when she started to get an unsettled, lurching sensation in her stomach—an anxious, shaky, heart-racing panic. The notes from the guitars onstage suddenly seemed stretched and off-key, grating. She put her hands over her ears.

She tried to take a few steps toward the middle of the room, her feet weaving in front of her, and then she stumbled. Her body was disobeying her. Like one of those dreams where your limbs are seemingly trapped in a vat of honey. Some men standing nearby laughed and rolled their eyes: “Hold your liquor, sugartits.”

The stage lights pulsed and circled up above like halos. Molly crouched to escape them, focusing her gaze on the littered ground, the crunched plastic cups and wadded-up credit card receipts—confusing clues to a mystery she couldn't solve, couldn't quite wrap her head around.
Good night! Thank you for coming, Austin! I love you!
What was she doing here? Who had brought her to this place, this experience? What was making everything spin? The crowd moved past Molly on their way to the doors, jolting and rattling her, a few of them looking down with abstract concern. She noticed a pair of lanky calves and Converse tennis shoes—Flannery. Flannery was here to save her. But when she tilted her head upward Molly saw orange curly hair and a teenager's face. The stranger slid away into the crowd.

Headaches. Mood-shifting night panics. Tics and twitches and restless limbs. Problems driving and counting money. Loss of balance. They were all symptoms she knew intimately from growing up, from watching her mother die, and yet she'd managed to ignore and deny them all. And Flannery. The way her sister had avoided Molly ever since getting back to Austin. Had it been so clear? No. No. No.

She closed her eyes, remembering the time in Dallas when she and her sister weren't led into the usual waiting room at the hospital
with the green plastic furniture that had accrued the waxy film of hours and hours of their boredom. The time they were allowed to go back with their mother into a different space where nurses and technicians bustled around little stations labeling vials and marking paperwork, one of them stopping to take a white medical glove and blow it up like a balloon, handing it to them with a bright smile.

Flannery tossed it to Molly with a look that said,
I'm too old for such a transparent bribe.
But did Molly truly understand it that way at the time? She remembered holding the glove balloon with the tips of her fingers as if it were a crystal ball.

The nurse was preparing to take a blood sample from both girls.

“Why, Papa?” asked Flannery, her hands pushed deep into her corduroy pants pockets.

“To help Mom,” said their father.

“But we're not sick like she is.”

“Of course not. That's why she needs your help.”

Later, days after the Lucinda Williams concert, Molly would do her own research. She would discover that this was before the International Huntington's Association had drawn up guidelines to limit testing of those under age eighteen. In fact, it was not for a test of HD at all, but merely to add their blood samples to a project on the cusp of finding and labeling the exact gene that could eventually predict the future of someone at risk. But already they were close, already they could make a pretty good guess based on the number of CAG repeats on a certain gene. And that, as it turned out, was good enough in Molly's case.

The nurse bound her arm and readied the syringe.

“It will only hurt for a second.”

Finally, the group found her sitting on the concrete of the club floor. They surrounded and protected her, Lou's and Steven's and everybody's
arms reaching out like one big net. She looked into their eyes—Brandon, Santiago—and did not see surprise; what she saw looked more like grief and desperation. She could almost detect the invisible film that rippled between the land of the living and of the dying. She felt ice-cold, as though she were trapped inside a deep, black hole while warm, living people tried to drag her out, to reanimate her.

But it was too late. As they pulled her up, she let her body go limp. Molly was dying, and it seemed she was the last to know.

S
antiago looked at the window, fogged and beaded from the humidifier, still expelling its slow mist of water particles up into the room like one long winter breath.

“Since when do you fly-fish?” asked Flannery. It was morning. They were lying on the floor in sleeping bags.

“My grandmother made them.” Santiago followed her gaze to the case he'd hung on the wall a few days ago: dozens of colorful and elaborate flies, tiny and twisted with little trails of fuzz and string.

“They're funny looking,” she said.

After the scene at the concert, Santiago had left Molly and Brandon at their car, Molly folding herself into the passenger seat in silence. He had taken a cab to the Climate Institute and dragged Flannery back with him to the fire station, where they drank whiskey and paced the floors, crying and wringing their hands. He talked some about his own father's death, but mostly Flannery rambled, spewing bits of stories he had to work to put together, about how her grandfather, her mother's father, had been misdiagnosed with Alzheimer's at first but his chorea was so bad her grandmother moved him out of town. To hide him. How at his memorial service, Flannery saw two of his sisters shaking with chorea, all blamed on strokes or something else. All ashamed to face the truth: they had passed down a death sentence to their children.