Migratory Animals (13 page)

A
s Molly watched her sister walk purposefully across the garden, past the statue of Mao and the crepe myrtle and the concrete gurgling fountain, she tried not to feel guilty. She didn't deserve to feel guilty. But she did deserve her anger—at her husband for somehow knowing and not telling, at her sister for being so patronizing (and lucky), at the universe for twisting a part of her DNA strand and killing her off too young.

But Molly was becoming weary of blame and sickness, which was all she'd been thinking about for days, sorting her memories and enemies. Now she needed to discuss concrete, physical things one could see or touch or eat. She needed to be here.

As though reading her mind, Alyce said, “The creek at the ranch has shriveled in this heat wave. It's mostly disconnected pools with fish swimming around in circles using up all the oxygen, sitting ducks for the blue heron along the cliff.”

“It's funny how living in the city I've hardly noticed it hasn't rained.” Molly turned to study Alyce sitting next to her.

“At night the coyotes howl their asses off. I can hear them from my studio.” Her legs, so tiny, not like a fashion model but more like a gaunt old woman, were twisted into a cross-legged position on the bench, beige pants swallowing any sign of calf or foot. Alyce was disappearing into her clothes.

“Sounds kind of cool, actually.”

“Not as cool as the tracks we run across in the morning. And the scat. It's like being a detective or a tracker: a deer crossed here, a fox quick in pursuit.” She told Molly she'd learned how vegetarian scat had seeds in it, carnivore scat little bits of white hair, and that it was hard to tell the difference between fox and coyote because on the ranch they ate more or less the same things. “One of them pinches at the end so it tapers. I can't remember which one though.”

“You should write a paper. ‘Special Topics in Feces Tapering.' I wonder what a tracker would say coming across my scat: A woman crossed here, obviously on her way back from eating a black bean and corn burrito with a large queso from Taco Cabana.”

Alyce didn't even feign laughter. “You know the triple bird homicide? The one I told y'all the boys are in mourning for? I sat on one of the birds.”

“Oh God.” Molly shivered, even in the heat.

“The blue jay or whatever it was that knocked those three baby titmice from their nest in the roof of the porch, knocked one straight onto my morning-coffee chair.”

“And you sat on it.”

“The two that were still alive didn't even have fully formed wings yet,” she said. She told Molly they just lay on the concrete, squirming helplessly, beaks opening and closing in vain, downy skin wrinkled and bunched up like that of the starvation victims on television news. “I put them out of their misery, swept them onto the lawn before the boys found them. Somehow I thought soil and grass wouldn't make the whole thing seem quite so brutal.”

Molly knew this was not normal conversation, but it was nice to focus on someone else's troubles. She had first met her sister's best friend fifteen years ago, when she was a senior in high school visiting Flan for the weekend at Marsh. Flannery and her friends had just moved into the big ramshackle rental on the edge
of campus that they called Dryden House and decided to throw a “fancy” dinner party, speaking in foreign accents and pretending their Goodwill plates were bone china. They sautéed gulf shrimp in butter—overcooked and rubbery. Brandon and Santiago struggled with their first rack of lamb—it was too dry, but it was lamb. For dessert, Alyce's coconut cake, her mother's recipe. This was how Molly remembered it.

“Does one use the small spoon for the soup?”

“No, no,” said Steven from across the table, his own British accent more Dick Van Dyke than Henry Higgins. “That's for the heroin. You eat the soup with cupped hands—it's all the rage in Montmartre.”

Bottles of Boone's Farm Strawberry Hill “wine” from the corner store were liberally poured; Molly's mouth smarted at the shock of sweetness when it hit her tongue.

“Daahling, the finish of this gastronomical novelty is only matched by its faintly burnt hair smell,” said her sister, ruffling Santiago's already thinning pelt.

“Even better than the Oriental noodles from a fortnight ago. What were they called?”

“Ramen, my pet. The most significant contribution from the East since gunpowder, or Chinese checkers.”

Alyce's black hair was piled on her head that night, pale face covered in shimmery dust. “The weather in this place certainly showcases your orbital mammaries,” she'd said, pointing at Molly's chest.

Molly looked down. The window-unit AC was blowing directly on her, and her nipples were erect and showing through her thin T-shirt. Her face turned red.

“Doesn't it, boys?” continued Alyce.

Brandon and Santiago, wine charged, began chanting “Yes. Yes. Yes” at the same time, louder and louder, trying to drown each other
out. The reference to her fictional namesake was not lost on Molly, even though she still hadn't actually read
Ulysses
in its entirety. There was an eruption of brief laughter before people's attentions moved onto something else, but Alyce held Molly's eye for a beat longer. Like a good-natured challenge.

Molly didn't think Alyce was trying to be mean or embarrass her or put her in her place. She just said whatever came to her head, and to Molly, there was something liberating about that.

Molly loved the idea of people who performed their way through life as if outward circumstances were nothing but props. People who did not seem to be weighed down by where they came from. Over time, Molly would discover there were all sorts of baggage and sharp edges to these people who eventually became her closest circle. But in that moment, looking at them from the outside, all she could see were lives that existed inside an upturned snow globe. Glittering in the light.

Even in a tight-knit group of friends like theirs, alliances varied, and in college she and Alyce had rarely hung out alone, just the two of them. But now, as Molly stared at Alyce, sitting on a bench in the Garden of Evil, she felt a tenderness emerge and spread, like juice spilled on carpet, for this woman who seemed to have previously unrealized capacities for suffering.

They sat for a while in silence, Molly working up the nerve to do what she knew needed to be done. She set her face to a neutral expression, turned, and wrapped her arms around her sister's best friend, holding Alyce close to her chest and saying in a voice she hoped sounded steely and objective, “Everything will be all right.” There would come a time when Molly would no longer be able to hold someone in complete stillness. But not yet.

Alyce returned her hug, and then just as quickly let go, saying, “Thanks,” but quietly.

Alyce reached in her purse for a tube of lipstick and applied it without a mirror. She smiled brightly. “Did I ever tell you about the kissing contest your sister and I won freshman year?”

“How did you both win?”

“We were on the same team.” She chuckled. “Against Harry and Santiago. They looked like two guppy-fish ten-year-olds kissing for the first time.”

The sun started to set, giving the grass a golden wash, everything splashed with Orange Crush. The temperature had dropped to somewhere near bearable. The Garden of Evil was empty except for the two of them and one waiter, who stood patiently by the door to the library like a sentry.

Molly liked to walk the neighborhood around first dark, and Brandon usually went with her—out of that sense of obligation often tied up with love, she thought. These days, she wished he would stay home.

Tonight they walked past the bungalow with its garden lined with bowling balls; they walked past the purple A-frame housing a nonprofit shelter for gay youth, past the corner lot where a man lived inside a small historic church he'd had transported from East Texas. Brandon pointed to a calico curled up on the roof of a sedan.

“Cat,” he said. They were always on the lookout for mangy felines napping on porches or beneath shrubs, counting the cats because it was a contest of theirs to see who could spot the most.

Molly frowned, “How many does that make?” They usually held hands on these walks, but now Molly kept hers tucked into the pockets of her hoodie.

“Forty-two this summer. You have ten.”

“Maybe I need glasses,” she said, but she knew it was because she was a distracted walker. Molly loved scouring people's gardens
and landscaping, straining to see in lit windows and spy on families eating dinner or watching television, colored lights flickering off the walls.

Sometimes they spotted green parrots perched up and down a telephone wire, the strange pandemonium of feral, tropical birds that, according to neighborhood lore, had escaped from a pet store and now nested at the university's intramural fields down the road. There was no sign of them tonight, though.

They passed a Latino man in Wranglers picking up pecans and dropping them into a trash bag. It was getting dark for that kind of work, but the temperature was cooler. A few weeks back someone had posted on the neighborhood listserv complaining about people who went around “stealing pecans right out from under our noses” and suggested notifying the police. Molly posted a response saying she didn't think of them as thieves. She preferred to think of them as gleaners.

Molly and Brandon rounded the corner. Molly almost said “cat” before realizing the eyes she saw gleaming from behind a recycling bin were a raccoon's. The beast crouched in the wild overgrown yard where three days ago she and Brandon had stopped to look at several dozen bright red flowers—all willy-nilly over the yard, sticking up out of the grass atop very long stems, like giraffes.

“Schoolhouse lilies,” Molly had exclaimed.

“In August?” Brandon said he thought they usually sprang up in September, as their name implied, just after the kids started back.

“Not everything happens according to plan,” she said, not trying to disguise the bitterness in her voice. The question she refused to ask hung in the air between them:
How long did you sense I was sick, and why did you keep quiet?

She'd said the name only once, and that was on the way home from the concert, when she'd turned to her husband from the passenger
seat: “Huntington's.” They drove in silence for a while. What else was there to say at that point? Though it had gone verbally unacknowledged, had they not lived for years with this shadow darkening around them?

“We'll find the best specialists. The best.” He didn't suggest she get tested. He didn't suggest she might be wrong.

Some things changed immediately. The physical world around Molly became glassy and unreal, her smile forced; she and Brandon stopped having sex. Other things stayed basically the same. They woke up each morning and went to work and mowed the lawn and made dinner and walked the neighborhood. Molly still tucked her cold feet under his thighs when they watched television on the green upholstered sofa. She thought about how eventually she would become unable to kiss her husband slowly, luxuriously on the lips. Not that she could bear to kiss him like that now.

She was furious with Brandon. She didn't know how to explain precisely why. It wasn't her husband's fault she was sick, of course, but the look in his eyes when he found her on the floor of the concert haunted her. He must have watched the signs of disease begin to manifest and yet said nothing to her. It felt like living in her parents' house again: dirty, awful secrets smudged on every surface.

Molly started eating more, collard greens and plums and big batches of scrambled eggs, and resting, taking catnaps throughout the day. Her body felt tender, and although she didn't remember any of these being symptoms of early Huntington's, she figured it was probably just her brain catching up with what had been going awry in her body for months, maybe years.

She didn't let Brandon go with her to the dozens of doctor's appointments set off by her diagnosis. She told him there would be plenty of time for him to take care of her. So Molly was sitting on the white butcher paper alone, after what felt like the millionth poke and prod
she'd undergone in the past month, when the doctor, a tall woman in her sixties, came back into the room with a strange expression on her face, one Molly had not yet encountered, not even when the woman had handed her the papers for the advanced directives so Molly could decide things about feeding tubes and respirators and DNRs.

“You're pregnant. Almost six weeks.” The doctor didn't say congratulations. After a moment, she asked Molly if she understood the implications.

Molly sat in shock while the woman patiently explained things she already knew. That the child would have a fifty percent chance of inheriting the gene. That because Molly was already symptomatic, the pregnancy would be difficult at best, another stress on her already stressed body.

“It wasn't planned.” Molly mentally counted back six weeks. It must have happened in the week before the concert. “I . . . can't.” She knew it was too late for her to be a mother.

The doctor patted her leg. “I'll give you the necessary referral in that case.”

Molly nodded. She was getting good at moving her head up and down in acceptance. No need to smile or respond when you could just nod.

On the way home from the doctor's, she turned the windshield wipers on when it began to shower and then flipped the switch on the radio, searching the dials for an answer. She wanted to hear Lightnin' Hopkins singing “Baby Please Don't Go.” Or Bessie Smith's “Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out.” Or Nina Simone's “I Put a Spell on You.” Nothing even close. She ended up singing along, against her will, to the Eagles. But her mind was running through different lyrics: Baby, baby, baby.

Last week, Brandon had tried to get her to listen to a series of podcasts he'd downloaded about Huntington's. One of them documented
a couple who were considering whether to use new fertility methods to implant only zygotes without the gene or whether to use traditional methods and hope for the best. “How is that even a choice?” Brandon had raged. “What else is science for?!”