Migratory Animals (14 page)

Molly didn't feel like going straight home with her news, so she stopped off to see Toni Price play her weekly “hippie hour” at the Continental Club, an old, small juke joint with a red velvet curtain behind the stage. Molly ordered a burger and sat on a stool at the back where she could barely see willowy, long-haired Price for all the fans swaying on the dance floor fronting the stage. Every now and then, the singer put her arm in the air, sparkling with sequins, her voice disembodied and lovely.

She and Brandon had always wanted children, hadn't they? Eventually? When they'd lived in Ann Arbor for two years for his postdoc, they had talked about it some. She'd certainly thought about it more back then, so alone in a city without friends or family. If Brandon had to stay in the lab over the weekend, she sometimes took the bus to a place an hour out of Ann Arbor where you could snowshoe for ten dollars. Once, on the way, the bus left the highway for some reason she did not understand, slithering through the narrow residential streets of a suburb, past what looked like a graveyard for ice cream trucks. The sides of the trucks were painted in sad shades of lime green and ochre, pictures of clowns and words like
lick
and
nuts
followed by exclamation points. There were at least fifty of them, hibernating for the winter, wrapped in chain-link fence, like her, waiting for a time when children would appear on the streets laughing, playing ball, and chasing the thought of wet, sliding ice cream.

When they discussed children, it was always in the abstract, Brandon never pushing for them, Molly saying inane things, like how the world seemed too fragile, people swinging to and fro like tinkling glass ornaments. If she'd known earlier—if only!—she
might have kids already. They would be half-grown. They would know her.

Arriving back at the house that day, Molly meant to tell Brandon. She really did. But instead, closing the front door behind her, the words that emerged from her mouth were cold and accusing: “Why haven't you called your parents to tell them about the diagnosis? I assume they didn't know before I did.”

“I've been meaning to . . .” His voice strained. They looked at each other without really looking at each other. “I'll do it right now.”

She watched him flip open the phone, punch numbers, and immediately greet his mother, who was the type of person who always picked up on the first ring.

Then, there was a brief silence inside of which Molly could imagine her mother-in-law's ritual litany of complaints. Her gout. Her neighbors. Her children.

“Sahlah is a grown woman. Let her alone,” said Brandon. “What she's doing is far from child abuse, Mama.”

Brandon's sister Sahlah, housewife and mother of two, had recently decided to don the niqab, arriving at his parents' most recent Eid-ul-Fitr dinner wearing the midnight-blue headgear that left only her dark brown eyes and heavily penciled eyebrows showing, outraging Brandon's only marginally religious parents. Molly had been intrigued by how Sahlah's face no longer gave away every emotion. Was her mouth smirking beneath there? Or set in that line of determination she must have used when she was sixteen to get her curfew moved back to twelve, later than Brandon or his middle sister had ever been allowed?

Molly left her husband sitting at the kitchen table, but after turning the corner toward the bedroom, she stopped at the window overlooking the backyard where her own mother's irises stood dormant.
For as long as Molly could remember, her mother had grown long beds full of them outside their stucco bungalow that backed up on a city park in Abilene. Molly kept an album with all the yellowed newspaper clippings, photos of her small mother, hair in a bob even as it grayed, standing in front of the award-winning blue and purple and orange blossoms.

“Mama,” she heard Brandon say from the other room, his voice changing. “Molly has Huntington's.”

Molly hadn't meant to eavesdrop, but she continued to stand there in the hallway as he added, “What her mother had. Remember? It's what their mother had.”

Molly remembered how as her mother became more infirm, she hired young workers to weed the iris beds in the spring and deadhead them in the fall. She would sit in her wheelchair, her body dancing with chorea, slurring orders until, eventually, she lost even that pleasure to the cloud of the disease.

The first time Molly'd invited Brandon home with her to Abilene was to help dig up those irises a few months after her mother's death. They'd only just begun dating and it was autumn, the best time to excavate dormant bulbs for transport to new ground. Dozens of friends and family showed up to help that afternoon and, while the activity was planned as a way for them to take and grow a living reminder of Helen, the flowers themselves were also special: fifty-year-old heritage bulbs, a purer genetic strain than found in irises bought on the general market. Smaller, but more beautiful, she'd explained to Brandon.

It had been hard labor for the group of mostly chubby, middle-aged folks wearing old jeans and baggy T-shirts, going row after row, using their muddy sneakered feet to put weight onto the pitchforks, unhinging the fist-size white bulbs from the earth.

Molly closed her eyes and thought of how those bulbs had felt like old baseballs in her hand as she listened to Brandon explain the disease to his mother over the phone. That first would come loss of motor control and coordination. Then changes in behavior. Finally, constant shaking, difficulty swallowing, dementia, and death. That was what Molly was looking at, and it could take ten, fifteen years, maybe more, to kill her.

Trudging through the sodden flower beds that day, she and Brandon had taken on the job of grouping piles of the best bulbs and then bagging them such that each contained flowers from all sections of the yard—that way, everyone who took a bag would have a mix of colors when the irises bloomed in the spring. At one point, he'd asked her, “Were you closer to your mother or to your father growing up?”

She told him the truth that day. Her mother was kind but self-pitying and sick. Her father was the family martyr, but he worked a lot and was always preoccupied with her mother's care. “I was closest to my sister. Always. Half of what I know about my parents comes from Flan.”

In the next room, there was silence. Molly strained but could not hear Brandon's mother's voice on the other end of the line, her rich accented alto, but she tried to imagine it.
This is horrible news, Brahim
, she might say. Or
How is our poor girl doing, habibi?

“What about them, Mama?” asked Brandon. “What?!”

What was he responding to? Was his mother asking about medical bills or genetics? Babies? God forbid she was asking about babies. There was a sound, and Molly could have sworn she heard a wail travel through the phone line and down the hall to where she stood. An Arabic wail. But, no. It was not his mother crying through the telephone receiver. It was her husband beginning to sob.

Touching the cool of the window glass, Molly pictured them as they'd been when they walked along that row of irises years ago. Young and in love, she'd had the feeling that, while her mother was gone, she was finding, not a replacement in Brandon exactly, but someone to be the witness her father had spoken of when she and Flannery were children. As they worked side by side, Brandon had told her about his own family, about getting up at three in the morning and going to work with his father, who was a baker for a large supermarket chain. During high school, his father got him summer jobs at the store, so he would sleep on bags of flour until his own shift at the deli began at six. Every once in a while, he said, despite the fact that they worked too hard for little pay, he felt nostalgic for it—awakening on the hard, gentle hills of those bags surrounded by the smell of rising dough.

In second grade he'd started going by the Americanized name Brandon instead of the Arabic Brahim. His mother cried when she called to get him out of class for a dentist's appointment and his teacher didn't know who she was talking about. She said to him later, “How could you do this to me?” Brandon had comforted her then but didn't stop using his chosen moniker, and he said she never brought it up again. He said he imagined that somewhere deep down she understood he was only trying to survive. His parents emigrated from Iraq when they were barely twenty, and they pushed him and his younger sisters to do well in school but after third grade were never able to help them with homework.

As they'd talked that day while her mother's garden was being uprooted, Molly hadn't thought about needing Brandon to watch over her; it was she who had wanted to protect this sensitive, brooding, beautiful man, to marry him. To take care of him.

As Molly listened to Brandon cry, she tried to make herself go to him in the kitchen and drape her body over him like a shroud, to
rock him to sleep and have him wake on rolling bags of flour to the smell of rising dough. But she couldn't.

Two weeks later, at Steven and Lou's wedding reception, there was no bouquet or garter toss, no cake-cutting or glass-clinking toasts. Just a big party. There was Thai food from Madame Mam's laid out in big foil containers that people ate on the foldout tables set up ad hoc around a barn on the outskirts of town; there was a dance floor in the middle covered in sawdust donated by Santiago from his fire station renovations; somebody's unwieldy, cone-headed dog sniffed at ankles and begged for food.

Molly sensed a vaguely subdued atmosphere among her friends, despite all their superficial efforts to be festive, maybe stemming in part from the fact they were older now and mostly living in the same city, a wedding no longer the occasion for a group reunion and drunken antics. And Molly was sick and would be for a long time; everyone else, she imagined, was trying to figure out how to apportion his or her grief and concern over the long haul. Not wanting to use it all up at the beginning of the race.

At some point, the music that had been pumping from speakers in the corner of the barn stopped. There was a muffled pitter-patter as three children dressed in matching plaid outfits and black patent leather shoes scampered onto the dance floor holding pieces of white cardboard. There was a drumroll, and the kids held up signs, chanting the words written on them in purple marker:
WE
-
LOVE
-
STEVEN
. We love Steven! We love Steven! And then they flipped them over so that the cards now read:
WEL
-
COME
-
STEVEN
. Welcome, Steven! Welcome, Steven! Welcome to the family, Steven! The sun streamed through the slates of the barn's roof, lighting up twirling dust particles as they spun through the air.

“Who are those little hobgoblins?” asked Flannery, reaching across Molly for the water jug.

“Lou's brother's kids, I think,” said Brandon.

“Waste not, want not.” Santiago poured everyone more wine-from-the-box. Molly smiled and left hers sitting on the table. No reason to bring attention to her sobriety.

“This stuff is terrible.” Brandon took another big swallow.

“We're being shown up by a crew of munchkins,” said Harry, faking energy, the only one of them wearing a full suit and tie. “Should we get up there and fuck with some Slayer? Is there a guitar around here we can smash?”

But nobody did anything, and soon the kids requested “The Hokey Pokey” and went around pulling adults who they'd never met before out onto the dance floor. Molly noticed two people whom she assumed were the children's parents, tall and well dressed, standing off to the side, proud smiles on their attractive, bland faces.

“I'm coming,” said Flannery, being dragged off by a boy whose hair was slicked back like Buddy Holly. “Hold your horses, kiddo.”

Soon, most of the guests were standing in a loose circle, putting their right foot in and their right foot out, shaking it all about, albeit halfheartedly. Molly and Brandon begged off and were left alone at the table.

Molly took a deep breath and let it out. It was a difficult thing to say. “I need to leave.”

“I'll drive us home. They'll understand.” Brandon sucked down the last of his wine.

“That's not what I mean.” She kept her voice gentle, as if she were talking to a child.

“Okay.” He stopped. He squinted at her. “Let's quit our jobs and travel. Let's go to Italy. Alaska, maybe. Australia. We could do it.” He took her face between his warm palms, but she twisted away.

“I don't think so.”

“You're scaring me.”

“I'm leaving. I've packed for Abilene, and Papa's expecting me.”

“No,” he said, but weakly.

“For a while anyway.”

They sat there in silence for a minute, both stunned. Finally, Brandon set his glass on the table and sighed. “It was in Abilene where I learned about your Huntington's gene.”

Not at all certain she was ready to hear this, she said, “Go on.”

Brandon let the story spill from his mouth as if it had been choking him. “I just don't want you to get yourself into something without understanding what it is,” he claimed her father had said to him in a man-to-man chat over a bottle of rotgut whiskey in her father's study, papered in blue-and-gold faded wallpaper, his desk shoved up against the window. Brandon said it was not what he was expecting to hear when her father invited him in the day after Christmas, just a year after Molly's mother had died, flashing the bottle of liquor from behind his back while Molly and Flannery remained sprawled on the living room sofa, giving each other foot rubs and watching Fred and Ginger dance in an old black-and-white.

“A horrible disease and a hardship to take care of someone suffering it. Believe me,” her father had said, glancing out the window. “I'm not saying I would have done things differently, but I wish somebody'd told me Helen was at risk. I wish Helen's family had told me.”