Migratory Animals (32 page)

“Where are your things?” he asked once they were both seated at the table, napkins on laps, eating the fold of moist egg. He was wearing his hair shorter now, close around his head like a sheared sheep. It made him look older.

Molly said her bags were in the car and, when he asked about the irises, as though he doubted she could really be back without them, she told him how she didn't want to be weighed down by those purple and gold sirens any longer. They were her mother's irises, not hers, and they belonged at the ranch now. Molly didn't want to spend the time she had left working in the garden, grieving for skills and mobility that were gone forever. She had better things to do.

Her hand jerked a little as it raised the fork to her mouth—she didn't try to hide it.

“A girl or a boy?” Brandon asked shyly.

“There's a sonogram scheduled for next week. We can go together?” She would wait until later to tell him that she was also seeing a high-risk specialist—her own symptoms made the pregnancy dangerous; she'd likely be put on bed rest soon—and that she'd signed up to join a double-blind cohort study for after her pregnancy.

He nodded. His face tightened. “What about the . . . ?”

“Reduced penetrance.” She emptied the diagnosis onto the table like spare change. “Indeterminate conclusion. The child can get tested again when he or she turns eighteen. If they want to. They will be offered all the possibilities.”

Molly understood that doing things differently than her own parents didn't guarantee a better outcome. She wouldn't dare express out loud her hope that this honesty would teach their child how to take advantage of life, to notice its passing and appreciate it more than other children possibly could. If the fetus had turned out to have full penetrance, which meant a one hundred percent chance of getting the disease, she would have aborted it and told Brandon nothing. Spared him the knowledge entirely. But reduced penetrance meant life for the child would be something like life was for Molly and her mother, full of uncertainty. Research had shown that HD, while a dominant gene, was not a switch that turned off or on—the mutation was initiated by extra repeats of the codon CAG. If the repeats were less than thirty-five, one would be free of the disease. If forty or more, it was a sure thing. However, there was a gray zone between thirty-five and thirty-nine where some people would get it, some wouldn't. Molly's fetus: thirty-nine. One repeat short of determination. A cosmic joke.

Many people would abort at thirty-nine repeats, though; it was just too close, too chancy. But it was a risk Molly was willing to
take. And by making the decision alone, Molly would be the only one to blame if the child grew up to think differently. And that was all right, because Molly would be gone.

Brandon reached out his hand and let his palm touch down on Planet Babe, as she and Alyce had begun calling it. His fingers were gentle. “A gene therapy will be discovered in time.” The love of her life, the atheist and rationalist, the man for whom research had, along the way, become just a day job, even he wasn't able to escape the illusion that we can make up for the pain we cause, she thought. That we can fix what is broken in the world.

Molly remembered how, early on, when her mother was first diagnosed, there was real anticipation in the Huntington's community that finding the gene would bring a quick cure. That hadn't been the case, not in the thirty-odd years since, and as with cancer and Parkinson's disease, all Molly hoped for now were minor improvements in treatment that might convey minor improvements in quality of life.

Of course, some things in life could be repaired. Not returned to the way they were before, maybe, but patched up. Made workable again.

“If it's a girl, she could be Helen after your mother,” he said, tilting his forehead toward her. They were settling back into their own little world, their snow globe.

“No afters.” Molly stacked their empty plates one on top of the other.

“What will we do about your father?” Brandon cracked his knuckles and spun his wedding band. “We can't hide this from him forever.”

“My father,” she said, wishing she could have a cup of coffee from the carafe that sat on the stovetop. She was so tired these days, and the dining room chair so uncomfortable; her belly prevented her
from scooting flush to the table. “I wrote to him that I needed space and time.”

She could tell Brandon did not full-heartedly welcome this information—the squint of his face said he thought she was being cruel. She didn't care. To keep looking her father in the eyes after what had happened was to continue unbinding the connections holding her entire childhood together. She couldn't bear it. It may not have been fair, but fair had flown.

When Molly remembered conversations or outings with her father, they were refracted through a new prism of menace. When they had gone to the State Cemetery, for instance, the rolling grounds in East Austin where war heroes like Edward Burleson were interred next to politicians, Rangers, and other famous Texans, like Barbara Jordan and James Michener, Molly was seventeen. They'd driven to the state capital to see the Daughters of the Republic of Texas honor with a cenotaph one of their ancestors, Catherine Overton Jennings, who was known for riding through the Hill Country to tell settlers the Alamo had fallen and warn them to flee for their lives—Santa Anna was on the way. It was called the Runaway Scrape.

At the time, as she and her father walked through the grounds, Molly found it amusing to meet these people, who introduced themselves as “Honeybunch” and “Bluford” and told stories of dead but colorful relatives who had been horse rustlers and bank robbers, while drinking punch in salute of a woman long gone and mostly forgotten. (In Molly's generation it was not so fashionable to be an Alamo defender—after all, it wasn't as if the Texicans hadn't basically stolen the whole place from Mexico.) Her father did not find those people silly and ridiculous, though, and, in fact, had a grand time taking notes and tracing family trees. He even went out of his way to bring a bouquet of wine-colored carnations, the Lockwood
family funeral flower because, two generations earlier, they were the only flowers grown in the local greenhouse during winter.

Now, when Molly looked back at this afternoon in the State Cemetery with her father, it seemed like an attempt to get her on his side of family history. To show her the part of the family where strength and heroism originated. To let her know he'd given her nothing but a noble, unadulterated pedigree. His relatives were honored by brass plaques, buried next to the greatest men and women in the state. Molly's father couldn't be held accountable for any bloodborne wrath her mother might have passed down.

Molly lurched up from the table and carried the plates to the sink.

“Why forgive me?” Brandon asked. But she knew, deep down, he'd expected to be forgiven, and what he was really asking was: Why not forgive her father, too?

“I choose my family from now on.”

As she looked at the wooden countertop, a few knife nicks and wine stains marring its surface, she thought about when it would need to be replaced. Her child, if Molly was able to carry it through the next few months, would be about seven then. Molly might still be alive but she would be using a walker, grown thin from the chorea that made it increasingly difficult to get enough calories into the body, paranoid and maybe less afraid, maybe more. Unlike people suffering from Alzheimer's, HD patients didn't lose the essential self but retained large chunks of memory and personality. Molly was not yet sure if this was a blessing or a curse.

She couldn't decide which aspect of Huntington's was most devastating: the horrors of the disease itself or the genetic dominion, which forced you to watch its long, pornographic destruction in those close to you, glimpsing your own future before it happened, knowing too well what lay crouched in wait.

But Molly still didn't know whether she would be more or less afraid than she was now. Lately, she'd been wondering if there was a finite amount of fear in a person. If fear could run out, like when you open the fridge and there's no milk. And if fear can run out, what would it mean? Peace? Apathy? Emptiness? The end?

She looked at the face of her husband, whom she loved more than anything in the world. She could admit that now. There was a tightness to his forehead, the emerging lines like a map of small hurts. She kissed him on the cheek, imagining her growing body becoming softer, skin melting onto Brandon's and fusing them together. She tried to breathe in his pain and breathe out a large blue sky.

B
y some unspoken code of friendship, every weekend that Alyce kept the boys out at the ranch, someone invited Harry to dinner so he wouldn't be alone.

Tonight he was at Heavy Metal Farm with Steven and Lou eating tofu stir-fry with brown rice and sitting on the picnic table just outside their trailer as glowing embers from the chiminea took the edge off the still-chill night air. Harry remembered walking these fields with Steven a year after his friend bought the land. The ground had been black and loamy, only just tilled by the gaggle of young, underpaid farming interns, and Steven had picked up a handful of rich soil, turning to Harry and saying, “Good enough to eat.”

Their daughter, Maya, picked at her food; her pleading face said she wanted to ask for a grilled cheese sandwich but was too shy to with Harry there. Harry loved his boys fiercely but had secretly always wanted a girl. He used to hope Alyce would eventually be ready for a third.

“Bet you've gotten spoiled eating Santi's cooking.” Steven licked soy sauce from the whiskers of his beard. “I am but a humble plowman. Plowperson? How the hell do you say that?”

“No, it's good. Santiago's making me fat,” said Harry, though it wasn't true. Over the past months he'd grown wan, the sockets of his eyes probably casting shadows in the light of the fire.

“Speaking of fat,” said Lou, laughing. “You should see Molly.”

Harry smiled. It had been two months since Molly's return to the city, and they'd all rallied around her news. But every time he saw her or heard her name, the only thing Harry could think about was the ranch. Alyce alone at the ranch.

“I have some Brussels sprouts for you to take home,” said Steven. “First of the season.” Earlier in the evening his friend had revealed, looking off into the distance as he spoke, that it was also Heavy Metal Farm's last season. The bank had finally come knocking. He said he hoped his daughter would remember these years when her father did something he was proud of all day long.

“Santi will know what to do with them.”

“Where is he, anyway?” asked Lou. “When I invited him to dinner, he texted saying he was out of town.”

“Interviewing for jobs.” Harry shrugged. He and Santiago had made peace since their fight—Santiago was so penitent and Harry eventually able to admit he'd also ignored their problems, which allowed Santiago, in a sense, to go rogue. But even so, the firm was unsalvageable. They couldn't work together anymore, and Harry would be moving out of the fire station at the end of the month. The vacation from his life was almost over.

“I don't think it's going very well,” continued Harry. “It's hard for everyone right now, but especially architects. When nobody's building, who needs a designer? I might even take this summer off, go somewhere cold. Alaska. The South Pole.” What Harry didn't say was that he didn't know how he'd ever work again. Harry was lost.

“The moon is cold,” said Maya, pointing to the slice of it rising on the horizon.

“Or you could just turn up the air-conditioning and rent
Doctor Zhivago
,” said Steven. “Santiago has a ushanka hat somewhere. Remember?
He wore it with his boxer briefs to Brandon and Molly's wedding?”

Steven's banter felt forced. Even Maya stared glumly into her plate of food. Then, the girl sneezed three times in a row.

“Maya,” Harry said, putting down his fork and looking at her, “did I ever tell you my family is from Finland on my mother's side? In Finland, when you sneeze three times in a row . . .”

Two weeks after dinner at Steven's farm, Harry called his wife.

“I want to come over.” The digital clock on the wall of Santiago's guest room told Harry it was two in the morning, and he hoped her ringtone hadn't woken Jake or Ian.

“Now?”

“Yes.” He didn't allow his voice to become gentle.

“Won't that confuse the boys?” she asked.

“I'll be gone before they wake up.”

“I'm not sure what's left to talk about.”

“I don't want to talk.” He held his breath.

A pause, a caesura. And then the word, “Come.”

Harry was already pulling on jeans and a sweatshirt, feeling around for his flip-flops. Harry told himself he was only driving out to the ranch to make love to his wife, and then he would return to this exile without protest. But, secretly, deep down in the part of his mind he didn't like to explore or examine, Harry believed Alyce would ask him to stay.

He would touch her, and she would remember how the copper birds flocked on the ceiling of his room at Dryden House, imperfections blurring into beauty.

A
fter hanging up with Harry, Alyce padded through the ranch house on the way to the front door, kicking aside tangled balls of tinsel and gold Burger King crowns. The boys had invented a new holiday called Castlemas, where they wore crowns and decorated the house with shiny treasures, waving silver serving spoons like scepters and making decrees. Jake decreed the official food of Castlemas to be peanut butter sandwiches and Ian decreed it was okay to pee in the yard and Alyce decreed that you had to move from room to room by leapfrogging. It was the sort of day Harry would have loved. It was the sort of day Alyce pretended to love, forcing her way through it with the invisible muscles of fake joy. The boys also decreed there would be no bedtime, but even so, they were all passed out by eight o'clock, smeared in glitter and melted chocolate. Even Alyce.