In some butterfly species, for example the monarch, no single individual completes a migratory journey, which is spread over a number of generations. Instead the animals reproduce and die while underway, and it is left to the next generation to complete the next leg of the journey. —Wikipedia 2015
“Are you mad at Don, Mama?” asked Lena when I was putting her to bed.
She clutched both the duck and the sheep.
“What? No, I’m not mad at him,” I said.
“Don’s too nice to be mad at.”
“Don’s definitely nice,” I said. “And we’re getting to know him better, aren’t we.”
“People ask questions to know each other better,” she said.
“Exactly.”
“Are you mad at my father?”
“Hmm. Well, that’s a good question.”
“You don’t like him.”
“I wouldn’t put it that way.”
“How would you put it, then.”
At that moment she sounded over forty.
“I’d say . . . well, I’d say we turned out not to have as much in common as I first thought we did.”
“I don’t know if I like him either. I love him, because everyone loves their father.”
“Right. Of course you do.”
“We used to live with him.”
“Yes. We certainly did.”
“He never gave me a present before. Even though it’s not Christmas. Did he give me a present ever before this?”
“Hmm. He must have, mustn’t he?”
“I like my sheep.”
“That’s good. It’s a nice sheep.”
“I like living here. With you and me.”
“I know you do. I do too.”
“We live at Don’s motel.”
“For now. But not forever, sweetie. You know that.”
“I know. One day we have to go. That’s why they call it a motel. It’s not a house or apartment.”
“No.”
“One day we have to live in one of those.”
“I expect so. We’ll have neighbors, I bet. You’ll like that, too.”
“OK. I’m going to go to sleep now.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
I COULDN’T SLEEP, so I wrote down that exchange, figuring it might give me needed insight, further on, into my failings as a parent.
Then I consoled myself by thinking that at least I was a good enough parent to try to keep account of those failings.
I lay in the other bed, letting the TV play muted in front of me, laptop on my knees. Don had to be some kind of counselor, some kind of advisor to those who’d heard . . . but now that I wasn’t the only one who spoke of “hearing,” the word seemed cultish to me and I didn’t like it, not at all. The word hearing had an unpleasant ring suddenly—now it was a matter for shame, almost, rather than one of the senses—and “the voice” wasn’t the plain and straightforward moniker I’d taken it for but a worshipful honorific.
Now it was the Voice.
I wondered if what the other guests had heard was different from what I had—assuming it wasn’t just Burke, of course, assuming he spoke for more of them. Not all of the guests had babies, in fact none of them did. As far as I knew, only Kay had necessarily had regular contact with infants. So maybe they’d encountered it, as she had, in the infants of others.
I went over the guest roster, as on TV a pretty woman was murdered with a knife. I knew the voice’s life cycle, or I thought I had. But I knew nothing. You don’t even remember how this supposed knowledge came to you, I told myself—it was never spelled out. If the voice had brought me here, how? What had driven us from old friends’ welcoming houses to these Maine bluffs, with this peculiar group?
Maybe Don was onto something, maybe the migration was encoded in my genes.
Many mechanisms have been proposed for animal navigation: there is evidence for a number of them, including orientation by the sun, orientation by the stars and by polarized light, magnetoception, and other senses such as echolocation and hydrodynamic reception . . . investigators have often been forced to discard the simplest hypotheses. —Wikipedia 2015
How could the other guests have heard the voice? I tried to recall exactly when they had seemed upset. Burke was the only one who’d showed emotion to me, aside from the angry young man on his cell phone and Kay talking about the NICU.
I picked up my computer and scrolled back in this document to what I’d written about Burke. Talking to Lena about giants and beanstalks: that was when he’d lost it. And now I saw it, and it was obvious. His dismay had been brought on by something he himself had said, that Lena didn’t have to worry about giants saying “Fee, fi, fo, fum” from beanstalks—a voice, talking down from the clouds.
There was my evidence, right there.
I heard a text alert on my cell phone and rose from the bed to fumble in my bag. I missed you tonight, it read. And then another: Did I get the date wrong?