Migrations

Content Warning: This novel depicts suicidal ideation and a suicide attempt

Five years after Franny’s realization about her mother, she gives birth to a stillborn baby girl. In her grief, she runs away from Galway for months. As she wanders alone through Yellowstone National Forest, Niall calls to tell her he can’t bear another abandonment. Franny agrees to accompany him to Scotland, to work at a conservation society called MER, but once there they are disappointed by the pessimism and human-centric viewpoint of the other employees. MER prioritizes saving pollinator species and conditioning their behavior to up their odds of survival. They have captured several Arctic terns, seeking to teach them to eat plants rather than fish. Niall believes that the terns will never adapt. They will keep flying until they find fish or die, because it is “in their nature” (218). Frustrated, he leaves MER and returns to Galway.

Soon afterward, Franny and Niall attend a party in Galway. As Franny drives them home, Niall surprises her by ending their relationship. He tells her that she shouldn’t be ashamed of her wandering nature and doesn’t want their marriage to tie her down. Heartbroken and suicidal, Franny intentionally steers into another vehicle, killing both Niall and the young mother in the other car. She is sent to prison for murder but paroled after four years.

After her release, Penny picks Franny up and takes her to Niall’s childhood home, where Franny finds a book in which he kept a log of observations about her, long before they were married. In it, he wrote, “I wait, always” (242). Penny gives Franny his will, in which he expresses a wish to have his ashes scattered with the Arctic terns. Franny asks Penny to have Niall’s body exhumed and cremated: She will take him to where the terns fly.

Aboard the yacht, Ennis weathers a perilous storm. Franny realizes that it’s unlikely any terns have survived the weather; she privately lets go of her hope that they’re alive. She mentally lets go of them, blaming their deaths on the way humans have negatively impacted the Earth. Emotionally shaken, she throws up.

Though they no longer have any way of tracking the terns, Franny remembers that Niall once told her the birds always stop at the Weddell Sea. She uses what Niall told her about the terns’ migration patterns to guide Ennis’s navigation. The yacht sails along the coast of the Atlantic toward the Weddell Sea. Temperatures drop rapidly and the ship begins to freeze, so Ennis docks prematurely in the Amundsen Sea. Franny and Ennis walk for three days. On the third day with no terns in sight, Franny is on the verge of giving up. She feels that Niall’s spirit has abandoned her. As she crests a steep hill she suddenly sees hundreds of terns wheeling in the sky, above a sea teeming with fish and whales. Franny tells Ennis she’s sorry he can’t catch any of the fish. He responds, “I stopped wanting to catch them a long time ago” (248).

Ennis leaves Franny to be alone with Niall’s ashes. When he has gone back to the yacht, Franny takes off her clothes and wades into the sea with the ashes. She promises that she will take a piece of all her loved ones with her in death: Her mother, her grandmother, her grandfather, and her daughter. But she will not take anything from Niall. Instead, she will give him “the wilderness inside [her]“ (251). As she sinks to the bottom of the sea, she hears Niall’s voice asking her if she can wait for him. She realizes that while there is still living nature on Earth, “there are things yet to be done” (252). Franny returns to the surface, where a rescue helicopter picks her up.

In prison, Franny learns that the world’s last gray wolf has been captured and sent to MER. Six years later, she is released from prison for the second time. An unknown man is waiting for her outside. As she draws closer, she recognizes her father Dominic. He shows Franny a tattoo on his hand of her mother’s favorite bird. Tentatively, she asks if he would like to accompany her to Scotland.