After the Flood
After the Flood
Kassandra montag
An unforgettable, inventive, and riveting epic saga with the literary force and evocative imagination of Station Eleven, Zone One, and The Road, that signals the arrival of an extraordinary new talent.After years of slowly overtaking the continent, starting with the great coastal cities, rising floodwaters have left America an archipelago of mountaintop colonies surrounded by a deep expanse of open water. Civilization as it once was is gone. Bands of pirates roam the waters, in search of goods and women to breed. Some join together to create a new kind of society, while others sail alone, barely surviving.Myra and her precocious and feisty eight-year-old daughter, Pearl, fish from their small boat, the Bird, visiting small hamlets and towns on dry land only to trade for supplies and information. Just before Pearl’s birth, when the monstrous deluge overtook their home in Nebraska, Maya’s oldest daughter, Row, was stolen by her father.For eight years Myra has searched for the girl that she knows, in her bones and her heart, still lives. In a violent confrontation with a stranger, Myra discovers that Row was last seen in a far-off encampment of raiders on the coast of what used to be Greenland. Throwing aside her usual caution, she and Pearl embark on a perilous voyage into the icy northern seas to rescue the girl, now thirteen.On the journey, Myra and Pearl join forces with a larger ship, a band of Americans like them. In a desperate act of deceit and manipulation, Myra convinces the crew to sail north. Though she hides her true motivations, Myra finds herself bonding with her fellow seekers, men, women, and children who hope to build a safe haven together in this dangerous new world.But secrets, lust, and betrayals threaten to capsize their dream, and after their fortunes take a shocking – and blood – turn, Myra can no longer ignore the question of whether saving Row is worth endangering Pearl and her fellow travelers.A compulsively readable novel of dark despair and soaring hope, After the Flood is a magnificent, action-packed, and sometimes frightening odyssey laced with wonder – an affecting and wholly original saga both redemptive and astonishing.
Copyright (#u4cdbe80a-f0ef-54df-82c3-c18f582b06b7)
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Kassandra Montag 2019
Cover illustration © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)
Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Kassandra Montag asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008319557
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2019 ISBN: 9780008319571
Version: 2019-06-07
Dedication (#u4cdbe80a-f0ef-54df-82c3-c18f582b06b7)
For Andrew
Epigraph (#u4cdbe80a-f0ef-54df-82c3-c18f582b06b7)
Only what is entirely lost demands to be endlessly named: there is a mania to call the lost thing until it returns.
—Günter Grass
Contents
Cover (#u3ad65ae5-d3f6-54c4-b53c-6b49498e1ed0)
Title Page (#udbd1386c-3e36-55fc-a952-2f51fa1408f1)
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Map
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About the Publisher
Map (#u4cdbe80a-f0ef-54df-82c3-c18f582b06b7)
PROLOGUE (#u4cdbe80a-f0ef-54df-82c3-c18f582b06b7)
CHILDREN THINK WE make them, but we don’t. They exist somewhere else, before us, before time. They come into the world and make us. They make us by breaking us first.
This was what I learned the day everything changed. I stood upstairs folding laundry, my back aching from Pearl’s weight. I held Pearl inside my body, the way a great whale swallows a man into the safety of his belly, waiting to spit him out. She rolled over in ways a fish never would; breathed through my blood, burrowed against bone.
The floodwater around our house stood five feet high, covering roads and lawns, fences and mailboxes. Nebraska had flooded only days before, water coming across the prairie in a single wave, returning the state to the inland sea it once was, the world now an archipelago of mountains and an expanse of water. Moments earlier, when I’d leaned out the open window, my reflection in the floodwater had returned dirty and marred, like I’d been stretched and then ripped into indiscriminate shreds.
I folded a shirt and screams startled me wide eyed. The voice was a blade, slipping metal between my joints. Row, my five-year-old daughter, must have known what was going on because she screamed, “No, no, no! Not without Mommy!”
I dropped the laundry and ran to the window. A small motorboat idled in the water outside our house. My husband, Jacob, swam to the boat, one arm paddling, the other clamping Row against his side as she struggled against him. He tried to hoist her onto the boat, but she elbowed him in the face. A man stood in the boat, leaning over the gunwale to pick her up. Row wore a too-small plaid jacket and jeans. Her pendant necklace swung like a pendulum across her chest as she struggled against Jacob. She thrashed and twisted like a caught fish, sending a spray of water into his face.
I opened the window and yelled, “Jacob, what are you doing?!”
He wouldn’t look at me or respond. Row saw me in the window and screamed for me, her feet kicking at the man who held her under the armpits, lifting her over the side of the boat.
I pounded the wall next to the window and yelled out to them again. Jacob pulled himself over the side of the boat as the man held Row. The panic in my fingertips turned to a buzzing fire. My body shook as I folded myself through the window and leapt into the water below.
My feet hit the ground beneath the water and I rolled to the side, trying to lighten my impact. When I surfaced, I saw Jacob had winced; the pained, tightened expression still on his face. He was now holding Row, who kicked and screamed, “Mommy! Mommy!”
I swam toward the boat, pushing aside debris that littered the water’s surface. A tin can, an old newspaper, a dead cat. The engine roared to life and the boat spun around, spraying me in the face with a wave of water. Jacob held Row back as she reached for me, her tiny arm taut, her fingers scratching the air.
I kept paddling as Row receded into the distance. I could hear her screams even after I could no longer see her small face, her mouth a dark circle, her hair standing on end, blowing in the wind that came off the water.
CHAPTER 1 (#u4cdbe80a-f0ef-54df-82c3-c18f582b06b7)
Seven Years Later
SEAGULLS CIRCLED OVER our boat, which made me think of Row. The way she squawked and waved her arms when she was first trying to walk; the way she stood completely still for almost an hour, watching the sandhill cranes, when I took her to the Platte to see their migration. She always seemed birdlike herself, with her thin bones and nervous, observant eyes, always scanning the horizon, ready to burst into flight.
Our boat was anchored off a rocky coast of what used to be British Columbia, just outside a small cove up ahead, where water filled a small basin between two mountaintops. We still called oceans by their former names, but it was really one giant ocean now, littered with pieces of land like crumbs fallen from the sky.
Dawn had just lightened the horizon and Pearl folded the bedding under the deck cover. She had been born there seven years earlier, during a storm with flashes of lightning white as pain.
I dropped bait in the crab pots and Pearl came out from under the deck cover, a headless snake in one hand, her knife in the other. Several snakes were woven around her wrists like bracelets.
“We’ll need to eat that tonight,” I said.
She sent me a sharp glance. Pearl looked nothing like her sister had, not thin boned or dark haired. Row had taken after me with her dark hair and gray eyes, but Pearl resembled her father with her curly auburn hair and the freckles across her nose. Sometimes I thought she even stood the way he did, solidly and sturdily, both feet planted on the ground, chin up slightly, hair always messed, arms a little back, chest up, as though exposing herself to the world with no fear or apprehension.
I had searched for Row and Jacob for six years. After they were gone, Grandfather and I took to the water on Bird, the boat he’d built, and Pearl was born soon after. Without Grandfather with me that first year, Pearl and I never would have made it. He fished while I fed Pearl, gathered information from everyone we passed, and taught me to sail.
His mother had built kayaks like her ancestors, and he remembered watching her shape the wood like a rib cage, holding people the way a mother held a child within her, sheltering them to shore. His father was a fisher, so Grandfather had spent his childhood on the Alaskan coastal seas. During the Hundred Year Flood, Grandfather had migrated inland with thousands of others, finally settling in Nebraska, where he worked as a carpenter for years. But he always missed the sea.
Grandfather searched for Jacob and Row when I didn’t have the heart to. Some days, I followed languidly behind him, tending to Pearl. At each village, he’d check the boats in the harbor for any sign of them. He’d show photographs of them at every saloon and trading post. On the open sea he’d ask every fisher we passed if they’d seen Row and Jacob.
But Grandfather had died when Pearl was still a baby, and suddenly the enormous task swelled up before me. Desperation clung to me like a second skin. In those early days, I would strap Pearl to my chest with an old scarf, wrapping her snugly against me. And I’d follow the same route he had taken: scouting the harbor, asking the locals, showing photographs to people. For a while it gave me vigor; something to do beyond survival, something that meant more to me than reeling in another fish to our small boat. Something that gave me hope and promised wholeness.
A year ago, Pearl and I had landed in a small village tucked in the northern Rockies. The storefronts were broken down, the roads dusty and littered with trash. It was one of the more crowded villages I’d been to. People hurried up and down the main road, which was filled with stalls and merchants. We passed one stall heavy-laden with scavenged goods that had been carried up the mountain before the flood. Milk cartons filled with gasoline and kerosene, jewelry to be melted and made into something else, a wheelbarrow, canned food, fishing poles, and bins of clothing.
The stall next to it sold items that had been made or found after the flood: plants and seeds, clay pots, candles, a wood bucket, bottles of alcohol from the local distillery, knives made by a blacksmith. They also sold packets of herbs with sprawling advertisements: WHITE WILLOW BARK FOR FEVER! ALOE VERA FOR BURNS!
Some goods had the corroded appearance of having been underwater. Merchants paid people to dive into old houses for items that hadn’t yet been scavenged before the floods and hadn’t rotted since. A screwdriver with a glaze of rust, a pillow stained yellow and heavy with mold.
The stall across from these held only small bottles of expired medications and boxes of ammunition. A woman with a machine gun guarded each side of the stall.
I had packed all the fish I’d caught in a satchel slung over my shoulder, and I hung on to the strap as we walked up the main road toward the trading post. I held Pearl’s hand with my other hand. Her red hair was so dry it was beginning to break off at the scalp. And her skin was scaly and light brown, not from sun, but from the early stages of scurvy. I needed to trade for fruit for her and better fishing supplies for me.
At the trading post I emptied my fish on the counter and the shopkeeper and I bartered. The shopkeeper was a stout woman with black hair and no bottom teeth. We went back and forth, settling on my seven fish for an orange, thread, fishing wire, and flatbread. After I packed my goods in my bag I laid out the photos of Row before the shopkeeper, asking if she’d seen her.
The woman paused, staring at the photo. Then she slowly shook her head.
“Are you sure?” I asked, convinced her pause meant she’d seen Row.
“No girl looks like this here,” the woman announced in a thick accent, and turned back to packaging my fish.
Pearl and I made our way down the main road toward the harbor. I’d check the ships, I told myself. This village was so crowded, Row could be here and the shopkeeper could have never seen her. Pearl and I walked hand in hand, pulling away from the merchants as they reached out to us from their stalls, their voices trailing behind us, “Fresh lemons! Chicken eggs! Plywood half off!”
Up ahead of me, I saw a girl with long dark hair, wearing a blue dress.
I stopped in my tracks and stared. The blue dress was Row’s: it had the same paisley pattern, a ruffle at the hem, and bell sleeves. The world flattened, the air gone suddenly thin. A man at my elbow was nagging me to buy his bread, but his voice came as though from a distance. A giddy lightness filled me as I watched the girl.
I rushed toward her, running down the path, knocking over a cart of fruit, pulling Pearl behind me. The ocean at the bottom of the harbor looked crystal blue, suddenly clean-looking and fresh.
I grabbed the girl’s shoulder and spun her around. “Row!” I said, ready to see her face again and pull her into my arms.
A different face glared at me.
“Don’t touch me,” the girl muttered, jerking her shoulder from my grasp.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, stepping back.
The girl scurried away from me, glancing over her shoulder at me anxiously.
I stood in the bustling road, dust swirling around me. Pearl turned her head toward my hip and coughed.
It’s someone else, I told myself, trying to adjust to this new reality. Disappointment crowded me but I pushed it back. You’ll still find her. It’s okay, you’ll find her, I chanted to myself.
Someone shoved me hard, ripping my satchel from my shoulder. Pearl fell to the ground and I stumbled to the side, catching myself against a stall with scavenged tires.
“Hey!” I yelled at the woman, now darting down the main road and behind a booth with bolts of fabric. I ran after her, leaping over a small cart filled with baby chicks, dodging an elderly man with a cane.
I ran and spun in circles, looking for the woman. People moved past me as though nothing had happened, the swirl of bodies and voices making me nauseous. I kept looking for what felt like ages, the sunlight dimming around me, casting long shadows on the ground. I ran and spun until I nearly collapsed, stopping close to where it had happened. I looked up the road at Pearl, who stood where she’d fallen, next to the stall with tires.
She didn’t see me between the people and stalls, and her eyes moved anxiously over the crowd, her chin quivering, holding her arm like it’d been hurt in the fall. This whole time she’d been waiting, looking abandoned, hoping I’d return. The fruit in my satchel that I’d gotten for her had been the one thing I was proud of that day. The one thing I could cling to as evidence that I was doing okay by her.
Watching her, I felt gutted and finished. If I’d been more alert, not so distracted, the thief never would have ripped it from my shoulder so easily. I used to be so guarded and aware. Now I was worn down with grief, my hope for finding Row more madness than optimism.
Slowly it dawned on me: the reason the blue dress was so familiar, the reason it had grabbed my gut like a hook. Yes, Row had that same dress, but it wasn’t one Jacob had packed and taken with them when he took her from me. Because I found that dress in her bedroom dresser after she was gone and I slept with it for days afterward, burying my face in her smell, worrying the fabric between my fingers. It had stayed in my memory because it had been left behind, not because she could be somewhere out there wearing it. Besides, I realized, she would be much older now, too large for that dress. She had grown. I knew this, but she remained frozen in my mind as a five-year-old with large eyes and a high-pitched giggle. Even if I ran across her, would I recognize her immediately as my own?
It was too much, I decided. The constant drain of disappointment every time I reached a trading post and found no answers, no signs of her. If Pearl and I were going to make it in this world, I needed to focus on only us. To shut everything and everyone else out.
So we’d stopped looking for Row and Jacob. Pearl sometimes asked me why we’d stopped and I told her the truth: I couldn’t anymore. I felt they were somehow still alive, yet I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t been able to hear about them in the small communities that were left, tucked high in the mountainsides, surrounded by water.
Now we were drifting, spending our days with no destination. Each day was the same, spooling into the next like a river running into the ocean. Every night I lay awake, listening to Pearl breathe, the steady rhythm of her body. I knew she was my anchor. Every day I feared a raider ship would target us, or fish wouldn’t fill our nets and we’d starve. Nightmares engulfed me and my hand would shoot out for Pearl in the night, rattling both of us awake. All these fears lined up with a little hope wedged in the cracks in between.
I closed the crab pots and dropped them over the side, letting them sink sixty feet. As I surveyed the coast, an odd, fearful feeling, a tiny bubble of alarm, rose in me. The shore was marshland, filled with dark grass and shrubs, and trees grew a little farther back from the shore, crowding up the mountainside. Trees now grew above the old tree line, mostly saplings of poplar, willow, and maple. A small bay lay around the shore’s bend, where traders sometimes anchored or raiders lay in wait. I should have taken the time to scope out the bay and make sure the island was deserted. There was never any quick escape on land the way there was on water. I steeled myself to it; we needed to look for water on land. We wouldn’t last another day otherwise.
Pearl followed my eyes as I gazed at the coast.
“This looks like the same coast with those people,” Pearl said, needling me.
She’d been going on for days about raiders we saw robbing a boat in the distance. We’d sailed away, and I was weary, heart heavy, as the wind pulled us out of sight. Pearl was upset we hadn’t tried to help them, and I tried to remind her it was important we keep to ourselves. But under my rationalizations, I feared that my heart had shrunk as the water rose around me—panic filling me as water covered the earth—panic pushing out anything else, whittling my heart to a hard, small shape I couldn’t recognize.
“How were we going to attack an entire raider ship?” I asked. “No one survives that.”
“You didn’t even try. You don’t even care!”
I shook my head at her. “I care more than you know. There isn’t always room to care more.” I’ve been all used up, I wanted to say. Maybe it was good I hadn’t found Row. Maybe I didn’t want to know what I’d do to be with her again.
Pearl didn’t respond, so I said, “Everyone is on their own now.”
“I don’t like you,” she said, sitting down with her back to me.
“You don’t have to,” I snapped. I squeezed my eyes shut and pinched the bone between my eyebrows.
I sat down next to her, but she kept her face turned from me.
“Did you have your dreams again last night?” I tried to keep my voice kind and soft, but an edge still crept in.
She nodded, squeezing the blood from the snake’s tail down to the hole where its head had been.
“I’m not going to let that happen to us. We’re staying together. Always,” I said. I stroked her hair back from her face and a shadow of a smile crossed her lips.
I stood up and checked the cistern. Almost empty. Water all around but none to drink. My head ached from dehydration and the edges of my vision were beginning to blur. Most days, it was humid; it rained almost every other day, but we were in a dry spell. We’d need to find mountain streams and boil water. I filled Pearl’s water skin with the last of the fresh water and handed it to her.
She stopped playing with her headless snake and weighed the water in her hand. “You gave me all the water,” she said.
“I already drank some,” I lied.
Pearl stared at me, seeing right through me. There was never any hiding from her, not like I could hide from myself.
I fastened my knife in my belt and Pearl and I swam to shore with our buckets for clam digging. I was worried it would be too wet for clams, and we both stumbled along the marsh until we found a drier spot to the south, where the sun fell warm and steady. Little holes peppered the mud plain. We began digging with driftwood, but after a few minutes Pearl tossed her driftwood to the side.
“We won’t find anything,” she complained.
“Fine,” I snapped. My limbs were heavy with fatigue. “Then go up the mountainside and see if you can find a stream. Look for willows.”
“I know what to look for.” She spun on her heel and awkwardly tried to run up the mountainside. The poor thing was still trying to account for the motion of the sea, and she set her feet down too firmly, swaying from side to side.
I kept digging, pulling the mud in piles around me. I hit a shell and tossed the clam in my bucket. Above the wind and waves, I thought I heard voices coming from around the bend in the mountain. I sat back on my heels, alert, listening. A tension settled along my spine and I strained to hear, but there was nothing. I always thought I sensed things on land that weren’t there—hearing a song where there was no music, seeing Grandfather when he was already dead. As though being on land returned me to the past and all the things the past had carried.
I leaned forward and dug my hands into the mud. Tossed another shell into my bucket with a clink. I’d just found another clam when a small, sharp scream pierced the air. I froze, looking up, scanning the landscape for Pearl.
CHAPTER 2 (#u4cdbe80a-f0ef-54df-82c3-c18f582b06b7)
SEVERAL YARDS UP the mountainside, in front of shrubs and a steep rock face, a wiry man held Pearl, her back against his front, a knife at her throat. Pearl was still, her eyes quiet and dark, her arms at her sides, not able to reach the knife at her ankle.
The man had a desperate, off-kilter look on his face. I stood up slowly, my heart pounding in my ears.
“Come with me,” he called out. He had a strange accent I couldn’t place, clipped and heavy on the consonants.
“Okay,” I said, my hands up to show I wasn’t going to try anything, walking toward them.
When I reached them he said, “You move and she goes.”
I nodded.
“I’ve got a ship,” he said. “You’ll work it. Drop your knife on the ground.”
Panic rose up in me as I unfastened my knife and tossed it toward him. He sheathed it at his waist and grinned at me. Holes showed where teeth should be. His skin was tanned to a red brown and his hair grew in sandy patches. A tattoo of a tiger spread across his shoulder. Raiders tattooed their members, often with an animal, though I couldn’t remember which crew used the tiger.
“Don’tcha worry. I’ll care for ya. It’s up thataway.”
I followed the man and Pearl along the side of the mountain, winding our way toward the cove. Rough grass scratched my ankles and I stumbled over a few rocks. The man lowered the knife from Pearl’s neck but kept his hand on her shoulder. I wanted to reach forward and snatch her out of his grasp, but his knife would be at her throat again before I pulled her away. Quick flashes of how things could go ran through my mind—him deciding he only wanted one of us or there being too many people to fight once we reached his ship.
The man started chatting about his people’s colony up north. I wanted him to shut up so I could think straight. A canteen hung from the man’s shoulder and swung back and forth at his hip. I could hear liquid sloshing inside and my thirst rose above even my fear as my parched mouth ached for water, my fingers itching to reach it and unscrew the cap.
“It’s important we have new nations now. Important for …” The man cast his hand out in front of him, as if he could pluck a word from the air. “Organizing.” The man nodded, clearly pleased. “That’s how it was always done, back in the beginning, when we were still in caves. People aren’t organized, we’d all be snuffed out.”
There were other tribes who were trying to make new nations by sailing from land to land, setting up military bases on islands and ports, attacking others and making colonies. Most of them began as a ship that took over other ships, and eventually they began trying to take over communities on land.
The man looked over his shoulder at me and I nodded dumbly, wide eyed, deferential. We were half a mile from our boat. As we approached the bend along the mountainside, the ground dropped away at our side and we walked along a steep rock face. I thought about grabbing Pearl and leaping from the cliff to the water and swimming to our boat, but it was too far in this choppy water. And I couldn’t know if we’d have a clean fall into the water or if there were rocks below.
The man had shifted to talking about his people’s breeding ships. Women were expected to produce a child every year or so, to grow the raider crews. They waited until a girl bled before they moved her to a breeding ship. Until then, she was held captive in a colony.
I’d passed breeding ships when I was fishing, recognized them by their flag of a red circle on white. A flag that warned boats not to approach. Since illness spread so quickly on land, the raiders reasoned the babies would be safer on ships, which they often were. Except when a contagion broke out on a ship and almost everyone died, leaving a ghost ship, unmoored until it crashed against a mountain and drifted to the bottom of the sea.
“I know what you’re thinking,” the man continued. “But the Lost Abbots—we, we do things the right way. Can’t build a nation without people, without taxes, without having people to enforce those taxes. That’s what gives us the chance to organize.
“This yer girl?” the man asked me.
I startled and shook my head. “Found her on a coast a few years back.” He wouldn’t be so keen on separating us if he didn’t think we were family.
The man nodded. “Sure. Sure. They come in handy.”
The wind changed as we began to make our way around the mountain, and voices from the cove now reached us, a clamoring of people working on a ship.
“You look like a girl I know, back at one of our colonies,” the man said to me.
I was barely listening. If I lunged forward, I could reach his right arm, pull it behind his back, and reach for my knife in his sheath.
He reached out and touched Pearl’s hair. My stomach clenched. A gold chain with a pendant hung from his wrist. The pendant was dark snakewood, with the engraving of a crane on it. Row’s necklace. The necklace Grandfather had carved for her the summer we’d gone to see the cranes. It was colorless except the drop of red paint he’d placed between the crane’s eyes and beak.
I stopped walking. “Where’d you get that?” I asked. Blood surged in my ears and my body thrummed like a hummingbird’s wings.
He looked down at his wrist. “That girl. One I was telling you about. Such a sweet girl. I’m surprised she’s made it this long. Doesn’t seem to have it in her …” He gestured with his knife toward the cove. “Don’t have all day.”
I lunged at him and swiped his right leg with my foot. He tripped and I smashed my elbow down on his chest, knocking the air from him. I stomped on the hand holding the knife, grabbed it, and held it to his chest.
“Where is she?” I asked, my voice all breath, barely above a whisper.
“Mom—” Pearl said.
“Turn away,” I said. “Where is she?” I pushed the knife farther between his ribs, the tip digging into skin and membrane. He gritted his teeth, sweat gathering at his temples.
“Valley,” he panted. “The Valley.” His eyes darted toward the cove.
“And her father?”
Confusion furrowed the man’s brow. “She had no father with her. Must be dead.”
“When was this? When did you see her?”
The man squeezed his eyes shut. “I dunno. A month ago? We came here straight after.”
“Is she still there?”
“Still there when I left. Not old enough yet—” He winced and tried to catch his breath.
He almost said not old enough for the breeding ship yet.
“Did you hurt her?”
Even now, a pleased look crossed his face, a sheen over his eyes. “She didn’t complain much,” he said.
I drove the knife straight in, the hilt to his skin, and pulled it up to gut him like a fish.
CHAPTER 3 (#u4cdbe80a-f0ef-54df-82c3-c18f582b06b7)
PEARL AND I stole the man’s canteen and shoved his body over the side of the cliff. As we ran back to the boat I kept thinking of his crew in the cove, wondering how soon they would start searching for him. There was enough wind, I thought, to push us south quickly. Once Bird got behind another mountain it’d be hard to track us.
When we got back to the boat I raised the anchor, Pearl adjusted the sails, and we surged forward, the coast behind us growing smaller, but I still couldn’t breathe steadily. I hid from Pearl under the deck shelter, my whole body shaking, not unlike how the man’s body shook when he died. I’d been in fights before, tense moments with weapons out, but I hadn’t killed. Killing that man was like stepping through a door to another world. It felt like a place I’d already been to but had forgotten, hadn’t wanted to remember. It didn’t make me feel powerful; it made me feel more alone.
We sailed south for three days until we reached Apple Falls, a small trading port nestled on a mountain that had been in British Columbia. The water in the canteen lasted us only a day, but late on the second day it rained a small bit, just enough that we weren’t ill with thirst by the time we reached Apple Falls. I dropped the anchor over the side and glanced at Pearl. She stood at the bow, staring at Apple Falls.
“I didn’t want you to see that,” I said to Pearl, watching her closely. Pearl hadn’t spoken to me much since.
Pearl shrugged.
“He was going to hurt us. You don’t think I should have done it? You think he was a good person?” I asked.
“I just didn’t like it. I didn’t like any of it,” she said, her voice small. She paused, as if thinking, then said, “Desperate people.” She looked at me a little too intently. I always said to her, when she asked me why people were cruel, that desperate people did desperate things.
“Yes,” I said.
“Will we try to find her now?”
“Yes,” I said, the word out of my mouth before I knew I’d already decided it. A response beyond reason. Just the image in my mind of Row in danger and me moving toward her, with no choice, only one direction to move, the way rain falls from the sky and does not return to the heavens.
Though I was surprised to realize this, Pearl showed no shock. She merely looked at me and said, “Will Row like me?”
I walked to her, squatted, and wrapped my arms around her. Her hair smelled like brine and ginger and I buried my face in it, her body as tender and vulnerable as the night I birthed her.
“I’m sure of it,” I said.
“Are we going to be okay?” Pearl asked.
“We’re going to be fine.”
“You said everyone is alone. I don’t want to be alone,” Pearl said.
My chest tightened and I pulled her close to me again. “You won’t ever be alone,” I promised. I kissed the top of her head. “We better count these,” I said, gesturing to the buckets of fish laid out on the deck.
Row is alone out there, I kept thinking, weighing each dead fish in my palm, one part of me asking how much it was worth, the other part imagining her alone on some coast. Did Jacob die? Did he abandon her? My hands shook with cold rage at this thought. He abandons people; that’s what he does.
But he wouldn’t do that to her, I argued with myself, feeling myself being pulled back into the hatred that had kept me awake at night for years after he left. I’d been blinded by love and now, I knew, I was blinded by hate. I had to focus. To remember Row and forget him.
The last three days we’d sailed, a part of me thought of Row incessantly. I had the sense that my entire body was plotting how to reach her, while my consciousness focused on tightening the rope at the block or reeling in fishing line, the small daily tasks that grounded me. There was both a low thrum of panic and shock at discovering she was alive, and a strange animal tranquility as I moved about the boat as if it were simply another day. It was what I’d dreamed of and hoped for and also what I’d feared. Because her being alive meant I had to go after her, had to risk everything. What kind of mother abandons her child in her hour of need? And yet, wouldn’t taking Pearl on this journey be a kind of abandonment of her? An abandonment of the peaceful life we’d fought to build together?
Pearl and I loaded the salmon and halibut into four baskets. We had gutted and smoked the salmon already on our boat, but the halibut was fresh from this morning, which could give us bargaining power.
Apple Falls was aptly named—apple trees had been planted in a clearing between the peaks of two mountains. Thieves were shot by the guards of the orchard, who had watchtowers on each mountain. I was hoping we’d be able to trade for at least half a basket of apples, plus some grain and seed. At our last trading post we had only three baskets of fish and could barely trade for the rope, oil, and flour we needed. We needed to trade for some vegetable seeds so I could grow a few more vegetables on board. Right now we only had a half-dead tomato plant. Beatrice, my old friend at Apple Falls, would give me a better deal for my fish than at any other port.
Water rippled against the mountainside and the bank rose in a steep incline up the mountain, with a small peat ledge for a dock. A wooden boardwalk, half submerged, had been cobbled together over the years.
We docked our boat and paid the harbor fees with a crate of metal scraps I had found while hunting the shallows. Bird was one of the smallest boats in the harbor, but it was sturdily built. Grandfather had designed the boat to be simple and easy to maneuver. One square mast, a rudder, a punting pole, and oars on each side. A deck cover made from old rugs and plastic tarp where we slept at night. He’d made it from the trees in our yard back in Nebraska at the beginning of the Six Year Flood, when we knew that fleeing was our only chance to survive.
Water had already covered the coasts around the world by the time I was born. Many countries had been cut to half their size. Migrants fled inland, and suddenly Nebraska became a bustling, crowded place. But no one knew the worst was yet to come—the great flood that lasted six years, water rising higher than anyone could imagine, whole countries becoming seafloors, each city a new Atlantis.
Before the Six Year Flood, earthquakes erupted and tsunamis struck constantly. The ground itself seemed heavy with energy. I’d hold out my hand and feel the heat in the air like the pulse of an invisible animal. On the radio we heard rumors that the seafloor had split, water from within the earth seeping into the ocean. But we never knew for certain what happened, only that the water rose around us as if to swallow us up in a watery grave.
People called the years the coasts disappeared the Hundred Year Flood. The Hundred Year Flood didn’t last exactly a hundred years, because no one knew for sure exactly when it began. Unlike a war it had no call to arms, no date by which we could remember its beginning. But it lasted close to a hundred years, a little longer than a person’s lifetime, because my grandfather always said that when his mother was born New Orleans existed and when she died it did not.
What followed the Hundred Year Flood was a series of migrations and riots over resources. My mother would tell me stories of how the great cities fell, when electricity and the Internet faltered on and off. People would show up on doorsteps at homes in Indiana, Iowa, Colorado, clinging to their belongings, wide eyed and weary, asking to be let in.
Near the end of the Hundred Year Flood, the government moved inland, but its reach was limited. I was seventeen when I heard over the radio that the president had been assassinated. But then a month later, a migrant passing through said he’d fled to the Rockies. And then later, we heard a military coup had taken over a session of Congress and members of the government had fled after that. Communication was breaking down by that point, the whole world reduced to a rumor, and I stopped listening.
I was nineteen when the Six Year Flood began and had just met Jacob. I remember standing next to him watching footage of the White House flood, only the flag on the roof visible above the water, each wave soaking the flag until it lay sagging against the pole. I imagined the interior of the White House, so many faces staring out of its paintings, water trickling down hallways into all its chambers, sometimes loud and sometimes quiet.
The last time my mother and I watched television together it was the second year of the Six Year Flood and I was pregnant with Row. We saw footage of a man lying on an inflatable raft, balancing a whiskey bottle on his tummy, grinning up at the sky, as he floated past a skyscraper, trash swirling around him. There were as many ways to react as people, she always said.
This included my father, who was the one to teach me what the floods meant. The blinking on and off of communication was familiar to me, the crowds of people at soup kitchens normal. But when I was six I came home early from school with a headache. The garden shed door was open and through the opening I saw only his torso and legs. I stepped closer, looked up, and saw his face. He’d hung himself from a rafter with a rope.
I remember screaming and backing away. Every cell in me was a small shard of glass; even breathing hurt. I ran inside and looked for my mother, but she wasn’t home from work. Cell towers were down that month, so I sat on the front stoop and waited for my mother to come home. I tried to think of how to tell her but words kept wincing away from me, my mind recoiling from reality. Many days, I still feel like that child on the stoop, waiting and waiting, my mind empty as a bowl scooped clean.
After my mother had gotten home, we found a mostly empty bag of groceries on the table with a note from my father: “The shelves were bare. Sorry.”
I thought when I had my own children I’d understand him more, understand the despair he felt. But I didn’t. I hated him even more.
PEARL TUGGED ON my hand, pointing to a cart of apples sitting just past the dock.
I nodded. “We should be able to get a couple,” I said.
The village was a clamoring, crowded throng of people and Pearl stuck close to me. We slung the baskets of fish on two long poles so we could carry them on our shoulders and we started up the long winding path between the two mountains.
I felt relief at being on land again. But as the crowd closed around me, I felt a new kind of panic, different from anything I felt when I was alone on the waves. An out-of-control sensation. Being the foreigner, the one who had to relearn the ever-changing rules of each trading post.
Pearl wasn’t ambivalent like I was, hovering between relief and panic. She hated being on land, the only benefit being that she could hunt snakes. Even as a baby she hated being on land, refusing to fall asleep when we camped on the shores at night. Sometimes she got nauseous on land and went out for a swim to calm her nerves while we were at a port.
The land was filled with stumps of cut trees and a thick ground cover of grasses and shrubs. People seemed to be crawling over one another on the path, an old man bumping into two young men carrying a canoe, a woman pushing her children in front of her. Everyone’s clothes were dirty and torn and the smell of so many people living close together made me dizzy. Most people I saw in ports were older than Pearl, and Apple Falls was no different. Infant mortality was high again. People would talk on the streets about our possible extinction, about the measures needed to rebuild.
Someone knocked one of Pearl’s baskets to the ground and I cursed them and quickly scooped up the fish. We passed the main trading post and saloon and cut across the outdoor market, smells of cabbage and fresh-cut fruit lingering in the air. Shacks littered the outskirts of town as we traveled farther up the path, toward Beatrice’s tent. The shacks were cobbled together with wood planks or metal scraps or stones stacked together like bricks. In the dirt yard of one shack, a small boy sat cleaning fish, a collar around his neck, attached to a leash that was tied around a metal pole.
The boy looked back at me. Small bruises bloomed like dark flowers on his back. A woman came and stood in the doorway of the shack, arms crossed over her chest, staring back at me. I looked away and hurried on.
Beatrice’s tent stood on the southern edge of the mountain, hidden by a few redwoods. Beatrice had told me she guarded her trees against thieves with her shotgun, sometimes awakening at night to the sound of an ax on wood. But she only had four shotgun shells left, she had confided in me.
Pearl and I squatted and slid the poles from our shoulders. “Beatrice?” I called out.
It was silent for a moment and I worried it was no longer her tent, that she was gone.
“Beatrice?”
She poked her head through the tent opening and smiled. She still wore her long gray hair in a braid down her back and her face had deeper creases, a sun-etched rough texture.
She sprang forward and grabbed Pearl in a hug. “I was wondering when I’d see you again,” she said. Her eyes darted between Pearl and me, taking us in. I knew she feared there’d come a day when we didn’t return to trade, just as I feared there’d come a day when I’d come to trade and her tent would be taken over by someone else, her name a mere memory.
She hugged me and then pulled me back by my shoulders and eyed me. “What?” she asked. “Something’s different.”
“I know where she is, Beatrice. And I need your help.”
CHAPTER 4 (#u4cdbe80a-f0ef-54df-82c3-c18f582b06b7)
BEATRICE’S TENT WAS the most comfortable place I’d been in the past seven years, since Grandfather and I took to the water. An oriental rug lay over the grass floor, a coffee table sat in the middle of the tent, and off to the side several quilts were piled on top of a cot. Baskets and buckets of odds and ends—twine, coils of rope, apples, empty plastic bottles—were scattered around the periphery of the tent.
Beatrice scurried around her tent like a beetle, wiry and nimble. She wore a long gray tunic, loose pants, and sandals. “Trade first, talk later.” She set a tin cup of water in my hands.
“So what do you have?” she asked. She peered into our baskets. “Just fish? Myra.”
“Not just salmon,” I said. “There are some halibut. Nice big ones. You’ll get a big fillet off this one.” I pointed to the largest halibut that I had positioned on top of a basket.
“No driftwood, no metal, no fur—”
“Where am I supposed to get fur?”
“You said your boat was fifteen feet long. You could keep a goat or two. It’d be good for milk, and later fur.”
“Livestock at sea is a nightmare. They never live long. Not long enough to breed, so it’s hardly worth it,” I said. But I let her scold me because I knew she needed to. A maternal itch, the pleasure of scolding and soothing.
Beatrice bent down and sorted through the fish. “You could tan leather on a ship easily. All that sun.”
We finally agreed to trade all my fish for a second tomato plant, a few meters of cotton, a new knife, and two small bags of wheat germ. It was a better trade than I expected and only possible because Beatrice was overly generous with Pearl and me. She and my grandfather had become friends years before, and after he passed away, Beatrice became more and more generous with her trades. It made me feel both guilty and grateful. Though I was known in many of the trading posts as a reliable fisher, Pearl and I still barely scraped by with our trades.
Beatrice gestured to the coffee table and Pearl and I sat on the ground while Beatrice stepped outside to light a fire and get started on supper. We ate salmon I had brought, with boiled potatoes and cabbage and apples. As soon as Pearl was finished eating she curled up in a corner of the tent and fell asleep, leaving Beatrice and me to talk quietly as the night grew darker.
Beatrice poured me a cup of tea, something minty and herbal, with leaves floating on the surface. I got the impression she was gathering her strength.
“So where is she?” Beatrice asked finally.
“A place called the Valley. Have you heard of it?”
Beatrice nodded. “I’ve only traded with people from there once. It’s a small settlement—maybe a few hundred people. People who make it there don’t normally make it back. Too isolated. Rough seas.” She gave me a long look.
“Where is it?”
“How’d you get this information? Can you trust it?” she asked.
“I found out from a raider with the Lost Abbots. I don’t think he was lying. He’d already told me most of the information before …”
I paused, suddenly uncomfortable. A flicker of understanding crossed over Beatrice’s face.
“Was he your first?”
I nodded. “He captured Pearl and me.”
“Those fighting lessons have paid off,” she said, though she sounded more sad than satisfied. Grandfather taught me to sail and fish, but Beatrice had taught me to fight. After Grandfather passed away, Beatrice and I would practice under the trees around her tent, a few paces apart, me mimicking the motions of her hands and feet. Her father had taught her to fight with knives back during the early migrations and she wasn’t gentle with me during our lessons, tripping me up with a heel, yanking my arm behind my back until it nearly snapped.
The tea steamed before me and I warmed my hand around the cup. I felt my body try to steady me with stillness, but a cascade still fell within me, as if inwardly I were scattering to pieces.
“Can you help me?” I asked. “Do you have maps?” I knew she had maps—she could charge wood and land for the maps she had, which was also why she had to sleep with a shotgun at night. I’d never heard of the Valley, but I hadn’t heard of many places.
When Beatrice didn’t say anything, I said, “You don’t want me to go.”
“Have you learned to navigate?” she asked.
Since I couldn’t navigate, I only sailed between trading posts along the Pacific coast, which I knew well from sailing with Grandfather.
“Beatrice, she’s in danger,” I said. “If the Lost Abbots are there, the Valley is a colony now. Do you know how old she is? Almost thirteen. They’ll be transitioning her to a breeding ship any day now.”
“Surely Jacob is protecting her. He may pay extra taxes to keep her off the ship.”
“The raider said she had no father with her,” I said.
Beatrice looked at Pearl, curled into a ball, sleeping on her side, her face serene. One of her snakes lifted its head from the pocket of her trousers and slid over her leg.
“And Pearl? What of her?” Beatrice asked. “What if you go on this journey only to lose her, too?”
I stood up and stepped out of the tent. The night had grown cold. I sank my face in my hands and wanted to wail, but I bit my lips together and squeezed my eyes so hard they hurt.
Beatrice came out and set her hand on my shoulder.
“If I don’t try—” I started. The sound of bats’ wings beat the air above us as they cut across the moon in fluttering black shapes. “She’s alone, Beatrice. This is my one chance to save her. Once they get her on a breeding ship, I won’t find her again.”
What I didn’t tell her was that I couldn’t be my father. Couldn’t leave her on a stoop somewhere when she needed me.
“I know,” she said. “I know. Come back inside.”
I hadn’t come to Beatrice only because she would help me, but because she was the only person who could understand. Who knew my whole story, going all the way back to the beginning. No other living person besides Beatrice knew how I met Jacob when I was nineteen and didn’t even know the Six Year Flood had begun. He was a migrant from Connecticut, and on the day I met him I was drying apple slices in the sunlight on our front porch. It was over a hundred degrees every day that summer, so we dried fruit on the porch and canned the rest that we harvested. I’d cut twenty apples into thin slices, lining them on every floorboard along the porch, before stepping inside to check the preserves over the fire. In the mornings I worked for a farmer to the east, but in the afternoons I was home, helping my mother around the house. She worked as a nurse only occasionally by that point, doing home visits or treating people in makeshift clinics, trading her care and knowledge for food.
When I came back out a row of the apple slices was gone and a man stood frozen, bent over the porch, one hand on a slice, the other hand holding open a bag that hung from his shoulder.
He turned and ran and I dashed across the porch after him. Sweat trickled down my back and my lungs burned, but I caught up to him and tackled him, both of us sprawling across the neighbor’s lawn. I wrestled the bag from him and he almost didn’t resist, his arms up to protect his face.
“I thought you’d be fast, but you’re even faster,” he said, panting.
“Get away from me,” I muttered, standing up.
“Can’t I have my bag back?”
“No,” I said, turning on my heel.
Jacob sighed and looked to the side with a mildly dejected look. I had the feeling he was accustomed to defeat and stomached it quite well. Later that night I wondered why I’d chased a stranger and not been more afraid, when usually I took pains to avoid strangers and feared an attack. Somehow, I realized, I’d known he wouldn’t hurt me.
He slept in a neighbor’s abandoned shed that night and waved to me in the morning. While I was weeding the front garden he watched me. I liked him watching me, liked the slow burn it gave me.
A few days later, he brought a beaver he’d trapped at the nearby river and laid it at my feet.
“Fair?” he asked.
I nodded. After that he’d sit and talk to me while I worked and I grew to like the rhythm of his stories, the curious way they always ended, with a note of exasperation mixed with delight.
Catastrophe drove us together. I don’t know that we would have fallen in love without that perfect mix of boredom and terror, terror that bordered on excitement and quickly became erotic. His mouth on my neck, my skin already moist with sweat, the ground wet beneath us, the heat in the air making rain every few hours, the sun drying it away. My heart already beating faster than it should, nerves calmed only by enflaming them more.
The only photo we got at our wedding came from an instant-print camera my mother borrowed from a former patient. We were standing in the sunlight on our front porch, my belly already round with Row, squinting so much you couldn’t see our eyes. And that’s how I remember those days: the heat and light. The heat never left, but the sunlight dimmed so quickly during each storm that you felt you stood in a room where some god kept turning a light on and off.
Beatrice ushered me back into the tent. She walked over to her desk, wedged between the cot and a shelf of pots. She rummaged through some papers and took out a rolled map that she spread out across the table in front of me. I knew the map wouldn’t be completely accurate; no accurate maps existed yet, but some sailors had attempted to chart the major landmasses that now existed above water.
Beatrice pointed to a landmass in the upper middle of the map. “This was Greenland. The Valley is in this southeast corner.” Beatrice pointed to a small hollow surrounded by cliffs and sea on both sides. “Icebergs” was written across the seas surrounding the small land mass. No wonder I hadn’t been able to find Row after years of looking; I hadn’t wanted to consider she could be so far away.
“It’s protected by the elements and raiders because of these cliffs, so I’m surprised the Lost Abbots made it a colony. Traders from the Valley said it was safer than other land because it’s so isolated. But it’s hard to get to. This”—she pointed to the Labrador Sea—“is Raider’s Aisle.”
I’d heard of Raider’s Aisle. A stormy section of dark seas where raiders lurked, often taking advantage of damaged ships or lost sailors to plunder their goods. When I passed through ports I’d barely listened to the tales, always assuming I’d never have to go near it.
“The Lily Black keep several of their ships in Raider’s Aisle,” Beatrice said. “News is they’re moving a few more ships up north.”
The Lily Black was the largest raider crew, with a fleet of at least twelve ships, maybe more. Ships made from old tankers fitted with new sails or small boats rowed by slaves. A rabbit tattoo marked their necks, and trading posts buzzed with rumors of other communities they’d attacked and the taxes they’d extracted from their colonies, working the civilians almost to death.
“And,” Beatrice went on, “you’ll have to deal with the Lost Abbots.”
“But if the Valley is already a colony, the Lost Abbots will only have left a few men behind to guard it. I can get Row out and we can leave—sail somewhere else before they return.”
Beatrice raised her eyebrows. “You think you can take them alone?”
I rubbed my temple. “Maybe I can sneak in and out.”
“How do you plan to get there?” she asked.
I dropped my forehead into my palm, my elbow resting on the table, the steam from the tea warming my face. “I’ll pay you for the map,” I said, so tired my body ached for the ground.
She rolled her eyes and pushed it toward me. “You don’t have the boat for this journey. You don’t have the resources. And what if she’s not still there?” Beatrice asked.
“I have some credit in Harjo I can use for wood to build a new boat. I’ll try to learn navigation—I’ll trade for the tools.”
“A new boat will cost a fortune. You’ll go into debt. And a crew?”
I shook my head. “We’ll sail it ourselves.”
Beatrice sighed and shook her head. “Myra.”
Pearl stirred in her sleep. Beatrice and I glanced at her and each other. Beatrice’s eyes were tender and sad, and when she reached out and grasped my hand, the veins in her hands were as bright blue as the sea.
CHAPTER 5 (#u4cdbe80a-f0ef-54df-82c3-c18f582b06b7)
THE NEXT MORNING Beatrice and I sat in the grass outside her tent, making lures with thread she’d scavenged in an abandoned shack up the mountainside. I knotted the bright red thread around a hook, listening to Beatrice tell me about how things were before the old coasts disappeared. Born in San Francisco, she was a child when it flooded and her family fled inland. Sometimes when she talked, I could tell she was trying hard to remember how things were when she was young, before all the migrations started, but that she couldn’t really. Her stories felt like stories about a place that never really existed.
The neighbors to her right, who lived in a one-room sod house dug out from the side of the mountain, were bickering, their voices rising and railing against one another. Beatrice told me about the Lost Abbots and how they began. They were a Latin American tribe, mostly people from the Caribbean and Central and South America. They began as many raider tribes began: as a private military group employed by governments during the Six Year Flood, when civil wars continued to destroy countries. After all known countries fell, they developed into a kind of sailing settlement, a tribe trying to build a new nation.
“Just last week, Pearl and I saw a small boat taken over by raiders north of here,” I said. “It was a fishing family. I heard their screams and—” I squinted hard at my lure and bit the thread to cut it. “We sailed away.” I had felt a heaviness in my gut when I placed my hand on the tiller, turning us south, away from their screams. I felt hemmed in and trapped on the open sea, left with few choices.
“I didn’t feel bad,” I confessed to Beatrice. “I mean, I did. But not as much as I used to.” I wanted to go on and say: It’s like I’ve gone dull inside. Every surface of me is hardened and rubbed raw. Nothing left to feel.
At first Beatrice didn’t respond. Then she said, “Some say raiders will control the seas in coming years.”
I had heard this before, but I didn’t like hearing it from Beatrice, who was never one to deal in conspiracies and doomsday speculation. She went on to tell me news from a trading post to the south, how governments were trying to form to protect and distribute resources. How civil wars were breaking out over laws and resources.
Beatrice told me about how some new governments accepted help from raiders and willingly became colonies, controlled by raider captains. The raiders offered protection and gave extra resources to the burgeoning community—food, supplies the raiders had stolen or scavenged, animals they’d hunted or trapped. But the community was bound to pay back any help offered with interest. Extra grain from the new mill. The best vegetables from the gardens. Sometimes the community had to send a few of its own people to work as guards on breeding ships and colonies. The raiders’ ships circled between their colonies, picking up what they needed; their guards enforced rules while they were gone.
My conversations with Beatrice followed the same rhythm each time. She urged me to move onto land and I urged her to move onto water. But not this time.
Beatrice began telling me a story about something that had happened to her neighbors the previous week. She told me how in the middle of the day shouts and yelling had erupted, coming from the sod dugout. Two men stood outside the dugout, shouting and pointing at a girl who stood between her mother and father. The girl looked about nine or ten years old. One of the men stepped forward and grabbed the girl, holding her arms behind her back as she tried to run toward her mother.
The father charged forward toward his daughter, but the other man punched him in the stomach. The father doubled and the man kicked him to the ground.
“Please,” the father pleaded. “Please—I’ll pay up. I’ll pay.”
The man stomped on the father’s chest with the heel of his boot and the father curled in pain and rolled to his side, his hand shaking and stirring up small clouds of dust.
The girl screamed for her father and mother, her arms held taut and long behind her as she tried to run toward them. The man who’d stomped on her father smacked her hard across the face, wound rope around her wrists, and knotted them. The other man lifted her body over his shoulder and turned around.
She didn’t scream again, but Beatrice could hear her soft cries as the men carried her away.
An hour later the village had begun to swarm with people again, footsteps echoing on the dirt paths, bright children’s voices calling to one another. Beatrice’s neighbor across the road leaned out the open window of her shack to hang a dish towel on a peg. Everything had moved on as though a child hadn’t just been taken from her parents.
Beatrice shook her head. “It was probably a private affair. Maybe a private debt being collected and no one wanted to interfere. They don’t have control here—but still.”
Both of our hands had gone still, the hooks glinting in the sunlight in our laps. Beatrice cast about for words.
“Still, I worry,” she said. “A resistance is being organized here. You could join us. Help us.”
“I don’t join groups and I don’t care about resistance. I’m not staying on land, waiting for someone to take her,” I said, nodding at Pearl, who had caught a snake and was dropping it into one of our baskets. Pearl came and sat next to us, eyes on the grass, another snake still in her hands.
“They built a library, you know,” Beatrice said softly, with pain in her voice.
“Who?” I asked.
“Lost Abbots. At one of their bases in the Andes—Argali. They even put windows in. And shelves. Books salvaged from before and new ones being transcribed. People travel for miles to see it. Some friends told me they built it to show their commitment to the future. To culture.”
Beatrice’s mouth tightened. Before the floods, she’d been a teacher. I knew how important learning and books were to her. How much it had pained her when her school closed and her students scattered across the country. I knew also of her lover who had been killed on his fishing boat three years before by a raiding tribe. She had been scared of the water even before that, and she cloaked this fear as a love for land.
“Little bit of good in everything,” Beatrice said.
I thought of the raider on the coast talking about new nations and the need to organize people. I’d heard that argument before in saloons and trading posts. That the raiders’ wealth could rebuild society faster. Forcing people to go without would get us back to where we were sooner.
I described what a library looked like to Pearl. “Do you want to go to a place like that?” I asked her.
“Why would I?” she asked, trying to wrap the snake around her wrist as he resisted her.
“You could learn,” I said.
She frowned, trying to imagine a library. “In there?”
I came up against this again and again with Pearl. She didn’t even want what I so sorely missed, had no conception of it to desire it.
It wasn’t just the loss of a thing that was a burden but the loss even of desiring it. We should at least get to keep our desire, I thought. Or maybe it’s how she was born. Maybe she couldn’t want something like that after being born in a world like this.
Beatrice didn’t say anything more, and after we finished making lures I went into her tent to pack. I packed our grain in a linen sack, tucking it in the bottom of a bucket. I set the tomato plant in a basket and tucked a blanket around it, a gift from Beatrice. I thought of Row, imagined her wrists cinched together with rope, her cries silenced or ignored. I shuddered.
Beatrice handed me the rolled-up map. “I don’t even have a compass to give you.”
“You’ve given me more than I hoped for,” I said.
“One more thing.” Beatrice pulled a photo from her pocket and placed it in my hand. It was a photo of Jacob and Row, taken a year before she’d screamed my name in that boat as it sped away. Grandfather and I gave it to Beatrice so she could ask traders in Apple Falls if they’d been seen. In the photo Jacob’s auburn hair had a gold sheen from the sunlight. His cleft chin and crooked nose, caused by a childhood schoolyard fight, made his face look angular. Row looked delicate with her small sloping shoulders and shining gray-blue eyes. They were my eyes, almond shaped, hooded. Eyes that looked like the color of the sea. She had a scar, shaped like the blade of a scythe, curving over an eyebrow and across a temple. When she was two she had fallen and cut her face on a metal toolbox.
I rubbed Row’s face with my thumb. I wondered if Jacob had built them a house at the Valley. That’s what he always said he wanted to do for me, years ago. Jacob worked as a carpenter like Grandfather. They began building our boat together, but after a while it was only Grandfather working on the boat. I had listened to their yelling and arguing for weeks and then suddenly it was quiet. That was two months before Jacob left with Row.
Beatrice reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and wrapped her arms around me. “Come back,” she whispered in my ear, the phrase she whispered in my ear each time I visited. I could feel in how her embrace lingered that she didn’t think I would.
CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_bd3e4709-255b-5713-9db4-b68707c34b88)
PEARL AND I set sail to the south, following the broken coast. It was rumored there was more wood for building boats down south in Harjo, a trading post in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. I’d use my credit at Harjo for wood and trade my fishing skills for help in building a bigger boat. My little boat would never handle the tumultuous seas in the north. But even if I could build a bigger boat, would I be able to navigate and sail it? Desperate people could always be found to join a ship’s crew, but I couldn’t stand the thought of traveling with other people, people I might not be able to trust.
I strung a line through a hook and knotted it and did it again for another pole. Pearl and I would fish over the side of the boat later in the evening, maybe even try some slow trolling for salmon. Pearl sat next to me, organizing the tackle and bait, dividing the hooks by size and dropping them in separate compartments.
“Who’s in this photo?” Pearl asked, pointing to the photo of Row and Jacob sitting on top of a basket filled with rope.
“A family friend,” I said. Years ago, when she’d asked about her father, I told her he had died before she was born.
“Why’d you ask that man about my father?”
“What man?” I asked.
“The one you killed.”
My hands froze over the bucket of bait. “I was testing him,” I said. “Seeing if he was lying.”
The sky to the east darkened and clouds tumbled toward us. Miles away a haze of rain clouded the horizon. The wind picked up, filling our sail and tilting the boat. I jumped up to adjust the sail. It was midafternoon and the day had begun clear, with an easy, straight wind, and I thought we’d be able to sail south for miles without making adjustments.
At the mast I started reefing the sails so we’d bleed wind. Around the coast to the west, waves rose several feet, the crashing white water swirling under the dark sky. We’d faced squalls before, been tossed in the wind, almost capsized. But this one was driving straight west, pushing us away from the coast. A rag on deck whipped up into the air, almost smacking me as it flew past and disappeared.
The storm approached like the roar of a train, slowly getting louder and louder until I knew we’d be shaking inside of it. Pearl climbed over the deck cover and stood by me. I could tell she was resisting the urge to throw her arms around me. “It’s getting bad,” she said, a tremor in her voice. Nothing else scared Pearl like storms; she was a sailor afraid of the sea. Afraid, she’d told me before, of shipwreck. Of having no harbor.
“Take the gear under the deck cover,” I told her, the wind catching my words and flattening them. “And bolt it down.”
I tried to ease the tension of the sail’s rigging, loosening the sheet, but the block was rusty and kept catching. When I finally got it loose, the wind picked up, knocking me backward against the mast, the rope flying through the block, sending the halyard soaring in the wind. I held on to the mast as Bird leaned left, waves rising and water spraying across the deck.
“Stay under!” I shouted to Pearl, but my words were lost in the wind. I climbed across the side of the deck cover, running toward the stern, but I slipped and slid into the gunwale. I scrambled to my feet and began tightening the rope holding the rudder, winding it around the spool, turning the rudder so we’d sail into the wind.
Thunder roared, so loud I felt it in my spine, my brain vibrating in my skull. Lightning flashed and a wave crashed over Bird, and I grabbed the tiller to steady myself. I dropped to my hands and knees, scrambled toward the deck cover, and ducked inside as another wave hit us, foaming overboard.
I wrapped myself around Pearl, tucking her under me, clutching her with one arm and holding on to a metal bar drilled into the deck with my other hand. Bird rocked violently, water pouring under the deck cover, our bodies jostling like shaken beads in a jar. I prayed the hull wouldn’t break.
Pearl curled in a tight ball and I could feel her heart beating like a hummingbird’s wings against my arm. The wind was blowing straight west, pushing us out of coastal waters and deeper into the Pacific. If we were pushed any farther offshore, I didn’t know how we’d make it back to a trading post.
Some dark feeling washed over me that felt like rage or fear or grief, something all sharp corners in my gut, like I’d swallowed glass. Row and Pearl rippled through my mind like shadows. The same question kept rising in me: To save one child, would I have to sacrifice another?
THE DAY MY mother died I had been at the upstairs window, four months pregnant with Pearl, hand on my belly, thinking of preeclampsia, placenta abruption, a breech baby, all the things I’d thought about when I was pregnant with Row. But now, with no hospitals, not even makeshift ones run out of abandoned buildings, they seemed like certain death. I knew my mother would help me deliver Pearl like she’d helped with Row, but I was still more nervous about this birth.
We had lost Internet and electricity for good the month before and we watched the horizon daily, fearing the water would arrive before Grandfather finished the boat.
In the block behind our house, a neighbor’s front yard held an apple tree. Mother had to stretch to pick them, a basket hooked over her arm, her hair shining in the sunlight. The yellow and orange leaves and red apples looked so bright, almost foreign, as though I already was thinking of them as lost things, things I’d rarely see again.
Behind her I saw a gray wall building, rising upward toward the sky. I was perplexed at first, my mind too shocked to comply, even though this was what we’d been waiting for. The water wasn’t supposed to be here yet. We were supposed to have another month or two. That’s what everyone on the streets had been saying. All the neighbors, all the people pushing grocery carts full of belongings as they migrated west toward the Rockies.
I didn’t understand how it was so quiet, but then I realized we were in the middle of a roar, a deafening crashing, the collision of uprooted trees, upended sheds, lifted cars. It was as if I couldn’t hear or feel anything, all I could do was watch that wave, the water mesmerizing me, obliterating my other senses.
I think I screamed. Hands pressed on glass. Grandfather, Jacob, and Row ran upstairs to see where the commotion came from. We stood together at the window, frozen in shock, waiting for it to come. The water rose as if the earth wanted vengeance, the water creeping across the plains like a single warrior. Row climbed into my arms and I held her as I had when she was a toddler, her head on my shoulder, her legs wrapped around my waist.
Mother looked up at the water and dropped the basket of apples. She ran toward our house, crossing the street, passing a house and almost reaching our backyard when the wave crashed around her. The wave dipped over her, its white spray falling around her.
I couldn’t see her anymore and the water thundered around our house. We held our breath as the water rose around the house, climbing up the siding, breaking the windows and flowing inside. It filled up the house like a silo full of corn. The house shuddered and shook and I was certain it’d splinter into pieces, that our hands would be ripped from one another. The water rose, climbing each stair toward the attic.
I looked back out the window, praying I’d see my mother reappear, surface for a breath of air. After the water settled, the surface was still and my mother did not come up to break it.
The water settled a few feet below our upstairs window. We waded and swam through the water for weeks afterward but could never find her body. We later found out the dam had broken half a mile from our house. Everyone had said it would hold.
After Mother was gone I kept wanting to tell her about how things were changing, in me and around me, Pearl’s first kicks, the water covering all the prairie as far as the eye could see. I’d turn to speak to her and be reminded she was gone. This is how people go crazy, I thought.
It was only a month later that Jacob would take Row. Only Grandfather and I were left in that house, sitting in the attic, that empty room the length of our house, as the boat slowly filled it.
A month after Jacob left we took the attic wall out with a sledgehammer and pushed the boat out of the house and onto the water. The boat was fifteen feet long, five feet wide, and looked like a large canoe with a small deck cover at the back and a single sail in the middle. We loaded the boat with supplies we’d been hoarding for the past year—bottles of water, cans of food, medical supplies, bags of extra clothing and shoes.
We sailed west, toward the Rocky Mountains. At first, the air was thin and felt hard to breathe, as if my lungs kept clutching for something more. Three months later I awoke with birthing pains. The wind was so strong it rocked the boat like a cradle and I rolled back and forth under the deck cover, gritting my teeth, clutching the blankets around my body, crying in the lulls between contractions.
When Pearl came she was glistening and pale and silent. Her skin looked like water. As if she’d risen out of the depths to meet me. I held her to my chest and rubbed her cheek with my thumb and she broke into a wail.
A few hours later, when the sun rose and she was suckling at my breast, I heard gulls above us. Holding Pearl at my breast was both like and unlike when I held Row at my breast. I tried to hold the feeling of both of them in myself but couldn’t; one kept sliding away and replacing the other. Deep down, I had known that one couldn’t replace the other, though I now discovered I had been hoping Pearl could replace Row. I placed my nose on Pearl’s forehead, smelling her newness, her freshness. I mourned the loss of it, the loss I felt before it happened.
In Grandfather’s last days he began speaking nonsense more and more. Sometimes talking to the air, addressing people he’d known in the past. Sometimes speaking in a dream language that I would have found beautiful if I wasn’t so tired.
“Now, you tell my girl that a feather can hold a house,” Grandfather said. I wasn’t sure if by “my girl” he meant my mother, myself, Row, or Pearl. He’d call all of us “his girls.”
“Who do you want me to tell?”
“Rowena.”
“She isn’t here.”
“Yes, she is, yes she is.”
This irritated me. Most of the people he spoke to were dead. “Row isn’t dead,” I said.
Grandfather turned to me, shock on his face, his eyes wide and innocent. “Of course not,” he said. “She’s around the corner.”
A week later Grandfather died sometime in the night. I had just finished nursing Pearl and had laid her in a small wooden box Grandfather had made for her. I crawled over to where Grandfather slept, my fingers outstretched to shake him awake. When I touched him, he was cold. His skin not yet ashen, only slightly pale, the blood having settled. He otherwise looked the same as he always did when he slept: eyes closed, mouth slightly agape.
I leaned back on my heels, staring at him. That he could pass with so little ceremony stunned me. I had never expected sleep to take him, of all things. Pearl whimpered and I crawled back to her.
We were alone, I kept thinking. I had no one left I could trust, except this baby that depended on me for everything. Panic pressed around me. I looked at the anchor lying a few feet away. I’d heard of people leaping from their boats tied to their anchors. But this wasn’t a possibility for me. It was as impossible as the water receding from the land and people standing up again where they’d fallen. Instead I took Pearl in my arms and climbed out from under the tarp into the morning sun.
I would carry him with me; he would still guide me. Grandfather was the person who taught me how to live; I wouldn’t fail him now. I wouldn’t fail Pearl, I told myself.
When I think of those days, of losing the people I’ve loved, I think of how my loneliness deepened, like being lowered into a well, water rising around me as I clawed at the stone walls, reaching for sunlight. How you get used to being at the bottom of a well. How you wouldn’t recognize a rope if it was thrown down to you.
CHAPTER 7 (#ulink_ce85e1cf-af16-5d7b-84d0-e2159f7c9773)
AFTER THE STORM, we came out from under the deck cover and surveyed the wreckage. We’d lost all the rainwater from the cistern. I dropped to my knees in front of it and swore. The waves crashing overboard had filled the cistern with salt water. We’d have to empty it all and get back to land as quickly as possible before we got dehydrated. We had a small emergency supply of water I kept in plastic bottles, tied down under the deck cover, but it would only last a few days.
Pearl kept close to me as we sloshed through the water, across the deck toward the bow. She held her arm against her side, a bruise blooming where she must have fallen when trying to scramble under the deck cover with the tackle and bait. I squatted in front of her, kissed my finger, and touched it to her arm. A shadow of a smile flickered across her face. I brushed her hair from her face with my palm, took her head in my hands, and kissed her forehead.
“We’ll be okay,” I said.
She nodded.
“How ’bout you get the bucket and towel. Start wringing the water off the deck. I’ll check the rudder.”
At the stern, I inspected the rudder and tiller. A crack split the base of the rudder support and it was leaning to the side. Above me, our single sail fluttered in the breeze, a tear down the middle. The bottom yard swiveled in the wind. The storm had taken our punting pole and the tomato plant Beatrice had given us, but the rest of our supplies were stored in the hull or tied down under the deck cover.
I cursed and rubbed my face with my palm. We were losing time, I thought. How would we get another boat built when I didn’t even know where we were?
“Oars are still here,” Pearl called to me, her hands on the gunwale, looking down to where the oars were tied tightly to the sides of the boat.
I shielded my eyes from the sun and squinted against the glint of water, peering east. Or what I thought was east. I glanced at the sun and back at the water. How long had the storm gone on? It felt like forever, but it could have been only a half hour. I couldn’t tell how far west we’d been pushed off our usual course, which was always two miles from the coast, straight north or south, tracking the bits of land that hovered above water.
Wreckage from another boat floated about a mile east of us, drifting our way. I squinted and grabbed the binoculars from under the deck cover.
It had been a salvage boat, made from various scavenged materials. A few tires were tied around a base of doors nailed together. A few dozen feet away, the cabin of a truck lay floating on its side, and a bright yellow inflatable raft floated nearby. Plastic bags and bottles were strewn across the surface of the water like trash.
“Grab the net,” I told Pearl. I hoped there was food or water stored in those bags and bottles.
“There’s a man,” Pearl said, pointing to the wreckage.
I peered through the binoculars again, scanning the wreckage. A man clutched the raft of tires and doors, treading water and squeezing his eyes shut against each wave that rolled into his face.
Pearl looked up at me expectantly.
“We don’t know anything about him,” I said, reading her thoughts.
Pearl scoffed. “That doesn’t look like a raider ship.”
“It’s not just raiders we should fear. It’s anyone.”
A nervous buzz spread through my veins. I hadn’t brought anyone else on Bird and I didn’t want to now. Someone sleeping right next to us under the deck cover. Sharing our food, drinking our water.
I glanced at the man and back down at Pearl. She wore the steady expression of already having made a decision.
“We don’t have enough food or water,” I told her.
Pearl knelt under the deck cover and pulled out her snake pot, a clay jar with a bright blue glaze. She lifted the lid and caught a small, thin snake just behind its head, its fangs out, its tongue a flickering red ribbon. She held him up to me and grinned. The snake opened and closed its mouth, biting the air. She squatted on the deck, cut its head off, held it by the tail over the water, and pinched it from tail to neck with her thumb and forefinger, draining its blood into the water.
“We can eat him,” she said.
She never offered her snakes for meals. I turned back toward the wreckage, the man now only half a mile from our boat. I felt in my bones that he would bring us trouble in some way. Every sinew and tendon in me turned and tightened like rope on a pulley.
But I couldn’t tell if the panic was from being lost or taking a stranger onto our boat. The fears mixed like blood in water and I couldn’t separate them. I thought I could get us back to a trading post, but if I miscalculated and it took longer than expected and it didn’t rain—I couldn’t stomach the thought of us drying up like prunes under the sun.
The man was beginning to float away, pulled by a current. Watching him in the water reminded me of how Grandfather would sing “I will make you fishers of men” while he fished the rivers in Nebraska. He’d lean back in the boat, an umbrella propped in the corner to shade him, a pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth, and he’d chuckle to himself as he sang. He always found things both silly and serious. The chorus began repeating in my mind as the man floated farther away, and I felt it as an admonishment. I clenched my jaw in irritation. I had wanted Grandfather to guide me, not haunt me.
“Grab the rope,” I told Pearl.
The man was barely conscious, so I jumped in the water and swam to him. I tied the rope around his torso and swam back to our boat. I climbed back onto Bird and Pearl and I hauled him up, bracing against the gunwale with each pull.
The man carried nothing but a backpack, and when we got him on the deck he sputtered and coughed up water, lying on his side, almost curled in the fetal position. Pearl crouched next to him, peering into his face. His dark hair fell loose and disheveled almost to his shoulders. He had a broad chest, long strong limbs, and skin darkened by the sun. He wore the rough-hewn look of someone accustomed to sailing alone. Despite this, he was handsome, in a still and solemn way, like a photograph of someone from another era. When he opened his eyes and looked at me I was startled by their light gray color.
“Sweetie, grab a water bottle,” I said.
Pearl leapt up and got the water. I leaned forward to dribble a few drops onto his lips, but he jerked away from me.
“It’s water,” I said gently, holding the bottle in front of him to show him. He reached for it and I pulled it away.
“I’m going to give you just a little. We don’t want you throwing up.”
I knelt forward and dribbled a few drops on his lips. He licked the water quickly and looked at me, a pleading expression on his face. I poured more water in his mouth, half the bottle, my stomach clenching as I did so, and I thought about the heat, the water bottles we had left, and the miles to shore.
The man lay back, closing his eyes, leaning against the gunwale. Pearl and I let him doze. Pearl and I caught what we could from his wreckage in our net and sorted it on the deck. Not much of use. A few bottles of water, two spoiled fish, and a bag of dry clothing. We fished spare wood from the water to use for rebuilding the rudder. We tied his raft to the stern of Bird so we could tug it along behind us like a caboose in case we ever needed it.
I brought down the sail and examined the tear. When I finished mending it two hours later, it was uneven and puckered along the tear, but it would last until we got to shore and I could trade for more thread and material.
I walked over and kicked the man’s shoe. He startled awake, his hands out in front of him.
“Almost dusk,” I said. “Can you skin two snakes?”
He nodded.
Pearl brought the bucket of coals over to where the man lay, near the mast step, and poured them in a flat pan, the kind we once used to make birthday cakes. We were lucky it wasn’t windy tonight. When it was windy we’d have to eat raw or dig into our stores of dried meat or flatbread. I sat in front of the pan with a box of kindling, arranging the twigs and leaves on top of the coals. Pearl lit it with her flint stone and knife.
“You didn’t have to. I’m grateful,” the man said. He had a soft, clear voice, like distant bells.
I was trying to decide if we should tie him up while we were sleeping. The uneasy feeling in my gut wouldn’t loosen.
“Can you help me hoist the sail?” I asked.
“Gladly,” he said.
He finished pulling the skins from the snakes and Pearl tossed them on the hot coals. The sun was low on the horizon, casting a gold glow across the water. The sun seemed to go down so much faster since the floods, now that the horizon had risen to meet the sun.
“I’m Daniel, by the way.”
“Myra. Pearl. What’s in your bag?”
“Some of my maps and instruments.”
“Instruments?”
“For navigating and charting. I’m a cartographer.”
He knows how to navigate, I thought.
Pearl scooped a snake off the coals with a long stick and coiled it on the deck in front of her to let it cool. It was blackened and my stomach turned just looking at it. It smelled acrid. Snake meat was as tough as sinew, and I was weary of eating it.
“You remind me of someone I used to know,” Daniel said.
“Oh, yeah?” I poked the snake still on the coals with a stick. What I really wanted to know was what schools of fish swam this far off the coast and whether they could be tracked.
“A woman I lived with for a year in the Sierra Madre. She didn’t trust people, either.”
“What makes you think I don’t trust you?
He rubbed his beard with his palm. “If you got any tenser, your muscles would break your own bones.”
“Should she have trusted people?”
He shrugged. “Maybe some.”
“And now?”
“She passed at the end of that year.”
“I’m sorry.”
Pearl tried a bite of the snake, chewing fiercely, the stench of the meat drifting toward me on the breeze. She laid it straight on the deck and cut it into three even pieces and tossed our two pieces to us.
“Who’d you make maps for?” I asked
“Anyone who wanted them. Fishermen. New government officials.”
“Raiders?”
He sent me a hard look. “No. At least not that I know of.”
“I’d think you’d have a better boat with that kind of work. Maps are more expensive than wood.”
“Let’s just say I’ve had bad luck.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. He was holding something back.
Pearl whimpered and I saw why she’d been so silent during our conversation. She held up her handkerchief and ran her finger along a tear at the edge.
“It ripped,” she said softly. “During the storm.”
“Bring it here,” I said, holding out my hand to her. She crawled to her feet and brought it to me. I examined the tear. “Well, this will be easy to fix since it’s so near the edge. We can fold it like this and take the thread around in a thumb knot and it won’t even fray, it’ll just be stronger.”
Pearl nodded and touched the handkerchief gingerly. “I’m still sleeping with it tonight.” The red handkerchief had been Grandfather’s. When he died we laid it over his face and it almost fluttered away on the breeze as we dropped his body into the sea, but I snatched it from the air. Pearl tugged it from my hand and after that she wouldn’t let go of it, even in her sleep.
“You pay attention to the little things,” Daniel said, watching us. He said it wistfully, like he was remembering something. He looked out at sea and his face was cast in shadow.
The sudden tenderness on his face turned something over in me, like lifting a rock and seeing the life beneath it. My chest went soft with a sudden movement. There was something about him that was beginning to put me at ease. Maybe it was the easy way he looked me in the eye, his frank way of speaking, his lack of charm. Jacob had been charming; he pretended to be simple and transparent while hiding what he actually thought. Daniel seemed like a man who carried guilt willingly and didn’t skitter away from it, who labored under decisions.
I decided he could sleep free tonight, though I’d still sleep with one eye open.
“I have to,” I said.
“No one has to do anything,” he said, looking back out at the sea.
CHAPTER 8 (#ulink_63e22ac6-7bbb-565a-8ffd-0e5bd557cb0d)
DANIEL CALCULATED OUR position and estimated that if we sailed southeast for four days we’d be close to Harjo. Daniel repaired the rudder while Pearl and I fished. After watching the birds and the water for hours, Pearl and I finally attached our net to the downrigger and began trawling for mackerel. We fished for two days before catching anything, our stomachs rumbling through the day and night, and when the rope finally went taut at the downrigger I swallowed sharply to stifle the gasp of relief that rose in my throat.
We spilled a full net of mackerel on the deck, the dark stripes on their backs glinting and shining in the sun. Each was at least eight pounds, and I savored the weight of meat in my hands. I gutted them, one after another, while Pearl set up the smoking tripod.
I still kept an eye on Daniel and tried to keep my defenses up. But I was growing more comfortable with him, as it felt as if he’d already been with us for a long while. We were quiet most of the time, just listening to the wind pull against the sail, or the distant splash of a fish or bird. Just sky and sea for miles and miles, the three of us, alone.
The closer we got to Harjo, the more we sailed over the old world, transitioning from the Pacific into water that now rippled over cities in California. I often sailed this way because I had to stick close to the new coasts, but it always haunted me to sail over cities, over the mass graves they’ve become. So many people died not just during the floods but during the migrations, from exposure and dehydration and starvation. Feet bloodied from trying to climb mountains and outrun the water. Possessions abandoned up the mountainside the way they were along the Oregon Trail.
Some of the cities were so deep below, no one would see them again. Others, which had been built at higher elevations, could be explored with goggles and a strong stomach. Their skyscrapers rose out of the water like metal islands.
I used to dive and spearfish in those underwater cities, but more recently I’d done it only when I was desperate. I didn’t like being in the water for long periods of time; didn’t really like being reminded of how it once was. Once, I was diving and swimming through an old city that’d been nestled on a mountainside in the Rockies. Fish made homes in the wreckage, hiding amid the sea grass and anemone. I dove down into an office building that was missing a roof. A few desks and filing cabinets floated in the room, items around them nearly unrecognizable. Barnacle shells grew on a mug with a photo of a child’s face, some birthday gift you once could get sent to you in the mail.
I swam deeper. A school of angelfish scattered and I speared one. As I turned to go up for air, the coiled rope I wore around my shoulder caught on the broken bottom handle of the file cabinet. I yanked at it, jimmying the cabinet loose from where it stood close to a wall. Out of the shadows, a skull tumbled along the floor toward me, settling a foot away. A flicker of movement from within the mouth. Something living inside it.
I yanked on my rope again to get free and the cabinet fell toward me. I shoved the cabinet to the side so it wouldn’t fall on me and my rope slid from the broken handle. In the space behind where the cabinet had stood, two skeletons lay on their sides, facing each other, as though in an embrace. Like falling asleep with a lover. One skeleton didn’t have a skull, but by the way it was positioned, turned toward the other body, I imagined its head had rested on the other’s chest. Positioned like they were waiting for their fate and chose to hold each other when the end came. Disintegrated clothing fluttered around them. Rocks lay on the floor all around their bodies. My oxygen-deprived brain recoiled before I realized they must have filled their pockets and stuffed their clothes with rocks so they could succumb to the water as it slowly inched upward around them, covering their arms that touched the floor first, a final whisper between them before it covered the arms that held each other. Otherwise the water would have separated them when it came, pulling them apart, floating their bodies before it sank them, miles apart.
I dropped the spear and swam for the surface. I traded for nets at the next post and from then on only dove when the nets came up empty.
I didn’t know how to talk to Pearl about what lay beneath us. Farms that fed the nation. Small houses built on quiet residential streets for the post–World War II baby boom. Moments of history between walls. The whole story of how we moved through time, marking the earth with our needs.
It felt like cruelty to bury the earth, to take it all away. I’d look at Pearl and think of all she wouldn’t know. Museums, fireworks on a summer night, bubble baths. These things were already almost gone by the time Row was born. I hadn’t realized how much I lived to give my child the things I valued. How my own enjoyment of them had grown dull with age.
But other times, when everything was so dark out on the sea that I felt already erased, it seemed like a kindness that life before the floods had gone on for as long as it did. Like a miracle without a name.
BY THE THIRD day Pearl pulled Daniel into her games: hopscotch on deck with a piece of charcoal, naming games for each cloud or strange wave. The next day it rained for most of the afternoon and we sat under the deck cover, telling each other stories. Pearl got Daniel to tell her stories about places he’d been that we’d never heard of. I didn’t know whether any of his stories were true, they seemed so tall, and Pearl never asked if they were true or not.
One morning while I was caulking a crack in the gunnel with hemp, Daniel and Pearl played shuffleboard with caps from plastic bottles. They’d drawn squares on the deck with charcoal and took turns knocking their caps into the squares with sticks.
“Why do you like snakes so much?” he asked Pearl.
“They can eat things bigger than them,” Pearl said.
Daniel’s cap skidded outside the square and Pearl cackled with laughter.
“I’d like to see you do better,” Daniel said.
“You will,” Pearl said, biting her lower lip as she concentrated.
Pearl knocked her cap into the square and cheered, hands raised in the air, jumping in a little circle.
Watching them gave me an unexpected good feeling, a warmth spreading slowly through me. It was like I was seeing a puzzle put back together after it had broken apart.
“Where will you go once we’re in Harjo?” I asked Daniel.
He shrugged. “Maybe stay in Harjo, work for a bit.”
We needed a navigator, I kept thinking. Ever since I’d found out he could navigate I considered asking him to stay with us, to help us get to the Valley. I felt like I could trust him—or was it just that I wanted to trust him because I needed him? Daniel was clearly hiding something. I could tell by the way his expression changed when I asked him questions, like a curtain falling over his face, shutting me out.
Pearl and I had never sailed with anyone else, and I liked being alone. Alone was simple and familiar. I felt sore from this division, one part of me wanting him to stay with us and the other part wanting to part ways with him.
The next morning, Harjo loomed in the distance, the sharp mountain peaks piercing the clouds. Sapling pines and shrubs grew near the water and tents and shacks climbed up the mountainside.
Daniel packed up his navigating instruments, hunched under the deck cover, his compass, plotter, divider, and charts spread out in front of him. I turned from Harjo and as I watched him put each instrument carefully in his bag, my chest grew constricted. Do you actually want to reach Row in time? I asked myself. Even if he taught me to navigate, I couldn’t afford to buy the instruments I needed.
Only a few hours later we reached the coast. Seagulls fed on half-rotted fish on the shore. Pearl ran out among the seagulls, squawking and flapping her arms like wings. They rose up around her like a white cloud and she spun, her feet kicking up sand, the red handkerchief waving out of her pocket. I thought of Row watching the cranes, thought of my father’s feet hanging suspended. I couldn’t just do what I wanted anymore. I turned to Daniel, my chest tight.
“Will you stay with us?” I asked Daniel.
Daniel paused from stacking the tripod wood against the gunwale and looked at me.
“We’re going to a place called the Valley,” I rushed on. “It’s supposed to be a safe place, a new community.” Inwardly, I winced at the lie. I hoped he didn’t already know the Valley was a Lost Abbot colony.
His face softened. “I can’t,” he said gently. “I’m sorry. I don’t travel with other people anymore.”
I tried to hide my disappointment. “Why is that?”
Daniel shook his head and thumbed a piece of charred wood in front of him, the ash snowing on the deck. “It’s complicated.”
“Could you just think about it?”
He shook his head again. “Look, I’m grateful for what you did, but … trust me. You don’t want me with you much longer.”
I turned from him and began loading the smoked mackerel into a bucket.
“I’m going to trade this at the post. We can meet after if you want your share,” I said, my last attempt to be appealing, hoping he’d reconsider.
“That mackerel is all yours. I owe you much more than that,” he said.
Damn right, I thought.
“I’ll carry it to the post for you and be on my way,” he said.
I called to Pearl to follow us into town. We climbed rock steps leading up the mountain slope to where the town lay, wedged between a cluster of mountains.
Harjo hummed with motion and voices. A small river cut down a mountain and fell in a waterfall into the sea. Twice as many buildings had been built in the year since I’d been this far south, with a flour mill half constructed up one side of a mountain and a new log cabin next to it with the word HOTEL in bold letters across the façade. Last year, the town was just beginning to farm basic crops like corn, potatoes, and wheat, and I hoped there’d be grain for a decent price at the trading post.
The trading post was a stone building with two floors. We stood outside of it and Daniel handed me the bucket of mackerel.
“Where will you go?” I asked.
“First? The saloon. Have a drink. Ask the locals about work.” He paused and rubbed his jaw. “I know I owe you my life. I’m sorry I can’t go with you.”
“You could,” I said. “You won’t.”
Daniel gave me a look I couldn’t read—one that seemed both regretful and admonishing. He bent down in front of Pearl and tugged on the handkerchief hanging out of the pocket of her pants.
“Don’t you lose that lucky handkerchief,” he said.
She slapped his hand. “Don’t you steal it!” she said playfully.
His face flinched almost imperceptibly, a slight tightening of the muscles.
“You take care,” he said softly.
Several people exited the post and I stepped out of their way.
“We have to go,” I said.
Daniel nodded and turned away.
He was a stranger. I didn’t know why I felt a twinge of grief while I watched him walk away.
THE CREDIT I had in Harjo would buy me less than I thought. I stood at the counter, biting back irritation, shifting my weight from one leg to another.
A middle-aged woman with deep wrinkles and a pair of eyeglasses with only one lens hobbled around the counter to look into my bucket.
“Last time I was here I was told my credit was equal to about two trees,” I told her.
“Costs have changed, my dear. Fish has gone down, wood has gone up.”
She pointed to a chart on a wall which detailed equations: twenty yards of linen equaled two pounds of grain. It ran down to things as small as buttons and big as ships. She clucked her tongue when she saw the mackerel. “Oh, lovely. You must be an excellent fisher. Not easy to catch this much mackerel ’round these parts. And you were the one last year with the sailfish, right?”
“I want to talk to you about wood—”
“You don’t want to buy or build here, dear. We’re growing by leaps and bounds. The mayor just put a limit on cutting lumber. We hardly have any saplings and there haven’t been any shipments in three weeks. I’d go farther south if I were you.”
My stomach dropped. How much time was it going to take to find wood, much less build a boat? Would Row still be in the Valley by then?
“Do you have a salvage yard?”
“Small one, up past Clarence’s Rookery. Where you sailing, if you don’t mind me asking?” The woman began weighing the mackerel and tossing it in a bin beside the scale, the meat landing with a thud.
“Up north. What was Greenland.” I glanced around the shop and saw Pearl looking at an advertisement pinned to the wall by the front door.
The woman clicked her tongue again. “You won’t get up there in a salvage boat. Sea’s too rough. If you ask me, stick around here. Richards told me they found a half-sunk oil tanker off the coast down south a few miles. Going to try and excavate it and renovate it. You know that’s what I’d love—a nice spacious tanker to spend my last days on.”
I used my credit on linen for a new sail. The woman and I negotiated back and forth over the mackerel, finally settling on trading it for an eight-foot rope, a chicken, two bags of flour, and three jars of sauerkraut and a few Harjo coins. Pearl and I had tried to avoid scurvy by trading fish for fresh fruit in the south, but sometimes a whole bucket of fish would only get us three oranges. Sauerkraut lasted longer and was much cheaper, but you had to find a place where cabbage grew to get it.
I handed Pearl the box of sauerkraut to carry and she said, “You got it.”
“My one bright spot,” I muttered. The little bell attached to the door rang as another customer stepped inside. I smelled stone fruit and my mouth began to water and I turned around to see a man carrying a box of peaches to the counter. The scent clouded my mind with longing.
“We need to tell Daniel about the advertiser.”
I glanced down at her in surprise. I’d been trying to teach her to read in the evenings with the two books we owned—an instruction manual for hair dryers and Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth—but didn’t know if my lessons had really stuck.
The advertisement asked for a surveyor, displaying pictures of a compass, divider, and plotter, with the words EARN MONEY, QUICK!
“You read that?” I asked.
She glared at me. “Of course. Where’s the saloon?”
“It’s pretty far. Besides, I’m sure he’ll run across the advertisement on his own.”
“You’re only pretending like you don’t want to see him again, too!” Pearl said. She jiggled the box, the jars clinking against one another.
I smiled despite my disappointment. She always could disarm me. I never could read her half as well as she read me.
CHAPTER 9 (#ulink_d0c8dc2b-1138-5c74-8c40-9f2d6f163141)
THE SALOON WAS a run-down shack with metal siding and a grass roof. Light filtered through dirty windows made of plastic tarp. In the dark, voices were disembodied, lifting and mixing in the shadows and the rank smell of dirt and sweat.
Upturned buckets and stools and wood crates served as chairs around makeshift tables. A cat lay on the bar, licking its black tail while the bartender dried canning jars with an old pillowcase.
Daniel sat at a table with a younger man who had the look of a runaway teen; disheveled, jaunty, like he could make use of anything and leave anywhere at a minute’s notice. Daniel leaned forward to hear what the younger man was saying, his brow deeply furrowed and his fists clenched on the table. His face was turned toward the door, as if trying to block the commotion of the bar from his view.
Pearl and I were in his eyesight, but he didn’t notice us. Pearl tried to step toward him but I caught her shoulder.
“Wait,” I said. I ordered moonshine at the bar and the bartender placed a teacup of amber liquid in front of me. I pushed a Harjo coin, a penny with an H melted into the copper, across the bar.
When the younger man stopped talking, Daniel leaned back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest, his eyebrows low and heavy over his eyes, his mouth a tight line. The younger man got up to leave and I thought about slipping out after him. I had wanted to see Daniel, to convince him to help us, but we didn’t need to get involved in whatever he was part of.
Pearl leapt toward Daniel before I could catch her. He jumped when he saw her and he forced a smile and tried to level his face into a friendly expression.
“The advertisement even had a picture of your tools,” Pearl was saying, moving her hands in excited circles as she told him.
Daniel smiled at her, that same sad smile he often wore around Pearl.
“I appreciate you coming to tell me,” he said.
Daniel wouldn’t look me in the eye, and I felt tension coming off his body like steady heat.
“Maybe we should go, Pearl,” I said, setting my hands on her shoulders.
An old man from the table next to Daniel’s tottered toward us and laid a gnarled hand on my arm. He smiled widely, showing a mouth with few teeth. He pointed in my face.
“I see things for you,” he said, his voice coming out wheezy, stinking of alcohol and decay.
“Town prophet,” Daniel said, nodding to the old man. “He already told me my future.”
“What was it?” I asked.
“That I’d cheat death twice and then drown.”
“Not bad,” I said.
“You,” the old man pointed in my face again. “A seabird will land on your boat and lay an egg that will hatch a snake.”
I glanced at the old man. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” the old man said, leaning forward, “what it means.”
I felt a blankness in my head, like my thoughts had nothing to connect to. A white fear rippled through me. Why did the prophet talk about snakes and birds? I shook myself inwardly. Snakes and birds were some of the only animals not extinct. He probably brought them up in everyone’s fortunes. But Row and Pearl’s faces rose up in my mind, their lives like tenuous things that could drift away.
“Myra,” Daniel said. He touched my arm and I startled, stepping away from him. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“I know.” I glanced around the dark saloon, the silhouette of heads bent over drinks, bodies slumped toward tables in fatigue. “We should go.”
“Wait—can—can I stay one last night on your boat?” Daniel asked.
I glared at him. “So you don’t have to pay for the hotel?”
He tilted his head. “I’ll help you fish in the morning.”
“I can fish on my own.”
“Mom, stop. You can stay, Daniel,” Pearl said. I glanced at Pearl and she raised her eyebrows at me.
“Who were you talking to?” I asked.
“Just an old friend,” Daniel said. “I’m only asking for one more night. I like being around you two.”
He ruffled Pearl’s hair and she giggled. I regarded him coolly, arms crossed over my chest, wishing I could read his face the way I could read the water.
“But you’re still not coming with us?” I asked.
A pained expression crossed his face. “I shouldn’t.”
He looked down at his hands on the table and I could feel him resisting us. As though there were two magnets in him—one pulling him away and another pulling him closer.
BEFORE SETTLING ON our boat for the night we searched the coast for firewood. The rule in most villages was anything small or damaged, like driftwood, could be claimed by anyone. Anything larger was considered property of the village and needed to be bought. If you were caught taking good wood that could be used for building you could be thrown in prison or even hanged.
The three of us drifted apart across the beach, scanning the sand for driftwood or kindling. I picked up a piece of dirty cloth and pulled up a clump of dried grass and stuffed them in my pockets. Daniel walked toward me, carrying a few sticks and an old paper bag.
“I was thinking, you might want to reconsider your trip,” he said.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Atlantic crossings are rough. Your boat is suited to the Pacific coast. It’ll be expensive to build another one.” Daniel kicked sand off a rock. “News in the saloon earlier was about how the Lily Black has a new captain, who is using biological warfare now. Rabid dogs, smallpox blankets. They start an epidemic, cut a population in half, and then take it over and make it a colony. They’re looking at northern villages.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that,” I muttered and bent to pick up a discarded shoe. I took the shoelace out, stuffed it in my pocket, and tossed the shoe aside.
“I know this Valley place sounds nice, but … is it worth the risk?” Daniel asked.
I looked at him. When he met my eyes I saw he knew I had another reason for going. His question set me on edge. I realized I couldn’t see Pearl anywhere on the beach. “Where’s Pearl?”
Daniel turned and looked over his shoulder. “I thought she was just over thataways.”
I scanned the beach. No sign of anyone, except a couple of people farther down the beach, behind a cluster of rocks. Pins and needles spread down my spine. I had heard of children just disappearing. Parents turning around and them being gone. Kidnapping was a new form of pickpocketing, and seemingly, for those good at it, just as easy.
“Pearl!” I called, trying to stay calm.
“Maybe she went back to the boat?” Daniel asked, in a carefree tone that enraged me.
“Of course she didn’t,” I said, glaring at him. “Pearl!” I screamed.
“Calm down—”
“Don’t tell me to calm down!” I shouted at Daniel. “What do you know about losing a child?”
I took off running, calling Pearl’s name, sand flying off my heels. To my left the mountain rose in a steep rock face and to my right the ocean stretched past the horizon. I leapt over a pile of seaweed and kept running and calling for her. It was eerily quiet on the beach, everything gone still. Even a small boat a mile from the coast seemed anchored, stuck in place as though painted into the landscape.
I stopped running and quickly turned in a circle. There was nowhere she could have gone; it felt like she’d been lifted up into the sky. Panic rose up in my chest. I could hear Daniel’s footsteps behind me, and farther behind him the cries of seagulls.
Pearl crawled out from a crevice in the mountain, a crack at the base only three feet wide, and she held a bundle of driftwood.
“All the wood is in the cave,” she called out to us.
I inhaled sharply. Her small body silhouetted by the darkness behind her, both familiar and strange, someone made from me and separate from me.
I ran to her and pulled her into a hug before pulling her back from me and tilting her chin up to face me.
“You need to stay in sight,” I said.
“I found the wood.”
“Pearl, I’m serious.”
Daniel caught up to us.
“She always overreacts,” Pearl told Daniel as I stepped into the crevice to pick up an armful of wood.
He reached forward and tousled her hair. “No,” he said. “She doesn’t.”
CHAPTER 10 (#ulink_500c77d2-801d-58eb-9c87-eec3c97b0586)
WE LIT A small fire on deck inside the metal lid of a trash can. We grilled half the chicken from our earlier trade and I started making a small loaf of bread. Pearl got two small pans from beneath the deck cover, along with a cup of water from the cistern.
The sun set as the chicken grilled, and I swore I could smell lilacs drifting toward us from land. Daniel and Pearl laughed at me when I told them this. They teased me about wishful thinking. But it was just land—being close to land stirring my memories. Smelling fresh-cut grass or in-season flowers. Expecting the mail at noon. All these memories like a phantom limb. Maybe that was the real reason Pearl and I stayed on the water.
Pearl danced a little jig for Daniel and showed him her two favorite snakes, their thin heads sliding above the rim of her clay jar when she lifted the lid. She pleaded with him to tell her a story. He told her about how he grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and spent hours hiking through the woods as a child and once stumbled upon a moose.
“What is a moose?” Pearl interrupted him.
Daniel looked at me. “Well, they are big …” he started.
“Like a whale?” Pearl asked.
“Uh, maybe a small whale. But they have fur and antlers.”
Pearl frowned in confusion and I could tell she was trying to imagine it but had no reference.
“Think of a really big goat, with really big horns,” I told her before Daniel started his story again.
“Then the moose pulled its ears back and dipped its head low and charged at me,” Daniel made a quick gesture with his hands and Pearl jumped. “It was only twenty feet away and I knew I couldn’t outrun it. So I raised my arms and yelled at it.”
Pearl giggled. “What did you yell?”
“Get away from me, you beast! Be off! Go away!” Daniel mimed waving his arms and yelling. “It was pretty ridiculous, but it worked. I pretended to be bigger.”
The firelight flickered across their faces, sending a warm glow over every surface. I kneaded the flour and water on the back of the pan, listening to them. It was good for Pearl, being around another person, I thought.
“Are there any moose now?” Pearl asked.
I shook my head. “They’re all gone.”
“Maybe there are a few somewhere,” Pearl said.
“Maybe,” Daniel said.
We ate the chicken and I baked the bread in two pans, one pan on top of the other to make a small oven. After it got dark, Pearl curled under the deck cover and Daniel and I sat in the moonlight, the fire dying to embers, our voices flickering on the wind.
“The reason you won’t travel with anyone anymore,” I said. “Is it that woman you told me about?”
“A little. And because it gets too complicated when other people get involved.”
I tilted my head and he sighed.
“My mom and I lived alone during the Six Year Flood. She was diabetic. When the water started coming I loaded up on insulin, traveling to the local hospitals that weren’t already ransacked or flooded. Got quite a bit. But most of it got stolen before we took to the water. We headed west and did okay for a while, but she died two years later of DKA.”
I remembered what I’d yelled at him on the beach and I looked down at the deck and scratched the wood with a fingernail, a cloud of shame building up in my chest.
“It was difficult …” Daniel paused and glanced out at sea. The moonlight caught the top of the water’s ripples, carving silver scythes into the black surface. “Knowing the end was coming for her … knowing I couldn’t do anything, no insulin left to be found. We tried adjusting her diet.” He let out a hoarse sound as though he were clearing his throat. “That was impossible with so little food left. Everyone grabbing at what was left.”
I remembered those days, the rush of excitement when you found a box of cereal in an empty cabinet in a neighbor’s house. And the way your heart dropped when you grabbed it, only to find it weightless, the contents already taken by someone else.
People raided gas stations and shops. And they filled other buildings to the brim. Schools, libraries, abandoned factories. So many people sleeping in rows, on their way somewhere else they hadn’t decided yet. Most of them kind and frightened. But some not, so you stayed at home most of the time.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured, and when I looked up at him the pain on his face hollowed my stomach.
Daniel raised his shoulders up to his ears. “It’s happened to everyone, hasn’t it?”
I nodded and felt an odd stirring in my bones. I held his gaze and felt like I was losing control, like I was floating in a sea so salty it held me up.
I remembered that we hadn’t just scavenged for food; we also taught ourselves to grow it. Row and I started a vegetable patch in the front yard where the sun was strongest. She once stood in that garden, holding a radish she’d pulled, a pleased grin on her face, sunlight bright on her face. Even in the upheaval there were incandescent moments like that—moments I’d spend the rest of my life reaching for.
“I’m not going to the Valley just because it sounds nice,” I said, surprising myself. “That’s where my daughter is. My other daughter.”
If Daniel was surprised, he didn’t show it. His stoic expression stayed unchanged as I told him about Jacob taking Row from me, about how I hadn’t heard of them for years until just a few weeks ago, and now Row was held in a colony in the Valley and I had to try to save her. To get her out before they moved her to a breeding ship and my chance was closed forever.
“I know the risk,” I said, my voice faltering. I glanced at Pearl under the deck cover. “I know. I just … I just have to try.” I shrugged and looked away, then looked back at him, his eyes locked on me, his face shadowed. “The thought of not trying feels like suddenly not having bones in my body. My body goes loose and empty.” I shook my head and brushed a palm over my face.
“I’ll come with,” he said, his voice barely audible above the lapping waves against the boat.
“What?”
“I’ll help you get there.”
“That isn’t why I told you,” I said. But I wasn’t so sure. A part of me had known it was my last card to play. Or maybe I wanted some human connection in a vast dark sea. I couldn’t sort it out. “Why are you changing your mind?”
Daniel looked away and reached forward for a stick and stirred the coals.
“I think we can help each other,” he said. “I—I’ve been lonely. Besides, it would be good to go northeast. I haven’t been that way before.”
The uneasy feeling I had in the saloon returned to me; it drowned out the relief I’d felt when he’d changed his mind. I shifted my weight, leaning to the side, one arm under me. Why was he changing his mind? I couldn’t believe it was just because he wanted to help me find Row. I tried to push the uneasiness away. You’ve always had trouble trusting people, I reminded myself.
When I glanced back at Daniel his eyes were closed, his head leaned back against the gunwale. He looked innocent, and I didn’t believe that, either.
CHAPTER 11 (#ulink_9d278e97-122c-5d12-9749-86d02c554567)
AFTER I LOST Row, before I gave birth to Pearl, I wished I wasn’t having another child. Part of me wanted Pearl more than anything and the other part felt I couldn’t meet her, couldn’t look into her face. It all felt too fragile.
I couldn’t regret my children, but I also couldn’t be free from them, from the way they had opened me up, left me exposed. I had never felt as vulnerable as I had after birth, nor as strong. It was a greater vulnerability than I ever felt facing death, which only felt like a blank expanse, not like free-falling, which was how I felt every day trying to care for Pearl in this world.
What was most different about mothering Pearl compared to Row wasn’t that I was on water with Pearl and on land with Row. It was that I was all alone with Pearl after Grandfather passed. With Row, I worried about her falling down the stairs as we played in the attic. With Pearl, I worried about her falling from the side of the boat while I hooked bait. But it was only with Pearl that no one else was there to help keep an eye on her. Paying such close attention turned my mind inside out, flayed my nerves.
When Pearl was a baby I carried her in a sling almost every moment, even when we slept. But when she was a toddler I had a harder time keeping a handle on her. During storms, I’d tie her to me with a rope to make sure she didn’t get swept away. I trained her to stay near me at ports and taught her to swim.
Pearl had to do everything early: swimming, drinking goat’s milk, potty training, helping me work the fishing lines. She learned to swim at eighteen months but didn’t learn to walk properly until she was three. Instead of walking, she scuttled about Bird like a crab. Her childhood was the kind I’d read about in frontier stories, the children who knew how to milk a cow at six or how to shoot a rifle at nine.
At first this made me pity her in a different way than I’d pitied Row. But then I realized that being born later, after we were already on water, could be a gift. As a young child she could swim better than I ever would, with an instinctive knowledge of the waves.
So having Daniel on board made me feel like I could breathe again. I noticed he kept an eye on her the way I would, keeping her in his peripheral vision, one ear attuned to her movements. Daniel, Pearl, and I kept sailing south. At night, we’d all sleep under the deck cover, the wind whistling above us, the waves rocking the boat like a cradle. I slept on my side with Pearl tucked against my chest, and Daniel lay on the other side of me. One night, he rested his hand tentatively on my waist, and when I didn’t move he reached his arm around the two of us, his arm heavy and comforting, grounding us.
Sometimes, on nights that peaceful, I’d imagine us three going on like that, forgetting about the Valley, making a quiet, simple life on the sea. I began to look forward to the moments when Daniel was close to me, both of us standing near the tiller or huddling under the deck cover during a rainstorm. We could be silently working on mending a rope, our heads bent above the fraying fibers, our hands swiftly weaving, and I’d feel a serenity at his body being near mine.
But I’d remember Row, tugging her blankie behind her on our wood floor, her head cocked to one side, her expression a mix of curiosity and mischief. Or how she’d push the coffee table against the window and sit on it with her perfectly straight posture, watching the birds. Naming them by their colors: red birdie, black birdie. I’d feel her as though she were beside me. A warm tide rose and flooded my veins, pulling me toward the Valley as if I had no choice at all.
I PICKED SARDINES and squid from one of the nets I’d fished with that morning and dumped them in our live bait jar, a large ceramic canister that once was used to hold flour in a kitchen. We kept the jar tied down next to the cistern and only filled it with live bait when we could spare the meat.
I kept scanning the horizon as we approached the mountaintops of Central America. When we were about fifteen miles from the closest coast we signaled to a merchant ship by waving our flag, a blue square of fabric with a fish in the middle. The ship’s own flag billowed in the wind, purple with a brown spiral that looked like a snail shell.
People had communicated by flags before Grandfather and I took to the water. Sailors said that the Lily Black had been the first to raise a flag, using it to identify the different ships within their tribe, and later, to invite another ship to surrender before an attack.
So Grandfather and I made a fisherman’s flag by cutting a fish out of a white T-shirt and sewing it onto a blue pillowcase. As soon as Pearl was a toddler I taught her the three different kinds of flags, because I needed her to be my second set of eyes on the sea, to alert me to who could be approaching us if I was busy fishing. So she learned how some flags were a plain color: white to communicate distress, black to indicate disease, orange to refuse a request. Others told what kind of ship you were: a merchant ship, fishing boat, or breeding ship. And the last kind were the tribal flags, flags with symbols on them to show the identity of a new community, like a family crest.
Though the Lily Black were the first to set up this communication, they were also the first to subvert it. Now it was rumored that the Lily Black liked to sail under false flags to get closer to an enemy and to raise their own flag right before an attack.
So as we approached the merchant ship, I kept my eyes on their flag, my hands on the gunwale, fearing they’d take it down and replace it with a raider tribal flag.
“I think you can relax,” Daniel said. “You can’t stay in a permanent state of hypervigilance.”
“I’ve always avoided this part of the Pacific because I’ve heard raiders have a stronghold here.”
“I thought you avoided this area because you can’t navigate?” Daniel grinned at me and brushed my arm with the back of his hand.
I suppressed a grin and glanced at him, the wind tossing my hair in my face. “After the trade, we should troll and head a bit farther east for sailfish.”
Daniel looked out at sea. “How can you tell?”
I pointed to frigate birds flying low and diving into the water a few miles east. Grandfather had taught me to watch the birds. “I also saw schools of tuna and mackerel. The water is warm here. Sailfish can get you eighty pounds of meat. It’s worth going off course.”
“Okay. We’ve just got to be careful, sailing so close to the coast without aiming to dock.”
I knew he was concerned about the mountains just under the surface of the water and the boat running aground, shredding the hull. Sometimes you could see shadows darkening the water where the mountains rose up to meet the sky, and when you sailed over them, you could look down and see the rocky peaks like ancient faces floating in the deep, looking back up at you. The ocean churned above them, its currents eddying among the rocks, coral springing up anew, new sea creatures adapting and forming in the dark.
I wouldn’t be here for whatever new things would grow out of this new world; I’d be ash before they sprouted fully formed. But I wondered about them, wondering what Pearl would live to see and hoping they’d be good things.
We pulled alongside the merchant ship and traded our fish for a few yards of cotton, thread, charcoal, and goat’s milk. When I asked them about wood, they told us we needed to go even farther south to get good prices. A knot twisted in my stomach. We couldn’t lose even more time by sailing farther off course.
When we parted ways with the merchant ship, it sailed northeast toward a small port on the coast and Daniel adjusted our tiller so we’d turn southeast, toward where I thought there might be sailfish. Pearl played with a snake on deck as I repaired crab pots, weaving wire between the broken slats of metal. There was always something to be fixed. The rudder, the sail, the hull, the deck, the tackle and bait. Everything always breaking and me barely able to keep up, time slipping through my fingers all the while.
We sailed toward the diving birds. Pearl and I trolled with brightly colored lures made of ribbons and hooks. The water ran clear and the wind breathed easy, one of those lovely sailing days that made me feel like I was flying. I caught sight of a sailfish near the surface, its sail cutting the water like a shark’s fin, and I dropped a line with live squid on the hook.
I let the line drift, occasionally moving it, watching the water and waiting, careful to bait the sailfish and not follow it. It took two hours before the sailfish bit and jerked me against the gunwale. My knuckles whitened as it almost tugged me into the sea.
Daniel leapt forward to steady me. “You okay?” he asked as he helped me screw the pole into the rod holder on the gunwale.
I nodded. “We can’t lose this one.”
It swam with astonishing speed, its sail cutting the surface of the water, and our boat lurched toward it when it reached the end of the line. It gave a powerful run, swimming in a semicircle at the end of the line, then fighting the line, diving into the air, sending a spray of water around it.
No coast lay in sight; the world was so flat and blue, your eyes could get tired of it. It was disorienting—this much space. Like a person needed something to dwarf them. Even the clouds were as thin as gauze.
A shark circled our boat, swimming closer and then farther away. At first I thought the shark was tracking the movements of a school of mackerel under us, but then I realized it was hunting our sailfish.
“We should try to reel it in quick,” I told Daniel.
“I thought you said it’s better to let them wear out before you reel them in? How are we going to handle this thing?”
I put on my leather gloves. “You and Pearl reel him in. I’ll catch him by the sword. Once I’ve got him, you help me lift him out of the water by grabbing his sail and under his torso.”
The pole that held the sailfish had been a titanium fence post before Grandfather fashioned it into a fishing pole. It didn’t bend or break against the sailfish’s weight, but the rod holder on the gunwale creaked and screeched, threatening to rip lose.
Daniel cranked the reel, straining with each pull, sweat gathering at his temples. The sailfish kept fighting, lunging into the air and whipping its body around. Water sprayed our faces. Its body slammed against the boat as it fought. I blinked away the salt caught in my eyes and lost sight of the shark.
When the sailfish was close enough to grab, I leaned over the gunwale and reached for it. It jerked on the line, its head pulled from the water, the hook glistening in its mouth.
I grabbed its sword and it almost slipped out of my hands, slick as an icicle. The sulfuric scent of coral and seaweed drifted around us. We must be close to mountaintops, I thought fleetingly.
Daniel locked the reel in place and leaned over the gunwale to grab the sail. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the shark reappear. It bumped the hull and we rocked slightly.
Dread gathered like bile at the base of my throat. The shark dove deeper into the water, its shape cloudy and then invisible in the depths. The sailfish’s eyes darted to and fro. Its gills fluttered and its scales tremored, spinning sunlight in a kaleidoscope. Even it seemed to have a fresh wave of fear roll over it.
It opened its eyes wide and ripped its sword from my hands in a violent lurch and dropped back into the water with a splash.
“Dammit,” Daniel muttered, reaching into the water to grab the sail.
“Daniel, don’t!” I said.
The shark pierced the water, mouth open, catching Daniel’s forearm in its teeth and shaking its head in a violent toss before dropping back into the water. Daniel screamed, falling forward toward the water.
CHAPTER 12 (#ulink_7078afc6-556f-5687-bfe7-218bd5c30a8f)
I CAUGHT THE back of Daniel’s shirt, braced against the gunwale, and yanked him hard. We both stumbled backward and fell to the deck. Blood streamed from his arm, running along the cracks between the wood.
“Pearl! Grab the fabric!” I shouted.
I couldn’t see the wound past the blood. Skin and tendons hung from his arm. Had he severed an artery? Was the bone crushed?
Pearl ran to the deck cover and returned with the fabric I’d gotten in Harjo. I pressed it against his arm.
“It’s going to be okay,” I told him, my own blood pulsing in my ears. “We just need to stop the bleeding.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. His face was pale and his breath came in quick shallow bursts.
“Pearl, hold this here and apply pressure,” I said. She held the fabric against the wound as I took off my belt and hooked it around his upper arm, above his elbow. I cut a new hole in the leather with my knife, tightened the belt, and fastened it in place.
I leaned back on my heels to get a better look at him and laid my hand on his shoulder. “Breathe,” I said. “Try to stay calm.”
The sound of wood on rock filled the air, a rumble growing into a dull roar. The boat rocked abruptly, knocking me to my side.
Daniel’s eyes flew open. “Mountain. Mountain!” he said frantically.
I leapt up, ran to the stern, and looked over the gunwale. The tops of mountains glimmered just below the surface, pocked with crevices and peaks, small blooms of coral sprouting in the shadows. We were running aground on mountaintops.
I turned the tiller, yanking the rudder as far to the right as it would go, and felt the boat start to shift. A strong wind caught the sail and we surged forward. Beyond the bow, several peaks protruded a few feet above the water. We needed to turn farther to the right, and faster.
“The sail!” I called to Pearl, but she was already at the block, working the rope through. I joined her, pulling the rope, fumbling to release a knot.
Pearl’s hands shook and tears streamed down her face. “We’re going to be in the water,” she cried.
“We’re going to be okay,” I told her.
I dropped the knot, pulled my knife from its sheath, and cut the rope, releasing the sail so it let out, bearing us away from the wind.
But it was too late. The rocky tip of a mountain stood a foot above the water’s surface and was only twenty feet in front of us. I grabbed Pearl and pulled her close.
Bird tilted to the left as we ran over the mountain, water sloshing over the deck and Daniel rolling toward the gunwale. Pearl and I tumbled against the mast and clung to it. The boat slid over the mountain, the sound of cracking wood thundering around us.
The hull hit the water again with a thud and Bird almost leveled. I ran to Daniel, pulling him up beneath his armpits and propping him against the gunwale. He clutched his arm against his chest and gritted his teeth. Bird started to lean to the right. We were taking on water. I stood up and scanned the horizon, hoping to see land, but found none.
“Pearl, grab the bucket and a torch,” I said.
I opened the latch door in the deck and peered into the cavity between the hull and deck. Interlaced boards blocked my view, but I could hear the rush of water. Pearl handed me the torch, a branch with a piece of fabric wrapped around one end and a plastic bag over it to keep it dry. I ripped the plastic bag off the end and Pearl struck her flint stone against it.
I jumped through the hole, my feet hitting water when I landed. The flame only illuminated a foot around me, casting deep shadows between the interlaced boards. To the right I saw the hole, near the bottom right of the hull. The water inside was already two feet high. We could sink in an hour or less.
I pulled myself out of the hole and grabbed a bucket from Pearl. She’d already tied a string to the handle, and I dropped it into the hole and pulled it up, water dripping and sloshing over the rim.
“Pearl, while I haul water, you pack food and Daniel’s instruments into our bags. And bottle some of the water from the cistern.”
“It won’t all fit.”
“Don’t take the flour then.”
“Okay,” Pearl said. She turned and disappeared beneath the deck cover, dragging out bags and tossing them on the deck in front of her.
I dropped the bucket again and again, my arms and back beginning to ache.
“Shit,” I muttered. I wasn’t buying us any time. I tossed the water over the side of the boat, and it caught the light in a bright curve, sparkling like crystal. I squeezed my eyes shut and reopened them. Bird, I thought, thinking of Grandfather’s hands as he made her, his callused palms running over the wood.
I WATCHED BIRD sink as I clung to Daniel’s raft. Daniel and Pearl sat on top of the raft, clutching the sides so they wouldn’t be knocked off with each wave. There was only room for two without it sinking; I put Pearl on so she’d be safe and Daniel on so he’d stop pissing me off by bleeding into the water. We each wore a backpack stuffed with supplies.
Bird pitched to the side and seemed to hold steady as the water filled her. I felt that the water was filling me, its weight inescapable. But then a gurgling sound came from Bird, water pulling her down, and she disappeared from sight like a coin dropped in a wishing well. I sucked in air. Bird was the last thing tying me to my mother and grandfather, and without her I felt suspended, cut loose from them. I stifled a sob and clutched the raft more tightly.
I held my knife in my other hand, scanning the water for the shark.
“It will wait till we tire,” Daniel said, watching me, concern softening his voice.
I glared at him. You’ll tire first, I thought, half tempted to pull him into the water if I saw the shark again. “I told you not to reach for the sailfish,” I snapped.
“I told you we should’ve stayed on course and gone straight to port,” he snapped back. “Navigating this close to the coastline is impossible.”
A small strangled sound came from Pearl, a sob caught in her throat. She hadn’t stopped shaking since the first collision.
I reached my hand up to grasp her white knuckles. “Pearl, sweetie. We’re going to be okay.”
“I don’t want you in the water. The shark,” she cried.
“I’ve got my knife,” I said, holding the blade up so it glinted in the sun. I forced a smile and squeezed her hand. “We’ll be fine.”
Pearl’s tears fell on my hand over hers. A wave splashed in my face and I swallowed salt water and felt rage unfurl inside me. I cursed myself. I never should have let him on board.
All my tackle and bait, most of the food stores, the fresh water in the cistern. All sunk, drifting to the seafloor. Even if we made it to land, I’d have nothing to trade for food or new fishing supplies.
“Myra, I see something,” Daniel said.
“Shut up.”
“Myra—”
“I said shut up,” I said, clutching my knife tighter.
“It’s a ship,” he said, reaching into a bag for the binoculars.
“Give them to me.”
I peered through the binoculars, scanning the horizon until I landed on a ship. It was larger than a fishing boat, about the size of a merchant vessel. I squinted through the binoculars, searching for a flag.
“I don’t know who they are,” I said. Strangely, they seemed to be sailing straight toward us, though I was doubtful they could see us yet. They seemed almost three miles from us, and we were such a small speck in the vast sea. I doubted they could see us unless they were searching for us.
I gnawed on my lip, already dry from salt and sun. I gazed toward the ship, only able to see a small shadow on the horizon without the binoculars. The ship could save us or condemn us to a worse fate than taking our chances on the open sea.
“You should wave them down,” Daniel said, reaching into the backpack for our white flag.
“We don’t know who they are,” I repeated. “I’d rather face my chances on the open sea than chained in the hull of a raider ship.”
“It’s worth the risk,” Daniel said.
I glared at him. Worth the risk for him, I thought. He wouldn’t survive on the open sea long, but Pearl and I might. At least for a few days, and if the currents were right, maybe we’d make it to the coast.
He seemed to read my thoughts. “You two won’t make it long. We’re still several miles from the coast. This isn’t well-traveled territory; someone else won’t come along.”
I glanced back at the ship. I remembered talking with my mother up in the attic, sitting on the top step, as Grandfather had fitted Bird’s joints. We talked about the latest reports we’d heard, how far the water had come, what buildings in town to avoid. Jacob was gone, meeting up with some of his new friends I didn’t know. Row carried a pail of water past us and set it next to the others, clustered around the perimeter of the attic. The city water had been shut off the week before and we were collecting rainwater in all our buckets and bowls. Row knelt in front of the bucket and leaned forward, grinning into her reflection.
“Hi,” she said to herself and giggled.
Grandfather had smiled at her and patted the side of Bird. “She’ll be a good boat to start out in,” he’d said.
I was surprised when he said this—I never imagined we’d leave Bird, not after it’d taken so much work to build. I was so young, I wasn’t accustomed to loss and impermanence the way Grandfather was. I hadn’t known how to expect it or accept it.
My heartbeat quickened and I tried to breathe deeply. No choice but to move forward, I told myself.
“Hand me the fishing wire,” I said. I pulled my torso up on the raft and treaded water. I pierced the fishing wire through the fabric, tying it around the oar to make a flag.
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Kassandra montag
An unforgettable, inventive, and riveting epic saga with the literary force and evocative imagination of Station Eleven, Zone One, and The Road, that signals the arrival of an extraordinary new talent.After years of slowly overtaking the continent, starting with the great coastal cities, rising floodwaters have left America an archipelago of mountaintop colonies surrounded by a deep expanse of open water. Civilization as it once was is gone. Bands of pirates roam the waters, in search of goods and women to breed. Some join together to create a new kind of society, while others sail alone, barely surviving.Myra and her precocious and feisty eight-year-old daughter, Pearl, fish from their small boat, the Bird, visiting small hamlets and towns on dry land only to trade for supplies and information. Just before Pearl’s birth, when the monstrous deluge overtook their home in Nebraska, Maya’s oldest daughter, Row, was stolen by her father.For eight years Myra has searched for the girl that she knows, in her bones and her heart, still lives. In a violent confrontation with a stranger, Myra discovers that Row was last seen in a far-off encampment of raiders on the coast of what used to be Greenland. Throwing aside her usual caution, she and Pearl embark on a perilous voyage into the icy northern seas to rescue the girl, now thirteen.On the journey, Myra and Pearl join forces with a larger ship, a band of Americans like them. In a desperate act of deceit and manipulation, Myra convinces the crew to sail north. Though she hides her true motivations, Myra finds herself bonding with her fellow seekers, men, women, and children who hope to build a safe haven together in this dangerous new world.But secrets, lust, and betrayals threaten to capsize their dream, and after their fortunes take a shocking – and blood – turn, Myra can no longer ignore the question of whether saving Row is worth endangering Pearl and her fellow travelers.A compulsively readable novel of dark despair and soaring hope, After the Flood is a magnificent, action-packed, and sometimes frightening odyssey laced with wonder – an affecting and wholly original saga both redemptive and astonishing.
Copyright (#u4cdbe80a-f0ef-54df-82c3-c18f582b06b7)
The Borough Press
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Kassandra Montag 2019
Cover illustration © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)
Cover design by Ellie Game © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Kassandra Montag asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008319557
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2019 ISBN: 9780008319571
Version: 2019-06-07
Dedication (#u4cdbe80a-f0ef-54df-82c3-c18f582b06b7)
For Andrew
Epigraph (#u4cdbe80a-f0ef-54df-82c3-c18f582b06b7)
Only what is entirely lost demands to be endlessly named: there is a mania to call the lost thing until it returns.
—Günter Grass
Contents
Cover (#u3ad65ae5-d3f6-54c4-b53c-6b49498e1ed0)
Title Page (#udbd1386c-3e36-55fc-a952-2f51fa1408f1)
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Map
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Acknowledgments
About the Author
About the Publisher
Map (#u4cdbe80a-f0ef-54df-82c3-c18f582b06b7)
PROLOGUE (#u4cdbe80a-f0ef-54df-82c3-c18f582b06b7)
CHILDREN THINK WE make them, but we don’t. They exist somewhere else, before us, before time. They come into the world and make us. They make us by breaking us first.
This was what I learned the day everything changed. I stood upstairs folding laundry, my back aching from Pearl’s weight. I held Pearl inside my body, the way a great whale swallows a man into the safety of his belly, waiting to spit him out. She rolled over in ways a fish never would; breathed through my blood, burrowed against bone.
The floodwater around our house stood five feet high, covering roads and lawns, fences and mailboxes. Nebraska had flooded only days before, water coming across the prairie in a single wave, returning the state to the inland sea it once was, the world now an archipelago of mountains and an expanse of water. Moments earlier, when I’d leaned out the open window, my reflection in the floodwater had returned dirty and marred, like I’d been stretched and then ripped into indiscriminate shreds.
I folded a shirt and screams startled me wide eyed. The voice was a blade, slipping metal between my joints. Row, my five-year-old daughter, must have known what was going on because she screamed, “No, no, no! Not without Mommy!”
I dropped the laundry and ran to the window. A small motorboat idled in the water outside our house. My husband, Jacob, swam to the boat, one arm paddling, the other clamping Row against his side as she struggled against him. He tried to hoist her onto the boat, but she elbowed him in the face. A man stood in the boat, leaning over the gunwale to pick her up. Row wore a too-small plaid jacket and jeans. Her pendant necklace swung like a pendulum across her chest as she struggled against Jacob. She thrashed and twisted like a caught fish, sending a spray of water into his face.
I opened the window and yelled, “Jacob, what are you doing?!”
He wouldn’t look at me or respond. Row saw me in the window and screamed for me, her feet kicking at the man who held her under the armpits, lifting her over the side of the boat.
I pounded the wall next to the window and yelled out to them again. Jacob pulled himself over the side of the boat as the man held Row. The panic in my fingertips turned to a buzzing fire. My body shook as I folded myself through the window and leapt into the water below.
My feet hit the ground beneath the water and I rolled to the side, trying to lighten my impact. When I surfaced, I saw Jacob had winced; the pained, tightened expression still on his face. He was now holding Row, who kicked and screamed, “Mommy! Mommy!”
I swam toward the boat, pushing aside debris that littered the water’s surface. A tin can, an old newspaper, a dead cat. The engine roared to life and the boat spun around, spraying me in the face with a wave of water. Jacob held Row back as she reached for me, her tiny arm taut, her fingers scratching the air.
I kept paddling as Row receded into the distance. I could hear her screams even after I could no longer see her small face, her mouth a dark circle, her hair standing on end, blowing in the wind that came off the water.
CHAPTER 1 (#u4cdbe80a-f0ef-54df-82c3-c18f582b06b7)
Seven Years Later
SEAGULLS CIRCLED OVER our boat, which made me think of Row. The way she squawked and waved her arms when she was first trying to walk; the way she stood completely still for almost an hour, watching the sandhill cranes, when I took her to the Platte to see their migration. She always seemed birdlike herself, with her thin bones and nervous, observant eyes, always scanning the horizon, ready to burst into flight.
Our boat was anchored off a rocky coast of what used to be British Columbia, just outside a small cove up ahead, where water filled a small basin between two mountaintops. We still called oceans by their former names, but it was really one giant ocean now, littered with pieces of land like crumbs fallen from the sky.
Dawn had just lightened the horizon and Pearl folded the bedding under the deck cover. She had been born there seven years earlier, during a storm with flashes of lightning white as pain.
I dropped bait in the crab pots and Pearl came out from under the deck cover, a headless snake in one hand, her knife in the other. Several snakes were woven around her wrists like bracelets.
“We’ll need to eat that tonight,” I said.
She sent me a sharp glance. Pearl looked nothing like her sister had, not thin boned or dark haired. Row had taken after me with her dark hair and gray eyes, but Pearl resembled her father with her curly auburn hair and the freckles across her nose. Sometimes I thought she even stood the way he did, solidly and sturdily, both feet planted on the ground, chin up slightly, hair always messed, arms a little back, chest up, as though exposing herself to the world with no fear or apprehension.
I had searched for Row and Jacob for six years. After they were gone, Grandfather and I took to the water on Bird, the boat he’d built, and Pearl was born soon after. Without Grandfather with me that first year, Pearl and I never would have made it. He fished while I fed Pearl, gathered information from everyone we passed, and taught me to sail.
His mother had built kayaks like her ancestors, and he remembered watching her shape the wood like a rib cage, holding people the way a mother held a child within her, sheltering them to shore. His father was a fisher, so Grandfather had spent his childhood on the Alaskan coastal seas. During the Hundred Year Flood, Grandfather had migrated inland with thousands of others, finally settling in Nebraska, where he worked as a carpenter for years. But he always missed the sea.
Grandfather searched for Jacob and Row when I didn’t have the heart to. Some days, I followed languidly behind him, tending to Pearl. At each village, he’d check the boats in the harbor for any sign of them. He’d show photographs of them at every saloon and trading post. On the open sea he’d ask every fisher we passed if they’d seen Row and Jacob.
But Grandfather had died when Pearl was still a baby, and suddenly the enormous task swelled up before me. Desperation clung to me like a second skin. In those early days, I would strap Pearl to my chest with an old scarf, wrapping her snugly against me. And I’d follow the same route he had taken: scouting the harbor, asking the locals, showing photographs to people. For a while it gave me vigor; something to do beyond survival, something that meant more to me than reeling in another fish to our small boat. Something that gave me hope and promised wholeness.
A year ago, Pearl and I had landed in a small village tucked in the northern Rockies. The storefronts were broken down, the roads dusty and littered with trash. It was one of the more crowded villages I’d been to. People hurried up and down the main road, which was filled with stalls and merchants. We passed one stall heavy-laden with scavenged goods that had been carried up the mountain before the flood. Milk cartons filled with gasoline and kerosene, jewelry to be melted and made into something else, a wheelbarrow, canned food, fishing poles, and bins of clothing.
The stall next to it sold items that had been made or found after the flood: plants and seeds, clay pots, candles, a wood bucket, bottles of alcohol from the local distillery, knives made by a blacksmith. They also sold packets of herbs with sprawling advertisements: WHITE WILLOW BARK FOR FEVER! ALOE VERA FOR BURNS!
Some goods had the corroded appearance of having been underwater. Merchants paid people to dive into old houses for items that hadn’t yet been scavenged before the floods and hadn’t rotted since. A screwdriver with a glaze of rust, a pillow stained yellow and heavy with mold.
The stall across from these held only small bottles of expired medications and boxes of ammunition. A woman with a machine gun guarded each side of the stall.
I had packed all the fish I’d caught in a satchel slung over my shoulder, and I hung on to the strap as we walked up the main road toward the trading post. I held Pearl’s hand with my other hand. Her red hair was so dry it was beginning to break off at the scalp. And her skin was scaly and light brown, not from sun, but from the early stages of scurvy. I needed to trade for fruit for her and better fishing supplies for me.
At the trading post I emptied my fish on the counter and the shopkeeper and I bartered. The shopkeeper was a stout woman with black hair and no bottom teeth. We went back and forth, settling on my seven fish for an orange, thread, fishing wire, and flatbread. After I packed my goods in my bag I laid out the photos of Row before the shopkeeper, asking if she’d seen her.
The woman paused, staring at the photo. Then she slowly shook her head.
“Are you sure?” I asked, convinced her pause meant she’d seen Row.
“No girl looks like this here,” the woman announced in a thick accent, and turned back to packaging my fish.
Pearl and I made our way down the main road toward the harbor. I’d check the ships, I told myself. This village was so crowded, Row could be here and the shopkeeper could have never seen her. Pearl and I walked hand in hand, pulling away from the merchants as they reached out to us from their stalls, their voices trailing behind us, “Fresh lemons! Chicken eggs! Plywood half off!”
Up ahead of me, I saw a girl with long dark hair, wearing a blue dress.
I stopped in my tracks and stared. The blue dress was Row’s: it had the same paisley pattern, a ruffle at the hem, and bell sleeves. The world flattened, the air gone suddenly thin. A man at my elbow was nagging me to buy his bread, but his voice came as though from a distance. A giddy lightness filled me as I watched the girl.
I rushed toward her, running down the path, knocking over a cart of fruit, pulling Pearl behind me. The ocean at the bottom of the harbor looked crystal blue, suddenly clean-looking and fresh.
I grabbed the girl’s shoulder and spun her around. “Row!” I said, ready to see her face again and pull her into my arms.
A different face glared at me.
“Don’t touch me,” the girl muttered, jerking her shoulder from my grasp.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, stepping back.
The girl scurried away from me, glancing over her shoulder at me anxiously.
I stood in the bustling road, dust swirling around me. Pearl turned her head toward my hip and coughed.
It’s someone else, I told myself, trying to adjust to this new reality. Disappointment crowded me but I pushed it back. You’ll still find her. It’s okay, you’ll find her, I chanted to myself.
Someone shoved me hard, ripping my satchel from my shoulder. Pearl fell to the ground and I stumbled to the side, catching myself against a stall with scavenged tires.
“Hey!” I yelled at the woman, now darting down the main road and behind a booth with bolts of fabric. I ran after her, leaping over a small cart filled with baby chicks, dodging an elderly man with a cane.
I ran and spun in circles, looking for the woman. People moved past me as though nothing had happened, the swirl of bodies and voices making me nauseous. I kept looking for what felt like ages, the sunlight dimming around me, casting long shadows on the ground. I ran and spun until I nearly collapsed, stopping close to where it had happened. I looked up the road at Pearl, who stood where she’d fallen, next to the stall with tires.
She didn’t see me between the people and stalls, and her eyes moved anxiously over the crowd, her chin quivering, holding her arm like it’d been hurt in the fall. This whole time she’d been waiting, looking abandoned, hoping I’d return. The fruit in my satchel that I’d gotten for her had been the one thing I was proud of that day. The one thing I could cling to as evidence that I was doing okay by her.
Watching her, I felt gutted and finished. If I’d been more alert, not so distracted, the thief never would have ripped it from my shoulder so easily. I used to be so guarded and aware. Now I was worn down with grief, my hope for finding Row more madness than optimism.
Slowly it dawned on me: the reason the blue dress was so familiar, the reason it had grabbed my gut like a hook. Yes, Row had that same dress, but it wasn’t one Jacob had packed and taken with them when he took her from me. Because I found that dress in her bedroom dresser after she was gone and I slept with it for days afterward, burying my face in her smell, worrying the fabric between my fingers. It had stayed in my memory because it had been left behind, not because she could be somewhere out there wearing it. Besides, I realized, she would be much older now, too large for that dress. She had grown. I knew this, but she remained frozen in my mind as a five-year-old with large eyes and a high-pitched giggle. Even if I ran across her, would I recognize her immediately as my own?
It was too much, I decided. The constant drain of disappointment every time I reached a trading post and found no answers, no signs of her. If Pearl and I were going to make it in this world, I needed to focus on only us. To shut everything and everyone else out.
So we’d stopped looking for Row and Jacob. Pearl sometimes asked me why we’d stopped and I told her the truth: I couldn’t anymore. I felt they were somehow still alive, yet I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t been able to hear about them in the small communities that were left, tucked high in the mountainsides, surrounded by water.
Now we were drifting, spending our days with no destination. Each day was the same, spooling into the next like a river running into the ocean. Every night I lay awake, listening to Pearl breathe, the steady rhythm of her body. I knew she was my anchor. Every day I feared a raider ship would target us, or fish wouldn’t fill our nets and we’d starve. Nightmares engulfed me and my hand would shoot out for Pearl in the night, rattling both of us awake. All these fears lined up with a little hope wedged in the cracks in between.
I closed the crab pots and dropped them over the side, letting them sink sixty feet. As I surveyed the coast, an odd, fearful feeling, a tiny bubble of alarm, rose in me. The shore was marshland, filled with dark grass and shrubs, and trees grew a little farther back from the shore, crowding up the mountainside. Trees now grew above the old tree line, mostly saplings of poplar, willow, and maple. A small bay lay around the shore’s bend, where traders sometimes anchored or raiders lay in wait. I should have taken the time to scope out the bay and make sure the island was deserted. There was never any quick escape on land the way there was on water. I steeled myself to it; we needed to look for water on land. We wouldn’t last another day otherwise.
Pearl followed my eyes as I gazed at the coast.
“This looks like the same coast with those people,” Pearl said, needling me.
She’d been going on for days about raiders we saw robbing a boat in the distance. We’d sailed away, and I was weary, heart heavy, as the wind pulled us out of sight. Pearl was upset we hadn’t tried to help them, and I tried to remind her it was important we keep to ourselves. But under my rationalizations, I feared that my heart had shrunk as the water rose around me—panic filling me as water covered the earth—panic pushing out anything else, whittling my heart to a hard, small shape I couldn’t recognize.
“How were we going to attack an entire raider ship?” I asked. “No one survives that.”
“You didn’t even try. You don’t even care!”
I shook my head at her. “I care more than you know. There isn’t always room to care more.” I’ve been all used up, I wanted to say. Maybe it was good I hadn’t found Row. Maybe I didn’t want to know what I’d do to be with her again.
Pearl didn’t respond, so I said, “Everyone is on their own now.”
“I don’t like you,” she said, sitting down with her back to me.
“You don’t have to,” I snapped. I squeezed my eyes shut and pinched the bone between my eyebrows.
I sat down next to her, but she kept her face turned from me.
“Did you have your dreams again last night?” I tried to keep my voice kind and soft, but an edge still crept in.
She nodded, squeezing the blood from the snake’s tail down to the hole where its head had been.
“I’m not going to let that happen to us. We’re staying together. Always,” I said. I stroked her hair back from her face and a shadow of a smile crossed her lips.
I stood up and checked the cistern. Almost empty. Water all around but none to drink. My head ached from dehydration and the edges of my vision were beginning to blur. Most days, it was humid; it rained almost every other day, but we were in a dry spell. We’d need to find mountain streams and boil water. I filled Pearl’s water skin with the last of the fresh water and handed it to her.
She stopped playing with her headless snake and weighed the water in her hand. “You gave me all the water,” she said.
“I already drank some,” I lied.
Pearl stared at me, seeing right through me. There was never any hiding from her, not like I could hide from myself.
I fastened my knife in my belt and Pearl and I swam to shore with our buckets for clam digging. I was worried it would be too wet for clams, and we both stumbled along the marsh until we found a drier spot to the south, where the sun fell warm and steady. Little holes peppered the mud plain. We began digging with driftwood, but after a few minutes Pearl tossed her driftwood to the side.
“We won’t find anything,” she complained.
“Fine,” I snapped. My limbs were heavy with fatigue. “Then go up the mountainside and see if you can find a stream. Look for willows.”
“I know what to look for.” She spun on her heel and awkwardly tried to run up the mountainside. The poor thing was still trying to account for the motion of the sea, and she set her feet down too firmly, swaying from side to side.
I kept digging, pulling the mud in piles around me. I hit a shell and tossed the clam in my bucket. Above the wind and waves, I thought I heard voices coming from around the bend in the mountain. I sat back on my heels, alert, listening. A tension settled along my spine and I strained to hear, but there was nothing. I always thought I sensed things on land that weren’t there—hearing a song where there was no music, seeing Grandfather when he was already dead. As though being on land returned me to the past and all the things the past had carried.
I leaned forward and dug my hands into the mud. Tossed another shell into my bucket with a clink. I’d just found another clam when a small, sharp scream pierced the air. I froze, looking up, scanning the landscape for Pearl.
CHAPTER 2 (#u4cdbe80a-f0ef-54df-82c3-c18f582b06b7)
SEVERAL YARDS UP the mountainside, in front of shrubs and a steep rock face, a wiry man held Pearl, her back against his front, a knife at her throat. Pearl was still, her eyes quiet and dark, her arms at her sides, not able to reach the knife at her ankle.
The man had a desperate, off-kilter look on his face. I stood up slowly, my heart pounding in my ears.
“Come with me,” he called out. He had a strange accent I couldn’t place, clipped and heavy on the consonants.
“Okay,” I said, my hands up to show I wasn’t going to try anything, walking toward them.
When I reached them he said, “You move and she goes.”
I nodded.
“I’ve got a ship,” he said. “You’ll work it. Drop your knife on the ground.”
Panic rose up in me as I unfastened my knife and tossed it toward him. He sheathed it at his waist and grinned at me. Holes showed where teeth should be. His skin was tanned to a red brown and his hair grew in sandy patches. A tattoo of a tiger spread across his shoulder. Raiders tattooed their members, often with an animal, though I couldn’t remember which crew used the tiger.
“Don’tcha worry. I’ll care for ya. It’s up thataway.”
I followed the man and Pearl along the side of the mountain, winding our way toward the cove. Rough grass scratched my ankles and I stumbled over a few rocks. The man lowered the knife from Pearl’s neck but kept his hand on her shoulder. I wanted to reach forward and snatch her out of his grasp, but his knife would be at her throat again before I pulled her away. Quick flashes of how things could go ran through my mind—him deciding he only wanted one of us or there being too many people to fight once we reached his ship.
The man started chatting about his people’s colony up north. I wanted him to shut up so I could think straight. A canteen hung from the man’s shoulder and swung back and forth at his hip. I could hear liquid sloshing inside and my thirst rose above even my fear as my parched mouth ached for water, my fingers itching to reach it and unscrew the cap.
“It’s important we have new nations now. Important for …” The man cast his hand out in front of him, as if he could pluck a word from the air. “Organizing.” The man nodded, clearly pleased. “That’s how it was always done, back in the beginning, when we were still in caves. People aren’t organized, we’d all be snuffed out.”
There were other tribes who were trying to make new nations by sailing from land to land, setting up military bases on islands and ports, attacking others and making colonies. Most of them began as a ship that took over other ships, and eventually they began trying to take over communities on land.
The man looked over his shoulder at me and I nodded dumbly, wide eyed, deferential. We were half a mile from our boat. As we approached the bend along the mountainside, the ground dropped away at our side and we walked along a steep rock face. I thought about grabbing Pearl and leaping from the cliff to the water and swimming to our boat, but it was too far in this choppy water. And I couldn’t know if we’d have a clean fall into the water or if there were rocks below.
The man had shifted to talking about his people’s breeding ships. Women were expected to produce a child every year or so, to grow the raider crews. They waited until a girl bled before they moved her to a breeding ship. Until then, she was held captive in a colony.
I’d passed breeding ships when I was fishing, recognized them by their flag of a red circle on white. A flag that warned boats not to approach. Since illness spread so quickly on land, the raiders reasoned the babies would be safer on ships, which they often were. Except when a contagion broke out on a ship and almost everyone died, leaving a ghost ship, unmoored until it crashed against a mountain and drifted to the bottom of the sea.
“I know what you’re thinking,” the man continued. “But the Lost Abbots—we, we do things the right way. Can’t build a nation without people, without taxes, without having people to enforce those taxes. That’s what gives us the chance to organize.
“This yer girl?” the man asked me.
I startled and shook my head. “Found her on a coast a few years back.” He wouldn’t be so keen on separating us if he didn’t think we were family.
The man nodded. “Sure. Sure. They come in handy.”
The wind changed as we began to make our way around the mountain, and voices from the cove now reached us, a clamoring of people working on a ship.
“You look like a girl I know, back at one of our colonies,” the man said to me.
I was barely listening. If I lunged forward, I could reach his right arm, pull it behind his back, and reach for my knife in his sheath.
He reached out and touched Pearl’s hair. My stomach clenched. A gold chain with a pendant hung from his wrist. The pendant was dark snakewood, with the engraving of a crane on it. Row’s necklace. The necklace Grandfather had carved for her the summer we’d gone to see the cranes. It was colorless except the drop of red paint he’d placed between the crane’s eyes and beak.
I stopped walking. “Where’d you get that?” I asked. Blood surged in my ears and my body thrummed like a hummingbird’s wings.
He looked down at his wrist. “That girl. One I was telling you about. Such a sweet girl. I’m surprised she’s made it this long. Doesn’t seem to have it in her …” He gestured with his knife toward the cove. “Don’t have all day.”
I lunged at him and swiped his right leg with my foot. He tripped and I smashed my elbow down on his chest, knocking the air from him. I stomped on the hand holding the knife, grabbed it, and held it to his chest.
“Where is she?” I asked, my voice all breath, barely above a whisper.
“Mom—” Pearl said.
“Turn away,” I said. “Where is she?” I pushed the knife farther between his ribs, the tip digging into skin and membrane. He gritted his teeth, sweat gathering at his temples.
“Valley,” he panted. “The Valley.” His eyes darted toward the cove.
“And her father?”
Confusion furrowed the man’s brow. “She had no father with her. Must be dead.”
“When was this? When did you see her?”
The man squeezed his eyes shut. “I dunno. A month ago? We came here straight after.”
“Is she still there?”
“Still there when I left. Not old enough yet—” He winced and tried to catch his breath.
He almost said not old enough for the breeding ship yet.
“Did you hurt her?”
Even now, a pleased look crossed his face, a sheen over his eyes. “She didn’t complain much,” he said.
I drove the knife straight in, the hilt to his skin, and pulled it up to gut him like a fish.
CHAPTER 3 (#u4cdbe80a-f0ef-54df-82c3-c18f582b06b7)
PEARL AND I stole the man’s canteen and shoved his body over the side of the cliff. As we ran back to the boat I kept thinking of his crew in the cove, wondering how soon they would start searching for him. There was enough wind, I thought, to push us south quickly. Once Bird got behind another mountain it’d be hard to track us.
When we got back to the boat I raised the anchor, Pearl adjusted the sails, and we surged forward, the coast behind us growing smaller, but I still couldn’t breathe steadily. I hid from Pearl under the deck shelter, my whole body shaking, not unlike how the man’s body shook when he died. I’d been in fights before, tense moments with weapons out, but I hadn’t killed. Killing that man was like stepping through a door to another world. It felt like a place I’d already been to but had forgotten, hadn’t wanted to remember. It didn’t make me feel powerful; it made me feel more alone.
We sailed south for three days until we reached Apple Falls, a small trading port nestled on a mountain that had been in British Columbia. The water in the canteen lasted us only a day, but late on the second day it rained a small bit, just enough that we weren’t ill with thirst by the time we reached Apple Falls. I dropped the anchor over the side and glanced at Pearl. She stood at the bow, staring at Apple Falls.
“I didn’t want you to see that,” I said to Pearl, watching her closely. Pearl hadn’t spoken to me much since.
Pearl shrugged.
“He was going to hurt us. You don’t think I should have done it? You think he was a good person?” I asked.
“I just didn’t like it. I didn’t like any of it,” she said, her voice small. She paused, as if thinking, then said, “Desperate people.” She looked at me a little too intently. I always said to her, when she asked me why people were cruel, that desperate people did desperate things.
“Yes,” I said.
“Will we try to find her now?”
“Yes,” I said, the word out of my mouth before I knew I’d already decided it. A response beyond reason. Just the image in my mind of Row in danger and me moving toward her, with no choice, only one direction to move, the way rain falls from the sky and does not return to the heavens.
Though I was surprised to realize this, Pearl showed no shock. She merely looked at me and said, “Will Row like me?”
I walked to her, squatted, and wrapped my arms around her. Her hair smelled like brine and ginger and I buried my face in it, her body as tender and vulnerable as the night I birthed her.
“I’m sure of it,” I said.
“Are we going to be okay?” Pearl asked.
“We’re going to be fine.”
“You said everyone is alone. I don’t want to be alone,” Pearl said.
My chest tightened and I pulled her close to me again. “You won’t ever be alone,” I promised. I kissed the top of her head. “We better count these,” I said, gesturing to the buckets of fish laid out on the deck.
Row is alone out there, I kept thinking, weighing each dead fish in my palm, one part of me asking how much it was worth, the other part imagining her alone on some coast. Did Jacob die? Did he abandon her? My hands shook with cold rage at this thought. He abandons people; that’s what he does.
But he wouldn’t do that to her, I argued with myself, feeling myself being pulled back into the hatred that had kept me awake at night for years after he left. I’d been blinded by love and now, I knew, I was blinded by hate. I had to focus. To remember Row and forget him.
The last three days we’d sailed, a part of me thought of Row incessantly. I had the sense that my entire body was plotting how to reach her, while my consciousness focused on tightening the rope at the block or reeling in fishing line, the small daily tasks that grounded me. There was both a low thrum of panic and shock at discovering she was alive, and a strange animal tranquility as I moved about the boat as if it were simply another day. It was what I’d dreamed of and hoped for and also what I’d feared. Because her being alive meant I had to go after her, had to risk everything. What kind of mother abandons her child in her hour of need? And yet, wouldn’t taking Pearl on this journey be a kind of abandonment of her? An abandonment of the peaceful life we’d fought to build together?
Pearl and I loaded the salmon and halibut into four baskets. We had gutted and smoked the salmon already on our boat, but the halibut was fresh from this morning, which could give us bargaining power.
Apple Falls was aptly named—apple trees had been planted in a clearing between the peaks of two mountains. Thieves were shot by the guards of the orchard, who had watchtowers on each mountain. I was hoping we’d be able to trade for at least half a basket of apples, plus some grain and seed. At our last trading post we had only three baskets of fish and could barely trade for the rope, oil, and flour we needed. We needed to trade for some vegetable seeds so I could grow a few more vegetables on board. Right now we only had a half-dead tomato plant. Beatrice, my old friend at Apple Falls, would give me a better deal for my fish than at any other port.
Water rippled against the mountainside and the bank rose in a steep incline up the mountain, with a small peat ledge for a dock. A wooden boardwalk, half submerged, had been cobbled together over the years.
We docked our boat and paid the harbor fees with a crate of metal scraps I had found while hunting the shallows. Bird was one of the smallest boats in the harbor, but it was sturdily built. Grandfather had designed the boat to be simple and easy to maneuver. One square mast, a rudder, a punting pole, and oars on each side. A deck cover made from old rugs and plastic tarp where we slept at night. He’d made it from the trees in our yard back in Nebraska at the beginning of the Six Year Flood, when we knew that fleeing was our only chance to survive.
Water had already covered the coasts around the world by the time I was born. Many countries had been cut to half their size. Migrants fled inland, and suddenly Nebraska became a bustling, crowded place. But no one knew the worst was yet to come—the great flood that lasted six years, water rising higher than anyone could imagine, whole countries becoming seafloors, each city a new Atlantis.
Before the Six Year Flood, earthquakes erupted and tsunamis struck constantly. The ground itself seemed heavy with energy. I’d hold out my hand and feel the heat in the air like the pulse of an invisible animal. On the radio we heard rumors that the seafloor had split, water from within the earth seeping into the ocean. But we never knew for certain what happened, only that the water rose around us as if to swallow us up in a watery grave.
People called the years the coasts disappeared the Hundred Year Flood. The Hundred Year Flood didn’t last exactly a hundred years, because no one knew for sure exactly when it began. Unlike a war it had no call to arms, no date by which we could remember its beginning. But it lasted close to a hundred years, a little longer than a person’s lifetime, because my grandfather always said that when his mother was born New Orleans existed and when she died it did not.
What followed the Hundred Year Flood was a series of migrations and riots over resources. My mother would tell me stories of how the great cities fell, when electricity and the Internet faltered on and off. People would show up on doorsteps at homes in Indiana, Iowa, Colorado, clinging to their belongings, wide eyed and weary, asking to be let in.
Near the end of the Hundred Year Flood, the government moved inland, but its reach was limited. I was seventeen when I heard over the radio that the president had been assassinated. But then a month later, a migrant passing through said he’d fled to the Rockies. And then later, we heard a military coup had taken over a session of Congress and members of the government had fled after that. Communication was breaking down by that point, the whole world reduced to a rumor, and I stopped listening.
I was nineteen when the Six Year Flood began and had just met Jacob. I remember standing next to him watching footage of the White House flood, only the flag on the roof visible above the water, each wave soaking the flag until it lay sagging against the pole. I imagined the interior of the White House, so many faces staring out of its paintings, water trickling down hallways into all its chambers, sometimes loud and sometimes quiet.
The last time my mother and I watched television together it was the second year of the Six Year Flood and I was pregnant with Row. We saw footage of a man lying on an inflatable raft, balancing a whiskey bottle on his tummy, grinning up at the sky, as he floated past a skyscraper, trash swirling around him. There were as many ways to react as people, she always said.
This included my father, who was the one to teach me what the floods meant. The blinking on and off of communication was familiar to me, the crowds of people at soup kitchens normal. But when I was six I came home early from school with a headache. The garden shed door was open and through the opening I saw only his torso and legs. I stepped closer, looked up, and saw his face. He’d hung himself from a rafter with a rope.
I remember screaming and backing away. Every cell in me was a small shard of glass; even breathing hurt. I ran inside and looked for my mother, but she wasn’t home from work. Cell towers were down that month, so I sat on the front stoop and waited for my mother to come home. I tried to think of how to tell her but words kept wincing away from me, my mind recoiling from reality. Many days, I still feel like that child on the stoop, waiting and waiting, my mind empty as a bowl scooped clean.
After my mother had gotten home, we found a mostly empty bag of groceries on the table with a note from my father: “The shelves were bare. Sorry.”
I thought when I had my own children I’d understand him more, understand the despair he felt. But I didn’t. I hated him even more.
PEARL TUGGED ON my hand, pointing to a cart of apples sitting just past the dock.
I nodded. “We should be able to get a couple,” I said.
The village was a clamoring, crowded throng of people and Pearl stuck close to me. We slung the baskets of fish on two long poles so we could carry them on our shoulders and we started up the long winding path between the two mountains.
I felt relief at being on land again. But as the crowd closed around me, I felt a new kind of panic, different from anything I felt when I was alone on the waves. An out-of-control sensation. Being the foreigner, the one who had to relearn the ever-changing rules of each trading post.
Pearl wasn’t ambivalent like I was, hovering between relief and panic. She hated being on land, the only benefit being that she could hunt snakes. Even as a baby she hated being on land, refusing to fall asleep when we camped on the shores at night. Sometimes she got nauseous on land and went out for a swim to calm her nerves while we were at a port.
The land was filled with stumps of cut trees and a thick ground cover of grasses and shrubs. People seemed to be crawling over one another on the path, an old man bumping into two young men carrying a canoe, a woman pushing her children in front of her. Everyone’s clothes were dirty and torn and the smell of so many people living close together made me dizzy. Most people I saw in ports were older than Pearl, and Apple Falls was no different. Infant mortality was high again. People would talk on the streets about our possible extinction, about the measures needed to rebuild.
Someone knocked one of Pearl’s baskets to the ground and I cursed them and quickly scooped up the fish. We passed the main trading post and saloon and cut across the outdoor market, smells of cabbage and fresh-cut fruit lingering in the air. Shacks littered the outskirts of town as we traveled farther up the path, toward Beatrice’s tent. The shacks were cobbled together with wood planks or metal scraps or stones stacked together like bricks. In the dirt yard of one shack, a small boy sat cleaning fish, a collar around his neck, attached to a leash that was tied around a metal pole.
The boy looked back at me. Small bruises bloomed like dark flowers on his back. A woman came and stood in the doorway of the shack, arms crossed over her chest, staring back at me. I looked away and hurried on.
Beatrice’s tent stood on the southern edge of the mountain, hidden by a few redwoods. Beatrice had told me she guarded her trees against thieves with her shotgun, sometimes awakening at night to the sound of an ax on wood. But she only had four shotgun shells left, she had confided in me.
Pearl and I squatted and slid the poles from our shoulders. “Beatrice?” I called out.
It was silent for a moment and I worried it was no longer her tent, that she was gone.
“Beatrice?”
She poked her head through the tent opening and smiled. She still wore her long gray hair in a braid down her back and her face had deeper creases, a sun-etched rough texture.
She sprang forward and grabbed Pearl in a hug. “I was wondering when I’d see you again,” she said. Her eyes darted between Pearl and me, taking us in. I knew she feared there’d come a day when we didn’t return to trade, just as I feared there’d come a day when I’d come to trade and her tent would be taken over by someone else, her name a mere memory.
She hugged me and then pulled me back by my shoulders and eyed me. “What?” she asked. “Something’s different.”
“I know where she is, Beatrice. And I need your help.”
CHAPTER 4 (#u4cdbe80a-f0ef-54df-82c3-c18f582b06b7)
BEATRICE’S TENT WAS the most comfortable place I’d been in the past seven years, since Grandfather and I took to the water. An oriental rug lay over the grass floor, a coffee table sat in the middle of the tent, and off to the side several quilts were piled on top of a cot. Baskets and buckets of odds and ends—twine, coils of rope, apples, empty plastic bottles—were scattered around the periphery of the tent.
Beatrice scurried around her tent like a beetle, wiry and nimble. She wore a long gray tunic, loose pants, and sandals. “Trade first, talk later.” She set a tin cup of water in my hands.
“So what do you have?” she asked. She peered into our baskets. “Just fish? Myra.”
“Not just salmon,” I said. “There are some halibut. Nice big ones. You’ll get a big fillet off this one.” I pointed to the largest halibut that I had positioned on top of a basket.
“No driftwood, no metal, no fur—”
“Where am I supposed to get fur?”
“You said your boat was fifteen feet long. You could keep a goat or two. It’d be good for milk, and later fur.”
“Livestock at sea is a nightmare. They never live long. Not long enough to breed, so it’s hardly worth it,” I said. But I let her scold me because I knew she needed to. A maternal itch, the pleasure of scolding and soothing.
Beatrice bent down and sorted through the fish. “You could tan leather on a ship easily. All that sun.”
We finally agreed to trade all my fish for a second tomato plant, a few meters of cotton, a new knife, and two small bags of wheat germ. It was a better trade than I expected and only possible because Beatrice was overly generous with Pearl and me. She and my grandfather had become friends years before, and after he passed away, Beatrice became more and more generous with her trades. It made me feel both guilty and grateful. Though I was known in many of the trading posts as a reliable fisher, Pearl and I still barely scraped by with our trades.
Beatrice gestured to the coffee table and Pearl and I sat on the ground while Beatrice stepped outside to light a fire and get started on supper. We ate salmon I had brought, with boiled potatoes and cabbage and apples. As soon as Pearl was finished eating she curled up in a corner of the tent and fell asleep, leaving Beatrice and me to talk quietly as the night grew darker.
Beatrice poured me a cup of tea, something minty and herbal, with leaves floating on the surface. I got the impression she was gathering her strength.
“So where is she?” Beatrice asked finally.
“A place called the Valley. Have you heard of it?”
Beatrice nodded. “I’ve only traded with people from there once. It’s a small settlement—maybe a few hundred people. People who make it there don’t normally make it back. Too isolated. Rough seas.” She gave me a long look.
“Where is it?”
“How’d you get this information? Can you trust it?” she asked.
“I found out from a raider with the Lost Abbots. I don’t think he was lying. He’d already told me most of the information before …”
I paused, suddenly uncomfortable. A flicker of understanding crossed over Beatrice’s face.
“Was he your first?”
I nodded. “He captured Pearl and me.”
“Those fighting lessons have paid off,” she said, though she sounded more sad than satisfied. Grandfather taught me to sail and fish, but Beatrice had taught me to fight. After Grandfather passed away, Beatrice and I would practice under the trees around her tent, a few paces apart, me mimicking the motions of her hands and feet. Her father had taught her to fight with knives back during the early migrations and she wasn’t gentle with me during our lessons, tripping me up with a heel, yanking my arm behind my back until it nearly snapped.
The tea steamed before me and I warmed my hand around the cup. I felt my body try to steady me with stillness, but a cascade still fell within me, as if inwardly I were scattering to pieces.
“Can you help me?” I asked. “Do you have maps?” I knew she had maps—she could charge wood and land for the maps she had, which was also why she had to sleep with a shotgun at night. I’d never heard of the Valley, but I hadn’t heard of many places.
When Beatrice didn’t say anything, I said, “You don’t want me to go.”
“Have you learned to navigate?” she asked.
Since I couldn’t navigate, I only sailed between trading posts along the Pacific coast, which I knew well from sailing with Grandfather.
“Beatrice, she’s in danger,” I said. “If the Lost Abbots are there, the Valley is a colony now. Do you know how old she is? Almost thirteen. They’ll be transitioning her to a breeding ship any day now.”
“Surely Jacob is protecting her. He may pay extra taxes to keep her off the ship.”
“The raider said she had no father with her,” I said.
Beatrice looked at Pearl, curled into a ball, sleeping on her side, her face serene. One of her snakes lifted its head from the pocket of her trousers and slid over her leg.
“And Pearl? What of her?” Beatrice asked. “What if you go on this journey only to lose her, too?”
I stood up and stepped out of the tent. The night had grown cold. I sank my face in my hands and wanted to wail, but I bit my lips together and squeezed my eyes so hard they hurt.
Beatrice came out and set her hand on my shoulder.
“If I don’t try—” I started. The sound of bats’ wings beat the air above us as they cut across the moon in fluttering black shapes. “She’s alone, Beatrice. This is my one chance to save her. Once they get her on a breeding ship, I won’t find her again.”
What I didn’t tell her was that I couldn’t be my father. Couldn’t leave her on a stoop somewhere when she needed me.
“I know,” she said. “I know. Come back inside.”
I hadn’t come to Beatrice only because she would help me, but because she was the only person who could understand. Who knew my whole story, going all the way back to the beginning. No other living person besides Beatrice knew how I met Jacob when I was nineteen and didn’t even know the Six Year Flood had begun. He was a migrant from Connecticut, and on the day I met him I was drying apple slices in the sunlight on our front porch. It was over a hundred degrees every day that summer, so we dried fruit on the porch and canned the rest that we harvested. I’d cut twenty apples into thin slices, lining them on every floorboard along the porch, before stepping inside to check the preserves over the fire. In the mornings I worked for a farmer to the east, but in the afternoons I was home, helping my mother around the house. She worked as a nurse only occasionally by that point, doing home visits or treating people in makeshift clinics, trading her care and knowledge for food.
When I came back out a row of the apple slices was gone and a man stood frozen, bent over the porch, one hand on a slice, the other hand holding open a bag that hung from his shoulder.
He turned and ran and I dashed across the porch after him. Sweat trickled down my back and my lungs burned, but I caught up to him and tackled him, both of us sprawling across the neighbor’s lawn. I wrestled the bag from him and he almost didn’t resist, his arms up to protect his face.
“I thought you’d be fast, but you’re even faster,” he said, panting.
“Get away from me,” I muttered, standing up.
“Can’t I have my bag back?”
“No,” I said, turning on my heel.
Jacob sighed and looked to the side with a mildly dejected look. I had the feeling he was accustomed to defeat and stomached it quite well. Later that night I wondered why I’d chased a stranger and not been more afraid, when usually I took pains to avoid strangers and feared an attack. Somehow, I realized, I’d known he wouldn’t hurt me.
He slept in a neighbor’s abandoned shed that night and waved to me in the morning. While I was weeding the front garden he watched me. I liked him watching me, liked the slow burn it gave me.
A few days later, he brought a beaver he’d trapped at the nearby river and laid it at my feet.
“Fair?” he asked.
I nodded. After that he’d sit and talk to me while I worked and I grew to like the rhythm of his stories, the curious way they always ended, with a note of exasperation mixed with delight.
Catastrophe drove us together. I don’t know that we would have fallen in love without that perfect mix of boredom and terror, terror that bordered on excitement and quickly became erotic. His mouth on my neck, my skin already moist with sweat, the ground wet beneath us, the heat in the air making rain every few hours, the sun drying it away. My heart already beating faster than it should, nerves calmed only by enflaming them more.
The only photo we got at our wedding came from an instant-print camera my mother borrowed from a former patient. We were standing in the sunlight on our front porch, my belly already round with Row, squinting so much you couldn’t see our eyes. And that’s how I remember those days: the heat and light. The heat never left, but the sunlight dimmed so quickly during each storm that you felt you stood in a room where some god kept turning a light on and off.
Beatrice ushered me back into the tent. She walked over to her desk, wedged between the cot and a shelf of pots. She rummaged through some papers and took out a rolled map that she spread out across the table in front of me. I knew the map wouldn’t be completely accurate; no accurate maps existed yet, but some sailors had attempted to chart the major landmasses that now existed above water.
Beatrice pointed to a landmass in the upper middle of the map. “This was Greenland. The Valley is in this southeast corner.” Beatrice pointed to a small hollow surrounded by cliffs and sea on both sides. “Icebergs” was written across the seas surrounding the small land mass. No wonder I hadn’t been able to find Row after years of looking; I hadn’t wanted to consider she could be so far away.
“It’s protected by the elements and raiders because of these cliffs, so I’m surprised the Lost Abbots made it a colony. Traders from the Valley said it was safer than other land because it’s so isolated. But it’s hard to get to. This”—she pointed to the Labrador Sea—“is Raider’s Aisle.”
I’d heard of Raider’s Aisle. A stormy section of dark seas where raiders lurked, often taking advantage of damaged ships or lost sailors to plunder their goods. When I passed through ports I’d barely listened to the tales, always assuming I’d never have to go near it.
“The Lily Black keep several of their ships in Raider’s Aisle,” Beatrice said. “News is they’re moving a few more ships up north.”
The Lily Black was the largest raider crew, with a fleet of at least twelve ships, maybe more. Ships made from old tankers fitted with new sails or small boats rowed by slaves. A rabbit tattoo marked their necks, and trading posts buzzed with rumors of other communities they’d attacked and the taxes they’d extracted from their colonies, working the civilians almost to death.
“And,” Beatrice went on, “you’ll have to deal with the Lost Abbots.”
“But if the Valley is already a colony, the Lost Abbots will only have left a few men behind to guard it. I can get Row out and we can leave—sail somewhere else before they return.”
Beatrice raised her eyebrows. “You think you can take them alone?”
I rubbed my temple. “Maybe I can sneak in and out.”
“How do you plan to get there?” she asked.
I dropped my forehead into my palm, my elbow resting on the table, the steam from the tea warming my face. “I’ll pay you for the map,” I said, so tired my body ached for the ground.
She rolled her eyes and pushed it toward me. “You don’t have the boat for this journey. You don’t have the resources. And what if she’s not still there?” Beatrice asked.
“I have some credit in Harjo I can use for wood to build a new boat. I’ll try to learn navigation—I’ll trade for the tools.”
“A new boat will cost a fortune. You’ll go into debt. And a crew?”
I shook my head. “We’ll sail it ourselves.”
Beatrice sighed and shook her head. “Myra.”
Pearl stirred in her sleep. Beatrice and I glanced at her and each other. Beatrice’s eyes were tender and sad, and when she reached out and grasped my hand, the veins in her hands were as bright blue as the sea.
CHAPTER 5 (#u4cdbe80a-f0ef-54df-82c3-c18f582b06b7)
THE NEXT MORNING Beatrice and I sat in the grass outside her tent, making lures with thread she’d scavenged in an abandoned shack up the mountainside. I knotted the bright red thread around a hook, listening to Beatrice tell me about how things were before the old coasts disappeared. Born in San Francisco, she was a child when it flooded and her family fled inland. Sometimes when she talked, I could tell she was trying hard to remember how things were when she was young, before all the migrations started, but that she couldn’t really. Her stories felt like stories about a place that never really existed.
The neighbors to her right, who lived in a one-room sod house dug out from the side of the mountain, were bickering, their voices rising and railing against one another. Beatrice told me about the Lost Abbots and how they began. They were a Latin American tribe, mostly people from the Caribbean and Central and South America. They began as many raider tribes began: as a private military group employed by governments during the Six Year Flood, when civil wars continued to destroy countries. After all known countries fell, they developed into a kind of sailing settlement, a tribe trying to build a new nation.
“Just last week, Pearl and I saw a small boat taken over by raiders north of here,” I said. “It was a fishing family. I heard their screams and—” I squinted hard at my lure and bit the thread to cut it. “We sailed away.” I had felt a heaviness in my gut when I placed my hand on the tiller, turning us south, away from their screams. I felt hemmed in and trapped on the open sea, left with few choices.
“I didn’t feel bad,” I confessed to Beatrice. “I mean, I did. But not as much as I used to.” I wanted to go on and say: It’s like I’ve gone dull inside. Every surface of me is hardened and rubbed raw. Nothing left to feel.
At first Beatrice didn’t respond. Then she said, “Some say raiders will control the seas in coming years.”
I had heard this before, but I didn’t like hearing it from Beatrice, who was never one to deal in conspiracies and doomsday speculation. She went on to tell me news from a trading post to the south, how governments were trying to form to protect and distribute resources. How civil wars were breaking out over laws and resources.
Beatrice told me about how some new governments accepted help from raiders and willingly became colonies, controlled by raider captains. The raiders offered protection and gave extra resources to the burgeoning community—food, supplies the raiders had stolen or scavenged, animals they’d hunted or trapped. But the community was bound to pay back any help offered with interest. Extra grain from the new mill. The best vegetables from the gardens. Sometimes the community had to send a few of its own people to work as guards on breeding ships and colonies. The raiders’ ships circled between their colonies, picking up what they needed; their guards enforced rules while they were gone.
My conversations with Beatrice followed the same rhythm each time. She urged me to move onto land and I urged her to move onto water. But not this time.
Beatrice began telling me a story about something that had happened to her neighbors the previous week. She told me how in the middle of the day shouts and yelling had erupted, coming from the sod dugout. Two men stood outside the dugout, shouting and pointing at a girl who stood between her mother and father. The girl looked about nine or ten years old. One of the men stepped forward and grabbed the girl, holding her arms behind her back as she tried to run toward her mother.
The father charged forward toward his daughter, but the other man punched him in the stomach. The father doubled and the man kicked him to the ground.
“Please,” the father pleaded. “Please—I’ll pay up. I’ll pay.”
The man stomped on the father’s chest with the heel of his boot and the father curled in pain and rolled to his side, his hand shaking and stirring up small clouds of dust.
The girl screamed for her father and mother, her arms held taut and long behind her as she tried to run toward them. The man who’d stomped on her father smacked her hard across the face, wound rope around her wrists, and knotted them. The other man lifted her body over his shoulder and turned around.
She didn’t scream again, but Beatrice could hear her soft cries as the men carried her away.
An hour later the village had begun to swarm with people again, footsteps echoing on the dirt paths, bright children’s voices calling to one another. Beatrice’s neighbor across the road leaned out the open window of her shack to hang a dish towel on a peg. Everything had moved on as though a child hadn’t just been taken from her parents.
Beatrice shook her head. “It was probably a private affair. Maybe a private debt being collected and no one wanted to interfere. They don’t have control here—but still.”
Both of our hands had gone still, the hooks glinting in the sunlight in our laps. Beatrice cast about for words.
“Still, I worry,” she said. “A resistance is being organized here. You could join us. Help us.”
“I don’t join groups and I don’t care about resistance. I’m not staying on land, waiting for someone to take her,” I said, nodding at Pearl, who had caught a snake and was dropping it into one of our baskets. Pearl came and sat next to us, eyes on the grass, another snake still in her hands.
“They built a library, you know,” Beatrice said softly, with pain in her voice.
“Who?” I asked.
“Lost Abbots. At one of their bases in the Andes—Argali. They even put windows in. And shelves. Books salvaged from before and new ones being transcribed. People travel for miles to see it. Some friends told me they built it to show their commitment to the future. To culture.”
Beatrice’s mouth tightened. Before the floods, she’d been a teacher. I knew how important learning and books were to her. How much it had pained her when her school closed and her students scattered across the country. I knew also of her lover who had been killed on his fishing boat three years before by a raiding tribe. She had been scared of the water even before that, and she cloaked this fear as a love for land.
“Little bit of good in everything,” Beatrice said.
I thought of the raider on the coast talking about new nations and the need to organize people. I’d heard that argument before in saloons and trading posts. That the raiders’ wealth could rebuild society faster. Forcing people to go without would get us back to where we were sooner.
I described what a library looked like to Pearl. “Do you want to go to a place like that?” I asked her.
“Why would I?” she asked, trying to wrap the snake around her wrist as he resisted her.
“You could learn,” I said.
She frowned, trying to imagine a library. “In there?”
I came up against this again and again with Pearl. She didn’t even want what I so sorely missed, had no conception of it to desire it.
It wasn’t just the loss of a thing that was a burden but the loss even of desiring it. We should at least get to keep our desire, I thought. Or maybe it’s how she was born. Maybe she couldn’t want something like that after being born in a world like this.
Beatrice didn’t say anything more, and after we finished making lures I went into her tent to pack. I packed our grain in a linen sack, tucking it in the bottom of a bucket. I set the tomato plant in a basket and tucked a blanket around it, a gift from Beatrice. I thought of Row, imagined her wrists cinched together with rope, her cries silenced or ignored. I shuddered.
Beatrice handed me the rolled-up map. “I don’t even have a compass to give you.”
“You’ve given me more than I hoped for,” I said.
“One more thing.” Beatrice pulled a photo from her pocket and placed it in my hand. It was a photo of Jacob and Row, taken a year before she’d screamed my name in that boat as it sped away. Grandfather and I gave it to Beatrice so she could ask traders in Apple Falls if they’d been seen. In the photo Jacob’s auburn hair had a gold sheen from the sunlight. His cleft chin and crooked nose, caused by a childhood schoolyard fight, made his face look angular. Row looked delicate with her small sloping shoulders and shining gray-blue eyes. They were my eyes, almond shaped, hooded. Eyes that looked like the color of the sea. She had a scar, shaped like the blade of a scythe, curving over an eyebrow and across a temple. When she was two she had fallen and cut her face on a metal toolbox.
I rubbed Row’s face with my thumb. I wondered if Jacob had built them a house at the Valley. That’s what he always said he wanted to do for me, years ago. Jacob worked as a carpenter like Grandfather. They began building our boat together, but after a while it was only Grandfather working on the boat. I had listened to their yelling and arguing for weeks and then suddenly it was quiet. That was two months before Jacob left with Row.
Beatrice reached out and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear and wrapped her arms around me. “Come back,” she whispered in my ear, the phrase she whispered in my ear each time I visited. I could feel in how her embrace lingered that she didn’t think I would.
CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_bd3e4709-255b-5713-9db4-b68707c34b88)
PEARL AND I set sail to the south, following the broken coast. It was rumored there was more wood for building boats down south in Harjo, a trading post in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. I’d use my credit at Harjo for wood and trade my fishing skills for help in building a bigger boat. My little boat would never handle the tumultuous seas in the north. But even if I could build a bigger boat, would I be able to navigate and sail it? Desperate people could always be found to join a ship’s crew, but I couldn’t stand the thought of traveling with other people, people I might not be able to trust.
I strung a line through a hook and knotted it and did it again for another pole. Pearl and I would fish over the side of the boat later in the evening, maybe even try some slow trolling for salmon. Pearl sat next to me, organizing the tackle and bait, dividing the hooks by size and dropping them in separate compartments.
“Who’s in this photo?” Pearl asked, pointing to the photo of Row and Jacob sitting on top of a basket filled with rope.
“A family friend,” I said. Years ago, when she’d asked about her father, I told her he had died before she was born.
“Why’d you ask that man about my father?”
“What man?” I asked.
“The one you killed.”
My hands froze over the bucket of bait. “I was testing him,” I said. “Seeing if he was lying.”
The sky to the east darkened and clouds tumbled toward us. Miles away a haze of rain clouded the horizon. The wind picked up, filling our sail and tilting the boat. I jumped up to adjust the sail. It was midafternoon and the day had begun clear, with an easy, straight wind, and I thought we’d be able to sail south for miles without making adjustments.
At the mast I started reefing the sails so we’d bleed wind. Around the coast to the west, waves rose several feet, the crashing white water swirling under the dark sky. We’d faced squalls before, been tossed in the wind, almost capsized. But this one was driving straight west, pushing us away from the coast. A rag on deck whipped up into the air, almost smacking me as it flew past and disappeared.
The storm approached like the roar of a train, slowly getting louder and louder until I knew we’d be shaking inside of it. Pearl climbed over the deck cover and stood by me. I could tell she was resisting the urge to throw her arms around me. “It’s getting bad,” she said, a tremor in her voice. Nothing else scared Pearl like storms; she was a sailor afraid of the sea. Afraid, she’d told me before, of shipwreck. Of having no harbor.
“Take the gear under the deck cover,” I told her, the wind catching my words and flattening them. “And bolt it down.”
I tried to ease the tension of the sail’s rigging, loosening the sheet, but the block was rusty and kept catching. When I finally got it loose, the wind picked up, knocking me backward against the mast, the rope flying through the block, sending the halyard soaring in the wind. I held on to the mast as Bird leaned left, waves rising and water spraying across the deck.
“Stay under!” I shouted to Pearl, but my words were lost in the wind. I climbed across the side of the deck cover, running toward the stern, but I slipped and slid into the gunwale. I scrambled to my feet and began tightening the rope holding the rudder, winding it around the spool, turning the rudder so we’d sail into the wind.
Thunder roared, so loud I felt it in my spine, my brain vibrating in my skull. Lightning flashed and a wave crashed over Bird, and I grabbed the tiller to steady myself. I dropped to my hands and knees, scrambled toward the deck cover, and ducked inside as another wave hit us, foaming overboard.
I wrapped myself around Pearl, tucking her under me, clutching her with one arm and holding on to a metal bar drilled into the deck with my other hand. Bird rocked violently, water pouring under the deck cover, our bodies jostling like shaken beads in a jar. I prayed the hull wouldn’t break.
Pearl curled in a tight ball and I could feel her heart beating like a hummingbird’s wings against my arm. The wind was blowing straight west, pushing us out of coastal waters and deeper into the Pacific. If we were pushed any farther offshore, I didn’t know how we’d make it back to a trading post.
Some dark feeling washed over me that felt like rage or fear or grief, something all sharp corners in my gut, like I’d swallowed glass. Row and Pearl rippled through my mind like shadows. The same question kept rising in me: To save one child, would I have to sacrifice another?
THE DAY MY mother died I had been at the upstairs window, four months pregnant with Pearl, hand on my belly, thinking of preeclampsia, placenta abruption, a breech baby, all the things I’d thought about when I was pregnant with Row. But now, with no hospitals, not even makeshift ones run out of abandoned buildings, they seemed like certain death. I knew my mother would help me deliver Pearl like she’d helped with Row, but I was still more nervous about this birth.
We had lost Internet and electricity for good the month before and we watched the horizon daily, fearing the water would arrive before Grandfather finished the boat.
In the block behind our house, a neighbor’s front yard held an apple tree. Mother had to stretch to pick them, a basket hooked over her arm, her hair shining in the sunlight. The yellow and orange leaves and red apples looked so bright, almost foreign, as though I already was thinking of them as lost things, things I’d rarely see again.
Behind her I saw a gray wall building, rising upward toward the sky. I was perplexed at first, my mind too shocked to comply, even though this was what we’d been waiting for. The water wasn’t supposed to be here yet. We were supposed to have another month or two. That’s what everyone on the streets had been saying. All the neighbors, all the people pushing grocery carts full of belongings as they migrated west toward the Rockies.
I didn’t understand how it was so quiet, but then I realized we were in the middle of a roar, a deafening crashing, the collision of uprooted trees, upended sheds, lifted cars. It was as if I couldn’t hear or feel anything, all I could do was watch that wave, the water mesmerizing me, obliterating my other senses.
I think I screamed. Hands pressed on glass. Grandfather, Jacob, and Row ran upstairs to see where the commotion came from. We stood together at the window, frozen in shock, waiting for it to come. The water rose as if the earth wanted vengeance, the water creeping across the plains like a single warrior. Row climbed into my arms and I held her as I had when she was a toddler, her head on my shoulder, her legs wrapped around my waist.
Mother looked up at the water and dropped the basket of apples. She ran toward our house, crossing the street, passing a house and almost reaching our backyard when the wave crashed around her. The wave dipped over her, its white spray falling around her.
I couldn’t see her anymore and the water thundered around our house. We held our breath as the water rose around the house, climbing up the siding, breaking the windows and flowing inside. It filled up the house like a silo full of corn. The house shuddered and shook and I was certain it’d splinter into pieces, that our hands would be ripped from one another. The water rose, climbing each stair toward the attic.
I looked back out the window, praying I’d see my mother reappear, surface for a breath of air. After the water settled, the surface was still and my mother did not come up to break it.
The water settled a few feet below our upstairs window. We waded and swam through the water for weeks afterward but could never find her body. We later found out the dam had broken half a mile from our house. Everyone had said it would hold.
After Mother was gone I kept wanting to tell her about how things were changing, in me and around me, Pearl’s first kicks, the water covering all the prairie as far as the eye could see. I’d turn to speak to her and be reminded she was gone. This is how people go crazy, I thought.
It was only a month later that Jacob would take Row. Only Grandfather and I were left in that house, sitting in the attic, that empty room the length of our house, as the boat slowly filled it.
A month after Jacob left we took the attic wall out with a sledgehammer and pushed the boat out of the house and onto the water. The boat was fifteen feet long, five feet wide, and looked like a large canoe with a small deck cover at the back and a single sail in the middle. We loaded the boat with supplies we’d been hoarding for the past year—bottles of water, cans of food, medical supplies, bags of extra clothing and shoes.
We sailed west, toward the Rocky Mountains. At first, the air was thin and felt hard to breathe, as if my lungs kept clutching for something more. Three months later I awoke with birthing pains. The wind was so strong it rocked the boat like a cradle and I rolled back and forth under the deck cover, gritting my teeth, clutching the blankets around my body, crying in the lulls between contractions.
When Pearl came she was glistening and pale and silent. Her skin looked like water. As if she’d risen out of the depths to meet me. I held her to my chest and rubbed her cheek with my thumb and she broke into a wail.
A few hours later, when the sun rose and she was suckling at my breast, I heard gulls above us. Holding Pearl at my breast was both like and unlike when I held Row at my breast. I tried to hold the feeling of both of them in myself but couldn’t; one kept sliding away and replacing the other. Deep down, I had known that one couldn’t replace the other, though I now discovered I had been hoping Pearl could replace Row. I placed my nose on Pearl’s forehead, smelling her newness, her freshness. I mourned the loss of it, the loss I felt before it happened.
In Grandfather’s last days he began speaking nonsense more and more. Sometimes talking to the air, addressing people he’d known in the past. Sometimes speaking in a dream language that I would have found beautiful if I wasn’t so tired.
“Now, you tell my girl that a feather can hold a house,” Grandfather said. I wasn’t sure if by “my girl” he meant my mother, myself, Row, or Pearl. He’d call all of us “his girls.”
“Who do you want me to tell?”
“Rowena.”
“She isn’t here.”
“Yes, she is, yes she is.”
This irritated me. Most of the people he spoke to were dead. “Row isn’t dead,” I said.
Grandfather turned to me, shock on his face, his eyes wide and innocent. “Of course not,” he said. “She’s around the corner.”
A week later Grandfather died sometime in the night. I had just finished nursing Pearl and had laid her in a small wooden box Grandfather had made for her. I crawled over to where Grandfather slept, my fingers outstretched to shake him awake. When I touched him, he was cold. His skin not yet ashen, only slightly pale, the blood having settled. He otherwise looked the same as he always did when he slept: eyes closed, mouth slightly agape.
I leaned back on my heels, staring at him. That he could pass with so little ceremony stunned me. I had never expected sleep to take him, of all things. Pearl whimpered and I crawled back to her.
We were alone, I kept thinking. I had no one left I could trust, except this baby that depended on me for everything. Panic pressed around me. I looked at the anchor lying a few feet away. I’d heard of people leaping from their boats tied to their anchors. But this wasn’t a possibility for me. It was as impossible as the water receding from the land and people standing up again where they’d fallen. Instead I took Pearl in my arms and climbed out from under the tarp into the morning sun.
I would carry him with me; he would still guide me. Grandfather was the person who taught me how to live; I wouldn’t fail him now. I wouldn’t fail Pearl, I told myself.
When I think of those days, of losing the people I’ve loved, I think of how my loneliness deepened, like being lowered into a well, water rising around me as I clawed at the stone walls, reaching for sunlight. How you get used to being at the bottom of a well. How you wouldn’t recognize a rope if it was thrown down to you.
CHAPTER 7 (#ulink_ce85e1cf-af16-5d7b-84d0-e2159f7c9773)
AFTER THE STORM, we came out from under the deck cover and surveyed the wreckage. We’d lost all the rainwater from the cistern. I dropped to my knees in front of it and swore. The waves crashing overboard had filled the cistern with salt water. We’d have to empty it all and get back to land as quickly as possible before we got dehydrated. We had a small emergency supply of water I kept in plastic bottles, tied down under the deck cover, but it would only last a few days.
Pearl kept close to me as we sloshed through the water, across the deck toward the bow. She held her arm against her side, a bruise blooming where she must have fallen when trying to scramble under the deck cover with the tackle and bait. I squatted in front of her, kissed my finger, and touched it to her arm. A shadow of a smile flickered across her face. I brushed her hair from her face with my palm, took her head in my hands, and kissed her forehead.
“We’ll be okay,” I said.
She nodded.
“How ’bout you get the bucket and towel. Start wringing the water off the deck. I’ll check the rudder.”
At the stern, I inspected the rudder and tiller. A crack split the base of the rudder support and it was leaning to the side. Above me, our single sail fluttered in the breeze, a tear down the middle. The bottom yard swiveled in the wind. The storm had taken our punting pole and the tomato plant Beatrice had given us, but the rest of our supplies were stored in the hull or tied down under the deck cover.
I cursed and rubbed my face with my palm. We were losing time, I thought. How would we get another boat built when I didn’t even know where we were?
“Oars are still here,” Pearl called to me, her hands on the gunwale, looking down to where the oars were tied tightly to the sides of the boat.
I shielded my eyes from the sun and squinted against the glint of water, peering east. Or what I thought was east. I glanced at the sun and back at the water. How long had the storm gone on? It felt like forever, but it could have been only a half hour. I couldn’t tell how far west we’d been pushed off our usual course, which was always two miles from the coast, straight north or south, tracking the bits of land that hovered above water.
Wreckage from another boat floated about a mile east of us, drifting our way. I squinted and grabbed the binoculars from under the deck cover.
It had been a salvage boat, made from various scavenged materials. A few tires were tied around a base of doors nailed together. A few dozen feet away, the cabin of a truck lay floating on its side, and a bright yellow inflatable raft floated nearby. Plastic bags and bottles were strewn across the surface of the water like trash.
“Grab the net,” I told Pearl. I hoped there was food or water stored in those bags and bottles.
“There’s a man,” Pearl said, pointing to the wreckage.
I peered through the binoculars again, scanning the wreckage. A man clutched the raft of tires and doors, treading water and squeezing his eyes shut against each wave that rolled into his face.
Pearl looked up at me expectantly.
“We don’t know anything about him,” I said, reading her thoughts.
Pearl scoffed. “That doesn’t look like a raider ship.”
“It’s not just raiders we should fear. It’s anyone.”
A nervous buzz spread through my veins. I hadn’t brought anyone else on Bird and I didn’t want to now. Someone sleeping right next to us under the deck cover. Sharing our food, drinking our water.
I glanced at the man and back down at Pearl. She wore the steady expression of already having made a decision.
“We don’t have enough food or water,” I told her.
Pearl knelt under the deck cover and pulled out her snake pot, a clay jar with a bright blue glaze. She lifted the lid and caught a small, thin snake just behind its head, its fangs out, its tongue a flickering red ribbon. She held him up to me and grinned. The snake opened and closed its mouth, biting the air. She squatted on the deck, cut its head off, held it by the tail over the water, and pinched it from tail to neck with her thumb and forefinger, draining its blood into the water.
“We can eat him,” she said.
She never offered her snakes for meals. I turned back toward the wreckage, the man now only half a mile from our boat. I felt in my bones that he would bring us trouble in some way. Every sinew and tendon in me turned and tightened like rope on a pulley.
But I couldn’t tell if the panic was from being lost or taking a stranger onto our boat. The fears mixed like blood in water and I couldn’t separate them. I thought I could get us back to a trading post, but if I miscalculated and it took longer than expected and it didn’t rain—I couldn’t stomach the thought of us drying up like prunes under the sun.
The man was beginning to float away, pulled by a current. Watching him in the water reminded me of how Grandfather would sing “I will make you fishers of men” while he fished the rivers in Nebraska. He’d lean back in the boat, an umbrella propped in the corner to shade him, a pipe stuck in the corner of his mouth, and he’d chuckle to himself as he sang. He always found things both silly and serious. The chorus began repeating in my mind as the man floated farther away, and I felt it as an admonishment. I clenched my jaw in irritation. I had wanted Grandfather to guide me, not haunt me.
“Grab the rope,” I told Pearl.
The man was barely conscious, so I jumped in the water and swam to him. I tied the rope around his torso and swam back to our boat. I climbed back onto Bird and Pearl and I hauled him up, bracing against the gunwale with each pull.
The man carried nothing but a backpack, and when we got him on the deck he sputtered and coughed up water, lying on his side, almost curled in the fetal position. Pearl crouched next to him, peering into his face. His dark hair fell loose and disheveled almost to his shoulders. He had a broad chest, long strong limbs, and skin darkened by the sun. He wore the rough-hewn look of someone accustomed to sailing alone. Despite this, he was handsome, in a still and solemn way, like a photograph of someone from another era. When he opened his eyes and looked at me I was startled by their light gray color.
“Sweetie, grab a water bottle,” I said.
Pearl leapt up and got the water. I leaned forward to dribble a few drops onto his lips, but he jerked away from me.
“It’s water,” I said gently, holding the bottle in front of him to show him. He reached for it and I pulled it away.
“I’m going to give you just a little. We don’t want you throwing up.”
I knelt forward and dribbled a few drops on his lips. He licked the water quickly and looked at me, a pleading expression on his face. I poured more water in his mouth, half the bottle, my stomach clenching as I did so, and I thought about the heat, the water bottles we had left, and the miles to shore.
The man lay back, closing his eyes, leaning against the gunwale. Pearl and I let him doze. Pearl and I caught what we could from his wreckage in our net and sorted it on the deck. Not much of use. A few bottles of water, two spoiled fish, and a bag of dry clothing. We fished spare wood from the water to use for rebuilding the rudder. We tied his raft to the stern of Bird so we could tug it along behind us like a caboose in case we ever needed it.
I brought down the sail and examined the tear. When I finished mending it two hours later, it was uneven and puckered along the tear, but it would last until we got to shore and I could trade for more thread and material.
I walked over and kicked the man’s shoe. He startled awake, his hands out in front of him.
“Almost dusk,” I said. “Can you skin two snakes?”
He nodded.
Pearl brought the bucket of coals over to where the man lay, near the mast step, and poured them in a flat pan, the kind we once used to make birthday cakes. We were lucky it wasn’t windy tonight. When it was windy we’d have to eat raw or dig into our stores of dried meat or flatbread. I sat in front of the pan with a box of kindling, arranging the twigs and leaves on top of the coals. Pearl lit it with her flint stone and knife.
“You didn’t have to. I’m grateful,” the man said. He had a soft, clear voice, like distant bells.
I was trying to decide if we should tie him up while we were sleeping. The uneasy feeling in my gut wouldn’t loosen.
“Can you help me hoist the sail?” I asked.
“Gladly,” he said.
He finished pulling the skins from the snakes and Pearl tossed them on the hot coals. The sun was low on the horizon, casting a gold glow across the water. The sun seemed to go down so much faster since the floods, now that the horizon had risen to meet the sun.
“I’m Daniel, by the way.”
“Myra. Pearl. What’s in your bag?”
“Some of my maps and instruments.”
“Instruments?”
“For navigating and charting. I’m a cartographer.”
He knows how to navigate, I thought.
Pearl scooped a snake off the coals with a long stick and coiled it on the deck in front of her to let it cool. It was blackened and my stomach turned just looking at it. It smelled acrid. Snake meat was as tough as sinew, and I was weary of eating it.
“You remind me of someone I used to know,” Daniel said.
“Oh, yeah?” I poked the snake still on the coals with a stick. What I really wanted to know was what schools of fish swam this far off the coast and whether they could be tracked.
“A woman I lived with for a year in the Sierra Madre. She didn’t trust people, either.”
“What makes you think I don’t trust you?
He rubbed his beard with his palm. “If you got any tenser, your muscles would break your own bones.”
“Should she have trusted people?”
He shrugged. “Maybe some.”
“And now?”
“She passed at the end of that year.”
“I’m sorry.”
Pearl tried a bite of the snake, chewing fiercely, the stench of the meat drifting toward me on the breeze. She laid it straight on the deck and cut it into three even pieces and tossed our two pieces to us.
“Who’d you make maps for?” I asked
“Anyone who wanted them. Fishermen. New government officials.”
“Raiders?”
He sent me a hard look. “No. At least not that I know of.”
“I’d think you’d have a better boat with that kind of work. Maps are more expensive than wood.”
“Let’s just say I’ve had bad luck.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. He was holding something back.
Pearl whimpered and I saw why she’d been so silent during our conversation. She held up her handkerchief and ran her finger along a tear at the edge.
“It ripped,” she said softly. “During the storm.”
“Bring it here,” I said, holding out my hand to her. She crawled to her feet and brought it to me. I examined the tear. “Well, this will be easy to fix since it’s so near the edge. We can fold it like this and take the thread around in a thumb knot and it won’t even fray, it’ll just be stronger.”
Pearl nodded and touched the handkerchief gingerly. “I’m still sleeping with it tonight.” The red handkerchief had been Grandfather’s. When he died we laid it over his face and it almost fluttered away on the breeze as we dropped his body into the sea, but I snatched it from the air. Pearl tugged it from my hand and after that she wouldn’t let go of it, even in her sleep.
“You pay attention to the little things,” Daniel said, watching us. He said it wistfully, like he was remembering something. He looked out at sea and his face was cast in shadow.
The sudden tenderness on his face turned something over in me, like lifting a rock and seeing the life beneath it. My chest went soft with a sudden movement. There was something about him that was beginning to put me at ease. Maybe it was the easy way he looked me in the eye, his frank way of speaking, his lack of charm. Jacob had been charming; he pretended to be simple and transparent while hiding what he actually thought. Daniel seemed like a man who carried guilt willingly and didn’t skitter away from it, who labored under decisions.
I decided he could sleep free tonight, though I’d still sleep with one eye open.
“I have to,” I said.
“No one has to do anything,” he said, looking back out at the sea.
CHAPTER 8 (#ulink_63e22ac6-7bbb-565a-8ffd-0e5bd557cb0d)
DANIEL CALCULATED OUR position and estimated that if we sailed southeast for four days we’d be close to Harjo. Daniel repaired the rudder while Pearl and I fished. After watching the birds and the water for hours, Pearl and I finally attached our net to the downrigger and began trawling for mackerel. We fished for two days before catching anything, our stomachs rumbling through the day and night, and when the rope finally went taut at the downrigger I swallowed sharply to stifle the gasp of relief that rose in my throat.
We spilled a full net of mackerel on the deck, the dark stripes on their backs glinting and shining in the sun. Each was at least eight pounds, and I savored the weight of meat in my hands. I gutted them, one after another, while Pearl set up the smoking tripod.
I still kept an eye on Daniel and tried to keep my defenses up. But I was growing more comfortable with him, as it felt as if he’d already been with us for a long while. We were quiet most of the time, just listening to the wind pull against the sail, or the distant splash of a fish or bird. Just sky and sea for miles and miles, the three of us, alone.
The closer we got to Harjo, the more we sailed over the old world, transitioning from the Pacific into water that now rippled over cities in California. I often sailed this way because I had to stick close to the new coasts, but it always haunted me to sail over cities, over the mass graves they’ve become. So many people died not just during the floods but during the migrations, from exposure and dehydration and starvation. Feet bloodied from trying to climb mountains and outrun the water. Possessions abandoned up the mountainside the way they were along the Oregon Trail.
Some of the cities were so deep below, no one would see them again. Others, which had been built at higher elevations, could be explored with goggles and a strong stomach. Their skyscrapers rose out of the water like metal islands.
I used to dive and spearfish in those underwater cities, but more recently I’d done it only when I was desperate. I didn’t like being in the water for long periods of time; didn’t really like being reminded of how it once was. Once, I was diving and swimming through an old city that’d been nestled on a mountainside in the Rockies. Fish made homes in the wreckage, hiding amid the sea grass and anemone. I dove down into an office building that was missing a roof. A few desks and filing cabinets floated in the room, items around them nearly unrecognizable. Barnacle shells grew on a mug with a photo of a child’s face, some birthday gift you once could get sent to you in the mail.
I swam deeper. A school of angelfish scattered and I speared one. As I turned to go up for air, the coiled rope I wore around my shoulder caught on the broken bottom handle of the file cabinet. I yanked at it, jimmying the cabinet loose from where it stood close to a wall. Out of the shadows, a skull tumbled along the floor toward me, settling a foot away. A flicker of movement from within the mouth. Something living inside it.
I yanked on my rope again to get free and the cabinet fell toward me. I shoved the cabinet to the side so it wouldn’t fall on me and my rope slid from the broken handle. In the space behind where the cabinet had stood, two skeletons lay on their sides, facing each other, as though in an embrace. Like falling asleep with a lover. One skeleton didn’t have a skull, but by the way it was positioned, turned toward the other body, I imagined its head had rested on the other’s chest. Positioned like they were waiting for their fate and chose to hold each other when the end came. Disintegrated clothing fluttered around them. Rocks lay on the floor all around their bodies. My oxygen-deprived brain recoiled before I realized they must have filled their pockets and stuffed their clothes with rocks so they could succumb to the water as it slowly inched upward around them, covering their arms that touched the floor first, a final whisper between them before it covered the arms that held each other. Otherwise the water would have separated them when it came, pulling them apart, floating their bodies before it sank them, miles apart.
I dropped the spear and swam for the surface. I traded for nets at the next post and from then on only dove when the nets came up empty.
I didn’t know how to talk to Pearl about what lay beneath us. Farms that fed the nation. Small houses built on quiet residential streets for the post–World War II baby boom. Moments of history between walls. The whole story of how we moved through time, marking the earth with our needs.
It felt like cruelty to bury the earth, to take it all away. I’d look at Pearl and think of all she wouldn’t know. Museums, fireworks on a summer night, bubble baths. These things were already almost gone by the time Row was born. I hadn’t realized how much I lived to give my child the things I valued. How my own enjoyment of them had grown dull with age.
But other times, when everything was so dark out on the sea that I felt already erased, it seemed like a kindness that life before the floods had gone on for as long as it did. Like a miracle without a name.
BY THE THIRD day Pearl pulled Daniel into her games: hopscotch on deck with a piece of charcoal, naming games for each cloud or strange wave. The next day it rained for most of the afternoon and we sat under the deck cover, telling each other stories. Pearl got Daniel to tell her stories about places he’d been that we’d never heard of. I didn’t know whether any of his stories were true, they seemed so tall, and Pearl never asked if they were true or not.
One morning while I was caulking a crack in the gunnel with hemp, Daniel and Pearl played shuffleboard with caps from plastic bottles. They’d drawn squares on the deck with charcoal and took turns knocking their caps into the squares with sticks.
“Why do you like snakes so much?” he asked Pearl.
“They can eat things bigger than them,” Pearl said.
Daniel’s cap skidded outside the square and Pearl cackled with laughter.
“I’d like to see you do better,” Daniel said.
“You will,” Pearl said, biting her lower lip as she concentrated.
Pearl knocked her cap into the square and cheered, hands raised in the air, jumping in a little circle.
Watching them gave me an unexpected good feeling, a warmth spreading slowly through me. It was like I was seeing a puzzle put back together after it had broken apart.
“Where will you go once we’re in Harjo?” I asked Daniel.
He shrugged. “Maybe stay in Harjo, work for a bit.”
We needed a navigator, I kept thinking. Ever since I’d found out he could navigate I considered asking him to stay with us, to help us get to the Valley. I felt like I could trust him—or was it just that I wanted to trust him because I needed him? Daniel was clearly hiding something. I could tell by the way his expression changed when I asked him questions, like a curtain falling over his face, shutting me out.
Pearl and I had never sailed with anyone else, and I liked being alone. Alone was simple and familiar. I felt sore from this division, one part of me wanting him to stay with us and the other part wanting to part ways with him.
The next morning, Harjo loomed in the distance, the sharp mountain peaks piercing the clouds. Sapling pines and shrubs grew near the water and tents and shacks climbed up the mountainside.
Daniel packed up his navigating instruments, hunched under the deck cover, his compass, plotter, divider, and charts spread out in front of him. I turned from Harjo and as I watched him put each instrument carefully in his bag, my chest grew constricted. Do you actually want to reach Row in time? I asked myself. Even if he taught me to navigate, I couldn’t afford to buy the instruments I needed.
Only a few hours later we reached the coast. Seagulls fed on half-rotted fish on the shore. Pearl ran out among the seagulls, squawking and flapping her arms like wings. They rose up around her like a white cloud and she spun, her feet kicking up sand, the red handkerchief waving out of her pocket. I thought of Row watching the cranes, thought of my father’s feet hanging suspended. I couldn’t just do what I wanted anymore. I turned to Daniel, my chest tight.
“Will you stay with us?” I asked Daniel.
Daniel paused from stacking the tripod wood against the gunwale and looked at me.
“We’re going to a place called the Valley,” I rushed on. “It’s supposed to be a safe place, a new community.” Inwardly, I winced at the lie. I hoped he didn’t already know the Valley was a Lost Abbot colony.
His face softened. “I can’t,” he said gently. “I’m sorry. I don’t travel with other people anymore.”
I tried to hide my disappointment. “Why is that?”
Daniel shook his head and thumbed a piece of charred wood in front of him, the ash snowing on the deck. “It’s complicated.”
“Could you just think about it?”
He shook his head again. “Look, I’m grateful for what you did, but … trust me. You don’t want me with you much longer.”
I turned from him and began loading the smoked mackerel into a bucket.
“I’m going to trade this at the post. We can meet after if you want your share,” I said, my last attempt to be appealing, hoping he’d reconsider.
“That mackerel is all yours. I owe you much more than that,” he said.
Damn right, I thought.
“I’ll carry it to the post for you and be on my way,” he said.
I called to Pearl to follow us into town. We climbed rock steps leading up the mountain slope to where the town lay, wedged between a cluster of mountains.
Harjo hummed with motion and voices. A small river cut down a mountain and fell in a waterfall into the sea. Twice as many buildings had been built in the year since I’d been this far south, with a flour mill half constructed up one side of a mountain and a new log cabin next to it with the word HOTEL in bold letters across the façade. Last year, the town was just beginning to farm basic crops like corn, potatoes, and wheat, and I hoped there’d be grain for a decent price at the trading post.
The trading post was a stone building with two floors. We stood outside of it and Daniel handed me the bucket of mackerel.
“Where will you go?” I asked.
“First? The saloon. Have a drink. Ask the locals about work.” He paused and rubbed his jaw. “I know I owe you my life. I’m sorry I can’t go with you.”
“You could,” I said. “You won’t.”
Daniel gave me a look I couldn’t read—one that seemed both regretful and admonishing. He bent down in front of Pearl and tugged on the handkerchief hanging out of the pocket of her pants.
“Don’t you lose that lucky handkerchief,” he said.
She slapped his hand. “Don’t you steal it!” she said playfully.
His face flinched almost imperceptibly, a slight tightening of the muscles.
“You take care,” he said softly.
Several people exited the post and I stepped out of their way.
“We have to go,” I said.
Daniel nodded and turned away.
He was a stranger. I didn’t know why I felt a twinge of grief while I watched him walk away.
THE CREDIT I had in Harjo would buy me less than I thought. I stood at the counter, biting back irritation, shifting my weight from one leg to another.
A middle-aged woman with deep wrinkles and a pair of eyeglasses with only one lens hobbled around the counter to look into my bucket.
“Last time I was here I was told my credit was equal to about two trees,” I told her.
“Costs have changed, my dear. Fish has gone down, wood has gone up.”
She pointed to a chart on a wall which detailed equations: twenty yards of linen equaled two pounds of grain. It ran down to things as small as buttons and big as ships. She clucked her tongue when she saw the mackerel. “Oh, lovely. You must be an excellent fisher. Not easy to catch this much mackerel ’round these parts. And you were the one last year with the sailfish, right?”
“I want to talk to you about wood—”
“You don’t want to buy or build here, dear. We’re growing by leaps and bounds. The mayor just put a limit on cutting lumber. We hardly have any saplings and there haven’t been any shipments in three weeks. I’d go farther south if I were you.”
My stomach dropped. How much time was it going to take to find wood, much less build a boat? Would Row still be in the Valley by then?
“Do you have a salvage yard?”
“Small one, up past Clarence’s Rookery. Where you sailing, if you don’t mind me asking?” The woman began weighing the mackerel and tossing it in a bin beside the scale, the meat landing with a thud.
“Up north. What was Greenland.” I glanced around the shop and saw Pearl looking at an advertisement pinned to the wall by the front door.
The woman clicked her tongue again. “You won’t get up there in a salvage boat. Sea’s too rough. If you ask me, stick around here. Richards told me they found a half-sunk oil tanker off the coast down south a few miles. Going to try and excavate it and renovate it. You know that’s what I’d love—a nice spacious tanker to spend my last days on.”
I used my credit on linen for a new sail. The woman and I negotiated back and forth over the mackerel, finally settling on trading it for an eight-foot rope, a chicken, two bags of flour, and three jars of sauerkraut and a few Harjo coins. Pearl and I had tried to avoid scurvy by trading fish for fresh fruit in the south, but sometimes a whole bucket of fish would only get us three oranges. Sauerkraut lasted longer and was much cheaper, but you had to find a place where cabbage grew to get it.
I handed Pearl the box of sauerkraut to carry and she said, “You got it.”
“My one bright spot,” I muttered. The little bell attached to the door rang as another customer stepped inside. I smelled stone fruit and my mouth began to water and I turned around to see a man carrying a box of peaches to the counter. The scent clouded my mind with longing.
“We need to tell Daniel about the advertiser.”
I glanced down at her in surprise. I’d been trying to teach her to read in the evenings with the two books we owned—an instruction manual for hair dryers and Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth—but didn’t know if my lessons had really stuck.
The advertisement asked for a surveyor, displaying pictures of a compass, divider, and plotter, with the words EARN MONEY, QUICK!
“You read that?” I asked.
She glared at me. “Of course. Where’s the saloon?”
“It’s pretty far. Besides, I’m sure he’ll run across the advertisement on his own.”
“You’re only pretending like you don’t want to see him again, too!” Pearl said. She jiggled the box, the jars clinking against one another.
I smiled despite my disappointment. She always could disarm me. I never could read her half as well as she read me.
CHAPTER 9 (#ulink_d0c8dc2b-1138-5c74-8c40-9f2d6f163141)
THE SALOON WAS a run-down shack with metal siding and a grass roof. Light filtered through dirty windows made of plastic tarp. In the dark, voices were disembodied, lifting and mixing in the shadows and the rank smell of dirt and sweat.
Upturned buckets and stools and wood crates served as chairs around makeshift tables. A cat lay on the bar, licking its black tail while the bartender dried canning jars with an old pillowcase.
Daniel sat at a table with a younger man who had the look of a runaway teen; disheveled, jaunty, like he could make use of anything and leave anywhere at a minute’s notice. Daniel leaned forward to hear what the younger man was saying, his brow deeply furrowed and his fists clenched on the table. His face was turned toward the door, as if trying to block the commotion of the bar from his view.
Pearl and I were in his eyesight, but he didn’t notice us. Pearl tried to step toward him but I caught her shoulder.
“Wait,” I said. I ordered moonshine at the bar and the bartender placed a teacup of amber liquid in front of me. I pushed a Harjo coin, a penny with an H melted into the copper, across the bar.
When the younger man stopped talking, Daniel leaned back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest, his eyebrows low and heavy over his eyes, his mouth a tight line. The younger man got up to leave and I thought about slipping out after him. I had wanted to see Daniel, to convince him to help us, but we didn’t need to get involved in whatever he was part of.
Pearl leapt toward Daniel before I could catch her. He jumped when he saw her and he forced a smile and tried to level his face into a friendly expression.
“The advertisement even had a picture of your tools,” Pearl was saying, moving her hands in excited circles as she told him.
Daniel smiled at her, that same sad smile he often wore around Pearl.
“I appreciate you coming to tell me,” he said.
Daniel wouldn’t look me in the eye, and I felt tension coming off his body like steady heat.
“Maybe we should go, Pearl,” I said, setting my hands on her shoulders.
An old man from the table next to Daniel’s tottered toward us and laid a gnarled hand on my arm. He smiled widely, showing a mouth with few teeth. He pointed in my face.
“I see things for you,” he said, his voice coming out wheezy, stinking of alcohol and decay.
“Town prophet,” Daniel said, nodding to the old man. “He already told me my future.”
“What was it?” I asked.
“That I’d cheat death twice and then drown.”
“Not bad,” I said.
“You,” the old man pointed in my face again. “A seabird will land on your boat and lay an egg that will hatch a snake.”
I glanced at the old man. “What does that mean?”
“It means,” the old man said, leaning forward, “what it means.”
I felt a blankness in my head, like my thoughts had nothing to connect to. A white fear rippled through me. Why did the prophet talk about snakes and birds? I shook myself inwardly. Snakes and birds were some of the only animals not extinct. He probably brought them up in everyone’s fortunes. But Row and Pearl’s faces rose up in my mind, their lives like tenuous things that could drift away.
“Myra,” Daniel said. He touched my arm and I startled, stepping away from him. “It doesn’t mean anything.”
“I know.” I glanced around the dark saloon, the silhouette of heads bent over drinks, bodies slumped toward tables in fatigue. “We should go.”
“Wait—can—can I stay one last night on your boat?” Daniel asked.
I glared at him. “So you don’t have to pay for the hotel?”
He tilted his head. “I’ll help you fish in the morning.”
“I can fish on my own.”
“Mom, stop. You can stay, Daniel,” Pearl said. I glanced at Pearl and she raised her eyebrows at me.
“Who were you talking to?” I asked.
“Just an old friend,” Daniel said. “I’m only asking for one more night. I like being around you two.”
He ruffled Pearl’s hair and she giggled. I regarded him coolly, arms crossed over my chest, wishing I could read his face the way I could read the water.
“But you’re still not coming with us?” I asked.
A pained expression crossed his face. “I shouldn’t.”
He looked down at his hands on the table and I could feel him resisting us. As though there were two magnets in him—one pulling him away and another pulling him closer.
BEFORE SETTLING ON our boat for the night we searched the coast for firewood. The rule in most villages was anything small or damaged, like driftwood, could be claimed by anyone. Anything larger was considered property of the village and needed to be bought. If you were caught taking good wood that could be used for building you could be thrown in prison or even hanged.
The three of us drifted apart across the beach, scanning the sand for driftwood or kindling. I picked up a piece of dirty cloth and pulled up a clump of dried grass and stuffed them in my pockets. Daniel walked toward me, carrying a few sticks and an old paper bag.
“I was thinking, you might want to reconsider your trip,” he said.
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Atlantic crossings are rough. Your boat is suited to the Pacific coast. It’ll be expensive to build another one.” Daniel kicked sand off a rock. “News in the saloon earlier was about how the Lily Black has a new captain, who is using biological warfare now. Rabid dogs, smallpox blankets. They start an epidemic, cut a population in half, and then take it over and make it a colony. They’re looking at northern villages.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that,” I muttered and bent to pick up a discarded shoe. I took the shoelace out, stuffed it in my pocket, and tossed the shoe aside.
“I know this Valley place sounds nice, but … is it worth the risk?” Daniel asked.
I looked at him. When he met my eyes I saw he knew I had another reason for going. His question set me on edge. I realized I couldn’t see Pearl anywhere on the beach. “Where’s Pearl?”
Daniel turned and looked over his shoulder. “I thought she was just over thataways.”
I scanned the beach. No sign of anyone, except a couple of people farther down the beach, behind a cluster of rocks. Pins and needles spread down my spine. I had heard of children just disappearing. Parents turning around and them being gone. Kidnapping was a new form of pickpocketing, and seemingly, for those good at it, just as easy.
“Pearl!” I called, trying to stay calm.
“Maybe she went back to the boat?” Daniel asked, in a carefree tone that enraged me.
“Of course she didn’t,” I said, glaring at him. “Pearl!” I screamed.
“Calm down—”
“Don’t tell me to calm down!” I shouted at Daniel. “What do you know about losing a child?”
I took off running, calling Pearl’s name, sand flying off my heels. To my left the mountain rose in a steep rock face and to my right the ocean stretched past the horizon. I leapt over a pile of seaweed and kept running and calling for her. It was eerily quiet on the beach, everything gone still. Even a small boat a mile from the coast seemed anchored, stuck in place as though painted into the landscape.
I stopped running and quickly turned in a circle. There was nowhere she could have gone; it felt like she’d been lifted up into the sky. Panic rose up in my chest. I could hear Daniel’s footsteps behind me, and farther behind him the cries of seagulls.
Pearl crawled out from a crevice in the mountain, a crack at the base only three feet wide, and she held a bundle of driftwood.
“All the wood is in the cave,” she called out to us.
I inhaled sharply. Her small body silhouetted by the darkness behind her, both familiar and strange, someone made from me and separate from me.
I ran to her and pulled her into a hug before pulling her back from me and tilting her chin up to face me.
“You need to stay in sight,” I said.
“I found the wood.”
“Pearl, I’m serious.”
Daniel caught up to us.
“She always overreacts,” Pearl told Daniel as I stepped into the crevice to pick up an armful of wood.
He reached forward and tousled her hair. “No,” he said. “She doesn’t.”
CHAPTER 10 (#ulink_500c77d2-801d-58eb-9c87-eec3c97b0586)
WE LIT A small fire on deck inside the metal lid of a trash can. We grilled half the chicken from our earlier trade and I started making a small loaf of bread. Pearl got two small pans from beneath the deck cover, along with a cup of water from the cistern.
The sun set as the chicken grilled, and I swore I could smell lilacs drifting toward us from land. Daniel and Pearl laughed at me when I told them this. They teased me about wishful thinking. But it was just land—being close to land stirring my memories. Smelling fresh-cut grass or in-season flowers. Expecting the mail at noon. All these memories like a phantom limb. Maybe that was the real reason Pearl and I stayed on the water.
Pearl danced a little jig for Daniel and showed him her two favorite snakes, their thin heads sliding above the rim of her clay jar when she lifted the lid. She pleaded with him to tell her a story. He told her about how he grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and spent hours hiking through the woods as a child and once stumbled upon a moose.
“What is a moose?” Pearl interrupted him.
Daniel looked at me. “Well, they are big …” he started.
“Like a whale?” Pearl asked.
“Uh, maybe a small whale. But they have fur and antlers.”
Pearl frowned in confusion and I could tell she was trying to imagine it but had no reference.
“Think of a really big goat, with really big horns,” I told her before Daniel started his story again.
“Then the moose pulled its ears back and dipped its head low and charged at me,” Daniel made a quick gesture with his hands and Pearl jumped. “It was only twenty feet away and I knew I couldn’t outrun it. So I raised my arms and yelled at it.”
Pearl giggled. “What did you yell?”
“Get away from me, you beast! Be off! Go away!” Daniel mimed waving his arms and yelling. “It was pretty ridiculous, but it worked. I pretended to be bigger.”
The firelight flickered across their faces, sending a warm glow over every surface. I kneaded the flour and water on the back of the pan, listening to them. It was good for Pearl, being around another person, I thought.
“Are there any moose now?” Pearl asked.
I shook my head. “They’re all gone.”
“Maybe there are a few somewhere,” Pearl said.
“Maybe,” Daniel said.
We ate the chicken and I baked the bread in two pans, one pan on top of the other to make a small oven. After it got dark, Pearl curled under the deck cover and Daniel and I sat in the moonlight, the fire dying to embers, our voices flickering on the wind.
“The reason you won’t travel with anyone anymore,” I said. “Is it that woman you told me about?”
“A little. And because it gets too complicated when other people get involved.”
I tilted my head and he sighed.
“My mom and I lived alone during the Six Year Flood. She was diabetic. When the water started coming I loaded up on insulin, traveling to the local hospitals that weren’t already ransacked or flooded. Got quite a bit. But most of it got stolen before we took to the water. We headed west and did okay for a while, but she died two years later of DKA.”
I remembered what I’d yelled at him on the beach and I looked down at the deck and scratched the wood with a fingernail, a cloud of shame building up in my chest.
“It was difficult …” Daniel paused and glanced out at sea. The moonlight caught the top of the water’s ripples, carving silver scythes into the black surface. “Knowing the end was coming for her … knowing I couldn’t do anything, no insulin left to be found. We tried adjusting her diet.” He let out a hoarse sound as though he were clearing his throat. “That was impossible with so little food left. Everyone grabbing at what was left.”
I remembered those days, the rush of excitement when you found a box of cereal in an empty cabinet in a neighbor’s house. And the way your heart dropped when you grabbed it, only to find it weightless, the contents already taken by someone else.
People raided gas stations and shops. And they filled other buildings to the brim. Schools, libraries, abandoned factories. So many people sleeping in rows, on their way somewhere else they hadn’t decided yet. Most of them kind and frightened. But some not, so you stayed at home most of the time.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured, and when I looked up at him the pain on his face hollowed my stomach.
Daniel raised his shoulders up to his ears. “It’s happened to everyone, hasn’t it?”
I nodded and felt an odd stirring in my bones. I held his gaze and felt like I was losing control, like I was floating in a sea so salty it held me up.
I remembered that we hadn’t just scavenged for food; we also taught ourselves to grow it. Row and I started a vegetable patch in the front yard where the sun was strongest. She once stood in that garden, holding a radish she’d pulled, a pleased grin on her face, sunlight bright on her face. Even in the upheaval there were incandescent moments like that—moments I’d spend the rest of my life reaching for.
“I’m not going to the Valley just because it sounds nice,” I said, surprising myself. “That’s where my daughter is. My other daughter.”
If Daniel was surprised, he didn’t show it. His stoic expression stayed unchanged as I told him about Jacob taking Row from me, about how I hadn’t heard of them for years until just a few weeks ago, and now Row was held in a colony in the Valley and I had to try to save her. To get her out before they moved her to a breeding ship and my chance was closed forever.
“I know the risk,” I said, my voice faltering. I glanced at Pearl under the deck cover. “I know. I just … I just have to try.” I shrugged and looked away, then looked back at him, his eyes locked on me, his face shadowed. “The thought of not trying feels like suddenly not having bones in my body. My body goes loose and empty.” I shook my head and brushed a palm over my face.
“I’ll come with,” he said, his voice barely audible above the lapping waves against the boat.
“What?”
“I’ll help you get there.”
“That isn’t why I told you,” I said. But I wasn’t so sure. A part of me had known it was my last card to play. Or maybe I wanted some human connection in a vast dark sea. I couldn’t sort it out. “Why are you changing your mind?”
Daniel looked away and reached forward for a stick and stirred the coals.
“I think we can help each other,” he said. “I—I’ve been lonely. Besides, it would be good to go northeast. I haven’t been that way before.”
The uneasy feeling I had in the saloon returned to me; it drowned out the relief I’d felt when he’d changed his mind. I shifted my weight, leaning to the side, one arm under me. Why was he changing his mind? I couldn’t believe it was just because he wanted to help me find Row. I tried to push the uneasiness away. You’ve always had trouble trusting people, I reminded myself.
When I glanced back at Daniel his eyes were closed, his head leaned back against the gunwale. He looked innocent, and I didn’t believe that, either.
CHAPTER 11 (#ulink_9d278e97-122c-5d12-9749-86d02c554567)
AFTER I LOST Row, before I gave birth to Pearl, I wished I wasn’t having another child. Part of me wanted Pearl more than anything and the other part felt I couldn’t meet her, couldn’t look into her face. It all felt too fragile.
I couldn’t regret my children, but I also couldn’t be free from them, from the way they had opened me up, left me exposed. I had never felt as vulnerable as I had after birth, nor as strong. It was a greater vulnerability than I ever felt facing death, which only felt like a blank expanse, not like free-falling, which was how I felt every day trying to care for Pearl in this world.
What was most different about mothering Pearl compared to Row wasn’t that I was on water with Pearl and on land with Row. It was that I was all alone with Pearl after Grandfather passed. With Row, I worried about her falling down the stairs as we played in the attic. With Pearl, I worried about her falling from the side of the boat while I hooked bait. But it was only with Pearl that no one else was there to help keep an eye on her. Paying such close attention turned my mind inside out, flayed my nerves.
When Pearl was a baby I carried her in a sling almost every moment, even when we slept. But when she was a toddler I had a harder time keeping a handle on her. During storms, I’d tie her to me with a rope to make sure she didn’t get swept away. I trained her to stay near me at ports and taught her to swim.
Pearl had to do everything early: swimming, drinking goat’s milk, potty training, helping me work the fishing lines. She learned to swim at eighteen months but didn’t learn to walk properly until she was three. Instead of walking, she scuttled about Bird like a crab. Her childhood was the kind I’d read about in frontier stories, the children who knew how to milk a cow at six or how to shoot a rifle at nine.
At first this made me pity her in a different way than I’d pitied Row. But then I realized that being born later, after we were already on water, could be a gift. As a young child she could swim better than I ever would, with an instinctive knowledge of the waves.
So having Daniel on board made me feel like I could breathe again. I noticed he kept an eye on her the way I would, keeping her in his peripheral vision, one ear attuned to her movements. Daniel, Pearl, and I kept sailing south. At night, we’d all sleep under the deck cover, the wind whistling above us, the waves rocking the boat like a cradle. I slept on my side with Pearl tucked against my chest, and Daniel lay on the other side of me. One night, he rested his hand tentatively on my waist, and when I didn’t move he reached his arm around the two of us, his arm heavy and comforting, grounding us.
Sometimes, on nights that peaceful, I’d imagine us three going on like that, forgetting about the Valley, making a quiet, simple life on the sea. I began to look forward to the moments when Daniel was close to me, both of us standing near the tiller or huddling under the deck cover during a rainstorm. We could be silently working on mending a rope, our heads bent above the fraying fibers, our hands swiftly weaving, and I’d feel a serenity at his body being near mine.
But I’d remember Row, tugging her blankie behind her on our wood floor, her head cocked to one side, her expression a mix of curiosity and mischief. Or how she’d push the coffee table against the window and sit on it with her perfectly straight posture, watching the birds. Naming them by their colors: red birdie, black birdie. I’d feel her as though she were beside me. A warm tide rose and flooded my veins, pulling me toward the Valley as if I had no choice at all.
I PICKED SARDINES and squid from one of the nets I’d fished with that morning and dumped them in our live bait jar, a large ceramic canister that once was used to hold flour in a kitchen. We kept the jar tied down next to the cistern and only filled it with live bait when we could spare the meat.
I kept scanning the horizon as we approached the mountaintops of Central America. When we were about fifteen miles from the closest coast we signaled to a merchant ship by waving our flag, a blue square of fabric with a fish in the middle. The ship’s own flag billowed in the wind, purple with a brown spiral that looked like a snail shell.
People had communicated by flags before Grandfather and I took to the water. Sailors said that the Lily Black had been the first to raise a flag, using it to identify the different ships within their tribe, and later, to invite another ship to surrender before an attack.
So Grandfather and I made a fisherman’s flag by cutting a fish out of a white T-shirt and sewing it onto a blue pillowcase. As soon as Pearl was a toddler I taught her the three different kinds of flags, because I needed her to be my second set of eyes on the sea, to alert me to who could be approaching us if I was busy fishing. So she learned how some flags were a plain color: white to communicate distress, black to indicate disease, orange to refuse a request. Others told what kind of ship you were: a merchant ship, fishing boat, or breeding ship. And the last kind were the tribal flags, flags with symbols on them to show the identity of a new community, like a family crest.
Though the Lily Black were the first to set up this communication, they were also the first to subvert it. Now it was rumored that the Lily Black liked to sail under false flags to get closer to an enemy and to raise their own flag right before an attack.
So as we approached the merchant ship, I kept my eyes on their flag, my hands on the gunwale, fearing they’d take it down and replace it with a raider tribal flag.
“I think you can relax,” Daniel said. “You can’t stay in a permanent state of hypervigilance.”
“I’ve always avoided this part of the Pacific because I’ve heard raiders have a stronghold here.”
“I thought you avoided this area because you can’t navigate?” Daniel grinned at me and brushed my arm with the back of his hand.
I suppressed a grin and glanced at him, the wind tossing my hair in my face. “After the trade, we should troll and head a bit farther east for sailfish.”
Daniel looked out at sea. “How can you tell?”
I pointed to frigate birds flying low and diving into the water a few miles east. Grandfather had taught me to watch the birds. “I also saw schools of tuna and mackerel. The water is warm here. Sailfish can get you eighty pounds of meat. It’s worth going off course.”
“Okay. We’ve just got to be careful, sailing so close to the coast without aiming to dock.”
I knew he was concerned about the mountains just under the surface of the water and the boat running aground, shredding the hull. Sometimes you could see shadows darkening the water where the mountains rose up to meet the sky, and when you sailed over them, you could look down and see the rocky peaks like ancient faces floating in the deep, looking back up at you. The ocean churned above them, its currents eddying among the rocks, coral springing up anew, new sea creatures adapting and forming in the dark.
I wouldn’t be here for whatever new things would grow out of this new world; I’d be ash before they sprouted fully formed. But I wondered about them, wondering what Pearl would live to see and hoping they’d be good things.
We pulled alongside the merchant ship and traded our fish for a few yards of cotton, thread, charcoal, and goat’s milk. When I asked them about wood, they told us we needed to go even farther south to get good prices. A knot twisted in my stomach. We couldn’t lose even more time by sailing farther off course.
When we parted ways with the merchant ship, it sailed northeast toward a small port on the coast and Daniel adjusted our tiller so we’d turn southeast, toward where I thought there might be sailfish. Pearl played with a snake on deck as I repaired crab pots, weaving wire between the broken slats of metal. There was always something to be fixed. The rudder, the sail, the hull, the deck, the tackle and bait. Everything always breaking and me barely able to keep up, time slipping through my fingers all the while.
We sailed toward the diving birds. Pearl and I trolled with brightly colored lures made of ribbons and hooks. The water ran clear and the wind breathed easy, one of those lovely sailing days that made me feel like I was flying. I caught sight of a sailfish near the surface, its sail cutting the water like a shark’s fin, and I dropped a line with live squid on the hook.
I let the line drift, occasionally moving it, watching the water and waiting, careful to bait the sailfish and not follow it. It took two hours before the sailfish bit and jerked me against the gunwale. My knuckles whitened as it almost tugged me into the sea.
Daniel leapt forward to steady me. “You okay?” he asked as he helped me screw the pole into the rod holder on the gunwale.
I nodded. “We can’t lose this one.”
It swam with astonishing speed, its sail cutting the surface of the water, and our boat lurched toward it when it reached the end of the line. It gave a powerful run, swimming in a semicircle at the end of the line, then fighting the line, diving into the air, sending a spray of water around it.
No coast lay in sight; the world was so flat and blue, your eyes could get tired of it. It was disorienting—this much space. Like a person needed something to dwarf them. Even the clouds were as thin as gauze.
A shark circled our boat, swimming closer and then farther away. At first I thought the shark was tracking the movements of a school of mackerel under us, but then I realized it was hunting our sailfish.
“We should try to reel it in quick,” I told Daniel.
“I thought you said it’s better to let them wear out before you reel them in? How are we going to handle this thing?”
I put on my leather gloves. “You and Pearl reel him in. I’ll catch him by the sword. Once I’ve got him, you help me lift him out of the water by grabbing his sail and under his torso.”
The pole that held the sailfish had been a titanium fence post before Grandfather fashioned it into a fishing pole. It didn’t bend or break against the sailfish’s weight, but the rod holder on the gunwale creaked and screeched, threatening to rip lose.
Daniel cranked the reel, straining with each pull, sweat gathering at his temples. The sailfish kept fighting, lunging into the air and whipping its body around. Water sprayed our faces. Its body slammed against the boat as it fought. I blinked away the salt caught in my eyes and lost sight of the shark.
When the sailfish was close enough to grab, I leaned over the gunwale and reached for it. It jerked on the line, its head pulled from the water, the hook glistening in its mouth.
I grabbed its sword and it almost slipped out of my hands, slick as an icicle. The sulfuric scent of coral and seaweed drifted around us. We must be close to mountaintops, I thought fleetingly.
Daniel locked the reel in place and leaned over the gunwale to grab the sail. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the shark reappear. It bumped the hull and we rocked slightly.
Dread gathered like bile at the base of my throat. The shark dove deeper into the water, its shape cloudy and then invisible in the depths. The sailfish’s eyes darted to and fro. Its gills fluttered and its scales tremored, spinning sunlight in a kaleidoscope. Even it seemed to have a fresh wave of fear roll over it.
It opened its eyes wide and ripped its sword from my hands in a violent lurch and dropped back into the water with a splash.
“Dammit,” Daniel muttered, reaching into the water to grab the sail.
“Daniel, don’t!” I said.
The shark pierced the water, mouth open, catching Daniel’s forearm in its teeth and shaking its head in a violent toss before dropping back into the water. Daniel screamed, falling forward toward the water.
CHAPTER 12 (#ulink_7078afc6-556f-5687-bfe7-218bd5c30a8f)
I CAUGHT THE back of Daniel’s shirt, braced against the gunwale, and yanked him hard. We both stumbled backward and fell to the deck. Blood streamed from his arm, running along the cracks between the wood.
“Pearl! Grab the fabric!” I shouted.
I couldn’t see the wound past the blood. Skin and tendons hung from his arm. Had he severed an artery? Was the bone crushed?
Pearl ran to the deck cover and returned with the fabric I’d gotten in Harjo. I pressed it against his arm.
“It’s going to be okay,” I told him, my own blood pulsing in my ears. “We just need to stop the bleeding.”
He squeezed his eyes shut. His face was pale and his breath came in quick shallow bursts.
“Pearl, hold this here and apply pressure,” I said. She held the fabric against the wound as I took off my belt and hooked it around his upper arm, above his elbow. I cut a new hole in the leather with my knife, tightened the belt, and fastened it in place.
I leaned back on my heels to get a better look at him and laid my hand on his shoulder. “Breathe,” I said. “Try to stay calm.”
The sound of wood on rock filled the air, a rumble growing into a dull roar. The boat rocked abruptly, knocking me to my side.
Daniel’s eyes flew open. “Mountain. Mountain!” he said frantically.
I leapt up, ran to the stern, and looked over the gunwale. The tops of mountains glimmered just below the surface, pocked with crevices and peaks, small blooms of coral sprouting in the shadows. We were running aground on mountaintops.
I turned the tiller, yanking the rudder as far to the right as it would go, and felt the boat start to shift. A strong wind caught the sail and we surged forward. Beyond the bow, several peaks protruded a few feet above the water. We needed to turn farther to the right, and faster.
“The sail!” I called to Pearl, but she was already at the block, working the rope through. I joined her, pulling the rope, fumbling to release a knot.
Pearl’s hands shook and tears streamed down her face. “We’re going to be in the water,” she cried.
“We’re going to be okay,” I told her.
I dropped the knot, pulled my knife from its sheath, and cut the rope, releasing the sail so it let out, bearing us away from the wind.
But it was too late. The rocky tip of a mountain stood a foot above the water’s surface and was only twenty feet in front of us. I grabbed Pearl and pulled her close.
Bird tilted to the left as we ran over the mountain, water sloshing over the deck and Daniel rolling toward the gunwale. Pearl and I tumbled against the mast and clung to it. The boat slid over the mountain, the sound of cracking wood thundering around us.
The hull hit the water again with a thud and Bird almost leveled. I ran to Daniel, pulling him up beneath his armpits and propping him against the gunwale. He clutched his arm against his chest and gritted his teeth. Bird started to lean to the right. We were taking on water. I stood up and scanned the horizon, hoping to see land, but found none.
“Pearl, grab the bucket and a torch,” I said.
I opened the latch door in the deck and peered into the cavity between the hull and deck. Interlaced boards blocked my view, but I could hear the rush of water. Pearl handed me the torch, a branch with a piece of fabric wrapped around one end and a plastic bag over it to keep it dry. I ripped the plastic bag off the end and Pearl struck her flint stone against it.
I jumped through the hole, my feet hitting water when I landed. The flame only illuminated a foot around me, casting deep shadows between the interlaced boards. To the right I saw the hole, near the bottom right of the hull. The water inside was already two feet high. We could sink in an hour or less.
I pulled myself out of the hole and grabbed a bucket from Pearl. She’d already tied a string to the handle, and I dropped it into the hole and pulled it up, water dripping and sloshing over the rim.
“Pearl, while I haul water, you pack food and Daniel’s instruments into our bags. And bottle some of the water from the cistern.”
“It won’t all fit.”
“Don’t take the flour then.”
“Okay,” Pearl said. She turned and disappeared beneath the deck cover, dragging out bags and tossing them on the deck in front of her.
I dropped the bucket again and again, my arms and back beginning to ache.
“Shit,” I muttered. I wasn’t buying us any time. I tossed the water over the side of the boat, and it caught the light in a bright curve, sparkling like crystal. I squeezed my eyes shut and reopened them. Bird, I thought, thinking of Grandfather’s hands as he made her, his callused palms running over the wood.
I WATCHED BIRD sink as I clung to Daniel’s raft. Daniel and Pearl sat on top of the raft, clutching the sides so they wouldn’t be knocked off with each wave. There was only room for two without it sinking; I put Pearl on so she’d be safe and Daniel on so he’d stop pissing me off by bleeding into the water. We each wore a backpack stuffed with supplies.
Bird pitched to the side and seemed to hold steady as the water filled her. I felt that the water was filling me, its weight inescapable. But then a gurgling sound came from Bird, water pulling her down, and she disappeared from sight like a coin dropped in a wishing well. I sucked in air. Bird was the last thing tying me to my mother and grandfather, and without her I felt suspended, cut loose from them. I stifled a sob and clutched the raft more tightly.
I held my knife in my other hand, scanning the water for the shark.
“It will wait till we tire,” Daniel said, watching me, concern softening his voice.
I glared at him. You’ll tire first, I thought, half tempted to pull him into the water if I saw the shark again. “I told you not to reach for the sailfish,” I snapped.
“I told you we should’ve stayed on course and gone straight to port,” he snapped back. “Navigating this close to the coastline is impossible.”
A small strangled sound came from Pearl, a sob caught in her throat. She hadn’t stopped shaking since the first collision.
I reached my hand up to grasp her white knuckles. “Pearl, sweetie. We’re going to be okay.”
“I don’t want you in the water. The shark,” she cried.
“I’ve got my knife,” I said, holding the blade up so it glinted in the sun. I forced a smile and squeezed her hand. “We’ll be fine.”
Pearl’s tears fell on my hand over hers. A wave splashed in my face and I swallowed salt water and felt rage unfurl inside me. I cursed myself. I never should have let him on board.
All my tackle and bait, most of the food stores, the fresh water in the cistern. All sunk, drifting to the seafloor. Even if we made it to land, I’d have nothing to trade for food or new fishing supplies.
“Myra, I see something,” Daniel said.
“Shut up.”
“Myra—”
“I said shut up,” I said, clutching my knife tighter.
“It’s a ship,” he said, reaching into a bag for the binoculars.
“Give them to me.”
I peered through the binoculars, scanning the horizon until I landed on a ship. It was larger than a fishing boat, about the size of a merchant vessel. I squinted through the binoculars, searching for a flag.
“I don’t know who they are,” I said. Strangely, they seemed to be sailing straight toward us, though I was doubtful they could see us yet. They seemed almost three miles from us, and we were such a small speck in the vast sea. I doubted they could see us unless they were searching for us.
I gnawed on my lip, already dry from salt and sun. I gazed toward the ship, only able to see a small shadow on the horizon without the binoculars. The ship could save us or condemn us to a worse fate than taking our chances on the open sea.
“You should wave them down,” Daniel said, reaching into the backpack for our white flag.
“We don’t know who they are,” I repeated. “I’d rather face my chances on the open sea than chained in the hull of a raider ship.”
“It’s worth the risk,” Daniel said.
I glared at him. Worth the risk for him, I thought. He wouldn’t survive on the open sea long, but Pearl and I might. At least for a few days, and if the currents were right, maybe we’d make it to the coast.
He seemed to read my thoughts. “You two won’t make it long. We’re still several miles from the coast. This isn’t well-traveled territory; someone else won’t come along.”
I glanced back at the ship. I remembered talking with my mother up in the attic, sitting on the top step, as Grandfather had fitted Bird’s joints. We talked about the latest reports we’d heard, how far the water had come, what buildings in town to avoid. Jacob was gone, meeting up with some of his new friends I didn’t know. Row carried a pail of water past us and set it next to the others, clustered around the perimeter of the attic. The city water had been shut off the week before and we were collecting rainwater in all our buckets and bowls. Row knelt in front of the bucket and leaned forward, grinning into her reflection.
“Hi,” she said to herself and giggled.
Grandfather had smiled at her and patted the side of Bird. “She’ll be a good boat to start out in,” he’d said.
I was surprised when he said this—I never imagined we’d leave Bird, not after it’d taken so much work to build. I was so young, I wasn’t accustomed to loss and impermanence the way Grandfather was. I hadn’t known how to expect it or accept it.
My heartbeat quickened and I tried to breathe deeply. No choice but to move forward, I told myself.
“Hand me the fishing wire,” I said. I pulled my torso up on the raft and treaded water. I pierced the fishing wire through the fabric, tying it around the oar to make a flag.
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Kassandra montag
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: An unforgettable, inventive, and riveting epic saga with the literary force and evocative imagination of Station Eleven, Zone One, and The Road, that signals the arrival of an extraordinary new talent.After years of slowly overtaking the continent, starting with the great coastal cities, rising floodwaters have left America an archipelago of mountaintop colonies surrounded by a deep expanse of open water. Civilization as it once was is gone. Bands of pirates roam the waters, in search of goods and women to breed. Some join together to create a new kind of society, while others sail alone, barely surviving.Myra and her precocious and feisty eight-year-old daughter, Pearl, fish from their small boat, the Bird, visiting small hamlets and towns on dry land only to trade for supplies and information. Just before Pearl’s birth, when the monstrous deluge overtook their home in Nebraska, Maya’s oldest daughter, Row, was stolen by her father.For eight years Myra has searched for the girl that she knows, in her bones and her heart, still lives. In a violent confrontation with a stranger, Myra discovers that Row was last seen in a far-off encampment of raiders on the coast of what used to be Greenland. Throwing aside her usual caution, she and Pearl embark on a perilous voyage into the icy northern seas to rescue the girl, now thirteen.On the journey, Myra and Pearl join forces with a larger ship, a band of Americans like them. In a desperate act of deceit and manipulation, Myra convinces the crew to sail north. Though she hides her true motivations, Myra finds herself bonding with her fellow seekers, men, women, and children who hope to build a safe haven together in this dangerous new world.But secrets, lust, and betrayals threaten to capsize their dream, and after their fortunes take a shocking – and blood – turn, Myra can no longer ignore the question of whether saving Row is worth endangering Pearl and her fellow travelers.A compulsively readable novel of dark despair and soaring hope, After the Flood is a magnificent, action-packed, and sometimes frightening odyssey laced with wonder – an affecting and wholly original saga both redemptive and astonishing.