After the Flood

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

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

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.