After the Flood

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

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

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

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.