by Lydia Millet
Jen and David and I went outside to round up the little boys. Their canoe was still moored at the trees’ edge, tied to a branch. We waded through knee-high water until we reached higher ground, shoes heavy with mud.
“Jack! Shel!” we yelled into the trees. “Are you there?”
“Evie, we have to stay,” called down my baby brother.
“Up a tree? In a storm?” I yelled.
“I’m going up,” said Jen. “It’s too dark. I can’t sign with Shel from down here.”
Jack’s tree was connected to others by bridges made of planks and ropes. His treehouse was the largest, but the platform was crammed so full of boxes we could barely step onto it. Jen signed rapidly at Shel—she was impatient, shivering in her shorts.
“What are all the boxes, Jack?” I asked.
“You know how, in that book the lady gave me, after they left that beautiful garden they got in a really big flood?”
“He’s reading the Bible?” said Jen.
“We can talk about your book later,” I said. “For now we should go in. It’s not safe here, you see.”
“Evie,” said Jack. “We have to save the animals. Like Noah did.”
That was when I looked around at the stacked boxes. I saw two birdcages, fluttering movements inside them. I saw holes punched in one box, two box, three box, four. A furry brown snout poked out of the grille on a plastic pet carrier.
“We collected them,” said Jack.
“Wild animals?” I asked.
“A bunny’s the one that bit me,” he said. “Maybe he thought my finger was a carrot.”
“You guys gotta come into the house now,” said Jen.
“But we can’t,” said Jack, and Shel grabbed her arm and signed at her frantically.
“Why not, Jack?” I asked. “Aren’t you getting cold out here? And hungry?”
“We have some food. And we moved everyone. Plus our owl won’t go in the house, no way. He’s hurt.”
“Your owl?” I asked.
Jack pointed up into the branches. I couldn’t see.
“He’s a barn owl. He has a broken wing.”
“You realize rabbits and owls don’t really chill together, right?” said David. “It’s not like picture books where woodland creatures put on dresses and square-dance at picnics.”
“But see, we have to feed him. He can’t fly,” said Jack.
“The ’rents could notice if these guys aren’t in the house tonight,” said Jen to me. “It’s me who’ll be punished.”
“We’re not going,” said Jack, and lifted his chin.
Shel shook his head in solidarity. Jen moved toward him—maybe to grab his arm—and he did something, quick, that surprised me.
He pulled a thick metal bracelet out of the pocket of his hoodie and clicked it onto his wrist, a silver glint in the dimness. Then he clicked again.
He’d handcuffed himself to the treehouse.
4
THAT WAS HOW our exile started: Shel and Jack and a pair of handcuffs. Jack said they’d found them in the toy closet, but they weren’t toys. Jen and I had to stay with our brothers, and David stayed out of guilt over the shipwreck. He was glad to get away from the unraveling mother.
A miracle, though: our cells had signals. Through the plastic bag hers was in, Jen read aloud to David and me about the floodwater. It was full of oil and sewage. There were bodies in there, human and dog and bird and cow. There were pesticides and fertilizers and drain cleaner and antifreeze.
It was a toxic soup.
I texted my mother our location, in the unlikely event that she was worried about Jack.
She sent back an emoji of a tulip.
“Don’t sweat it,” said Jen. “It’s drinking and talking time.”
The three of us accepted crackers from the boys and called up weather apps. Rain. Icons of clouds with bolts of lightning. Icons of hail. A spiral one I hadn’t seen.
“That’s ‘hurricane,’ ” said David helpfully.
Coastal flood warnings, severe thunderstorm warnings—it seemed like a word salad in a clean red font. Who knew what it meant? Who knew what was coming?
Later we slept hunched together on a nearby platform—smaller than the Ark, but decently covered—sharing some blankets and pillows Jack and Shel had brought. They smelled of cat pee.
IN THE MORNING Jack showed me his menagerie. The sharp-nosed animal I’d seen in the pet carrier was a possum that kept itself busy gnawing on the wire door with its sharp yellow teeth. Did serious damage, too. There were two doves, a robin, and a small brown bird in a homemade-looking mesh deal. There was a murky terrarium Jack said held crayfish, toads, and a salamander. There were plastic food containers with holes poked in the top, full of silty water and minnows, and a big, fat fish in a cooking pot. There were brown field mice skittering back and forth in a drawer with a sheet of clear plastic duct-taped on top of it.
“How about the bees?” said David. “Are they still in the flooded basement?”
“Of course not!” said Jack, indignant. “They went back in their hive. So we brought it outside.”
“Hey!”
It was Sukey, at the base of the tree. Others. Umbrellas and hooded ponchos and raincoats. Upturned faces. Rafe, Terry, Dee, Low, Juicy.
“We’re moving out here!” shouted Sukey.
“You don’t want to,” I called down. “It’s cold and wet!”
“Don’t care!” yelled Low. “It’s vile in there!”
THEY STRAPPED UP the tarps from the beach to extend our roof cover. They found a stash of paint-spattered groundsheets and swarmed over the canopy, lashing the bright-blue vinyl to the treehouse posts. They stretched them between platforms, over nets and ladders.
I felt restless. If they didn’t want to go back to the house, whatever, but I did. I wanted the fireplace and the cabinets packed with snack cakes and miniature powdered donuts. The indoor plumbing.
I asked Dee, then Terry, then Rafe what the deal was, but they refused to talk about it. It was only when Sukey finished setting up her sleeping bag, weighing it down with rocks, that I got a straight answer: during the night the older generation had dosed itself with Ecstasy.
No one knew if it had been a plan or covert action, but they’d promptly ascended new heights of repulsive.
It was true Juicy and Terry had watched them fool around from behind slatted doors at the beginning—even Low had done it. Out of a sense of desperate boredom, soon after the phones were taken away. Also vengeance. And scorn.
Now they regretted it. Maybe they’d had had stronger stomachs, back then.
“Plus that was just like, normal old-people sex,” said Juicy.
“How would you know?” said Rafe.
“Like, couples,” said Juicy. “This is . . . like, everything.”
“They’re walking around butt naked,” said Low.
“I saw two fathers and Dee’s mother in a three—” started Juicy.
“Stop!” shrieked Dee. “Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!”
“Shut up, Juicy,” said Rafe. “No names. That’s cruel and unusual punishment.”
“They’re writhing and moaning all over the place,” said Sukey. “Biggest shitshow I ever saw.”
“Shitshow,” said Val, nodding. “Biggest.”
The nodding looked strange, since her face was upside down. She was hanging off a rope ladder by her knees.
“They gave up completely on fixing the holes,” said Sukey. “The water keeps pouring in and they just smile and chew their bottom lips. And stroke each other’s junk.”
LATER I FOUND myself sitting on a rock at the edge of the woods, waiting. Terry and David had drawn the short straws and taken the canoe to get food, and a few of us were hanging around at the water’s edge to help them unload. I watched them paddle across the yard toward us.
Branches thrashed back and forth in the wind.
“Those trees look just like girls freaking out,” said Juicy. He flung his arms r
andomly around his head, his mouth wide open. “They look hysterical.”
“You’re such a fucking sexist,” said Sukey. “When you say shit like that, I kind of feel like degloving your testes.”
“Degloving?” asked Juicy. “Huh. What’s that?”
They were drowned out by the wind, thankfully, as Sukey explained it to him. I could only hear snatches of dialogue. “. . . peel the skin back . . .”
Leaves flew into my face, leaves and dirt, until I had to hold my arms up in front of me. The sky was flashes and booming thunder.
“Come on! Come on!” shouted Jack behind us.
Terry and David paddled faster, but the canoe was carrying too much and moved at a lazy pace. Water slopped over the sides.
Lightning struck. A direct hit: the weathervane on top of the house. It sent up a fountain of sparks.
Terry shrieked, leaping up in the canoe. He toppled out. The boat capsized.
I saw cracker boxes soaking up water, cans sinking. I saw bags of cheese popcorn spin away in the dark.
So we had to wade into the toxic soup again.
I COULDN’T GET to sleep when the others did. There was no lightning, but the water was pouring down.
I fumbled around on the platform for my headlamp, stepped over Jen and Sukey, and walked across two rope ladders to the Ark.
Jack was fast asleep, his small face lit by a lantern that hung from the single, low roof beam. But the animals in their cages were scratching around. Chirping. Squawking. I figured most of them were probably nocturnal.
I squatted down and lit up the face of the possum. Its snout twitched as it sniffed at me. Then an animal I couldn’t identify turned away from my light—a fox? Could Shel have caught a fox?
My mouth tasted bad: no toothpaste around.
Rustling next to my ear. A flurry. Something brushed against my cheek. A sharp claw almost pierced my shoulder.
“What!” I said.
It scrabbled down my arm and made a horrible screech. I almost hit it. It almost fell over.
I saw a flash of gauze, then a curved black talon. If I’d been wearing short sleeves, the talons would have sliced my skin open. White face. Feathers. A beak that looked like a hooked nose.
The barn owl flapped its one healthy wing and opened its beak repeatedly, making no noise.
“What do you want, a dead mouse?”
Maybe Jack had forgotten to feed it. But I didn’t know how to feed owls, and he could probably take my finger off with that nose-like beak.
I wished I could feed him, but I had nothing to offer.
His large dark eyes stared at me. I stared back. I felt I could see all owls in their roundness.
All the owls we couldn’t feed.
“Owl,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
His black eyes stared on. Then blinked. He was hungry, I felt sure.
But in the few seconds before he scrambled off my arm again, landing awkwardly on the wooden crossbar, I wanted to believe he forgave me.
THAT WAS THE night I burst from a dream about guinea pigs and thought the forest was groaning. The wind was so fierce it snatched wet clothes off the wooden crossbar. I saw a shirt lifted and speared onto a nearby branch, where it dangled and flapped. I saw bags of dinner rolls flung into the dark, hairbrushes and flip-flops fly off and disappear.
It was the night Rafe’s sleeping bag got so soaked his feet were sloshing around when he woke up, and the night two fools who hadn’t put their phones in plastic found that the rain had turned them to slivers of scrap metal. I won’t name names, other than to say, Low and Juicy.
It was the night the trees fell.
The force of the storm scared us. We huddled together as close as we could, balanced on the edges of platforms and ladders. In the jittery leaps of our flashlight spots we saw three trees fall one after another, dominoes. They fell at the other side of the yard, across the poison lake—a spindly one first, so thin we were surprised it had the weight to topple the others. The second and third fell after, till they were a blurred pile on the ground.
Near the true lake, trees also fell. In the morning we would see them atop the water, sinking. Their branches sagged, humped in the middle and trailing at the ends.
But firmly anchored by the village in the canopy—older and on higher ground—our own trees still stood strong.
AFTER THE RAIN stopped, it took three days for the floodwaters to recede.
On the first day a seaplane landed on the lake, the first I’d seen in real life. We watched men in blue uniforms get out and stand on the floats. Then we saw Alycia, saved.
She was wrapped in a blanket and wore big rubber boots. Her parents went out to meet her in the rowboat, since the dock was still submerged. The boathouse was waterlogged, with planks separating from the walls, warping out over the risen waters like the lifted hem of a skirt.
Alycia stepped into the boat, and the men in blue uniforms talked to the father while the mother fussed over her. Alycia gazed over her mother’s head and waved at us lazily.
“They all made it,” said David. “Every last jerkoff on that yacht.” But he was smiling.
Actually, he looked radiant with relief.
“A fishing boat sank,” said Jen. She was a newshound.
“And that cruise ship,” said Low. “No death toll. Yet.”
Coming back across the lake in the boat, Alycia stood at the prow. She never sat down in boats—always stood. Her father rowed. Her mother looked up at her adoringly.
Later the three of them drove away from the great house in a tractor. Its big tires churned up slurries of mud and raised surges of red-brown water beside them like moving walls. In that way they made their sluggish progress down the flooded drive. And out of view.
Alycia hadn’t wanted to go with them, said David—rumor had it they’d bribed her. Those parents had paid her cold, hard cash to let them take her home.
But his relief lasted.
ON THE SECOND day it was discovered that the twins were missing. Their parents hadn’t noticed before, figuring they were with us. The mother’s bottom lip was so chewed up from the Ecstasy it had swollen halfway down her chin.
Jack and Shel went looking and found Kay. She was sleeping in the fishing shed, surrounded by small rodent skeletons and junk-food wrappers. It was curious, Jack said: the skeletons were fresh.
As far as we knew, she was a picky eater who usually insisted on white bread with cold cuts. On the other hand, her mouth was smeared with what looked a lot like dried blood. She smelled rancid.
Don’t ask, was our approach. We marched her back to her parents.
There was no sign of her sister.
ON THE THIRD day hundreds of dying fish lay flapping on what used to be the lawn, an enormous mudflat interrupted by islands of bush. Jack and Shel splashed desperately back and forth from the mud to the real lake, carrying buckets of fishes. It was a race against time, so some of us helped them.
For those that died before they could be saved, the boys dug a mass grave. They piled the fish bodies inside it and conducted a funeral service, with readings from Jack’s Bible.
“My peace I give you,” read Jack sadly. “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Do not be afraid.”
Shel had made a sign. His verse was written on it in block letters. He held it up in front of his chest for us to see.
ARE NOT FIVE SPARROWS SOLD FOR TWO PENNIES? AND YET NOT ONE OF THEM IS FORGOTTEN BY GOD.
We found a blow-up raft snagged in a clump of reeds in a cove of the lake. One of the flimsy rafts you use in a pool, yellow and muddy. On it lay a small man.
He had a gaunt face and wore only a pair of cargo shorts, exposing a scrawny chest and stringy legs.
He seemed to be asleep.
“Is he dead?” asked Juice.
“Nah. Chest is moving,” said Sukey.
Next to me Jack cocked his head thoughtfully and tapped the shoulder bag where his picture Bible was. He’d gotten fond of it—carried i
t everywhere and flipped through it so often it was getting shabby. He’d done the same with his first copy of the Frog and Toad Treasury. Read it into rags.
“They found a guy in some reeds in my book! A baby, though. They brought him to the princess of Egypt,” he told us.
“No princess of Egypt here,” said Sukey. “No princess of anything.”
“Alycia was the closest thing we had,” said Rafe. “But she fucked off.”
“What should we do with him?”
Low leaned down and poked his arm. The small man stirred, opened his eyes and did a double-take, startled by the ring of us standing around.
“Um hi?” he said. Sounded dazed.
“I’m Val,” said Val, unexpectedly friendly. “Hi.”
She took to the small man instantly.
“Be careful,” whispered Dee. “Could be a pedophile. A molester!”
“Not a molester,” objected the small man. He raised his hands, palms up. “No molesting.”
“Dee?” said Sukey. “Try not to be an assface, for once.”
“I’m Burl,” said the small man. “Almost drowned, I think. Man. I’m starving.”
“Energy bar?” said Val, who kept them on her person for sustenance while climbing. She slipped it out of a cargo pocket and handed it over. Burl gobbled it, ravenous.
“You live around here?” asked Terry.
Burl nodded, used his non-eating hand to wave around.
“Forest?” asked Val.
He nodded.
“Homeless, you mean?” said Dee.
“Forest,” he repeated, his mouth full. “Was kayaking. It flipped. Then the storm . . .” He shook his head, swallowed and shoved the rest of the energy bar in his mouth.
“Whatevs,” said Sukey.
“S’OK,” said Val. “Leave him to me.”
The rest of us went back to our phones and foraging. That was how we subsisted: trips to the house for water and food and recharging.
The next time I saw Burl he was climbing a tree with Val. He was no slouch, either. That small man could climb.
BY AND BY I went to the house to use a toilet and had to thread my way through a crowd of parents. There were state troopers in the foyer.