Maybe if Liam and the father rowed hard, they could make it in twelve days. But twelve days still wouldn’t solve the problem. The problem was something the father couldn’t bring himself to say and it was tearing his throat out: they had only one boat.
And the mother grasped it immediately, as he had known she would, because just then she looked at him with fire and hatred and despair all at the same time, a look that condemned him now and forever—and she murmured, as if it was because of him, just him, as if it were all his fault, the sea, the storm, and misfortune:
“Who are you going to leave behind?”
ON THE ISLAND
The morning of August 19
There was always noise in the big house, and it woke them at dawn, one after the other, with a smile. There were good, warm, toasted smells. Madie, since the tidal wave, had been making French toast in the morning with the stale loaves they had put aside. Of course she was parsimonious as she sprinkled the bread with sugar, because she didn’t know how long they would be there on that stump of earth without any help. The children didn’t mind, they realized the situation was exceptional and when it wasn’t raining too hard they made their own fun baking rolls with flour and water on a fire outside, stuffing a square of chocolate into the middle to make them less insipid. Then Madie had decreed that they had to save on the food, and on the wood she was keeping for the old stove they’d retrieved in haste from the barn where it had been languishing, and by the third day they were no longer allowed to cook their soft, sweet pastry. As it happened, it was on that third day that the restrictions began. Madie was getting organized, it was a siege, she said, the sea had surrounded them, they had to resist. Pata and the older children had already started putting aside the cans, jars, and bottles they found in every nook of the most hidden cupboards—but how long would they be on the island? The rough seas meant flight was impossible, or only at great risk, they didn’t dare think of it, there was only the need to survive on their hill from one day to the next and hope the house would stand. The sea is getting calmer, murmured Pata, and Madie wondered what her man had between his ears, because with the naked eye you couldn’t see it getting any calmer, not as far as she could tell, not according to the children, either; she could do nothing but shrug in response to their questioning looks.
But the fact remained that in spite of the mother’s decision to ration everything it still smelled good when they woke up in the morning. When Madie didn’t feel like using up her vanilla and sugar anymore, all she had to do was fry her pancakes, which they used as bread; even the slightest burning on the stove and the smell filled the room, wove its way down the corridor, up the stairs, and into the bedrooms.
Yes, Louie would recall those mornings for a long time, those dawns that had enchanted his taste buds and lured him spellbound into the kitchen.
Until the thirteenth day.
He would never forget that, either.
It had started the same as any ordinary morning. But it wasn’t a morning like the others: there was no smell in the house.
At first he didn’t really notice, it took him a few seconds to emerge from sleep, feeling calm, drowsy. In the bedroom, Perrine and Noah were still asleep. For a few seconds he listened to their breathing, watched their blankets rising and falling rhythmically. He pushed back his sheets.
He wasn’t thinking about anything just then. Or maybe only that it was hot. He could leave his shirt off. Open the door, quietly.
And finally: no smells, no coffee or toast, nothing, just the smell of the void.
* * *
Outside, the water hasn’t moved. Or surely it has risen a bit, but you can’t see it, either in Louie’s eyes, or Noah’s, or in Perrine’s one eye. No room.
They stand looking out to sea.
They have seen the footprints around the jetty and they know it is true. And anyway, the boat is gone. Afterward, they’ll go back into the house and reread ten times over the note that Madie left on the table. For now they are staring out at the horizon as hard as they can. If they could spot the boat somewhere, even at the farthest point, they would throw themselves in the water to swim to it. But all they can see are the usual reeds and scattered shrubs, and their vision blurs.
With tears, naturally.
Noah is the first to fall to his knees. He calls to their mother. Perrine sits next to him, takes him in her arms. Louie joins them. All three cling to each other, their hands squeezed, white with the energy they put into silently promising not to leave one another. Three little creatures, their wet cheeks pressed together, sobbing words which the wind sweeps away.
They’re afraid.
They don’t know who will say it first: why have their parents abandoned them? Actually, they understood why when they read the letter that crumpled their faces and stopped their hearts—but there is something else they can’t stop thinking about, nor find the means to express: why them?
Why them and not the others.
Noah was the one who asked.
“I don’t know,” murmurs Louie to start with.
Perrine snivels, still looking out at the horizon as if she might miss seeing her parents on their boat, out there on the water. Her clear little voice, just the same. I don’t know.
“Because we were naughty?”
Silence. Maybe they are thinking. Noah continues.
“Because I’m too small, Louie has a sick leg, and Perrine’s only got one eye, is that why they left us? Because they didn’t love us?”
At the same time, they reply in one breath.
“No,” says Perrine.
“Yes,” says Louie.
* * *
That their parents didn’t love them; and if they knew, those little children left behind on the island, how their mother is sobbing in silence on the boat, just as they are crying alone on the damp earth, the mother who is holding Lotte and Marion tight, inconsolable. Emily and Sidonie are curled up next to Matteo. In the middle, Liam and his father are rowing. Because of the mounds of supplies, lashed in place with criss-crossing straps, they don’t have an inch to move, crowded fore and aft on their small craft. The father has installed ropes all around the gunwale, as a precaution.
Madie doesn’t know how the little ones will manage to sit still for twelve or fourteen days. We’ll stop, said Pata. But she silenced him with a look. No, they won’t stop. They will keep going until they reach higher ground and he will go back for the other three right away. He promised.
The night before their departure he was also the one who decided which children would stay behind on the hill. The mother didn’t want it, she was set on one impossible idea: take them all.
“We won’t last three days without supplies or water,” said the father. “We can’t be sure we’ll find any other people to help us. There might be nothing more until we reach the mountains. No people. No islands.”
Madie repeated, No more love. No more honor. We’re like animals. And she fell silent, because her gaze had met Pata’s, no need of words to pierce soul and flesh, is there, silence is enough, when it is so heavy with meaning, and it was the father who took a breath and started speaking after that silence; the harm was done. Nothing would ever erase the mother’s silence, nothing would ever prevent the words she had not uttered from going through Pata’s head over and over again, and every day he’d wonder if there was not some truth in them, and yet no, God, he swore that when, sick at heart, he had picked the names of the three little ones who’d stay behind, not once had it occurred to him, it was Madie who thought it must have, Madie who eventually came out with it, because it was too much to bear.
“The lame one, the half-blind one, the dwarf. So, we’ll leave them behind, the most damaged. We’ll finish what nature began.”
But the father saw things differently. He needed Liam and even Matteo to row, and they couldn’t abandon the little girls: they
would never survive on the hill. Louie, Perrine, and Noah slept in the same room. It would be easier not to wake them when they left. Louie and Perrine were very resourceful. They would manage, they’ll surprise us, hey, don’t you think, implored the father. The mother wasn’t listening, she was blocking her ears. She didn’t want to hear his pathetic arguments. She simply murmured, “Suit yourself.”
“You’ll blame me.”
“I’ll blame you for everything, anyway.”
Because earlier that evening, when he had decided they must flee, she had tried. Oh, yes, she had tried to make him change his mind, and she’d hit him in the chest ten times, until he took her in his arms to stop her, until he murmured that they had no choice, and with all the spite she’d accumulated she snarled how unthinking he was, how stubborn, how criminally stupid, You see where it’s gotten you, your stubborn pride? You think I brought children into the world so that you can go and kill them?
The father had wept, too, but he’d held his ground. This time he was right, he was sure of it. He didn’t tell the mother but he felt they had to start by saving some of the children; deep inside, a little voice echoed, That’s already something. And when the mother swore she would stay on the hill to give her place on the boat to one more child, he refused point blank. She had to go with them. To watch over the children, to keep them calm. To look after them once they landed and the father went back for the others. He wouldn’t let her discuss it: she would be the mother of the six children on the boat.
But God, the other three!
“We could at least explain to them,” she begged.
But the children would scream and weep and cling to them when it came time to leave, thought the father. Neither one of them, neither he nor the mother, would have the courage to pry their little fingers from the ropes on the boat; neither one of them would be able to shove them away with the blades of the oars when they flung themselves into the water to follow them like little abandoned dogs about to drown. Their cries would stay with them all through the crossing: shrill at first, then more and more distant. No, it was unbearable.
The mother begged him to think about it.
“Can’t we find something to put them in—a tub, a feed trough. We could tow them behind the boat.”
The father shook his head: every solution was futile. There was nothing left on the hill. Nor any time left. The sea was still threatening, it would already be hard enough with one boat. So they gathered the necessary supplies, hiding them in a corner of the barn; they threw together a few belongings, blankets, tarps, when the children wouldn’t see them, most often in the middle of the night. Madie helped, weeping, sick with shame. Hiding from my own children, she sobbed. It’s as if I were preparing their coffin. Pata took her by the shoulders and shook her.
“Will you stop?”
He had repaired the boat without a word, as the children cried for joy. When he first launched it, Noah wanted to go with him to check that it was watertight, sliding his little hands over the repair, looking for any signs of a drop seeping through.
“Not a thing,” he concluded, delighted. “Pata, you’re great.”
And the father had given him an odd look, you’d think he wasn’t all that happy to have such a seaworthy boat after all. Noah went on smiling, calling to the others onshore, who called back, somewhat envious.
And so Madie and Pata left at dawn on the thirteenth day, rousing six of their nine children without a sound, piling their belongings wet with their mother’s tears there among them, while Liam and Matteo, whom the father had ordered to keep quiet, whispered together, wide-eyed.
“Where are Louie, Perrine, and Noah? Where are we going?”
* * *
But of course this is of no consolation to the children on the island. The only thing they can see is the deserted land around them.
“There’s nobody left,” cried Noah, after running around the house.
Louie and Perrine did not protest: the three of them are nobody. They don’t really exist anymore.
All that’s left is the rising sea.
Day one of wandering.
Stupor keeps them riveted to the hill. One thing makes Louie fly off the handle: the hens squawking to be fed. He eventually kicks them away.
“Shut up! Shut up!”
All they had ever wanted was more time to play, but now they don’t know how to fill the hours. There is a terrifying void inside which prevents them from thinking, moving, even talking sometimes. Never has their land been so silent.
They don’t dare get separated. They follow each other for everything, they walk together around their plot of land as if the parents might be hiding somewhere, they keep close together to go back to the house to eat a pancake, tidy the kitchen, turn their sheets back at night.
They constantly return to the shore, to the water’s edge, where they sit side by side. A part of them has not yet understood, not yet accepted. Noah asks:
“When are they coming back?”
Louie’s furious gaze: They’re not coming back.
“Yes they are,” says Perrine. “Madie said so in her letter.”
Louie stamps his foot on the ground.
“They’re not coming back.”
“They said they would.”
“They’re liars.”
Noah starts crying again. Don’t worry, whispers Perrine, it’s not true, what he said, he’s the liar. But her eyes are stinging, little Perrine, she’s not all that sure what the letter has promised. That they’ve gone away, yes, the mother does say that. That there wasn’t room enough on one boat. As soon as they’ve found higher ground, the father will come back—“which means he’ll come and get us, you see, Louie, you’re full of nonsense.”
Noah looks his sister right in the eye.
“Are we going to die?”
At the bottom of the letter the mother wrote that they have to keep adding wood so the fire in the stove won’t go out. And that they have to eat the hens. That she has left enough food, if they share it every day, and that she loves them all, Perrine, Louie, and Noah: those were her last words. But whether they’re going to die or not, she doesn’t say. Perrine turns the paper over. There’s nothing written on the back. So she repeats it to herself: “Die?”
She doesn’t really know what it means, or how it happens. Neither does Noah, actually, he’s heard his parents say the word but he’s hardly seen anything more than fish or poultry lifeless in the kitchen sink, and that is how he pictures death, in fact: when you don’t move anymore but your eyes are open. And sometimes there’s some blood on your body.
“No,” says Perrine after a long pause.
Not that she’s completely sure: she answered on principle.
“And what about them,” continues Noah, “Pata, Madie, and the others, are they dead?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I wish they were dead.”
Louie looks up. Me, too. Perrine frowns.
“You mustn’t say that.”
Noah shakes his head. I wish they were. They shouldn’t have left us.
Later, all three of them lie down on the shore, they stop moving, stop speaking. They keep their eyes open, blinking as little as possible. They want to know what it’s like to be dead, they wait a few seconds, a few minutes. Noah gets impatient and wiggles, Louie scolds him.
“This is stupid,” says the little boy, sitting up.
And then:
“I’m hungry.”
Perrine glances over at Louie, who hasn’t reacted. She too is finding this immobility difficult, so the thought of eating something brings her to her feet. She’s used to helping her mother in the kitchen; what she likes best is making cakes.
“Noah, go get a log.”
The little boy runs off.
Louie’s stomach is rumbling. They have lost tra
ck of time. Does it matter? He grumbles.
“I’m not hungry.”
But Perrine is not their mother. She doesn’t insist, doesn’t ruffle his hair and ask him what’s wrong. Doesn’t shrug or pull him along behind her. She walks back up to the house next to Noah, he carries his log, out of breath. So Louie stops being dead and catches up with them.
“What are we going to eat?”
Perrine doesn’t know. It’s one thing to help out in the kitchen, another thing to come up with a meal. She thinks about the days gone by, what her mother used to make. She’ll do the same. And like it said in the letter, make portions for each day. On a sheet of paper she writes down what they will eat. At the same time she sets the food out in little piles on the table: one for the first Wednesday, one for the first Thursday, and so on. This reassures her. If they stick to her list, they’ll easily have enough. She nods: “That’s it, then.”
Noah smiles: They’re pretty, those little piles.
In the afternoon they wander around the hill. Louie stares at the hens pecking at the close-cropped grass; he gathered their eggs, laid them carefully side by side in a basket. They return to sit at water’s edge, tirelessly, even if the chances of seeing the boat now are nonexistent. The rain stopped that morning, the sun is baking. They lie on the ground, facing the horizon, exhausted by emotion. With their half-open eyes they keep watch on the expanse of water. The hope that their parents will return has not totally disappeared. They fall asleep, unawares, and when they wake they are sunburnt. Noah has a headache and cries.
“I want Mommy.”
Perrine and Louie try to console him, in vain. His sobs turn to moans, he would like to stifle them but cannot, he begins to tremble, his hands stretched toward the open ocean, he stammers, Mommy, Mommy . . .
It’s silly, but what can they do, anyway, when they see him so unhappy the two older children begin to cry, too. And besides, they’re not the eldest; they feel tiny on this planet which, for the first time, is hostile toward them—tiny and lost, they don’t know what to do, they no longer know how to live, or why. Two weeks is too long. One day, yes, that they could understand, or even two or three. But now it’s getting all muddled in their heads. Two weeks is infinity, something unimaginable and terribly impossible. They miss their parents, and this hollows out their bellies, leaves a lump in their throats. Abandonment has begun.
Just After the Wave Page 3