Just After the Wave

by Sandrine Collette

  So Noah is watching his siblings, who are looking in the water to see if they can fish out the cinder blocks. He is humming to himself, his voice inaudible, You can’t, you can’t. He feels all the tension in his body, because he knows he’s done something wrong. To break the silence he shouts, legs spread, ready to hightail it:

  “And anyway, it was no use!”

  No reply. Louie and Perrine are sitting facing out to sea, their backs to him. After a moment, Noah goes over to them, impatient—What are you doing?

  “Go away,” says Louie.

  “But what are you doing?”

  “None of your business.”

  “Come on.”

  “Scram.”

  The older boy starts to get up, and Noah backs away, goes to sit a bit further away. He hopes he’ll be able to hear what they are saying, but the wind prevents him.

  “Are you going to go and get some more potatoes?”

  “There’s no more raft, you idiot!”

  “I’m hungry!”

  That morning, Perrine made a batter with fresh eggs, and cooked up twenty or thirty pancakes on the still-warm stove so they’d have a supply. Louie made a list of what they had left to eat, and it didn’t match the list Madie had left them, there is much less than they expected, even though Perrine had divided it all up into little piles; he doesn’t get it. His sister confesses: she had to take from a pile here and there because they didn’t have enough.

  How will they manage now, for the last days?

  With tears in her eyes Perrine says she doesn’t know. They were hungry, that was all.

  “Let’s do the piles again,” murmurs Louie. “But no changing them this time, you hear?”

  In the house, once again they make piles of cans, potatoes, eggs. Behind them Noah empties the cupboards to hand them the food, copying them, mute and conciliatory. So he is startled when Louie grabs a can of raviolis from him and growls:

  “You’re pleased with yourself, because of the tower, aren’t you, blockhead.”

  Noah cringes, makes himself small, maybe hoping for pity, for sure to become invisible. He looks down, hands him another can.

  “Blockhead,” says Louie again.

  In the end, they have enough food for six days.

  “It’s not a lot,” says Perrine.

  Noah points to the cans: I don’t like green beans or broccoli.

  “We’ll eat eggs,” says Louie. “The hens lay every day. And with milk and flour we can make pancakes.”

  “Every day?”

  “Every day.”

  Noah’s eyes are shining.

  * * *

  Sitting close to the house to avoid the first drops of rain, they are eating pancakes with jam. Perrine fills their glasses with orange juice; they have enough bottles of water and soda to last for weeks. Liam and Matteo brought back entire packs from the neighbors’. Farther away, the sea still shifts its cargo of bits of wood, floating objects, plastic. Maybe there are still bodies, too, but they’ve stopped looking, they’ve become accustomed, to be honest, in the beginning it was exciting, the thought that those were dead bodies going by, but now. They’re afraid it might be Madie or Pata, or their big brothers, or their little sisters. What if they capsized, and the sea brought them all the way back to the place they were hoping to get away from? And it’s not so much the burden of sorrow that would be hard to bear, but knowing that now no one will be coming to get them.

  “It’s getting higher, isn’t it?”

  Perrine didn’t move her head when she asked. She doesn’t need to say what she’s referring to, and Louie gazes at the gray sea, waves just starting to toss with bad weather.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  No, he doesn’t think so: he knows so. Every morning, the way Pata did before him, he checks the water level on the stairs to the basement. When the parents left, he had marked the third step; now the sea is attacking the sixth one. That means they need boots to go to the ground floor. The previous day they saw that the sea was gradually eating its way across the living room floor and into the kitchen, so they sweated blood to drag the old stove up the stairs. Too exhausted to drag it any further, they left it in the corridor by the stairs. At the bottom of the garden, they will soon be sitting on the pontoon with their bottom in the water. Every evening for the last four days, Louie has been planting a stake precisely where, on the terrain, the water has reached. Every morning, he measures the distance the sea has advanced during the night. Twelve, sixteen inches. One day there was nothing, and he hoped this meant the drop in the water level Pata had spoken about so often—but it was probably only because it had been a very sunny day, because the following day, the water was rising again.

  What a strange climate the great tidal wave has imposed on them, with these constant storms, this inconstant, spinning sky. They have learned how to read the portents of storms—sudden choppy water, initially just splashing onto the shore, then proper waves washing onto the land. At the same time the wind rises, whistling and gyrating, intoxicating the sky, filling it with shadows. The veiled sun gives off a terrifying yellow light, that is what they remember above all, the world gone yellow right down to their own faces when they look at each other, anxiously, the sickly reflection of a world that has yet to finish dying. The surface of the water looks as if it has been ploughed full of holes, black eddies, and wherever they turn the sea seems to be gathering in upon itself, growling, towering in turbulent rollers that have formed out to sea, that charge through the spray and make the children recoil. In the house they yank the shutters closed and take refuge upstairs. Perrine throws floorcloths down against the doors to block the gaps, with Noah’s help, running crazily here and there.

  And then, they wait.

  But before, too: it’s a game, a challenge. Seek the shelter of the house as late as possible, don’t give in right away, not completely, like now as they are finishing their pancakes, the fine rain already wetting their legs. With the hot, damp air, they enjoy the wind on their cheeks and in their hair, for these few minutes, sometimes ten, sometimes thirty, until the storm breaks, it’s like an airlock, a time in-between, the sharp lurch of coming danger they feel deep in their gut. Right up to the last minute they stay there, backs against the wall, clothes clinging in the gusts, soaked, to savor the moment when they will go and find shelter, get changed, drink a glass of lemonade. Sometimes the house adds to the terror. Creaking, cracking, a shutter banging, a tile falling. They observe it with a curious sentiment of helplessness, as if it were some sort of giant gradually losing a finger or an eye, now with one knee to the ground—Pata has to come back before everything falls to pieces. And while they might forget their situation when the sun is blazing, forget the fear and abandonment, the storm, every time, brings them back to their terrifying reality: they are lost, all three, in the middle of the ocean.

  Louie cannot help but imagine the day the house falls down. What will they have left to cling to, so that the sea does not come after them, bearing them away to a place where everything drowns, so that they won’t each become one of those floating bodies, tossed here and there by the waves—to end up sinking in some forsaken corner of the world, once the fish have eaten half their flesh? So he counts the trees still standing, their roots laid bare by the sea; he knows the salt will get the better of them. But for the time being they are still there.

  “Look,” says Noah.

  He points through the window to the pile of stones left at the foot of the ruined tower: the ocean is already washing against them.

  “It didn’t last long.”

  At the other end of the room Perrine crushes a spider with her broom.

  “There are loads of them,” she grumbles.

  They’re like us, thinks Louie: they’re seeking shelter. Refuge. We should leave them, this could be our own ark, there are so many animals missing but at leas
t we have spiders.

  Perrine doesn’t like spiders. She’s always afraid she’ll swallow one at night, every since Liam read that every human being consumes seven or eight spiders in a lifetime of sleeping. When he told them, the others had shuddered and cried out.

  Bet it’s not even true, said Noah.

  Bet I’m not even afraid, laughed Matteo—and he’d grabbed a daddy longlegs to show them, a little one, granted, the size of a coin, but it was a daddy longlegs all the same, and he swallowed it right there before them. The girls had screamed. For two or three days they kept a safe distance, convinced that at some point the spider would come back out. Out of his mouth or ears—or eyes, promised Matteo, running after them, and they scattered, shrieking in horror.

  Noah watches as Perrine sweeps up the dead spider with the tip of her dust broom.

  “If we end up with nothing left, do you think we’ll have to eat them?”

  The days last forever, as if time were moving in slow motion. If it were winter, it would be dark at five o’clock and they would sleep half the day, but the sun is in the sky from seven in the morning to nine at night, and wakes them, gets them up, they open the shutters, the summer crushes them with heat and the storms come and go, wedged between two expanses of blue sky. Twice, five times a day, they can feel the wind coming from the south, dragging with it those big black clouds which, they know, are harbingers of the storms to which they are gradually getting accustomed. It doesn’t bother them: the variations of weather don’t interrupt anything, there is no work or play, harvests or picnics, no game of croquet—to be honest, by mid-morning they are already sighing, eager for evening so they can lie down and doze, incapable as they are of filling the absence of their parents and brothers and sisters, gone across the water. This, along with food and weather, makes up the essence of their conversations: do they believe their parents have reached the high ground, or have they been shipwrecked? Are they all dead; and are the three of them the sole survivors? What if even the high ground has been engulfed? And then always, at the end: what if Pata doesn’t come back?

  They have faces grown weary with anxiety, features drawn with the fear they may have to stay there forever. The night before, Perrine murmured:

  “Maybe we’ll be here until we’re old.”

  Old, for them, means twenty, thirty years of age: as soon as you’re an adult, you’re old. Once you’re old, you die. There it is. Die on the island.

  “Oh, no,” protested Noah. “You’re crazy.”

  As if it depended on them.

  To conjure fate, Louie bursts out laughing.

  “What I want, when Pata comes back, is for him to take me to the car race we were supposed to go to before the storms.”

  Perrine thought, then said, “What I want is a kitten.”

  Noah trumpeted: “And I want an ATV!”

  For a moment they smiled, the way they used to when Madie had them write their letters to Santa Claus, when they still really believed in him. To start by saying they’d been good, and provide examples to prove it: this was exasperating. Of course, Madie, Santa Claus already knows that, we don’t need to write it, he can see us, can’t he? He’s kind of like God.

  Making their list, on the other hand, immersed them in frenetic excitement: they would fight over the round-ended scissors to cut out pictures from the toy catalogs so there’d be no mistakes, adding arrows and descriptive notes, using colored felt-tips and little hearts to show how those were the presents they absolutely had to have. Afterwards, they had to choose. Two presents each, said Madie, because they were far too numerous to ask Santa Claus for more, he only had two arms, after all (and a sack, ventured Louie). So they would frown at one another, they wished they were fewer in number, even though it wasn’t something you could change. At first, Liam and Matteo resorted to the argument about the sheep and the crèche, because that was the rule: every evening during Advent Madie and Pata asked them if they’d been good, or kind, or generous. They’d been allotted one sheep each, and depending on how they’d behaved that day, they had the right to move one length closer to the little terra-cotta structure where Joseph and Mary were hovering, for the moment, over nothing at all, since Jesus wasn’t born yet. But if they’d been naughty, their sheep would just stay where it was, or even move back. This was what the older boys were trying to point out: that the first sheep to reach the crèche would be entitled to an extra present. As a result, squabbles broke out, provocations, fights, cheating, too, because Madie discovered that her little ones would sneak in, when she was busy elsewhere, and move their sheep forward a few inches. In the evening, cries came thick and fast:

  “But I was ahead of Louie, there, I wasn’t there!”

  “My sheep has gone backwards!”

  “Get out of the way, I’ll put it back.”

  “You weren’t there!”

  “Yes I was!”

  “Cheater!”

  Madie eventually raised her voice one day, and ferociously. She picked up all the sheep, despite the wailing, and put them away in a box at the very top of the cupboard.

  “There,” she said. “And anyway, with all those sheep, it was looking like a racetrack, not a crèche.”

  Ever since, the lists for Santa Claus were all pretty much the same, and anyway, Liam and Matteo, and then Louie, and then Perrine stopped making them. Noah stoutly maintained that he still believed, and that it was his right; everyone knew he was lying, but Madie let it go, and he would sit next to Emily and Sidonie to pick out toys from the magazines.

  “Madie doesn’t want you to have an ATV,” says Louie. “It’s too dangerous.”

  Noah shrugs.

  “I’ll get it all the same.”

  “Oh, yeah? And why’s that?”

  “Because . . . they’re gonna give it to me because . . . they left us here, that’s why.”

  Louie turns to Perrine.

  “And you, do you think you’ll get your kitten?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  He scratches his cheek; his trip to the racetrack doesn’t seem like much in comparison to what the others are asking for, so he tries to come up with a better idea. A new bike? A dog? A game console. Or nothing at all, if they are stuck on this island the way Perrine said, until they’re old.

  “We’ll have beards,” he murmured to Noah.

  “And we’ll walk with a cane.”

  They giggle and look at each other out of the corner of their eye. In the end they know perfectly well that it isn’t funny.

  Boredom. Never before have they sat for so long doing nothing. No inspiration, no desire: when one of them suggests something, the other two sigh and shake their heads. It’s driving Noah crazy. He jumps to his feet.

  “Okay, what do we do now?”

  “Stop saying that all the time!”

  “Yes but we’re not doing anything. I’m bored.”

  “There’s nothing to do,” says Louie, spreading his arms to encompass the house and the island. “Where do you want to go?”

  “I’m sick of being here.”

  The little boy goes out to walk along the shore; initially Louie and Perrine can see him, then he vanishes from their field of vision. They go back to gazing at the sea, hoping to see Pata arrive.

  “How many days has it been?” asks Louie.

  Perrine, who crossed off a Thursday on the sheet, replies without hesitating.

  “Seven.”

  “That’s all?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  Louie raises his eyebrows and suddenly stifles a laugh.

  “What is it?” says Perrine.

  “So that means we haven’t had a wash in seven days.”

  The little girl smiles in turn: It’s not as if we were really clean, after the storm.

  “It st
inks,” adds Louie, sniffing his T-shirt, which he hasn’t changed, either.

  And then:

  “Shall we go for a swim?”

  “In the sea?”

  “Well sure, it’s nice weather, there’s no waves.”

  “Somewhere where we can touch bottom?”

  “All right.”

  They call Noah and he comes running. In the beginning they probe cautiously for the bottom. And yet they know this spot at the end of the garden, not even a week ago it was still grass, and they can feel it tickling their ankles; a gentle slope, and they move fifteen yards or so before they’re able to let themselves go into the water and swim and splash. Before long they’re shouting and splashing one another, they forget that initially they swore to keep an eye on the horizon, on the sky and the sea. They stay there for maybe two hours, not a cloud, no fear, no twinge in their bellies. Sometimes they spot an object the sea has brought to the shore and they pull it up, shouting. They have found a ball, and pieces of wood, and a plastic chair. When they’re not interested they toss the item back into the sea.

  “And what’s that!” screams Noah, pointing.

  A thick tarp floating a few yards away. Louie dives in to retrieve it.

  “There’s something inside it!”

  “Treasure!”

  “It’s heavy. Come and help me.”

  The three of them tow the tarp until it beaches on the shore. Impossible to pull it any further.

  “Shall we look?” says Louie.

  Noah is jumping up and down: Go on, go on! Wading by the water’s edge, they struggle over the rolled tarp, in vain, it’s stuck. Perrine runs to fetch a pair of scissors and hands them to Louie.

  “I’m sure it’s a safe!” says Noah, fidgeting as he tears off the bits of plastic his older brother has cut away.

  Then all of a sudden they recoil.

  The smell.

  “Yuck,” says Perrine. “What is it?”

  “Dunno.”

  Louie cautiously removes the tarp, keeping an arm’s length.

  “Well?” asks Noah.