After the Flood

by Kassandra Montag

  Dedication

  For Andrew

  Epigraph

  Only what is entirely lost demands to be endlessly named: there is a mania to call the lost thing until it returns.

  —Günter Grass

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Map

  Prologue

  Children think we make them, but we don’t. They exist somewhere else, before us, before time. They come into the world and make us. They make us by breaking us first.

  This was what I learned the day everything changed. I stood upstairs folding laundry, my back aching from Pearl’s weight. I held Pearl inside my body, the way a great whale swallows a man into the safety of his belly, waiting to spit him out. She rolled over in ways a fish never would; breathed through my blood, burrowed against bone.

  The floodwater around our house stood five feet high, covering roads and lawns, fences and mailboxes. Nebraska had flooded only days before, water coming across the prairie in a single wave, returning the state to the inland sea it once was, the world now an archipelago of mountains and an expanse of water. Moments earlier, when I’d leaned out the open window, my reflection in the floodwater had returned dirty and marred, like I’d been stretched and then ripped into indiscriminate shreds.

  I folded a shirt and screams startled me wide eyed. The voice was a blade, slipping metal between my joints. Row, my five-year-old daughter, must have known what was going on because she screamed, “No, no, no! Not without Mommy!”

  I dropped the laundry and ran to the window. A small motorboat idled in the water outside our house. My husband, Jacob, swam to the boat, one arm paddling, the other clamping Row against his side as she struggled against him. He tried to hoist her onto the boat, but she elbowed him in the face. A man stood in the boat, leaning over the gunwale to pick her up. Row wore a too-small plaid jacket and jeans. Her pendant necklace swung like a pendulum across her chest as she struggled against Jacob. She thrashed and twisted like a caught fish, sending a spray of water into his face.

  I opened the window and yelled, “Jacob, what are you doing?!”

  He wouldn’t look at me or respond. Row saw me in the window and screamed for me, her feet kicking at the man who held her under the armpits, lifting her over the side of the boat.

  I pounded the wall next to the window and yelled out to them again. Jacob pulled himself over the side of the boat as the man held Row. The panic in my fingertips turned to a buzzing fire. My body shook as I folded myself through the window and leapt into the water below.

  My feet hit the ground beneath the water and I rolled to the side, trying to lighten my impact. When I surfaced, I saw Jacob had winced; the pained, tightened expression still on his face. He was now holding Row, who kicked and screamed, “Mommy! Mommy!”

  I swam toward the boat, pushing aside debris that littered the water’s surface. A tin can, an old newspaper, a dead cat. The engine roared to life and the boat spun around, spraying me in the face with a wave of water. Jacob held Row back as she reached for me, her tiny arm taut, her fingers scratching the air.

  I kept paddling as Row receded into the distance. I could hear her screams even after I could no longer see her small face, her mouth a dark circle, her hair standing on end, blowing in the wind that came off the water.

  Chapter 1

  Seven Years Later

  Seagulls circled over our boat, which made me think of Row. The way she squawked and waved her arms when she was first trying to walk; the way she stood completely still for almost an hour, watching the sandhill cranes, when I took her to the Platte to see their migration. She always seemed birdlike herself, with her thin bones and nervous, observant eyes, always scanning the horizon, ready to burst into flight.

  Our boat was anchored off a rocky coast of what used to be British Columbia, just outside a small cove up ahead, where water filled a small basin between two mountaintops. We still called oceans by their former names, but it was really one giant ocean now, littered with pieces of land like crumbs fallen from the sky.

  Dawn had just lightened the horizon and Pearl folded the bedding under the deck cover. She had been born there seven years earlier, during a storm with flashes of lightning white as pain.

  I dropped bait in the crab pots and Pearl came out from under the deck cover, a headless snake in one hand, her knife in the other. Several snakes were woven around her wrists like bracelets.

  “We’ll need to eat that tonight,” I said.

  She sent me a sharp glance. Pearl looked nothing like her sister had, not thin boned or dark haired. Row had taken after me with her dark hair and gray eyes, but Pearl resembled her father with her curly auburn hair and the freckles across her nose. Sometimes I thought she even stood the way he did, solidly and sturdily, both feet planted on the ground, chin up slightly, hair always messed, arms a little back, chest up, as though exposing herself to the world with no fear or apprehension.

  I had searched for Row and Jacob for six years. After they were gone, Grandfather and I took to the water on Bird, the boat he’d built, and Pearl was born soon after. Without Grandfather with me that first year, Pearl and I never would have made it. He fished while I fed Pearl, gathered information from everyone we passed, and taught me to sail.

  His mother had built kayaks like her ancestors, and he remembered watching her shape the wood like a rib cage, holding people the way a mother held a child within her, sheltering them to shore. His father was a fisher, so Grandfather had spent his childhood on the Alaskan coastal seas. During the Hundred Year Flood, Grandfather had migrated inland with thousands of others, finally settling in Nebraska, where he worked as a carpenter for years. But he always missed the sea.

  Grandfather searched for Jacob and Row when I didn’t have the heart to. Some days, I followed languidly behind him, tending to Pearl. At each village, he’d check the boats in the harbor for any sign of them. He’d show photographs of them at every saloon and trading post. On the ope
n sea he’d ask every fisher we passed if they’d seen Row and Jacob.

  But Grandfather had died when Pearl was still a baby, and suddenly the enormous task swelled up before me. Desperation clung to me like a second skin. In those early days, I would strap Pearl to my chest with an old scarf, wrapping her snugly against me. And I’d follow the same route he had taken: scouting the harbor, asking the locals, showing photographs to people. For a while it gave me vigor; something to do beyond survival, something that meant more to me than reeling in another fish to our small boat. Something that gave me hope and promised wholeness.

  A year ago, Pearl and I had landed in a small village tucked in the northern Rockies. The storefronts were broken down, the roads dusty and littered with trash. It was one of the more crowded villages I’d been to. People hurried up and down the main road, which was filled with stalls and merchants. We passed one stall heavy-laden with scavenged goods that had been carried up the mountain before the flood. Milk cartons filled with gasoline and kerosene, jewelry to be melted and made into something else, a wheelbarrow, canned food, fishing poles, and bins of clothing.

  The stall next to it sold items that had been made or found after the flood: plants and seeds, clay pots, candles, a wood bucket, bottles of alcohol from the local distillery, knives made by a blacksmith. They also sold packets of herbs with sprawling advertisements: white willow bark for fever! aloe vera for burns!

  Some goods had the corroded appearance of having been underwater. Merchants paid people to dive into old houses for items that hadn’t yet been scavenged before the floods and hadn’t rotted since. A screwdriver with a glaze of rust, a pillow stained yellow and heavy with mold.

  The stall across from these held only small bottles of expired medications and boxes of ammunition. A woman with a machine gun guarded each side of the stall.

  I had packed all the fish I’d caught in a satchel slung over my shoulder, and I hung on to the strap as we walked up the main road toward the trading post. I held Pearl’s hand with my other hand. Her red hair was so dry it was beginning to break off at the scalp. And her skin was scaly and light brown, not from sun, but from the early stages of scurvy. I needed to trade for fruit for her and better fishing supplies for me.

  At the trading post I emptied my fish on the counter and the shopkeeper and I bartered. The shopkeeper was a stout woman with black hair and no bottom teeth. We went back and forth, settling on my seven fish for an orange, thread, fishing wire, and flatbread. After I packed my goods in my bag I laid out the photos of Row before the shopkeeper, asking if she’d seen her.

  The woman paused, staring at the photo. Then she slowly shook her head.

  “Are you sure?” I asked, convinced her pause meant she’d seen Row.

  “No girl looks like this here,” the woman announced in a thick accent, and turned back to packaging my fish.

  Pearl and I made our way down the main road toward the harbor. I’d check the ships, I told myself. This village was so crowded, Row could be here and the shopkeeper could have never seen her. Pearl and I walked hand in hand, pulling away from the merchants as they reached out to us from their stalls, their voices trailing behind us, “Fresh lemons! Chicken eggs! Plywood half off!”

  Up ahead of me, I saw a girl with long dark hair, wearing a blue dress.

  I stopped in my tracks and stared. The blue dress was Row’s: it had the same paisley pattern, a ruffle at the hem, and bell sleeves. The world flattened, the air gone suddenly thin. A man at my elbow was nagging me to buy his bread, but his voice came as though from a distance. A giddy lightness filled me as I watched the girl.

  I rushed toward her, running down the path, knocking over a cart of fruit, pulling Pearl behind me. The ocean at the bottom of the harbor looked crystal blue, suddenly clean-looking and fresh.

  I grabbed the girl’s shoulder and spun her around. “Row!” I said, ready to see her face again and pull her into my arms.

  A different face glared at me.

  “Don’t touch me,” the girl muttered, jerking her shoulder from my grasp.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, stepping back.

  The girl scurried away from me, glancing over her shoulder at me anxiously.

  I stood in the bustling road, dust swirling around me. Pearl turned her head toward my hip and coughed.

  It’s someone else, I told myself, trying to adjust to this new reality. Disappointment crowded me but I pushed it back. You’ll still find her. It’s okay, you’ll find her, I chanted to myself.

  Someone shoved me hard, ripping my satchel from my shoulder. Pearl fell to the ground and I stumbled to the side, catching myself against a stall with scavenged tires.

  “Hey!” I yelled at the woman, now darting down the main road and behind a booth with bolts of fabric. I ran after her, leaping over a small cart filled with baby chicks, dodging an elderly man with a cane.

  I ran and spun in circles, looking for the woman. People moved past me as though nothing had happened, the swirl of bodies and voices making me nauseous. I kept looking for what felt like ages, the sunlight dimming around me, casting long shadows on the ground. I ran and spun until I nearly collapsed, stopping close to where it had happened. I looked up the road at Pearl, who stood where she’d fallen, next to the stall with tires.

  She didn’t see me between the people and stalls, and her eyes moved anxiously over the crowd, her chin quivering, holding her arm like it’d been hurt in the fall. This whole time she’d been waiting, looking abandoned, hoping I’d return. The fruit in my satchel that I’d gotten for her had been the one thing I was proud of that day. The one thing I could cling to as evidence that I was doing okay by her.

  Watching her, I felt gutted and finished. If I’d been more alert, not so distracted, the thief never would have ripped it from my shoulder so easily. I used to be so guarded and aware. Now I was worn down with grief, my hope for finding Row more madness than optimism.

  Slowly it dawned on me: the reason the blue dress was so familiar, the reason it had grabbed my gut like a hook. Yes, Row had that same dress, but it wasn’t one Jacob had packed and taken with them when he took her from me. Because I found that dress in her bedroom dresser after she was gone and I slept with it for days afterward, burying my face in her smell, worrying the fabric between my fingers. It had stayed in my memory because it had been left behind, not because she could be somewhere out there wearing it. Besides, I realized, she would be much older now, too large for that dress. She had grown. I knew this, but she remained frozen in my mind as a five-year-old with large eyes and a high-pitched giggle. Even if I ran across her, would I recognize her immediately as my own?

  It was too much, I decided. The constant drain of disappointment every time I reached a trading post and found no answers, no signs of her. If Pearl and I were going to make it in this world, I needed to focus on only us. To shut everything and everyone else out.

  So we’d stopped looking for Row and Jacob. Pearl sometimes asked me why we’d stopped and I told her the truth: I couldn’t anymore. I felt they were somehow still alive, yet I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t been able to hear about them in the small communities that were left, tucked high in the mountainsides, surrounded by water.

  Now we were drifting, spending our days with no destination. Each day was the same, spooling into the next like a river running into the ocean. Every night I lay awake, listening to Pearl breathe, the steady rhythm of her body. I knew she was my anchor. Every day I feared a raider ship would target us, or fish wouldn’t fill our nets and we’d starve. Nightmares engulfed me and my hand would shoot out for Pearl in the night, rattling both of us awake. All these fears lined up with a little hope wedged in the cracks in between.

  I closed the crab pots and dropped them over the side, letting them sink sixty feet. As I surveyed the coast, an odd, fearful feeling, a tiny bubble of alarm, rose in me. The shore was marshland, filled with dark grass and shrubs, and trees grew a little farther back from the shore, crowdi
ng up the mountainside. Trees now grew above the old tree line, mostly saplings of poplar, willow, and maple. A small bay lay around the shore’s bend, where traders sometimes anchored or raiders lay in wait. I should have taken the time to scope out the bay and make sure the island was deserted. There was never any quick escape on land the way there was on water. I steeled myself to it; we needed to look for water on land. We wouldn’t last another day otherwise.

  Pearl followed my eyes as I gazed at the coast.

  “This looks like the same coast with those people,” Pearl said, needling me.

  She’d been going on for days about raiders we saw robbing a boat in the distance. We’d sailed away, and I was weary, heart heavy, as the wind pulled us out of sight. Pearl was upset we hadn’t tried to help them, and I tried to remind her it was important we keep to ourselves. But under my rationalizations, I feared that my heart had shrunk as the water rose around me—panic filling me as water covered the earth—panic pushing out anything else, whittling my heart to a hard, small shape I couldn’t recognize.

  “How were we going to attack an entire raider ship?” I asked. “No one survives that.”

  “You didn’t even try. You don’t even care!”

  I shook my head at her. “I care more than you know. There isn’t always room to care more.” I’ve been all used up, I wanted to say. Maybe it was good I hadn’t found Row. Maybe I didn’t want to know what I’d do to be with her again.

  Pearl didn’t respond, so I said, “Everyone is on their own now.”

  “I don’t like you,” she said, sitting down with her back to me.

  “You don’t have to,” I snapped. I squeezed my eyes shut and pinched the bone between my eyebrows.

  I sat down next to her, but she kept her face turned from me.

  “Did you have your dreams again last night?” I tried to keep my voice kind and soft, but an edge still crept in.

  She nodded, squeezing the blood from the snake’s tail down to the hole where its head had been.