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 grea
ter 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.
When Pearl was a baby I carried her in a sling almost every moment, even when we slept. But when she was a toddler I had a harder time keeping a handle on her. During storms, I’d tie her to me with a rope to make sure she didn’t get swept away. I trained her to stay near me at ports and taught her to swim.
Pearl had to do everything early: swimming, drinking goat’s milk, potty training, helping me work the fishing lines. She learned to swim at eighteen months but didn’t learn to walk properly until she was three. Instead of walking, she scuttled about Bird like a crab. Her childhood was the kind I’d read about in frontier stories, the children who knew how to milk a cow at six or how to shoot a rifle at nine.
At first this made me pity her in a different way than I’d pitied Row. But then I realized that being born later, after we were already on water, could be a gift. As a young child she could swim better than I ever would, with an instinctive knowledge of the waves.
So having Daniel on board made me feel like I could breathe again. I noticed he kept an eye on her the way I would, keeping her in his peripheral vision, one ear attuned to her movements. Daniel, Pearl, and I kept sailing south. At night, we’d all sleep under the deck cover, the wind whistling above us, the waves rocking the boat like a cradle. I slept on my side with Pearl tucked against my chest, and Daniel lay on the other side of me. One night, he rested his hand tentatively on my waist, and when I didn’t move he reached his arm around the two of us, his arm heavy and comforting, grounding us.
Sometimes, on nights that peaceful, I’d imagine us three going on like that, forgetting about the Valley, making a quiet, simple life on the sea. I began to look forward to the moments when Daniel was close to me, both of us standing near the tiller or huddling under the deck cover during a rainstorm. We could be silently working on mending a rope, our heads bent above the fraying fibers, our hands swiftly weaving, and I’d feel a serenity at his body being near mine.
But I’d remember Row, tugging her blankie behind her on our wood floor, her head cocked to one side, her expression a mix of curiosity and mischief. Or how she’d push the coffee table against the window and sit on it with her perfectly straight posture, watching the birds. Naming them by their colors: red birdie, black birdie. I’d feel her as though she were beside me. A warm tide rose and flooded my veins, pulling me toward the Valley as if I had no choice at all.
I picked sardines and squid from one of the nets I’d fished with that morning and dumped them in our live bait jar, a large ceramic canister that once was used to hold flour in a kitchen. We kept the jar tied down next to the cistern and only filled it with live bait when we could spare the meat.
I kept scanning the horizon as we approached the mountaintops of Central America. When we were about fifteen miles from the closest coast we signaled to a merchant ship by waving our flag, a blue square of fabric with a fish in the middle. The ship’s own flag billowed in the wind, purple with a brown spiral that looked like a snail shell.
People had communicated by flags before Grandfather and I took to the water. Sailors said that the Lily Black had been the first to raise a flag, using it to identify the different ships within their tribe, and later, to invite another ship to surrender before an attack.
So Grandfather and I made a fisherman’s flag by cutting a fish out of a white T-shirt and sewing it onto a blue pillowcase. As soon as Pearl was a toddler I taught her the three different kinds of flags, because I needed her to be my second set of eyes on the sea, to alert me to who could be approaching us if I was busy fishing. So she learned how some flags were a plain color: white to communicate distress, black to indicate disease, orange to refuse a request. Others told what kind of ship you were: a merchant ship, fishing boat, or breeding ship. And the last kind were the tribal flags, flags with symbols on them to show the identity of a new community, like a family crest.
Though the Lily Black were the first to set up this communication, they were also the first to subvert it. Now it was rumored that the Lily Black liked to sail under false flags to get closer to an enemy and to raise their own flag right before an attack.
So as we approached the merchant ship, I kept my eyes on their flag, my hands on the gunwale, fearing they’d take it down and replace it with a raider tribal flag.
“I think you can relax,” Daniel said. “You can’t stay in a permanent state of hypervigilance.”
“I’ve always avoided this part of the Pacific because I’ve heard raiders have a stronghold here.”
“I thought you avoided this area because you can’t navigate?” Daniel grinned at me and brushed my arm with the back of his hand.
I suppressed a grin and glanced at him, the wind tossing my hair in my face. “After the trade, we should troll and head a bit farther east for sailfish.”
Daniel looked out at sea. “How can you tell?”
I pointed to frigate birds flying low and diving into the water a few miles east. Grandfather had taught me to watch the birds. “I also saw schools of tuna and mackerel. The water is warm here. Sailfish can get you eighty pounds of meat. It’s worth going off course.”
“Okay. We’ve just got to be careful, sailing so close to the coast without aiming to dock.”
I knew he was concerned about the mountains just under the surface of the water and the boat running aground, shredding the hull. Sometimes you could see shadows darkening the water where the mountains rose up to meet the sky, and when you sailed over them, you could look down and see the rocky peaks like ancient faces floating in the deep, looking back up at you. The ocean churned above them, its currents eddying among the rocks, coral springing up anew, new sea creatures adapting and forming in the dark.
I wouldn’t be here for whatever new things would grow out of this new world; I’d be ash before they sprouted fully formed. But I wondered about them, wondering what Pearl would live to see and hoping they’d be good things.
We pulled alongside the merchant ship and traded our fish for a few yards of cotton, thread, charcoal, and goat’s milk. When I asked them about wood, they told us we needed to go even farther south to get good prices. A knot twisted in my stomach. We couldn’t lose even more time by sailing farther off course.
When we parted ways with the merchant ship, it sailed northeast toward a small port on the coast and Daniel adjusted our tiller so we’d turn southeast, toward where I thought there might be sailfish. Pearl played with a snake on deck as I repaired crab pots, weaving wire between the broken slats of metal. There was always something to be fixed. The rudder, the sail, the hull, the deck, the tackle and bait. Everything always breaking and me barely able to keep up, time slipping through my fingers all the while.
We sailed toward the diving birds. Pearl and I trolled with brightly colored lures made of ribbons and hooks. The water ran clear and the wind breathed easy, one of those lovely sailing days that made me feel like I was flying. I caught sight of a sailfish near the surface, its sail cutting the water like a shark’s fin, and I dropped a line with live squid on the hook.
I let the line drift, occasionally moving it, watching the water and waiting, careful to bait the sailfish and not follow it. It took two hours before the sailfish bit and jerked me against the gunwale. My knuckles whitened as it almost tugged me into the sea.
Daniel leapt forward to steady me. “You okay?” he asked as he helped me s
crew the pole into the rod holder on the gunwale.
I nodded. “We can’t lose this one.”
It swam with astonishing speed, its sail cutting the surface of the water, and our boat lurched toward it when it reached the end of the line. It gave a powerful run, swimming in a semicircle at the end of the line, then fighting the line, diving into the air, sending a spray of water around it.
No coast lay in sight; the world was so flat and blue, your eyes could get tired of it. It was disorienting—this much space. Like a person needed something to dwarf them. Even the clouds were as thin as gauze.
A shark circled our boat, swimming closer and then farther away. At first I thought the shark was tracking the movements of a school of mackerel under us, but then I realized it was hunting our sailfish.
“We should try to reel it in quick,” I told Daniel.
“I thought you said it’s better to let them wear out before you reel them in? How are we going to handle this thing?”
I put on my leather gloves. “You and Pearl reel him in. I’ll catch him by the sword. Once I’ve got him, you help me lift him out of the water by grabbing his sail and under his torso.”
The pole that held the sailfish had been a titanium fence post before Grandfather fashioned it into a fishing pole. It didn’t bend or break against the sailfish’s weight, but the rod holder on the gunwale creaked and screeched, threatening to rip lose.
Daniel cranked the reel, straining with each pull, sweat gathering at his temples. The sailfish kept fighting, lunging into the air and whipping its body around. Water sprayed our faces. Its body slammed against the boat as it fought. I blinked away the salt caught in my eyes and lost sight of the shark.
When the sailfish was close enough to grab, I leaned over the gunwale and reached for it. It jerked on the line, its head pulled from the water, the hook glistening in its mouth.
I grabbed its sword and it almost slipped out of my hands, slick as an icicle. The sulfuric scent of coral and seaweed drifted around us. We must be close to mountaintops, I thought fleetingly.
After the Flood Page 7