After the Flood

by Kassandra Montag

  “We all need one another,” he said. “Now more than ever.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  He started and looked at me as if just now noticing I was there.

  “You . . .” he murmured. “I think you get it. Get how fragile this is. When I saw how frightened you were when you waved us down. Some people . . .” Abran looked into his drink and shook it to break the reflection. “Some people have forgotten how to be afraid. Lost too much. I don’t ever want to stop being afraid.”

  We looked at each other. I knew exactly what he meant.

  “I’m grateful you were there,” I said.

  “Me, too,” he said, reaching across the table to lay his hand over mine. I broke his gaze and he withdrew his hand. He finished his moonshine and pushed the tin mug away. He stood, took the kerosene lamp from its hook, and turned toward the door. At the threshold he turned and looked at me, the kerosene lamp sending flickers of light and shadow across his face.

  “What happened to Pearl’s father?” he asked.

  “Dead.”

  “I’m sorry. That had to be difficult.”

  I smiled tightly and nodded. Not so much, I thought.

  “Come to me. Anytime. With anything,” he said, stepping away, leaving me in darkness.

  I stayed in the dark, rocking with each wave, listening to the creaking of the ship in the night. The wounded look on Abran’s face came to me once more. Was I any better than his false friend? Wasn’t I pretending to be a friend and actually deceiving him by aiming to convince him to sail to the Valley without telling the full truth?

  I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again, the darkness flooding over me. I thought of Marjan, losing her husband and two of her children. I knew I was greedy. I still had one child, healthy and vibrant as the day she was born. Wasn’t she enough?

  But it wasn’t about Pearl being enough—it was about me being enough. This journey was changing her life, but it had less to do with her than it had to do with me. With proving that whatever Jacob thought about me when he left was wrong. Maybe he thought I couldn’t make it in this world. Maybe he thought I couldn’t help them. That they didn’t need me.

  Out of the darkness, memories of Row rose up. The roundness of her cheeks. The way she had smelled like cinnamon in the morning after eating her oatmeal. I imagined all the memories of her I didn’t have but wanted. Her reading a book in the summer, with light from a window falling bright on the pages. Moments that would be snuffed like the flame on a wick if I didn’t help her. I kept the other image of her at bay, lingering at the edges of my mind’s eye: the image of her boarding the breeding ship, her small form shadowed by the men around her.

  Chapter 20

  I went to his room that night for two reasons. I wanted to be touched. And I wanted to start trying to change his mind.

  I stood before his door, snores and rustling coming from the crew’s quarters. I was hesitant to knock and alert anyone of where I was, but I couldn’t enter without knocking. So I laid my fingers on the door and tapped lightly.

  I gasped when he opened the door, surprised that he heard me. He wore only his trousers and his hair was disheveled. The candle he held cast a warm glow around us.

  “Can I come in?” I whispered.

  “Of course,” he said, opening the door wider and peering behind me to see if I was alone.

  Once I was in his room I realized I didn’t know what to say or do. I felt unsure of myself, confused about how to move forward. I stood there, dumbfounded, looking around in the dim light of several candles. I could smell the faint scent of tobacco, unwashed linen, and wet wood. A wooden box was turned upside down for a table and books were piled several feet high along the walls. A quilt lay on the bed, and several books were strewn across it.

  “Were you reading?” I asked.

  He smiled guiltily and shrugged. “Breaking the rules . . .” he said, gesturing to the candles.

  “I won’t tell.” I grinned at him. “How’d you get all the books?”

  “Been collecting them for years now. They’re harder to come by now than they were in the beginning. So many of them tossed in fires for warmth back then. But I hear there’s a library now in the Andes, so people must be saving them again. It feels like good fortune to have them around.”

  “It does,” I said, surveying the books and wondering if it was the same library Beatrice had told me about, started by the Lost Abbots.

  There was nowhere to sit but on the bed. Abran gestured for me to sit down and I did. My face felt warm and I didn’t know where to put my hands.

  “So,” Abran said, sitting next to me. “Why did you stop by?” He leaned toward me, his arm between us, fist wedged in the mattress. His weight was tilting me toward him. I leaned away to steady myself from falling into him.

  I cast about for something to say and surprised myself with honesty. “I was lonely. I wanted to be in here. See you.”

  Abran set the candle on the table and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “I’m glad. Nice to have you here.”

  I was wearing Row’s crane necklace, and he reached out and touched the pendant lying between my breasts.

  “A crane,” he said softly. “I hear they’re gone now. The wind is not right for them.”

  I had a feeling they were still somewhere, somewhere we did not know about. At least, I wanted to believe they were. I raised my eyes to his and he looked at me with such intensity that I felt myself unraveling, blood rushing from my head, making me feel dizzy.

  I stood up and crouched before a pile of his books, running my finger across the spines. I hadn’t liked school, but I had loved to read. The local school closed for good when I was fifteen, and before that I had only attended sporadically. I was thirteen when the library shut down. It was left unlocked and migrants slept inside. I’d go and walk through the rows of books and take home whatever I liked, piles and piles of books that later would swell up when the house filled with water. When I was alone on Bird at night, with nothing but the dark sky and dark waves to speak to me, I’d ache to flip through the pages of books, to feel the connection of another mind.

  Abran and I were both quiet, and then he asked, “What are you thinking about?” He laid a hand on my shoulder and I felt him beckoning me back to the bed.

  “I want Pearl to be able to read more books. To be able to be somewhere safe. Like the Valley.”

  I felt him stiffen and he removed his hand from my shoulder.

  “I don’t want this to be a problem,” he said.

  I turned to face him, keeping my body open, my shoulders relaxed, dropping my knees to the floor, my hands on either side of me, my eyes beseeching. Childlike, innocent, harmless.

  “It won’t be,” I said softly.

  His face softened and he said, “Okay. Tell me about it.”

  “It’s hard to get there, so there aren’t as many threats. It’s isolated. There are resources. More land, less people. Vegetation does well there now with the increased humidity. Since it’s a valley, you’re naturally protected from storms and attacks.”

  “But I doubt there are many trees. In the north the soil hasn’t adapted yet. How would we build?”

  “We can scavenge with materials already there.”

  “Wouldn’t we need more resources to make that kind of journey? More food, more weapons?”

  “I can get us more fish; we can trade more. You already have so much.”

  “It could also risk everything I’ve built.”

  “If you really want to build this community, you need the right land. Otherwise you’ll be back on the water in less than a year.”

  “I can’t take that kind of risk,” he said. I felt him slipping away from me, like he was an oyster shell closing before my eyes. He looked away from me and he suddenly looked very tired, fatigue etched in the lines and hollows of his face.

  I stood up and sat on the bed next to him and touched his shoulder.

  “You’re rig
ht,” I murmured. “It’s too much of a risk.”

  “The thing is—we aren’t just looking for land, we’re looking for the right land. I had hoped the Andes would be our best bet. There are lots of villages and ports there. We need to settle somewhere close to a village so we can trade, but we also need to have enough space and resources on the land to farm, raise livestock, cut trees for building. We can’t just settle anywhere and expect to survive.”

  I knew he was right. Villages and ports were often overcrowded and the lands around them were often mined for every resource, leaving them barren and uninhabitable. The rivers were drained to irrigate farmland in the villages and trees cut to trade at the ports. Or the land itself seemed unwilling to support life; rocky soil with no chance of growth or marshes holding only rotten water and strange animals.

  “We’ll find what we need,” I assured him, wondering how I could convince him about the Valley.

  He looked back at me, his brow furrowed in concern, his eyes heavy with worry. “What if I can’t do this?”

  I cupped his face with my palms. “You can.”

  He leaned in and kissed me, pulling me toward him. I softened against him. I began to untie the bandanna around his neck, but he stopped me.

  “Don’t,” he whispered.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  His hands softened and I untied the bandanna, feeling scar tissue on his neck beneath the fabric. It was raised, pink, and rippled as though from a bad burn, and I turned my face into his neck to kiss it.

  He pulled me down to lie on the bed, my hands on his chest, feeling his heart hammer against my palms. We both tried to move quietly, our bodies straining against making noise. As his tongue slid in and out of my mouth I became wetter and wetter, heat and liquid spreading, making me ache. I turned my head to the side, watched the candle’s shadow flicker on the wall. We peeled our clothes off, the room around me a blur of stillness against our motion. I arched my neck, my hands moving up to his hair, thick and warm between my fingers.

  He slid into me and something in me contracted and expanded, a fluid motion, a rising and rising. We moved together, our breath hot, our nerves spinning, and I felt myself splitting, teetering on an edge. He pushed into me again and again, like some other animal’s faster pulse, and I rose out of the dark depths as though bursting through the water’s surface into sunlight, unfurling in a bright white spot, a sudden high spark that left me heavy-lidded and drowsy.

  He pulled out before he finished, my hands on his hips, directing him out to spill on the quilt. We lay in the quiet, my body tucked into his, his arm around my waist. My mind fluttered clumsily, like a butterfly with a hole in its wing, over people and places. Row when she ate a crayon, blue streaming down the side of her chin. The meadows my grandfather and I would walk through to get to his favorite fishing lake. And how Daniel almost smelled like that, like floral woods and grass that’s never been cut. I hadn’t noticed how much Daniel smelled like home until I was lying next to someone else. I wanted sometimes to tuck my face into his neck and breathe him in.

  Abran shifted his weight, turning over. The last time I’d slept with someone, Jacob and I had conceived Pearl. I remembered how his hair had fallen into his face when he moved over me. I’d liked how his shoulders looked from that angle; I’d liked the warmth coming off his chest.

  We’d just had an argument about Row playing outside alone, and the argument had brought a sudden closeness.

  We were already talking less in those days. He was looking at me differently by then, too. He’d always been so captivated with me, but then, after Row, after the flood got worse, after we stopped talking, there was this distance in his gaze. Like we were strangers. But not even that, not even that much mystery. Like we were people who’d half known each other in a lifetime before.

  When we conceived Row it had been our decision. Our way of thumbing our noses at the world. And it wasn’t just us. During the Hundred Year Flood birth rates didn’t drop like you’d expect, but remained steady. Some people who had wanted children decided they couldn’t care for them with water approaching their doorstep. And others, who had never felt particular on the subject, suddenly started having a child a year, birthing them like flowers in spring, to remind themselves of how fertility felt. But so many of these children died in their first couple of years, along the migration routes, typhoid and cholera wiping out refugee settlements.

  If my being pregnant worried my mother, she never let on. The local hospital where she’d worked as a nurse was closed at that point, but she still held free clinics in an abandoned warehouse a few blocks from our house, and she began stocking up on supplies for a home birth—sterile gloves, scissors, painkillers.

  Unlike Row, Pearl was a surprise. We had been using old condoms scavenged from the local drugstore, and one day in April I realized I hadn’t bled in over a month. I panicked and went to Jacob, and when I told him he just stared at me and then looked away, his jaw set, desperation in his eyes.

  Abran’s breath grew heavier and slower, and I whispered, “I should go,” lifting his arm off my waist.

  “You should stay,” he said, lifting his head groggily.

  “The others shouldn’t know,” I said, sitting up, reaching for my shirt. “Let’s just keep this between us.”

  Abran looked at me cautiously as if trying to discern my reasoning. “Okay,” he said.

  I tiptoed down the dark hallway, feeling along the walls to find my way back to the crew quarters and my bunk. When I got into bed I heard Daniel shift above in his bunk. I hoped he had been asleep. We had been quiet. He couldn’t have heard, I told myself.

  Chapter 21

  When I woke the next morning I heard Pearl murmuring a prayer of St. Bridget, pulling the edge of her handkerchief inch by inch through her pinched fingers. She moved the handkerchief the way I’d seen my grandmother move the beads on her rosary. Grandfather had taught Pearl the prayer during long evenings we spent on the boat, after the fishing lines had been rolled up and moonlight lay heavy on the water. The words comforted Pearl, and I caught her doing it when she was alone, trying to be brave.

  We were late waking; everyone else had already gone upstairs for breakfast.

  I reached out, rubbed Pearl’s shoulder, and pulled her close, tucking her head under my chin.

  “What is it, sweetie?” I asked.

  “We’ll sink,” she said before resuming the prayer. “. . . perforating Thy delicate feet, and not finding Thee in a pitiable enough state to satisfy their rage . . .”

  “What makes you say that? Pearl?” I gave her shoulder a little shake.

  My grandfather was not especially religious, but the prayers had been passed down to him through the generations. He often recited them while he was working, with a jovial voice, the harsh words and dark sentiments odd on his tongue, which was neither austere nor reverent.

  I hadn’t liked it when he taught the prayers to Pearl, feeling that they were too violent and disturbing for a young child to memorize.

  The ancient prayers were stories of suffering, he would say. Stories we would do well to remember.

  I wasn’t sure what the remembering would offer her, but I wanted her to keep a part of him, so I let him teach her the prayers.

  “. . . pulled Thee from all sides, thus dislocated Thy limbs . . .”

  “Pearl,” I said firmly, pulling the handkerchief from her hands.

  “No!” she said, grabbing the handkerchief back from me. “They’ll cast us overboard and we’ll sink. Like Jonah. But we won’t be swallowed by a whale. We’ll be swallowed by another ship.”

  She was always having nightmares about shipwrecks, about going down into the sea, trapped in the ship, her grave the dark cold water.

  “No, no, Pearl. Did you have another bad dream? That won’t happen.”

  Pearl’s face pinched and reddened. “We’ve been cursed and they will see it. The sea will take us. The sea will not rest,” she wailed, covering her face
with her handkerchief.

  I pulled Pearl into my chest and rubbed her back. “No, honey. No. Those are stories you’ve heard.”

  Pearl’s small body shook and I squeezed my eyes shut. What struck me, hardening like a stone in my chest, was that she was right. The sea would eventually take us in some form, and we would disappear beneath its surface. I couldn’t stop its rising; I couldn’t keep us afloat forever. I’d brought her into this world, and some days all I hoped was that I wouldn’t be around when she left it.

  She turned her face up from my chest, her voice small and singular like a bird’s. “I don’t want to be alone. You’ll go with me?”

  “I’ll go with you,” I said.

  Her cheeks were rosy. I tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’m here. Always,” I whispered in her ear. I felt her relax against me, her fingers going limp around the handkerchief.

  Daniel and I butchered fish on deck, slitting open the stomachs of wahoo, pulling out their guts, and tossing them in a bucket. The noonday sun burned against our backs and sweat kept falling in my eyes. All I could smell was fish guts and salt. Salt in my body and salt from the sea; I felt I couldn’t escape it.

  I chopped off a dorsal fin and head, pushed the fish aside, and reached for another.

  Pearl was helping Marjan peel potatoes in the cabin. I could see her head, bent over her task, through the open doorway. It was the last of the potatoes. We needed to port soon and trade for vegetables.

  “I heard you go to his room last night,” Daniel said, his voice quiet. Sound of blade against wood, the dull scrape of shoving the head away from the body.

  “And?” I was surprised to see sadness, a sort of melancholy regret in his gray eyes. The way he looked at me made me feel exposed.