After the Flood

by Kassandra Montag

  “Did you tell him everything? About Row?” Daniel asked.

  “You know I didn’t.”

  “But you were trying to convince him to go to the Valley, weren’t you?”

  “I also like him,” I said, hoping it’d shut him up.

  A wounded look crossed his face and he slit a fish’s stomach and yanked the guts out. He tossed them in a bucket. Behir and Abran’s voices, chatting and laughing about something, drifted our way.

  “You know what you haven’t mentioned this whole time?” Daniel asked.

  “What?”

  “Jacob. You’ve talked about Row, but you won’t talk about Jacob.”

  He waited to see me react to the name. I shrugged, but I felt a burning in my spine, a dull buzz between my ears. I assumed Jacob was dead from what the raider on the coast had said, but he still felt strangely alive to me, some otherworldly presence that penetrated me wherever I was, like some ghost beyond my reach. Back before I assumed he was dead, I had at times longed for his death, but sometimes, I had also longed to have him with me again. To not be alone. To be with someone familiar.

  “Do you ever wonder why he did it? Did you ever think he’d do such a thing?” Daniel asked.

  “No,” I lied, my voice cold as steel. I gripped the knife tighter.

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Yes, you did,” I said, my throat tight. “You meant to imply he left because I was somehow terrible. You meant to imply I should have known. You meant to imply it’s my fault she’s gone—” My voice cracked and I shut my mouth, pressing my tongue against the roof of my mouth, blinking furiously to clear my eyes of tears.

  Daniel reached out to touch me and I hit his hand away.

  “Don’t touch me!” I hissed.

  “I asked because . . .” Daniel shook his head and looked down. “It must have been terrible.”

  His voice faded and I watched him warily.

  “No,” I said. “I never imagined he could do such a thing. And yes, I’ve wondered why. I suppose he thought I’d be a liability. I was pregnant. It made him nervous.”

  “I didn’t mean—” Daniel started.

  “Yes, you did. Don’t make me speak of him. Don’t pry. I thought better of you.”

  Shame colored Daniel’s face and he looked down at the fish before him, the single eye staring back, the scales glittering in sunlight. He wiped his bloody hands on a rag.

  “You’re right. I’m sorry. I know how it feels . . . to want to change what has already happened.”

  I felt skepticism like an itch in my spine, but when he looked up and his eyes met mine I saw he was telling the truth. His eyes were tender and calm, like an open palm stretched out for me to take. I also saw regret in him, but a kind of half regret. The kind of regret you have when you feel bad about something, but not bad enough to stop doing it.

  I gave a short nod and returned to the fish before me. I felt uncomfortably warm and exposed, like I’d walked naked a long while and needed shelter. We resumed our work in silence.

  Part of me felt like I knew Daniel. And yet he was absent somehow, removed. He was holding himself back from me for some reason. As though each time I was with him I was only seeing a small part of him. This dance of taking a step closer and then a step back.

  Those questions Daniel asked me I had already asked myself. During those early years on the water I would constantly ruminate on why Jacob left without me and took Row from me. For years and years I blamed myself. I must have somehow pushed him away, I thought.

  But over the years a different picture emerged: one filled with other, small disappearances he’d enacted during those years we were together. How when Row was a newborn, crying for hours from colic, he’d leave the house for days, staying with friends and leaving me alone to tend to her. There was never any mention of taking turns, only his turn. He was charming and fun, but when things became difficult, he seemed to disappear on me. He’d had a habit of disappearing, and the floods simply brought his final disappearance.

  He could be the most generous person I’d ever met. And he could be ruthless in his weakness, always looking for an out. Someone who could talk big but never follow through. I held on to this side of him and started to blame only him.

  What I hadn’t told Daniel was that Jacob had actually asked me to leave with him once. He had been skittish about reports that water was coming our way. He didn’t think the boat Grandfather was building would be big enough for all of us or done in time.

  I was out in the front lawn, weeding our vegetable patch. I pulled a dandelion and tossed it in the bucket.

  Jacob grimaced, looking at the house across the street from us. All the windows were boarded up from the inside, and if you walked past it you could smell decay. The neighbor hadn’t come outside for months and we weren’t sure if he was alive in there.

  “I think we should leave early,” Jacob said.

  I stood up and brushed dirt off my pants.

  “What do you mean, early?” I asked.

  “Davis told me the dam could break. Besides, it’s not going to work—all of us on that boat.”

  I glared at him. Jacob had never gotten along with my grandfather.

  “Davis has a motorboat. I’m trying to talk him into letting us take off with him and his family.”

  “All of us?”

  “Your mom and grandpa can take the boat they’re building. They’ll be right behind us. It’s more suited for two anyway.”

  I stifled the urge to tell Jacob to fuck off. I was already worn to the bone, trying to prepare for our departure, and here he was losing his nerve. “I’m not leaving without everyone,” I said. “We stick together. We’re a family. All of us.”

  Jacob sighed and glanced up at the attic, where we could see Grandfather through the window, bending over the boat. On the sidewalk near my feet, puddles of water had slowly grown from cracks in the cement. As if the earth were so waterlogged it was now bubbling up from below, too.

  “Myra, you’re not listening to me.”

  “Yeah, you’re right. I’m not. Why don’t you help us out, instead of making other plans? We’re still stockpiling food. You haven’t been hunting in days.”

  Jacob had backed away from me, shaking his head. I could never understand why he couldn’t just help us. He always hovered at the edges of my family as if he weren’t actually a part of it. But I still never imagined he’d just leave. He needed me, didn’t he?

  I kept my rage at Jacob tucked so deep inside me, I could sometimes feel it roiling out, barely contained. I felt when he left that I had been gripping the edge of a boat like Sedna had and he had cut each of my fingers off, watching me drift to a watery grave. And a part of me wanted to rise up from the depths and pull him down with me.

  More than I wanted to admit, I was disappointed when I heard he was dead. I had wanted to see him again; it had been a burning desire that I hadn’t even fully acknowledged.

  But why see him again? To demand answers? To enact revenge?

  After I killed that raider on the coast I would sometimes imagine it was Jacob’s body crumpled at my feet and I would wait to see how it would feel, holding that image in my mind. But no feeling came. Only emptiness.

  My rage still beat on like a second heart. I wondered, if I saw Jacob in the flesh, could I kill him so coldly? Did I actually want to?

  Maybe there was something else, beneath the anger, beneath the pain. Some third option, between revenge and absolution, that hovered just beyond my consciousness, waiting to be named.

  I knew I hated him too much to not still love him.

  Chapter 22

  I crept through the dark hallway to Abran’s room several nights a week for three weeks. I knew our nights together would have to come to an end soon. He was becoming too serious about us, starting to say “we” too often. I wanted to convince him to go to the Valley before I ran out of time, but I knew I couldn’t push it. Abran was the type of person who had to feel it was h
is idea.

  On these nights Abran loved to share stories from his past with me. I’d lie half awake, half asleep, Abran’s lips brushing my hair, and he’d tell me about where he’d been and who he’d known. He didn’t often ask questions about me, and I didn’t offer many stories of my own. After a while I got the sense that he wasn’t sharing stories with me so much as confessing. He needed to tell it all, all the little details, to get to the darker parts.

  One night, we lay naked on our sides, the quilt pulled halfway up our bodies, the candlelight jumping and falling like a wave. Abran talked about the community he wanted to start, his plans for distribution of labor.

  “Why did you promise your brother about starting the community?” I asked.

  Abran was silent and I turned over to look him in the face. Abran looked at me warily and kissed my forehead. I pushed his dark hair from his face.

  “My brother, Jonas . . . he felt guilty,” Abran said. “We had done some bad things. He wanted to build a safe place. A place we’d want to live.”

  I thought of the man I’d killed on the coast, the terrifying way his body jerked as I waited for him to bleed out. I sometimes lay awake at night thinking of the man. I thought of who he was before the floods. How he could have been a neighbor, a man I walked past while carrying groceries up the front stoop, someone who said hello and continued on his way, under the dappled sunshine, among the fallen leaves on the sidewalk.

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  Abran spread my hair tips like a fan across the pillow’s edge. My hair, once silky, had grown coarse from the constant salt, wind, and sun.

  “Got in with some people. Got out eventually . . .”

  It was rare for Abran to be reluctant to speak.

  “I think we should tell the crew about us,” he said.

  I stiffened. “Not yet.”

  I was already worried the crew knew about our nighttime visits. I felt like Wayne and Jessa watched us with strange, bemused looks on their faces, and Marjan had given Abran an extra pillow for his bed last week.

  “Don’t make me wait forever,” he said, grinning and nudging my shoulder.

  I smiled and felt a chill in my veins. I did feel something for Abran, but whatever I felt, I knew it couldn’t last. I’d been here before, wanting and needing, ready to be disappointed.

  We lay in silence for a few minutes, and I reached up and touched the scars on Abran’s neck. “A man I killed close to Apple Falls had a tattoo on his shoulder,” I said. I thought of Abran’s charisma, the way he naturally gathered everyone around him. So often the raiders I’d encountered were charming, could charm you before you knew who you were dealing with, and then it was too late.

  Sedna creaked and rumbled, the rubbing of the sea against the ship making a low growl. Abran and I held each other’s eyes for a moment before he spoke, saying, “Lily Black.”

  I raised my eyebrows and felt a drop in my stomach. I had suspected he’d been part of some raider ship, but it had felt abstract and distant. That he had been part of the Lily Black made them feel more present, as if it somehow brought them closer to us. I’d heard of them tracking people who’d left their crews and joined other ships. Should we be keeping a lookout for ships following us?

  It wasn’t easy to find people anymore, I reminded myself. Tracking someone on the open sea was nearly impossible. Besides, raiders got into so many battles, it was likely that half the crew Abran had been with was already dead.

  “I heard that in the early days the Lily Black had started as a few families protecting their land. By the time I joined them they were a military tribe,” Abran said, sitting up. He rested his arms on his knees, his back a long curve. I sat up and placed my hand on his spine.

  “They came to us, to our home. My parents were both surgeons. During the Hundred Year Flood they moved up to a gated community high up in the mountains with other friends. They’d kept their old medical textbooks and used them to teach my brother and me the family business. My parents pinched drugs from the hospitals where they worked before they closed. People would travel to us to receive medical care and we treated them out of our living room. They paid us in food and scavenged items. For a while, we could live like the world wasn’t completely collapsing . . . until the Mediterranean War.”

  Abran made a choking sound and swallowed. I rubbed his back.

  “But some of my parents’ friends had ties with the Lily Black and they needed a military base during the war, so they moved in. An outbreak of dysentery spread through our community and surrounding areas. My parents died when I was twenty-six. Jonas and I talked about fleeing south, but we didn’t have enough food to make the journey. Then Jonas got sick. We met a man who offered to treat Jonas and let us join his ship. We started as cabin boys, mopping up the deck, running ammunition belowdecks. We didn’t know what all they did when we first joined, and once we joined . . . it was too late to leave. No one was calling them raiders back then. We thought they were protecting themselves . . . not attacking others.”

  Abran shook his head and looked around the room as if searching for a window to look out of. He looked so pained, so lost, that I rubbed his back and whispered, “You’re not the same as them.”

  “Everything was so confusing in those days,” he said. “So many people and yet so few. The world felt like it kept expanding and contracting. We transported goods, we traded, we fought other ships, but everyone did. We tried not to think about it.”

  Abran laid his hand over the scars on his neck as if hiding them. “Then they put the rabbit on our necks. They started to get more serious about colonizing villages on land. Jonas and I were already talking about trying to start our own community. It was Jonas’s idea. He felt even guiltier than I did. His health was failing; he wasn’t sleeping at night. We made a pact that if either of us didn’t survive leaving the ship, the other would go on and still start a community where certain things . . . certain things wouldn’t happen. So when we left the Lily Black I stole from our crew to start Sedna. I still know about where they have some resources hidden. They have medicine—mostly antibiotics—hidden northeast of here.”

  “Antibiotics?” I asked.

  Abran shook his head. “It’s too dangerous to go after any of it. Better to stay as far away as possible from those places. Sometimes they leave men behind to guard them.”

  My heart sank, but I tried not to show my disappointment. “Have you told the others? About the Lily Black?”

  “No. I don’t want them to know.”

  “They won’t hear about it from me,” I said. And I meant it. His secrets were his.

  “Your brother . . . ?” I said.

  Abran shook his head and lay back down, his hand over his eyes. I lay next to him. Sedna rocked abruptly and a few books fell from the table. Abran lifted his head from his pillow and propped his face on his knuckles. “Do you really think we could make it through the northern Atlantic?”

  “Yes,” I said. “With this ship we have a better chance than many.”

  “If we made it out there, we would have it mostly to ourselves. Not many people can journey that far north.”

  He was repeating my own words back to me. I stayed silent, letting him ponder it.

  “I’ve been thinking more about what Robert said. I don’t think he was lying,” Abran said. He traced the vein from my hand up my arm with his fingertip. I felt a thrill, a thrumming in my bones. It felt like I was close; after weeks of carefully planting seeds, I was now finally seeing some green poking through the dirt.

  “Are you sure you trust him?” I asked, playing the devil’s advocate, giving him the resistance he needed.

  “Not at all,” Abran said. “But I’ve heard the same thing elsewhere about the south. At each trading post. I was just fixed on going south because . . . that’s where Jonas and I had talked about going.”

  Abran rubbed the tender skin on the inside of my wrist with his thumb. “That day, I think Robert felt powerful and wa
nted to give me something . . . something I didn’t want.”

  I realized Abran could read people better than I’d expected. How well could he read me?

  “I’ve been thinking about it more and more, and everything you say is right. The isolation, the resources. I’ve been scared of the risk, but I’ll regret it if I don’t try,” Abran said.

  Elation poured through me, as if a dam had broken. I couldn’t believe I’d finally done it. All the gentle coaxing and the casual reminders had paid off. Already I could see the shores of Greenland, the rocky coast and crisp, cold air. I tried to ignore a darker undercurrent tugging at me—images of guards patrolling the streets of the Valley, the meager rations in dining halls. Public beatings and spontaneous house searches. At least you’re moving closer to her, I told myself. I took Abran’s hand in mine, felt the calluses on his palms.

  “But it isn’t up to me,” he said. “We have to put it to a vote with the rest of the crew.”

  Chapter 23

  Abran told me we’d hold the vote for changing our destination to the Valley the next evening. He wanted to ask Daniel to chart out the route we’d take before we voted, so he could share with the crew the details of how long it would take. I didn’t tell him that Daniel had already charted a course.

  That morning after breakfast Abran pulled me aside and told me we needed more provisions for the journey. I needed to catch more fish than I had if I was going to prove to the crew we could make it across the Atlantic. I couldn’t stop thinking about the vote as I went about my morning chores, considering each crew member and which side they’d fall on.

  Sedna approached a small mountain range a few miles away. Thomas stood at the bow with the binoculars, keeping an eye out for mountains just below the water. I felt like we were losing time by traveling farther south, but Abran insisted we wait until evening for the vote. The water was warmer and we were getting closer to channels and estuaries between the broken coastline, so Pearl and I began trolling for bluefish with live bait.