“You don’t need to do this now,” Marjan said softly.
“Can you hand me the bucket?” I asked. I couldn’t stop and think right now. But the more I tried not to think of Pearl, the more she resurfaced in my mind. I’d failed her. I’d failed her. I bit my lip so hard I tasted blood.
Marjan handed me the bucket and I tossed a handful of guts in it. I slid the knife between the scales and the meat, jiggling the fillets loose. I set the fillets on the counter and noticed Marjan watching me.
“Did you know the raiders would be there?” she asked. “On the island?” When I didn’t respond right away she went on. “The friend who told you about the antibiotics. Was it the same one who told you about the Valley?”
“Yes. She sailed there a while back. Left resources along the way.”
Sound of blade on wood, a dull scrape to move the head aside.
I tossed the head in the pile and dipped my knife in the bucket of water, scraping it against the edge to clean it. “And no, of course, I didn’t know the raiders would be there.”
“I wasn’t trying to suggest . . .”
“Look—I’m not going to apologize,” I said. “If the antibiotics were there, it could have helped her. Could have helped us all in the Valley.”
Marjan laid her knife down, wiped her hands on her apron. “I just wondered whether if you had known they were there, would you still have gone?”
She was asking how much I’d risk. I turned and looked at her, my eyes burning with unfallen tears.
“I’d have gone.”
A week passed and Pearl’s incision healed as well as we could hope. Each morning and evening I cleaned the wound with honey soap Marjan had made and changed the bandages, wrapping the gauze carefully and knotting it, keeping my eyes on her face; trying to discern how she was adjusting.
One day after I’d bandaged Pearl’s hand, I went to the cabin to gather hooks and bait for a day of fishing. I found Daniel hunched over his papers and navigational instruments, writing.
“Hey,” I said.
Daniel jumped, flipped over the page he’d been writing on, and tucked it under a map.
“Hey,” he said, not turning around, sitting there, looking at the map.
“Planning new routes?” I asked.
“No, just wanted to map out a few backup routes. Case of storms.”
I stepped around the table so he had to face me. “Can I see?”
“I’m not finished.”
Daniel tapped his foot on the floor and rapped his pencil against the table. Normally, he was as composed as a deer: quiet, alert, poised. Ever since Pearl’s amputation Daniel had grown quieter and more removed. Sometimes during evening meals he’d watch her with this intense yet gentle expression, a look that reminded me of how I felt about her.
“Is this about the Lily Black following us? Even if they try, you think it will be that easy?”
“The world’s a small place now.”
I sat down. Seeing Daniel so agitated made me feel uneasy.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Hm? Nothing. The raider you saw on the island—did he have any other tattoos? Anything other than the rabbit on his neck?”
I shook my head. “Not that I saw, but he had a long coat on, so more could have been covered.”
Daniel didn’t react, and the absence of a reaction seemed odd. He looked right through me like I wasn’t there. After he was quiet a moment, he said, “You ever worried you love your older daughter more because she isn’t here?”
My spine tensed. “I love her because she’s my child. Love her more than what?”
“Sometimes I just wonder if it’s really about you. What you can do. What if she’s fine?”
“How could she be fine? The Valley is a colony. Jacob undoubtedly abandoned her, as he did me.”
“I thought you said he was dead.”
“Whatever. Point is, the raider said she didn’t have a father. No one is helping her. She’ll be boarding a breeding ship any day now.”
“I can’t help but wonder if your responsibility to Pearl is greater. Because she’s here,” Daniel said.
My bones felt loose in my joints. I opened my mouth to speak but had no words.
I stood up and slammed my chair against the table. “You know nothing about it.”
He looked up at me. “That’s how it is with me. I love the people who aren’t here.”
“Well, that’s you. You know—you don’t know the half of it.”
I knew it was sometimes easier to love ghosts than the people who were around you. Ghosts could be perfect, frozen beyond time, beyond reality, the crystal form they’d never been before, the person you needed them to be. Sometimes I wanted only the good moments to surface in my memory. My father sitting next to me while I played cards and he did a crossword puzzle in an old newspaper. Running toward my father through the backyard, into his arms, to be tossed up into the sky. The smell of autumn when he brought in firewood, and how I’d kneel beside him to stack the wood in the fireplace and feel warmer even before the fire was lit.
In these memories I’d pushed away the girl on the stoop, the girl who knew some things are absolute and that she couldn’t have been enough. I sometimes needed to pretend for a while that she was someone else and that my story had ended differently.
Daniel stood up and walked closer to me. “I worry about the weight of all this on you . . . if something more happened to Pearl—”
“Whether or not Row’s fine in the colony isn’t all that matters,” I interrupted. “I don’t trust that Jacob told her the truth. That he kidnapped her. What if she thinks I abandoned her? What if she doesn’t remember how I tried to reach her? She won’t be fine if she thinks I just let her go.”
Daniel reached out to touch my arm but I hit his hand away. “I’m sure that’s not what she thinks,” he said softly.
“You know what happens to kids who are abandoned? Who don’t believe they’re worth anyone staying around? It changes how you see yourself. Everyone else is walking around fine and it’s like you have a fucking hole in your chest and the whole world can reach in and touch anything in you. You have no armor. You never feel safe. I’m not just saving her from the Lost Abbots, I’m saving her from that. She . . . she has to know that I’m here for her.”
My throat started to close up. I took a step away from Daniel and rubbed my hands over my face. I thought of my father hung like a fish from a line, his feet moving ever so slightly in the breeze that came in the shed. I thought of telling Daniel about what had happened and how it had opened up a need in me I’d never satisfy. I looked up at him and he looked back at me like he pitied me, like he guessed there was something wrong with me. I wanted to wipe that look off his face.
“Myra, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean . . .”
I pointed in his face. “Don’t ever assume you know me.”
Daniel nodded. Seagulls’ cries grew louder outside, the frenzied caws of diving for fish and fighting the wind. I was beginning to accept I’d always feel like this—caught between my daughters, caught between my past and future, wrestling toward an uncertain hope. Like being caught between the sea and sky, always hunting the horizon.
Daniel returned to his maps and I rummaged through the shelves for new line. The cabin was so quiet, we both jumped when Pearl and Behir opened the cabin door and strolled inside. Behir disappeared into the kitchen and Pearl plopped down beside Daniel.
“I’m hungry,” she said. She had her favorite snake wrapped around her wrist. His head hovered above her missing finger, his black tongue undulating in a wave.
I eyed him cautiously. Pearl had told me he wasn’t venomous, but I still hated seeing him outside of his jar.
“Lunch isn’t for another hour,” I told her.
Behir pulled the kitchen curtain aside and set a loaf of bread in front of Pearl. We were beginning food rations and I knew Behir would have to answer to his mother later.
“Are you only gi
ving this to me because I lost a finger?” she asked. Then she grinned and said, “It wasn’t my favorite finger anyway.”
I could tell Behir saw right through her bravado. That façade of disregard when you’re crumbling inside. He knelt beside her and said, “Who’s this guy?”
“Charlie stays with me now,” Pearl said. She smirked. “He’s my right hand.” She erupted into a fit of giggles, her hand without Charlie covering her face, but when she removed it, her face was red and wet with tears.
“Let me show you something,” Behir said, going to the shelves to pick up the binoculars.
He took her left hand and led her out onto the deck. Daniel and I followed.
“I saw them just before we came into the cabin,” Behir said, leading her to the bow of the ship.
About a mile away the water broke and an orca dove up into the air and disappeared again. Then another. Their black backs gleaming in the sun. Ripples lost in the waves that tumbled over them. Their calls rising up in song, each voice folding over the other, a chant in a foreign tongue.
“Early this morning they were really close to us,” Behir said. “And I got a close look. See that big one there? She’s the leader.”
Behir handed Pearl the binoculars and she peered through them.
“She has a deep scar up her belly. Something big must have got her. But all the rest follow her. She’s the mother ship. She’s the strongest now.”
Pearl smiled at Behir.
Daniel stood so close his arm brushed mine. I watched Pearl watch the whales and felt an unfolding inside me. A stirring in my chest. Standing there, watching something greater than us, reminded me of taking Row to watch the cranes. How much we needed to see a beautiful creature that was not us, that had little to do with us.
Unbidden, a vision came to me of Pearl, Row, and me living in a small stone cottage on a cliff overlooking the sea. White curtains fluttering in the sea breeze. A small woodpile stacked against the house. A stone chimney releasing a curl of smoke. Pearl’s and Row’s voices high-spirited and bright, a new sound as they spoke over one another and their voices mixed.
I hadn’t allowed myself to have a dream in so long it felt foreign, uncomfortable, like a muscle gone weak. I pressed deeper into it, saw us on a bed reading a book, a quilt heavy and warm over our legs. The smell of bread cooling on a counter.
The whales came up out of the water and crashed back again, sending up a spray of white water. Rising again and again. Their bodies drawing a healing arc over and over, a movement they had to repeat to go on breathing.
Chapter 36
Before we docked at Broken Tree, everyone discussed our last port stop during breakfast. What we needed to trade for, which merchants would give the best deals, and what we’d do if we ran into trouble.
“We can’t mention to anyone that we’re heading to the Valley. Much less chance of the Lily Black ever finding us once we’re out in the Atlantic,” I reminded everyone.
I had stayed up all night wondering if we could skip our last trade at Broken Tree. I had crept into the storage room and stared at our bare shelves and the crates of smoked and salted fish I’d caught. Our best bet was trading quickly and slipping out in case the Lily Black were there.
“And everyone stay close to the harbor, in the first few shops or saloons. We need to be able to collect everyone quick if we need to get out. We’re not going to be able to stay the night,” Abran said.
A murmur of groans went around the table.
“It will be our last day on land,” Behir said. “Shouldn’t we rest up before starting the Atlantic crossing? The Lily Black probably isn’t even there.”
“No,” Abran said. “We’ll set sail directly after our trade.”
We docked our ship and carried the crates into the village. I hadn’t caught half as much fish as I’d hoped. These past few weeks none of my previous techniques had worked. It was like I’d lost the ability to read the water, to do the right thing in the right place.
Even Abran looked at the half-full crates disapprovingly when we loaded them onto the dock. I wished we could have filled less crates to hide how little I caught, but we always took the same crates into ports so we’d be able to haul our traded goods back to the ship.
Broken Tree was shabby compared to Wharton, so many buildings made of scrap metal and mismatched wood planks tied or nailed together. The streets stank of trash and manure. They were all dirt, no stone or laid planks, with potholes that deepened and connected into large fissures.
“Don’t twist your ankle,” I told Pearl, pointing out the crevasses.
She readjusted the bag slung over her shoulder gingerly, with her maimed hand. I had told her she couldn’t bring Charlie into the village.
“Don’t tell me how to walk,” she snapped.
We were so low on food that last night we’d eaten two of her snakes. She’d refused to eat that night and had sat at the table, chin tucked into her neck, kicking the table with one foot. She had asked to be excused and I said no, she’d wait out the meal. That night she had lain curled in a ball at the foot of the bed, and I suspected it was about more than her snakes, about never having control, everything moving out from underneath you.
The eastern side of the village was covered in trees, but the western side was full of crop fields. Barley, wheat, potatoes, cabbage. Workers knelt between the rows, straw hats shading their faces, backs bent under the noonday sun. They looked like peasants from a seventeenth-century Dutch painting. It caught my breath and I briefly felt suspended in time, beyond the loop of years.
The salt breeze coming off the sea roughened every edge; the stone, metal, and wood of the buildings were cracked and patched with mud and clay. Near the shoreline, built into the crevasse in the mountain face, stood an old Catholic church with a sign that said store on the front. It was clear the church had been built before the water came. It wasn’t made from scavenged materials; it wasn’t a patchwork of broken and abandoned materials. It was made of cream bricks, all mortared with clean lines. It was eerie, the way the church stood, silhouetted against the bright sky, one of the only buildings from before the flood that I’d seen in years. It looked like it had been dropped down from the sky.
“It’s like someone knew,” Jessa said, her voice awestruck as she gazed at the church. The perfect corners, the thick walls. A small circular window right under where the roof came to a point in the middle. An actual door with hinges in the front. Like nothing that existed anymore.
“Knew we’d need a store, I guess,” Marjan said.
Marjan still prayed with the sun every morning and evening. When I asked her about it she said it was a habit she was scared of breaking. “I have faith,” she had said. “But only for every minute out of a hundred. So I act on that one moment even when I’m not in it.”
We carried the fish to the trading post and traded for the last essentials we’d need for the Atlantic crossing. Rope, tackle and block, scrap metal and wood for repairs around the ship, potatoes and cabbage and flour, fabric and a couple of buckets of salt.
We didn’t have enough fish to trade for the food we wanted: the sausage, eggs, fruit, or poultry. I’d need to catch more fish on the voyage than I had been if we were to make it without starving.
When we finished trading, most of the crew wandered along the stalls set up on the roads, browsing the goods with their two coins or venturing beyond the main road to one of the saloons that overlooked the ocean.
“Come with us to the church?” I asked Abran.
“No,” Abran said, glancing away, rubbing his hands together in an anxious gesture. “I’ll be around.”
I watched him walk away, a dull anger thrumming in me. Had he hidden some of the fish to trade for alcohol? How much alcohol did he have stashed in his room?
I was tempted to follow him but walked with Daniel and Pearl to the church instead. A black stone on the front door held an engraved inscription. It told the story of a rich man who lived at the foo
t of this mountain. He’d had a dream that God wanted him to build a church at the top of the mountain for future peoples. So he’d had it done. The date read two decades before the floods.
I’d heard other strange reports of similar premonitions people had had before the water came. Premonitions or dreams or visions. But no one I knew of had acted on it.
Tables and stalls were set up inside the church, divided by the main aisle, which led straight to the altar and the crucifix. The church was a long rectangle and sunlight poured through long thin windows on either side, giving the air a luminescent glow. Daniel took Pearl to look at a stall filled with wool gloves and hats.
I smelled charcoal and gasoline and turned around to see a booth with combustion equipment: lighters, ferrocerium rods, bow drill fire kits, and little bags of charcoal and bottles of gasoline. They were charging the equivalent of a week’s worth of food for a small bottle of gasoline. I shook my head and stepped away, and a plaque with a carving of Christ’s face caught my eye. It was a station of the cross, the style of the carving dramatic, overwrought, baroque. The agony was exquisite on Christ’s face, the expression both transcendent and the pain of an animal.
“We only dropped one body.” The woman’s voice came from behind me, the accent thick, perhaps western European, but I couldn’t quite place it.
The hair on the back of my neck stood up and I kept looking at Christ’s face, straining to hear the other person this voice addressed.
“Well, it’s easier up north than in the Caribbean. Bodies decompose too fast in that heat,” a man said in a low growl. The voice was somehow familiar, but I didn’t dare turn around to look.
“Yah. Ammo is so short, we’re building bombs now. Much more effective. You set them out, kids walk on them, people start panicking, all over. You take ’em out, go in, and get what you need. We got salvaged materials for a new ship being collected by the dock.”
“Keep your voice down.”
“We need to take another colony and then focus on building a bigger fleet. Governor is already paying our tax. There are several wealthy colonies of other nations to the east. I have my scouts there now,” the woman said.
After the Flood Page 20