After the Flood

by Kassandra Montag

“That’s not on you.”

  I glared at him. He was acting like none of it mattered. If it wasn’t my fault, how else could I make sense of it? Taking responsibility for all of it was the only way I could accept it as real. The only way I didn’t feel as helpless and out of control.

  “Of course it is,” I snapped.

  “What you did—deceiving them—yeah, that’s on you. But not all the rest.”

  I shook my head. I’d lost Pearl because of what I’d done. It was punishment.

  “There were times I didn’t even want to be a mother,” I whispered. I squeezed my eyes shut and felt a hollow ache in my bones. “I didn’t want to be responsible for other lives. There were times I wished them away.”

  I had feared losing them, but there were moments that desire lurked right at the edge of that fear. Set loose from them, I could give up, I told myself. I could slip away into the water, no longer fighting, no longer pretending to be strong.

  But now I had lost both of them and I still couldn’t give up. The breath in my throat felt like a curse. It kept coming and coming, steaming before my face, mocking me. My own body betraying me.

  “I can’t go on,” I told Daniel. I turned to him, my voice strained, my eyes burning. “I can’t. I don’t have anything left.” My hands went to my chest, scratching at my coat, clawing for skin. “It’s like my heart’s been chipped and chipped away.”

  The way waves change the shape of a rock, beating it into something new.

  I yanked at my coat, clawing it off me. I dug at my upper chest and neck, the cold air rushing in, the bright pain of nails on skin a relief.

  Daniel grabbed my wrists.

  “Myra. Stop. Myra!”

  “I want to be done,” I sobbed, falling into his chest, my body growing weak and heavy.

  Daniel cradled my head against his chest, tucked my body against his.

  “I don’t have anything left. I have no heart,” I murmured.

  “Myra, you aren’t hurting because you have no heart, you’re hurting because you’re carrying two other hearts in you. You’ll always have them. You’ll always have to carry them. They’re your gift and your burden.”

  I shook my head against him, my hair a tangle in my face. I couldn’t go on; I didn’t feel I had it in me. I didn’t even know what direction to take or how to move forward.

  You do the hardest thing, Marjan had said.

  You must become someone you haven’t had to be yet. The thought came from somewhere in me I didn’t know existed. I thought of flying fish, the ones that rose up out of the water into the sky, their fins flapping like wings.

  I thought of my father and how despair must have had him in its clutches. Not only despair about what had happened, but despair about who he couldn’t become.

  A year before he hung himself he’d been in a fire at the factory where he worked. An electrical accident where light flared in his eyes and left him half blind. The world he lived in became one of shadows.

  Unbidden, a memory I’d forgotten flashed before me. It was a spring day after the accident and I was sitting in the grass, hunting worms to use for bait. My mother sat on the front stoop and my father walked home from a day spent looking for new work. Every day he roamed the streets, knocking on doors of boarded-up shops, begging for a place on a farmer’s crew.

  On this day he stopped a few feet from my mother. “I couldn’t see your face until I got here,” he said softly.

  Her mouth tightened and she glanced at me and took a deep breath. I knew even then she was trying not to cry. She stood and took him by the hand and led him inside.

  During that year I also took him by the hand and led him around and told him what I saw. For me, it had been fun. A game. For him, it must have been like crawling back into the womb. Sounds and shapes muffled as he drew ever more inward into himself and what he could no longer do.

  Wind howled across the rocks and clouds moved across the moon, darkness and then a glow of soft light. It felt like we sat on the edge of the world.

  I was happy to be your eyes, I thought. We needed each other. If I was enough you would have stayed.

  Something turned over in me, hackles rising in resistance. I hadn’t come all this way for someone else to decide who I was and what I was worth. I hadn’t come all this way to stay in one place. I might still be that child, but I was someone else, too. Like the sky becoming sea, the horizon shifting, ever rising.

  I rested against Daniel, the fire slowly warming us. I let time pass. After a while, I placed my hands on the rock and pushed myself up. Clouds drifted east, a cast of starlight lightening the landscape. Clusters of small flowers grew between rocks. The dark descent into the Valley stretched in a long shadow.

  Chapter 54

  We entered the Valley before dawn broke. A soft pink glow on the horizon gave us enough light to see as we came down the mountain. From a distance, the Valley looked like a village recently abandoned, smudged with fog. Buckets upturned in the streets, a feral cat prowling the rim of a well, doors left hanging open, clothing and household items dumped on lawns, smokeless chimneys, a radiating silence.

  As we got closer I smelled death. Pungent, heavy, a stench even the wind couldn’t clear. I swallowed hard. No sign yet of the Lost Abbots’ guards.

  Funeral pyres lay scattered around the perimeter of the village. A base of stones, a jumble of charred wood, bones, and ash. From one pyre a thin tail of smoke climbed up the sky. A raven circled over a distant pyre, then dove to the ground, disappearing behind a shack.

  Some shacks on the outskirts of town looked hastily built, with metal siding nailed to wood boards. Other buildings farther into the village were made of stone with thatched roofs. Some had been painted in bright colors—crimson, yellow, bright blue. Colors that looked too bright against the gray and green landscape. Out of place. The prettiness mixed with the smell of death and became disorienting, an irritant.

  We came down the mountain on a little path that had been dug out by footsteps between the rocks. The purple wildflowers I’d placed in Marjan’s hands grew at the foot of the mountain here as well. The village stretched about a mile to the east from where we stood.

  “You go east on the south side, I’ll go east on the north side. We’ll meet at the other end,” Daniel said.

  The feral cat jumped off the well. My stomach turned over. The well was boarded over, but the stench of a rotting body still escaped.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Myra.” Daniel reached out for my hand and squeezed it. “We’re going to find her.”

  I nodded and squeezed his hand back. The sheen of resolve I saw in his face buoyed me. He really believed it.

  We parted ways and I crossed to the south edge of town, heading east. The closest building to the well had graffiti painted on the metal siding in bright red block letters: body in the well.

  I remembered the shopkeeper at Harjo when I’d first heard of the attack. How her voice felt like it was coming from far away. The sudden claustrophobia of all the shelves in the shop.

  I scanned the village and crept behind a crumbling stone wall. The air felt woolen, too thick to breathe. A shadow moved past an open doorway in a nearby house. I crept to the doorway and paused on the threshold, peering into the dark house, my hand resting on my knife.

  A creak in the floorboards split the silence. I stepped inside, my eyes adjusting to the dim room. Sunlight seeped through lace curtains. They must have been carried up from below when the water rose. Strange, the things people brought with them when they fled to higher ground.

  The room was filled with an odd assortment of furniture—an old dining room table, a small settee, several kerosene lamps hanging from the ceiling. The house smelled of dirt and feces and urine and rotting food. Every surface was smudged with mud. I stepped into a bedroom, my knife out in front of me.

  A thin woman, about my age, sat on the bed. She held her hands up in front of her; her eyes wide.

  “Please,” she mum
bled in an accent I didn’t recognize. “Please.”

  “I’m not going to hurt you,” I said, lowering my knife. “Is anyone else here?”

  She shook her head no but I still scanned the room and kept the knife in my hand.

  “Have you seen a small girl?” I asked. I held my hand at chest level to indicate Pearl’s height. “Reddish hair, light brown skin. Wearing a blue sweater.” I realized it was absurd to give so many details. Any strange girl would be recognizable in a village wiped out from illness.

  The woman shook her head no again, but it seemed she did so more from fear than giving a real answer. Her eyes clouded and I felt her retreating from me, as though she were stepping deeper into herself. She dropped her hands to her lap and sat perfectly still.

  I backed away and left the house. The sun had dried up the fog and the air was beginning to warm. I continued on past abandoned houses, searching for any sign of Pearl. For a fleeting minute, I forgot that I had come all this way for Row.

  Movement behind the window in another house. I gripped my knife tighter and waited for someone to appear in the doorway. No one did. Perhaps it’d been an animal. Or the person was hiding from me. Or stalking me.

  I was almost halfway to the east side of the village. A few more houses lay ahead, and past all of these, at the very southeastern edge of the village, a house stood all alone, about four acres from all the others. Behind this house a steep slope rose. I looked at the map. This slope led up to the cliff close to where we had shipwrecked on the beach.

  I walked past the other houses, drawn to that final, separate house for some indiscernible reason, as though a magnet pulled me toward it. As I approached the house and the base of the slope I saw a bright red piece of fabric on the lawn. I looked again. It was Pearl’s handkerchief. I bent and picked it up, rubbing the fabric between my fingers.

  I crept toward the house, listening. If the Lost Abbots had captured Pearl and were holding her inside, I needed to surprise them. But I couldn’t hear anything over the seabirds calling out to each other from the cliff, where they watched the water and dove to their prey below.

  Everything except the seabirds felt impossibly still. Even the wind didn’t seem to touch this part of the Valley.

  Like almost every house, this one’s door was ajar. The house was built of smooth wood planks that had been sanded. The joints fit perfectly, having no cracks between the boards stuffed with mud, moss, and wood chips like the other houses.

  “One day, I’ll build us a house,” Jacob had said years ago. This had been on a picnic along the Missouri River, after he’d ask me to marry him. It was the most romantic thing anyone had ever told me. He’d only made furniture for us at that point, but he dreamed of making us a house. I believed his dream and when I daydreamed about the house it looked almost like this one. Something small and simple, tucked into a quiet space.

  Blood thudded in my ears. I crept toward the house, up the porch stairs. One of them creaked and I froze, listening. I thought I heard voices, but I couldn’t tell if it was my imagination.

  I stood on the threshold and peered inside. Homemade furniture—a side table and a rocker—sat against a wall. They were as recognizable as a person’s smell. Furniture Jacob had made.

  The voice I thought I’d heard before now grew louder. It was Pearl’s voice.

  I felt like I was underwater, clawing toward the top. The need for air building in me, my lungs pumping, nothing coming in.

  I charged through the living room toward her voice. I burst into the kitchen. Pearl sat with her father at the kitchen table, holding a teacup.

  Chapter 55

  Jacob. I stared at him, frozen, too shocked to swallow the gasp that came from my lips. My hand drifted to my chest as though to slow my heart. My spine gone rigid, my mind blank, I stood in my stung skin and couldn’t take my eyes off him.

  I shook myself. “Put it down,” I told Pearl.

  Startled, Pearl obeyed, carefully setting the teacup on the table. I ran to her and snatched her up in my arms, inhaling her in a quick gasp, while keeping my eyes on Jacob. I set Pearl down next to me, my hand on her shoulder, keeping her rooted slightly behind me. She still wore her burlap sack of snakes slung over her shoulder.

  The kitchen was cramped and littered with dishes on a small cart and shelves. A child’s drawings were pinned all over the wood walls. Sunlight came through a window over the table, which looked out onto the grassy slope. Looking through it, you couldn’t see the sky, so it seemed like a wave of grass was about to envelop you. I ached for the movement of the sea, to not be bound to one room with one man, everything so stable and still.

  Jacob hadn’t changed except he was thinner and looked frailer. His hair was still auburn, his face unlined, his eyes brown and soft.

  “Hi, Myra,” Jacob said softly.

  The way he said it made me feel weaker, like some defenses were falling without my permission. I struggled to buoy myself against him. His familiar form, the angle of his chin, the way he sat leaning forward over the table, his eyebrows raised slightly as if about to ask you a question about yourself.

  Pearl looked at me and said, “He says he’s my father. I told him my father is dead.”

  “Myra, is she . . .” Jacob couldn’t finish. His cheekbones stood out; his face was gaunt. “She called me a family friend. You . . . must have a photo.”

  I remembered the photo I had of Row and Jacob, the one Grandfather and I would show at trading posts all those years ago. Pearl used to like to look at it.

  “She said, ‘You must be Mom’s friend. Where’s Row?’ I took a closer look at her. I . . . couldn’t breathe. Her standing here. I thought . . . she was a ghost, an apparition. I asked who her mother was and she said your name.” Jacob looked at me and his eyes shone with tears.

  “He fell down,” Pearl said flatly.

  Jacob laughed, a tear falling down his cheek and splashing on the table. “It’s a miracle.”

  “You are nothing to her. You are nothing,” I said.

  Jacob’s mouth flattened in a thin line and he gave a small nod to this. “We’ve never been kind to each other, have we?” he asked.

  I didn’t know what to say to this. His betrayal, his abandonment of Pearl and me, was sometimes all I could remember. It was easy to forget all the small moments of selfishness and apathy, the myriad ways we’d turned our backs on one another. The times he left the house and spent days with people I’d never met instead of helping us prepare to leave. The times he raised concerns and I turned my back to him, pretended he wasn’t speaking at all. I didn’t want to remember those; it mixed everything up and made it hard to think straight.

  I held my knife out in Jacob’s direction. My hand trembled so badly that the blade shook. Anger pulsed through me, and the room seemed to narrow. Beneath my rage I felt the unfurling of vulnerability, the exposed shoot of longing edging toward light. I wanted to know everything and to have all my questions answered, but I also wanted to silence him.

  “Where’s Row?” I demanded.

  A flicker of pain crossed his face and he glanced down. I felt dropped, suspended. I wanted to feel the impact on the other side. I needed to know. Maybe it was the only thing I came for.

  “Where is she?” I asked again.

  “The illness . . .” Jacob said. He didn’t look different, but his voice was different. Softer. The voice of a broken man. He lifted his eyes to me and I closed mine. His voice hollowed me like a knife scraping guts from the belly of a fish. I stood, weightless, feeling emptiness vibrate in me.

  “I’ll show you,” he said softly as he stood up.

  We exited the house and he led us around toward the back. There was an ax wedged in a tree stump and a pile of firewood next to it. A few tools lay on the ground, below a window with a broken shutter.

  The wind had picked up and came down the slope, making the grass wave. My hair blew in my face. The sky grew darker but the grass shone golden and bright.

&nbs
p; We walked around a small garden and lean-to shed and I saw it. A pile of stones and a wood cross, halfway up the slope.

  When we reached the grave, I fell to my knees in front of the stones and waited to feel the impact. Waited to be on the other side of grief. All these years I grieved that Row wasn’t with me, but I couldn’t grieve the loss of her life. Now I was on the other side, the side of knowing the full extent of my loss.

  I waited and waited, but nothing came.

  Pearl knelt beside me and took my hand in hers. When she touched me I collapsed inside, like glaciers running into the sea, a slow erasure. I turned to her, sank my head on her small shoulder, and sobbed. She stroked my hair.

  I remembered Row’s face, the way she’d wrinkle her nose when she smiled. Her teeth so tiny, I’d wonder when they’d grow to fit her. Her voice so high pitched it sounded like birdsong. I reached for more memories of her, wanting to go back in time.

  I held Pearl and breathed her in again and again until it comforted me. When I finally leaned back on my heels I saw Jacob out of the corner of my eye, standing apart from us, his hands behind his back, his head down. This wasn’t how I imagined it. Kneeling at Row’s grave with Jacob standing nearby. I had imagined Row, Pearl, and me together, and Jacob gone, as if he’d never existed.

  Gradually my numbness gave way to anger, that familiar burning fire. I glared at Jacob, but his face was free of expression as he looked back at me, the lines around his mouth forlorn, his eyes heavy with fatigue.

  “When?” I asked.

  Jacob bit his lip and looked down. “I made the grave four days ago. They wanted to take her with them—to work the ship. But she got ill.”

  If we’d gotten here just a little sooner, I could have held her. Felt her skin when it was warm, looked into her eyes. Heard her voice. How I could treasure even the curve of her eyelashes, the roughness of her elbows. Cup each in my mind and keep it, sustenance for every day to come. Just like when she was younger and I’d pinch each of her fingertips and together we’d watch the blood return. Both of us mesmerized by her body, her wanting words for every part and its sensation, and me content to witness life unfold before me. Never real enough anymore in my own body, but in hers, a glorious awakening for each of us. She, my second awakening, my second birth.