by Sarah Blake
When the rains were over, it took Naamah a week to relearn how to sleep through the night without that constant sound; she’d pushed all the other noises into the steadiness of that rain. It reminded her of when the boys were babbling, crawling, and she’d let herself pay attention to something else, anything else, until she was startled by an instant of silence. Because that meant they’d found something worth finding. That meant they’d brought it to their mouths.
FOURTEEN
The next morning, Naamah wonders if her ability to be underwater is gone for good, but she’s not ready to know. She stays on the boat all day. And while she knows that she’s hurt the angel, she’s still filled with doubt. The tiger was so real to her, right in front of her face, real enough that she doesn’t trust God anymore. The longer she is on the boat, the less she trusts Him, and His feelings toward her, and His choice of her for matriarch. Figurehead.
* * *
• • •
IN A HALLWAY on the second floor, Sadie corners her.
“Naamah,” she starts. “I counted the beetles.” But she loses her confidence quickly.
Naamah touches her arm. “I will bring it back,” she says.
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“It’s not dead?”
“It’s not dead,” Naamah says. But she’s not sure that’s true.
* * *
• • •
NAAMAH TUCKS A MORNING GLORY into her dress before she heads down the ladder to the water. They leave the ladder set up all the time now. Naamah sometimes catches herself worrying that someone will sneak onto the boat, and then she remembers there is no one.
* * *
• • •
SHE KEEPS HER HEAD above water, treading, for a long time—but eventually she has to find out. She puts her head under, closes her eyes, and presses her tongue forward. The thin film is there. She wants to see this as the angel’s forgiveness, but as she gets closer to the village, as she swims through it, the angel is nowhere to be seen. Naamah heads for the cave.
Inside, the woman is carving into the wall.
“Hello? Hello!” Naamah repeats, louder and louder over the woman’s hammering, trying not to surprise her.
“Naamah! Hello!”
“Is the beetle still here?”
“How are you? What are you working on?”
“What?”
“Oh, the things you might say to me if you were interested in seeing me.” She smiles and crosses her arms, long and thin like the rest of her. “You know, if you weren’t just here for the beetle.”
“Right, yes, I’m sorry.”
She shakes her hand. “Teasing. Teasing.”
“I just wanted to get back.”
“It’s okay.” She puts down her tools. “The beetle has been hanging out on that table.”
Naamah swims over and looks to the woman, who dips her hand and points up, underneath the table. Naamah ducks down to look. The beetle is there, walking slowly, but Naamah can’t see it.
“Will you get it for me and put it on top of the table? On top of this?” She takes the morning glory out of her pocket.
The woman lifts the beetle with a finger and puts it on the morning glory. Naamah sees a spot of pressure on a petal. She leans down and blows to make a bubble—by instinct, not sure it will work—and out it comes, a perfect sphere around the morning glory.
“What are you working on?” Naamah asks.
The woman looks up at the patterns she’s been making in the rock. “I’m not sure yet. You like it?”
“Yes.” Naamah looks at the tools. “Are you good with those?”
The woman laughs, rolling her eyes, as if to say, Look at these walls.
“I mean,” Naamah tries again, “would you be good enough, with your tools, to do that on a tooth?”
“Oh,” the woman says. “I think so.”
“I want something, on a back molar, on top. I want to remember.”
“What do you want?”
“Two lines, next to each other.”
“Right now?”
“Yes.”
“Okay,” she says. “You know this might make you more likely to lose the tooth one day?”
“Then pick a tooth I won’t mind losing,” Naamah says.
Inside her mouth, the dead woman’s hands drip with floodwater as she works.
* * *
• • •
WHEN SHE’S FINISHED, Naamah scoops up the bubble with the beetle on its half-eaten morning glory. The woman asks, “Will the beetle be all right?”
“Yes.”
“I heard about the horse.”
“You did?” Naamah’s surprised.
“The angel told me.”
“I didn’t know she saw that.”
“She saw you put your fingers through the worms as they spilled out of the sliced intestine.”
Naamah nods, with her head at an angle—not to say yes, just to mark the thought.
“You really can’t see them?”
“Not right now.”
“Why do you think the beetle will survive?” the woman asks.
“Because He wants it to.”
“Didn’t He want the horse to survive?”
“I thought so,” Naamah says.
“Then you can’t really say about the beetle, can you?”
“I know that, back in its box, you wouldn’t be able to tell this one from the others.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Horses die of worms. I can’t prevent that.”
“He could prevent it,” says the woman.
“He could.”
“I want the beetle to live.”
“You probably want all the animals to live. Come stay on the boat with me and see how you feel about them then.”
“You don’t want them to?”
“I think them living is as much up to them as it is to me.”
“I do want them all to live,” the woman says softly.
“I know.”
“I thought that I didn’t want anything He wants.”
“And here you are, distraught over a beetle.” Naamah laughs, and the woman nods. “The beetle can stop, like a hibernating bear. It can take care of itself.”
“Thank you,” she says.
“Thank you for my tooth.” Naamah runs her tongue over it and feels the two lines, not too sharp.
“If you come back to the cave, Naamah, come back to see me. Not to ask about the angel. And if you don’t want to see me, that’s fine. I don’t want anything else from you. I worry that I haven’t made myself clear. Do you know what I mean?”
“I do.”
“Okay. Then I’m getting back to work.”
Naamah swims off with the beetle as the woman hammers away behind her.
* * *
• • •
THE ANGEL REACHES HER BEFORE she’s back to the shallow water near the boat.
“I’m sorry I left you like that, so deep underwater,” she says.
“I made it, didn’t I?”
“Yes, I was pleased to see that.”
“I’m sorry I said you’re not real.”
“Yes. I am real.”
“I know.”
“I am not a tiger.”
Naamah doesn’t respond to this.
“I’m not planted here by Him to keep an eye on you, or to keep you happy or distracted.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I don’t want you to be sorry; I want you to believe me.”
“I don’t know how to believe you when I don’t understand Him.”
“He doesn’t care as much about you as you think, Naamah.”
“No, He’s just given me responsibility for everything He does care abou
t.”
“No. I—” The angel pauses. “I meant for that to come out as a good thing. That you might relax at the thought of Him.”
“He killed everyone! Everyone! How can I relax at the thought of Him?”
“Naamah, please.”
“I don’t know Him and I don’t want to know Him.”
“Naamah, you’re crushing the beetle.”
Naamah releases her grip. “Shit.” She calms down. “Is it okay?”
“It is,” the angel says.
“I have to go.”
The angel leaves first, and Naamah can’t help looking for a hint of a tiger’s gait as she moves through the water.
* * *
• • •
“SADIE!” NAAMAH YELLS, back on the boat, below deck.
Sadie pops out of a doorway.
Naamah takes her hand and puts the beetle into it. “See? It’s fine.”
“Thank you.”
“Will you put it away for me?”
“Yes,” she says, and suddenly she tears up.
“Sadie—”
“It’s nothing. Nothing. Every time I open a door, I expect to see more dead animals, or sick animals, or missing animals. And you whisk one away and return it like it’s nothing. You get the dam to accept the lamb again. How, Naamah?”
“It’s not like that. I haven’t done anything.”
“I know. I know. But how are you not defeated by all of this?”
“I can’t even see them, Sadie. I want to love them and fear them, and I can’t even see them.”
But Sadie’s hardly listening to Naamah now. “It’s our job not to fail, and yet I feel surrounded by possible failures. I lie in bed at night thinking of ways we might fail.”
“Your only job is to live. It’s my job to take care of the animals. I’m so grateful for all the help you give, but don’t think, as you clean the rooms, feed the animals, that any of them are more important than you.” She lifts Sadie’s chin. “You can worry only about yourself, okay?”
“Naamah?”
“Yes.”
“What if I don’t want to have children when we get off the boat?”
Naamah takes her time. She knows Sadie well enough to know there will come a point in her life when she’s so flooded with the desire for a child that she will feel it inside her body like a hunger. Not a painful one, not like when you’re actually hungry, but when you’re full and thinking ahead to the next thing you’ll eat, if you could choose anything in the world. How Naamah often feels now, on the boat, about a piece of fresh fruit, an orange maybe. Everything in your body says it will be right, it will be perfect.
“See how you feel after Neela has her child. There’s no rush. What a wonderful aunt you will make.”
Sadie’s quiet.
“Aren’t you excited to be an aunt?”
“I am.” And she’s sincere in that.
Naamah wonders if God has considered this: women so distrustful of Him that they might never bear children for the new world.
* * *
• • •
UNDER THE WATER AGAIN, Naamah’s with the children, playing with blocks the angel made them. Naamah haphazardly makes a tower with the walls in the shape of a heart. “Look,” she tells the children. They come over and stare down the middle of it.
“That looks like a pretty damaged heart,” says one of the children.
Naamah laughs.
Another child reaches his hand in, says, “It’s acidy in here!”
Naamah laughs again. “That’s your stomach,” she says. “Blood is almost like water.”
“Water!”
“Yes.”
“Really water?”
“Yes,” Naamah says. And she thinks, Not so different from how you are now.
* * *
• • •
ANOTHER DAY, Naamah returns and finds one girl playing alone.
“Hi, Naamah!”
“Hello.”
“Would you like to play with me?”
“I would. That’s why I came.”
The girl smiles and shows Naamah a game where they clap their hands and then slap them with each other, first the backs of their hands, then the front, and after the next clap, they must do it twice, back-front, back-front, and so on, and so on, as far along as they can get without messing up. They make it to six. The girl is a mess of giggles. She falls forward into Naamah’s chest.
When she sits back up, she looks as if she wants to speak, but she lifts up her clothing first. “My chest looks the same as every other child’s, Naamah. It’s flat, smooth, bony, brown. And my nipples are as small as my fingertips.”
“Yes.”
She lowers her clothing again. “The women here, the men—every chest is different. Each woman’s breasts are a different size, some covered in stretch marks, some with larger nipples than others, some that stick out all the time. The men are wider and slighter, hairy and not, sagging and not.”
“Yes.”
“I like how different everyone looks. If all the children held their clothes over their heads, I don’t think you’d know which one I was, would you?”
“I don’t know.”
“You wouldn’t. I don’t think so,” the girl says. “Will I grow breasts?”
Naamah holds back tears. “No, darling.”
The girl doesn’t say anything.
“Are you okay?” Naamah asks.
“I’m dead.”
“You—”
“I heard the angel say it.”
Naamah reaches out and takes the girl’s hands.
“It makes sense. And you aren’t dead?”
“No.”
“Do you want to be dead?”
Naamah shakes her head.
“Is it bad to be dead?”
“No!” She pulls the girl in and holds her. “No, of course it’s not. It’s just another way to be.”
“A way that doesn’t grow.”
“Not your body.”
The girl pulls away from Naamah. “There are things I’ll miss out on, never being a woman.”
“A few things.”
“Like I’ll never have a child.”
“Yes.”
“I’ll never have sex.”
“Yes.”
“You and the angel have sex.”
Naamah nods slowly.
“I’ve seen you.”
Naamah tenses a little.
“It’s okay.” The girl rubs Naamah’s arm, how a child would, her hand flat and light on Naamah’s skin. Not quite a comfort, but a gesture of comfort. “If you’ve already had sex, and you have children, why then? Why not die?”
“I want to sometimes.”
“I think you should,” says the girl.
“I will, but for now I want to stay with my children. I want to meet my grandchildren.”
“Will you tell them about me?”
“If you want me to.”
The girl nods quickly.
“I don’t know your name.”
The girl stops nodding. “I don’t remember it.”
Naamah doesn’t know what to say.
“Tell them you met a girl who could never grow up,” the girl says, pulling back to look into Naamah’s eyes, “but she imagined that if she did grow up, she would be tall and fat, with giant breasts and giant nipples, and stretch marks everywhere, and she would have a dozen children, and they would all eat cream on everything and run around laughing, and they would paint her body with their hands, hundreds of purple stains and smears, until she looked like, like—”
“Like a god.” But Naamah regrets it as soon as she says it.
“Yes, like a god,” the dead girl says.
* * *
• • •
NAAMAH STARTS THE NEXT DAY milking a cow. It’s easy enough to find her way to a cow and its teat. Milking always reminds her of when she was breastfeeding, how she could press her own breast back at the nipple’s edge, follow that with a squeeze, down toward the tip, flatly on each side, flat like a wedge, and the milk would come out of at least four different places, sometimes straight up in the air. She remembers how she laughed at that, and how the baby was small and didn’t laugh at anything.
She runs the cow’s milk through a clean cloth and takes it up to her family.
* * *
• • •
ON A DAY LIKE any other, Naamah wakes thinking of Bethel and can’t get out of bed. She tells Noah she’s tired. He brings her snacks throughout the day as he thinks to. A bowl of grain. Then raisins. In the evening, he brings her peeled and sliced jicama.
“You went into the room for this,” she says.
“I did.”
“You shouldn’t have.”
“The water is going down fast enough, I think. I can spoil you tonight.”
She takes a slice and bites it.
“Are you feeling better?”
She nods, chewing.
“Do you want to talk about it?”
She shakes her head. “I want to lie here and eat jicama slices in the dark.”
He smiles. “So be it!” He leaves the room and closes the door without even a creak.
* * *
• • •
WHEN SHE WAKES THE NEXT DAY, she throws her legs over the side of the bed, forcing herself up so quickly that she blacks out, and she has to rest her forehead on the wall until her vision comes back. Up on the deck, at breakfast, Neela still tosses bread to the animals when she thinks Naamah won’t notice. Naamah wants so badly to see an animal she almost can’t stand it. She decides to go back to the cave, where there are no animals to see. She doesn’t even wait until the end of breakfast to go down the ladder.
At the cave, the woman has covered one wall completely. The angel has inset lighted crystals into all the paths the woman has chipped away.
“Do you like it?” she asks. “I asked the angel to do it for me.”