Just After the Wave

by Sandrine Collette

  Only exhaustion restores calm.

  On her sheet of paper that evening Perrine crosses off the day and all three of them look at the number of days remaining. It’s huge. Not one of them has any idea what their life will be like during this endless period that lies ahead.

  “I wish the planet would sink tonight,” says Louie.

  Noah frowns.

  “Planets don’t sink.”

  Sitting on their beds, they stay up late, exchanging a few meager words to fill the silence and, once anxiety returns, to forget the sound outside of the rising wind and the shutter hooks banging against the walls. To drift off without noticing into an unquiet rest, broken by tears, all three of them in the same bed, otherwise it’s too scary. And to dream of Madie, of her warm arms, her lovely smile when she kisses them in the evening before they go to sleep—Madie who is no longer there except in the space of a dream, she left without them, they sob in their sleep, they’re almost dead.

  By the second morning, they are already little animals, pale and hairy, wordless creatures who rub their eyes as they look at each other, grumpily, as if each one of them was guilty for the terrible abandonment, as if anger had grown during the night and all it would take was one misstep, one word, one gesture too many, a sneeze. They get dressed without washing, without combing their hair—in fact they don’t get dressed, they simply put trousers over their pajamas and go barefoot to the kitchen where there is no smell, no movement. Then they look at each other and remember; until now it was only a dream. Noah sits on the floor. They wait.

  How long?

  To see if their mother is simply late. If she’s going to get up.

  A quarter of an hour, a bit more. In silence. If their mother hums behind the door, they’ll hear her.

  But there is no one humming.

  Reality takes hold of them again: their parents are gone. There is no more dream. They wander aimlessly, empty of all desire, sitting at the table the way they did when their mother was still there to give them breakfast, pancakes and tea, hot chocolate, or hot water with a few grains of coffee just to give it some taste, sometimes fruit or a crêpe, or bread and honey. They look at each other. Who is going to make breakfast? Louie slips off his chair and opens the cupboards. He knows that in one cupboard there are cookies and candy, at the very top; he knows, too, that Madie must have taken them with her, but he tries all the same, and lets out a shout. The shelf is nearly full, the candy is there, all the ones they’re only allowed to have from time to time, green, red, blue, pink, or yellow, it’s junk, says Madie, Pata buys it to keep the children happy, what’s the point if we can’t eat it?

  Louie takes everything down and puts it in the middle of the table, next to Noah, who bursts out laughing and holds out his hand. Louie crushes his hand with his.

  “Just one. Otherwise we’ll be sick.”

  They tear the packets open, furiously. In the beginning they count them, because Perrine told Louie that they could have three each, but those three go too quickly, they’ll stop at five, six, eight, and then they forget, the sugar sticks to their gums and saliva whenever they stuff their mouths with a licorice or a marshmallow gummy bear, and they laugh. Of course they don’t leave a single one, and they already feel sick to their stomachs, but in defiance, vengefully, they will devour every last one, right down to the grains of sugar that fell on the floor, until they put their hands on their tummies, hesitant, and Noah murmurs, “I’m gonna puke.”

  They scatter, prey to the strange experience of making themselves sick with no one there to scold them, no one there to hand them a basin or a damp cloth, afterwards, when they’ve run outside bent double and stayed on their knees in the grass for a long time, one after the other, each one in their own little spot, they come back together hanging their heads, eyes red, mouths still grimy, We shouldn’t have eaten everything, whispers Louie.

  The morning goes by in a sort of semiconsciousness between disgust and sorrow, a time in between where nothing gets done, where they wander absently and shuffle along until they end up on the shore, overwhelmed, distraught. They forget to have lunch, the candy has upset their stomachs. In the house they take out a game, then another one, and spread them across the floor. They don’t begin to play. Don’t feel like it. Don’t have the energy. They go on sitting on the old parquet floor, heads to one side, gazing at the cards spread before them, the dice, the pieces, and they don’t touch them, they’re not interested. They sigh, frequently. I’m bored, says Noah. The others shrug.

  Melancholy, at a loss, they eventually fall asleep. Something inside them has realized that sadness fades during sleep, that many hours gone by, stolen hours during which they don’t need to live, are tiny, vital moments of respite. If they could they would sleep for two weeks. But the wind and sun and hens wake them. They go on lying on the floor—why should they get up? Eyes floor level, they glance at their abandoned games, not seeing them. From time to time one of them cries for a spell. Then it passes.

  To rebuild a world, they hang sheets between the upturned beds in their room and make forts: closed at the top and on all four sides, cocoon-like tents where they can find refuge. They have taken the mattresses off the beds. They tell each other stories in a hushed voice. Memories, made-up things, quiet laughter.

  They doze. They only go out to use the toilet or bring some food and drink back. They stay there for hours. At the end of the corridor the door is still open and the hens have wandered into the house; they hear them cackling, ferreting, pecking at things; they don’t care. Their food is hidden in the cupboards. The chickens bring some life, they listen to them and say nothing. Louie decides he won’t shut them inside the flooded chicken coop ever again. He wonders if the cage is big enough for them to take the hens along when their father comes back, or if any of them are missing, although he doesn’t know where they could get to. He’ll count them, later on. And if any are missing: so what.

  But when night begins to fall, the children haven’t moved, and Louie hasn’t counted the hens. They find some candles which they place on saucers in the middle of their tents.

  “Careful,” says Louie. “Not to start a fire.”

  They burn little pieces of paper to make long flames. Perrine has tied her hair back with a blue rubber band. Before long the heat bothers them, so they open the sheets to let the air through and snuff out all the candles but one, and they lean around it on their elbows, close together.

  “We should close the door,” says Perrine. “It’s nighttime.”

  Louie smiles. There’s no one here.

  “Still.”

  He slips out of the tent, making fun of her. As he walks along the corridor, glancing at the stairs that lead down to the ground floor and to the cellar, off-limits because of the flood, he notices that the water level has risen a little more and is covering the third step. At the moment, he doesn’t really pay it much attention. Tomorrow, or maybe the day after, once he’s decided to brave the sea again, he’ll go down for their half-submerged fishing rods, and then he’ll have a look. And he’ll number the steps with chalk, from four to thirteen, so he’ll have a gauge, so he can keep an eye on it—whether there’s any point, he has no idea.

  * * *

  Too much sun, too much heat: when there were birds, Louie, Perrine, and Noah thought the birds went quiet when they were overcome by the heat, that they went to cluster in the tree branches, sheltered from the burning rays; but they haven’t heard any birds for days. Only insects have survived the invasion of water, they cling and whirr, little brown or yellow flies that buzz in their ears and stick relentlessly to their sweaty skin, impervious to being flicked off, immediately returning, pests, pains in the butt—that’s what Louie cries, beside himself, in the heat of the third day.

  “What shall we do?” asks Noah with a sigh.

  Too much freedom, too much indolence. The other two are sitting on the grass, si
lent.

  They are waiting. That’s all.

  They could stay there for two weeks, until their father comes back. As if they were afraid of missing him or that Pata might not recognize the island, might sail by without stopping, of course that’s impossible, but the fear of it has them in its grip.

  “We have to keep watch,” murmurs Louie.

  Noah looks around him.

  “Over what?”

  “The sea.”

  Perrine nods: You think Pata might already be on his way back?

  “You never know.”

  “I can’t see anything,” grumbles Noah.

  Louie gets annoyed. You’re just way too little.

  Then thinks.

  “We’ll build a watchtower.”

  They rummage in the barn and find cinder blocks and an old worm-eaten wooden door, and drag them to the shore, huffing and puffing.

  “No,” says Perrine. “It’s too close. What if there’s a wave.”

  Louie agrees.

  “Further back, then.”

  “It’s heavy,” says Noah.

  Halfway between the sea and the house they slowly build a platform and place the door on it horizontally, then lean a stool against it to climb up. Louie with his bad leg slips on the aluminum rungs, catches himself just in time, gets annoyed; Noah pushes behind him. And then there they are, all three of them, and to be honest it doesn’t put them much higher up, but the impression they get as their gazes sweep the horizon is enthralling. Louie goes back down to hand up the last of the cinder blocks for a sort of guardrail which makes them feel safer. They plant a wooden pole in each corner and hang a big sheet as best they can over them to serve as a roof. They decide to have their snack in their new refuge once they’ve consolidated it with a pile of stones all around; now when they climb up it doesn’t wobble at all. Sitting overlooking the ocean, nibbling the last of the pancakes Madie left for them, they are silent for a long time. Until Perrine says, “Is that the way they left?”

  “That’s where the boat was,” Noah points out.

  “Yes, but maybe they turned.”

  “I don’t know,” says Louie, because they were asking him.

  How many times since the parents left has he had to say this. I don’t know. He feels his helplessness right down to the stinging in his fingertips.

  “But then,” says Perrine, “can we be sure Pata will come back this way? What if he goes past the other side of the island?”

  Louie freezes for a moment. He hadn’t thought of that. For him there is only one place where the boat can land, and the watchtower is right opposite that place. He frowns: No.

  Perrine insists.

  “But still, if he—”

  “No!”

  Louie stands up on the platform and stamps his foot.

  “And anyway, he would go around the island to come and get us. He’ll call out to us.”

  “So we shouldn’t sleep, then,” says Noah gravely. “Otherwise we won’t hear him.”

  “That’s why we built the tower.”

  “So we’ll be here even at night?”

  “We’ll take turns, yes.”

  The little boy’s eyes gradually open wider, and he purses his lips. The tower all on his own, in the middle of the night; that’s not how he had envisaged things.

  “Even me?”

  There’s a tremor in his voice. Louie shrugs his shoulders:

  “Are you scared?”

  “Like I would be.”

  “So what is it, then?”

  “It’s just, uh, if it starts to rain, you know. This—” he points to the sheet roof—“this won’t keep the rain out, will it?”

  Louie shrugs.

  “We’ll see.”

  * * *

  First night on watch. The weather has stayed warm and Louie can see the stars scattered across the sky. He hears the sea lapping regularly against the shore, shlap shlap, a sort of calm, repetitive lullaby. He listens to the sounds all around, and has trouble identifying them: tiny cries, rustling, animal sounds—and yet everything was drowned two weeks ago, there’s nothing left, he pricks up his ears to see if he can recognize something.

  The hens? Or a surviving bird, lost in the night.

  The sea lapsing onto a leaping fish.

  Something else?

  He thinks of Perrine and Noah back at the house asleep. With these boards beneath his back, hard despite the blankets, too much darkness, too much light, he cannot sleep. When the sounds vanish, the silence makes him sit up. He wishes dawn would come. In the end, it’s pointless keeping watch at night.

  Will Pata come back? If the sea doesn’t carry them away first. The water around him is oppressive, a sort of living creature looking for cracks to slip through, to gnaw at the foundations of the house, and of the tower, to dig in silence until everything collapses all of a sudden. For three days Louie hasn’t said anything, but he’s afraid.

  He kneels on the board. He does so without thinking, the way he used to. For two years he hasn’t been doing it anymore because it’s for little kids—Madie tried to persuade him to, in the beginning. Tonight it has come back to him. With his eyes closed before the immense ocean, his hands joined in mute supplication, Louie prays, as hard as he can.

  Perrine wakes him in the morning, calling his name. Louie? He struggles to rouse himself. A sort of titanic fatigue; he’s not sure he has the strength to stand up or even open his eyes.

  “Louie?”

  He has to answer, he knows. A grunt at best.

  “Are you asleep?”

  “Mmm.”

  “It’s nine o’clock.”

  Nine o’clock. Louie sits up all of a sudden, his heart pounding, sweat on his brow.

  “Really?”

  “Yes, that’s what it says on the kitchen clock. Were you asleep?”

  “No. No, no. Or maybe a little . . . ”

  “So you didn’t see anything?”

  Louie rubs his face, haggard. Morning moodiness: he must have fallen asleep in the middle of the night and didn’t realize when day was breaking. He was supposed to be watching the horizon for the last three hours.

  “Oh.”

  Perrine presses her hands on her T-shirt.

  “What if Pata went by?”

  “He wouldn’t have, not yet. This is just practice, you know.”

  Tears in the girl’s eyes.

  “But you said—”

  “It’s no big deal, Perrine, he didn’t go by, I promise. The sound of the boat would have woken me up for sure. Come on, let’s go get breakfast.”

  The hens welcome them with a loud cackling, running to meet them at the door of the house as if the children’s arms were full of seed and salad leaves and worms. Louie holds out his hand and doesn’t flinch when they peck at his palm.

  “What can we give them to eat? There’s not much on the island.”

  But Perrine shakes her head:

  “We don’t have anything for them, they’ll just have to manage. We don’t have enough. And anyway in the letter Mommy said we have to eat them if we’re hungry.”

  Louie scowls. He’s attached to his hens. He’s the only one who knows them by name, all twenty-eight of them, even the rooster: before the tidal wave there were fifty of them and it was no different. He could tell you the name of every one that drowned, too, the ones he called by their size and their color, Little Black, Big Black, Big White Feather, Old Black. The ones he liked best and which had real names, like Peanut or Sulky, or the names of his classmates when he’d run out of ideas, Caroline and Sophie and the others. The only one he doesn’t really like is the rooster, he has no idea why, he’s more arrogant, stupider, or maybe it’s his color, but the thing is you have to have a rooster, if you want chicks who’ll turn into young hens, that’s
the way it goes.

  In the beginning, Pata had taught them that you had to keep them in separate groups so that the rooster wouldn’t go messing around—that’s what he’d said, messing around—and that they would wait for a second little rooster to be born and then make two little harems, so there wouldn’t be too much consanguinity. But when they had two roosters, and the time came to move the hens from one group to the other, the father got muddled, and didn’t know which hens were supposed to go with which rooster. All the children down to Sidonie had given their opinion: this rooster with these hens, and it was by no means certain that the yowling of the somewhat panic-stricken farmyard animals was any worse than that of the children who were choosing them, and the father couldn’t identify any of them anymore, he gave a good shout so that at least the kids would shut up, but there was nothing for it, he couldn’t make head nor tail of it all. After that, several hens got loose and the groups got mixed up; the father listened to his older boys telling him which hens to put back with which rooster—until he realized that the kids were grouping the fowl by color and it was all a hopeless mess. In the end the father had taken one of the roosters and wrung its neck just so they’d have some peace and quiet. They’d figure out later what to do. And in fact it went no further, there was just one rooster and the hens didn’t seem to mind at all.

  Why don’t we eat the rooster? says Louie.

  But Perrine doesn’t want to: she knows that hens are much tastier.

  “No,” says Louie.

  His little sister begs him: Just one.

  “No, we’re not hungry yet, not really, and besides, we have the eggs.”