My bare feet started to go numb on the chilled deck, so I went downstairs to get my boots. I was alone in the quarters, pulling on my boots, when Marjan walked in and set an empty liquor bottle on the table next to me. I tied the laces to my boots, leaned back, and sighed. It was a glass bottle, similar to the one I’d seen in Abran’s room weeks earlier.
“He’s going through more than before,” Marjan said.
I nodded. “How bad is it?”
“He’s been trading the ship’s goods for alcohol. He stores smoked fish in a separate bucket and goes up and trades it after we’ve finished with the ship’s trade at each port.”
I stared at her. “You’ve known this whole time? How long has this been happening?” I tried to remember when I started to notice a difference in Abran. It was around when we stopped in Wharton—he had claimed he needed to unwind because Wharton was close to where his brother died.
“For years,” Marjan said. She looked weary. Her worry lines had deepened and her gray hair had thinned around her temples. She wore her usual blue tunic and it brought out the blue in a vein that split her forehead like a small river.
“Years?” I asked.
“It’s not always this bad. It ebbs and flows. Worse when he’s stressed,” Marjan explained.
“What about the rules? Why hasn’t anyone said something to him?” I asked.
“The rules . . .” Marjan shrugged. “The rules are just some ideas Abran had. He’s never enforced them. It’s more of an honor code, but now . . .”
“But why hasn’t someone stopped it?” I asked.
Marjan closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. I suddenly felt like a small child asking questions that didn’t have anything to do with this world. When she opened her eyes again they seemed to glitter with vigor, a tireless momentum. I wondered how much work she did around Sedna that no one knew about. She was always slipping in and out of rooms, attending to business the rest of us only had a half knowledge of.
“Sorry,” I said. “I know it isn’t that easy. I’ll try to talk to him.”
“There won’t be enough to make the crossing,” Marjan said. “So he’ll go through withdrawals. I’m starting a dosing schedule to wean him. I was hoping you’d help me.”
“Of course. Anything.”
Marjan nodded, picked up the bottle, and wrapped her shawl around it. Since Behir’s death, I’d felt so much shame I thought it would burst straight out of me, splitting me in two. And beneath that shame I’d felt abundant fear, fear like another gravity, pressing me down, making me feel smaller and smaller. To stand up straight with all that weight on me took more strength than I thought I had. With each day that passed, the need to confess had grown and grown.
She turned to leave and I reached out and touched her arm.
“Wait,” I said. My body tensed and my hands went clammy. “I’m sorry.” When she faced me, I felt as if the ground had dropped out from beneath me. I thought of my mother, her dark eyes and quick laugh. The way she had tried to hide her fear so as not to burden me, breathing into the weight of it, tilting up her chin and forcing a smile. Each mother is different except in the ways she is broken, right to the marrow; even the softest parts can crumble.
I hurried on. “Earlier I wouldn’t apologize, and I said I wasn’t sorry about Ruenlock, but I am. I’m sorry I deceived you all, I’m sorry about—” My throat closed up and I blinked quickly to clear my eyes.
Marjan patted my arm as though she were a mother comforting a child. Her eyebrows knit together in concern and thoughtfulness. If she had moments when she blamed me, now wasn’t one of them. I’d seen flashes of anger cross her face when she was working, hanging the laundry to be washed in an approaching rainstorm. Memories surfacing in the stillness. But if she blamed me, she never mentioned it.
Marjan’s necklace now held four beads instead of three and it gave me an ache in my chest just looking at it. I wondered if she’d kept an extra bead hidden somewhere all this time, perhaps in her bunk, knowing she may one day need it.
The room seemed to hum with a deep quiet that enveloped us. I thought of how birth is only the beginning of giving life, maybe the smallest part of giving life, like a seed that still needs the sun and soil, needs so much to still blossom. I thought of how much Marjan had already given all of us and how much she’d keep giving.
Then Marjan shook her head, a sad smile etched on her face.
“I keep thinking grief feels like climbing a staircase while looking down,” she said. “You won’t forget where you’ve been, but you’ve got to keep rising. It all gets farther away, but it’s all still there. And you’ve only got one way to go and you don’t really want to go on rising, but you’ve got to. And that tightness in your chest doesn’t go away, but you somehow go on breathing that thinner, higher air. It’s like you grow a third lung. Like you’ve somehow gotten bigger when you thought you were only broken.”
I climbed through the hatch onto the deck and saw Daniel and Pearl sitting across from each other near the starboard gunwale, bent over a piece of paper spread between them.
The sun brightened Pearl’s hair to the color of a flame and her hair tossed in the wind like a flickering candle. Daniel traced something on the paper with his finger and Pearl leaned forward, her small hand following his.
I walked closer to them so I could hear them but pretended to inspect a crack in the gunwale. I heard Daniel say, “You use the sextant to measure the sun’s distance from the horizon.”
“This is boring,” Pearl muttered.
“You’ll have to learn to read maps and calculate distances,” Daniel said.
“Why?”
“So you can go wherever you want.”
Listening to them talk, I could see Pearl sailing away on her own, her little brown body barely a spot on the horizon, standing on the deck of some ship I’d never been on, moving toward a destination I couldn’t imagine. She was as new as this world I’d never fully know.
Daniel saw me out of the corner of his eye, stood, and walked over to me.
“I thought it’d be good for her to practice,” he said cautiously. “Hope that’s okay.”
“I want her to learn,” I said stiffly. In the evenings I’d been continuing to teach Pearl to read with Abran’s books. Her favorite was The Jungle Book.
Pearl remained bent over a map, twisting the sextant in semicircles. She wrote down a number on a pad of paper next to her knee. She leaned again over the map and made another measurement.
Daniel and I watched her. The sun glowed on her back, bronzing her skin. Her face was furrowed in a frown. The wind made the edge of the map curl and she kept smoothing it with an impatient hand. At times like this, when she was immersed in something, she seemed like someone I barely knew, and it made me happy in a wistful way.
It made me remember her birth and how she felt like a stranger even then. And how even before her birth, I had feared losing that little stranger. Not losing her was the one thing that kept me going, I kept telling myself. What Marjan had said sounded nice, and I wanted to believe it, but I feared it couldn’t be true. That after too great a loss I’d simply be snuffed out. That being broken simply meant being broken.
Daniel stood so close I could smell him, that familiar scent of wood smoke and some dark flower that grew at the roots of trees. Like a forest in autumn. In the distance I heard the calls of seagulls.
“I should get back to fishing,” I said, though my feet stayed planted on the deck. The seagull cawing grew louder and louder and I looked out over the water. A flock was diving into the water to the east of us and coming up with fish wrestling in their beaks. I gripped the gunwale. I’d trolled in that spot only a half hour before and had come up empty.
“You can rest for just a minute,” Daniel said.
I still was having trouble reconciling what Daniel had done with who I felt he was. I had also always had trouble reconciling the different sides of Jacob, trying to understand how the man I married could
be the man who hurt me even more than the floods could. I had spent hours stewing over it, combing through memories, looking for clues. I could read the devil into his every word and gesture, but some memories resisted this. They reminded me of a man I loved and who seemed to love me.
Back when Row was just a baby, I had awakened once to Jacob bringing me breakfast in bed. He had kissed my forehead and tucked my hair behind my ear before setting a tray on my lap full of eggs, strawberries, and toast.
“What’s this for?” I asked.
“For you. You’ve been working hard. I know how lucky I am to be with you,” he said.
Sunlight from the window turned his hair a brighter red, his fair skin almost porcelain. I placed my palm on his cheek and murmured thanks.
“I’d best get the coffee. Almost done,” he said, standing up and leaving.
The scent of coffee wafted upstairs and I listened to his movements down in the kitchen. Warmth enveloped me and I stretched out in bed. Row would be waking soon, her catlike cry spreading through the house like clockwork in a half hour. Everything in its place. Like we were a still-life painting you could stand in front of and find pleasing.
Early on, Jacob had been obsessed with me, as if I were some creature he hadn’t seen before. What was grouchiness he mistook for mystery, what was cynicism he mistook for intelligence. I married him because I thought he was so taken with me that he’d never leave me. That I’d never relive those moments on the front stoop waiting for my mother to come home.
How wrong I’d been. But had I been wrong about all of it? Should I dismiss the beautiful times I’d trusted him? How could I reconcile that the man who brought me breakfast in bed was the same man who betrayed me?
Since Jacob was a carpenter like Grandfather, part of me thought he’d actually be like Grandfather. Stable, patient, a calm, steady presence. Someone I needed and could trust.
Pearl squealed. “Mom! It’s my bird!”
Pearl danced in a circle and pointed overheard to a bird that coasted above us. It was smaller than the other seagulls and darker in coloring, and it did not cry out to the others. It circled our mainsail and then coasted along with us, keeping pace with the boat.
“It’s the bird I caught!” Pearl said, running up to me and tugging my arm.
I squinted up at it. “I don’t think so, honey.”
“Of course it is,” Pearl said impatiently. She spun around in a circle again, her arms spread wide, the bird flying above her. She twirled and twirled. Her hair spread out from her like wildfire.
Daniel smiled as he watched Pearl and said to me, “You know, I think it might be her bird.”
Every good thing will return to you, my mother used to say. I had forgotten it until now, watching Pearl’s shirt billow around her. Every surface of the ship felt impossibly delicate, wood windblown to the texture of driftwood, sails above us bleached to the softness of sheets hung on a clothesline. Even we felt delicate at that moment: three bodies on the deck of a ship, cold water for miles, our three hearts beating furiously like wings.
Chapter 41
It grew dark during supper, shadows lengthening and then the window casting our reflection back at us as the light dimmed outside. Marjan hung the lantern from the ceiling and lit candles on the table. I hadn’t thought about the long stretches of darkness we’d be encountering as we went farther north. How both the sea and the sky turned black so early, the final bit of light hanging on the horizon, like being inside a clam as it snapped shut.
We devoured the fish bone broth, barely speaking with one another. A bread basket sat empty in the middle of the table, each of us having been given a piece of bread the size of my palm. I suspected the yeast we’d traded for was almost gone. Daniel and I gave our bread to Pearl. I was sick of feeling her ribs poking through her skin when she lay next to me at night.
It reminded me of my own body when I’d breastfed her. How I was lucky my milk still came in despite the long days of hunger, but my flesh disappeared from my body, bones appearing where I’d forgotten they existed. My body put her first for a while, siphoning off nutrients to make milk, leaving me achy and starved. But after a few months, the tide shifted, and my milk began to dry up.
Grandfather traded fish for goat’s milk at ports and we spoon-fed it to her from cups. She began to fatten up, finally getting as much as she needed. Grandfather and I fished around the clock and began trading for other foods for her: fruit, sourdough bread, cheeses. She surprised us both by growing into a chubby, happy baby, and I remember thinking for a while that this was possible; with Grandfather’s help, I could actually raise her.
Marjan began stacking dishes. A small tower of crumbs built up in front of Pearl, and once she finished her bread, she scooped the crumbs into her fist and jammed them into her mouth. That evening, the crew and I discussed our plan for dealing with the guards at the colony. I showed them the map and suggested we anchor on the south side, where the mountain would be easiest to climb, so we could then descend into the valley below. I volunteered to go in first as bait. My plan was that the guards would take me captive and while they were busy subduing me, Abran, Daniel, and Wayne would attack them, taking them out. Thomas, Marjan, and Pearl would stay behind on Sedna and we’d signal with a flag once we’d killed the Lost Abbots. There was no telling what condition the community itself would be in by the time we arrived, but I hoped whoever was left would be grateful to be rid of their overseers. And hopefully they would partner with us to begin reinforcing the community against another attack. Because undoubtedly, the Lost Abbots would return for their collections.
After the meal Wayne surprised us by getting out his guitar and playing a few ballads and sea shanties. My heart warmed to him. I could tell he wanted to cheer us up.
Over his shoulder, I could see Abran leaning against the wall adjacent to the kitchen, smoking a pipe, his expression gloomy.
Wayne began playing a faster jig and Pearl got out of her chair and began yanking on Daniel’s hand, trying to pull him up to dance with her. Finally he relented and stood by the side of the table, in front of where Wayne played. Wayne tapped his foot quickly with the beat and Jessa began clapping alongside. Daniel stood still and Pearl held on to his hand and spun and spun around him, a planet spinning and orbiting the sun. Daniel slowly rotated in the circle Pearl made around him, his hand holding hers as she spun, his face tender and enchanted as he watched her.
I sat and talked with Thomas. He had that quick, computational mind I’d seen in a few older people. They’d observe the world like they were collecting data and preparing questions in response. Pearl observed the world like she was listening to something very far away, like she had a third hand with which she reached out and touched something invisible.
Thomas told me about how he’d been an ecologist employed by the government before the Six Year Flood.
“I studied the salinity changes in the ocean,” he explained wistfully. I could tell he was proud of the work he’d done and missed it. “My father couldn’t have been more proud of me when I finished my Ph.D. I’d started out in philosophy, but then I wanted something more . . . concrete, more applicable. My father was a welder, and while I was still in school I’d work alongside him in his shop. Years later, after the government broke down and I migrated to Colorado, I returned to his work, not mine. People needed boats and new buildings high up in the mountains. Needed someone who could work metal. So that’s what I did.”
“The work you did,” I said, “with salinity. These floods, are they just the beginning . . .”
“Of the end?” Thomas asked.
I nodded.
Thomas squinted like he was looking at something far away. “Could be. But you know what surprised me the most? The salinity didn’t change as much as people thought. It fluctuated up and down in different oceans at different times, but ultimately it remained steady. Some of it was changes in ocean floor sediment from increased earthquakes. Some of it was increases in carbonic ac
id. Some of it I could never understand; I couldn’t trace it. Maybe it was Gaia.”
“Gaia?”
“There was this theory, over two hundred years ago, called the Gaia hypothesis. Essentially that all living matter on earth works together to create life, to make earth habitable. A regulation among matter to fight disorder. Life can’t exist without fighting disorder.”
“Do you believe that?” I asked.
Thomas shrugged. “It raises questions for me. Do all natural things but man conspire toward life, but man alone has a death drive? If life exists to fight disorder, will violence and disorder evolve right alongside us, the shadow that we need to keep breathing? If rage is a reaction to disorder, does that make rage the original life force?”
I stared at him. “What I want to know is if things will get worse. I want to keep fishing.”
“You fish while you can,” Thomas said gently.
Marjan set clay cups on the table and poured herbal tea in them. A bitter scent rose from the cups, and crushed dandelion leaves settled at the bottom. After a few more songs, Wayne handed the guitar over to Jessa and she thumbed through a few ballads quickly, in the corner, like she didn’t really want to be heard.
Daniel had settled back at the table next to Abran, and as they talked, Abran’s voice grew louder and louder, thundering over Jessa’s quiet notes.
“It will be a ‘he who does not work, neither shall he eat’ sort of thing,” Abran said. Abran leaned forward, hunched over his cup, elbows on the table, both hands around his cup in a possessive gesture.
“Even the children? The sick and elderly?” Daniel asked.
Pearl sat on the floor in front of Jessa, making her newest dead snake dance by twisting its body with the melody. Pearl had caught many snakes around the warm coasts of Wharton and a few more in Broken Tree, but she only had a few live ones left in her snake jar. After each meal Pearl warmed rocks on the fire Marjan used for cooking and set them at the bottom of the snake jar. I’d told her that we’d have to eat them all before we landed in the Valley because it would be too cold for them to survive there.
After the Flood Page 23
