After the Flood

by Kassandra Montag

  “Then I noticed she was looking at me intently when she’d sing it and one night she reached for my face.” Daniel reached out and brushed my cheek with his knuckles. “She was losing her sight by that point and it was like she was looking for me. She said, ‘Don’t go yet, don’t go yet.’ I told her I wasn’t going to leave her, but that didn’t settle her. It wasn’t until after she died that I realized she was trying to tell me not to give up. She could tell I’d gone cold inside. Cold and empty. I thought I was with her at the end, but in a way, I wasn’t.”

  Seagulls called out in the distance, their voices a relief. It had to be clear water for miles. I knotted the thread, cut it with my teeth. Daniel watched me. I kept my eyes on the fabric, waiting for him to go on.

  “That’s what I liked about you,” Daniel said so softly that I leaned toward him so I could hear. “You never went cold. Not even for a while.”

  I realized why he was making me uncomfortable. His kind words to me were like water given to a thirsty man. I’d gulp it down and ask for more if I didn’t restrain myself. I had made it this far by living alone and asking for less of this world than I’d ever thought possible. A few necessities to survive, but not much else. I was proud of how starved I could be. But longing for more remained in me like a steady fire I hoped wouldn’t give me away.

  Both our heads were bent over the fabric, his hands holding the sail down against the wind, mine clutching the needle and spare fabric. I noticed a single strand of gray hair at his temple. He seemed too young for it. The wind lifted my hair and sent it in a dark flurry around my face, and I pushed it back. It gave me an odd quickening in my veins, to sit next to him, to see myself the way he saw me.

  “So Abran was part of the Lily Black,” Daniel said, looking at me for confirmation.

  I pressed my lips together and gave a slight nod.

  “It’s just if they follow us, Jackson will tell his crew they’re going for Abran and to take over the Valley. They want a stronghold in the north. That’s how he’ll clear it with his commander. But for him, it will be for me. He promised. He keeps his promises.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again. I didn’t want to think about the possibility of being followed. “Tell me about him,” I said.

  “He always protected me.” Daniel shook his head and looked at me with so much pain in his face, my heart clenched. “One winter, we were ice-skating on a small river and I fell through. Jackson leapt into the icy water and pulled me out and then built a fire on the bank so we could warm up before walking two miles back home. He had me sit with my feet and hands to the flames while he kept getting brush to feed the fire. He lost three toes and I made it through just fine. It was . . . not even a choice for him. Just who he was.”

  I pulled the thread tight, the stitches puckering the fabric like a scar.

  “We always were rivals. I was my mom’s favorite. That didn’t bother him too much, though, until that night he came home for us. He started talking all about the Lily Black and what they were doing to rebuild society. But our mom had heard rumors about Jackson instigating the use of biological warfare during the war. Took out half of Turkey. She told him he was no son of hers.”

  A muscle in Daniel’s jaw twitched and he blinked quickly. I swallowed and looked down. I imagined them around a kitchen table, a mother disowning her son.

  “So Jackson told her, ‘You know what Daniel did to get your insulin? He beat people up and stole from them. Tracked them down and beat them until they gave him their insulin. But I guess that’s okay because he’s your favorite. I guess he can’t do any wrong.’ She just told Jackson to get out of her house. And the look on his face. He’d come back to save us and now he was being thrown out. The shock and disbelief. I don’t think I’ve ever hurt as much as he did in that moment.”

  Daniel lifted his hands from the sail to rub his face, and the sail fluttered in the wind like a broken wing. I pushed it back down.

  “So he took the boat and insulin I’d gotten for her and sailed away. I understand . . . but I can’t forgive it. Especially with what he’s doing now. I can’t stand by.”

  “That day—in the church,” I began. “You came so close. To what you wanted.” I let the unspoken question linger in the air.

  Daniel shook his head. “I guess it wasn’t just me and him anymore,” he said.

  I remembered how bewildered and frightened Pearl was that day in the church. Gratitude toward him swept through me. I reached out and grasped his hand. The touch sent a jolt to my bones and I let go of his hand and returned to my crooked seams.

  Daniel looked out across the deck to where Thomas and Wayne were carrying the new yard toward the mainmast.

  “Myra, you still believe it’s you against the world. You think you can plow straight through a storm if need be. I will find a way to get you there, but you’ve got to trust me,” Daniel said.

  I scowled at him with what I knew was a childish, petulant expression. The look you have when you’re wrong and someone else is right and you’re almost glad of it.

  He shook his head at me. “I would do anything for you. And the way you’re looking at me tells me you already know that.”

  His eyes wouldn’t leave mine, so I nodded once, a curt dip of my chin. I felt myself starting to give way, the cracks in my walls growing to fissures. I looked down at his hands still on the sailcloth, the calluses at the edges of his palms, the long scar traveling up his index finger. I wanted to touch them again, but I repositioned the fabric over the sailcloth, pricked my finger with the needle, and brought it to my lips just to taste something.

  We worked on the repairs from dawn until dusk for over a week, but even once the repairs were done something still felt broken. I wondered if it was the solitude; this was the longest we’d ever gone without seeing another ship. It’d been a month since we’d left Broken Tree.

  Thomas helped me scrounge up some old plywood and metal rods to reinforce the downrigger. Marjan and I nailed scrap wood along its base and fastened the metal rods along the shaft with wire.

  “We need to just replace the shaft,” I muttered, pressing on the downrigger. It shifted from my push.

  “We could throw a net over, see how much weight it will hold,” Marjan suggested. “See where the strain is the worst and reinforce it more.”

  I attached a net to the downrigger and tossed it overboard. We both sat on the deck, watching the downrigger lean to the left. Marjan got a piece of wood; I pushed the downrigger upright and she nailed it in place.

  We sat back down. The downrigger strained against the weight but held. We were both quiet and I was thinking of the dream I’d had last night, from which I woke, startled, to Pearl’s light snore. I’d dreamt everything in the sea had died as if a poison had run through it. Or maybe it had gone too hot or too cold and there was nowhere to migrate, just miles and miles of blue poison. The water was suddenly all wrong and no creature could change fast enough to keep up, so each fish shriveled and drifted to the seafloor, where hundreds of them piled, one on top of the other. Tiny mountains of mass graves under the waves.

  “What if all the fish dry up?” I asked Marjan. “The water changes somehow, becomes inhospitable? I’ve hardly been able to catch anything lately.”

  Marjan’s face remained placid, only faint lines on her forehead and on either side of her mouth. Her dark eyes were unfocused, like she was in another place. I suddenly wanted to know what she’d done and what she remembered. Not just what she’d done in her life, but what she’d done that she didn’t want to.

  “Then we won’t fish,” Marjan said after a minute of silence. Marjan was sitting cross-legged, hands in her lap.

  Her calm unnerved me. “Easy for you to say,” I muttered and winced as soon as I said it. “I’m sorry. I—”

  “With no one depending on me?” Marjan asked. Her voice went cold, but then a faint smile appeared on her lips. She shook her head. “In a way it is easier. And harder.”

&nbs
p; I squeezed my eyes shut and leaned back, my hands behind me. I breathed deeply, trying to expand my chest, a heaviness suffocating me.

  “I’m sorry. I just . . . sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m trying to save her, but I won’t be able to protect her,” I said. “Not in this world.”

  “Not in any world.” Marjan peered across the deck and up at Thomas in the rigging, nailing a small metal block against the new main yard. When she looked back at me she seemed softer and smaller. The sun was shining in her eyes and she squinted. “My mother used to always say there’s wisdom in suffering. But if I have any wisdom, it hasn’t come from what’s happened to me, so much as from the suffering I’ve brought on myself.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “My daughter . . . when she drowned. She wasn’t ripped from my hands by a flash flood like I said.” A sad smile crossed Marjan’s face. “Sometimes I like to think that’s how it happened.”

  The hesitant, halting way she spoke reminded me of my mother. The rhythm was not unlike the sea, pushing forward and then pulling back.

  “Before the schools closed I was a teacher. Math and science. I’d heard stories of how teachers tend to treat their students like children and their children like students. You teach your kids and give to your students. I always thought, Oh, I don’t do that. But I did. Especially with my only daughter. Always expected more of her, put more pressure on her. After we migrated during the Six Year Flood we stayed in Kansas or Oklahoma for a short while. Became friends with another family with two young sons. They fished and their sons worked by diving in the shallows for clams and other small creatures. They shared their food with us and we shared with them. My sons dove with their sons and my daughter didn’t want to. Said she was scared to go under the water. But I told her, ‘You need to face your fears. You need to contribute. This is what we have to do now.’ And I told her to dive with the rest of them.”

  My heart began to beat faster. Marjan set her palms on the deck between us, spread her fingers wide, her knuckles knobby with age. I tried to focus on the wood deck visible between her fingers.

  “A week later they were diving in an old house for fish and she got stuck. Couldn’t find a way out. The other kids thought she’d already come up. There was this moment . . .” Marjan squinted, and I could tell she was returning to that place and time, perhaps remembering the water, the exact way the sunlight fell on its surface. “This moment that was just the beginning of denial, denial I still struggle with. People say denial is a stage, but it isn’t. I always wrestle with acceptance. Want to believe she could actually be here, that things could have gone another way.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and sweat broke out along my back. I tried to swallow, but my mouth had gone dry. No, I kept thinking. No. It shouldn’t have happened that way, not to Marjan.

  “I went down for her body because I sent her down there.” Marjan’s voice went soft. “She was so light in the water. Like a feather. Like she hadn’t even been a little girl. Like I’d dreamed her.”

  Marjan turned her face to the side and the sunlight caught her black hair, casting a blue sheen across it.

  “So when you sacrificed us all to get to Row, I thought: That’s a terrible thing. And it is. But I also thought, she’s busy breaking herself. The world will break you, but it’s when you break yourself that you feel you really can’t heal.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” I said, shaking my head at her.

  Marjan bit her lip. “Sometimes I believe that, too.”

  I could hear seagulls diving into the water, their wings furiously flapping as they pulled a fish up out of the water. The net’s rope was so taut it vibrated against the gunwale. Something was stirring in me, a surge of pressure building in my veins, something that needed to get out. I couldn’t look at her, so I leaned forward and looked down at my hands.

  “When Row was born her shoulders were these tiny curves. Barely even there. Like her skeleton hadn’t formed yet. Like she wasn’t ready to be out in this world,” I said, something catching in my throat. I rubbed the back of my neck. “How?” I asked, my voice hoarse. “How do you go on?”

  Marjan was silent a moment, watching me. She bit her lip and squinted until her eyes were slits. “You do the hardest thing. The most impossible thing. Again and again.”

  I couldn’t do what she’d done, I thought. I couldn’t go on like she had. The downrigger moaned against the pressure and leaned toward the gunwale like it’d bolt off the ship. Neither of us moved to pull in the net. I blinked furiously so the tears wouldn’t spill. I wanted to reach out and grasp her hand, but I stayed still. There were no maps for any of this. Only people who had gone before, leaving trail markers behind for the rest of us.

  Marjan made me think of a line Grandfather kept repeating over and over in the days before he fell asleep and never woke up. From the water we came and to the water we will return, our lungs always hungering for air, but our hearts beating like waves. It had seemed sad at the time, foreboding, but now it seemed somehow comforting, something that spoke of vigor.

  Marjan sighed. “Myra, you don’t need fish in the sea, you don’t need dry land, so much as you need hope. You’re strangling yourself.”

  I looked up at her and she held my gaze, her dark eyes unrelenting. I was surprised by the despair I saw in her eyes. Marjan always seemed so steadfast, so resolute in the face of hard times, but there was a black gravity in her, too. Hope would always hold despair in it, I realized, despair born of what I’d seen and done. I’d carry those images and those acts in my body and hope would sit right next to them, neither feeding nor extinguishing them.

  I remembered finding my father hanging. He was so cold, his face mottled. Wanting more from life than it could give you looked like weakness. You should accept what it gave you and trudge on, I had thought. After we took him down, the rope left a line at his throat. It looked like a flood line, as if the sea had risen right up under his chin and he had grown tired of treading water.

  Chapter 46

  I didn’t know what rules we were following anymore. So I stayed up late one night, making lures by candlelight in the cabin. An ill-fitting new door had been constructed from plywood and it thudded rhythmically against the doorframe with each wave.

  I tied dead insects onto hooks and wove bits of fabric and thread together to look like insects or worms. I was running out of thread, trying to think of where I could scavenge for more, when Daniel opened the door to the cabin.

  “Don’t tell Abran,” I muttered.

  Daniel glanced at the hooks laid out before me and shrugged. “Wasn’t going to.”

  He sat next to me. In the candlelight he looked older and more remote, the angles on his face deeper. His high cheekbones gave way to his beard, which almost hid the new gauntness of his face. His silence and still presence made him seem like a man come from an ancient time, a time I didn’t have access to.

  “How far are we?” I asked.

  “About six hundred miles southwest.”

  I inhaled sharply. Almost there. I had thought I would be excited, but I only felt an odd trepidation, something caught and bottled in my bones.

  “What is it?” Daniel asked, touching my arm with the tips of his fingers.

  I shook my head quickly as if to wake myself up. “Nothing.”

  The wings fell off the dead fly I was pinching between two fingers, trying to get it wedged on a hook. “Shit,” I muttered. I took a deep breath. All evening I had been thinking about Jacob, wondering how he felt all those years after he left. Had he regretted it? Had he felt any guilt? Or had he died soon after he had left, with little time to feel anything at all? I wanted to speak to Daniel about it but didn’t know where to begin. The longing I had felt as Daniel and I repaired the sail burned even brighter now, a flame that kept jumping and reaching.

  “What you said,” I started, and then paused. I gritted my teeth and pierced the fly’s torso with the hook. “About wanting a reckoning
. I . . . for so long, I tried to believe Jacob wanted to come back for me. I waited. And waited. When he didn’t come back for me, I told myself something got in his way.” I looked up at Daniel, my eyes burning. “Nothing got in his way.”

  I had a vision of myself, at the bottom of the sea, releasing sea creatures one by one from the dark seafloor. Claws, fangs, tentacles. Things I knew intimately. Rising toward the surface.

  “You don’t know that,” Daniel said, scooting his chair closer to me, his eyes not leaving my face.

  Saving Row was the only thing I could admit to wanting. Was there a part of me that wanted to see Jacob again? Did I want the chance to destroy him, as he destroyed me?

  “If he were there . . .” I trailed off into silence.

  “He’s still their father,” Daniel said. He watched me like he was reading my thoughts. “What parents do to each other . . . it matters.”

  I blinked down at the dead fly shaking in my hand. “Of course, think of the children,” I muttered sarcastically.

  “I’ll be there with you, Myra,” Daniel said, his voice low and soft.

  “You don’t always get to take care of everything,” I snapped.

  “I know. You never let me take care of you. Or Pearl.”

  “We don’t need care.”

  “Yes, you do,” Daniel said. His eyes didn’t waver from mine, and I looked away.

  A growing heaviness descended on me. What would happen in the Valley felt irrevocable, something in an ancient story that had already been written. I had the odd sensation of being watched by my future self, some future self who whispered in my ear, asking me to pay attention.

  I knotted a piece of twine around the dead fly. I ran a hand down the back of my neck and it came away damp with sweat. I was flustered. I needed Daniel to leave. Letting him in was giving in to the wrong impulse, feeding longing that needed to be squelched.

  “I appreciate how much you’ve helped me,” I said, turning my body slightly away from his. “I should finish up.” I cleared my throat and squinted down at the fly.