After the Flood. Kassandra montag
covering roads and lawns, fences and mailboxes. Nebraska had flooded only days before, water coming across the prairie in a single wave, returning the state to the inland sea it once was, the world now an archipelago of mountains and an expanse of water. Moments earlier, when I’d leaned out the open window, my reflection in the floodwater had returned dirty and marred, like I’d been stretched and then ripped into indiscriminate shreds.
I folded a shirt and screams startled me wide eyed. The voice was a blade, slipping metal between my joints. Row, my five-year-old daughter, must have known what was going on because she screamed, “No, no, no! Not without Mommy!”
I dropped the laundry and ran to the window. A small motorboat idled in the water outside our house. My husband, Jacob, swam to the boat, one arm paddling, the other clamping Row against his side as she struggled against him. He tried to hoist her onto the boat, but she elbowed him in the face. A man stood in the boat, leaning over the gunwale to pick her up. Row wore a too-small plaid jacket and jeans. Her pendant necklace swung like a pendulum across her chest as she struggled against Jacob. She thrashed and twisted like a caught fish, sending a spray of water into his face.
I opened the window and yelled, “Jacob, what are you doing?!”
He wouldn’t look at me or respond. Row saw me in the window and screamed for me, her feet kicking at the man who held her under the armpits, lifting her over the side of the boat.
I pounded the wall next to the window and yelled out to them again. Jacob pulled himself over the side of the boat as the man held Row. The panic in my fingertips turned to a buzzing fire. My body shook as I folded myself through the window and leapt into the water below.
My feet hit the ground beneath the water and I rolled to the side, trying to lighten my impact. When I surfaced, I saw Jacob had winced; the pained, tightened expression still on his face. He was now holding Row, who kicked and screamed, “Mommy! Mommy!”
I swam toward the boat, pushing aside debris that littered the water’s surface. A tin can, an old newspaper, a dead cat. The engine roared to life and the boat spun around, spraying me in the face with a wave of water. Jacob held Row back as she reached for me, her tiny arm taut, her fingers scratching the air.
I kept paddling as Row receded into the distance. I could hear her screams even after I could no longer see her small face, her mouth a dark circle, her hair standing on end, blowing in the wind that came off the water.
Seven Years Later
SEAGULLS CIRCLED OVER our boat, which made me think of Row. The way she squawked and waved her arms when she was first trying to walk; the way she stood completely still for almost an hour, watching the sandhill cranes, when I took her to the Platte to see their migration. She always seemed birdlike herself, with her thin bones and nervous, observant eyes, always scanning the horizon, ready to burst into flight.
Our boat was anchored off a rocky coast of what used to be British Columbia, just outside a small cove up ahead, where water filled a small basin between two mountaintops. We still called oceans by their former names, but it was really one giant ocean now, littered with pieces of land like crumbs fallen from the sky.
Dawn had just lightened the horizon and Pearl folded the bedding under the deck cover. She had been born there seven years earlier, during a storm with flashes of lightning white as pain.
I dropped bait in the crab pots and Pearl came out from under the deck cover, a headless snake in one hand, her knife in the other. Several snakes were woven around her wrists like bracelets.
“We’ll need to eat that tonight,” I said.
She sent me a sharp glance. Pearl looked nothing like her sister had, not thin boned or dark haired. Row had taken after me with her dark hair and gray eyes, but Pearl resembled her father with her curly auburn hair and the freckles across her nose. Sometimes I thought she even stood the way he did, solidly and sturdily, both feet planted on the ground, chin up slightly, hair always messed, arms a little back, chest up, as though exposing herself to the world with no fear or apprehension.
I had searched for Row and Jacob for six years. After they were gone, Grandfather and I took to the water on Bird, the boat he’d built, and Pearl was born soon after. Without Grandfather with me that first year, Pearl and I never would have made it. He fished while I fed Pearl, gathered information from everyone we passed, and taught me to sail.
His mother had built kayaks like her ancestors, and he remembered watching her shape the wood like a rib cage, holding people the way a mother held a child within her, sheltering them to shore. His father was a fisher, so Grandfather had spent his childhood on the Alaskan coastal seas. During the Hundred Year Flood, Grandfather had migrated inland with thousands of others, finally settling in Nebraska, where he worked as a carpenter for years. But he always missed the sea.
Grandfather searched for Jacob and Row when I didn’t have the heart to. Some days, I followed languidly behind him, tending to Pearl. At each village, he’d check the boats in the harbor for any sign of them. He’d show photographs of them at every saloon and trading post. On the open sea he’d ask every fisher we passed if they’d seen Row and Jacob.
But Grandfather had died when Pearl was still a baby, and suddenly the enormous task swelled up before me. Desperation clung to me like a second skin. In those early days, I would strap Pearl to my chest with an old scarf, wrapping her snugly against me. And I’d follow the same route he had taken: scouting the harbor, asking the locals, showing photographs to people. For a while it gave me vigor; something to do beyond survival, something that meant more to me than reeling in another fish to our small boat. Something that gave me hope and promised wholeness.
A year ago, Pearl and I had landed in a small village tucked in the northern Rockies. The storefronts were broken down, the roads dusty and littered with trash. It was one of the more crowded villages I’d been to. People hurried up and down the main road, which was filled with stalls and merchants. We passed one stall heavy-laden with scavenged goods that had been carried up the mountain before the flood. Milk cartons filled with gasoline and kerosene, jewelry to be melted and made into something else, a wheelbarrow, canned food, fishing poles, and bins of clothing.
The stall next to it sold items that had been made or found after the flood: plants and seeds, clay pots, candles, a wood bucket, bottles of alcohol from the local distillery, knives made by a blacksmith. They also sold packets of herbs with sprawling advertisements: WHITE WILLOW BARK FOR FEVER! ALOE VERA FOR BURNS!
Some goods had the corroded appearance of having been underwater. Merchants paid people to dive into old houses for items that hadn’t yet been scavenged before the floods and hadn’t rotted since. A screwdriver with a glaze of rust, a pillow stained yellow and heavy with mold.
The stall across from these held only small bottles of expired medications and boxes of ammunition. A woman with a machine gun guarded each side of the stall.
I had packed all the fish I’d caught in a satchel slung over my shoulder, and I hung on to the strap as we walked up the main road toward the trading post. I held Pearl’s hand with my other hand. Her red hair was so dry it was beginning to break off at the scalp. And her skin was scaly and light brown, not from sun, but from the early stages of scurvy. I needed to trade for fruit for her and better fishing supplies for me.
At the trading post I emptied my fish on the counter and the shopkeeper and I bartered. The shopkeeper was a stout woman with black hair and no bottom teeth. We went back and forth, settling on my seven fish for an orange, thread, fishing wire, and flatbread. After I packed my goods in my bag I laid out the photos of Row before the shopkeeper, asking if she’d seen her.
The woman paused, staring at the photo. Then she slowly shook her head.
“Are you sure?” I asked, convinced her pause meant she’d seen Row.
“No girl looks like this here,” the woman announced in a thick accent, and turned back to packaging my