After the Flood. Kassandra montag
his breath.
He almost said not old enough for the breeding ship yet.
“Did you hurt her?”
Even now, a pleased look crossed his face, a sheen over his eyes. “She didn’t complain much,” he said.
I drove the knife straight in, the hilt to his skin, and pulled it up to gut him like a fish.
PEARL AND I stole the man’s canteen and shoved his body over the side of the cliff. As we ran back to the boat I kept thinking of his crew in the cove, wondering how soon they would start searching for him. There was enough wind, I thought, to push us south quickly. Once Bird got behind another mountain it’d be hard to track us.
When we got back to the boat I raised the anchor, Pearl adjusted the sails, and we surged forward, the coast behind us growing smaller, but I still couldn’t breathe steadily. I hid from Pearl under the deck shelter, my whole body shaking, not unlike how the man’s body shook when he died. I’d been in fights before, tense moments with weapons out, but I hadn’t killed. Killing that man was like stepping through a door to another world. It felt like a place I’d already been to but had forgotten, hadn’t wanted to remember. It didn’t make me feel powerful; it made me feel more alone.
We sailed south for three days until we reached Apple Falls, a small trading port nestled on a mountain that had been in British Columbia. The water in the canteen lasted us only a day, but late on the second day it rained a small bit, just enough that we weren’t ill with thirst by the time we reached Apple Falls. I dropped the anchor over the side and glanced at Pearl. She stood at the bow, staring at Apple Falls.
“I didn’t want you to see that,” I said to Pearl, watching her closely. Pearl hadn’t spoken to me much since.
Pearl shrugged.
“He was going to hurt us. You don’t think I should have done it? You think he was a good person?” I asked.
“I just didn’t like it. I didn’t like any of it,” she said, her voice small. She paused, as if thinking, then said, “Desperate people.” She looked at me a little too intently. I always said to her, when she asked me why people were cruel, that desperate people did desperate things.
“Yes,” I said.
“Will we try to find her now?”
“Yes,” I said, the word out of my mouth before I knew I’d already decided it. A response beyond reason. Just the image in my mind of Row in danger and me moving toward her, with no choice, only one direction to move, the way rain falls from the sky and does not return to the heavens.
Though I was surprised to realize this, Pearl showed no shock. She merely looked at me and said, “Will Row like me?”
I walked to her, squatted, and wrapped my arms around her. Her hair smelled like brine and ginger and I buried my face in it, her body as tender and vulnerable as the night I birthed her.
“I’m sure of it,” I said.
“Are we going to be okay?” Pearl asked.
“We’re going to be fine.”
“You said everyone is alone. I don’t want to be alone,” Pearl said.
My chest tightened and I pulled her close to me again. “You won’t ever be alone,” I promised. I kissed the top of her head. “We better count these,” I said, gesturing to the buckets of fish laid out on the deck.
Row is alone out there, I kept thinking, weighing each dead fish in my palm, one part of me asking how much it was worth, the other part imagining her alone on some coast. Did Jacob die? Did he abandon her? My hands shook with cold rage at this thought. He abandons people; that’s what he does.
But he wouldn’t do that to her, I argued with myself, feeling myself being pulled back into the hatred that had kept me awake at night for years after he left. I’d been blinded by love and now, I knew, I was blinded by hate. I had to focus. To remember Row and forget him.
The last three days we’d sailed, a part of me thought of Row incessantly. I had the sense that my entire body was plotting how to reach her, while my consciousness focused on tightening the rope at the block or reeling in fishing line, the small daily tasks that grounded me. There was both a low thrum of panic and shock at discovering she was alive, and a strange animal tranquility as I moved about the boat as if it were simply another day. It was what I’d dreamed of and hoped for and also what I’d feared. Because her being alive meant I had to go after her, had to risk everything. What kind of mother abandons her child in her hour of need? And yet, wouldn’t taking Pearl on this journey be a kind of abandonment of her? An abandonment of the peaceful life we’d fought to build together?
Pearl and I loaded the salmon and halibut into four baskets. We had gutted and smoked the salmon already on our boat, but the halibut was fresh from this morning, which could give us bargaining power.
Apple Falls was aptly named—apple trees had been planted in a clearing between the peaks of two mountains. Thieves were shot by the guards of the orchard, who had watchtowers on each mountain. I was hoping we’d be able to trade for at least half a basket of apples, plus some grain and seed. At our last trading post we had only three baskets of fish and could barely trade for the rope, oil, and flour we needed. We needed to trade for some vegetable seeds so I could grow a few more vegetables on board. Right now we only had a half-dead tomato plant. Beatrice, my old friend at Apple Falls, would give me a better deal for my fish than at any other port.
Water rippled against the mountainside and the bank rose in a steep incline up the mountain, with a small peat ledge for a dock. A wooden boardwalk, half submerged, had been cobbled together over the years.
We docked our boat and paid the harbor fees with a crate of metal scraps I had found while hunting the shallows. Bird was one of the smallest boats in the harbor, but it was sturdily built. Grandfather had designed the boat to be simple and easy to maneuver. One square mast, a rudder, a punting pole, and oars on each side. A deck cover made from old rugs and plastic tarp where we slept at night. He’d made it from the trees in our yard back in Nebraska at the beginning of the Six Year Flood, when we knew that fleeing was our only chance to survive.
Water had already covered the coasts around the world by the time I was born. Many countries had been cut to half their size. Migrants fled inland, and suddenly Nebraska became a bustling, crowded place. But no one knew the worst was yet to come—the great flood that lasted six years, water rising higher than anyone could imagine, whole countries becoming seafloors, each city a new Atlantis.
Before the Six Year Flood, earthquakes erupted and tsunamis struck constantly. The ground itself seemed heavy with energy. I’d hold out my hand and feel the heat in the air like the pulse of an invisible animal. On the radio we heard rumors that the seafloor had split, water from within the earth seeping into the ocean. But we never knew for certain what happened, only that the water rose around us as if to swallow us up in a watery grave.
People called the years the coasts disappeared the Hundred Year Flood. The Hundred Year Flood didn’t last exactly a hundred years, because no one knew for sure exactly when it began. Unlike a war it had no call to arms, no date by which we could remember its beginning. But it lasted close to a hundred years, a little longer than a person’s lifetime, because my grandfather always said that when his mother was born New Orleans existed and when she died it did not.
What followed the Hundred Year Flood was a series of migrations and riots over resources. My mother would tell me stories of how the great cities fell, when electricity and the Internet faltered on and off. People would show up on doorsteps at homes in Indiana, Iowa, Colorado, clinging to their belongings, wide eyed and weary, asking to be let in.
Near the end of the Hundred Year Flood, the government moved inland, but its reach was limited. I was seventeen when I heard over the radio that the president had been assassinated.