the things I’d thought about when I was pregnant with Row. But now, with no hospitals, not even makeshift ones run out of abandoned buildings, they seemed like certain death. I knew my mother would help me deliver Pearl like she’d helped with Row, but I was still more nervous about this birth.
We had lost Internet and electricity for good the month before and we watched the horizon daily, fearing the water would arrive before Grandfather finished the boat.
In the block behind our house, a neighbor’s front yard held an apple tree. Mother had to stretch to pick them, a basket hooked over her arm, her hair shining in the sunlight. The yellow and orange leaves and red apples looked so bright, almost foreign, as though I already was thinking of them as lost things, things I’d rarely see again.
Behind her I saw a gray wall building, rising upward toward the sky. I was perplexed at first, my mind too shocked to comply, even though this was what we’d been waiting for. The water wasn’t supposed to be here yet. We were supposed to have another month or two. That’s what everyone on the streets had been saying. All the neighbors, all the people pushing grocery carts full of belongings as they migrated west toward the Rockies.
I didn’t understand how it was so quiet, but then I realized we were in the middle of a roar, a deafening crashing, the collision of uprooted trees, upended sheds, lifted cars. It was as if I couldn’t hear or feel anything, all I could do was watch that wave, the water mesmerizing me, obliterating my other senses.
I think I screamed. Hands pressed on glass. Grandfather, Jacob, and Row ran upstairs to see where the commotion came from. We stood together at the window, frozen in shock, waiting for it to come. The water rose as if the earth wanted vengeance, the water creeping across the plains like a single warrior. Row climbed into my arms and I held her as I had when she was a toddler, her head on my shoulder, her legs wrapped around my waist.
Mother looked up at the water and dropped the basket of apples. She ran toward our house, crossing the street, passing a house and almost reaching our backyard when the wave crashed around her. The wave dipped over her, its white spray falling around her.
I couldn’t see her anymore and the water thundered around our house. We held our breath as the water rose around the house, climbing up the siding, breaking the windows and flowing inside. It filled up the house like a silo full of corn. The house shuddered and shook and I was certain it’d splinter into pieces, that our hands would be ripped from one another. The water rose, climbing each stair toward the attic.
I looked back out the window, praying I’d see my mother reappear, surface for a breath of air. After the water settled, the surface was still and my mother did not come up to break it.
The water settled a few feet below our upstairs window. We waded and swam through the water for weeks afterward but could never find her body. We later found out the dam had broken half a mile from our house. Everyone had said it would hold.
After Mother was gone I kept wanting to tell her about how things were changing, in me and around me, Pearl’s first kicks, the water covering all the prairie as far as the eye could see. I’d turn to speak to her and be reminded she was gone. This is how people go crazy, I thought.
It was only a month later that Jacob would take Row. Only Grandfather and I were left in that house, sitting in the attic, that empty room the length of our house, as the boat slowly filled it.
A month after Jacob left we took the attic wall out with a sledgehammer and pushed the boat out of the house and onto the water. The boat was fifteen feet long, five feet wide, and looked like a large canoe with a small deck cover at the back and a single sail in the middle. We loaded the boat with supplies we’d been hoarding for the past year—bottles of water, cans of food, medical supplies, bags of extra clothing and shoes.
We sailed west, toward the Rocky Mountains. At first, the air was thin and felt hard to breathe, as if my lungs kept clutching for something more. Three months later I awoke with birthing pains. The wind was so strong it rocked the boat like a cradle and I rolled back and forth under the deck cover, gritting my teeth, clutching the blankets around my body, crying in the lulls between contractions.
When Pearl came she was glistening and pale and silent. Her skin looked like water. As if she’d risen out of the depths to meet me. I held her to my chest and rubbed her cheek with my thumb and she broke into a wail.
A few hours later, when the sun rose and she was suckling at my breast, I heard gulls above us. Holding Pearl at my breast was both like and unlike when I held Row at my breast. I tried to hold the feeling of both of them in myself but couldn’t; one kept sliding away and replacing the other. Deep down, I had known that one couldn’t replace the other, though I now discovered I had been hoping Pearl could replace Row. I placed my nose on Pearl’s forehead, smelling her newness, her freshness. I mourned the loss of it, the loss I felt before it happened.
In Grandfather’s last days he began speaking nonsense more and more. Sometimes talking to the air, addressing people he’d known in the past. Sometimes speaking in a dream language that I would have found beautiful if I wasn’t so tired.
“Now, you tell my girl that a feather can hold a house,” Grandfather said. I wasn’t sure if by “my girl” he meant my mother, myself, Row, or Pearl. He’d call all of us “his girls.”
“Who do you want me to tell?”
“Rowena.”
“She isn’t here.”
“Yes, she is, yes she is.”
This irritated me. Most of the people he spoke to were dead. “Row isn’t dead,” I said.
Grandfather turned to me, shock on his face, his eyes wide and innocent. “Of course not,” he said. “She’s around the corner.”
A week later Grandfather died sometime in the night. I had just finished nursing Pearl and had laid her in a small wooden box Grandfather had made for her. I crawled over to where Grandfather slept, my fingers outstretched to shake him awake. When I touched him, he was cold. His skin not yet ashen, only slightly pale, the blood having settled. He otherwise looked the same as he always did when he slept: eyes closed, mouth slightly agape.
I leaned back on my heels, staring at him. That he could pass with so little ceremony stunned me. I had never expected sleep to take him, of all things. Pearl whimpered and I crawled back to her.
We were alone, I kept thinking. I had no one left I could trust, except this baby that depended on me for everything. Panic pressed around me. I looked at the anchor lying a few feet away. I’d heard of people leaping from their boats tied to their anchors. But this wasn’t a possibility for me. It was as impossible as the water receding from the land and people standing up again where they’d fallen. Instead I took Pearl in my arms and climbed out from under the tarp into the morning sun.
I would carry him with me; he would still guide me. Grandfather was the person who taught me how to live; I wouldn’t fail him now. I wouldn’t fail Pearl, I told myself.
When I think of those days, of losing the people I’ve loved, I think of how my loneliness deepened, like being lowered into a well, water rising around me as I clawed at the stone walls, reaching for sunlight. How you get used to being at the bottom of a well. How you wouldn’t recognize a rope if it was thrown down to you.
AFTER THE STORM, we came out from under the deck cover and surveyed the wreckage. We’d lost all the rainwater from the cistern. I dropped to my knees in front of it and swore. The waves crashing overboard had filled the cistern with salt water. We’d have to empty it all and get back to land as quickly as possible before we got dehydrated. We had a small emergency supply of water I kept in plastic bottles, tied down under the deck cover, but it would only last a few days.
Pearl kept close to me as we sloshed through the water, across the deck toward the bow. She held her arm against her side, a bruise blooming where she must have fallen when trying