The moonlight caught the top of the water’s ripples, carving silver scythes into the black surface. “Knowing the end was coming for her … knowing I couldn’t do anything, no insulin left to be found. We tried adjusting her diet.” He let out a hoarse sound as though he were clearing his throat. “That was impossible with so little food left. Everyone grabbing at what was left.”
I remembered those days, the rush of excitement when you found a box of cereal in an empty cabinet in a neighbor’s house. And the way your heart dropped when you grabbed it, only to find it weightless, the contents already taken by someone else.
People raided gas stations and shops. And they filled other buildings to the brim. Schools, libraries, abandoned factories. So many people sleeping in rows, on their way somewhere else they hadn’t decided yet. Most of them kind and frightened. But some not, so you stayed at home most of the time.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured, and when I looked up at him the pain on his face hollowed my stomach.
Daniel raised his shoulders up to his ears. “It’s happened to everyone, hasn’t it?”
I nodded and felt an odd stirring in my bones. I held his gaze and felt like I was losing control, like I was floating in a sea so salty it held me up.
I remembered that we hadn’t just scavenged for food; we also taught ourselves to grow it. Row and I started a vegetable patch in the front yard where the sun was strongest. She once stood in that garden, holding a radish she’d pulled, a pleased grin on her face, sunlight bright on her face. Even in the upheaval there were incandescent moments like that—moments I’d spend the rest of my life reaching for.
“I’m not going to the Valley just because it sounds nice,” I said, surprising myself. “That’s where my daughter is. My other daughter.”
If Daniel was surprised, he didn’t show it. His stoic expression stayed unchanged as I told him about Jacob taking Row from me, about how I hadn’t heard of them for years until just a few weeks ago, and now Row was held in a colony in the Valley and I had to try to save her. To get her out before they moved her to a breeding ship and my chance was closed forever.
“I know the risk,” I said, my voice faltering. I glanced at Pearl under the deck cover. “I know. I just … I just have to try.” I shrugged and looked away, then looked back at him, his eyes locked on me, his face shadowed. “The thought of not trying feels like suddenly not having bones in my body. My body goes loose and empty.” I shook my head and brushed a palm over my face.
“I’ll come with,” he said, his voice barely audible above the lapping waves against the boat.
“What?”
“I’ll help you get there.”
“That isn’t why I told you,” I said. But I wasn’t so sure. A part of me had known it was my last card to play. Or maybe I wanted some human connection in a vast dark sea. I couldn’t sort it out. “Why are you changing your mind?”
Daniel looked away and reached forward for a stick and stirred the coals.
“I think we can help each other,” he said. “I—I’ve been lonely. Besides, it would be good to go northeast. I haven’t been that way before.”
The uneasy feeling I had in the saloon returned to me; it drowned out the relief I’d felt when he’d changed his mind. I shifted my weight, leaning to the side, one arm under me. Why was he changing his mind? I couldn’t believe it was just because he wanted to help me find Row. I tried to push the uneasiness away. You’ve always had trouble trusting people, I reminded myself.
When I glanced back at Daniel his eyes were closed, his head leaned back against the gunwale. He looked innocent, and I didn’t believe that, either.
AFTER I LOST Row, before I gave birth to Pearl, I wished I wasn’t having another child. Part of me wanted Pearl more than anything and the other part felt I couldn’t meet her, couldn’t look into her face. It all felt too fragile.
I couldn’t regret my children, but I also couldn’t be free from them, from the way they had opened me up, left me exposed. I had never felt as vulnerable as I had after birth, nor as strong. It was a greater vulnerability than I ever felt facing death, which only felt like a blank expanse, not like free-falling, which was how I felt every day trying to care for Pearl in this world.
What was most different about mothering Pearl compared to Row wasn’t that I was on water with Pearl and on land with Row. It was that I was all alone with Pearl after Grandfather passed. With Row, I worried about her falling down the stairs as we played in the attic. With Pearl, I worried about her falling from the side of the boat while I hooked bait. But it was only with Pearl that no one else was there to help keep an eye on her. Paying such close attention turned my mind inside out, flayed my nerves.
When Pearl was a baby I carried her in a sling almost every moment, even when we slept. But when she was a toddler I had a harder time keeping a handle on her. During storms, I’d tie her to me with a rope to make sure she didn’t get swept away. I trained her to stay near me at ports and taught her to swim.
Pearl had to do everything early: swimming, drinking goat’s milk, potty training, helping me work the fishing lines. She learned to swim at eighteen months but didn’t learn to walk properly until she was three. Instead of walking, she scuttled about Bird like a crab. Her childhood was the kind I’d read about in frontier stories, the children who knew how to milk a cow at six or how to shoot a rifle at nine.
At first this made me pity her in a different way than I’d pitied Row. But then I realized that being born later, after we were already on water, could be a gift. As a young child she could swim better than I ever would, with an instinctive knowledge of the waves.
So having Daniel on board made me feel like I could breathe again. I noticed he kept an eye on her the way I would, keeping her in his peripheral vision, one ear attuned to her movements. Daniel, Pearl, and I kept sailing south. At night, we’d all sleep under the deck cover, the wind whistling above us, the waves rocking the boat like a cradle. I slept on my side with Pearl tucked against my chest, and Daniel lay on the other side of me. One night, he rested his hand tentatively on my waist, and when I didn’t move he reached his arm around the two of us, his arm heavy and comforting, grounding us.
Sometimes, on nights that peaceful, I’d imagine us three going on like that, forgetting about the Valley, making a quiet, simple life on the sea. I began to look forward to the moments when Daniel was close to me, both of us standing near the tiller or huddling under the deck cover during a rainstorm. We could be silently working on mending a rope, our heads bent above the fraying fibers, our hands swiftly weaving, and I’d feel a serenity at his body being near mine.
But I’d remember Row, tugging her blankie behind her on our wood floor, her head cocked to one side, her expression a mix of curiosity and mischief. Or how she’d push the coffee table against the window and sit on it with her perfectly straight posture, watching the birds. Naming them by their colors: red birdie, black birdie. I’d feel her as though she were beside me. A warm tide rose and flooded my veins, pulling me toward the Valley as if I had no choice at all.
I PICKED SARDINES and squid from one of the nets I’d fished with that morning and dumped them in our live bait jar, a large ceramic canister that once was used to hold flour in a kitchen. We kept the jar tied down next to the cistern and only filled it with live bait when we could spare the meat.
I kept scanning the horizon as we approached the mountaintops of Central America. When we were about fifteen miles from the closest coast we signaled to a merchant ship by waving our flag, a blue square of fabric with a fish in the middle. The ship’s own flag billowed in the wind, purple with a brown spiral that looked like a snail shell.
People had communicated by flags before Grandfather and I took to the water. Sailors said that the Lily Black had been the first to raise a flag, using it