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He banged a knuckle against the heavy steel door, said we’d need to batten the hatches, but would be safe in the house. Then he lowered his face and tugged a hairy earlobe. He asked me to wake Seaman Chang. The captain himself had issued the order. He was to deliver Dewey to the ship posthaste.
Dewey threw on his uniform and haphazardly packed his duffel. I snatched the bag from his hand and begged him not to go. I told him I was sorry about the way I’d been behaving, but I’d seen lights in the sky and Mama like a warrior atop the fire tower. I said I couldn’t explain why, but he couldn’t leave, not now.
Eyes anguished, Dewey gently took the duffel back from me. Though he protested, I insisted I’d see him down to the dock. I told Ava Lynn the storm was coming and to stay in the house, but the girl pulled on her boots, grabbed her stuffed otter, and marched defiantly out behind us.
The wind soughed through the trees, the sky beyond the bay smoked with rain. At the dock, Dewey knelt to hug Ava Lynn, then stepped to me. He took my hands and told me he’d be back so soon I wouldn’t have time to miss him.
I searched for words to make him stay, but I’d been stricken mute. The men hollered from the skiff. Dewey kissed me, then ran onto the bobbing dock with his arms out for balance and tossed his duffel to Einar Fejedelem and climbed aboard.
Ava Lynn hollered, waving Mr. Otter above her head. Dewey waved back. I’d become a boulder, a woman of stone. I squeezed the arrowhead in my pocket just to feel the pain of my flesh.
The first lash of rain swept over us, the swirling wind lifting spray over the skiff as it trolled away from the dock. Ava Lynn cried she was getting soaked, that she was going back to the house. I flicked a hand to let her go, and watched the skiff bump away through the flood-covered trees.
A commotion broke out on board. From halfway across the bay and through the rain, I could barely make out that the men on the skiff were fighting. A figure shoved free. The men grabbed at the figure, who hopped onto the stern and dove into the water.
I dashed to the end of the swaying dock. The figure was swimming back to shore. The nearer he drew, struggling through the wind and chop, the clearer I could make out each thrust of Dewey’s mighty arms.
Thunder boomed as if from within my skull. The sky became like night. Beyond the darkened bay, the battleship listed then righted itself. I didn’t at first understand what I was seeing, the sea cresting higher than the ship’s highest mast.
The wall of water lifted the ship like a stick in a stream, driving pilot waves into the bay that flipped the skiff skyward, the men flying from the boat.
I shouted for Dewey to hurry. He flopped onto the dock, coughing and spitting. I yanked his arm for him to rise. Together we ran, but the first wave snapped through the dock, overturning our fishing boat and hurtling us through the air.
We landed in the shore’s mud. Dewey hauled me upright. We lurched up the rocky slope. The wind a gale of needle and bark, the pine and cedar thrashed and fell one into the next, the woods collapsing around us.
Ava Lynn clutched Mr. Otter and shrieked high up the hillside. I hollered for the girl to run for shelter. The rain and whipping wind shoved us like a hand. I fell and Dewey lifted me and dragged me along into the house.
Before we could close the door, an explosion rocked the land far below us, an ear-splitting detonation, metal twisting, ripping, as the warship smashed against the mountain.
Cabinets in the kitchen burst open, plates and pans clattering. The house lurched forward, rocked off its foundation and pitched as if to plummet down the face.
I grabbed Ava Lynn’s hand to run. She dropped Mr. Otter and was trying to reach back for the toy, but I lifted her into my arms and carried her screaming out of the sliding house.
I led the three of us tripping out and around through the writhing hemlock and up the old gravel road. We hurried past the line of vehicles and the ruins of the homestead, loose shingles spinning through the sky as we made our way to the storm shelter.
The hillside had buckled, a ridge raised in the whirling grasses. The back side of the shelter thrust upward, the front driven into the earth, I tugged at the hatch but it wouldn’t lift. Dewey nudged in beside me and pulled, too, but the hatch was jammed.
Behind us roared a rumbling like a building collapsing. The slope below us split up the gravel drive like a zipper opened in the earth, cars and trucks clattering into the gap. Ava Lynn cried, clutching my waist. I shrieked for us to head to the high cave.
We climbed through the firs and into the moraine. Noxious wind smothered us in smoke. Falling, crawling, the rocks were slick and cut my hands as we scrambled to the high ledge, where I boosted up Ava Lynn, then Dewey did the same for me.
The cave mouth was hitched at an angle to offer relief from the wind and rain. My lungs heaved. I shivered and held my sister, who sobbed and twitched against me.
I hid the girl’s face inside my coat. Dewey flopped in beside us, gasping, blood trickling from his nose. He stared back out of the cave, muttering something about the ship.
Then the wind shifted to whistle shrill and smoke flooded the cave. Water burst over the ledge and raced across the stone floor. How was it possible? How could the sea reach so high?
Cracks webbed across the slate floor beneath us, the stone breaking like eggshell. The ceiling fractured. Chunks fell thumping around us. Then fissures in the back wall spread and the floor fell away, a black maw opened in the rock.
Dewey grabbed the hood of my jacket, dragging me to my feet. I carried Ava Lynn as we lunged again out into the elements. The girl clutching the back of my belt, blood like fire in my thighs, up through the drubbing rain we crawled onto the summit.
Dewey scampered to the fire tower and dove behind a piling. I pulled Ava Lynn along, and the three of us huddled against the tower as water gushed over the rocks and then our shoes.
The tower’s guy-wires sang, the pitch keening higher and higher until a cable snapped like a gunshot. The tower tilted and fell as one footing crumbled and then another.
Icy waves battering us, we clambered to cling to the leaning hut’s wall. I eyed the roofline where the past night I’d seen Mama winged with godly fire. I cried out for Mama to save us. Ava Lynn wailed, and I shoved my sister onto the froth-slick roof, then pulled myself up and yelled for Dewey to come on.
Loose in the storm we’d die. The cables had slackened enough I could wedge my legs under and pin myself against the roof. Dewey did the same. I gripped Ava Lynn by the leg of her pants, trying to help the girl get secured, but she only bawled and flailed.
The current was quickly rising, or maybe the land was sinking. No sky, no ground, the sea clawed cold up my back then filled my ears. I watched Dewey’s cheeks inflate. I held my breath, too, my grip on Ava Lynn straining.
I choked my last scrap of air. As the water covered us, the hut’s moorings broke free from the mountain, the tower whipping to the surface of the deluge with such violence that Ava Lynn yanked free from my fist.
Through the stinging swirl, I saw the yellow of her boatswain’s shirt and a flash of white like a flag unfurling. Then she was gone. Pinned to the tower’s roof, I shrieked after my sister, madly grasping in every direction as we spun and bucked through lightning flash and rainwash and squall.
THE RAIN WEAKENED BUT REMAINED, the sallow sky scouring our hut with algid gusts of mist. Waterspouts twined and parted far out on the sea. Waves hammered the tower roof, cracking over Dewey and me, and blasting water into my ear canals.
Pressure popping, a ringing in the bell of my skull, I kept my face turned to Dewey, whose head lolled with the rocking of the surf, his eyes loose in his skull, peering but not seeing. Deaf to the water and the sky, the ringing in my ears drowned out my voice as I shrieked for Dewey to hang on.
* * *
BY DUSK THE WIND had shed its bluster. Though rain still fell, tattered strips of clouds coursing overhead, the maelstrom had passed. The ringing in my ears dwindled and up rose the sloshing and sucking current and the creaking of the hut’s old wood.
I pulled against the cable binding me to the roof and managed to wriggle free. I crawled across to Dewey. His lips as thick as thumbs, brine streaking his forehead, blood darkened his pants where the cable had sawed the skin beneath the cloth.
I stroked his brow and his eyes opened to peek through his lashes. He coughed once, then again closed his eyes. I tugged at the guy-wires, but they’d snagged on the eaves. No matter how hard I pulled I couldn’t free Dewey from his binding.
* * *
HOW MUCH WATER does the world contain? Could there be more rain than water in the seas? Sometimes soft, sometimes hard, it rained for days and then there were no days. It rained for nights and then there were no nights. No day, no night, no days or weeks, life had been reduced down into rain.
I lay against Dewey and tried to stay warm and keep him warm. I thought I’d never be warm again. Then I couldn’t remember warmth and I became the cold.
I knew I would die. Mama gone, Ava Lynn gone, the rain never-ending, I wanted to die. I’d long thought it was easy to kill and therefore must be easy to die, but when I finally wanted to die my body kept living.
Life didn’t reside with me atop that roof. Life was inside me, sheltered from the rain and wind, my heart and lungs swaddled in skin and fat and muscle, my brain housed in blood-warmed bone. I could no more will my heart from beating, or my mind from thinking, than I could the rain from falling.
I left my shivering skin and retreated into my heart. I became my pulsing heart and thrumming blood. My blood fed one thought, and then another, each compelled with a bit more life.
* * *
I COLLECTED RAIN IN MY BOOT. A person could live long on water alone. Drinking from my boot, I glimpsed a pod of whales, just slick black humps emerging from the sea. Mist spouted from their blowholes. Their shadows gently rocked our hut as they passed beneath us. I envied the whales as the world was now theirs.
Sea kelp in long ribbons drifted on the current. I lay on my belly and collected the kelp as it caught on the edge of the roof. Armloads of kelp. Kelp for weeks. I shredded the kelp into bits and fed Dewey by hand. We ate kelp and drank from the sky.
I drew Aleshka’s arrowhead from my pocket and used it to cut the Mylar from a patched hole in the roof, and used the sheet to cover us from the rain. Pressed against Dewey, I grew sturdy in the thought that if the sun was shining we’d have already died. The sun that gave warmth also blistered skin. The ocean of salt water was a well from which we could not drink. I became grateful for the rain that for us was life.
* * *
I HAVE NO ACCOUNTING for how long it rained, or if the rain that fell over Dewey and me had swallowed the globe. I only know that after a long darkness a blush of light appeared in the west, a dim rosy glow that quickly ceded to the night.
Clouds thinned and parted, the sky laid bare. My teeth chattered as I straddled the ridge of the roof and gazed up at the stars crisp and twinkling. It was long since I’d last seen the stars. Never had I seen so many and so bright.
The cosmos wheeled in capillaries of fire, luminous dust haphazardly strewn, all that cold celestial light reflected upon the mottled surface of the sea. Boundless water and stars, maybe somewhere up there the children were eating cake.
A great calamity would befall the world. That was what Jo Sam had told me. He’d wanted to clean the slate as God had in the time of Noah. Was this rain his bidding? Or had God, craving relief from what we’d become, once again drowned our wickedness?
I thought of Nalli Sandoval, not the woman I knew or the actress, but the girl on the boat screaming up at a God who spoke only in wind. Like that girl, I wanted to hear the voice that once commanded Noah. I wanted to glimpse the face of God.
When I tried to imagine God’s face, I could only picture Mama, her kind eyes peering down from the utter dark. I could feel her hand caressing my cheek. Are you hungry? Are you warm? Do you know that I love you?
Say the words, touch every cheek, for a thousand years of peace. But no face showed itself. No caressing hand. I peered up into night’s shimmering shroud and gleaned only the profound emptiness spanning the galaxies of ice.
What if there was no God? The rebelling climate, this rain, the nexus of our greed and the denial of inconvenient truths. These wars from nations ruled by psychopaths prodding us like scorpions in a tub, their whims of killing nothing that would ever lead to peace, death begetting death in the battle of the dreams.
Please, I begged of the stars. Show yourself. Tell me how to heal the anger and pain. How to not be afraid. Please, God, just one word. One word.
The sky hung silent.
Nothing stirred in the pitched vastation but the spectral pricks of stars long dead. Confounded in this clamp of ancient light, I cursed the sky, my screams quickly melting into a lifetime of tears held dammed. A spate of tears for a flooded world, tears to flood a world, I wept beneath the still-mute heavens.
* * *
THE STARS FADED and the sky succumbed to peerless dark. For a time, blackness engulfed our little floating hut. Then a crescent of dim light broke from the vault of the sea. The timid light swelled into molten fans spreading upward and outward. The black sky washed gold. Gold lacquered the water as the sun breached the horizon.
The sun’s warmth drew tendrils of smoke from the frigid waters. Curling, drifting higher, smoke rose from the sea like a million ascending souls. Curtained in souls, my own soul drawn upward, I thought of all the people I’d ever known.
I put names to the faces in my mind, considered all those I couldn’t recall, the soldiers and teachers and welders and bakers, firefighters, farmers, mothers and preachers and pilots and clerks.
All in all, the people I’d known had been reasonable and kind, occasionally inspiring, and even when confused or ignorant, even sometimes violent, rarely were they so bad as to deserve this world of destruction into which we’d been born.
Adrift in that sea of souls, I knew in my heart the people were gone. With them passed every scrabbling hope and malformed belief. Empires and cultures, laws and gods; death decreed that eventually everything was erased. If you fought in war, you fought over nothing. If you died in war, you died over nothing.
What if Jo Sam was right about this one thing? What if we could start anew, be born again into a world cleansed of the fictions of history and old toxic dreams? Politics gone, churches gone, no capitols or courthouses, no currency or borders over which to war? My only belief then would be to believe in nothing so much I’d ever again kill for it.
AVA LYNN DIED THREE WEEKS AFTER the sun’s reemergence. Her wings had shed their white feathers, were reeking of rot and hanging limp down her back. Dewey suggested we amputate to stave off the infection, as the doctors had done with me. But we weren’t surgeons, hadn’t the tools or talent, and Ava Lynn was adamant her wings had saved us and shouldn’t be touched.
A fever took hold we couldn’t break. At the end, Ava Lynn requested we lie as we once had with Mama on the storm-shelter bunk, the three of us like spoons: Dewey in front, me behind, my sister’s frail limbs trembling, her dead wings pressing my chest.
My heart was helpless. My sadness reared as anger, and I said if her fever was a person I’d stomp its face and dance in its blood. That was what I told her. The ugly things we say sometimes.
A God-peace had settled over Ava Lynn, as if though her body remained, the rest of her resided in the light. She tilted her face and said, “Oh, Mazzy, don’t talk like that. The more you hate something, the closer it gets.” Her little hand clutched my wrist. “But the same is true for love. You’ve got to believe in that, too.”
The girl had become ancient. She smiled and said she’d see Mama soon, and though I was uncertain what awaited beyond these corporeal bonds, I told her that was true. Then she was pleased and there were no more words and my sister just faded, so gently, like the orb of the evening sun gradually descends into the gold-limned curve of the sea.
Dewey eventually rose from the bunk, but I refused to leave Ava Lynn’s side. I cried into her little back and clutched her body, what was once trembling with fever but quickly turned cold. I wept through the night, muttering unanswerable questions into the darkness.
Come morning, Dewey told me, with pastoral gentleness, that he’d built a grotto of stacked stones in which to bury the child. At last, I let loose of my sister’s lifeless body. Dewey knelt over Ava Lynn, was preparing to lift her from our pallet of straw, when he reared back in shock.
The morning sun slanting through the opening of our hut washed over the girl. In that light sparkled tiny feathers, golden fluff at the tips of her wings where only the day before had been scabs and skin.
Ava Lynn let out the feeblest of coughs. She sat upright and rubbed her eyes, as if waking from slumber and not from death. She turned her face into the sunlight, then stood without acknowledging Dewey and me.
I quaked with joyful terror and watched my sister step out onto the dawn-bright hillside. Ava Lynn raised her thin arms as if embracing the sky, her wings spreading full, now furred in golden down, glittering like royal robes.
“Berries,” she said, back to us. “I’d like some berries.”
* * *
WHILE STILL AFLOAT on the tower roof, we’d braced Ava Lynn’s legs under the cables and she flapped her mighty wings to haul us to a mountain jutting from the water. The mountain’s peak was topped by a single tree. A bristlecone grown out of rock, tall and twisted with fibrous knots, like the ancient pine I’d once seen in the White Mountains. A tree grown where it didn’t belong. A pine with boughs that bore fruit instead of cones.
We survived on pine fruit and fish. With stones and wood from the tower roof, we built a hut. We made simple tools, a hoe, a hammer, a shovel, and used Aleshka’s flint arrowhead to spark our fires.
