Rank floodwater fills his mouth and nose and ears and right before he’s fully submerged he thinks, this can’t be the last thing I ever taste.
The good thing about the subway tunnel flooding is that the water pressing down on his chest prevents him from panicking, allows him to orient himself in the current until he sees a shimmer of light that some primal part of his brain registers as up, and another, equally primal part begins to swim toward.
Only when he surfaces with a loud sputter does the panic set in. It’s not fair, really: human beings aren’t meant to be this quiet.
He wonders if there are any subway cars left to throw himself in front of.
And then he sees the cat.
He follows the cat, because it makes as much sense as anything else. When she stops at a random alley he assumes it’s because she’s spotted a rat, or a puddle of water.
That’s when he sees the woman.
Sam, she whispers to him under the awning, under the water, under the frantic beating of his own heart.
His first few attempts at saying his own name are unsuccessful. He’s so f*cking terrified, is the thing.
But then he breathes deep and looks in her eyes and says, Eric.
When she repeats it back to him, he realizes he’s not going to go to the South Street Seaport. He’s going with her, as far as he can.
And then he reads her poem and realizes there are places she is going that he can’t, not yet. None of their math will ever add up.
But they can cry together, they can scream about the unfairness of it all. She can put her hand on his chest and slow his breathing and he can find the medication that will ease the worst of her pain.
Whiskey and pizza isn’t bad as far as last meals go. Better than floodwater, anyway.
And why not put on a show, when the playing cards are right there on the table and the late afternoon sun is shining down like stage lights.
He wishes he’d seen her smile more.
He knows she made it back to Harlem.
Frodo purrs and rubs against Sam’s cardigan. It must still smell like her, under the saltwater.
You’re safe, says Henri, but Eric doesn’t start to believe it until they set foot on the island. It stays quiet at first, wide eyes and whispers and panic at the sound of every snapped branch.
The survivors wake up to the sound of screaming one morning; Eric’s stomach drops as he prepares for the worst but there are still no creatures here, only people at the end of their rope. The screams stop soon. Later on, there is the sound of faint laughter as some of the children kick a ball in a made-up game with no rules.
Eric tenses and buries his face in Frodo’s fur, remembers not to scratch her belly.
He’s nearly forgotten about the screaming until Henri comes to talk to him by the fire in hushed tones, says a name Eric doesn’t know and explains that she ran out into the ocean without any warning. They’d tried to stop her but she was a strong swimmer, fast, and there was no one who could catch up to her. All they could do was watch her sink.
This thing that’s happened, Henri says and shakes his head. It gets under your skin in ways you never even realize.
Eric nods and eats his rations and stays silent, not out of necessity but because the only thing he’s thinking is that it’s still happening. It will always be happening.
It becomes a less constant thought when a month passes without incident, and then another. The island was a good choice. There are always things to be done: shelter, food, fire. He feels a change in his body, a new firmness of muscles in his shoulders and arms and chest, a sun-baked golden glow to his complexion.
One day he reports for work detail only to find that there is none.
Why? he asks, and frowns, and tries desperately to breathe through the wave of catastrophic thoughts that threatens to flood his mind.
Henri shrugs. There is nothing to do. At least nothing urgent. You should rest.
So he finds a sunny spot to lie down and imagines a calming hand on his chest and thinks of Sam, the expression of wonder on her face when he’d revealed her card.
He wakes up to the sandpaper scratch of a cat’s tongue lapping up salty tears from his cheek. Gathers up Frodo and goes to the fire pit, where antsy children are interfering with meal preparation.
Right, he says to the unruly flock, channeling a gregarious Property Law professor from another life. Has anyone got a deck of cards?
Eric begins to dread the tide. What it leaves behind, specifically: broken boards and bloated bodies, the ones who tried to make it but didn’t. They burn the dead because there’s not another option, because if they didn’t the whole island would be a graveyard.
The objects that wash up with them are mostly sentimental: wedding dresses and waterlogged stuffed animals and a flood of photographs. They create a memorial wall in the community center, start a library with the salvageable books.
When an enormous crate turns up on the beach a crowd gathers, cautious but curious. Eric stands on the fringes, feels a familiar fear rising in his chest and squeezing his heart faster than it’s meant to pump. Frodo rubs against his leg and purrs.
There’s a creak of nails being pried loose from wood and then a soft thud as the side of the crate hits the sand and then a low gasp from the crowd as they witness a miracle: an upright piano in pristine condition. Eric doesn’t realize he’s crying until he feels the wetness on his chin, walks away before anyone can ask what the matter is.
The sun sets later and later as the summer solstice approaches—someone must be keeping track of the date, Eric imagines. Or maybe it’s better if they don’t, if no memories can latch themselves to numbers on a calendar.
All he knows is that it’s not yet fully dark as he walks back from dinner to turn in for the night, to hope that the bad dreams don’t find him this time. The lights in the community center are on, which isn’t unusual, but the sound floating out through the open door is.
Somebody is playing the piano, a vaguely familiar classical melody. Eric steps through the door and the playing stops; a bespectacled woman peers around the piano to meet his gaze. He can’t recall her name, only that she seems calm and collected whenever he sees her around camp, though of course there’s no telling what she went through to get here.
Please, he says. Keep playing.
When the song ends the room seems quieter than ever. Eventually she stands to leave and Eric gathers the courage to ask his real question: Will you teach me?
He’s not a fast learner but he grows to like the feeling of the keys under his fingers, smooth and cool and solid. Eventually he doesn’t have to think so hard, doesn’t have to look down when he plays. It starts to feel like sleight of hand, like magic, like a thing that should be impossible.
How lucky, he thinks, how f*cking miraculous to be alive.
So the piano teacher is the first person he tells about his plans inside the subway tunnel. He feels something inside him crack open, some stony layer around his heart.
What made you change your mind? she asks.
I didn’t, he says. The floodwater did.
And after that?
She did.
He doesn’t elaborate and the piano teacher doesn’t ask. Out of habit he shuts the piano as quietly as he can, pinches the flesh of his fingertip under the lid and winces through the whisper of pain.
More months pass and the ashes on the funeral pyre get cold and the tide is just the tide again. The winter is hard but they make it through and come out on the other side feeling confident, almost invincible.
Which is, of course, what gets them into trouble.
Even when the man and the girl arrive there are no extra patrols, no one wondering whether one boat might be a harbinger of more.
The screams that arise when the attacks start are even more haunting than the ones on that first day, because Eric knows every soul they’re attached to, knows that they’ll bury these bodies.
He also knows to run away from trouble, shepherds as many people as he can into the basem*nt. Frodo is already there, perched on a shelf next to the canned tomatoes. A familiar panic starts to rise in his throat but then he hears the ragged, gasping breaths of someone already in its throes, sees the piano teacher on the precipice of snapping.
Breathe, he mouths, not even a whisper. Just breathe.
And then there’s a sound, impossibly loud. Screeching feedback that makes them all clap their hands over their ears and wince and brace for the arrival of the creatures.
They wait and they wait and they wait but nothing happens and eventually it dawns on Eric that he’s survived again, for some reason. He goes outside and sees the damage, the end of the world in this place it was never supposed to reach. They’ll rebuild the houses, salvage what they can. The community center is totaled, the piano smashed to bits.
Eric gets blisters digging Henri’s grave, the callouses he’d developed in those first few months long gone. He wears the yellow cardigan to the service and then goes out to sit on the rocky cliff on the west side of the island, where the creature’s boat had washed up. They’d already set the whole bloody thing on fire and pushed it out to sea, watched the horizon until it sank. He imagines it rotting there with all the other wrecked ships, mysteries no one will ever bother to solve.
There’s a rustling in the tall grass and he turns to look for Frodo, sees the girl instead. Regan, he remembers. She sits down a few feet away from him and stares at the horizon, seems lost in her own thoughts. Eric recognizes the look.
Thanks, he signs, mildly surprised to find that his hands still remember the movements he’d learned as a child.
Regan shakes her head, and the emotion on her face doesn’t require any interpretation because it’s like a mirror: could I have done better, was it worth it, what unendurable thing will I be asked to endure next.
Thank you, he repeats. I’m Eric.
She looks at him with a quizzical frown so he repeats the letters, tries to make the signs as precisely as he can.
That’s BSL, she replies, mouthing the words as she signs in a language he half-understands, like catching bits and pieces of conversation from another room.
Sorry. He puts his hand in a fist and rubs his chest in small circles, hoping it translates.
Regan shrugs.
Hey, he says, signing what he remembers. Do you want to meet my cat?
There’s a commotion on the beach a few days later; a familiar knot begins to form in Eric’s chest until he realizes people are running toward the sound, not away from it. Regan sprints through the crowd and even though Eric doesn’t recognize the sign he understands its meaning immediately.
Mom, she repeats over and over, tears streaking down her face. Mom.
The woman and the boy and the baby have arrived in a waterlogged motorboat, none of them well. They’re given water and medicine and food but the boy is still feverish and pale: all they can do is wait for the antibiotics to work.
Well, almost all.
They say you can do magic tricks, Regan signs, approaching Eric as he works in the garden one afternoon. He understands more every day, feels the words slowly coming into focus. Will you show my brother?
She takes him to the clinic and he does a simple card trick, isn’t sure if the boy can even understand that in his delirious state. But he says Is this your card? and Marcus says Yes and laughs and Regan watches with wide-eyed wonder and even Evelyn smiles, the baby sleeping in her arms. The other two children are soon asleep as well, beads of cold sweat forming on Marcus’s forehead: his fever has finally broken.
You should get some sleep, too, Eric says to Evelyn, already knowing by the set of her jaw that she won’t, she can’t.
How long was your family alone out there? he asks, deciding that the least he can do is keep her company.
The whole time, she whispers. Since the beginning.
And the baby…?
The basem*nt flooded, Evelyn says, and Eric realizes that she’s only just processing the memory now, making sense of it in bits and pieces as she says it out loud for the first time. I had to put her in a box.
He has more questions then but understands that it’s not the time, that she’s not ready to speak about the unspeakable.
Your daughter is brilliant, he says instead. She saved us all.
Evelyn smiles again, bittersweet this time. She gets it from her father.
Eric looks at her, tries to wrap his head around what it would take to make it here from the wilderness, no voice offering quiet reassurances of safety.
Maybe she gets it from you, too, he says.
The baby wakes up and cries; she doesn’t know not to.
Does she have a name yet? Eric asks.
Evelyn’s eyes widen in surprise, like she hadn’t even considered the question. Like she hadn’t known for sure that any of them would be around long enough for it to matter.
Any suggestions? she asks.
Eric doesn’t know what he’s going to say until he’s saying it, looking at the woman and the girl and the boy and the baby and thinking how relieved he is to have been wrong about the end of the world.
Sam. Tears flood the corners of his eyes as he says the name out loud for the first time since that day and feels a cool crossbreeze on his skin that carries memories or ghosts or both. I think you should call her Sam.
