“It’s that shiner you gave me. I’ve been seeing flashes and…” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I’ve lost some vision in my left eye. I think it was the helicopter ride, it must have shaken something loose.”
“My God, Jessie.” Pat was thunderstruck. “My God, you’ve got to get here now.”
“I can’t. Things are a mess, and—look, you just make that appointment and let me know when I have to be there. And don’t tell anyone. Because if the Army finds out, they’re going to pull me off this job faster than you can spit.”
There was a pause before Pat replied. “Are you sure that wouldn’t be a good thing?” Jessica clenched her teeth. “Everything’s fucked up, okay?” she said. “Everything I’ve done has been destroyed or compromised or made a mess of. All I’ve been able to do is watch. I’m not leaving this job till I have a win, okay?”
“Yes,” Pat said. “Yes. I understand.”
“Make that call, okay? Take care of this for me.”
“Right away.”
“Good. Good. Because I need this.”
“I love you, Jessie.”
Jessica felt some of the tension ease from her taut-strung body. “I love you too, Pat.” She turned off the cellphone and pulled the rain cape off her head. The air smelled sweet, of rain and the grassy meadow.
Helicopters throbbed on the horizon, bringing in a company of military police, who would over the next day or two replace the Rangers and Jessica’s engineers, leaving them free for other duties. Jessica hoped to hell she wouldn’t be blind by then.
Jason rubbed Arlette’s arms, the friction of his palms warming the gooseflesh brought on by the clammy dawn. “Thanks,” Arlette said in a small voice, and shivered. Jason wanted to put his arms around her, hold her close, keep her warm against him. But though he had huddled with her through the storm, flesh to flesh, in the tiny cockpit, so close that he could feel the chill cold of her thigh alongside his, smell the warmth of her breath beneath the improvised plastic rain canopy, still he did not quite dare to put his arms around her.
Not with Nick and Manon there, looking at him with weary, half-resentful eyes, as if they were on the verge of politely asking him to leave.
“Come here, baby,” Nick said to Arlette. “Let me get you warm.” Arlette shifted across the little cockpit to sit on the edge of the cockpit next to her father. Nick began rubbing her bare arms, her back. Arlette sighed gratefully against his warmth. A pang of envy throbbed through Jason’s heart.
Arlette sneezed. “Scat,” her mother said.
“Thank you, Momma.”
Arlette sneezed again.
“Scat,” her parents said in unison.
Nick caught Jason’s puzzled look. “‘Scat’ is Arkansas for ‘Gesundheit,’” he said. Jason nodded. “I kind of figured that out.”
He rose stiffly to his feet from his perch on the edge of the cockpit, and gazed about at the fog-shrouded morning. Drops of water pattered down from the dark cypress trees, almost a rainstorm in themselves. The trees, standing on their thick stilt-legs and hung with vines and moss, were ungainly shadows barely visible through the mist. Some had fallen in the quake and lay like dead giants in the water, and elsewhere cypress roots, shorn off by tectonic force, stood in clumps like forlorn soldiers lost on a battlefield. Jason stepped up onto the wet front deck, looked down at the still, dark water, at his reflection fragmented by ripples. All the ripples were from the falling water, he realized. There wasn’t so much as a breath of wind. Hunger burned in his stomach. “What do we do?” he said.
“Get some food,” Manon said. “It’s been two nights since we ate.”
“We need to figure out where we are,” Nick said. “The river’s to the east of here, generally—maybe north or south is closer, but east will get us there—but in this fog we can’t tell where east is.”
“So we just sit here?” Manon said. “In the fog? And starve?”
“If you have a better idea,” Nick said, “I would like to hear it.”
“You should have planned better,” Manon said. “You should have made sure that we had food with us when we got away from the camp.”
“I wasn’t the one who worked in the kitchens,” Nick said. “You didn’t put anything away?”
“Can we not argue over this?” Arlette demanded in a loud voice. “Can somebody tell me why we’re arguing?”
The argument had the bitter taste of familiarity to Jason. They sure sound like a family, he thought. Arguing about all the things they can’t change.
That was his family, too. What he remembered most about his family was the arguments. That and the long, terrible silences that followed the arguments, and the long absences when his father would vanish for weeks at a time, working eighteen hours a day in his office.
Nick’s family seemed to be entering one of those familiar glacial silences. Jason rubbed the chill out of his upper arms.
“We could try to find some cattail,” he said. His voice had a strange, hollow ring in the clammy mist. “Or some—what is it?—pokeweed?”
His voice vanished into the mist. The silence enveloped him. No one bothered to acknowledge his words.
He dropped to sit on his heels on the foredeck, hunkered against the tendrils of misery he felt floating around him, dank and clammy, like the mist.
Jason looked up for a moment as he noticed that one of the strange-looking cypress trees, standing tall on its knees in the flood, was moving along his line of vision. He looked up and found himself staring at the range of twelve feet or so into the beady eyes of a cormorant, one of a dozen who occupied the tree’s lower branches—black, sinister silhouettes that sat in the trees as motionless, and as alien, as Easter Island statues, sentinels standing guard over unknown country.
Surprise brought an exclamation to Jason’s lips. The cormorants didn’t react, didn’t even blink.
“Urn,” he said, to cover sudden embarrassment. “We’re moving. There’s a current here.” He heard the others shifting in the cockpit, testing the notion for themselves. None of them seemed to notice the ominous, long-necked figures in the trees that followed them with glittering eyes.
“The current is going downstream,” Manon said. “All we have to do is go in the direction of the current, right?”
When Nick spoke, it was with slow reluctance. “Not necessarily,” he said. “The storm just dumped a lot of rain upstream from here. When the flood hits us, it might spread out into the country as well as draining toward the Gulf. This current might be taking us further inland.”
“That’s not bad, is it?” Manon asked. “There are people inland.”
“Maybe. It could be that we’re just going further into the wilderness.” There was another moment of silence. “Nick,” Manon said, “we have to get the child some food.” Jason turned away from the cormorants, saw Nick frowning in the cockpit. “I don’t want to use fuel till we know where we’re going.”
“Anywhere is better than this.”
“The fog will lift sooner or later,” Jason offered, but the adults paid him no attention. It was as if they were locked in a kind of dance, and they couldn’t leave the dance floor till the end of the music, and they couldn’t change to a different dance because these were the only steps they knew. Arlette, who knew the steps as well as the dancers, left her father’s lap and joined Jason on the foredeck. They hunched in cold silence and watched the cormorants fade away into the mist. At the end of the argument, Nick started the outboard and began to motor along with the current. Jason and Arlette took their oars and stood on the foredeck to fend off floating debris.