“You can fill it in again.”
The boy reaches for the shovel.
Afterwards, all three of them stand there unspeaking in the waning daylight, hesitant, should they leave, should they wait some more. Perrine and Noah don’t dare move, but they sway from side to side. Finally, Louie sighs and walks away.
“Now what do we do?” shouts Noah.
The older boy doesn’t answer. Perrine has gone to fetch the bag of potatoes and is dragging it behind her.
“We’re going to cook the potatoes,” she says. “I know how to do that.”
During dinner they do not say much. Louie has locked the hens in one of the bedrooms and will keep the key on him at night and whenever he’s got his back turned. He’ll let them out during the day. Neither Perrine nor Noah complain about the squawking from the other side of the wall.
“It was Little Black,” murmurs Louie suddenly.
Silence.
“You made such a mess of her I didn’t recognize her. So I counted them when we got back tonight. It was Little Black.”
The two siblings bite their lips, bent over their plates, and they plant their forks in the overcooked potatoes. Louie looks at them.
“I liked her.”
And then:
“You really are assholes.”
In the night, Noah shivers. Not from cold, he’s scared.
Punishment.
Louie said: Tonight you’re on watch. No point looking for support from Perrine, she has turned her head not to see her little brother’s wide open eyes.
Nothing for it.
There are sounds out there, all the time, sounds and mosquitos. Noah wraps himself in the sheet, then immediately tears it off—it’s too hot. He looks constantly toward the house behind him. There’s no light, they blew out the candles a long time ago. But the sky is clear, and there’s a moon; Noah gazes at the sea, darkness engulfing everything twenty or thirty yards from there. Even if a boat went by just then, he wouldn’t see it.
A rustling sound, he jumps.
Louie?
He listens: nothing. He feels for the stick he put down next to him for reassurance. Earlier, he said to Perrine:
“If there’s a thief, I’ll split him open.”
A thief?
Perrine said: There’s no one here. But just in case. Louie heard him, and he snickered.
“With your shitty stick, sure. He’ll have a knife. Or even a rifle.”
Noah trembles.
Still not from cold; he wipes the sweat from his brow.
Could Pata be on his way back already? He spreads his fingers one by one to count, gets a little mixed up. Five days? Six? In any case, he can’t keep watch on the sea, with his head constantly swinging left to right because of the sounds. What could still be on the island? What creatures, what monsters? Noah sits down, his heart pounding.
He looks at the house. He looks at the sea.
House. Sea.
Which way lies the greatest fear?
In the early morning, on leaving his bedroom Louie almost trips over the little boy. Noah is sleeping across the threshold, curled up in a ball, his head on a blanket. He is snoring gently—or has a draft given him a cold? Louie prods him with his toe the way you turn over a dead fish on the shore.
Then leaves him.
What’s the point.
-
Noah lingers behind. From where he is, he knows he can run away if Louie tries to catch him. Run away, how far would he get, on this island which the sea is nibbling at a little bit more every day—but it comforts him to know that he can run a few dozen yards away. He watches for the older boy’s reactions, he and Perrine are by the shore, bending over, looking at something. He thinks: I don’t want to go there ever again, not ever, ever.
Deep inside he feels a certain pride, in spite of his fear that Louie will beat him. It took him a while, last night, with his scrawny arms and little legs, to drag all those cinder blocks into the ocean.
Destroy the tower: yes. So that he wouldn’t be sent there anymore. A once and forever solution. If he’d just taken it apart, the others would have told him to build it again. But this way. He threw the rubble in from the promontory, where the boat used to be moored. Where the water is six or eight feet deep.
He left the door there: too heavy. And besides, what would they do with the door all on its own?
So Noah is watching his siblings, who are looking in the water to see if they can fish out the cinder blocks. He is humming to himself, his voice inaudible, You can’t, you can’t. He feels all the tension in his body, because he knows he’s done something wrong. To break the silence he shouts, legs spread, ready to hightail it:
“And anyway, it was no use!”
No reply. Louie and Perrine are sitting facing out to sea, their backs to him. After a moment, Noah goes over to them, impatient—What are you doing?
“Go away,” says Louie.
“But what are you doing?”
“None of your business.”
“Come on.”
“Scram.”
The older boy starts to get up, and Noah backs away, goes to sit a bit further away. He hopes he’ll be able to hear what they are saying, but the wind prevents him.
“Are you going to go and get some more potatoes?”
“There’s no more raft, you idiot!”
“I’m hungry!”
That morning, Perrine made a batter with fresh eggs, and cooked up twenty or thirty pancakes on the still-warm stove so they’d have a supply. Louie made a list of what they had left to eat, and it didn’t match the list Madie had left them, there is much less than they expected, even though Perrine had divided it all up into little piles; he doesn’t get it. His sister confesses: she had to take from a pile here and there because they didn’t have enough.
How will they manage now, for the last days?
With tears in her eyes Perrine says she doesn’t know. They were hungry, that was all.
“Let’s do the piles again,” murmurs Louie. “But no changing them this time, you hear?”
In the house, once again they make piles of cans, potatoes, eggs. Behind them Noah empties the cupboards to hand them the food, copying them, mute and conciliatory. So he is startled when Louie grabs a can of raviolis from him and growls:
“You’re pleased with yourself, because of the tower, aren’t you, blockhead.”
Noah cringes, makes himself small, maybe hoping for pity, for sure to become invisible. He looks down, hands him another can.
“Blockhead,” says Louie again.
In the end, they have enough food for six days.
“It’s not a lot,” says Perrine.
Noah points to the cans: I don’t like green beans or broccoli.
“We’ll eat eggs,” says Louie. “The hens lay every day. And with milk and flour we can make pancakes.”
“Every day?”
“Every day.”
Noah’s eyes are shining.
Sitting close to the house to avoid the first drops of rain, they are eating pancakes with jam. Perrine fills their glasses with orange juice; they have enough bottles of water and soda to last for weeks. Liam and Matteo brought back entire packs from the neighbors’. Farther away, the sea still shifts its cargo of bits of wood, floating objects, plastic. Maybe there are still bodies, too, but they’ve stopped looking, they’ve become accustomed, to be honest, in the beginning it was exciting, the thought that those were dead bodies going by, but now. They’re afraid it might be Madie or Pata, or their big brothers, or their little sisters. What if they capsized, and the sea brought them all the way back to the place they were hoping to get away from? And it’s not so much the burden of sorrow that would be hard to bear, but knowing that now no one will be coming to get them.