He is still here.
All he’s good for is wandering around the island in the early morning to see if the red hen has come home.
She hasn’t.
Does a hen sink?
—and what if they’d used the hens as floats.
You see how it makes you go crazy.
After a great deal of hesitation, Perrine and Noah again asked him to kill a bird so they could eat it. Perrine and Noah are hungry. But they don’t know how to wring a chicken’s neck, how to empty out it innards and pluck it. We have eggs, barks Louie, yet again. For them it’s not enough. They want meat, they want something roasted.
Louie doesn’t tell them that he is hoping to keep the hens until Pata’s return, to hand his flock over to him like a good shepherd, a good boy.
I’m a shepherd of hens.
And whether he’ll make it? He doesn’t know.
The parents left nine days ago. Nine days assiduously crossed off on Perrine’s sheet of paper, and there should be five or six left—if everything goes to plan. But everything has gone to pieces. His parents’ calculations are worthless now, don’t mean a thing, not a chance, they’re meaningless in light of the storm and the rising waters, the vast floods that are still poisoning the planet, they got it wrong from the get-go, because once there was the huge tidal wave it became obvious that this would never end.
They got it wrong, Madie and Pata, because nine days ago they had to slip away in the middle of the night so as not to be seen.
And because six days from now, with the onslaught of the ocean, there will be no more island and no more house, and there will be no more children.
Louie constantly returns to this thought.
In the beginning, he wanted to cry. Now, he is angry. He tells the others. This time, it is Perrine who cries—it is always fascinating to see her cry with her blind eye weeping like the good one, her white, dead eye you’d think must be all dried up, but it’s not, she wipes both eyes, little Perrine.
There will be no more island: he’s not sure Noah understands what this means, and Louie explains with rare, chosen words, no abruptness, no rancor. Noah listens and doesn’t believe him, he shakes his head. Then Louie shows him the stakes he has been planting every day to mark the spot the sea has reached: stakes standing like little soldiers marching up to the house and past it, flooding the basement, making their way to the top of the hill. One stake equals one day. Louie has his feet in the water and he counts the steps between the most recent stakes and reproduces them on the ground: he puts a pebble at the tip of his big toe.
This is where it will be tomorrow.
And this is the day after tomorrow.
In three days, the sea will be here.
“But”, says Noah, “that’s upstairs in the house.”
Louie has his hands behind his back and he gazes thoughtfully out at the horizon.
“So, you see. In three days we’ll be sleeping outside, at the top of the hill, and in six days, we’ll drown.”
ON THE WATER
The same morning, August 19
-
The mother’s heart skips a beat the moment she steps into the boat to leave the island a bit before dawn, with Marion in her arms. She automatically counts the nervous children crowded on the small craft: from one to six. When she reaches six something snaps inside her, something that knows six is not the right number. A surge in Madie’s guts to hold back her cry. She sits down, too, trembling all over: hands, legs, her lips that want to say, seven, eight, nine.
But don’t.
It stops at six.
Madie, in smithereens. She’s the one who is leaving. The one who is abandoning.
She faces backward until the very last moment, the fraction of a second when, very precisely, the island disappears into the end of the night. Even her bulging eyes can no longer see.
The little ones look at their mother. Before long, they fall asleep.
Pata, Liam, and Matteo, as taut as animals on the hunt, oars in their hands, deciding whose turn.
She is alone, Madie. Her throat and belly in a knot.
She tells herself she should have jumped. Should have let herself sink into the ocean without a sound, undulating like an eel, or a tired mermaid.
To go back to the island.
Before Louie, Perrine, and Noah wake up, she would have had time to sweep the floor, clean the cooker, and make breakfast. As if it nothing had happened. There would have been the smell of hot pancakes. The glasses filled with orange juice, bright little suns at every plate and bowl.
Madie didn’t jump.
She just felt, very faintly, something tearing inside, right to the vibration in her body, part of her on the boat with six children, part of her staying on the island with the other three.
But this is nonsense: nothing stayed on the island, she knows that very well. What is the point of tearing herself apart, tossing her soul onto the shore to protect her little children? There is no point, none at all. To find comfort. To put a bit of balm on her heart, which does nothing to ease either the horror being born inside her, or her silent sobs. In a few hours the children, back there, will find out that they are alone.
Back to the burning, the one deep in her guts. The little girls woke up with the daylight, the sun already pounding on the sea and the overloaded boat rocking and slowly moving forward. Of course they asked where Louie and Perrine and Noah were. Madie answered. At home, she said. We’ll go back and get them afterwards.
“Oh, I see,” murmured Emily.
“I’m hungry,” whispered Sidonie.
Liam and Matteo, on the other side of the pile of belongings, also heard.
Madie would have liked for someone to worry, to ask questions, to shout. To make Pata turn around, build a tower on the boat, with different levels so they could put the little children everywhere, and she, the mother, would get that torn, painful part of herself back. She’d give the ocean a beating, she’d wave her fists in a threat. Quiet. Sit—as if she were giving orders to a dog.
No one asks any questions.
Madie waits, thinks she’s about to scream, But aren’t you going to ask why? Aren’t you going to say you’re not okay with this?
I’m not okay with this.
“What are we going to eat?” says Sidonie again, tugging on her sleeve.
So she had to resign herself, and stay on the boat, gliding across the sea with six children who don’t ask why. Madie has withdrawn into herself. Sometimes she looks around—but there’s nothing to see but water, and now that their island has disappeared, there’s really nothing, just the ocean as far as the eye can see, no trees, no stones to break the surface, no rooftop to make you think you could hang onto it. Madie supposes they are crossing the plain—God, she thinks, stiffening, we’re no further than that, in the car it took less than half an hour. Tomorrow, when they sail over what used to be the Duens hill, maybe they’ll see a little vegetation; for the time being she turns pale imagining the fathoms of water below them, ten or twenty or thirty, bottomless pits, abysses. The eddies she can sometimes sense, when the muddy sea makes ripples, and Pata, with one word, instructs Liam to avoid them.