They could stay there for two weeks, until their father comes back. As if they were afraid of missing him or that Pata might not recognize the island, might sail by without stopping, of course that’s impossible, but the fear of it has them in its grip.
“We have to keep watch,” murmurs Louie.
Noah looks around him.
“Over what?”
“The sea.”
Perrine nods: You think Pata might already be on his way back?
“You never know.”
“I can’t see anything,” grumbles Noah.
Louie gets annoyed. You’re just way too little.
Then thinks.
“We’ll build a watchtower.”
They rummage in the barn and find cinder blocks and an old worm-eaten wooden door, and drag them to the shore, huffing and puffing.
“No,” says Perrine. “It’s too close. What if there’s a wave.”
Louie agrees.
“Further back, then.”
“It’s heavy,” says Noah.
Halfway between the sea and the house they slowly build a platform and place the door on it horizontally, then lean a stool against it to climb up. Louie with his bad leg slips on the aluminum rungs, catches himself just in time, gets annoyed; Noah pushes behind him. And then there they are, all three of them, and to be honest it doesn’t put them much higher up, but the impression they get as their gazes sweep the horizon is enthralling. Louie goes back down to hand up the last of the cinder blocks for a sort of guardrail which makes them feel safer. They plant a wooden pole in each corner and hang a big sheet as best they can over them to serve as a roof. They decide to have their snack in their new refuge once they’ve consolidated it with a pile of stones all around; now when they climb up it doesn’t wobble at all. Sitting overlooking the ocean, nibbling the last of the pancakes Madie left for them, they are silent for a long time. Until Perrine says, “Is that the way they left?”
“That’s where the boat was,” Noah points out.
“Yes, but maybe they turned.”
“I don’t know,” says Louie, because they were asking him.
How many times since the parents left has he had to say this. I don’t know. He feels his helplessness right down to the stinging in his fingertips.
“But then,” says Perrine, “can we be sure Pata will come back this way? What if he goes past the other side of the island?”
Louie freezes for a moment. He hadn’t thought of that. For him there is only one place where the boat can land, and the watchtower is right opposite that place. He frowns: No.
Perrine insists.
“But still, if he—”
“No!”
Louie stands up on the platform and stamps his foot.
“And anyway, he would go around the island to come and get us. He’ll call out to us.”
“So we shouldn’t sleep, then,” says Noah gravely. “Otherwise we won’t hear him.”
“That’s why we built the tower.”
“So we’ll be here even at night?”
“We’ll take turns, yes.”
The little boy’s eyes gradually open wider, and he purses his lips. The tower all on his own, in the middle of the night; that’s not how he had envisaged things.
“Even me?”
There’s a tremor in his voice. Louie shrugs his shoulders:
“Are you scared?”
“Like I would be.”
“So what is it, then?”
“It’s just, uh, if it starts to rain, you know. This—” he points to the sheet roof—“this won’t keep the rain out, will it?”
Louie shrugs.
“We’ll see.”
First night on watch. The weather has stayed warm and Louie can see the stars scattered across the sky. He hears the sea lapping regularly against the shore, shlap shlap, a sort of calm, repetitive lullaby. He listens to the sounds all around, and has trouble identifying them: tiny cries, rustling, animal sounds—and yet everything was drowned two weeks ago, there’s nothing left, he pricks up his ears to see if he can recognize something.
The hens? Or a surviving bird, lost in the night.
The sea lapsing onto a leaping fish.
Something else?
He thinks of Perrine and Noah back at the house asleep. With these boards beneath his back, hard despite the blankets, too much darkness, too much light, he cannot sleep. When the sounds vanish, the silence makes him sit up. He wishes dawn would come. In the end, it’s pointless keeping watch at night.
Will Pata come back? If the sea doesn’t carry them away first. The water around him is oppressive, a sort of living creature looking for cracks to slip through, to gnaw at the foundations of the house, and of the tower, to dig in silence until everything collapses all of a sudden. For three days Louie hasn’t said anything, but he’s afraid.
He kneels on the board. He does so without thinking, the way he used to. For two years he hasn’t been doing it anymore because it’s for little kids—Madie tried to persuade him to, in the beginning. Tonight it has come back to him. With his eyes closed before the immense ocean, his hands joined in mute supplication, Louie prays, as hard as he can.
-
Perrine wakes him in the morning, calling his name. Louie? He struggles to rouse himself. A sort of titanic fatigue; he’s not sure he has the strength to stand up or even open his eyes.
“Louie?”
He has to answer, he knows. A grunt at best.
“Are you asleep?”
“Mmm.”
“It’s nine o’clock.”
Nine o’clock. Louie sits up all of a sudden, his heart pounding, sweat on his brow.
“Really?”
“Yes, that’s what it says on the kitchen clock. Were you asleep?”
“No. No, no. Or maybe a little…”
“So you didn’t see anything?”
Louie rubs his face, haggard. Morning moodiness: he must have fallen asleep in the middle of the night and didn’t realize when day was breaking. He was supposed to be watching the horizon for the last three hours.
“Oh.”
Perrine presses her hands on her T-shirt.
“What if Pata went by?”
“He wouldn’t have, not yet. This is just practice, you know.”
Tears in the girl’s eyes.
“But you said—”
“It’s no big deal, Perrine, he didn’t go by, I promise. The sound of the boat would have woken me up for sure. Come on, let’s go get breakfast.”
The hens welcome them with a loud cackling, running to meet them at the door of the house as if the children’s arms were full of seed and salad leaves and worms. Louie holds out his hand and doesn’t flinch when they peck at his palm.
“What can we give them to eat? There’s not much on the island.”
But Perrine shakes her head:
“We don’t have anything for them, they’ll just have to manage. We don’t have enough. And anyway in the letter Mommy said we have to eat them if we’re hungry.”
Louie scowls. He’s attached to his hens. He’s the only one who knows them by name, all twenty-eight of them, even the rooster: before the tidal wave there were fifty of them and it was no different. He could tell you the name of every one that drowned, too, the ones he called by their size and their color, Little Black, Big Black, Big White Feather, Old Black. The ones he liked best and which had real names, like Peanut or Sulky, or the names of his classmates when he’d run out of ideas, Caroline and Sophie and the others. The only one he doesn’t really like is the rooster, he has no idea why, he’s more arrogant, stupider, or maybe it’s his color, but the thing is you have to have a rooster, if you want chicks who’ll turn into young hens, that’s the way it goes.