I’d read a book about young people who bonded after society’s collapse. The abandoned cities sent shivers up my spine, the vines that grew through cracked concrete and broken windows, the mountains where the youths sheltered beneath overhangs, staring out at the desolate landscape for a flicker of light.
Reading made me feel as if I’d swigged my father’s vodka. Did my brother or sister experience this? My brother loved video games, and my sister sang constantly so that her location in the house could be determined according to her volume. My mother always told us to read, but did she know that books made me want to run outside and breathe the air rolling off the mountains, smell the wet fields and drying mud, hear the crunch of onion grass under my feet? Stories seemed like paths. If you went outside, there was just the world, but if you went and looked after reading a story, there was a world where anything could happen, as if beyond the mountains were a hundred countries to which I might go, a hickory cane over my shoulder and my few possessions tied in a red bandanna.
But there would be no escaping this time. The flood hemmed us in, our house like a frog on a lily pad. Neighbors put out sandbags, and in a few places the water on the road was so high that even my father had to drive through it slowly, afraid of shorting out his engine.
My mother had gotten two horses a few years earlier and checked on them and on her bedeviling goats. She cooked restlessly, baking crumbly bread in coffee cans so that each loaf came out with the can’s seams printed on it. She made hard, flat cookies like wet mud thrown at a wall.
As I studied the flood, imagining all the ways to cross it, she joined me on the back porch.
“We’re going to leave soon,” she told me, and my heart beat with an excitement so involuntary, so sudden, that it ached.
“Where?”
“We’re moving. Just you and me and your brother and sister.”
“What about André?”
“He’s staying here.”
“When will we come back?”
The wind gusted in her hair as she stared beyond the smooth surface of the water to the mountain.
“We’re not coming back,” she said, her voice almost breaking.
“Ever?” Though I loved the idea of setting out, the valley was the one place we’d returned to after our many temporary homes, and I’d never known spring or summer anywhere else. I couldn’t imagine not seeing it or my father again.
My mother stared off, lips slightly parted so that I thought she might speak. She narrowed her eyes, staring as if to see past the limits of the sky.
✴
THE NEXT MORNING, I walked out to where the water began. The grass appeared distorted, like the bottom of a swimming pool, undulating. Far off, the tops of a few Christmas trees showed, and then there was simply the deluge stretching on toward the mountain.
I wanted to worry that we were leaving, but it seemed impossible—not just because of the flood, but because my parents often said crazy things that never happened. Besides, just before going to work, my father had made a comment that now obsessed me.
“I bet carp are swimming up from the rivers, right through the fields. If we take the boat and shine the flashlight in the water, we’ll see them.”
I couldn’t think of anything but carp—gliding out of the river, nestling in the branches of submerged trees, riding currents through the beams of flashlights.
The rowboat lay upside down in the shed, and I discussed with my invisible friends whether we should take it and do some exploring. Eleven of them were in agreement, making me suspect that I had eleven invisible friends but maybe only one spirit guide. The guide was concerned. In fact, he sounded a lot like my brother later did.
“We’re not allowed,” he said.
“Come on. Just for a little while. There are carp out there.”
“No. We can’t. We’ll get washed away by the river and die.”
In the past, my father had been more open to ideas like this, but I suspected that convincing him to do something wild might not be as easy as before.
“Can we go out in the boat?” I asked him that evening.
“I’m busy.”
“But we can see carp.”
“That’s true,” he said. “There might be carp out there.”
I hesitated, knowing what I had to say next.
“Do you think it would be really dangerous?”
He grinned as if he’d just woken up and was himself again, not that person who cared only about his business.
“Okay,” he said, “we can go later on tonight.”
After dark, the moon shone on the water, turning the flood into a silvery plain. In the rowboat, we crossed the hidden fields of Christmas trees as my brother and I took turns aiming the flashlight. When my father let go of the oars, I gave it to him.
As he peered down, his edge of the boat sank close to the water, and we sat on the opposite side, trying to counterbalance. If he knew we were leaving him, he didn’t show it. I considered what a relief it would be if the end came now, the three of us in the boat, with no choice but to find a new home.
He shone the light on the eerie shapes of drowned Christmas trees below us and worried that if the water didn’t go down soon, they would die. We’d had floods before, and afterward, I’d followed him along the rows as he pulled up yellow yearling pines, their dead roots slipping from the earth.
“I’m going to lose a lot of money,” he said, staring down, the oars dragging in the rowlocks.
Then he shut off the light and we just sat, gazing along the gleaming surface to the mountains, the water still, the moon full and blazing all around us.
✴
A WEEK LATER, when the waters went down, my father hired a helper from a nearby farm, a young man with a fuzzy, lopsided mustache and bulging biceps who, as a boy, my mother once confided in me, had jumped from the roadside bushes to make cars swerve until he caused a grisly head-on collision.
But rather than cause more deaths, he helped my father replace the tractor bridge. They finished at sundown, returned to the back porch and each drank a beer. My father was telling him how quickly floods could begin, that he’d seen rivers triple their size in seconds and had himself almost drowned in a Yukon mining camp.
“I’d just finished my last shift and had a few days off, and there was no way I was going to stay in camp. I wanted to get out and drive into town and have some fun. A gorge with a river in it separated the camp from the main road where our cars were parked. A wooden footbridge went across, but the snow was melting in the mountains and it was raining so hard the gorge had almost filled. There was a narrow point not too far upstream, and the water was coming through in surges. I was standing in front of the bridge. I really wanted to leave, but each surge was higher. The water carried uprooted trees that
