And God saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth.

This may have been true. And if He’d told them that, they might have understood more. They might have learned that what ran through each of them, what they all felt, could in fact be named.

And the Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth.

And while God would act harshly, He would not act impulsively. And between His deciding to destroy all things and the act of doing so, He came to know Noah.

Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God. And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth.

With Naamah. Naamah was the first one to know Noah to be a just man and perfect in his generations. Naamah married him before God ever spoke to him.

Naamah bore Japheth first. Then Shem. Then Ham. Though at some point Shem fell into the position of the baby of the family, spoiled and watched over. And Noah’s walks with God continued, every afternoon, and sometimes into the night, as Naamah raised the boys.

When Noah brought home God’s command to build the ark, Naamah helped him to make a model of the ark out of stalks of grass. “How can we do this?” Noah asked. And though neither of them could answer, they began the work of it.

And every thing that is in the earth shall die. But with thee will I establish my covenant.

They hurried their boys to marry, and they did without difficulty. Japheth married Adata; Ham, Neela; Shem, Sadie. Then there were eight of them to build. They worked for years. At night, they left and ate with their families, they played with children in the dirt. It was impossible for them to envision the destruction of the world. And why should they?

Noah and Naamah shook with their imaginings.

Two of every sort shall come unto thee, to keep them alive.

“How can we do this?” Noah asked Naamah again.

“If we don’t, we’ll die,” she answered. They were sitting on their bed.

“Maybe we should die,” he said, “if every one of us is wicked.”

“No,” she said, and she took him in her arms because he had begun to cry. “If I am sure of anything, I am sure that you and our children should not die.”

He did not say anything.

“I need you to be sure of it, too, Noah.” She pushed him away from herself. “I need for you, when you look at me, to be overwhelmed with the feeling that I should not die.”

He looked at her and nodded slowly.

“You don’t feel it,” she said.

“I want to.”

“What about our sons? Do you want them to die?”

He shook his head.

“But you think that maybe they should?”

He nodded and she stormed around their bed, keeping her eyes up so he could see how she did not look at him.

“Is it not love?” he shouted at her.

She stopped and put her face very close to his. “Love is protecting them.”

Neither of them said anything for a long time. They stayed in that position as if she could pin the thought into his head with her eyes.

“Are you with me?” he asked her.

“I am always with you,” she said.

And Noah went in, and his sons, and his wife, and his sons’ wives with him, into the ark.

When the rains began, Noah’s doubt left him.

When the rains continued, his guilt left him.

When the waters were high enough to lift the ark from the earth, he and all the family were asleep.

When they woke, they were adrift.

And what was remarkable, to them all, was that they could not feel the difference between the earth covered with life and the earth barren of it. They each had thought they’d feel it somewhere in their bodies—their chest or gut or bones—but none of them did.

And the waters prevailed upon the earth.

There was a time, then, when God forgot about the ark on the floodwaters. It was not a long time for God, but it was a long time. Enough that the family began to feel as if they had always been adrift. The waking to water, every day, flat and blue and everywhere. When someone dies and you forget how they look or how they laughed, that is how they forgot the land.

But only Naamah mourned it. The rest of them were merely eager to see it again.

Naamah sometimes imagined the water was land. That she could stand on it and face the boat, which she refused to call an ark anymore, disenchanted with it and these weeks with the animals, rowdy and foul.

From the surface of the water, the side of the boat seemed insurmountable, too big to be real. But given time and tools, she thought, she could climb it. She could solve it.

Naamah knew that the true difficulty was in her own position, on the boat.