Naamah doesn’t swim again for days. Her family doesn’t want her to, of course, but she doesn’t want to either. She is quiet at meals. Ever since she’s been back on the boat, she can see the animals again. Perhaps she was close to death, she thinks; perhaps she’s been reborn in some way. Or maybe her restored vision is a gift from the angel, to keep Naamah from getting herself killed on the boat. Whatever the cause, it brings her no happiness. She sees nothing but hooves that need trimming, nails that need clipping, flaking skin in their fur. Every sight a chore to be done.
She starts to spend her days and nights on the deck because she can’t bear to go to her room and walk past all their doors.
One night, a gerbil makes its way to the deck and runs to her for warmth. It’s not the smartest animal, but it’s figured out that much.
“Now I have to go downstairs, don’t I?” she says.
She places the gerbil in a pouch in her clothes and drapes a blanket around herself. She finds a closet in the hall downstairs, opens the door, lays the blanket down at her feet, and starts to fill it with things. A cube of pitch, a pitch candle, a wire stand, a metal bowl, a metal spoon, a small wipe cloth, a plank of wood, a hammer, and nails. Then she takes up the corners of the blanket and carries all of it to the room where the gerbils live.
Inside, she takes the gerbil out of the pouch and lowers it gently to the ground. She spots right away where it chewed its way out.
“I will not punish you for this,” Naamah says. “You did what you were born to do.”
The gerbil’s mate comes up and investigates the new smell on the gerbil, the chill the deck left on its fur. The gerbil’s mate’s teeth are overgrown. One has gotten so long it’s curved around the creature’s head in a tight spiral, up and around the side, toward the brain.
“You haven’t been chewing the way you should, have you? I’ll have to come back with the clippers. I don’t know why someone hasn’t mentioned you. Have you been hiding?”
She sets up the wire stand, arranges the candle beneath it, the metal bowl above, and then places the cube on top. She lights the candle, and while the pitch melts she hammers the plank of wood over the hole that the gerbil made.
“You should let her help you next time.”
Once the pitch is melted, she lowers the spoon into it. It immediately starts to firm up at the coolness of the spoon, but she stirs until the spoon is as hot as the pitch. Then she drips the pitch over the new plank of wood.
“I’m going to make this door a little less appealing to chew through. We can’t be doing this every night, can we?”
She spreads the pitch with the back of the spoon, a thin, even coat over the entire length of the bottom of the door, starting a little high so she can catch every drip.
“If He regrets you, gerbil, why save you, do you think? When the water recedes, won’t you create all the new gerbils just the same? Are you so different, gerbil of the new world?”
The gerbil bites her hard on the leg. She yelps and hits the gerbil smack on the head with the spoon, and it dies instantly. The other gerbil comes over and starts eating him. Naamah smashes her on the head as well.
I don’t know if we brought enough pairs, she thinks. They were supposed to bring seven pairs of the clean animals, only one pair of the unclean animals, but that seemed too risky to Noah and Naamah. There are at least two pairs of every animal on the boat. But even if she has not driven gerbils to extinction, she wonders, Am I wicked?
She lies down and falls asleep there, in the small room, beside the bodies of the gerbils.
WHEN THEY LIVED in the village, a man used to come through every so often, quietly asking for the dead. Once, Naamah came upon him out in the desert, dissecting a body. Around it were bowls, each with a different part of the body she’d never seen.
He flushed at the sight of her. He started apologizing, but she shook her head, insisting she was fine. When he finally relaxed, she asked him to name the parts in the bowls—a liver, a heart. That was the first time she’d seen a full tongue. She didn’t realize how far back it went into her throat. In the bowl, it resembled a penis. He commented on her tough stomach. At the time, she’d thought this man’s work merely strange; now she wondered if it was wickedness.
Then healers began to come to the village to learn from him. He was not a healer himself, but he taught many men, and many midwives, too. He cannot be solely wicked, Naamah thought.
“YOU HAVE BEEN DIFFERENT since you fell in the water,” Shem says.
“Have I?”
“Yes. Worried.”
“I think I’ve been worried this whole time.”
Shem smiles. “Something different.”
She shrugs.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean.”
“I’m sorry. You’re right.”
“What happened when you fell into the water?”
“It hurt. It hurt so much I passed out, and your father rescued me. What about up here? That’s where things were really happening.”
“Not much.”
“You too, huh?”
“Okay, okay. At first, we didn’t know you’d fallen in. Dad told us to deal with the wolf, and Japheth took it back to its room. Dad went to the railing, and that’s when we realized what had happened. We looked for you in the dark, and you were nowhere. And then the moon came out, and your body came to the surface. The way you rose, back first, in your pale clothes, you looked like a moon yourself. As soon as Dad saw you, he jumped in. Ham and I grabbed the swing and tied it near where you were and threw it over the side.”
“And then?”
“I guess that was when Japheth came back up. He asked us where Dad was, and when we told him you were both in the water, he rushed to the side. But at that point all we could do was wait until Dad had you both back on the swing.”
“You pulled me up?”
“Yeah. Dad tried to protect you as he walked up the boat, but you got scraped up pretty bad—you know that. Once you were back on deck, we cleaned and dressed the cuts on your arm and leg.”
“Where was Sadie? And Neela and Adata?”
“Trying to quiet the animals. Tossing them feed. They didn’t know that you’d fallen.” Shem paused. “I was scared.”
“I would have been scared if I knew what was happening.”
“Don’t joke,” he says.
“I know.” She looks at him. “I love you.”
“I love you, Mom.”
She hugs him. Over his shoulder, all she can see is water.