Noah runs up onto the deck. “The ewe is lambing, Naamah. I thought you might want to come.”
“Yes,” she says. “I’ll follow you.”
They go to a large room where they keep all the sheep together. The sheep, in their small herd, are less anxious than some of the other animals. Naamah spots right away that one of the ewes has a lamb’s front hooves sticking out of its vagina. The ewe panics as Naamah approaches, but once Naamah gets her hands on her, she pushes her down, places a knee on her, and the ewe is calm.
Naamah holds the lamb’s hooves tightly with her left hand. Then she slides her right hand underneath the sheep’s tail, under a flap of skin, pale pink, a near half-moon. She moves her hand under the flesh, to the right and to the left and to the right again, until the head of the lamb begins to come forward. Then she grabs it, her hand around the back of the neck, under the ears.
“Now push,” she says to the ewe. And she pulls the lamb from the body of the sheep. From the neck, she runs her right hand over the lamb’s face and clears the nose of mucus. “Come on,” she says, and she pats the lamb on its side. It starts to breathe and sneezes.
Naamah looks up at Noah, who is smiling. He’s been standing in the doorway with the door open, to let the air circulate. Behind him is Neela. She looks like she might be sick. Naamah motions to Noah to take her away.
Naamah can see another lamb is coming, so she moves the first lamb to a fresh spot of hay. She then goes through the same actions until the second lamb is out and breathing. She moves the second lamb to be with the first, away from the blood and afterbirth. They are starting to fluff up. They are soft and sweet.
She turns back to the mother, who is already getting back on her feet. “Good job, mama,” she says. It’s then that Naamah notices that Noah, in tending to Neela, has left the door ajar and some sheep have begun to wander into the halls of the boat.
IN THE DESERT, even on cooler nights, Naamah and Noah would sleep naked next to each other. She liked to lay her hand on his chest. His hair was soft, and the skin underneath was even softer. His hands grew rough. Sometimes his lower arms. Always his cheeks, sun-worn. And if she ever had a day where she’d been bothered by little things he did or failed to do—not helping enough with the boys, not asking her how she felt—somehow her feelings were always eased by ending the day next to the soft skin of his chest. The next day he could do just one lovely thing, tell one perfect joke, and she would remember how difficult it was just to get through life at all. She loved him enormously, and she knew she always would.
“BOYS!” NAAMAH CALLS OUT AS she leaves the room, closing the door behind her, scanning the hallway for sheep. Neela has found a bucket nearby, and Noah is still with her, standing behind her.
“What happened?” he says.
“The sheep got out.”
“Shit. I’m sorry.”
“At least they’re all right,” she says. “Are you going to be okay, Neela?”
Neela nods, stretching one arm behind her and waving them off awkwardly.
“We’ll check on you,” Naamah says as they hurry away.
Soon Japheth, Ham, Shem, Sadie, and Adata are all there with them. “There should be fourteen full-grown sheep in the room, along with two new lambs, but four sheep have just wandered away,” Naamah tells them. “I’m not sure how far they got. Let’s split up and get them back.”
“New lambs! That’s so great, Mom,” says Shem.
“I can’t wait to see them!” Sadie’s beaming like she’s the mother.
“After all the sheep are back,” Naamah says, “we can play with the babies for a bit. They’ll probably be walking around by then.”
“See you back here,” Japheth says, and he heads off. They split up to cover the decks, with Naamah staying on this one. It looks empty, but there are rooms at the ends that aren’t always securely closed, like their bedrooms. She almost expects to find a sheep in her room, chewing on a blanket. But she makes it all the way to the other end of the boat, and all the rooms are empty that should be.
She turns to walk back down the hallway, dark as night in the middle of the boat, and then she hears something. It sounds like one of the cockatoos, repeating one word over and over: “Jael. Jael.” She stops to listen, and the word sounds familiar to her, but she can’t remember why. She runs her hand along the wooden door. But then she starts walking again, eager to see the sheep.
Noah, Japheth, and Adata are there, standing patiently in a little arc, and they’re smiling, looking down at an empty floor.
“What happened? Where did they all go?” Naamah asks.
“We’re back up to thirteen sheep, Naamah. We’re just admiring the little ones,” Noah says.
And then she understands—the way they’re standing, their smiles. She feels something bump into her legs, and she instinctively reaches down and shoves away the rough wool of one of the sheep she cannot see. Just when I actually wanted to see them, she thinks. Her chest begins to hurt.
“I rushed to the deck, just in case, but no sheep there,” Noah says. “Ham is with Neela. Japheth and Adata went one deck down and returned with three sheep. Shem and Sadie went to the lowest deck, and they’re not back yet.”
Naamah stumbles out of the room, trying to catch her breath. Noah follows her.
“Are you okay?”
She feels dizzy. “I need to swim,” she says. The angel can fix this.
“Right now?” Noah asks.
“Yes. But I’ll just be a minute. I’ll leave the ladder down. I promise.” And she leaves him, his body still leaning toward her in the darkness of the hallway.
BELOW THEM ALL, Sadie and Shem search the lower deck together. This level is darker and colder than the rest. Usually Sadie wraps herself in a blanket before walking around down here, but they came so fast.
It’s not hard to hear where the sheep has headed as they start down the hallway. It’s somewhere down at the end, confused and lonesome, maybe having stumbled into a small room.
But just as Naamah had unsettled the walrus, the sheep’s sad bleating has awoken some of the larger animals.
NAAMAH WADES OUT from the patch of land and gets under the water. She swims to where it gets deep, and the angel is there.
“Give it back,” Naamah says.
“Excuse me?” The angel’s voice is calm, almost polite.
“My ability. To see the animals. Give it back to me.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“When I was on the boat, I had stopped being able to see the animals. Then I met you and I could see them again. And now it’s gone again. I just helped these two beautiful lambs into this world and I can’t see them anymore. You must have taken it from me. You must have taken it back.”
“Naamah, I didn’t do anything to you.”
“Yes, you must have—and you can undo it. I need to see them again.”
“I’m sure you can regain it, if you have before. But it has nothing to do with me.”
“No—”
“You’re quick to assign blame where there is none.”
“No!”
“Naamah.” The angel’s face drops. “You must get back to the ark.”
“You can—”
“Naamah,” she says again, “get back.”
Naamah realizes something is wrong. The angel pulls her hands back along the sides of her rib cage, pushes forward with her palms, and Naamah flies backward through the water. She spins herself around and swims as fast as she can, to the land, the ladder, the boat.
SHEM AND SADIE hear the scratching of claws, but they continue down the hall. They reach the sheep and usher it back toward the stairs, Sadie in front and Shem behind. As they approach the scratching again, they hear a growl. It scares Sadie.
“We can go faster, if you want,” Shem says.
That’s when they hear the first pound—the sound of an animal launching itself into its door. The wood begins to splinter.
“Run, Sadie!” Shem is right beside the door when the second pound comes, and with it, the door breaks. Shem is one step ahead of the door as the animal crashes into the other side of the hallway, driven by its own force: a polar bear.
As it scrambles for its footing, the bear swings a paw at Shem, catching his leg.
NAAMAH CLIMBS THE LADDER, grabs her clothes but doesn’t bother dressing.
“Noah!” she screams. “Noah!”
They run into each other on the stairs.
“Is everyone okay?” she asks.
“Shem and Sadie still aren’t back.”
“We need to find them.”
They run together down the stairs.
SHEM YELLS OUT in pain as he runs. The sheep is frozen in the hallway and he climbs over it. The bear lashes out at the sheep next, and the moment’s distraction gives Shem and Sadie time to make it up the stairs. At the top there is a stronger door, a barricade, for emergencies like this.
This is where Naamah and Noah find them. Through the door, they can hear the bear filling itself with the warmth of the sheep. Shem passes out from the pain, and Sadie screams. Noah scoops him up.
“He will be okay, Sadie,” Naamah says. She follows Noah to the deck. They bring out water, soap, a needle and thread, and cloth to wrap the wound. They wash his leg, and Shem wakes again. Noah gives him a bit of cloth to bite down on. Sadie is waiting nearby, knowing not to get close.
Three of the five cuts are deep enough that they need stitches. It’s hard for Shem not to pull his leg away, so Noah sits on his chest, facing away from him, holding his leg down with both hands above the knee. As Naamah stitches the biggest cuts shut, the skin is pulled. She’s worried about the remaining two cuts opening further, so they each get a stitch, too.
Noah nods that she’s done well, and he gets off of Shem’s chest. He dries and wraps Shem’s leg, and Sadie rushes over and kisses Shem hard on the mouth.
JAPHETH AND ADATA ARE DOWNSTAIRS, waiting at the barricade to see what the bear will do next. When it’s quiet, they go in. The hall is covered in blood, but the bear and dead sheep are gone. The bear dragged it back to its room, its odd den. Japheth and Adata set to work fixing the door while the bear is still eating. After this little feast, if the bear conserves its energy, it might not need to eat again for a month. And they are hoping that the water will be gone by then.
They get long planks of wood from a closet to reinforce the door. Then they start to clean the blood. Neither of them feels sick or queasy, and they’re glad to know they have each other for the times ahead.
NOAH HELPS SHEM TO BED, but Naamah tells Sadie to follow her. They walk back toward the room with the sheep. They pass Neela and Ham, and tell them what’s happened. Ham goes off to be with Shem, and Naamah pulls Neela along with her and Sadie.
When they get to the room, Naamah encourages them to play with the lambs, whose knees still buckle. So the women sit down and pretend to forget everything that has happened that day, and they play. And though Naamah cannot see the lambs, she enjoys watching two of her daughters-in-law laughing and happy.
SOON AFTER THE RAINS STOPPED, Naamah had brought buckets of dirt from the storage room up to the deck and filled a very large, low frame with it all. She gathered manure from the cows and horses and mixed it in with the dirt. Then she went down to her seeds. She took a cup of grass seed, and then cups of clover and forb seeds, too, and brought them back to the deck in a cloth bag. She half-filled a bucket with water, placed the bag inside, and put on a lid. For days she tended the dirt in the frame and swapped out the water in the bucket. Soon the seeds were sprouting.
She poked holes into the dirt with her finger, row after row, then dropped a seed into each hole. She pinched the holes closed and the dirt fell to cover the seedlings. Soon a little pasture was growing on the deck. Naamah wanted to lie in it but didn’t trust that it wasn’t a fragile thing.
She was thrilled that soon she would be able to pick grass from it and offer it to a cow or sheep. She was thrilled that soon, after she’d taken her hand to its rich surplus and removed as much as she could, complete with sounds of tearing and ripping, no one would be able to tell. Her actions would be undetectable. Her presence would mean little.
THE DAY AFTER THE LAMBS are born, early in the morning, the family takes the lambs out on the land, in the sun, to help them dry out. Naamah watches from the deck, worried she’ll knock a lamb into the water in her blindness. Noah stays behind to keep her company.
From above, Naamah watches her sons and daughters-in-law, figuring where the lambs are by the way her family moves. She can hear the lambs’ young hooves even through her family’s excited cooing. The bandage on Shem’s leg shows that some blood has made it through during the night.
“We’ll change it when he gets back to the deck,” Noah says, watching her eyes, knowing what she’s thinking.
ABOUT A MONTH after the rains stopped, Naamah heard a great rustling in one of the rooms near her own. Nothing bad had happened with any of the animals yet—no one hurt, no door broken, everything according to plan—and she was feeling bold. She entered the room.
The walls and floor of the room were covered with atlas moths, a thousand of them, some clustered in corners, others flying clumsily through the air. Naamah stepped inside and shut the door behind her. She thought she should be scared, but instead it comforted her, how this room no longer looked like a room, the walls and floor shifting in shapes of red and brown. The ends of the moths’ wings looked like the heads of yellow snakes, dissatisfied and bitter.
She slid her feet across the floor, hoping they would make way for her passing body. Some did, but some were caught under her feet and began to die. Naamah crouched and swept her arm across the floor to make a space for herself. She sat with her legs crossed, watching the wall ahead of her morph and distort. If she unfocused her eyes, the shapes seemed to move toward her. The wall would bend and lean, veer in a blink of her eye.
She closed her eyes and tried to feel the movement in her body, too, which she knew should be its own collection of endless contortions. She felt nothing but steady. She turned and pushed aside more moths so she might lie down. On her back, the moths began to climb her. She ignored them. She knew she could feel the unreliability of her own form if she could only figure out how. She tried not to focus on her body. She tried to will herself into motion. She tried to feel the floor move beneath her. And then suddenly it worked. She felt it move, and her body, in staying still, felt such a jolt that she screamed.
The moths weren’t bothered at all.
NOAH TELLS Naamah that one lamb is doing better than the other. Naamah, determined to prevent another outburst from one of the large predators, decides to feed the weaker lamb to a tiger who’s been showing signs of hunger. Since what happened to Shem, she’s been spending more time than she’d like to admit outside the predators’ rooms, hovering outside in the early mornings, listening as they pace and scratch, bellies grumbling.
Sadie is there when Naamah goes to get the lamb.
“Oh,” Naamah says, “I didn’t realize anyone was in here.”
“That’s okay, Naamah. Would you like to sit with me?”
Naamah nods and plops down right where she is, by the door.
Sadie smiles at her. “These little ones give me such joy.” The lambs spring about. Over to Naamah and back again. Naamah can hear their hooves pop, pop, popping. She feels one starting to nibble at her pocket, where she’s stuffed a bit of clover she brought from the garden on the deck. She reaches down and can tell it’s the larger lamb. It must be. But the treat is for the smaller lamb, the sacrifice, and Naamah pushes the lamb away.
“Where is the little one?” she asks Sadie.
Sadie grabs hold of him and pulls him over to Naamah. “That was sweet of you to bring,” Sadie says, gesturing at the clover.
Naamah gets down on her knees, takes him in her arms, and brings the clover under his chin. “No, Sadie. It wasn’t.” Naamah can’t look at her. “I have to take him. The tiger could become dangerous.”
Sadie’s eyes fill with tears.
Naamah says, “It’s just . . . the water isn’t going down fast enough. You know that.”
Sadie still doesn’t respond.
“It’s not the first time we’ve had to. I . . .”
The sheep begin to bleat, as if they know.
“I wanted to shield you from it.”
“How often have you done it?” Sadie asks.
“Not terribly often.”
“You’re lying to me, Naamah.”
Naamah looks at her. “Please, let me.” She looks down again. “Let me this time.”
Sadie stands, brushes hay off her dress. Tears are falling down her cheeks, but she doesn’t whimper as she leaves the room. Naamah waits until she can’t hear Sadie’s footsteps. Then she picks up the lamb.
FOR THREE DAYS IN A ROW, Naamah returned to the room with the moths. On the second day, she spent hours examining them, scouring their bodies, and she discovered they had no mouths. She tried to entice them with food, to provoke some proboscis to unfurl. When she finally accepted that there was nothing to find, she thought, Well, how long can they live like this?
On the third day, almost all of them were dead. Their bodies were piled in layers on the floor. Some clung dead to the walls. She brought in the largest bag she could find, and started to gather up the moths. Their wings did not hold their shape at her touch. Some structural piece—inside them, around them, she didn’t know—broke, but nothing broke off. She grabbed them by the handful, threw body after body into the bag. She let the bag hang open like a mouth and swept them in by the armful. When the bag was full enough to stand on its own, she arranged its open mouth and tried to scoop them in. They fell between her elbows, slipped down against her body. Then she took the bag to the room of snakes, to the lizards, the birds, the monkeys, and spent a whole day treating animals to the spoils of the room.
DESPITE SADIE’S DISTRESS, Naamah finds herself outside the door of the tiger’s room feeling oddly indifferent. She feels the lamb’s quick breath and beating heart under her arm and against her own chest, and she wonders if it would be kinder to kill him before she takes him in. Of course it would be. She kneels down, places the lamb beside her, and breaks its neck over her leg. Then she tosses the dead body into the tiger’s feeding room and closes the door loudly behind her. Why is this any different than the moths? she asks herself over and over.
WHEN SHE’D CLEARED THE ROOM of dead moths, she found the thousands of eggs they’d left behind. She decided to kill almost all of them, then and there. She scraped them off the floor, gathered them in a bucket, took them to the deck, and threw them in the water. When the remaining eggs hatched, she fed many of the caterpillars to the other animals, just as she had done with the moths. She left about fifty caterpillars to do the process all over again. She feared that if she left only a few, she might sense their genders subconsciously and select only female caterpillars to save. Then they’d never exist on earth again; she’d never again have a room that could change everything she knew about how she could exist inside a space. In the days that followed, she saw the pattern of the moths everywhere, even when she looked at the sky. The world felt smaller because of this, her body more at ease.