When Jael wakes, Naamah is still asleep, but her breath is steady, and she does not sweat, and she is not pale. All is well—she’s just asleep.
The rest of them carry on with their lives, which means that even the dread around the prospect of Naamah’s death is something they can become accustomed to. In her absence, they tend her garden. Jael continues to visit her in his dreams. Japheth starts going out again on his horse. The map grows larger in the tent. Adata’s stomach grows larger, too. For the first time, Danit laughs at a face that Ham makes. Neela starts to paint again.
The birds come as God said they would. Sadie sees them first and yells until everyone is out of their tents. Together they follow the dark sheet of birds to the garden. The sun comes through gaps in their formation like sparks.
When the birds land, the ground can’t be seen. They peck and peck. And when they leave again, the noise of their shuffling wings is tremendous. Neela covers Danit’s ears. Everything falls quiet again as the birds fly higher, as they catch the currents of air.
WEEKS LATER, STILL ASLEEP, Naamah is lying in the tree in the rain forest again when Sarai comes to her. “Am I dying?” Naamah asks her.
“No,” she says. “You saw God. Your body needs to rest.”
“Don’t I need to eat? Drink water?”
Sarai smiles. “No. Your body has been forced into a kind of hibernation in order to recover. Everything has slowed.”
“How are you? I heard God spoke to you.”
Sarai reaches behind her neck and gathers her long black hair, which is down now but still plaited and studded with gold. She pulls it over her shoulder and lies back on a branch. The two women, lounging there, look like the world was made for them. Their bodies dappled, their bodies round and soft, the tissue of their breasts resting to the sides of their rib cages, their arms strong, their legs stronger, their heads the most peculiar things in the rain forest.
“Did He tell you that?” asks Sarai.
“Yes.”
“Speaking to Him is not like speaking to you. It’s as if He forgets I was human.”
“Are you not human anymore?”
“Decidedly not.”
Naamah raises herself up on her right elbow and her breasts fall to the right. If Sarai isn’t human anymore, perhaps she isn’t either. Perhaps in another place, she could look upon her body and know what new thing she is becoming.
IN ANOTHER DREAM, Naamah asks Sarai to take her to the strangest place she’s ever been.
Sarai takes them to a beach of white sand and says, “It looks like a cloud was cursed and turned to stone.”
“Every cloud,” Naamah says.
“No! Wait!” Sarai yells. And then they are at a lake that’s red.
“Can I touch it?” Naamah asks.
Sarai looks at her. “You’re dreaming, Naamah. You can do whatever you want.”
Naamah puts her hand under the surface of the water and looks at it, in perfect stillness. “Can nothing hurt me in the dream?”
“I don’t think so.”
Naamah’s hand fades to nothing, and she thinks, After all this, am I only becoming a ghost?
“You’re waking up,” Sarai says.
Naamah’s whole body is gone now, but she can still hear Sarai.
“If I don’t see you again,” Sarai says, “it was good to see you.”
IN THE TENT, Naamah feels her mouth first. She can feel that it tastes bad, smells bad. Her tongue is thick and stiff, and when she opens her mouth, she takes a breath in like a gasp, straight to her belly. She coughs. She opens her eyes.
“Hello,” says Jael.
She can’t speak yet, but she smiles. She moves her tongue around her mouth. She feels the two lines carved into her tooth. She was already beginning to forget them before she fell asleep. Everything she can do to her body, her body can absorb.
Jael flies off and returns with Noah. She tries to sit up, but when she can’t, Noah lifts her, and she rests her head on him.
“I have water. Do you want to try to drink?” he asks.
She nods into his shoulder. He leans her back and holds a bag of water to her lips and tilts it up. Swallowing the water hurts, but she does it.
“I can get you some broth. Do you want to eat?”
She nods again, so he lays her back down, gets a bowl of broth, and brings it back. He places it on the ground and looks for something to prop her up. Jael flies around the tent as if he’s helping. Soon she’s propped up, and Noah is spooning broth to her lips and she’s drinking it down. But Jael doesn’t stop flying around the top of the tent, chirping and whistling, making every sound he can make.
NAAMAH REGAINS HER STRENGTH. She takes it slow. The sun seems too bright, but every day it gets more tolerable as she forgets the depths that God showed her.
Soon she’s strong enough to watch Danit, and Neela leaves Danit with her constantly. Danit crawls around Naamah’s feet as Naamah practices standing. She shifts her weight from one foot to another.
Naamah says to Danit, “Maybe I should be down there with you, huh?”
Naamah sits, and then leans forward until her palms hit the ground. She rocks back and forth until she can get up on her knees. She moves ahead her left knee, her right hand, and then her right knee and left hand.
“No. No, no. This is worse.” She laughs.
Danit laughs back.
Naamah crawls her arms out until she can fall to her side. “What do you think? How much longer will I be like this?”
Danit climbs up on her until she’s standing. She whacks one hand on Naamah’s shoulder. She bends her knee and her body dips and she loses her balance and she falls back onto her butt. She looks at Naamah as if the ground has offended her.
“Oh, baby, it happens,” Naamah says.
Danit cries, and it could be for any number of reasons.
ADATA COMES BACK TO HER tent one day to find Danit and Naamah there. Japheth’s map has extended to the highest point of the tent, and Naamah’s lying in the middle of it all, looking up, dictating to Danit, a river, a mountain, a lake.
Adata doesn’t make a sound.
“And where there is nothing marked, that is the desert,” Naamah is saying.
Danit spots Adata and crawls over to her. Naamah cranes her neck to make sure Danit isn’t leaving the tent.
“Adata!” she says.
“Hi, Naamah.”
“I hope it’s okay that we’re in here.”
Adata comes over to her. “It is,” she says. She sits down with her stomach large in her lap.
Naamah puts her hand, palm up, on Adata’s leg, and Adata holds it. “How are you doing?” Naamah asks.
“I’m good. Tired.”
Danit crawls over to them and touches Adata’s belly.
“Baby,” Adata says.
Naamah looks back at the map.
Adata asks, “What happened to you?”
“I don’t know,” Naamah says, because that’s what she’s been saying to everyone.
“You know,” Adata says.
Naamah looks at her. “Why do you want to know?”
Adata shakes her head.
“What is it?”
“Are we in danger, Naamah?”
“No. I would have told you that. We wouldn’t still be here.”
“So nothing did this to you?”
“Nothing you need to worry about.”
“See! You’re doing it again. It was something that did this to you, but you think none of us need to fear it. How can you know that?”
“I know it because if He wanted to harm you, He would already have done it. His intentions aren’t hidden.”
“God did that to you?”
“I don’t think He knew the effect it would have. I don’t think He—”
“No. Stop. Just stop,” Adata says, and she gets up and starts to leave the tent.
“He’s not what you think He is,” Naamah says.
Adata spins around. “He has to be!” She puts her hands in her hair and takes them out again. “He has to be because that’s why I’ve accepted all of this!”
“I’m glad you’re here.”
“That doesn’t mean enough, Naamah. Not for me.”
“Yes, it does.”
“I should’ve died in that flood,” Adata says.
“No, you—”
“You should have, too. He could have started again.”
“Maybe, but we made it easier for Him by caring for all of the animals.”
“I’m not solely a caretaker, Naamah.”
“Not to me.”
“To Him?”
“I don’t speak for Him.”
Adata starts to leave again and Danit follows her.
“Adata,” Naamah says. “Danit.”
“I’ve got her,” Adata says over her shoulder.
Naamah stays, looking at the marks Japheth has made in the tent. Soon he will have mapped out everything he can reach with a horse with the intention of returning. But with a project such as this, he will not be content to stop. When he proposes to Adata that they move on from here, Naamah imagines she will agree to it.
THE NEXT WEEK, it rains so much one night that it reminds everyone of the flood, even if only in their sleep. In the morning, the river has flooded. Tops of bushes look like they’re sitting on top of the water, and Naamah is reminded of the heads of the dead children as she looks out across it.
Neela comes up next to her. “Will you sit for me, Naamah? For a painting?”
“You want to paint me? Why?”
“Honestly? We thought you were going to die, Naamah. I thought we would lose Noah, too, if you died. And I want something of you, if that makes sense.”
Naamah looks at the river, whose boundaries were never boundaries, whose water was never its own, just a collection of water cutting a path. Should the water be named river if it’s only that? Should it be named at all?
“I will sit for you,” she says.
EVERY DAY NEELA PAINTS HER. Naamah has never been so still in her life. She sits cross-legged in the dirt, and she tries to enjoy the hours. She focuses on the warmth of the dirt on her legs, the sunlight on her arms. Some days Jael sits with her.
“Do you want me to paint Jael, too?” Neela asks.
“Whatever you want,” Naamah says.
Every evening Neela insists that Naamah returns home before she returns with the painting. After Naamah passes her, she turns the painting from the direction of the tents.
“I won’t look,” Naamah says, raising her hands in the air.
“Let me have my fun, won’t you?” And Neela smiles.
AT LAST SADIE IS PREGNANT. With her pregnancy, her great joy returns. Neela is done with her painting, but she hides it away so that Sadie can be the center of attention for a few days.
In secret, Naamah weaves a giant wreath together from branches she’s collected. She asks everyone to pick wildflowers and bring them to her tent. She has them each tuck the long stems into the frame of the wreath.
Early one morning, after Sadie goes to wash in the river, Naamah and Shem carry the wreath into their tent.
“Do you think she’ll like it?” Naamah asks.
“She’s going to love it,” Shem says. “It’s great, Mom.”
Naamah puts her arm around him. “I’m so excited for you.”
“Me too,” he says.
“Do you like it here?”
“I do,” he says.
She smiles as she steps away from him. “I better go before she comes back.”
“You don’t want to be here when she sees it?”
She shakes her head and walks out into the sunlight. The day has come on strong and hot.
WHEN NEELA DOES REVEAL HER painting, the family applauds. It looks just like Naamah. It reminds Naamah she is, in and of her body, a forgettable woman. Beautiful, but forgettable. And though that is a feeling she often yearns for, to be confronted with it like this makes her feel like she might die. She wonders if God guided Neela’s hand to capture her this way. She wonders if she might turn around and see the Metatron there, smirking, as much as a vulture can smirk.
THE NEXT MORNING JAEL IS GONE. At first she thinks he might be with someone else, but then she puts her fingers through her hair and feels a spot on her scalp that stings—a small scratch like when they first met. She remembers what he said in their last dream, that he would leave when she was well, and she thinks, Is this well?
She finds Japheth scraping a hide clean.
“When are you leaving again?” she asks.
“Soon.”
“I bet you’d like to follow Jael wherever he is right now, the way he followed you.”
He stops working on the hide. “Jael left?”
She nods.
He returns to her question. “Wouldn’t anyone?” he says.
“I don’t think so. I think most of us like the home we’re making here.”
“The world is nearly empty right now. It will never be that way again. I think I have to see it.”
“And what about being a father?”
“I can do that, too.”
“Okay,” she says.
“You don’t think I can.”
“I do. If you say you can, then you can.” But she wonders if Japheth will feel the same way about exploring the world after he holds his child. And as the child gets older, when the child is so in love with Adata, and they seem to delight in each other and their home—won’t he want to be a part of that?
Or maybe he will always be outside of it. Maybe he has inherited that part of Naamah and will build it out to an extreme. Maybe the wonders of the world will be enough. Maybe he will stand behind a waterfall or at the edge of a canyon and his laugh will be so loud and true that the world will split in two at his mirth and that will make even more places for him to explore.
NEXT SHE FINDS Noah collecting eggs from the hens.
“Jael is gone,” she says.
He stops. “I’m sorry, Naamah. I know you love him.”
She reaches her hand into a nest and finds two warm eggs. She places them into his basket. “I do,” she says.
He lowers his head next to her and kisses her cheek.
She takes a big breath and keeps her head straight. She knows if she looks at him she’ll cry, and he knows it, too.
He goes back to the hens.
“I’ll be at the river, then,” she says, and she walks off as if someone might scold her for being late.
SHE SITS WITH HER FEET in the pool of the hot spring. She reaches to touch the white crust that’s beginning to cover the rocks beside it, where the water rushes over and evaporates off, leaving its minerals behind. How thick the crust must have been before the flood. And how fully it might return. And how did the geyser understand the flood? And how did the geyser understand the dead? And how does the geyser understand Naamah?
She steps back out of the pool, takes her sharpened bone, and chips away at the crust on the rocks, hacks away at it. Enough to leave a deep mark and change its shape. Enough that she’s covered in sweat. And she promises herself that she’ll return and do it over and over again.
If she is the bearer of this new world, then let everything be touched by her hand.