“Why were you so angry?” I asked her that night as she was tucking me in.
“I don’t want you to grow up with that garbage in your head. When I was a kid, I had to go to church. I imagined God was some big, mean guy staring down, and I was afraid to do anything, afraid to be myself or have fun.”
She told me about her father, how strict he was, as if this were also God’s fault. She said she’d wanted her freedom. The way she told me this made me feel that she was still struggling to be free. She seemed about to tell me more, but her expression became pained and she said nothing.
“Who is God?” I finally asked, just to make her speak. She sighed and explained how some people believed in an all-powerful, judgmental geezer who saw everything we did. Her description was so convincing that I forgot what we’d been talking about before and became a little jealous of this old man’s mental powers. Above all, I was angry at the thought of being spied on, and I told her that I was never going to take a bath again.
✴
MY SISTER WAS lying on her belly with a book, the blinds drawn, her room so faintly lit I didn’t know how she could read.
“Want to hear a story?” I asked and flopped down next to her.
“Okay,” she said and turned onto her side. I wasn’t sure why I was bothering her. Vacation had ended and winter dragged on, my parents fighting, all of us busy with our own things, books or music or video games.
I began to describe a future in which everyone could levitate, but she said, “Tell me about how Bonnie and André met.”
“Well, she’s from Pittsburgh,” I said and thought of all she’d shared over the years. “Grandma’s mom is German, and Grandpa’s from somewhere else. He made steel. Bonnie didn’t like them because they believed in God, so she ran away to live in nature. Since André grew up really poor, he could do everything—farm and catch fish and even … deliver babies.” This always sounded funny to me, as if he were a mailman, but now the story I’d been struggling to find became clear. It was about my birth, and I repeated the version he’d often told me. “I was born on the living room couch. André delivered me. The cord was around my neck.”
“What cord?”
“Babies are born with a rope. Sometimes it feeds them, but sometimes it strangles them. He took it off and blew into my mouth, and then I began to breathe.”
“Oh,” she said quietly, as if expecting something else. I didn’t know what happened after my birth, and feeling vaguely irritated, I got up and walked away. The next day, after school, she asked me to tell another story, but I said I was busy and left her in the musty silence of the house.
As I crossed the frozen fields, I wished for spring and that first breathless warmth that was no warmth at all but seemed it after so long in the cold. Dandelions would bloom, like when I was very small and everything was perfect.
I sat in my favorite place, a grove of large trees where the ground was without weeds—soft and shadowed all summer, though now I stared up through the naked branches at the colorless sky. Everyone I knew had died. The house had burned down. The school had been incinerated. I was the hunter, the loup-garou. The world had ended, but in nature I would survive.
Eventually it grew late, and my mother’s voice called across the valley from the back porch, my name echoing off the mountains.
✴
THE SNOWMELT CAME suddenly, flooding drainage ditches, covering the fields, water gathering toward our backyard until it shone in a crescent around the slight rise where our house had been built. The sun blazed day after day, and I forgot my boredom.
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
