Wanda started taking the canoe out alone, after their work was done, disappearing for hours at a time. She didn’t ask if it was all right, she just went. Phyllis bit back her objections as best she could, telling herself it might do Wanda some good. She’d have to trust her to navigate the wild on her own someday—it might as well begin now. She was young but also capable, and that’s what mattered. Phyllis leaned into the idea that Wanda had already learned more about survival than most adults. Even so. She worried.
On one of these afternoons, Phyllis stood in the driveway, shifting from one foot to the other as Wanda pulled the canoe out of the bramble where they hid it and down toward the water. Phyllis almost stepped forward to help, but then held herself back. Wanda had to be able to do these things alone. She struggled under the weight of it, but she kept it aloft, careful not to drag it across the rocks and scratch up the hull. It wasn’t so long ago that she wouldn’t have been able to manage it. Phyllis remembered the day they brought it home—how firm Wanda was in wanting it. The way the old fire chief just shrugged. Phyllis tried to pay him, but he wouldn’t take her money. “There’s people in this town freaked out by that kid,” he said to her when Wanda was busy cramming the paddle into the back of Phyllis’s car. “But I never been. You gotta be made of something extra, coming into this world like that. I don’t know what she wants that old piece of shit for, but she can have it and good luck to her.” Phyllis wondered where Arjun had ended up. If he was still alive.
At the water’s edge, Wanda slid the canoe down off her shoulder and it landed with a smack in the stream.
“You’re sure you don’t want company?” Phyllis knew she didn’t.
“No, thanks,” Wanda said.
“But you’ll be careful. Not too far?”
“Not too far.”
Phyllis stared at her old mailbox, all but submerged beside the canoe, its little red flag valiantly lifted against the push of the current. Inside, the box would be full of water and algae and maybe a creature or two seeking refuge. She wondered what species had claimed it. In another time, she would already know the answer to that question. She would have been watching since the day they moved in. Wanda was not the only one struggling in the wake of Lucas’s departure. “We should build a dock one of these days,” she said, trying to keep Wanda here just a little longer. Reaching for something, anything, that might occupy her interest. Wanda only grunted in response. The truth was, such an addition would attract too much attention. Someone might see it and wander up toward the blue house, now completely hidden by the bramble she had been cultivating for more than a decade. And they would almost certainly steal the canoe if it was left in plain view. But Phyllis wanted to pretend such concerns didn’t matter, if only for a moment. “That’d be a good project, wouldn’t it? I’ve got that lumber set by, it would be fun, we could—”
Wanda hopped into the canoe without answering and pushed it out into the canal in the same fluid motion, leaving Phyllis there at the foot of the driveway, the water lapping at her feet. She trailed off, her sentence unfinished. Wanda’s paddle began to flicker in and out of the water, and soon enough, between the pull of the current and the determined press of her arms, she was gone.
After Lucas left them for good, the constraints of their life revealed themselves. To Wanda and Phyllis both. Before, the dissolution of society had felt like a release from a structure that no longer made any sense. There was relief in that, and excitement. But once that final human tether to the outside civilization was cut, isolation crept close. The tides pressed in, rising higher and higher. The sun beat down, shining hotter and hotter. The monotony of their days took on a foreboding as the swamp spread and deepened.
Hurricane season arrived, stretching well beyond its usual confines. With it, spikes of uncertainty. Without the constant deluge of the weather service’s predictions, they had to rely on their own observations. Every time the sky darkened and the needle of the old-fashioned barometer began to swing, they prepared. Sometimes Phyllis cranked the radio to try to glean what she could, but the forecasts were written for the north and the signal was barely there now that all the nearby repeaters were decommissioned. Officially, there was no one left here—no one to warn, no one to rescue. Their information came from what was left unsaid. Eventually, the two of them began to rely on the color of the sky and the smell of ozone that rolled in off the ocean instead. They stopped bothering with filling in the blanks of the weather service’s broadcasts. Their own forecasts were more reliable. Wanda especially, Phyllis noticed, seemed to know when it was time to strap in. She knew even when the sky was still clear and the air pressure had yet to drop. Once Wanda made the call, their preparations were a well-oiled machine.
Bit by bit, the Wanda she remembered returned. As far as Phyllis could tell, it was the storms she had to thank. As the first hurricane season after Lucas left swept through, Wanda clicked into that rhythm of preparation, endurance, recovery. The work required a degree of innovation and each storm was its own surprise, washing away the monotony that had colored the preceding spring. It was as if the storms were filling her internal stores with that great, churning power they wrought, feeding her in some extraordinary capacity. Shocking those batteries back to life. Phyllis watched the smooth, almost effortless way Wanda navigated the storms, wondering, not for the first time, where the lines between what was explained, what had yet to be explained, and what was wholly inexplicable were drawn. There was data Wanda could hear that she couldn’t. Which category did that belong in?
There were a great many storms that year, some harsher than others, but all demanding in their own way. In October, Wanda turned seventeen. During another time and in another place, she’d be a girl toying with the idea of adulthood, just beginning to shake off the vestiges of childishness. But here, now—she was grown. The luxury of that transition had gone the way of gasoline and beach bungalows.
As the season wound down, they decided to see what might be salvaged from some of the big box stores up north. It was a long way by boat, but now that the water had swallowed the old Highway 1, it was the only way. Paddling that far upriver took time and muscle, and in the past, Phyllis reasoned that whatever treasures they might find weren’t worth the exposure of the trek. But she wanted to give her young friend a treat. And, if she was being honest, she needed one for herself as well. The relative calm of winter’s skies after such a tumultuous summer beckoned them away from the haven of the blue house. She decided that the risk, just this once, was acceptable.
They struck out when it was still dark. The humidity of the summer months still hadn’t broken. Most days, the temperature would creep into the nineties and maybe beyond by the time the sun gathered its strength above the horizon, but none of this was unusual anymore. They reasoned that if they got an early enough start, they could be back before the hottest part of the day. Taking turns rowing, they made good time. Phyllis began, then passed the paddle to Wanda when she was tired. Wanda leaned into it, sliding the blades in and out of the water so cleanly they barely made a sound, propelling their vessel faster and straighter than Phyllis ever could, a coordinated dance of muscle and tendon flickering underneath the skin of her bare arms. She thought about what Lucas had said to her before he left, that his little sister belonged here. Watching Wanda, she understood what he’d seen. And she understood that he was right. Loss was a part of life above the Floridian border and below it. Whether he’d taken her or not, she couldn’t have escaped it. At least here, Wanda not only understood her ecosystem, she was a part of it. It was the water-bound light that flocked to her, but so much more—the storm predictions, her ease in the water, the way she adjusted to the changing environment almost effortlessly. Leaps of adaptation are what’s necessary now, Phyllis thought. If humans desired a future, if they deserved one, it would have to come from a generation made like Wanda.