She was sick in the corner. As quietly as she could, so that Wanda wouldn’t hear. Her head pounding, she retched until there was nothing left. She put her hand against the wall to steady herself and waited until the static intruding on her vision cleared. She filled the crate as quickly as she could and left these two bodies to their pyre. There was nothing more she could offer them. Not even her remorse. She told herself that if she were a better woman, she would say a few words. A prayer. A scrap of ceremony. She paused in the doorway, the crate heavy in her arms, and tried to locate some semblance of respect. But she couldn’t.
Upstairs, she could hear Wanda packing. Drawers thudded against the bureau, plastic hangers clattered, the closet door smacked the wall. Phyllis understood the urgency, but she was having trouble convincing her body to meet it. She roamed the first floor, gathering items in what she hoped was a logical process. Later, she would look at her choices and shake her head, but for now, she did her best. Pots, pans, books, tools, batteries, a camping stove, and as many propane tanks as she could carry. Matches. First aid. Iodine. Needles and thread. Tarps. What else, what else? She chided herself: “Focus,” she whispered.
There was so much they would have to leave behind. So much work she had done over the years that could help them no longer. They agreed that Wanda would take as much as she could to the new place in the canoe—mostly the lumber and tools they’d need to build, but also some of the food—while Phyllis hid the rest in the swamp, to be fetched later. It was a good plan. The only plan. There was too much to do and too much to transport for them to stay together. Still, it was hard to let Wanda out of her sight after everything that had happened. Phyllis tried to give her the handgun as she climbed into the canoe, fully loaded and riding low in the water.
Wanda shook her head. “No,” she said.
“Please.”
“I don’t want it.”
Phyllis watched Wanda row away without the gun and couldn’t tell what worried her more: the violence of the night’s murders, or the idea that Wanda might not be able to do such a thing again. Give her time, she thought. Give her time. She would become whatever this place needed her to be.
After Wanda had made three trips and Phyllis had hidden what she could in the swamp, they came together in the living room for the last time. A dim, murky light tossed up shadows on the walls and made the piles of rejected items strewn throughout the rooms look like monsters. The careful order of the blue house was unmade. In its place, panic. Was this finality really necessary? Was it just an ill-considered reaction to the violence that had found them here? She asked herself again, for the hundredth time, if leaving the house behind was the wrong thing to do, if the reward of making it through the night was that they got to stay…but then she remembered the rising water. The threat of more drifters lurking nearby. If they stayed, they would always be afraid. There would always be an invisible clock. Human or nature. Either, or both. No, they had to leave. It was time for the next phase. Phyllis’s head throbbed so hard it was audible—a beating drum. She tried to concentrate.
“I think we have what we need,” she said, surveying the chaos. Wanda was quiet. Phyllis looked over and saw the glimmer of unspilled tears accumulating in her eyes. Pulling Wanda in close, she smoothed back her curls. “I know,” she said. “I know.”
“You don’t,” Wanda snapped. The thrum inside Phyllis’s skull beat harder, louder, faster. She struggled to stay upright, to hold not only herself but also this girl, this child, who had left something precious behind in the night. A thing she’d never get back. Innocence? Hope? Phyllis couldn’t possibly know.
“You’re right,” Phyllis said, dismayed that this was true, that Wanda had gone somewhere she could not possibly follow. She tried to think of something she could say that might help, but there was nothing. They just stood, propped up against each other like a lean-to, and were quiet. Eventually, Wanda separated herself. She straightened her spine and rolled back her shoulders. She wiped her face. “It’s time to go.”
Watching Wanda pour the last of their gasoline down the hallway and out the front door, Phyllis understood that willingly destroying this house she had given so much of herself to, the structure that had kept them safe for all these years, was in many ways the final act of what it meant to teach Wanda about survival.
Homes could no longer be rigid, immovable things. That way of life was changing. Had already changed. She’d been languishing in being ahead of the times for too long. Now, she was behind. The blue house was a relic, as all the houses in Rudder were. Structures that belonged to an old paradigm. A series of rooms built upon a series of ideas, none of which had withstood the test of time: the idea that what was here would always be here; the idea that the limestone beneath their feet would go on holding them forever; the idea that the coast was a faithful, unmoving line in the sand. None of this was true anymore. The thing was, it never had been.
Wanda lit the match and ran to join her in the shadows. The flame raced across the ground and up the steps. It clawed up the porch, then engulfed the doorway. This house and the land it stood on had never been hers, not really. They watched the blue house burn from the bottom of the driveway, the canoe ready for them. The fire moved faster than she’d thought it would, from the tip of a match to a hungry, roaring blaze in just a few minutes: cremating their shabby comforts and this notion that being sealed inside was the best thing, the safe thing.
Wanda leaned into her as they watched. “Are you sure we had to burn it?” she asked, a tremble in her voice, the reflection of the flames in her pupils.
“It’s better this way,” Phyllis said. She wanted to explain that it was the ideas woven into the siding and the shingles and the door frames that needed to go, that sometimes humans need to see change, to literalize it, in order to know that it’s arrived, but she couldn’t manage to put the words together.
She could already glimpse what was to come: a new kind of life among the mangrove islands that were bursting forth, thriving in the ruins of this flooded town. Wanda would show her where, and this was correct because as much as she had taught Wanda, she had learned even more by raising her. There would be no walls and there would be no windows. They would endure the elements as the very first people had, with respect and curiosity and the interdependence Wanda was born into. This would be how Phyllis spent her remaining time on this earth. Hadn’t humans lived this way for thousands of years? They must learn to live this way once more—she was certain of it. The structures they built would bend and break, and they would make new ones. There would be nothing so precious that they couldn’t begin again. And again.
Watching her home of so many years beginning to collapse in on itself, the flames licking around the eaves, the window sashes glowing red hot, the skeleton of it revealed before her, beams and doorways and the staircase at its center, she mourned what had been. They watched in silence until the second floor fell into the first. The roof kissed the foundation, and finally, with a crack like bones breaking and a spray of sparks, all that remained was a pile of flaming rubble. She became aware of Wanda’s hand in hers. “Ready?” Wanda asked.