The storms are back with the sound of thunder and sheets of rain coming down against the windows of what used to be our sunroom. Dad’s sitting at a card table out there in the dark, hunched over the machine he pulled from the sea. He’s got the oil lamp next to him and he stoops his head in the small circle of light, looking like he’s in the hull of a submarine. It’s getting late and we should eat soon, but Dad doesn’t look like he’s even thinking about cooking. He’s got his screwdriver and is working the screws out one by one, and I try to imagine myself at his age, alone in this house on a hill that’s barely above water, messing with some waterlogged machine. All I see is me in our sailboat trying to go someplace far from here, out across the waves where my mother and the other survivors went.

Back before our town disappeared beneath the ocean, there were other families in the neighborhood with kids who went away to college. There were architecture programs, and I imagined one day I’d move to New York and learn how to build skyscrapers. That was before that city also disappeared beneath the ocean.

“Why don’t we sail someplace,” I used to ask Dad. “There’s got to be other people across the waves. Mom might still be alive.”

“Sure, there are people out there,” Dad said. “Whole cities above the waterline, and plenty of islands wherever the elevation’s high enough. But I know what humans are like when they’re hungry, and I know what the government’s like, and I also know what your mom was like. If she’s still alive, she doesn’t want to see us. But we have it good here, you and me. We can fish, we can dive, we can make it through this storm however long it lasts. And when the waters recede we’re going to have a windfall of land that’ll be ours. Don’t worry, we’ll make it through.”