And I don’t say anything more to him the whole drive home, not even when he wishes me good night. Instead, I light my candle and lie in bed, looking at the book the woman gave me. I flip the pages one by one, hearing the scratch of Dad’s scrimshaw knife coming from below as he works on carving another piano key. There are pictures of Manhattan’s skyscrapers, page after page of enormous buildings: the Empire State, the Chrysler, Rockefeller Plaza. I imagine those buildings rising above the ocean with whole neighborhoods surviving on upper floors fishing from windows, scanning the horizon, ready to welcome survivors like my mother, like me.

All week, Dad cleans out the house. He wipes off the tables, hauls oxygen tanks out to the garage, and makes me clear the fishing nets from my room. Our wetsuits disappear into closets, and I’m sent outside to work in the rain where I fill bucket after bucket with the oyster and conch shells we’ve let accumulate on our lawn until I’m soaked and hungry and angry that we’re wasting time cleaning instead of fishing.

Dad boils water on the stove and fills big basins to rinse our clothes along with our sheets, wringing them out, though I know they’ll never dry in time. Then we row out into the sea, pull up our lobster pots, and haul in four big green bugs, which sit in the kitchen sink, clawing at each other tiredly, their mouths bubbling foam as they try to escape up the stainless steel sides.

Our sheets are still damp on the night Dad picks up Dalia and Fiona. I hear the truck return and watch the three of them getting out of the cab, my dad telling Fiona something that makes her laugh.

“We’re here,” Dad says as they come in. The woman says hello to me, and Dad takes their coats. “Why don’t you show Fiona your room,” he says.

“All right,” I say, but what can I show her? Just baseball cards and a dumb graphic novel I’m bored with, though there’s a globe that Fiona likes. I sit on the floor with her, spinning it slowly while she runs her fingers across the bumpy elevations, showing her what the earth looked like before the flood.

When we come down for dinner, the table’s glowing with candlelight, so different from how our house usually looks that I hardly recognize it. Dad brings out the lobsters and we sit cracking their claws and using the small dish of salt that Dad made from boiled-down seawater. Mostly I’m thinking how weird everything feels. Dad sitting and talking about the old world with Dalia, something he never does with me. They’re both being too gentle when they talk to me, like I’m a piece of bait they’re trying to hook without getting barbed.