Salvage the Bones - Jesmyn Ward [99]
“I’ma swim, break the window. Y’all come in,” Skeetah says.
“Hurry,” Randall says.
“Esch, you come with me!” Skeetah says.
“This ain’t the time!” Daddy yells.
“This ain’t about the puppies!” Skeetah squints at me.
“She too small!” Daddy hollers. He grabs my free elbow with his good hand. Grips.
“She’s pregnant.” Skeetah points.
Daddy’s face shuts, and he pushes.
Daddy saw it, that second before he pushed me. My big T-shirt and my shorts fitting me like a second skin, sodden with water. Where I used to be all sharp elbows and thighs straight as pines and a stomach like a paved road, my wet clothes show the difference. Daddy saw the curve of a waist, the telltale push of a stomach outward. Daddy saw fruit. I’m flailing backward with the bucket, the squeaking puppies. And in that second after he pushes me, Daddy is reaching out with his good hand, his bad hand hooked to the branch he crouches on, his eyes open and hurt and sorry as I haven’t seen him since he handed Junior over to me and Randall, said, Your mama—and I kick, grasping at the air, but the hurricane slaps me, and I land in the water on my back, the puppies flying out of the bucket, their eyes open for the first time to slits and, I swear, judging me as they hit.
“Esch!” Randall yells, and Junior tightens his legs like a looping shoestring across Randall’s waist. Randall grips Junior’s shins, those legs thin as rulers. Randall can’t jump in. “Swim!” he screams.
I kick my legs and palm water, but I can barely keep my head above it. It is a fanged pink open mouth, and it is swallowing me.
“Fuck!” Skeetah yells. He looks down at China, who is thrusting up and against his sling.
“Esch!” Junior screams, and the water is dragging me sideways, away from the window, out into the yard, toward the gullet of the Pit. I snatch at the puppy closest to me, the brindle, which is limp in my hand, and shove it down my shirt. The white and the black-and-white have disappeared.
“Fuck!” Skeetah screams. He grabs China’s head, whispers something to her as she scrabbles against him. Her teeth show and she jerks backward away from him. She writhes. Her torso is out of the sling he has made. Skeetah grabs China by the head and pulls and her body comes out and she is scrambling. She flies clear of him, twists in the air to splash belly first in the water. She is already swimming, fighting. Skeetah jumps.
The water swallows, and I scream. My head goes under and I am tasting it, fresh and cold and salt somehow, the way tears taste in the rain. The babies, I think. I kick extra hard, like I am running a race, and my head bobs above the water but the hand of the hurricane pushes it down, down again. Who will deliver me? And the hurricane says sssssssshhhhhhhh. It shushes me through the water, with a voice muffled and deep, but then I feel a real hand, a human hand, cold and hard as barbed wire on my leg, pulling me back, and then I am being pushed up and out of the water, held by Skeet, who is barely treading, barely keeping me and him afloat. China is a white head, spinning away in the relentless water, barking, and Skeetah is looking from her to me, screaming, Hurry up! Hurry up! at Randall, who is breaking what was left of the glass and wood of the window with his hands, his shoulders, his elbows, and diving through, while Junior clings to him close as a shell, and Skeetah is pushing me through the window, his hand a leash loop wrapped too tightly around my arm, his other hand treading, and he is calling, China, come China, but she is nowhere, and Daddy is swimming and sinking and jerking toward us, his bad hand flashing, and he is through the window and we are all struggling, grabbing at walls, at broken cabinets, at wood, until Randall stretches his way up to the open ceiling and hauls himself and Junior into the half-eaten attic, where the hurricane fingers the gaping roof, and Skeet pushes me up and through