The Others We Were

The microwave chimed back to life through the hollow quiet of the house, its saccharine little tune carrying a familiarity that no longer belonged there. This time it had been six days. The blackouts had matured over the years—first lasting hours, then stretching longer until they became some unacceptably normal thing. Now the tune felt oddly misplaced, too intact for everything around it. Power had become something temporary enough to mourn while it was still on.

Still, she reached for the sad little cord hanging beside the bed. A phone was mostly a notebook and photo album now, but some habits outlived the world that made them. She filled the tub and started a load of laundry. Electricity was measured in small salvations. Quick wash. Save the rest for the dryer.

Outside, the palmettos were lacquered in ice, their fronds locked rigid beneath a white crust. It was nearly May. By now the air should have been wet and close, gathering behind the knees and under the collar, but the cold had sharpened everything instead. A few doors down, plastic Mardi Gras beads, brittle as blown glass in the cold, clinked painfully against the railing of an abandoned townhome when the wind moved through.

From the kitchen, the emergency radio struggled through the silence:

“…ice accumulation reported south of Natchez, with heavy floes through the Baton Rouge reach. Shelters in East Baton Rouge and Iberville parishes are at capacity. Residents are advised to avoid levee access and unnecessary travel along the river…”

The signal dissolved again.

Memphis had been the line people watched. For years, whenever the river froze hard enough there to carry people, the South braced for what followed. The city had broken open more than once beneath the weight of them—families, sleds, caravans, entire towns outrunning the more sinister season up north until every church basement, warehouse, and strip of dry ground had become temporary shelter. Afterward came the stranger stories: husbands insisting the wrong wives had arrived with them, mothers searching shelters for children nobody else remembered, “winter doubles” glimpsed in two places at once. The stories moved downriver with the people and evolved into their own kind of lore. Hunger could explain most things if you let it. Cold could explain the rest.

But Natchez was far below Memphis. Baton Rouge farther still.

The Mississippi had become the country’s most valuable travel corridor again, its winter surface lengthening south with every mile the ice managed to hold. The interstates still crossed old maps, but out there they had become strange dead channels—lanes consumed by drifts, abandoned vehicles, exits leading nowhere useful. The river was different. People followed the ice south with something close to faith, gathering wherever it thinned, coiled at the edges of those unlucky port cities, waiting for winter to carry them farther. 

No one could get far enough south.

The world had not ended, exactly. Tankers still crossed warm oceans. Refineries still burned where pipelines held. Fuel was made; grain and medicine still came north from places where the seasons had gone strange in other directions—too wet, too dry, but not always frozen. The trouble was getting any of it where it needed to go.

Mara had spent eight years maintaining a rotating fuel reserve: twenty gallons, one old can burned for every new one she found. The oldest went into the little generator Dave had bought during some bygone hurricane season. Fortune had become mostly a matter of timing—being there when something briefly existed again.

Twenty gallons. Enough to get her past Houma and down toward Bayou Sable, where the roads narrowed and then gave themselves over to water. 

She’d stayed in the city as long as she could. Purple-and-gold bumper stickers on frosted windshields made it feel a little less dire. Music from somebody’s phone-turned-iPod proved people were still people. Occasionally a grocery shipment came in. “Merry Christmas,” they’d say over a can of cream of chicken.

After the worst of the first year, the city had become a haven in ways northern towns and scattered rural places couldn’t. But the river held its own calendar. Once the ice reached this far south, whatever fragile balance remained would be over. Everything downriver would narrow into the same southbound vein, swelling under the weight of all those still trying to outrun winter. It was strange how quickly sympathy became geometry when survival entered the equation. A thousand frightened people were still a thousand frightened people, but also mouths, bodies, fuel, pressure.

Now, here it was.

“…residents south of Baton Rouge are advised to conserve food and fuel ahead of increased river traffic—”

Static.

The gas cans went into the 4Runner she had kept locked away for years, starting it just often enough to make sure it still would. The garage door groaned against long-unused rails. Anything worth taking had already been sequestered to one corner of the bedroom. She locked the door anyway and left the tub full upstairs, a little reservoir of usefulness belonging to no one.

The drive became less harrowing after the bridge at Gramercy. The abandoned cars got fewer. So did the people. She hated the way she had come to see them: squatters, robbers, omens—never of anything good.

It had been seven years since she lost the baby, to the month. Seven years since the second eruption. She had felt something similar then: an utter distaste for them all. How could anyone appreciate anything when it could be siphoned away in an instant? Loss had made the world precious and unbearable in equal measure.

The cane fields, arrested in their unending intention to experience a Louisiana spring, gave way to deep woods. Cypress rose from flooded timber like old bones, their knees glazed white. Spanish moss hung rigid on the branches. Thin skins of ice filmed the ditches, but the wider water still moved dark and slow.

The fish camp was a houseboat-turned-real-house perched atop posts sunk into blackwater. The aluminum jon was still where her grandpère had kept it. Surely this far down the ice would never hold more than a day or two. Life here had always arranged itself around water and whoever arrived first. The names changed. The claims changed. The wanting did not.

Mara killed the engine and sat for a beat, listening to the 4Runner tick itself quiet. Then she opened the door.

A shotgun racked above her.

A woman stood on the balcony, thirty-something, earth-colored hair and the spare build of someone who had learned what could be lived without. A twelve-gauge rested against her shoulder.

“What are you doing here?” Mara called.

The woman’s grip tightened.

“I could ask you the same.”

A small shape appeared behind her—a girl of maybe seven, dark curls framing a teddy bear worn ragged at the neck.

The child rearranged the threat entirely.

“I’m coming up, okay? We can figure this out.”

The woman lowered the shotgun, though not by much.

Mara took the steps slowly.

“I’m Camille,” she said after a moment. She glanced back toward the girl.

“That’s June.”

June’s cheeks were flushed too brightly against the gray of everything else.

“She sick?”

“She’s fine.”

June coughed into the bear.

Mara nodded toward the door. “It was locked. Did you break in?”

“There was a key.”

“Where?”

“Under the stairs.”

Something grabbed at her from inside. “Which one?”

June pointed to the third step. “That one right there. See?”

Grandpère had kept the spare beneath the third tread for as long as Mara could remember, wedged where nobody would find it unless they already knew.

“Who told you that?”

Camille frowned. “Nobody.”

For a second neither moved. Then Camille slung the shotgun across her back and went inside as though the matter had settled itself.

Canned tomatoes simmered on the stove. An old Laura Ashley quilt, faded mauve and blue, had been shoved beneath the door against the draft. The last embers of a fire folded in on themselves.

Camille opened a drawer, looking for something to strain the soup.

“Bottom left,” Mara said.

Camille’s hand was already there.

She looked back at Mara, one eyebrow lifting before the other, and Mara felt an irrational flash of offense. Her own mother used to tease her for making that face.

Across the room June drew a rainbow in charcoal on a scrap of newspaper, bright in shape if nothing else. Something soft and unwanted stirred in Mara.

Then came the arithmetic. There was enough food for three, but not for long. Scarcity had a way of reducing morality to numbers.

“The river’s frozen farther south than ever,” Mara said. “All those people coming down…”

Camille’s face tightened.

“It’s why I left.”

By evening, June’s fever had spiked. Her eyes were glassy. The fire had burned down to a red seam beneath the logs. Mara watched Camille rock the girl who was almost too big to hold, worry carved permanently between her brows.

“I wouldn’t wish this on anyone,” Camille said. “Raising a child in this world has tested every ounce of me. You’re lucky in some ways.”

The words landed somewhere still a bit raw.

“I almost wasn’t so lucky, if that’s what you want to call it.”

Camille looked at her. “You had a child?”

“I said almost.”

One of the logs gave way with a dry little crack and collapsed inward, throwing up a brief orange flare. Neither of them looked at it.

The silence that followed was not quite an apology. Camille resumed the anxious circuit of her hand over June’s back until even the tenderness of it began to irritate Mara.

“You should sleep,” she said at last. “I can sit with her awhile.”

Camille hesitated.

“Please,” Mara said, the word carrying more of a wish for solitude than kindness.

Sometime in the early morning, June woke screaming.

“Mama!”

Mara crossed the room before she had time to think and gathered her against her chest. The ease of it disturbed her—June settling into her as though Mara’s body already knew where to put her.

“Shh. It’s all right.”

“Get away from her.”

Camille stood in the hallway, hair loose around her face, fully awake now. Mara let June go, unwilling to defend an instinct she hadn’t understood herself. She was nearly across the room when June spoke again.

“I couldn’t breathe... I was stuck under there!” She got out between heaves.

Camille knelt beside her and smoothed the damp curls from her forehead. “It was just a nightmare.”

“No!” June’s voice broke. “I remembered.”

Camille stilled. “Remembered what?”

“When I died.”

The room seemed to contract around them.

“You didn’t die, baby.”

“I did. You were crying.”

And Mara knew the scene before she knew what to do with it: Camille kneeling beside this same couch, June burning against her chest. A wail so sharp it could only mean one thing. Not imagined. Remembered.

Except Mara had never seen either of them before that afternoon.

She lay awake long after the house quieted, troubled less by the image than by the ache attached to it. It had not felt borrowed. It had felt hers.

By morning, June’s fever had broken. The stove fogged the windows, sealing the three of them inside a square of heat while the world beyond remained white and indistinct.

Camille poured a cup of tea and set it before her.

“She won’t drink it without sugar,” Mara said.

Camille went still. “How could you know that?”

Mara looked at June, then at the mug. “I don’t.”

“You keep doing that.”

“Doing what?”

“Acting like you know her. Like you know my daughter.”

Something in the possessive landed harder than it should have.

“I’m not trying to do anything.”

“Stay away from us.”

Camille shoved the mug aside. Tea ran across June’s charcoal rainbow, bleeding the black lines into one another.

Mara stared at it for a moment, then reached for her coat before she said something an apology would not suffice for.

Outside, the air had devolved into the kind of cold that made breathing feel wrong. Rime whitened the cypress knees while ice crept farther from the banks, joining patches that yesterday had floated separately. Mara stayed out until her fingers hurt, letting the cold empty her head of everything but itself.

When she went back inside, Camille had packed their bags. The shotgun hung across her back.

“We’re leaving.”

“No, you're not.” Mara looked toward the windows. “Not in that.”

“We’ll take our chances.”

“With a sick seven-year-old?”

Camille’s face closed. They stared at one another, each waiting for the other to become the kind of person she already suspected. Then Camille shoved the bags beneath the table.

That evening June asked Mara to read to her. She found a children’s book in a cabinet, a relic of her own childhood, its pages yellowed by humidity.

Camille looked up. “That was my favorite.”

Mara glanced at the cover.

“Mine too.”

Neither smiled. Halfway through, June leaned against Mara’s shoulder.

“Mama?”

Mara stopped.

“Oops—sorry.”

Something warm and terrible moved through her.

“Don’t call me that.”

“I know. I just get mixed up.”

“Mixed up how?”

June shrugged.

“Sometimes I have trouble telling you apart.”

Across the room, Camille dropped something.

That night the storm came hard. The three had settled into the strained silence of people forced too close, each listening for danger in the others’ breathing.

In the room at the end of the hall, Camille dreamed of blood. Not June. Something smaller. A bathroom floor. Trembling hands. A towel between her legs. The hollowness of something ending before it had properly begun. She woke with the impression of a small townhome bedroom disappearing around her, though she had never been there, a life receding before she could take hold of it. 

Unable to sleep, she stood at the kitchen window watching snow cut through what had once been a dense mat of water hyacinth. For a while there was nothing but white. Then, a darker shape crossed between the trees. Camille leaned closer to the glass. It stopped. Or seemed to. The snow shifted, erasing it for a second. When the shape appeared again, it was nearer the water.

A woman.

She stood near the bayou, barely visible through the storm, then stepped onto the ice. Between gusts, Camille made out a child limp against the woman’s chest, dark curls hanging toward the frozen water.

Camille moved before she knew why, shoving through the door barefoot.

“Stop!” she screamed. “Stop!”

The woman kept going. Camille plunged into the sleet after her, slipping once in the snow and catching herself with both hands before scrambling upright again. Panic had stripped thought down to instinct.

“Give her back! She’s not yours!”

The cabin door slammed open behind her. Mara stood half awake, June wrapped in the quilt at her side. Camille was already halfway onto the blackwater.

Mara hesitated. “Do not come after me,” she told June, closing the door.

Snow needled her face as she ran. Camille crouched over the ice. For a second Mara thought she was praying. Then she struck the frozen surface.

“There!” she screamed. “She’s there!”

Beneath the thinning ice, a pale face gathered into June’s. Her eyes were closed, dark hair drifting in the current. From the cabin came a muffled cry.

“Mama!”

They turned. June stood at the window, one hand against the glass. When Mara looked down, the face was gone.

“No!” Camille struck the ice again.

“Camille—stop. She’s inside.” 

“You don’t know what I saw. She was here.”

Mara caught her wrist.

“I remember.”

The words escaped before either understood them.

Camille froze.

For a second Mara saw herself in Camille’s face: the same grief given another history. Recognition crossed Camille’s expression, then something harder, as if she had found the shape of what she’d feared since Mara arrived.

“You.”

“I don’t know what’s happening.”

“Stay away from her.”

“Camille—”

“You already had your chance.”

What happened afterward survived only in pieces: Camille’s fingers in Mara’s coat, the crack beneath them, black water rising through the seams. One screaming that June was hers. The other saying she never had been. Rain erasing the edges of everything. Mara could no longer remember which voice was hers, or which hands had done the pushing and which had done the reaching.

By morning the storm had passed. Weak sunlight bled through the windows as meltwater dripped from the eaves. Thin plates of ice turned in the current as though the night had never held it still.

She woke beside the stove with one sleeve wet to the shoulder, her palm split, a bruise circling her wrist.

Camille was gone.

June sat beneath the quilt watching her, then lay beside Mara until their eyes met.

“Where did the other mama go?”

Mara looked toward the window. Nothing remained on the ice. No body, no footprints, no proof the night belonged to this world any more than the one beside it.

“I don’t know.” 

June was quiet.

Outside, water moved beneath the fading ice, carrying south whatever temporary overlap of their other lives the cold had held in place. With every drip from the roof, another impossible memory solidified: a first birthday she had never attended, June’s hand in hers, the weight of a life that had somehow been hers and not hers at all. For a little while, the freeze had made room for all of them. Perhaps that was what had driven so many people half-mad in the cold—too many versions of themselves pressing through at once. Now the water was moving again, and whatever had been caught between one life and the next was being forced back into a single current.

June leaned against her without hesitation. Mara smoothed the damp curls from her forehead. The gesture came easily enough to feel remembered. Sunlight spread across the floorboards, warm and ordinary.

“It was always just us.”