Chapter 1
Now
Annie MacLeod can’t hear the sea.
She drags a shovel and a white plastic bucket under a blanket of clouds that refuses to leave. Wind-whipped, hair unwashed,
a smear of sand on her cheek. She’s digging for clams. She hasn’t gone near the water yet, even though it’s been four days
since it happened. Even though her body craves that cold shock on her skin, to submerge so deep she dissolves. The waves curl
out and back, a heartbeat she ignores by squishing bright orange earplugs deeper into her ears.
The beach is a junkyard. The surf picks up stray flip-flops, pebbles mixed with Plexiglas shards, waxed juice boxes with straws
still attached, floaty aluminum cans, and plastic barrettes. She eyes the glint of a silver spoon—-its handle engraved with
the delicate pattern of moon phases—-and puts it in her back pocket next to a cake of soap still in its wrapper.
Each day, her grandmother Ruth tells her to work harder. To get her tears out with a shovel. “Maybe they’re not dead,” she
says.
Sand is everywhere now: up on the hill where it doesn’t belong, lodged between cedar shingles, filling up eavestroughs.
Lumps of it, with rainwater, will gradually rinse out the downspouts, making new piles.
Some of it is stuck inside the helices of Annie’s ears, glued to her scalp, wedged under her nails.
They cannot find a nail clipper anywhere, and Annie thinks about biting her nails but then the sand would even be inside her.
No matter how hard she tries to get it all out, she finds more still, in the sink drain, embedded in the seams of the mattress,
in the plastic utensil divider in the kitchen drawer, in the thumb of Ruth’s oven mitt.
Her grief is like this.
Sprinkles of it in what she manages to eat, gritty against her teeth even when the food tastes fine. She’s already swept the
floor, but it’s silty again.
Annie wonders if she’ll ever escape it; if the places sand and grief should not be will ever be free of them again.
The horizon remains empty and haunting. Only the swoop of seabirds, the smell of decaying seaweed, and all the debris at the
wrack line. The ground is disorienting and overly flat.
How long has she been out here? It must be hours. The wind burns her eyes, her stomach growls, and her shoulders ache. She’s
after another clam, her arm down a hole, when she’s distracted by movement in her peripheral vision. The clam gets away and
burrows further into the muck.
She sits down next to an upside-down picnic table and hugs her knees—-not long enough to start dwelling on everything or start
crying again. Just for a minute. The backs of her pants are soaked through and sticking to her skin and the spoon and soap
are bulky in her pocket. For an instant, the clouds part. The sand glimmers.
A thwump-thwump rises beneath her.
Each beat lasts a few languid seconds. Each thwump sinks her down, as if her bones go slack against each other, as if her muscles give themselves up to her scooped-out insides.
A shape forms in the distance and moves along the stretches of sand. Annie stands up for a better look. It’s a person walking. But no one’s been out this far from Hale’s Landing since the tsunami, and there’s hardly anyone left.
Annie removes her earplugs and looks up for a helicopter, looks around for a speedboat hopping over waves. Anything else to
explain the thwumping.
Nothing.
She leaves the shovel and the bucket where they are and walks toward the person, then jogs, with the faint hope that it’s
her mom or dad. That they’ve made it back.
But it’s not them. It’s a boy, or a man. She isn’t sure. He’s stark naked, she can tell that much.
Annie calls out: “Hello?”
He doesn’t respond.
She moves closer, until he’s right in front of her. He can’t be more than twenty years old, close to her own age, but well
over six feet tall, with soaked blond hair that shines like the water.
“Where did you come from?”
His unfreckled skin makes her squeamish. It feels too translucent. He doesn’t look injured. She would have expected cuts and
scrapes or broken limbs. She would have expected him to be wearing clothes if he’d been pulled out and stranded by the wave.
“Are you okay?” she tries again.
He doesn’t say anything. Unnerved by his nakedness, his silence, his lack of urgency and explanation, she tries not to stare
at his pale flesh. He has a startling vacancy about him, not fully there, looking past her. His irises are sea-urchin grey
with streaks of silver.
His eyes roll backward as he caves sideways onto the sand into a fetal position.
Annie crouches and shakes him hard by the shoulder.
His skin is too hot. The thwumping sound from earlier pours up through her palms. She shakes him again and checks his wrist for a pulse.
It’s there: a too-slow beat at her fingertips.
A wave breaks up into his face and even that doesn’t wake him.
She turns him by his knees onto his back.
She’ll have to drag him, even if the plastic shards and cracked shells and crab legs and bottle caps will scrape his jelly-skin.
No choice.
She wraps her hands tight around his forearms. He’s heavier than he looks, and his skin is spongy and slimy and gives too
much. She pulls hard and manages to move him a few feet, looks over her shoulder to gauge how far they are from the dry sand,
then pulls again, clears debris from under him, pulls. Growls. Drags him, as her thoughts get more and more clunky. This hypnotic
beat in her body.
The sound climbs up and surrounds them; Annie and this boy, marooned on the edge of nowhere.