Chapter 2
Twenty years before
Dr. Aiden MacLeod cannot see land.
The Pacific Ocean stretches in all directions from where he stands barefoot in the cockpit. It’s midafternoon and a light
wind flutters the mainsail. The ocean ripples, a patchwork of sequins.
“You’re overthinking it,” Mara says with her paring knife poised. She’s eight months pregnant, cross-legged behind him, wearing
one of his old T-shirts and a bathing suit bottom. A glistening salmon rests on the wooden cutting board in front of her.
“You can’t predict this.” Aiden grips the helm. He’s said it before, and even to his own ears it sounds repetitive. “What
about operating rooms? Oxygen tanks?”
“I want to be sailing.” Mara looks at him.
He imagines it all going wrong out here when the baby is born: a breech delivery, shoulder dystocia, a massive hemorrhage.
He’s transported back in time to all-nighters in hospital hallways that smelled like iodine, the sensation of running to catch
up with something.
“I’m not going back to a hospital.” She stands up, nearly a foot shorter than him. On her tiptoes she intertwines her fingers at the back of his neck. He inhales the scent of her sun-warmed skin. “We’ve talked about this.”
“I need you to be okay.”
“We’ll be fine.” Mara’s voice is an anchor. She kisses him and nuzzles against the stubble of his jaw. Then she sits back
down, delicately slipping the edge of her knife under the scales to release pink shimmering flesh and the smell of salt.
Aiden’s mother, Ruth, did not think they’d be fine. Fifty kilometres east is his hometown, Hale’s Landing, with its pine-needled
roads and cedars dripping in endless rain. He recalls the exact tone of Ruth’s voice as it echoes in the cathedral of his
forehead.
When he tied off the stern at Hale’s Wharf last Tuesday, Ruth gave him a quick peck on the cheek and lectured him briefly
about his boat’s peeling bottom paint. Then she whisked herself off to the clinic in her pressed nursing scrubs. She’s probably
weighing a baby right now under those bright fluorescent lights, her rubber-soled shoes squeaking over the scrubbed linoleum.
Even though Aiden doesn’t work there, his medical degree hangs in her waiting room above the aquarium of tropical fish, the
air bubbles surging up and bursting under the edge of the thick, black frame.
Aiden never loved medicine. As a kid, he drove his rusty fishing dinghy long before he could drive a car. He woke in the early
morning, threw off the lines, and motored down the channel, a fishing rod in hand. What he loves most is the sea, this rugged
Pacific Northwest coast: the rhythmic lap of waves, euphoria of endless sky, swirling patterns of tides. It disentangles him.
He doesn’t need to be anything he’s not.
He met Mara at the hospital four years ago. She was strange; everyone noticed it. A bit feral. Hardly talked. But to Aiden
she was heart-stopping—-skin so pale it was ghost-like, and stone-grey eyes. A line was drawn. The before and after meeting
Mara. It wasn’t long before they bought this boat and painted the name Amphitrite in gold cursive on the transom.
She’d always wanted to live on a sailboat, which was just one of the many unusual things about her.
She liked to swim in the middle of the night.
In the ebony water, she wrapped her legs around him, fused their bodies together, kissed his open mouth.
She always stayed in the water the longest. She tracked the cyclic phases of the moon, mapped constellations in a spiral notebook on the charting table.
Ruth did not approve. “It’s impractical,” she said to Aiden while replenishing the Band-Aids and syringes in the clinic’s
back hallway. “Living on a boat after all you’ve studied for, Aiden. Think of everything you’ll be throwing away.” She forced
an overstocked drawer closed.
As the son of a single mother, even at thirty-four years old, Aiden still leans toward doing what Ruth expects.
Mara finishes gutting the fish and slices it into neat fillets for the grill. She goes below to scrub the cutting board and
wash her hands. Even so pregnant, she moves as if she’s hovering two inches off the deck, swimming through air. Where does
she get this ease? Wherever it is, the more time he spends with her, the more it rubs off on him.
Back up on deck, light radiates from her skin. She puts her warm palms on his face and kisses him again.
“Trust me,” she says.
And he does. His shoulders descend. It feels like he’s loved her longer than the years they’ve been together; illogically,
it feels like he’s always known her. The light fades into a burning sunset. The night unfolds with constellations that Mara
cannot stop watching.
A month later, Mara paces below deck with each contraction. Aiden keeps watch, up and down, up and down the companionway.
Thankfully, there’s no wind. The sea lies pancake flat. His face is a facade of calm.
He uses his portable Doppler ultrasound and listens to the tap-tap-tap of the fetal heartbeat. Mara doesn’t want the Doppler. She tries to shoo him away, but he persists, a divot of concern crossing his forehead.
Mara wants to swim as she labours.
“We’re in the middle of the Pacific, Mara.” Aiden keeps his voice level.
“People give birth in the water all the time,” she hums.
He puts his palm on her belly. “It’s freezing.”
There’s no stopping her. Soon enough she’s floating on her back, in less pain. The contractions are easier. On the swim ladder,
Aiden stands and holds the Doppler out to her stomach as she floats. The tap-tap-tap stays strong. He watches the heart rate.
She watches the moon.
“It’s time.” Mara wipes her upper lip and pushes her hair from her eyes.
“Come back on board.” Aiden reaches a hand toward her. “I won’t be able to see what I’m doing.”
She shakes her head.
The divot in his forehead deepens as he considers what to do next. Mara will not relent; he knows this of her. He takes off
his boots, his pants, throws them into the cockpit, and grabs a life jacket and a rope. After securing a line between himself
and the transom handhold, he slides into the bite of cold salt water.
“Jesus,” he breathes.
Mara’s gaze is unfocused.
“You have to come closer, Mara.” He grips her arm and pulls her to the ladder, so she can slide herself onto the middle step.
“Hook your arms through the handholds.”
She does.
He’ll have to float in front of her, somehow, as she pushes. He swears under his breath. This is the last place he ever expected
to be delivering a baby, let alone his own. With her left calf under his right armpit, and the rope holding them both, he
suspends himself between Mara’s legs.
“It’s time to push.” She barely whispers it.
Aiden can’t see anything beneath the dark surface; he’ll have to help her by feeling alone. He balances with his feet spread
on the lowest rung of the ladder and his hands between her legs. In the glow of the boat’s running lights, her face is contorted
and red.
“Breathe,” he says.
Mara jams her right foot into his shoulder and pushes. He prays the rope holds them while she writhes against the ladder.
“You’re doing it,” he says.
Her next moan is long and primal.
The scent of blood and seawater. Aiden feels a head, then a small shoulder. An arm. The rest of a warm body sliding into his
waiting grasp. He does not breathe until the baby—-resting upon his trembling, numb hands—-reaches the water’s surface.
It’s a girl. She takes a breath of air, then wails.
Mara has tears in her eyes.
Annie is born to the sea. Aiden can breathe now. When he looks down at his daughter, he wonders if his entire reason for being
has been poured into this one tiny body.
By the time Annie is three years old, it’s impossible for Aiden to keep hold of her.
They’ve managed through toddlerhood on Amphitrite. He installed netting around the lifelines and tethered a child safety harness to the mast. They keep a playpen up against
the berth for when the seas are roughest.
But Annie won’t stay inside it; she wants the rush of wind and the spray of salt water. In a particularly strong gale that
winter, she demands to stay topside. She belly-laughs and calls out for more as the sailboat rises and drops over the waves.
Her legs are strong and fast and always moving.
Come spring, Aiden chases her along the shoreline, blue-green algae under their feet.
She finds a pink-tipped sea anemone at the edge of a rocky tide pool.
Its tentacles reach up as if it wants to be touched.
Next, an itty-bitty octopus that Annie collects in the cup of her palms, its double row of suckers attached to her skin.
All day she plays on the shore. Her bucket is full of ribbed limpet shells and sand dollars.
The crabs do their sideways scuttles in the sand during her endless game of catch and release.
When she’s not running the beach, Annie swims. The first day of summer that year, brown pelicans swoop overhead as she and
Mara float on their backs under an expanse of sky.
“Come back aboard!” Aiden calls, his voice carrying over the waves. “Dinner’s getting cold.”
But they do not. They splash him instead, grinning ear-to-ear. Water drips from their golden hair.
Aiden and Mara make ends meet selling catch to Rosie, the fishmonger at Hale’s Wharf. Installed behind the same wooden counter
since Aiden was little, Rosie doesn’t seem to age. Her dyed-black hair is always pulled into a ponytail, shellacked in place.
Perhaps her dirty apron used to be whiter, but she clicks away at her cash register like she always has. John, her husband,
sells Aiden fish and chips out the back kitchen window: fried cod wrapped in newspaper with a plastic container of coleslaw
slathered in mayonnaise.
Otherwise, they rarely come ashore. When they bought Amphitrite, Aiden wondered if he’d find it unsettling to not have a home with a foundation and walls, or a reasonable square footage.
Maybe they should’ve purchased a bigger boat? He sold his car, whittled down his mystery novel collection to the few that
fit in the berth, and donated his spare clothing. He occasionally misses having a full-sized refrigerator and a flushing toilet.
In the end, though, Amphitrite feels more like home than any house he’s had. With Mara and Annie inside, the boat is all he needs.
On a hot day midsummer, Aiden and Ruth stand on the beach at Hale’s Landing.
The sun is directly overhead, burning the top of Aiden’s head.
Annie has been swimming off the wharf for hours.
Now she dives in again, this time to retrieve a spiny-skinned sea star from the bottom.
Next, a rock covered in acorn barnacles.
Aiden and Ruth ooh and aah at her finds.
“Come get some goggles,” Ruth calls, holding out a neon-green pair. “You’ll see better!” They dangle from her fingers.
Annie looks over briefly, then bobs under again.
An elderly couple stroll by. They look like tourists, wearing matching windbreakers and bright white running shoes, ice cream
cones in their hands.
“She swims so well. And so young!” the woman marvels. She licks the melting soft-serve from her fingers.
“She’s a little fish,” Aiden comments.
“I really wish you’d make her wear a life jacket,” Ruth says, as Annie ducks under the water’s surface and out of sight.
Aiden clears his throat, a habit of his when he doesn’t know what to say.
“The ocean’s wild,” Ruth pushes. “Better to keep her safe.”
Later, Aiden tries to put her in a life jacket, but Annie refuses. She dives back in. He chases her underwater through the
forest of kelp, its emerald-green fronds dancing in the current. But she’s gone in a trail of bubbles, faster than he can
swim, only popping her head up much further away than he could have managed. She can hold her breath far longer than he can.