Chapter 3
Now
Annie leaves the boy on the beach.
She’s back in a few minutes, accompanied by Ruth, in her muddy gumboots and bleached-out Vancouver Aquarium sweatshirt, a
medical bag slung over one shoulder. They climb down the rope ladder they’ve rigged from the bluff to the beach. At the bottom,
Ruth gives the boy a head-to-toe once-over, kneels beside him on the sand, and places two fingers on the side of his neck.
It feels awkward to stare at him, but Annie can’t stop. The fine hair on his arms . . . was it there before? His skin appears
firmer, more assembled. More like skin and less like see-through rice paper. Her eyes find their way to the sharp angle of
his jaw and the steep slant of his nose.
“Has a pulse.” Ruth nods. “Let’s roll him onto his side.” She covers him with a flannel blanket she retrieved from the cedar
trunk beside the front door; the same trunk Annie has to steel herself for before opening, the one with her dad’s old clothes
and their faint smell of fish.
Ruth wedges the oxygen sat probe on the boy’s left index finger. His hands are large and smooth. The probe beeps and glows
99 percent on the screen, pulse 32 beats per minute.
“Too slow,” Annie says.
Ruth pauses. “Maybe it’s a poor tracing.” She digs in her bag for a stethoscope, applies the diaphragm to his chest, and listens
to his heart and lungs in a looping repetition.
The thwumping sound from earlier seems to be right here.
“Do you hear that noise?” Annie asks.
“What noise?” Ruth cocks her head, but the stethoscope is still in her ears. “We have to get him up to the cabin,” she says.
“It’s thirty feet up. He’s too heavy.”
“We can’t leave him here,” Ruth says. “He needs an IV. He’s probably dehydrated. Hypothermic.”
“But his skin’s hot.”
Ruth pulls the thermometer out of her bag and puts it in his ear. The number rises to 39.5 degrees Celsius. “He’s febrile,”
she says, then puts down all her instruments simultaneously.
“Why would he have a fever?”
Ruth’s breath hitches and she’s suddenly pale, ashen under her cheekbones. Glassy-eyed.
Annie reaches for her shoulder. “Are you okay?”
Ruth looks away, toward the ocean, as if she’s lost track of what she was doing. Annie can’t help following her gaze, can’t
help hoping again. Until Ruth abruptly turns back. “We have an old EMS stretcher in the shed.” Her voice is hoarse.
“Did you think you saw Mom and Dad?”
Ruth leans forward and puts her hand on Annie’s thigh. “No, honey.”
“When I look at the ocean, I keep thinking I can see them.”
“Because it’s impossible not to think that,” Ruth says.
Annie closes her eyes tightly. She’s inside the tsunami, again—-the dank water she’ll never be able to swim across. The ground
gives way under her feet; a riptide yanks against the backs of her calves. The clouds condense and press down on her shoulders.
Ruth’s voice interrupts the collapse of the sky: “We can strap him in and use the boat pulleys to get him up the bluff.”
Annie is nowhere that pulleys matter or even exist. “When I first saw him, I thought it was them, too,” she whispers.
Ruth hasn’t heard her. “We’ll get the old stretcher.”
Annie manages to nod—-is she nodding?—-her eyes still closed and the rest of her body numb.
But the thwump-thwump sound returns. It enters her joints, rises from her feet into her knees and hips. Her panic abates by degrees. Air finds
the bottom of her lungs.
Ruth is already climbing the ladder. She’s near the top by the time Annie’s legs obey.
Half an hour later, the boy is secured to an orange slider board.
They’d retired it a decade ago from the single Hale’s Landing ambulance, but Ruth was never one to get rid of something that
might serve a purpose, like carting a spongy-skinned boy up a thirty-foot bluff. Both women heave and grunt and lift and sweat,
taking turns holding his weight while the other catches her breath, praying the pulleys hold, willing the knots to stay strong,
until they’ve reached solid ground.
“You can’t hear that sound?” Annie asks again as they finally carry him—-lanky arms and legs—-through the cabin door and into
the living room.
“Hear what?” Ruth is sweaty, breathing much harder than Annie is.
“It sounds like humming. It comes and goes.” Annie looks at her feet and the water-warped planks of Ruth’s floor, then upward,
at the light bulbs that won’t turn on anymore. It’s not coming from there.
It’s a low-pitched violin chord. Or murmuring starlings—-their glossy black wings fluttering in unison.
All the usual noise has receded.
From nowhere, her dad’s voice reverberates through Annie’s memory.
“Elephants hear through their feet.” He’d always been fascinated by the way animals communicate: seismically, triangulating through space and time.
He loved to talk about it whenever his feet hit dry land.
“They eavesdrop on each other’s footsteps.
It’s how they reach one another over vast distances. Ground vibration.”
His voice fades; the soothing, back-and-forth undertone remains. Annie touches her earplugs in her pocket, nestled with the
spoon and the soap. It’s the first time in days that she doesn’t feel the need to wear them.
“Let’s lift him onto the couch,” Ruth says. She’s already collected more medical equipment from the bathroom: IV tubing, a
needle, a rubber tourniquet she wraps around his bicep while Annie retucks the blanket in place. Ruth tears the alcohol swab
open with her teeth and swipes the boy’s inner arm before poking him. He doesn’t flinch.
The blood flash into the needle is bluish.
“Shouldn’t it be red?” Annie asks.
Ruth keeps working, her brow furrowed, her cheeks still not their usual colour. She tapes the IV tubing to his forearm, hangs
the bag of Ringer’s Lactate solution to a lamp stand. Adjusts the flow, then shakes her head. “Deoxygenated blood is blue . . .
I don’t have oxygen for him, anyway. But the probe still says ninety-eight percent.”
“What do we do?” Annie asks.
“This is all we can do,” Ruth says. She stands and walks to the kitchen, then rattles around in the pots. “Can you bring your
clams up?”
“What?”
“From the beach.”
How can she make dinner at a time like this? Ruth has always been matter-of-fact, but everything is changed now, can’t she
feel it? This unconscious boy on the couch. The blue blood. The potent hum-breathing sound. Her parents. It seems wrong to
start making dinner.
But Ruth has a cast-iron pot in her hands. She raises her eyebrows and looks at Annie until she’s compelled to move.
Outside, the clouds are clearing. The wind threads through the porch rafters, between the faded buoys that have hung there
for decades. They bump each other in the breeze. Annie retrieves the bucket from the beach and carries it to the manual pump
on the grass, another relic Ruth couldn’t part with, even though she didn’t expect to need it again.
Annie has to use her entire weight to crank the pump handle until the bucket is full. Using a stiff-bristled brush, she cleans
the sand and barnacles from the clam shells. If she focuses on the movement of her hands, then she can do this. Meaning: She
can keep existing. Intense focus on small things, moment-to-moment. Don’t think about Mom and Dad, don’t think about inky
water swallowing boats. Watch the bristles unlatch the barnacles. Watch the sand sink to the bottom of the bucket.
But the hum reaches for her again, reeling her back in.
She’s momentarily lost inside it. Indigo waves rock her side to side as she breathes in the scent of wind. A new warmth envelops
her ribcage.
“Annie?” Ruth’s voice rings out from the kitchen.
“Coming,” she calls back automatically. But what is happening to her? She picks up the bucket. The porch steps creak in their
usual way. She clacks back through the screen door.
“You can throw them in.” Ruth points to the rolling boil of the water in the pot on the wood stove. Rogue droplets sizzle
on the burner.
They move around one another. Ruth rechecks the boy’s pulse and flicks the IV tubing to mobilize a trapped air bubble, then
chops onions and a head of garlic from the now defunct refrigerator. Annie warms a second pan to fry them. In the bubbling
water, the clams start to crack open. When everything is cooked, Annie scoops it all together into chipped ceramic bowls from
the hutch.
They eat sitting next to each other on the floor. The trestle dining table is sideways in the corner, where Ruth has been repairing its broken legs and scrubbing off the remains of seawater.
The boy hasn’t roused.
“Maybe he hit his head in the tsunami,” Annie offers.
Ruth runs her tongue over her bottom lip. “Maybe, but the timing is off. It’s been four days.”
“What do you think happened?”
“He’s not about to wake up, is what I think. We should put some clothes on him. It’s going to get cooler overnight.” She gets
an old pair of athletic shorts and a blue long-sleeve T-shirt from the trunk. Annie lifts his limbs, threading the IV bag
through the shirt sleeve, while Ruth tugs the clothes into place. “People must be washing up like this all down the coast
this week.”
“Their bodies, you mean,” Annie says before stopping herself.
“People who got stranded, who somehow survived.”
“Do you think help’s coming soon?”
“We’re a long way out,” Ruth says, as if it’s an explanation, and there’s nothing else to say about it.
The daylight fades into the shadows. Annie wants to curl up on the floor next to the boy, beside the couch. The sound is clearer
around him, close to him—-braids of it, some stronger, some softer, curving near where they sit.
Somehow, when she listens to the humming, everything inside her stops aching.
“He’ll be here in the morning,” Ruth says, as if she knows what Annie is thinking. “I’ll check his vitals overnight.”
Eventually, Annie goes to her bedroom down the hall. She digs the spoon with its moon phases and the packaged soap out of
her pocket and puts them onto an empty shelf in the closet. Then she gets in bed. She hasn’t slept for days. Grief stalks
her in the darkest hours; when she closes her eyes, the black wave is there, consuming everything.
Annie inspects the dark corners of the room. The caulking is cracked and peeling. A knee-high salt line—-the height the wave
reached—-disrupts the wallpaper. The air is muggy with the musty scent of mould, and the damp sheets cling to her. She still
isn’t used to sleeping on land. She misses being rocked to sleep on Amphitrite, misses being a few feet from her parents.
Annie picks up a pink conch shell from the floor beside the mattress. Part of Ruth’s collection, it had been a bathroom counter
decoration, until Annie found it in a silty corner behind the toilet after the tsunami.
“I can hear you whispering,” her mom used to say when she listened to shells.
How long does the seashell sound last? As a child, Annie believed that if the shell was away from the water too long, the
sound would gradually leak out until she could no longer hear it. Annie couldn’t bear the idea that the song would drain away,
like the gas in their outboard motor. So she would routinely gather Ruth’s shells in a basket and cart them down to the shore,
in order to amplify their inner oceans. That way they’d never run out of song.
Annie rolls on her back and puts the pink conch beside her on the pillow. She can’t bear to listen to it now.
The pulse sound is still with her, even when the boy is down the hallway. Is he awake? Does he have enough blankets? Annie
wants to go look at him again. Her eyelids are unusually heavy, though. Her mind empties itself. Why is it not spinning the
way it has been?
She relaxes into the mattress, wading between asleep and awake.
The pulsing is underneath her now.