Chapter 6
Before
The second time Annie meets Evan Hale is in June the following year, early in the morning. She is seven years old.
“Pass me that line, Annie.” Aiden steps out of the dinghy and ties them off to Ruth’s dock. Ruth waits in an Adirondack chair, in her scrubs, two steaming cups of coffee beside
her.
Annie dives straight into her lap. Ruth kisses the top of her head.
Over the curve of Ruth’s shoulder, she sees him. Evan is lying belly-down on the dock planks, poking the water with a stick.
Annie remembers his soft chocolate eyes, the way he tried to fend off the bullies at school. But today he looks smaller. Alone.
Aiden takes a long sip of black coffee. “You’ve got company?”
“Isaac’s up at camp.”
“So now you’re a babysitter in addition to a nurse?”
Ruth shrugs. “I was with Evan so much at the end, when I was looking after Celeste. He wanted to stay here. I told Isaac it
was fine.” Ruth gives Annie a squeeze around her middle. “Evan remembers you, sweetie.”
“You’d think Isaac—-” Aiden starts in a low voice.
“Put yourself in his shoes,” Ruth says.
“His son needs him.”
“He can’t hold it together since Celeste died.”
Evan comes over to them. He’s wearing jeans and a camo T-shirt, a Hale Timber baseball cap pulled low on his forehead. He
gives Annie a wave. She looks closely at his face, his sooty black eyelashes, thick eyebrows, pink cheeks.
“Evan Hale, is it?” Aiden says.
“Yes, sir.” Evan removes his hat.
Ruth shades her eyes from the sun. “You want to take him along today? I’ve got a long shift.”
Aiden looks between Ruth, Evan, and Amphitrite, moored about one hundred metres away in the cove.
“When does he need to be back?”
“Isaac’s staying at the logging camp until Friday.”
Annie tugs the hem of Aiden’s shirt. “He should come,” she says. She’s sure of it.
Aiden looks down to Annie. He’s hesitant, but accustomed to deferring to Mara and Annie by now.
“What do you think, Evan?” he finally says. “Would you like to learn about life on the sea?”
It’s not long before the three of them putter back out to Amphitrite. The wind picks up the dark curls of Evan’s hair. Sunlight touches his forehead. Annie feels a fizz of excitement, like a
new path unfurling before her.
Evan holds the lifelines carefully as they climb aboard. He gets his footing before he steps tentatively into the cockpit.
“This is Dodge.” Annie hops down and points to the dodger. “Dodge, meet Evan.”
Evan says nothing.
“I call him Dodge, anyway . . . that’s what you call this cover thing. It blocks the wind.”
Evan runs his hand along the fabric.
“Then the Winch family,” Annie continues. “We have four of them. They’re quadruplets if you’re wondering.” She jumps around to each. “This one’s a bit grouchy.” She pats the starboard winch. She wants him to say something, anything.
Aiden puts a hand on Evan’s shoulder and leaves it there.
“Well. Um.” Annie bounces on her toes. “Wanna play crazy eights?”
“No.” It’s the first thing Annie hears Mara say, after Aiden has climbed below. He talks softly, but Annie can still hear
him from the cockpit. Evan is quiet, deep in his cards, sunlight in his hair.
“I think it would be good for her to have another kid around,” Aiden says.
Mara exhales. “Who is he?”
Evan plays an eight on the growing pile of cards. If he can hear the conversation, he doesn’t show it. “Hearts,” he says,
deciding the next suit. His voice is the edge of a feather.
“Isaac Hale’s boy. He lost his mom last month,” says Aiden. “Breast cancer.”
Annie plays a queen of hearts during a long pause in her parents’ conversation below. Soft footsteps ascend the companionway.
Mara appears.
Evan looks up.
“Your mom was Celeste,” she says to Evan. No hello.
Aiden, behind her, puts a palm to his chest. “He might not want to talk about it, Mar.”
Mara crouches down next to Evan. “Your mother was different.”
Evan places his cards beside him, face up. “She was?”
“I met her years ago at Rosie’s. She was holding you,” Mara continues, placing her hand on his knee.
Evan breathes. It’s as if his breath had been stuck in his collarbones; now it comes from his belly.
Mara goes on, “She was twirling her fingers through your hair while you slept against her shoulder. She sang to you.”
Evan has tears in his eyes. “She always sang me to sleep.”
“Your mother felt like love,” Mara says. “She sounded like love.”
“I have a hard time sleeping now.”
Mara watches him and listens and waits and the waves do their thing under the boat, soothing them all.
Aiden and Annie do not interrupt.
“Do you want to come with us?” Mara eventually asks.
Evan nods.
And so does Mara.
So it goes that summer.
Over a period of weeks, Evan emerges. He talks more. His smile is lopsided, the left side goes first, and there’s a dimple
high in his left cheek when he laughs. Annie likes hearing him laugh.
Quickly, they’re inseparable. They sail and swing off the halyard with cannonballs into the sea, then catch shiners off Ruth’s
dock. They gut fish and sell it at Rosie’s, eat Creamsicles from the freezer while she tells them not to drip pink juice all
over her floor. They sail far out from Hale’s Landing for days, catch Chinook in the Pacific. When they sleep on the deck
under the stars, Aiden cocoons them in blankets.
“Can we go ashore?” Evan asks Mara one late afternoon in July. He always wants to go ashore for adventures.
Mara is slow to acquiesce, but soon enough she’s wandering the beach with them, never letting them stray too far. Since the
episode at school, she doesn’t like to let Annie out of her sight.
“Here’s the spot.” Evan smooths a swath of sand under his tanned feet.
“I want a magic kingdom,” Annie says.
“We’ll be king and queen.”
“I’ll be a queen octopus,” she says. “Let’s make me an octopus bed.”
They build the tallest sandcastle they’ve ever seen. Annie moulds a spiralling steeple and Evan digs deep, long moats—-fed
by buckets of seawater—-all the way to the trees. The magic holds on to them until long past dinner. They have not eaten;
they cannot stop. Mara checks on them periodically, but they don’t even notice her. She returns to the surf.
By late evening, Annie and Evan are covered head to toe in sand and mud.
Mid-August, they explore a different beach, closer to Hale’s Landing.
“I want to show you something.” Evan points to a trail up the mountainside, a path between salmonberry thickets and stinging
nettles.
Down the beach, her mom is clamming with her shovel and bucket, too far to call out and ask for permission. Mara is still
paranoid about Annie going off on her own. Annie knows this well, along with a handful of other things that seem slightly
odd about her mother: her reclusive nature, her tendency to sit still for long periods, her near obsession with swimming.
Her sensitivity to noise. The way she rarely speaks but loves to hum, loves music, loves Aiden’s harmonica.
“Just for a minute, and we’ll come right back,” Evan says. His voice reassures her. He’s already starting up the trail, so
she follows.
He bounds ahead of her. Annie tries to keep up, her eyes on where his feet meet the ground. He runs the way she swims, with
pure power.
Cotton ball clouds drift overhead and the sunlight dapples their arms. They climb the trail for a good ten minutes until Evan
stops.
“This one’s perfect!” At the base of a mammoth arbutus tree, he grabs a branch above his head and pulls himself up. “Come on, Annie!” he calls, a grin on his face.
The orange wood feels smooth and ancient under her fingertips. She braces her knee on the trunk and levers herself up.
On a higher branch, Evan presses his ear against the bark, his eyes closed.
“Are you listening to the tree?” Annie asks.
“My mom always said they can hear us.”
Nearby, a grinding motor hiccups, then sputters to life.
Evan opens his eyes with a start.
“What’s that noise?” Annie says.
“A chainsaw. Let’s go higher.”
They climb to the highest branch, until they can see into the canopy and across to a balding patch of earth on the mountainside,
about fifty metres away. The hemlocks and red cedars have been clear-cut. The chainsaw motor fills Annie’s ears again, so
loud it hurts.
“They just got a licence to log over here,” says Evan.
“Is that a good thing?”
“My dad was excited.” Evan frowns.
According to her dad, Isaac Hale is as close to royalty as you can get in Hale’s Landing. His family tree stretches back to
when they practically clawed their name into the dirt seventy years ago. Evan’s great-grandfather was granted licences for
thousands of hectares of interior old-growth logging and his family has been cutting it down, piece by piece, for decades.
Hale’s Landing sprung up around it as a by-product.
Now it’s only Isaac and Evan left.
“My mom would have been sad,” Evan says.
“Did she listen to the trees like you do?”
“She wanted Dad to stop.”
A shower of sawdust explodes high overhead as a cedar falls. Its giant trunk rolls down the mountainside in the distance.
“Annie?” Mara’s voice calls up from below. “Both of you—-”
“But he wouldn’t stop?” Annie asks.
“Maybe,” Evan tries. “Maybe he would’ve.”
“Come down this minute,” Mara calls.
“We’re coming.” Annie’s voice wobbles and goes nowhere.
Evan is still looking at the spot where the tree fell, his cheek against the bark of the arbutus. Annie’s skin is prickling.
She can sense her mom’s impatience and should get back to her. But Evan is stuck watching. The two of them stay sitting in
the tree’s branches, long enough for sawdust to float down and settle in their hair.
By early September, everything is sliding toward autumn. The light is subdued, darker in the evenings. They need sweaters
again.
“Time to join the real world,” Isaac Hale says to Evan. He stands on Ruth’s dock, his burly shoulders set back, hands in his
pockets. “School starts tomorrow.”
It’s the first time Annie has seen Isaac up close. He’s bearded, nearly bald, and has a booming voice. He feels like hard
edges, but then he rubs Evan’s hair. Evan talks with his hands, already telling Isaac how many seals they counted in the cove
this morning. And how long he was able to hold his breath underwater. Isaac leaves his hand at the back of Evan’s neck.
“Bye, Annie.” Evan waves as they walk away. “Thanks for having me.” Isaac leads him by the shoulder up the dock and toward
a Hale Timber pickup truck waiting on the bluff. He’s left the engine running, belching clouds of black smoke from the exhaust.
Annie wants to keep Evan with her.
She doesn’t trust Isaac, and his scarred patch of mountain she can see in the distance where trees had once been.