Chapter 7
Now
Ruth leads the way off the bluff where her house is perched, into town, with Walker in between them.
“We’ll see if anyone knows him,” she suggested. “Maybe put a call out on the radio.”
Annie shoulders blackberry branches out of the way. Rubble and garbage cover the ground. Downed telephone cabling winds through
the debris while bright green shoots keep their upward trajectory, despite everything.
Walker looks at Annie every couple of minutes, as if she might disappear. He trips over a washed-up vacuum cleaner hose, stumbles
and scrapes his left elbow. He’s fascinated for several moments by the tiny breaks in his skin, but then his attention is
absorbed by a dandelion puffball, pulling the seeds from the stem, letting them drift away in the breeze.
Ruth gives him a curious once-over. “Let’s get a move on,” she says.
The black wave of water is a memory Annie can’t shake. She hangs back as they get closer, not wanting to see the town. Walker
slows to match her pace. They pass the washed-out gas station and its crumbling pavement. A cement post remains, minus its
sign. Her spine stiffens.
Annie knows every part of Hale’s Landing—-the shade of the storefronts, or at least how they looked from the bow of Amphitrite at summer sunset. The roads, even if she’s rarely walked them. Now the landscape has been redrawn, in the crunch of digested
metal and tile under her shoes, the uprooted trees and strips of carpeting they climb over. Shattered windows. A maze of fallen
branches, a new geography.
Above the well-defined line where the wave stopped its assault, houses sit untouched between the green crowns of trees.
But down by where the wharf used to be, it smells like dead things and rotting fish. Annie wants to hear the chatter at the
gas pumps, the plunk of logs dropping into the water, kids shrieking as they run on the beach. Instead, it’s the sound of
an excavator scraping the sand, and the megaphone voice of Isaac Hale, who stands in his white dress shirt, belted khakis,
and loafers on top of an overturned vending machine a few feet away. The candy inside still hangs from the inner coils, the
sunlight refracts off shiny wrappers. Evan, arms crossed, stands a few feet behind him.
Annie has the urge to go straight to him—-a lightning-bolt feeling—-even if she’s angry at him. As she debates whether to
call out his name, Isaac yells to the excavator driver: “Take that tree out!”
Evan hasn’t seen her yet. He appears to be arguing with Isaac. Judging by the solemn trench between Evan’s eyebrows, Isaac
seems to be winning. Evan takes a step backward and his chin sinks to his chest.
In their height and upright posture, Isaac and Evan are almost replicas of one another. But inside they’re different. Evan
secretly feels everything. His feelings dominate him. Isaac appears chronically stoic and unfazed. Ruth said it wasn’t always
this way; Isaac used to be more receptive and open before Celeste died. “He had nasturtiums planted at the library every spring.
He’d bring ice cream sandwiches to the school on the last day before summer break.”
There’s no ice cream left. All that remains at the grocery store is wilting fruit and vegetables, picked-over cans, fabric softener for washing machines that no longer function. Dried kibble for dogs that ran away before the wave hit.
The ice cream sandwich version of Isaac isn’t here on the beach, if he exists at all now. Annie has the familiar instinct
to grab Evan’s hand and pry him away from his father, so he doesn’t morph into him. As if she could reach across the debris
with her heart and touch his, she wills him to look up at her. To see her.
But he does not.
Annie scans for anything else recognizable. Great Uncle Henry, Ruth’s older brother, stands on the far side of the beach beside
a table of fish under a flimsy white tent, distributing the fish to a short line of people. He’s a solid, rectangular sort
of man. His fishing vest has a collection of pockets; some zippered, some snapped. His white hair blows in the wind. He’d
been far enough up Hecate Strait in his gillnetter to survive the wave. He prefers not to talk; Annie feels relief around
him because of it. Henry loves solitude on the deck of his boat. She wants to go over to him and continue not talking.
Walker is beside her, kneeling behind a sideways chest freezer draped with bull kelp. He is still, not a muscle twitches.
As far as Annie can tell, he’s not even breathing.
Eventually, it’s not Evan who sees Annie; it’s Isaac.
“Your sailboat girl is here,” Isaac says gruffly, patting his shirt pocket for cigarettes.
Annie looks better than Evan expected. Her eyes are clear and bright. She looks composed, even in the chaos on the beach.
He’s been lying awake worrying about her every night since the tsunami.
If he’s honest, there have been few nights in the last decade he hasn’t lain awake thinking about her.
She’s the most alluring person he knows: that honey-brown hair with a mind of its own; unruly, long waves that get tangled up.
The way she finds it unimportant to straighten them out.
The freckles he wants to kiss, under her eyes and across the bridge of her nose.
Her slender frame and deceptively strong muscles, often stronger than his, and those crooked bottom teeth that only show when she smiles her real smile.
Her beauty arrests him. But also, she’s always been a little untethered, some pervasive wildness that worries him sick, sometimes.
Isaac waves the unlit cigarette between his fingers. “We need to clear this out so we can get the logs shipped.”
“But we can’t stay here,” Evan responds, not looking away from Annie. The excavator interrupts him with its beep-beep-beep. “There’s no running water. Electricity.”
“What people care about is keeping their jobs, Ev.” Isaac searches his pants pocket for a lighter. “Coast guard will be here
within the week.”
“I better go over to Annie. There’s no word from her parents yet.” Evan swallows. Swallows the fact he’s here standing with
Isaac, as if he’s handcuffed to him, instead of holding Annie’s hand.
“They knew the ocean was risky,” Isaac says.
Evan loved Amphitrite. He’d snuck out from under Isaac’s thumb to spend hours on her bow every summer. He knew that boat inside out. His own pencilled
notes lived in the margins of Aiden’s ledger, detailing tides, coordinates, weather. The hundreds of hours he’d spent repairing
things with Aiden were some of the happiest of his life. A weathered photo of the four of them was clipped to the desk light
on Amphitrite’s charting table: Aiden, Mara, Annie, and Evan, on a deserted beach, a fire blazing beside them, arms slung around each other.
They’d balanced Aiden’s old camera on a piece of driftwood, held their pose until the shutter clicked. Evan’s smile had never
been bigger.
It’s certainly the only thing that got him through losing his mom.
But sailing is risky, like Isaac said. Especially the way they’d sailed, so far out every year, so dependent on the weather
and the ocean’s whims. When it came to cash, Aiden and Mara were scraping by. Amphitrite always needed this or that, with money they didn’t have. The constant fraying and replacing of the lines. A new jib. Engine
parts. It wasn’t that Evan thought they were irresponsible parents. But when Annie needed the dentist, Aiden and Mara had
trouble paying the bill. The dentist did it for free as a professional courtesy to Aiden, but Evan still doesn’t understand
why you’d work so long and hard for a medical degree just to give it all up.
It wasn’t a choice Isaac understood, either.
Four years ago, the sweltering afternoon Evan turned sixteen, he tried for the first time to tell his dad how he felt: “I
want to invite Annie to my party tonight,” he said.
“Not her.” Wearing chinos and a starched dress shirt, Isaac was stacking liquor on the bottom shelf of the pantry. “It’s one
thing for you to go out on their boat. Fine. But leave it at that.”
“Why not the party?”
“Mara’s a little nuts, that’s why.”
“What’s that got to do with Annie?” Not that he agreed Mara was nuts; she didn’t seem that way. But there were rumours about
how she’d been locked up in some kind of psych ward.
“Families repeat themselves.”
“Annie’s not crazy.”
“You can have some fun with her, but end it there.” Isaac unscrewed a bottle of Perrier and took a drink. “It’s for your own
good.”
Evan held off inviting Annie to the party that year. He tried to talk himself out of being in love with her. In the following
years, he dated other girls, ones his father approved of. He pretended to like them, even.
But he knew at sixteen, and long before, that Annie was the one for him—-even if his dad forbade it.
There are so many things he loves about her. She never needs to try to be beautiful; she doesn’t wear makeup or fancy clothes.
He’s always loved watching her swim. She’s sentimental about the paired-up seashells she keeps on Ruth’s windowsill. When
he left the cabin after the tsunami, he didn’t check to see if they were still lined up there, or if they’d been washed away.
And Annie sees him in a way no one ever has. It’s the way he wants to be seen: for his inner goodness, for the fact that he’s
not automatically following in his father’s footsteps. He can’t stand what his family’s company does to the trees. It makes
his blood boil. Sometimes he thinks he could transform Hale Timber, be different from the men who came before him. He believes
this, even if he doesn’t know how to do it. Annie could show him.
In that photo clipped to Amphitrite’s charting table, Annie is not looking at the camera. She’s looking at Evan.
With her attention, he feels less lost.
He hasn’t worked up the guts to go against Isaac and tell Annie how much he feels for her—-the depth of it. It’s not just
some teenage fling, some superficial attraction.
On the beach right now, his resolve strengthens. Mara and Aiden haven’t returned. Aside from Ruth and Henry, Annie is all