Chapter 9
Now
A sprinkle of raindrops turns to a downpour on the way back to the cabin.
A hard rain sloshes under Annie’s boots. It washes away the dust of the excavator, kills the smells, dampens the bonfires
of refuse on the beach. The coming week brings even more: a deluge of summer rain that keeps them inside.
Evan does not visit. Annie circles her missing pieces—-wondering why he is not here, watching any hope that her parents are
alive drain out of her. She can only tend to her grief in shallow ways, like rotating two whelk shells over and over in her
pocket, and by wearing one of Aiden’s undershirts as her pyjamas. She wants to not dwell on them, but it’s impossible. She
thinks of them constantly.
In the middle of this, Walker seems to emerge from himself. He has a certain lightness about him.
“What’s this?” It’s the first thing he says, shortly after they return home, as he examines the jars in the kitchen cupboard.
He unscrews a lid and pours short-grain brown rice into his palm.
“You can talk.” Annie is shocked to hear him speak. “It’s rice. You eat it.”
He puts a piece in his mouth and chews.
“You have to cook it first,” she says.
He doesn’t respond. He opens other lids, pours each thing into his waiting palm: flakes of red pepper, filaments of saffron
Ruth bought in Vancouver, a ribbed seed of nutmeg.
Annie offers him a plate of halibut and boiled beets. After watching her eat at the counter, he tries out his own cutlery,
moving each finger into the right spot, angling his fork slowly, following her example. He manages to get a bite into his
mouth but then gives up on the fork. By this time, Annie has already finished her meal. She tucks her hands under her thighs
and watches him as he slowly devours the rest of his food with his hands.
The next morning, Annie collects a bowl of wild raspberries from the mountainside above the cabin. He eats the entire thing
in minutes.
“They taste like the sun,” he says, eyes lit up.
“Do you remember what happened to you?” Annie asks.
He puts the last one into his mouth. “They’re warm.”
“Did you get washed out to sea by the tsunami?”
“You can’t force it,” Ruth says. She’s on her hands and knees, twirling a bolt into the table leg with a screwdriver. “The
chicken coop needs shovelling out, honey. I’ll find him something to do, too.”
Walker’s face brightens with each new morning. He no longer fixates on everyday things. He stays close to Annie. Sometimes
she turns around to find him only inches away, while she’s sweeping sand off the floors or lugging buckets of water into the
cabin. She doesn’t mind his proximity, but Ruth seems to. She’s always sending him off in the other direction, to wash clothes
by hand, to turn the compost, or bring soggy triangles of wood into the cabin to dry out by the stove.
The chores are endless, but he picks them up easily.
“All of this is seawater?” he asks, salt on his fingertips, while Annie scrubs white lines left by the wave off the cabin
walls.
“It almost swallowed us.”
“Did she take things away with her?”
His questions are like this: non-linear and slanted.
“Everything,” Annie says. She doesn’t mean for her voice to sound angry, but it does.
“She spared you.”
Annie does not know what to say to this. “She took everything from me.”
He picks up a picture of Mara and Annie from the bookshelf and gently touches the image of Mara. “Does she still sing?”
“Who?” Annie shakes her head. “My mother?”
He looks into Annie’s eyes. His hum rises inside her neck and rests against her shoulder blades. “You love her singing,” he
says.
“How would you know that?”
He does not answer, because he’s back to the salt: running his finger along the wall and collecting more of it, sticking his
tongue out to taste it with raised eyebrows. The questions he doesn’t answer feel like a delicate bubble Annie does not want
to pop.
She leaves him be.
He’s both strange and familiar, and easy to be with. In his presence, Annie doesn’t need her earplugs. She puts them on the
shelf in the closet, next to the spoon, the soap, and the ticking watch.
Walker is captivated by Ruth’s books, her battered romance novels and shiny textbooks. He presses his fingers against the
embossing on their spines and runs his hands over the weathered pages.
“This one.” He pulls out an anatomy atlas and sits on the floor, all legs and arms, the book in his lap.
“Did you go to school?” Annie asks. “Can you read?”
He’s engrossed in the pictures. She sits next to him and folds her legs underneath her.
“Walker?”
“There are so many bones, Annie. These tiny ones at the tips of our fingers,” he says. “Look how many there are.” He examines his own hand, mesmerized, then picks up Annie’s and brings it close to his eyes.
She wants to touch him more. Why does she want this?
“Are you making that humming sound?” she asks.
“It’s not mine.” His thumb presses into the centre of her palm.
Her vision tunnels. For a split second, Annie can see the seafloor, its sandy bottom of crushed shells and coral. She blinks
twice, and it’s gone.
“What was that?”
“Everything makes sound,” he says.
Walker turns back to the anatomy book and flips the pages until he finds an image of the human ear: the auricle and tympanic
membrane, the bony labyrinth within.
“There are bones even here,” he says, as he touches his own ear. “Three of them. Ossicles, it says.”
He’s still holding her hand.
They head for the woodshed during a break in the downpour.
Their boots submerge in the mud with each step. Damp clothes hang across the porch on lines, waiting for the sun. Smoke billows
from the chimney.
Annie swings the axe, but it only makes it halfway through the large stump of wood.
“Can I try it?” he asks.
The axe looks comfortable in his hands. He takes a swing and the wood splits smoothly in half. He’s wearing Aiden’s green
rain slicker. For a moment, it’s as if Walker has always been here. The swing of the axe through the air, the thump, and the
muddy footsteps back and forth. But she actually knows so little about him.
“Is there nothing else you remember?” Annie asks.
He splits one more piece of wood, then pauses. He always pauses for longer than she expects.
“Do you remember being a baby?” he finally asks.
“I do.” Annie remembers more about babyhood than anyone does, according to Evan.
“What do you remember?”
She pushes her hands deep in her pockets. It feels dangerous to haul up what she’s lost. “Crawling on the boat deck and my
mom laughing . . . the smell of orange peels. Wet bathing suits drying on a line.”
He smiles at her. “Anything else?”
“It’s like pictures I can’t string together. Snapshots.”
“Like dreams?”
“A little. I remember how it all felt.” The warm embrace of her parents. A sturdy and durable ocean that slowed everything
down. “What do you remember?”
“It’s like I remember dreams,” he says. He looks at her for a while longer. Wouldn’t anyone else be distressed by their own
amnesia? At being lost? Rain dumps from the sky, drenching them again. He laughs at the rain. Annie is surprised how musical
his laugh is.
“Annie!” Ruth interrupts from the porch. “Leave him to it. Come peel these potatoes.”
The next day, Annie wakes at sunrise.
The rain has eased off. Chickadees are deep in their songs. She feels the pull of the water, the familiar desire to look at
the sea out her window. Drifting, her dad had called it. When the ocean makes you calm just by looking at it.
Not now. It’s been ten days since the tsunami and she’s sure she’ll never see the water the same way again.
Annie pushes it all down, swings her legs out of bed, and goes to the closet.
She rearranges her growing collection of items: two matching zipper pulls, a thin gold bracelet, and dented bottle caps in a rainbow of colours.
She shrugs into a Whidbey Island hoodie her dad bought her, that time they stopped in Langley for the farmer’s market.
They ate tangerines and watched a pod of orca play in the harbour.
Eleven days since she hugged them goodbye.
Ruth says work is the antidote to pain; to take their minds off it. It’s not time yet, she says, to unravel. First, they have
to survive.
Immediately after the tsunami, before Walker arrived, Ruth had gotten to work. She set broken bones and handed out antibiotics
to the people coughing up seawater. She swept piles of silt from the cabin and scrubbed the soggy couch cushions. In her pragmatic
way, she left Annie with a shovel and told her they needed to eat.
“There may not be any clam beds left,” Ruth said. “But if anyone can find them, it’s you.”
Annie collected what she could. Some shellfish beds were gone, but many remained, as if their own cove had been spared the
worst, like Walker said. Ribbed cockles and moon snails, lime-green sea lettuce. She dug for clams and let the task consume
her. Instead of screaming, she shovelled harder.
The week of heavy rain has kept her off the beach, and they’re living off jerky and canned beans from the back of the pantry.
Annie tiptoes around, gathering her clamming gear, then eats a piece of smoked halibut from the jar on the counter. Embers
smoulder in the stove. By the meagre light they shed, she sees Walker moving across the living room toward her.
“I’ll come with you?” He doesn’t ask where she’s going; it never seems to matter. He wants to be alongside her, and she wants
him along, too. It feels like being alone but together, at the same time.
A greyish haze pushes away the night. The sun smudges pink and orange at the horizon as they walk out on the bluff and down
the ladder.
The tide is out.
Walker stops at the high-water line. He pokes a cracked Tupperware container with his shovel. A half-buried white crab scoots away under the other trash. “There’s so much junk,” he says.
“It’s everywhere,” she agrees.
It hurts to think it was all in the water before. Each day there’s a new arrangement: garbage sucked back out to sea and swallowed,
the water eating away at the remains, and new garbage deposited on shore. The sea spits back out so much of what it doesn’t
want.
It’s not until they reach the hard wet sand of low tide that they’re past all the debris.
“You need to be around at slack tide,” Annie says. “There’s a couple hours to get them.” She drags her rake through the sand,
feeling the knobby clamshells. She grabs a littleneck and holds out her palm. “It’s like sorting through soil for potatoes.”
She bends down and pulls her muddy glove through the sand.
Walker does the same, then holds up a clam. “What’s this one?”
“Butter clam,” Annie says. “You have to cut the neck off before you eat it.” She holds the bucket out and he tosses it in.
Annie knows the clams by rote: butter, manila, varnish, razor, littleneck, geoduck. Soak, scrub, then steam them, with shallots
and garlic, if there is any, until they open and give up their sweet meat. “They blow holes and give themselves away, too,”
Annie says, digging two feet down over a larger blowhole and reaching her hand deep into the water. Her fingers brush a clam.
She grabs it before it can get away. “Razor clam.” She shows Walker the yellowish tongue sticking out from the side of the
shell. “He’s playing with us.” She throws it in the bucket and shovels some briny water over the top.
They stop at all the tide pools. Annie shows him every sand dollar she finds. How are they still here? They’re her favourites,
the way they tuck themselves into the earth. She moves two sand dollars next to one another, the way she always does.
“You paired them up,” Walker says.
Annie nods. “I like doubles. Then they’re together.”
So far out, she can almost pretend there was no tsunami. Only stretches of beach, calm water, and the thud of clams into the bucket.
But her shovel catches on a set of children’s building blocks in a netted bag. She drags it from a muddy puddle, unsure what’s
compelling her to examine these things the sea leaves behind. Each block has the carved imprint of a sea animal: a perched
walrus, a lobster with pincers, a sea turtle gliding through water.
“Annie.” Walker’s voice comes from behind her. He’s on his knees in the sand and elbow-deep in a hole. But his eyes are focused
on the horizon, staring at something she can’t see.
The thwump-thwump-thwump rises again through her boots, into the tendons of her feet, ascending into her ankles and shins.
Walker stands up and tosses another butter clam in the bucket, then removes his gloves. He touches the back of Annie’s arm.
“Do you hear it?” he asks.
A whooshing noise erupts from the channel. Annie turns with a jolt to look at the water. A spout of breath lingers a hundred
metres west of them where the sea is deeper. A long, barnacled back breaks the surface.
The thwumping settles in her ribs. It’s pulsatile and alive. Annie is sure it’s trying to tell her something—-if she could
only speak its language.
More thwumping from underneath, spreading outward, liquefying everything in its path. Nothing feels firm.
But it’s fleeting. Tail flukes poke up as the whale drifts under and disappears, leaving a circle of bubbles in its wake.
A wavy footprint. The ocean settles and stills. The thwumping dissipates to a faint coming-and-going tone. Annie solidifies,
contained inside her skin again.
After what feels like hours but surely is not, Walker picks up the bucket with his gloved hand. “Home?” he asks.
Home. She rolls over the shape of the word. She looks around at the beach, the endless sand, the accumulated garbage, and has trouble understanding what she’s seeing. Is this where home is now?
He takes the bucket over his shoulder, carrying it like it’s nothing. He does not mention the whale, or that liquid feeling,
but for that brief moment, things felt reordered. On the beach, the two of them, the clams, the whale; but mostly the sound
beneath her. Something made sense, deep in Annie’s body, when nothing about their situation really makes sense at all.